Modern Literature

//Modern Literature
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  • The wind is whispering in Woody Creek...Change is in the air...It's 1958 and Woody Creek is being dragged kicking and screaming into the swinging sixties. Jenny's daughters, Cara and Georgie, are now young women. They have inherited their mother's hands, but that is where their similarity ends. Raised separately, they have never met. A mistake from Cara's teenage years looms over her future, but she believes emphatically in the white wedding and happily ever after myth. Georgie has seen enough of marriage and motherhood. She plans to live her life as her grandmother did, independent of a man. But life for the Morrison girls has never been easy, and once the sisters are in each other's lives, long-buried secrets are bound to be unearthed, the dramatic consequences of which no-one could have predicted...Described as ‘...very Australian, very real, very country small town and very well written.’
  •   Woodlea Book 2. After losing a patient, Dr Fliss Knight returns to small town Woodlea and buys a rundown farm, her confidence and city career in tatters. She intends to live a solitary life and hopes that the slow country pace will help her heal. Pickup rider Hewitt Sinclair is no stranger to how hairy things can get in a rodeo arena. But when he can’t save the life of his twin brother, he hangs up his spurs. Determined to provide for his brother’s widow and young family, he gives himself no time to grieve. But when a motorbike accident proves he needs to also look out for himself, he accepts an old friend’s invitation to stay at an isolated property while his body heals. When Fliss meets the cowboy living in the bluestone stables across the garden, all her hopes for a quiet and peaceful life fade. Despite his reserve, Hewitt is impossible to ignore. As they work together to care for an abandoned dog and her puppies they find themselves drawn to each other. But as a family secret threatens every truth Fliss has ever known, and the heavy spring rain continues to fall, both Fliss and Hewitt must each face their deepest fears.
  • When young Jinnie Howlett’s widowed father, a tinker man, died a pauper, she was indeed fortunate to already be the inmate of a northern workhouse, for with no other relatives, she might have ended up on the streets – a fate for girls her age that was all too common in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Close to her fifteenth birthday and after years of drudgery and toil, she is at last offered a position as a maid of all work with the Shalemans at Tollet’s Ridge Farm, a bleak isolated place near the Cumbrian border. Rose, the invalid wife of Pug Shaleman and mother to Bruce and Hal demanded all her time. But Bruce realises there’s more to this seemingly vulnerable girl than the rest of the family realises, and he becomes her defender against the brutish harassment of Pug and Hal. It is onlyj when she accidentally makes the acquaintance of Richard Baxton-Powell, who owed his life to Bruce, that Jinnie realises how different and tempting life was beyond the farm – and it is only later she understands that her growing confidence and maturity owed more to her life with the Shalemans than to any other outside influence.

  • Spanning three generations, Capricornia tells the story of Australia's north. It is a story of whites and Aborigines and Asians, of chance relationships that can form bonds for life, of dispossession, murder and betrayal. In 1904 the brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth, clad in serge suits and bowler hats, arrive in Port Zodiac on the coast of Capricornia. they are clerks who have come from the south to join the Capricornian Government Service. Oscar prospers, and takes to his new life as a gentleman. Mark, however, is restless, and takes up with old Ned Krater, a trepang fisherman, who tells him tales of the sea and the islands, introduces him to drink, and boasts of his conquests of Aboriginal women - or 'Black Velvet', as they are called. But it is Mark's son, Norman, whose struggles to find a place in the world embody the complexities of Capricornia itself. The inspiration behind Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia.
  • Growing up in an isolated cottage in the hills of Cumberland, Tom knows the bitter cold of shooting expeditions with his grandfather and long evenings spent with his father and mother. But taken away from the hills to live in the small town of Thornton, Tom experiences a tumult of conflicting emotions which he must master before he can come to terms with his identity.
  • Reid’s collection of poems relate to the beauty of the Australian countryside, creating realistic images. He also offers humor and vision in his observations of people, animals, philosophy, emotions and of course, love.

  • Young student Axel and Professor Otto Lidenbrock, studying a very old manuscript, discover an ancient pathway into the centre of the Earth. They travel to Iceland, and with the assistance of Hans, a local guide, they find an entrance in Snæfellsjökull, a volcano near Reykjavík. The travel is extensively long, and not without its many perils. Will they be able to make it? And what amazing wonders await hidden within the depths of the Earth? Colour illustrations by T.C. Dugdale.
  • Lennie Lower was born in Dubbo in 1903 and after school joined the Royal Australian Navy, which he left in circumstances that are somewhat obscure. During the Depression he seems to have led a hobo existence and began contributing humorous material to newspapers, later becoming a full time journalist. In this volume: The Secret Lives Of Lennie L:ower; Bloodhound Lower Of The Yard; Husband Lower Of The Back Yard; Hints For Young Home-muckers; Bearding Grandpa In His Den; Putting Curry Into The Curriculum; How To Be A Lighthouse Keeper Or Almost Anything; Is There An Elf On Your  Shelf? Whaling, Chess And Other Indoor Sports; Science, Medicine And Other Lurks. Epilogue:The Melancholy Of Lennie Lower by Alexander MacDonald.  Known for Here's Luck, Lower is still considered to be the comic genius  of Australian journalism. He died in 1947.

  • Neat little quirky tales with stings in their tails, some just for fun and others to make you think. In this volume: Hard Labour; The Bully Of The Cavendish; The Peacemaker; A Tiger's Skin; Three At Table; A Black Affair; A Case Of Desertion; The Rival Beauties; Smoked Skipper; An Intervention; The Lost Ship; The Persecution Of Bob Pretty; Odd Charges; His Lordship; In The Family. From the author of The Monkey's Paw.  
  • In this omnibus volume: Britannia All At Sea: It was love at first sight for Britannia Smith when she met Professor Jake Luitingh van Thien and shamelessly followed him to Holland, hoping to see more of him. She succeeded - and to her joy, he proposed. But just when all seemed perfect, she met Madeleine de Venz. In every way Madeleine was right for Jake, and Britannia became more convinced that to go ahead with the wedding might ruin Jake's life… Three For A Wedding: Phoebe Brook hadn't planned to take a nursing job in Holland. But when her sister Sybil got married instead of going to work for Dr Lucius van Somersen, Sybil persuaded Phoebe to take her place. And just to compound matters further, Phoebe found herself captivated by Lucius. Caroline's Waterloo: Caroline had never imagined that anyone would want to marry her, but the imposing Professor Radinck Thoe van Erckelens did propose to her - and having easily fallen in love with him, she accepted. But Radinck was clear about what he wanted in a wife - a convenient hostess! Caroline had to decide whether to settle for that, or to set about changing Radinck's feelings for her.
  • They say no one from the convict settlement of Sydney Town crossed the steep ranges of the Blue Mountains until 1813. But the quick-witted convict Clancy Fitzgerald did it in 1798, dragging with him the proud, but reluctant, Eliza Phillips. Failure meant the noose, so their only hope was to push forward, into the unknown. Faced with constant danger and wrenching isolation, Clancy and Eliza find themselves pale-skinned strangers in a land of ancient traditions and spiritual beliefs. But their destiny is dramatically altered when Clancy discovers a golden road to fortune and makes a triumphant return to white society as a new man - in more ways than one...
  • Barbara Trevor is the youngest of four children living on their parents' farm in country Australia. Barbara has acquired a horse, which she calls Rosinante, though she doesn't know the origin of the name. The book follows her attempts to school her horse and come to terms with her own life. Australian country life is well described, with real characters and an unaffected family living in a typical homestead. For young readers. Illustrated by Margaret Horder.
  • Sydney 1945... The war is over, the fight begins.The war is over and so are the jobs (and freedoms) of tens of thousands of Australian women. The armaments factories are making washing machines instead of bullets and war correspondent Tilly Galloway has hung up her uniform and been forced to work on the women's pages of her newspaper - the only job available to her - where she struggles to write advice on fashion and make-up. As Sydney swells with returning servicemen and the city bustles back to post-war life, Tilly finds her world is anything but normal. As she desperately waits for word of her prisoner-of-war husband, she begins to research stories about the lives of the underpaid and overworked women who live in her own city. Those whose war service has been overlooked; the freedom and independence of their war lives lost to them. Meanwhile Tilly's waterside worker father is on strike, and her best friend Mary is struggling to cope with the stranger her own husband has become since being liberated from Changi a broken man. As strikes rip the country apart and the news from abroad causes despair, matters build to a heart-rending crescendo. Tilly realises that for her the war may have ended, but the fight is just beginning...

  • NUMA Files 8. In the Micronesian Islands, a top secret, U.S. government– sponsored undersea lab conducting vital biomedical research on a rare jellyfish known as the Blue Medusa suddenly...disappears. At the same time, off Bermuda, a bathysphere is attacked by an underwater vehicle and left helpless a half mile below the surface, its passengers—including Zavala—left to die. Only Kurt Austin’s heroic measures save them from a watery grave, but, suspecting a connection, Austin puts the NUMA team on the case. He has no idea what he’s just gotten them all into. A hideous series of medical experiments . . . an extraordinarily ambitious Chinese criminal organization . . . a secret new virus that threatens to set off a worldwide pandemic. Austin and Zavala have been in tight spots before, but this time it’s not just their own skins they’re trying to save - it’s the lives of millions.
  • Fargo 12. Husband-and-wife team Sam and Remi Fargo come up against an old enemy while searching for a treasure that has been lost for centuries. Ten years ago, a chance meeting at the Lighthouse Café in Redondo Beach led Sam Fargo and Remi Longstreet on the adventure of a lifetime, hunting the legendary riches stolen from the Persian King Croesus in 546 B.C. But they weren't the only ones. Someone else is after the gold, and he's willing to kill anyone who gets in his way. When Sam and Remi run afoul of a criminal drug-running operation, their hopes of finding the treasure are dashed. But with Sam's ingenuity and Remi's determination, they survive their confrontation with the drug runners, and manage to send one of the key players to prison. Though the cache of gold is never found, life goes on. Sam and Remi marry - and years later return to Greece to find the one treasure that got away. Time becomes their enemy when the kingpin they helped send to prison over a decade ago is released - and he has two goals in mind. Find the legendary hoard of King Croesus, and kill Sam and Remi Fargo. The Fargos know that as long as this gold is out there, no one is safe. They return to Greece for a final showdown - and one last chance to find that elusive treasure.
  • Here is the rich and dazzling point where two worlds collide: those of 1960s parents and their 1990s offspring, ‘Golobal Teens.’ Raised in a hippie commune, Tyler Johnson is an ambitious twenty-year-old Reagan youth, living in a decaying northwest city and aspiring to a career with the corporation whose offices his mother once fire-bombed. It’s a six month chronicle of Tyler’s life that takes the reader to Paris and the ongoing party beside Jim Morrison’s grave, then to a wild island in British Columbia, the freak-filled redwood forests of northern California, a cheesy Hollywood, ultramodern Seattle and finally back home. On the way, a constellation of characters: Jasmine, Tyler’s Woodstock mum; Dan, his land-developer stepfather; Tyler’s summer fling ‘Princess Stephanie’; Anna-Louise, his post-feminist girlfriend with an eating disorder; Neil, Tyler’s Deadhead dope-ranching biological father...and Harmony, a rich computer hacker with a fetish for the medieval.

  • His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creauture of the night and then as a mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross country run and then been beaten up expertly by secret police. He felt bad.

    Jim Dixon has as lousy job at a second rate university. His life is full of things he could happily do without – a tedious and ridiculous professor; a neurotic semi-detached girlfriend; burnt sheets; medieval recorder music and over-enthusiastic students. The solution seems to be fairly straightforward – pull faces behind people’s backs, copy others’ work and make sure the pretty girls choose his course. But without luck, life is never simple...This is a book for anyone who has come to hate a job they have to keep and who never ever has quite enough money for beer and cigarettes. A book about embarrassment, daydreams and lust and the importance of being lucky, Jim.
  • Rogan Stewart unexpectedly falls in love with the married Elspeth Trant, but following the wilful destruction of his home anf familyj and being implicated in her husband's murder following a tragic poaching accident, then takes to the road in the company of a group of travellers  to re-evaluate his life and the lessons that have come to him. There are poetic descriptions of the Irish countryside, bucolic pictures of life on the road, and serious discussions between the characters about ethics and morals, seasoned with much whimsy and reality.