Through Australian Eyes: Books

Aaron Rowe walks in his sleep. He has dreams he can't explain, and memories he can't recover. Death doesn't scare him - his new job with a funeral director may even be his salvation. But if he doesn't discover the truth about his hidden past soon, he may fall asleep one night and never wake up.

Seventeen-year-old Delilah's crazy life is about to get crazier. Ever since her father took off overseas, she's been struggling to run the family's cafe - The Flywheel - without him and survive high school. But after a misjudged crush on one of the cool girls, she's become the school punchline as well. With all that's on her plate she barely has time for her favourite distraction - spying on the beautiful Rosa, who dances flamenco at the tapas bar across the road. Only her best friend Charlie knows how she feels about Rosa, but he has romantic problems of his own. When his plan to win an older woman's heart goes horribly wrong, Del is the only one who can help Charlie stay out of jail. All this leaves Del grappling with some seriously curly questions. Is it okay to break the law to help a friend? How can a girl tell another girl she likes her without it ending in humiliation and heartbreak? And - the big one - is it ever truly possible to dance in public without falling over?

A darkly satirical novel of love, revenge, and 1950s haute couture... After twenty years spent mastering the art of dressmaking at couture houses in Paris, Tilly Dunnage returns to the small Australian town she was banished from as a child. She plans only to check on her ailing mother and leave. But Tilly decides to stay, and though she is still an outcast, her lush, exquisite dresses prove irresistible to the prim women of Dungatar. Through her fashion business, her friendship with Sergeant Farrat--the town's only policeman, who harbors an unusual passion for fabrics--and a budding romance with Teddy, the local football star whose family is almost as reviled as hers, she finds a measure of grudging acceptance. But as her dresses begin to arouse competition and envy in town, causing old resentments to surface, it becomes clear that Tilly's mind is set on a darker design: exacting revenge on those who wronged her, in the most spectacular fashion.

Rosie and Nona are sisters. Yapas. They are also best friends. It doesn't matter that Rosie is white and Nona is Aboriginal: their family connections tie them together for life. Born just five days apart in a remote corner of the Northern Territory, the girls are inseperable, until Nona moves away at the age of nine. By the time she returns, they're in Year 10 and things have changed. Rosie has lost interest in the community, preferring to hang out in the nearby mining town, where she goes to school with the glamorous Selena, and Selena's gorgeous older brother Nick. When a political announcement highlights divisions between the Aboriginal community and the mining town, Rosie is put in a difficult position: will she be forced to choose between her first love and her oldest friend?

Laurinda is an exclusive school for girls. At its hidden centre of power is The Cabinet, a triangle of girls who wield power over their classmates - and some of their teachers. Entering this world of wealth and secrets is Lucy Lam, a scholarship girl with sharp eyes and a shaky sense of self. As she watches The Cabinet in action, and is courted by them - as she learns about power and repression - Lucy finds herself in a battle for her identity and integrity.

Melina Marchetta's stunning debut novel Looking for Alibrandi is one girl's story of her final year at school, a year she sets herself free. Josephine Alibrandi is seventeen and in her final year at a wealthy girls' school. This is the year she meets her father, the year she falls in love, the year she searches for Alibrandi and finds the real truth about her family — and the identity she has been searching for.

My Placebegins with Sally Morgan tracing the experiences of her own life, growing up in suburban Perth in the fifties and sixties. Through the memories and images of her childhood and adolescence, vague hints and echoes begin to emerge, hidden knowledge is uncovered, and a fascinating story unfolds - a mystery of identity, complete with clues and suggested solutions. Sally Morgan's My Placeis a deeply moving account of a search for truth, into which a whole family is gradually drawn; finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

From the author of the Chanters of Tremaris series comes a contemporary time travel fantasy, grounded in the landscape of Australia   Beginning and ending, always the same, always now. The game, the story, the riddle, hiding and seeking. Crow comes from this place; this place comes from Crow. And Crow has work for you. Sadie isn't thrilled when her mother drags her from the city to live in the country town of Boort. But soon she starts making connections—with the country, with the past, with two boys, Lachie and Walter, and, most surprisingly, with the ever-present crows. When Sadie is tumbled back in time to view a terrible crime, she is pulled into a strange mystery. Can Sadie, Walter, and Lachie figure out a way to right old wrongs, or will they be condemned to repeat them? A fantasy ground in mythology, this novel has the backing of a full consultative process on the use of indigenous lore.

Life is made up of three parts: in the first third, you're embarrassed by your family; in the second, you make a family of your own; and in the end, you just embarrass the family you've made. That's how Billy's grandmother explains it, anyway. She's given him her bucket list (cue embarrassment), and now, it's his job to glue their family back together. No pressure or anything. Fixing his family's not going to be easy, and Billy's not ready for change. But as he soon discovers, the first third has to end some time. And then what? It's a Greek tragedy waiting to happen.

A deftly curated anthology of the best of contemporary Australian short stories, each with an essay by their authors Breaking down the wall between the creative and discursive, the imagistic and the expository, this collection offers an alternating story/essay structure, making it ideal for the classroom, as well as a pure pleasure to read for anyone interested in the best of "Ozlit." The authors' essays reveal the acute organizing intelligence behind the most artless-appearing of stories, and are a rare bonus for readers.

Award-winning author Alice Pung has selected 25 diverse stories written by high school students inspired by her novel, Laurinda. The collection features an impressive range of genres by exciting new voices, exploring themes as varied as intergenerational friendship, cultural identity, bullying and heartbreak. From epiphanies on an African safari to trying to cope with the death of a parent, from a prank gone wrong to finding love in unexpected places, the stories in My First Lesson are vivid and imaginative, funny and surprising, poetic and moving.

Henry Lawson is too often regarded as a legend rather than a writer to be enjoyed. In this selection John Barnes reveals Lawson as a writer whose delightful, humorous, wry, moving and above all, enjoyable short stories continue to delight generations of readers.