AustLit
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30 Oct 2015(Display Format : Landscape)(Scheme : scheme-orange)
Short Scares
19th-century Scares for the 21st CenturyFor your Halloween scarification, we present some nineteenth-century Australian-written horror stories, from classic Europe-centred Gothic to outback tales and Australian ghosts. The links below take you to open-access copies of these stories.
All the stories are rated on the Radcliffe-Lewis scale (which we just made up for this blog post), where Radcliffe = creepy terror and Lewis = bodily horror.
- 'Penroysteth Castle: A Legacy of Terror' (1848). Published in two parts in the Geelong Advertiser, 'Penroysteth Castle' is a classic Gothic narrative, complete with haunted buildings and embedded stories. Read part one here and part two here. Radcliffe-Lewis scale: Very Radcliffe.
- 'The Ghost Upon the Rail' (1853). It's not an Australian Halloween without Fisher's Ghost, and this story by John Lang is one of the earliest examples. Read it here. Radcliffe-Lewis scale: mildly Radcliffe.
- 'The White Maniac: A Doctor's Tale' (1867). Written by the redoubtable Mary Fortune, there's not much we can tell you about this story that won't give away the shocks. Read it in full here. Radcliffe-Lewis scale: Very Lewis.
- 'What Happened at Emu Plains' (1871). The story of a terrified squatter and a villainous shepherd, this story trades on the vast spaces of the Australian outback. Read it here. Radcliffe-Lewis scale: moderately Radcliffe.
- 'Spirit-Led' (1890). Ernest Favenc's ghost story is set in the heat of the Gulf of Carpentaria and makes terror from the Australian landscape. Read it (and other creepy Favenc tales) here. Radcliffe-Lewis scale: moderately Lewis.
- 'A Haunt of the Jinkarras' (1893). Another Ernest Favenc, this is a classic Gothic 'found narrative', but with the flavour of the Australian outback. Read it here. Radcliffe-Lewis scale: mostly Radcliffe.
- 'The Devil of the Marsh' (1893). H.B. Marriott Watson had a particular knack for the spine-tingling, although, unlike his contemporary Favenc, he preferred a more European environment. Read this creepy story here. Radcliffe-Lewis scale: more than a little Lewis.
- 'The Stone Chamber' (1899). Another H.B. Marriott Watson, this one is old-school Gothic, with more than a trace of Poe. Read it here. Radcliffe-Lewis scale: more than a little Radcliffe.
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6 Aug 2015(Display Format : Landscape)
Some Australian Responses to Hiroshima
Marking the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.August 6th, 2015: the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. To mark the anniversary, we present–without fanfare–this brief list of some Australian responses to the bombing.
To see all the works in the database that are set in Hiroshima, follow this link. For works set in Nagasaki, follow this link.
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6028748404185719828.jpgAshes of Hiroshima : A Post-War Trip to Japan and China Frank Clune , 1950 single work prose
Frank Clune's work often blurred the line between fact and fiction, but this account of a post-war journey into Japan is all the more horrifying for being a straightforward travel narrative.
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In 1960, Dorothy Hewett first published this poem, not only about about the bombing of Hiroshima, but also about the loss of her own son and the fears of an atomic future.
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8156569595128678172.jpegAlien Blossom : A Japanese-Australian Love Story Isabel Carter , 1965 single work biography
The biography of Nobuko Sakuramoto, orphaned at Hiroshima, who became the first Japanese bride to be allowed entry into Australia after the Pacific war.
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Kenneth Harrison was a former prisoner of war and one of the first four allied soldiers to enter Hiroshima after the atomic bombing of 1945. His book title drew much ire in 1966, but he noted 'It seems to me that it is far too convenient to say that we are brave and the enemy is merely fanatical.' (See 'P.O.W. Author Defends His Book', Canberra Times, 8 October 1966, p.24).
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Stephen Kelen was the only foreign correspondent to attend the first Hiroshima Peace Festival, held in Japan in 1946 on the anniversary of the atomic bombing. That event is the basis for this book.
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Nearly forty years after the bombing, Jon Cleary tried to capture the immensity of the act through this novel, with its complicated shifts across the points of view of multiple characters.
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3957109938998228419.jpg629902325740975939.jpgMy Hiroshima Junko Morimoto , Anne Bower Ingram (translator), Isao Morimoto (translator), 1987 single work picture book
Junko Morimoto, who settled in Australia in 1983, was thirteen and a high-school student in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945.
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4931523866685858630.jpgI Saw Too Much : A Woman Correspondent at War Lorraine Stumm , 2000 single work autobiography
Lorraine Stumm, Australia's first accredited woman war correspondent, reported on the war from General MacArthur's headquarters, where she worked from 1941, after the fall of Singapore.
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From one of Australia's most highly regarded short-story writers, 'Hiroshima' speaks in the voice of a young girl in war-time Hiroshima, who tries to repress her loneliness and longing for family by clinging to the rhetoric of propaganda.
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16 Jul 2015(Display Format : Landscape)
Aust. Historical Fiction: A Crowd-sourced List
In our proud tradition of having crowd-sourced a couple of other reading lists (namely Australian YA fiction and Australian romance novels), we now bring you our crowd-sourced list of Australian historical fiction.
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2500767750840839275.jpg5636572668077526412.jpg1549097974792768160.jpg4544435785273587186.jpg4796788794080948320.jpg5382868810518598882.jpgPlaying Beatie Bow Ruth Park , 1980 single work novel
No sooner had we asked people to nominate their favourite Australian historical novel than someone asked if Playing Beatie Bow counts. And it does! Many an Australian child has come to Sydney history via Ruth Park's surprisingly eerie novel.
Playing Beatie Bow also unwittingly set the mood for this list. As you'll see, the suggested works are heavily weighted towards women writers and works with a supernatural bent.
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2221798898811365861.png8904867474543782760.png4252313708466249356.jpg2451937109971219799.jpg6179407750872617367.jpg6241838756100286429.jpg7476862765095770400.jpg4577548656075940128.jpg3775030314838225601.jpgPicnic at Hanging Rock Joan Lindsay , 1967 single work novel
Another text by a woman writer, and another historical novel with a strong supernatural flavour, Joan Lindsay's novel has fascinated readers for decades, as well as inspiring an almost-as-beloved film adaptation.
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Written by the partnership of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is set in future Australia, where a 24th-century author is writing a novel set in 20th-century Sydney. The novel was heavily censored on first publication in 1947 (including an adjustment to the original title), and not published in its original form until 1983, when Virago brought out a complete edition.
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Perhaps the best known of her works, Eleanor Dark's Timeless Land trilogy delineates the early years of the British colony in New South Wales, from the arrival in 1788 to the opening up of lands beyond the Blue Mountains. Unlike many historical novels of the period, Dark carved out a place in her narrative for the women who accompanied the settlers and for the local population with whom the settlers clashed.
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Despite the plethora of women on this list, we weren't the slightest bit surprised when Bryce Courtenay made his appearance. Perhaps the best-selling Australian historical novelist of the 1990s, Courtenay's work is deeply loved by his fans, and this novel spawned that most Australian of tributes: a television mini-series.
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Speaking of historical novels that spawned television mini-series, there'll be many an Australian who remembers this novel through the sweeping adaptation, starring Sigrid Thornton and John Waters. But readers hold a soft spot for the novel, which is the first in a series of three.
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9073204644082774171.jpg9101425297038650738.jpg758532883199565657.jpgRazorhurst Justine Larbalestier , 2014 single work novel
Razorhurst has now appeared on two of our three crowd-sourced lists of favourite books, and no wonder: eerie, rich, and bloody, the novel captures a period of Australian history that is often overlooked in favour of earlier decades.
Larbalestier dedicates the book to her predecessors, Ruth Park and Kylie Tennant, only one of whom, surprisingly, also makes this list.
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225115552269811111.jpg6587685218897997446.jpg4173718994030024521.jpg7628334135084447098.jpg6654466297410939762.jpg839881719312859956.jpg6790177349207503455.jpg939162831828705494.jpg6946511526653998237.jpgThe Secret River Kate Grenville , 2005 single work novel
Admit it: you're not surprised to see Grenville's novel make this list. From an award-winning novel to an award-winning play to what will likely be an award-winning television adaptation, The Secret River is one of the most prominent historical novels of recent years.
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4235538972912765439.jpg124065660128083717.jpg5808940828954044135.jpgBenang : From the Heart Kim Scott , 1999 single work novel
Framed in the narrative of a young man piecing his familial and cultural history together from fragments of courses, Benang tells the story of the long history of the Noongar, inhabitants of the south-west corner of Western Australia.
Fittingly, the novel won Kim Scott his first Miles Franklin Award (which he shared with Thea Astley's Drylands).
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Fiona McIntosh also appeared on our crowd-sourced list of your favourite romance novelists, but this time the emphasis is on Nightingale–and aptly, because this is a novel of Gallipoli and its consequences, and what better year to be reading about that moment in Australian history?
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Unlike most of the novels on the list, this is not a novel of Australian history, but of Europe, with a Dutch protagonist who flees to London when her dreams of self-sufficiency come with a terrible price. Karen Brooks has been making a name for herself as a fantasy novelist, and she puts those skills to good use here–after all, what is our past but an alien culture?
(And the novel's focus on beer makes it utterly Australian.)
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As scholarly bibliographers, we despair at a title like N: so difficult to search for among the tens of thousands of works on this database. But as readers, what's not to love? Another novel with a fantasy tinge, this is a historical novel of an Australian history that never actually existed–but could have, had we followed a different route.
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Scapegallows: one of those words that is so rich and mysterious that it takes you a moment to twig to the brutality of which it speaks. And for many white Australians, there are scapegallows in the family tree: convicts who escaped execution only to be transported to what was the far side of the world, to become some of the first white settlers in Australia.
In this instance, Scapegallows tells the story of Margaret Catchpole, one of Australia's most written-about convicts, beginning with an 1845 novel.
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3328886971100567460.jpg4621394033811172308.jpgThe Accomplice Kathryn Heyman , 2003 single work novel
Speaking of some of the murky elements of Australian history, meet the Batavia. Before the first convicts were sent to Australian shores, the Batavia, a Dutch ship, wrecked on Morning Reef near Beacon Island, off the coast of Western Australia. Many survived to make their way ashore on an island with no fresh water and few other sources of food–which is when the real horror of the Batavia shipwreck began.
This is only one of many historical novels about the Batavia. To check out some of the others, follow this link.
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A young-adult novel, Scout follows Kit Lovell as she travels from England to Australia, where her widowed mother is to marry a lighthouse keeper on remote Kangaroo Island. Nicole Plüss has published a number of other young-adult novels, often with a strong focus on the sea, but this is her only historical novel so far.
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22 May 2015
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The Hidden Door (Courier-Mail, 1934)
The header image for the Courier-Mail serialisation of The Hidden Door was too moody to survive the digitisation process intact, leaving only an impression of a battlement, a looming moon, and what could be a flower or a splash of moonlight.
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The Hidden Door (Advertiser, 1934)
Perhaps it is for this reason–fear that a gloomy image might become muddy and indistinct–that the Advertiser chose a plain header for this serial.
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The Judgement of Larose (Courier-Mail, 1934)
Gilbert Larose was Gask's regular detective: an investigative genius, an Australian in Scotland Yard, and a man who put an abstract concept of justice above the law – all of which is neatly captured in this stylish header image.
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The Poisoned Goblet (Advertiser, 1934-1935)
For this, the earliest of at least three serialisations of this novel, the Advertiser has gone for a simple but stylish font, with no additional illustrations.
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The Poisoned Goblet (Courier-Mail, 1935)
The Courier-Mail, conversely, shows a family scene that is simultaneously unnerving, with the family isolated an a broad, lonely stretch of beach.
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The Hangman's Knot (Advertiser, 1935-1936)
This header image from the Adelaide Advertiser wants to reader in no doubt about the novel's outcome, with a fabulous rope-inspired font.
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The Hangman's Knot (Courier-Mail, 1935-1936)
The Courier-Mail, on the other hand, wants to draw attention to the novel's engagement with the contemporary fears that led to phrases such as 'yellow peril'.
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The Master Spy (Advertiser, 1936)
Gilbert Larose is a Secret Service agent in this novel, and the header image chosen by the Adelaide Advertiser neatly suggest both political bureaucracy and surveillance.
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Night of the Storm (Advertiser, 1937)
The suspects in Night of the Storm are three sisters, the victim their estate manager. Both their privilege and their isolation are captured in this header image.
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The Grave-Digger of Monks Arden (Advertiser, 1938)
Can you imagine a more evocative header image for a story in which someone making death masks of recently buried celebrities is actually the least puzzling crime?
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The Red Paste Murders (Advertiser, 1938)
The Red Paste Murders is a Jekyll-and-Hyde tale set in Adelaide: a cowardly clerk eats a mysterious 'oriental' paste and becomes a psychopathic murderer–as perfectly captured in this eerie image.
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Fall of a Dictator (Advertiser, 1938-1939)
Gask's detective novels became quite politically charged as World War II approached, and this one–which doesn't star his usual detective, Gilbert Larose–is illustrated with a battleship.
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The Vengeance of Larose (Advertiser, 1939)
Of all the header images, this is the most abstract–and perhaps that's the point. Wouldn't you read the serial to find out what this bucolic but isolated cottage has to do with the attempts of a foreign dictator to destablise England's army on the brink of World War II?
(Display Format : Landscape)The Serialising of Arthur Gask
For a period in the 1930s and 1940s, Arthur Gask, South Australian dentist turned crime writer, was one of Australia's most prolific and successful detective writers, turning out 34 novels, most of which starred brilliant Australian detective Gilbert Larose.
He was also frequently serialised, especially in his home town newspaper, the Adelaide Advertiser.
In revisiting Arthur Gask's works, we were struck by the stylish, and occasionally beautiful, header images that accompanied these serial publications. In this slideshow, we explore some of our favourites (all of which have been sourced from the incomparable Trove database).
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24 Feb 2015(Display Format : Landscape)
Australian Romance Novels: A Crowd-Sourced List
Last week, we asked Twitter for a list of their favourite Australian romance novels–and we should have expected the deluge of suggestions that followed.
The suggestions came in two main forms: authors whose entire canon (or at least more than one work) were dearly beloved and individual works with whom readers were besotted.
So this, our crowd-sourced list of your favourite Australian romance writers, is divided into two alphabetical lists: first, the authors whose works you love en masse, and, second, the individual novels that you adore.
(Warning: mixed metaphor ahead.)
These authors and novels are only a taste of Australia's rich vein of romance novels. To explore further, try this list of 4500 novels. Or, for a broader scope, try this list of every single work in AustLit (including novels, but also other forms) labelled 'romance'.
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Looking at Anna Campbell's assured position in Australian romance, it's easy to forget that her first novels were published as recently as 2007.
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Anne Gracie's historical romances have netted her nomination after nomination as Australia's favourite romance writer.
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Multi-award-winning Barbara Hannay has penned some of the most beloved and widely read outback romances ever published in Australia.
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Loretta Hill's Pilbara books–from The Girl in Steel-capped Boots to The Girl in the Hard Hat–appealed to readers who like their romance red and dusty.
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For their small-town romances, readers were looking to Jennie Jones to provide–three-hundred-pound pigs and all.
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An extraordinarily prolific writer, Marion Lennox has works well into triple figures recorded on AustLit.
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For their richly researched historical romances of the fifteenth century, readers were going straight to Isolde Martyn.
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Sarah Mayberry also has some script-writing under her belt, but she's listed here for her popular romances–most recently, cowboy romances in the wilds of Montana.
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Readers wouldn't choose between McIntosh's works, but particular passion was reserved for Nightingale and The Lavender Keeper.
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Ellie Marney was another novelist whose works readers wouldn't choose between: if it included Rachel Watts and James Mycroft, it was in.
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Kylie Scott made her appearance with romances of the zombie apocalypse such as Room with a View and Flesh, but it was the Stage Dive series that proved a break-out success.
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Curiously, we'd just been talking about Kandy Shepherd on Twitter the week before, as the go-to author for dog-adjacent romances, and here she is on the list.
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Safe Harbour was a particularly popular choice, but it wasn't the only Helene Young novel that people wanted to tell us about.
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A country versus city romance, with a woman determined to save her family farm.
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1604009123607359747.jpg3370348474847650624.jpgBillabong Bend Jennifer Scoullar , 2014 single work novel
The heroine of this novel is a floodplains grazier, with a tie to the land perhaps stronger than her tie to the hero.
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Another of the rural romances that make such wonderful use of the enormous landscape that is Australia, this one is a rich-boy / poor-girl small-town saga.
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What could be better than a wine-flavoured contemporary romance? This one is set in the McLaren Vale.
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Finalist for a Daphne Du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense (Single Title Romantic Mystery/Suspense), longlisted for a Davitt Award, and winner of an Australian Romance Reader Award–what more reason do you need to pick up this novel of national parks, organised crime, and murder?
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goodoil_FSOO.jpg2289260222469399575.jpg4512435854856655113.jpgGood Oil Laura Buzo , 2010 single work novel
The debut novel for Lauren Buzo, Good Oil is the story of a romance between a teenager and the twenty-one-year-old co-worker for whom she falls hard.
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Three families and three properties are driven apart and drawn together by tragedy and the struggles of life on the land.
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One terrible secret ties two people together forever. Losing Kate was Kylie Kaden's debut novel, and she followed it with another story of devastated relationships and terrible secrets in Missing You.
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7864319248198656488.jpg8461626475700068487.jpgQueen of the Road Tricia Stringer , 2012 single work novel
Truck-drivers and romance novels: it's perhaps not the connection that first springs to mind, but it runs at least as far back as Paperback Hero. In this novel, romance is only one of the heroine's many obstacles.
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4965268765438000746.jpg7842859640725792812.jpgRed Sand Sunrise Fiona McArthur , 2014 single work novel
There's something particularly delightful about a medical romance, something that speaks to romance's nature as its own unique, robust genre. This one involves a midwife and the remote, red stretches of western Queensland.
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Jo's self-imposed rules about staying well away (all the way away) from men for six weeks would have been difficult enough before her new, gorgeous roommate moved in.
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8699275350622606042.jpg604769498409208158.jpg765575078653505188.jpgThe Sunnyvale Girls Fiona Palmer , 2014 single work novel
From 1946 to 2014, from a remote Australian property to Italy, The Sunnyvale Girls untangles the family secrets of three generations of women.
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Juanita Kees is rapidly building a list of romance novels about tough, resilient women and the men who love them–this is her third novel, and already looks to bring her accolades.
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Who to love more in Untamed: the heroine with a penchant for challenging people to duels or the cross-dressing hero who loves her? Combined, it makes for one of the most unusual of Regency romps.
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WildGirl_Forsyth_FXIg.jpg1544496915371234325.jpg3128470683945520208.jpg580592087980437347.jpgThe Wild Girl Kate Forsyth , 2013 single work novel
A book about fairytales with romance at its core, The Wild Girl has attracted rapturous accolades and is already making its way onto university teaching lists.
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17 Dec 2014(Display Format : Landscape)
YA Fiction of 2014: A Crowd-Sourced List
In which, via Twitter, AustLit provides a crowd-sourced list of some of the YA fiction published in 2014 by Australian writers.
2014 has been a year of many and many glorious YA books from Australian writers–just look at this incredible (and ongoing) GoodReads list from the OzYA Twitter chat list: it's already into triple figures.
So when we read a Mashable list of the best YA fiction of 2014, and it was a good list, a fine list, but a list without any Australian writers at all, we thought, "This can't be right." And we asked the people of Twitter which Australian YA books popped into their heads when they thought of 2014. This is the list that resulted.
It's not a complete list and it's precisely not a 'best of' list–we, as Australia's primary database of Australian literature, love all Australian writing indiscriminately, and not just because we're programmed that way.
Think of it more as a reading list: we read these, and now we want you to read them too.
And if you get to the bottom of this list and want more? Here's our list of young-adult novels published by Australians in 2013 and 2014. At 265 works, it'll keep you going for a while.
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4340214365323350516.jpg3559253812074081353.png7260991732612492726.jpgClariel Garth Nix , 2014 single work novel
The fourth in Garth Nix's Old Kingdom series, Clariel was released to great excitement this year, nearly twenty years after the publication of the first Old Kingdom book, Sabriel, in 1995.
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Last year, Claire Zorn published post-apocalyptic novel The Sky So Heavy: the shattering story of brothers Fin and Max and their struggle to survive a nuclear winter continued to garner attention in 2014. But also in 2014, Zorn published The Protected, a story of loss, grief, and familial scars, as Hannah learns to navigate her slowly imploding family after sister Katie's death.
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And then there was clamouring to include The Sky So Heavy, even though it was published in 2013, so we did: after all, people will have read it this year, yes?
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The girl detective is a significant figure in children's and young adult story-making, from plucky Trixie Belden and convertible-driving Nancy Drew to Eugenie Sadler, PI, and Veronica Mars. In Rebecca James's Cooper Bartholomew Is Dead, it's Libby, who probes into what really happened on the day they say that her boyfriend committed suicide.
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9073204644082774171.jpg9101425297038650738.jpg758532883199565657.jpgRazorhurst Justine Larbalestier , 2014 single work novel
This year, Justine Larbalestier strengthened an already unassailable position as a major author of young-adult fiction with Razorhurst, a novel both subtle and brutal in its evocation of the ghosts of 1930s Sydney.
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8115514257143968498.jpg7223190533594900678.jpgDisruption Jessica Shirvington , 2014 single work novel
2014 also saw the publication of Disruption, the first of Jessica Shirvington's dystopic young-adult novels of a world in which one corporation controls society through pheromones, and one young woman struggles to discover why her father was so abruptly taken away from them.
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7947494767680789167.jpg7853101941755195030.jpgCorruption Jessica Shirvington , 2014 single work novel
And then, soon after Disruption, came its sequel and finale: Corruption.
(On a slightly unrelated note, how glorious are those covers?)
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Every Breath, the first novel in Ellie Marney's series, was published in 2013: a smart, young-adult take on the ever-malleable Sherlock Holmes canon, with country-girl Watts meeting troubled forensics genius James Mycroft and teaming up with him to chase a murderer. 2014 saw the release of this sequel, in which Watts and Mycroft travel to Sherlock Holmes's own stomping ground: London.
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3846014452575534636.jpeg8641242887528597737.jpgThe Disappearance of Ember Crow Ambelin Kwaymullina , 2013 single work novel
The Disappearance of Ember Crow was technically published in 2013, but with a November release date, it was read more widely in 2014. The second in Ambelin Kwaymullina's post-apocalyptic Tribe series, this one sees Ashala pursuing her missing friend, not knowing what that friend's terrible secrets could do to the Illegals under Ashala's protection.
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Since 2012, Paula Weston has been publishing The Rephaim, a young-adult fantasy series, in which Gaby Winters learns that she is not the teenage backpacker that she believes herself to be. In Shimmer, the third in the series, Gaby has to bring together not only the fragments of her own self, but also the fragments of her bitterly divided people, the Rephaim.
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Pip Harry appeared in the field of young-adult novels in 2012, with I'll Tell You Mine, which followed Kate Elliott and her deep-buried secrets to a 'life sentence' at Norris Grammar Boarding School for Girls. In 2014, Harry followed this with Head of the River, in which superstar siblings Leni and Cristian Popescu, the children of Olympians, are set to row their grammar school to glory–but for performance-enhancing drugs, crippling self-doubt, and the pressure of family and friends.
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3505356293362454054.jpg5442805136314988301.gif5863694025965669405.jpgInvincible Cecily Anne Paterson , 2014 single work novel
Cecily Anne Paterson is a new one to us: she published her first book, Invisible (to which this is the sequel), in the middle of last year. But we're all about plucky teen girls facing down bullies in a new school–especially if they're also dealing with unthinkable traumas and the difficulties of hearing impairment in a phonocentric world.
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Lauren K. McKellar has a knack for writing gothy, high-school rock chicks, like Amy in her debut novel, Finding Home. This time, it's Katie, in The Problem with Crazy. And Katie doesn't just have the problems and pleasures of high-school life and rock-band boyfriend; she also has a father suffering from a brutal, terrifying genetic disorder.
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3083041331001424174.jpg5169382329363311096.jpg4279322472093992792.jpgThe Incredible Adventures Of Cinnamon Girl Melissa Keil , 2014 single work novel
What goes together better than adolescents and apocalypses? Nothing, that's what: just ask the first four seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or you could ask Alba, Melissa Keil's comic-book-writing heroine, who finds her town flooded with doomsday enthusiasts thanks to one dodgy television psychic.
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Frontier Resistance is new to us: we only knew Leonie Rogers from her writing for Antipodean SF. But the concept is certainly enticing: a sequel to 2012's Frontier Incursion, Frontier Resistance is set on a distant world. 300 years earlier, a ship crash-landed on the planet, and its inhabitants have been slowly exploring their new world ever since. Until one day, when they come face-to-face with something they never imagined.
Also there are giant space-cats, which is always good.
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207476646401968042.jpg5680145141241149513.jpg3005647287746530395.jpgLaurinda Alice Pung , 2014 single work novel
Laurinda only burst onto the scene in late October this year, but all the outlets where books are discussed have been singing its praises ever since: a sharp, sly, frightening books about a sharp, sly, frightening period in people's lives.
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Rosie and Nona are best friends. Sisters. Yapas. The ties that bind them are deep and intricate. But don't let that make you think that Clare Atkins shies away from what these kinds of ties mean in a small mining town when one of the girls is white and one is Indigenous Australian.
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1710312521202395787.jpg1107652103718612666.jpgThe Cracks in the Kingdom Jaclyn Moriarty , 2014 single work novel
Originally, we skipped this one, because we'd sung its praises in our summer reading list. But who were we kidding? It needs to be on this list too, because it's a fine book in a year of fine books.
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29 May 2014
Coming-of-Age: A Twitter Theme Day Round-up
Did you miss AustLit's sampling (on Twitter a week ago) of Australian-written works about coming of age? Never fear: you can check out the list below.
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All the Green Years is actually the adaptation of D.E. Charlwood's All the Green Year (1965), but the extra years make it sound so much more hopeful. Both novel and television adaptation are the coming-of-age stories of a young boy in Melbourne in 1929.
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The coming-of-age in the Incredible Here and Now is triggered by intense trauma: just before Michael turns fifteen, his older brother dies. The following year is a mixture of grief and romance, as Michael comes of age in the western suburbs of Sydney.
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Summer City is a surfing psycho-drama, and, let us tell you, there aren't too many of those around. (Maybe Point Break.) It's also a coming-of-age saga in a thoroughly 1970s sense–with road trips, surfing, Australian sun, and girls.
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Moving Out, on the other hand, is another kind of Australian coming-of-age story–not beaches, but inner-city Melbourne and Italian-Australian teenagers (an early role from Vince Colosimo) coming to terms with their own rich cultural heritage. It's always interesting to see a coming-of-age film from Jan Sardi, who, long before Shine, was a school-teacher, and so has his own take on teenagers.
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silversuntitles_FVM,.jpgSilversun Ray Boseley , Glen Dolman , Graeme Farmer , Kirsty Fisher , Rob George , Peter A. Kinloch , Meg Mappin , Jo Martino , Mark Poole , Chris Roache , Roger Simpson , Fiona Wood , Giula Sandler , Andy Muir , Meaghan Smith , 2004 series - publisher film/TV
Speaking of teenagers, Silversun has them crewing the titular spacecraft for a ninety-year flight to a distant Earth-like planet, intended for colonisation. Here's another kind of coming-of-age: the ship is crewed by teenagers so they can grow up into–and eventually out of–their roles, lasting longer in their positions than they would if they'd come to them as adults.
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The Lost Child is perhaps the most recently published coming-of-age story on our database. One child goes missing and the other lives with the terror that she somehow caused the disappearance. Sylvie's coming-of-age is also a coming to terms–with the idea of small events leading to enormous changes.
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Finally, Jonah was chosen for us, as a coming-of-age story that has had a strong impact on its readers. Adapted for television in the 1980s, it's a rags-to-riches coming-of-age story set in Waterloo and surrounding suburbs in the early years of the twentieth century.
No one theme day can capture the full extent of Australian coming-of-age stories, so for further reading, we suggest starting with this list.
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