Secondhand Australian Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2694

Secondhand Australian Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box — 21 Books

Martin Boyd's complete Langton Quartet — one of the supreme achievements of Australian fiction, tracing an Anglo-Australian family across generations with a social and psychological precision that earned Boyd consideration for the Nobel Prize — anchors a box rich in Australian literary distinction. Robert Drewe contributes three novels spanning his career from 1979 to 1996; Garry Disher brings two entries in his acclaimed Wyatt crime series; Marjorie Barnard appears in a Virago Modern Classics edition; and Tony Birch, Bruce Dawe, Damien Broderick, and Blanche d'Alpuget round out a box that ranges across the full spectrum of what Australian fiction can do.

1. Garry Disher — Cross Kill (A Wyatt Novel) Wyatt is Disher's career criminal — a professional thief whose code of self-reliance and meticulous planning places him among the most compelling figures in Australian crime fiction. Cold, precise, and addictive.
2. Julian Davies — The Boy Davies is an Australian novelist working at the psychological edge of literary fiction — this early work announcing the unsettling sensibility that would characterise his subsequent writing.
3. Carmel Bird — Red Shoes Bird is one of Australian fiction's most distinctive voices — dark, witty, formally inventive. Victoria Glendinning's cover praise is apt: "her imagination and observation give another dimension to dark and grim territory."
4. Robert Drewe — The Drowner Drewe's 1996 novel — about an irrigation engineer and a circus performer, myth and water and desire — was praised internationally as a work of rare imaginative richness. Among the finest Australian novels of its decade.
5. Robert Drewe — Fortune Drewe's 1986 novel, called "a compelling treasure" by TIME — spanning Australian history and examining the myths of luck, gold, and national identity with the precision and beauty that marks all his best work.
6. Robert Drewe — A Cry in the Jungle Bar Drewe's debut novel, set in Manila — a young Australian adrift in South-East Asia, and one of the first Australian novels to look seriously northward rather than back toward Europe. A significant and unjustly neglected work.
7. Garry Disher — Paydirt (A Wyatt Novel) Wyatt returns — and Disher again demonstrates why this series represents the gold standard of Australian crime fiction: tough, psychologically credible, and entirely without sentimentality.
8. Grace Bartram — Darker Grows the Valley Australian literary fiction engaging with landscape and psychology in the tradition of the country's most characteristic writing — the valley of the title pressing on the inner lives of those who inhabit it.
9. Blanche d'Alpuget — Winter in Jerusalem d'Alpuget — whose biography of Bob Hawke and novel Turtle Beach made her one of Australia's most prominent literary figures — brings her characteristic intelligence about power and desire to the charged landscape of Jerusalem.
10. Damien Broderick — Transmitters Broderick is one of Australia's most significant science fiction writers, but Fay Weldon's cover quote — "like Youngm, Broderick makes us choke while we laugh" — signals a work crossing between genre and literary fiction, as he frequently and brilliantly did.
11. Julian Davies — The Beholder Davies's second appearance in this box — "an hypnotic novel of corrupted affection and compulsive love" that confirms him as a writer of genuine psychological power.
12. Carmel Bird — The White Garden Bird's second appearance — further evidence of her ability to make Australian domestic spaces feel strange, menacing, and morally complex beneath their surfaces.
13. Marjorie Barnard — The Persimmon Tree and Other Stories (Virago Modern Classics) Barnard — who wrote fiction with Florence Eldershaw as M. Barnard Eldershaw and was one of the key figures of Australian literary modernism — collected in the prestigious Virago Modern Classics series. This is the edition that helped return her work to the readership it deserved.
14. Tony Birch — Shadowboxing Birch's debut short story collection, set in inner-city Melbourne — the streets and lives of working-class communities rendered with warmth, precision, and unflinching honesty. The beginning of a career that has made him one of contemporary Australian literature's most valued voices.
15. Bruce Dawe — Over Here, Harv! and Other Stories Dawe is celebrated as one of Australia's greatest poets — "Homecoming" alone secures his place — but this story collection is considerably rarer and reveals his gifts for character and social observation working in a different register.
16. Blanche d'Alpuget — Monkeys in the Dark d'Alpuget's second appearance — a novel of Australian expatriates in South-East Asia that established her as a novelist of serious ambition before Turtle Beach consolidated her reputation.
17. Martin Boyd — The Cardboard Crown (The Langton Quartet, Book 1) The first of Boyd's four Langton novels — in which Guy Langton, reading his grandmother Alice's diaries, begins to reconstruct the Anglo-Australian family history that will occupy all four books. The beginning of a complete quartet.
18. Martin Boyd — A Difficult Young Man (The Langton Quartet, Book 2) Dominic Langton — volatile, beautiful, and deeply at odds with the worlds on both sides of the world — at the centre of Boyd's social comedy and elegy. The second book of the complete quartet.
19. Martin Boyd — Outbreak of Love (The Langton Quartet, Book 3) Melbourne society in the 1890s — and the Langtons navigating love, class, and cultural exile with the irony and tenderness Boyd brought to all his best work. The third book of the complete quartet.
20. Martin Boyd — When Blackbirds Sing (The Langton Quartet, Book 4) The final Langton novel, set during the First World War — Dominic confronting the violence of history and the impossibility of his own position with heartbreaking clarity. The complete quartet is present in this box.
21. Martin Boyd — Lucinda Brayford The fifth and final Boyd in this box — his standalone 1946 novel tracing a woman's life across three generations and two continents, once described as the great Australian novel that Australians forgot to claim. A magnificent companion to the quartet.