Item category 1: Classics

Fifty years after its first publication, Robin Boyd's bestselling The Australian Ugliness remains the definitive statement on how we live and think in the environments we create for ourselves. In it Boyd railed against Australia's promotion of ornament, decorative approach to design and slavish i...

Barnaby Rudge is a young innocent simpleton who is devoted to his talkative raven, Grip. When he gets caught up in the mayhem of the Gordon riots and a mysterious unsolved murder, his life is put in jeopardy. Barnaby Rudge a powerful historical tale of treachery, forbidden love, abduction and the...

The award-winning tale of the motley crowd of travelling 'battlers'. The Battlers is the story of Snow - a drifter and wanderer; Dancy - a hard-bitten young woman; and the crowd that accompanies them as they travel the roads looking for work in the 1930s. Their story is told with compassion and h...

Alex Garland's The Beach was published to immediate acclaim, and has since become a bestselling cult classic and a Hollywood blockbuster. Richard, a gap-year student, is introduced to a beautiful island by the mysterious Daffy.

Anthony Patch and Gloria Gibson are the golden children of the Jazz Age. They marry and embark on a life of glittering parties, lavish expenditure and scandalous revelry. When the money dries up their marriage founders. In this wistful novel Fitzgerald portrays the decline of youthful promise wit...

'One is repeatedly moved by the delicacy of the imagery and the understated precision' New Statesman The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets.

The unedited version of 'What we talk about when we talk about Love" before it would be cut by Carver's editor and mentor.

I was supposed to be having the time of my life. When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther's life begins to s...