Item category 1: Classics

Late one night Lloyd Fitzherbert, police reporter for the Sydney Gazette, is called to the morgue. The body of Irma, a beautiful young refugee from Nazi Europe, has been fished out of the harbour. She was Fitzherbert's lover - and he knows more about what happened to her than he can let on.

"Craiglockhart War Hospital, Scotland, 1917, where army psychiatrist William Rivers is treating shell-shocked soldiers. Under his care are the poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, as well as mute Billy Prior, who is only able to communicate by means of pencil and paper. Rivers's job is to ma...

The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second World War, Stevens is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him -- o...

A picture of Australia at the time of its foundation, focused on the hostility between early British settlers and native Aboriginals. It is essentially the story of a boy caught between both worlds.

Acknowledged as the cornerstone of Western philosophy, and presented in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and three interlocutors, It addresses the notion of a perfect community and the ideal individual within it; what is goodness; what is reality ; what is knowledge?; also the purpose o...

Some years after the war has ended Alan Duncan returns to the family farm in Australia. But his homecoming is upset by the suicide of his parent's much-loved maid. A long night's vigil at the fireside bring back his harrowing memories of wartime Britain.

Robert Merivel is a dissolute young medical student when an accident of fate leads him to the attention of King Charles II. Finding favour with the King, Merivel embarks on the time of his life, enthusiastically enjoying the luxury, women and wine of the vibrant royal court, until he is called up...