Item category 1: Classics

A gang war is raging through the dark, seedy underworld of Brighton. Pinkie, fighting for leadership, is only seventeen yet he has already proved his ruthlessness in the brutal killing of Hale, a journalist. Untouched by human feeling, Pinkie is isolated from the rest of the world, a figure of pu...

Querry, a world famous architect, is the victim of a terrible attack of indifference: he no longer finds meaning in art of pleasure in life. Arriving anonymously at a Congo leper village, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper who has gone through a stage of mutil...

Cakes and Ale is a delicious satire of London literary society between the Wars. Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her lionized novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the ...

Life is good for Buck in Santa Clara Valley, where he spends his days eating and sleeping in the golden sunshine. But one day a treacherous act of betrayal leads to his kidnap, and he is forced into a life of toil and danger. Dragged away to be a sledge dog in the harsh and freezing cold Yukon, B...

John Steinbeck's paean to the Monterey County of his youth, "Cannery Row" contains an introduction by Susan Shillinglaw in "Penguin Modern Classics". In the din and stink that is "Cannery Row" a colourful blend of misfits - gamblers, whores, drunks, bums and artists - survive side by side in a ju...

This remarkable novel, first published to a chorus of acclaim in 1952, is one of the lost classics of Australian literature. Martin Boyd is a deeply humane novelist, a writer of family sagas without peer. Set in Australia and England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, The Cardboa...

It is the Great Depression. Six-year-old PS is an orphan. He lives in Sydney with his Aunt Lila. But all that is about to change. Now his Aunt Vanessa has decided to take proper care of him.

Centred on the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance, a township shaped by cyclones, monsoonal floods and a river that spurns human endeavour with its incomprehensible tides, it tells the story of the powerful Phantom family. Led by Norm Phantom, the great fish-embalming king of time, l...