Secondhand Australian Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2708

Secondhand Australian Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box — 18 Books

A deeply literary Australian collection with a remarkable range of voices across six decades of writing. My Place by Sally Morgan — one of the most important books ever published in Australia — is the headline find, but this box rewards closer inspection: Patrick White himself called Kate Grenville's Lilian's Story "dazzling fiction of universal appeal"; Hal Porter's The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony is one of the great Australian memoirs; and Randolph Stow is represented with a novel that Francis King called the work of one of fiction's strongest and most original talents. Two Keneally titles, two Grenville titles, two Sherborne titles, and two Mat Schulz titles give unusual author depth throughout.

1. Bearded Ladies — Kate Grenville (UQP). Grenville's debut short story collection — already showing the sharp psychological eye and vivid, unsentimental treatment of women's lives that would make Lilian's Story and The Secret River essential reading. A significant historical document as well as a fine collection of stories.
2. Claim: Fact and Fiction, Murder and Madness — Mat Schulz (Flamingo). Schulz works in the territory between fiction and fact with a distinctive energy, excavating Australian crime and madness with a journalist's instinct for the revealing detail and a novelist's ear for voice. A genuinely original contribution to Australian writing.
3. The Suburbs of Hell — Randolph Stow. Francis King wrote that "there are few stronger or more original talents in fiction today" — and Stow, one of Australian fiction's most neglected major writers, earns every word of that praise. Best known for Tourmaline and Visitants, he brought a spare, uncanny intensity to everything he wrote. The Suburbs of Hell is late Stow and demonstrates why his rediscovery is long overdue.
4. Ceremony at Lang Nho — Georgia Savage. Savage is one of Australian fiction's more quietly remarkable figures — a writer of considerable power whose work deserves far more readers than it has found. Ceremony at Lang Nho brings her characteristic strangeness and moral seriousness to a story reaching across cultures and generations.
5. Zombie Field — Mat Schulz. A second Schulz title — his fiction returns obsessively to the darker corners of Australian life and history, always with an eye for the absurd as well as the horrifying. The two Schulz volumes together give a strong sense of a distinctive and important Australian voice.
6. I Dream of Magda — Stefan Laszczuk. "Quirky, self-obsessed... but ultimately touching" — Laszczuk writes with the wry, self-deprecating intelligence of a writer who has thought seriously about what it means to be a certain kind of Australian man. A debut that announced genuine promise.
7. A Bride for St Thomas — Cynthia Nolan. Cynthia Nolan was the wife of Sidney Nolan — and A Bride for St Thomas, set partly in London, partly in Australia, draws on that life at the centre of Australian artistic culture while remaining entirely its own literary achievement. A rare find.
8. Fault Lines — Pierz Newton-John. Chris Womersley called it "a startling collection... sly humour and memorable characters," and Matthew Condon praised it for returning "the gift to the Australian literary tradition." Newton-John brings a poet's precision and a satirist's edge to short fiction that catches contemporary Australian life at unexpected angles.
9. The Cry of the Goldfinch — Peter Skrzynecki. Skrzynecki is best known to generations of Australian schoolchildren through his poetry — "Feliks Skrzynecki" and "Postcard" are among the most studied Australian poems — but this prose work reveals the same qualities that make his verse so enduring: the immigrant's eye, the loving attention to family, the search for belonging in an unfamiliar landscape.
10. A Dutiful Daughter — Thomas Keneally. One of Keneally's early experimental novels — surrealist, strange, and entirely unlike the historical fiction that would later make him famous. A farm family in whom the boundaries between human and animal begin to dissolve: dark, fable-like, and showing Keneally's extraordinary range. Essential for serious Keneally readers.
11. The Georges' Wife — Elizabeth Jolley. Jolley was one of the most original novelists in Australian literature — eccentric, dark, possessed of a comic sensibility that could turn deeply unsettling without warning. The Georges' Wife was praised as "one of the significant pieces of writing of our time" by the Canberra Weekend Australian, and it is vintage Jolley.
12. Lilian's Story — Kate Grenville. Patrick White — the only Australian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature — called this "dazzling fiction of universal appeal." The novel follows Lilian Singer from her brutally constrained childhood through her eventual liberation into the eccentric, shouting, magnificently alive street presence she becomes. It is one of the finest Australian novels of the 1980s and the book that established Grenville as a major writer.
13. Tree Palace — Craig Sherborne. Sherborne is one of the most uncompromising voices in contemporary Australian fiction, and Tree Palace applies his forensic social eye to a community of itinerant workers at the absolute margins of Australian life — tender and brutal in equal measure, written without a single wasted word.
14. The Amateur Science of Love — Craig Sherborne. Sherborne's celebrated novel of a young man's catastrophic first love — charted with the self-lacerating precision of someone who has examined every mistake and found dark comedy in each one. A second Sherborne title in the same box, together making a strong case for one of the most distinctive voices in Australian fiction.
15. My Place — Sally Morgan. One of the most important books ever published in Australia. Morgan's memoir of discovering her Aboriginal heritage — and her family's long-enforced silence about it — changed the way many Australians understood their own history. Moving, warm, and quietly devastating, it remains essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this country. An extraordinary find in any box.
16. Blood Red, Sister Rose — Thomas Keneally. Keneally's novel of Joan of Arc, written with his characteristic blend of historical rigour and novelistic freedom. This is Keneally before Schindler's Ark — already commanding the historical epic form with total confidence, giving voice to one of history's most contested figures with freshness and power.
17. The Revolt of the Coats — Grant Caldwell. Caldwell is one of Australian fiction's more elliptical and formally adventurous voices — a writer of short, strange, carefully made fictions that operate according to their own internal logic. The Revolt of the Coats is characteristic: baffling on the surface, resonant underneath.
18. The Watcher on the Cast-Iron Balcony — Hal Porter (Faber). One of the great Australian memoirs — Porter's account of his Bairnsdale childhood is written in a prose so elaborately textured and self-conscious that it reads almost like fiction, and all the better for it. Lush, precise, and utterly distinctive, it stands alongside My Brother Jack and A Fortunate Life as one of the indispensable documents of Australian literary autobiography.