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Titles will be released starting October 2009 - see the side bar for details.

Inez Baranay
With the Tiger
ISBN 978 1 921509 57 5

Australian teenager Larry Darrell returns from backpacking in India to refuse the privileges and opportunities of his former life. His travels seeking the meaning of chance and death take him to personal growth workshops, a fashionable ashram, the worlds of art and politics, a Buddhist monastery and an Indian saint. Meanwhile his ex-fiancée Isabel achieves wealth and fame when she marries their old friend Gray, a Queensland property developer. By the end of the 1980s they are bankrupt and disgraced. Ten years later they meet again in Sydney, along with Isabel’s camp, domineering uncle Elliott, their badly behaved, grieving old friend Sophie, and Will Maugham, the playwright who narrates this story.

Peter Corris
Wishart's Quest
ISBN 978 1 921509 54 4
NOW AVAILABLE

In a New England country town to give a paper, academic Tom Wishart is struck by an amateur painting in the local art gallery. It looks just like him. Wishart is a foundling who knows nothing about his parents. The clue given by this uncanny resemblance sets him on a quest to discover his origins. As the search reaches back in time, the turbulent, shadowy lives of Paul Bushell, son of the squattocracy and disgraced Vietnam deserter, and Diana Saunders, vanished Aboriginal sportswoman, come into view and are played out. Could these be his parents? How and why was he abandoned? The trail leads to Sydney, Vietnam, Manila and Hong Kong, but the answers are found in a isolated place in the Blue Mountains.

Phillip Edmonds
Leaving home with Henry
ISBN 978 1 921509 55 1

Henry Lawson arises from the vaults of the National Library and hitches a road trip around contemporary Australia. His driver (and erstwhile narrator) Trevor is in search of the ‘real’ Australia, and they travel together through western New South Wales, on up into Queensland, retracing the past and imagining the present. Henry has a romantic moment in Nimbin, is charmed by the contradictions of Byron Bay, makes it to the Gold Coast, and eventually finishes up in his old home town of Sydney. This novel asks central questions about Australians and the myths they create for themselves. Are we an egalitarian people or individuals in the pursuit of pleasure?

Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor Jordan
Fools’ paradise: life in an altered state
ISBN 978 1 921509 58 2

“Wake up, Australia,” Grafton Everest exhorts viewers every morning on Australia-wide breakfast television. This doesn’t please those he attacks like incumbent state premier, Bruce Henderson, former premier wily old Sir Otis Hoogstraden, and Mr David Satoya, Visiting Fellow in Tourist Economics at the University of Mangoland, where Grafton holds down a day job as Professor of LifeSkills and Hospitality.
And Lee Horton, head of Australia’s newly privatised Secret Service (trading as Spyforce Australia) is worried too. He knows that Grafton has trouble lying. And nothing is more dangerous than a man who habitually tells the truth.
Hoogstraden and Horton are losing ground to the new conservative, media-savvy songstress Marnie Miller, whose short but feminine auburn hair, discreet earrings, steel-capped cowboy boots and homespun demagoguery have boot-scooted her to political stardom. The School of Humanities and Lifeskills is under threat from the economically and sexually rapacious Vice-Chancellor Deidre Morrow. And Grafton is forced into a deal with the Devil—Sir Otis Hoogstraden—to write Sir Otis’s biography.

Michael Wilding
The prisoner of Mount Warning
ISBN 978 1 921509 56 8

When small-press bibliographer Charles Dorritt recovers from a breakdown by doing a creative writing course, he announces he is publishing his memoirs of torture and sex-slavery at the hands of the security services. Plant is called to lunch with the arts editor of a metropolitan broadsheet, lifestyle journalist Angela Dark, and political speechwriter Ghostly Sperrit, all of whom seem deeply concerned the revelations should not appear. They hire Plant to have a word with Dorritt, but Dorritt heads out to Byron Bay. Plant pursues him through the dope lands of northern New South Wales. A past era of magic mushrooms, free love, American friends, and an alternative newspaper of deep level inauthenticity begins to emerge, something no one but Plant is keen to see revealed.