Secondhand Australian Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2706

Secondhand Australian Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box — 18 Books

The headline story of this box is Peter Goldsworthy — five titles including Maestro, one of the most celebrated Australian novels of the twentieth century and a staple of school and university curricula for decades. Three John Morrison titles add further depth from a different generation of Australian writing, while Miles Franklin herself — the writer behind the award — is represented with On Dearborn Street. Ashley Hay, Olga Masters, David Foster, and Andrea Goldsmith round out a collection of genuine literary seriousness.

1. Invented Lives — Andrea Goldsmith. Goldsmith is one of Australia's most consistently underrated literary novelists, and Invented Lives is characteristic of her intelligence and emotional ambition — a book about the stories we tell about ourselves and others, and what happens when those stories are finally exposed. Warmly praised and deserving of far wider readership.
2. The Lone Child — Anna George. Praised as "absolutely arresting" by Zoë Morrison, "absorbing and poignant" by Sara Foster, and "sensitive and haunting" by Wendy James — three of Australia's finest literary voices. George's debut is a psychological study of a woman whose life fractures around loss and longing, written with considerable skill and intensity.
3. Three Dog Night — Peter Goldsworthy. From the author of Maestro and Honk If You Are Jesus, this novel follows a lawyer who retreats to the remote country — and the dark discoveries that follow. Goldsworthy's prose is spare, muscular, and quietly devastating, and Three Dog Night is one of his most atmospheric achievements.
4. Winter Traffic — Stephen Greenall. Matthew Condon called this "tough but lyrical... utterly original in every respect" — high praise from one of Australia's best journalists and novelists. Greenall writes with a distinctive, restless intelligence about contemporary life and the ways people drift toward and away from each other.
5. The Railwayman's Wife — Ashley Hay. Gail Jones — author of Five Bells and one of Australia's finest literary novelists — praised this as "a tender portrait of a marriage and the poetry and grief it contains. A beautiful, dreamy, melancholic book." Set in a New South Wales coastal town in the postwar years, following a widow and the two poets who orbit her life, it is one of the loveliest Australian novels of recent decades.
6. John Morrison: Selected Stories (UQP Australian Fiction series). Morrison was one of the great Australian short story writers of the twentieth century — a working-class voice who wrote about wharfies, labourers, and ordinary Australians with dignity, precision, and genuine literary craft. This UQP selection gathers the best of his work and is the ideal introduction to a writer who deserves to be better known.
7. Currawalli Street — Christopher Morgan. "A powerful and moving dance through time" — a novel rooted in the life of a single street across generations, following the families who pass through it and the way place accumulates memory and meaning. Australian domestic fiction at its most attentive.
8. On Dearborn Street — Miles Franklin. Not the award, but the woman behind it — Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, whose My Brilliant Career made her famous. On Dearborn Street is her Chicago novel, drawing on her years in America, and offers a fascinating window into a side of Franklin's life and imagination that Australian readers rarely encounter.
9. Wish: A Biologically Engineered Love Story — Peter Goldsworthy. One of Goldsworthy's most distinctive and provocative works — a genetically engineered being, a love story, and a sustained meditation on what it means to be human. Goldsworthy is one of the very few Australian writers who can make science and philosophy central to literary fiction without either dumbing down or losing the reader.
10. Little Deaths — Peter Goldsworthy. Short stories from Goldsworthy — a form he excels in, with his precision and economy perfectly suited to the compressed world of the short story. "By the author of Honk If You Are Jesus and Maestro" — and every story shows why those books matter.
11. Hitting the Wall — David Foster. Foster is one of the most ambitious and demanding figures in Australian literature — a writer of enormous range and intellectual seriousness — and Hitting the Wall captures his capacity to find depth in apparently ordinary Australian experience. Essential for readers interested in the more experimental reaches of Australian fiction.
12. The Home Girls — Olga Masters. Masters arrived late to fiction — she was in her fifties before her first collection was published — and wrote with the earned authority of a woman who had spent decades watching Australian domestic life closely. The Home Girls is her finest collection: stories of women navigating marriages, children, and small towns with a clear-eyed compassion that recalls Alice Munro. A UQP classic.
13. Walking the Dog — Marian Eldridge (UQP). Eldridge is one of the quieter but more accomplished voices in Australian women's fiction — her short stories and novellas observe the texture of ordinary lives with a precision and warmth that rewards close reading. Another excellent UQP publication.
14. This Freedom: Short Stories — John Morrison (Penguin). A second Morrison collection — further evidence of why he was so admired. His working-class world is rendered without sentimentality and without condescension, and his gift for the telling detail and the perfectly weighted ending makes every story linger. Together with the UQP Selected Stories, this gives readers a substantial Morrison collection.
15. North Wind — John Morrison (Penguin). Stephen Murray-Smith wrote that "Morrison draws a world, a 'respectable world', in delicate and damning touches" — and North Wind is a fine example of that gift. A third Morrison title in the box makes this an extraordinary resource for anyone wanting to understand his place in Australian literature.
16. Magpie — Peter Goldsworthy. A fourth Goldsworthy title — his fiction is so consistently achieved that each new work rewards attention. Magpie demonstrates the range that has made him one of Australia's most versatile and durable literary novelists across five decades of writing.
17. Maestro — Peter Goldsworthy. The novel that made Goldsworthy's reputation and has never left it. The story of Paul Crabbe, a teenage piano prodigy in 1960s Darwin, and his relationship with the mysterious Eduard Keller — a Viennese pianist carrying a devastating history — is one of the great Australian coming-of-age novels. Taught in schools and universities across the country, it is a book that repays reading at any age. To have five Goldsworthy titles in a single box, anchored by Maestro, is a genuine find.
18. Passing Remarks — Helen Hodgman. Hodgman is one of Australian fiction's sharper and more underappreciated satirical voices, and Passing Remarks carries her characteristic dark wit and social observation. Essential for readers interested in the more sardonic edges of Australian women's fiction.