In a time of texts and tweets, the long story is a great luxury. Collected in this weighty tome are longer stories that are perfect for an afternoon of curling up on the couch. Editor Mandy Sayer has selected fiction that runs from 10,000 to 20,000 words from Australia’s greatest contemporary names including Tim Winton, Elizabeth Jolley and Helen Garner. Newcomer Nam Le delivers a heartwrenching tale of a boy’s first love tainted by his dying mother, while David Malouf takes us hunting into Queensland’s rainforests. While the tales themselves vary in themes and voice, the quality of writing is consistently impressive and it’s reassuring to be in the company of writers who use the longer form to such dazzling effect.

Gerald Murnane, once nominated for the Nobel Prize, has been a recent recipient of several prestigious Australian awards, including the Australia Council Emeritus Award for Lifetime Achievement. His first novel Tamarisk Row (Giramondo. PB. $27.95) has recently been reissued to a fresh wave of acclaim, and now Barley Patch, his first work of fiction in 14 years, has been released. Challenging, experimental and deeply intellectual, it follows an unnamed writer’s reflections on his career as a writer and reader as he takes an introspective backwards journey over his reading life, trying to recapture the images he has imbibed over the decades, pursuing greater and greater clarity. Layered with irony, the novel teases the reader with its biographical parallels to Murnane himself, all the while rejecting such a straightforward reading.

Editor Barry Oakley has been collecting stories for Five Mile Press’ highly regarded shortstory collections for over five years and he’s distilled his favourites here. Best of the Best showcases pieces from some of the brightest of Australian literati – from Frank Moorhouse’s reflections on meeting an ex-wife to rising star Karen Hitchcock’s tale of a hunted father. The 25 stories demonstrate Oakley’s ability to unearth great fiction, and include pieces by Cate Kennedy and Thea Astley. With so many stories, the inclusion of a tagline for each ingeniously allows readers a taste as they search out their favourites. Oakley is retiring as editor with this book, and has certainly marked his legacy with this always-intriguing collection.

The book that sparked 2009’s bitchiest debate about what qualifies as ‘Australian literature’ has hit the shelves with an impressive thump. At over 1400 pages it represents an encyclopaedic study of our national culture, unearthing Aboriginal works, bushranging yarns and new voices of immigration. Icons aren’t forgotten – Henry Lawson, Ern Malley, Germaine Greer – but surprise inclusions such as Kev Carmody’s From Little Things Big Things Grow or Michael Leunig’s How Democracy Actually Works redefine our literature. Introductory essays by Kerryn Goldsworthy and the book’s editor Nicholas Jose are insightful overviews, but the great reading is in rediscovering the works themselves. A book that is as epic and contradictory as our nation.

Peter Carey may have left us, but this great Australian author is still intrigued by the New World and the stunning possibility it represented to a dry Europe in the 19th century. Olivier is a young French aristocrat who survived the French Revolution bent on exploring America. Sent along to look after Olivier is the servant Parrot, an older failed artist. Carey plays with the richness of both characters, pitting their ideas on art, love, money and incarceration against each other as the pair form a thoughtful and comic friendship. The novel echoes Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey through the United States so democracy, individualism and the American Dream embellish the subtext. Carey offers both a touchingly real friendship and a witty toying with history – great stuff.

Buy any two of these Australian classics on audiobook and you can choose a third title free! From controversial The Slap to gritty Truth, these Bolinda titles are perfect for those who like to listen to books as well as read them. Stock up for summer road trips, or for listening while cooking Christmas feasts for the family. Note that the title with the lowest RRP will be the one given free.

Buy any two of these Australian classics on audiobook and you can choose a third title free! From controversial The Slap to gritty Truth, these Bolinda titles are perfect for those who like to listen to books as well as read them. Stock up for summer road trips, or for listening while cooking Christmas feasts for the family. Note that the title with the lowest RRP will be the one given free.

When Katie, who is bipolar, is looking for new flatmates, a tragic American called Adam and a middle-aged charity worker named Graeme join her inner-city household. As the three disparate and dysfunctional characters connect and disconnect with each other, the different demons that haunt them are revealed – mental illness, grief, depression, displacement and the unanswered questions about life’s meaning that can lead to suicide. This dark and gritty novel by Australian author Emily Maguire is set in Sydney over a long hot summer and a sense of sultry heat infuses its pages. Maguire, author of Princesses and Pornstars (Text. PB. $32.95), never steers away from controversy and important issues of social justice and consumerism underpin the book’s narrative.

Buy any two of these Australian classics on audiobook and you can choose a third title free! From controversial The Slap to gritty Truth, these Bolinda titles are perfect for those who like to listen to books as well as read them. Stock up for summer road trips, or for listening while cooking Christmas feasts for the family. Note that the title with the lowest RRP will be the one given free.

Axel and Edward are a pair of Englishmen bonded through their service in WWI. Intrepid Axel is determined to take his balloon over New Albion (a fictionalised Papua New Guinea) and Edward is along for the ride. But when Axel disappears on his latest adventure, Edward becomes a detective, following his friend’s last journey through a disappearing world. In The Umbrella Club, the fascinating pursuit of dirigible travel, the stiff upper lips of the heroes and the mythical locales collide in an adventure story that glides over colonial politics and cultural clashes. Brooks has a light touch with his very British characters – sometimes amusing, sometimes heartbreaking – that vividly takes readers along on this great expedition.

Buy any two of these Australian classics on audiobook and you can choose a third title free! From controversial The Slap to gritty Truth, these Bolinda titles are perfect for those who like to listen to books as well as read them. Stock up for summer road trips, or for listening while cooking Christmas feasts for the family. Note that the title with the lowest RRP will be the one given free.

From grunge godfather to the author of the Miles Franklin–winning The White Earth (Allen & Unwin. PB. $23.95), Andrew McGahan is a writer always changing direction. Here, he gives us a grown-up fable of a silent orphan residing peacefully in a Gothic hospital until the admission of a strange foreigner. Their curious friendship takes them around the world but begins to affect other patients as sadistic murders occur and a nearby volcano bubbles into life. Wonders of a Godless World balances between insanity and imagination, the bizarre and the mundane, with pageturning panache. This quixotic, creepy and utterly fascinating work marks another direction for McGahan – an exciting one that’s on-course for award nominations in 2010.

Now a highly anticipated annual publishing event, Black Inc.’s three ‘Best of’ volumes are essential summer reading. This year’s Essays showcases pieces as diverse as Annabel Crabb on Julia Gillard, David Marr on Christmas Island and Peter Conrad on Michael Jackson. Poems features work by Clive James, Robert Gray, Les Murray, Dorothy Porter and other notables. Stories offers quality short fiction by writers including Mandy Sayer, Steven Amsterdam and Peter Goldsworthy.

Nam Le recently won the Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under the age of 30 for this bestselling collection of short stories.

The winner of this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award is a powerful meditation on life, loss and the meaning of existence.

Established, bestselling and award-winning writers explore the tensions, alliances and affections between siblings in this collection of stories.

Set adrift by his wife’s death, salesman Bunny Munro hawks his wares, feeds his libido and selfdestructs on England’s south coast. A darkly comic, heartrending novel.

SPECIAL PRICE. Alice Black is from Western Australia, and she is fascinated by modern technology: photocopiers, neon lights, photography, astronauts. She is a loner, detached from the world around her, even from her sister Norah. But then she travels to Paris and meets 68-year-old Mr Sakamoto, who shares her interest in inventions, in particular that of Alexander Graham Bell – the telephone. As their unusual friendship develops, they discuss the book Alice is writing, movies and countless other topics, including just a little about Mr Sakamoto’s life in Japan after surviving the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945. Acutely observed and poetic in its sense of disconnection, Dreams of Speaking is by the author of Sixty Lights (Vintage. PB. $24.95), awarded the 2004 WA Premier’s Prize and the 2005 Age Book of the Year.

Can Nicola survive the hellish end of a relationship and overcome her heartbreak to arrive at an understanding of the human heart?

Tony Birch won wide acclaim for his first story collection, Shadowboxing (Scribe. PB. $24.95), set in working-class Fitzroy in the 1960s. In Father’s Day, he revisits the fringes of society – his characters have grown up in poverty and recently escaped it, or still dwell in commission flats or bedsits. Birch is compassionate to his damaged men and struggling women, but never sentimental. The reader senses whole universes of submerged feeling and hard experience beneath the surface of the stories, the most moving of which explore family connections: two middle-aged brothers are fleetingly bound by a childhood memory; a man visiting his estranged father watches him unexpectedly connect with his own son. Father’s Day is about connections made and missed – and the possibility of redemption.

The concepts of guilt and memory are explored in this powerful novel set against the backdrop of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of power in Cambodia.

This handsome set of Grenville’s awardwinning novels is the perfect Christmas gift for those who appreciate quality Australian literature. The Secret River, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2006, tells the story of William Thornhill, sentenced in 1806 to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife and children in tow, he arrives in the new colony and eventually stakes his claim to a patch of land on the Hawkesbury River near others who are trying to make lives for themselves in a harsh new world. In her follow-up novel The Lieutenant, Grenville introduces us to Daniel Rooke, a soldier and astronomer who arrives in New South Wales with the First Fleet in 1788 and strikes up a friendship with an Aboriginal girl, Tagaran, and her people.

Behrendt’s stunning debut novel is about Simone Harlowe, a young and clever Aboriginal lawyer straddling two lives and two cultures.

Seeking shelter from a sudden rainstorm, Australian tourist John Patterner enters a modest café in Paris and is immediately entranced by Sabiha, the Tunisian niece of the café’s owner. Theirs becomes a contented but unlikely partnership – a marriage of two cultures lived in a third – but because they are essentially foreigners to each other, their love story sets in train a course of tragic events. Years later, in Melbourne, John confides their story to Ken, an ageing and somewhat jaded novelist. It is a story about human frailties and passions that raises difficult questions of morals and purpose. Reminiscent of Miller’s 2000 novel Conditions of Faith (Allen & Unwin. PB. $23.95), Lovesong is a sumptuously designed book that showcases the author’s sparse but deeply resonant prose.

A beguiling meditation on friendship and love, on men and women, on landscape and the difficulties of thought itself, by one of Australia’s greatest novelists.

The Toads have a marriage of convenience: Gin to escape a mental institution, Toad the censure of a country community. Then everything changes with the arrival of two Italian POWs.

The great Australian writer revisits Homer’s Iliad in his first novel in more than a decade.

Four friends are drawn back to Melbourne for a reunion 20 years after they met at university, facing issues of love, power, friendship and betrayal.

Age Book of the Year and Miles Franklin winner David Foster has been too long between books. His return is dazzling. In part, Sons of the Rumour is a re-imagining of The 1001 Arabian Nights, as King Shahrban is charmed from murdering his wives by the beguiling story-spinner, Scheherazade. Woven into this myth are the contemporary travails of Al Morrisey, a former British jazz drummer escaping his failed marriage in an attempt to relive his youth. The interplay between stories makes each more powerful as Foster eruditely hops between them with wit and intrigue. Sprawling in its themes and ambitious in its humanity, this is a masterful work by one of Australia’s best living writers.

‘How is it that she can enter this heart-breaking territory – the dying friend who comes to stay – and make it not only bearable, but glorious and funny?’ Peter Carey

A still-grieving mother tries to write the story of her young son Tom, dead for 10 years. A powerful meditation on loss and mourning.

With his chart-topping band, Butterfish, Curtis Holland lived the clichéd rock dream – but back in Brisbane, he now has to work out what things in life really matter.

A charming novel set in 1960 about the staff of the ladies cocktail frocks section at the F. G. Goode department store in Sydney.

The first novel by acclaimed short-story writer Cate Kennedy is set in the Tasmanian wilderness and explores the vast terrain of contemporary relationships and family ties.