Favourite Australian Fiction
Discover the best Australian fiction with our curated list of favorite books. Explore top-rated novels and timeless classics from Australia's finest authors.
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Disquiet
by Julia Leigh
Accompanied by her two children, Olivia leaves her violent marriage and returns to her childhood home in rural France, where she is joined by her brother Marcus and his wife Sophie, who are struggling to overcome their devastation over their stillborn baby. Original.
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Cloudstreet
by Tim Winton
Hailed as a classic, Tim Winton's masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between. An award-winning work, Cloudstreet exemplifies the brilliant ability of fiction to captivate and inspire. Struggling to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster, the Pickle family, who've inherited a big house called Cloudstreet in a suburb of Perth, take in the God-fearing Lambs as tenants. The Lambs have suffered their own catastrophes, and determined to survive, they open up a grocery on the ground floor. From 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the two overpopulated clans -- running the gamut from drunkenness, adultery, and death to resurrection, marriage, and birth -- bond them to each other and to the bustling, haunted house in ways no one could have anticipated.
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The Ghost's Child
by Sonya Hartnett
When a mysterious child appears in her living room one day, the elderly Maddy tells him the story of her love for the wild and free-spirited Feather, who tried but failed to live a conventional life with her, and her search for him on a fantastical voyage across the seas.
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The Spare Room
by Helen Garner
A powerful, witty, and taut novel about a complex friendship between two women—one dying, the other called to care for her—from an internationally acclaimed and award-winning author How much of ourselves must we give up to help a friend in need? Helen has little idea what lies ahead—and what strength she must muster—when she offers her spare room to an old friend, Nicola, who has arrived in the city for cancer treatment. Skeptical of the medical establishment, and placing all her faith in an alternative health center, Nicola is determined to find her own way to deal with her illness, regardless of the advice Helen offers. In the weeks that follow, Nicola’s battle for survival will turn not only her own life upside down but also those of everyone around her. The Spare Room is a magical gem of a book—gripping, moving, and unexpectedly funny—that packs a huge punch, charting a friendship as it is tested by the threat of death.
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Butterfly
by Sonya Hartnett
Struggling with insecurity stemming from her cruel-spirited and fickle friends and her own adolescent awkwardness, 14-year-old Plum worshipfully emulates a glamorous young wife who lives in her 1980s Australian suburb, unaware that the woman hides a personal agenda. By the author of Surrender.
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Piano Lessons
by Anna Goldsworthy
Anna Goldsworthy was nine years old when she met Eleanora Sivan, the charismatic Russian émigré and world-class pianist who became her piano teacher. Piano Lessons is the story of what Mrs. Sivan brought to Anna's lessons: a love of music, a respect for life, a generous spirit, and the courage to embrace a musical life. Beautifully written and strikingly honest, Piano Lessons takes the reader on a journey into the heart and meaning of music. As Anna discovers passion and ambition, confronts doubt and disappointment, and learns about much more than tone and technique, Mrs. Sivan's wisdom guides her: "We are not teaching piano playing. We are teaching philosophy and life and music digested." "What is intuition? Knowledge that has come inside." "My darling, we must sit and work." Piano Lessons reminds us all how an extraordinary teacher can change a life completely. A work that will appeal to all music lovers and anyone who has ever taken a music lesson, Piano Lessons will also touch the heart of anyone who has ever loved a teacher.
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Every Move You Make
by David Malouf
Bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy - here are their stories, whole lives brought vividly into focus and so powerfully rooted in the landscape that you can almost feel the heat and the dust. His canvas is the vast Australian continent from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons behind the Great Divide in Far North Queensland, to bohemian Balmain and the Centre at Uluru, but always there are enticing glimpses of a world beyond, and the stories are tender, subtle, unsettlingly intimate. A young man going off to war tries to make sense of his place in the world he is leaving; a composer's life plays itself out as a complex domestic cantata; an accident on a hunting trip speaks volumes, which its inarticulate victim never could; and, in the funniest, most surprising story of all, a down-to-earth woman stubbornly tries to keep her feet on the ground at Ayers Rock.
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An Imaginary Life
by David Malouf
In the first century A.D., Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, Malouf has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving novel. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impale their dead and converse with the spirit world.Then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer. What ensues is a luminous encounter between civilization and nature, as enacted by a poet who once cataloged the treacheries of love and a boy who slowly learns how to give it. "A work of unusual intelligence and imagination, full of surprising images and insights...One of those rare books you end up underlining and copying out into notebooks and reading out loud to friends."--The New York Times Book Review
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The Secret River
by Kate Grenville
"London, 1806 - William Thornhill, happily wedded to his childhood sweetheart Sal, is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes a mistake, a bad mistake for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. His sentence: to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life." "The Thornhills arrive in this harsh and alien land that they cannot understand and which feels like a death sentence. But among the convicts there is a rumour that freedom can be bought, that 'unclaimed' land up the Hawkesbury offers an opportunity to start afresh, far away from the township of Sydney. When William takes a hundred acres for himself he is shocked to find aboriginal people already living on the river. And other recent arrivals - Thomas Blackwood, Smasher Sullivan and Mrs Herring - are finding their own ways to respond to them" "Soon Thornhill, a man neither better nor worse than most, has to make the most difficult decision of his life."--BOOK JACKET.
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The Transit of Venus
by Shirley Hazzard
"The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century." - The Paris Review Finalist for the National Book Award Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women--seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal--becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard's novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.
