The Reader's Shelf

From Library Journal Wonder from Down Under:  Australian Fiction

Cloudstreet By Winton, Tim 2002-04 - Scribner Book Company 9780743234412 Check Our Catalog From separate catastrophes, two rural Australian families flee to the city and find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives again. …More

Eucalyptus By Bail, Murray 2007-08 - Picador USA 9780312427313 Check Our Catalog Winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book A "New York Times Book Review" Notable Book of the Year On a property in New South Wales, a widower named Holland lives with his daughter, Ellen. Over the years as she grows into a beautiful woman, Holland plants hundreds of different eucalyptus trees on his land, filling the landscape, making a virtual outdoor museum of trees. When Ellen is nineteen, Holland announces that she may only marry the man who can correctly name the species of each and every gum tree on his property. A strange contest begins, and Ellen is left unmoved by her suitors until she chances on a strange young man resting under the Coolibah tree whose stories will amaze and dazzle her. A modern fairy tale, and an unforgettable love story, that bristles with spiky truths and unexpected wisdom about art, feminine beauty, landscape, and language. "Eucalyptus" affirms the seductive power of storytelling itself. …More

The Slap By Tsiolkas, Christos 2010-04 - Penguin Books 9780143117148 Check Our Catalog Winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. When a man slaps a child who is not his own at a neighborhood barbecue, the act triggers a series of repercussions in the lives of the people who witness the event. …More

The Secret River By Grenville, Kate 2007-04 - Canongate Books 9781841959146 Check Our Catalog In 1806 William Thornhill, an illiterate English bargeman and a man of quick temper but deep compassion, steals a load of wood and, as a part of his lenient sentence, is deported, along with his beloved wife, Sal, to the New South Wales colony in what would become Australia. "The Secret River" is the tale of William and Sal's deep love for their small, exotic corner of the new world, and William's gradual realization that if he wants to make a home for his family, he must forcibly take the land from the people who came before him. Acclaimed around the world, "The Secret River" is a magnificent, transporting work of historical fiction. …More

The Great World By Malouf, David 1993-09 - Vintage Books USA 9780679748366 Check Our Catalog By the author of 'Remembering Babylon', 'The Great World' is a remarkable novel of self-knowledge and of fall from innocence, of survival and witness. …More

Oscar and Lucinda: Movie Tie-In Edition By Carey, Peter Stafford 1997-11 - Vintage Books USA 9780679777502 Check Our Catalog The Booker Prize-winning novel--now a major motion picture from Fox Searchlight Pictures. This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent--a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms--could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback. …More