Lacuna Publishing imprint: 19 books

'Effective writing: plain English at work, second edition, is about writing that works: it is based on sound English grammar and plain English style. If you want to write in a way that is clear and meaningful, to avoid writing ‘gobbledegook’, and to be able to explain effective writing to others,...

"From da kokroach point of view, humans are irrelvant. Kokroaches no like em. Doan want em. Do not even tink bout em. Doan care for deh conversations. Books we like to eat, not read. We wish humans dead so we can eat em too." — Sizwe Bantu, The Cockroach Whisperer, 2010. Sizwe Bantu is the Greatest...

Ghost Armies presents Andrew Sneddon’s poetic works Fukuoka and The Wait-a-While Vine in one volume. Sneddon’s connected verses explore two defining episodes in Australia’s history and provide emotional and cultural insights of both personal and universal import. Fukuoka relates the experiences...

Fukuoka relates the experiences of two Australian brothers, Alf and Wally, in a prisoner-of-war camp in Japan during the Second World War, expressed in poetry in the voice of the surviving brother Alf. Based on the lives of his own great-uncles, Andrew Sneddon’s poetry captures the intimacy that exists...

White-out: selected published poems 1986–2016 brings together 194 of Tasmanian poet Saxby Pridmore’s published poems to commemorate his achievement and contribution to Australian poetry: more than 300 poems published in over 40 different literary magazines and journals, including Quadrant, Studio, Famous Reporter, Blue Dog, Overland and Island.

When the new goth girl in town Maggie befriends town misfit Lily, they discover more in common than their taste in alternative music: a disdain for the "popular" and "normal", psychic abilities, and the same dark secret. United in their struggle against society’s rules, Lily frequently wishes for death...

After backpacking around Asia, Anne Fitzpatrick spent three months volunteering in rural India. Inspired by the program, she returned to Australia determined to raise funds for the education of young people in Kodaikanal, by cycling around Australia – despite having no experience of either cycling...

The Fifteens of Stone House have reached Attainment: the day a girlie may Beseech for the privilege of serving as a Perfected womanidol in the Orchid Nursery. When vivacious, irreverent Pearl goes missing, pious Mica hopes fervently that her friend has been chosen for Perfection and has not, as she fears,...

Spike, a psychologist and activist, and Jane, a philosopher and writer, leave their dead-end temping jobs in Toronto and head for Paris — in their lunch break — by car, stopping frequently to stock up on chocolate. En route they pick up X, an extraterrestrial from a planet where chocolate is one...

After a lifetime in India, Philip returns to Australia, to his estranged wife Jenny, whom he had brought from India fifty years earlier. Philip seeks to establish links with his ex-wife and his grandson amidst the 2001 'Tampa' crisis. Displaced and disappointed in his hopes of resuming a career in his...

Sophie can’t walk or talk, but behind her disability hides a keen intelligence. Living on The Styx River cattle station with her father and a nanny, Sophie is acutely aware that she is a non-person. She feels as voiceless and isolated as the wallabies of The Wall, an eerie wilderness of basalt lava...

“David Edge is a Chinese Whisper.” So Constable Carol Porter learns while digging into one of Edge’s cold cases, unsure if she’s investigating the crime, the crim or the ex-cop. But to petty thief Ben Bovell, Edge is his only friend, his hero, and the one person he can trust — to keep the...

The Wait-a-While Vine is a poetic imagining of the doomed Cape York expedition of Edmund Kennedy and Jacky Jacky in 1848. The verses merge landscape and dreamscape, history and legend. Beginning with the young Kennedy’s life in England and ending with Jacky Jacky’s death, the poems traverse topics...

Victoria Eliza Annie MacLean can’t escape actors. Her father Richard, who raised her in a bohemian and somewhat morally negligent household, is a famous actor. Her childhood playmate and “prince” Billy is inspired and encouraged by Richard to pursue his dream of acting. All the men she is seriously...