AustLit

'Vera has cabin fever. Confined with her thoughts in the concrete tower of a New York hotel, she is haunted by her mother's reminders of what she should have been, and the desperate choices she faced as an unprotected single mother.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Modern Classics ed.).

Wresting his family from the easy living of nineteenth-century Sydney, Cornelius Laffey takes them to northern Queensland where thousands of hopefuls are digging for gold in the mud. They confront the horror of Aboriginal dispossession, and Cornelius is sacked for reporting the slaughter. This is an unforgettable tale of the other side of Australia's heritage.

Source: Penguin Random House Australia.

(https://penguin.com.au/books/its-raining-in-mango-popular-penguins-9780143204749)

'Reaching across continents, these allusive, richly textured stories are unified by moments of dislocation in which certainties are eclipsed by unfamiliar terrain. A last, transforming embrace between Indian lovers heralds their separate journeys into arranged marriages; an elderly woman discovers a kinship with her neighbour through their mutual isolation; a young woman's beauty is ravaged by fire; a schoolteacher, fettered by responsibility, learns from her brash students during a Queensland summer heady with the smell of sugar cane; a decaying amaryllis plant mirrors the pain of the artist who obsessively sketches it, and a woman devastated by her friend's death, is shocked by her own secret exultation in living.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Virago ed.)