Cosmo Cosmolino
Helen Garner
Introduced by Ramona Koval
Janet is a skeptic, a journalist; Maxine revels in New Age fantasies; and Ray, a drifter, is a born-again Christian. The common ground is the house they share. But their fragile domestic balance is about to explode amid the smashing of ukeleles, the unexpected ascension of an angel, and a sudden shower of jonquils.
‘Helen Garner writes the best sentences in Australia.’ Bulletin
Read more here.
Collect all the Classics
-
More »1788
Watkin Tench
In 1788 Watkin Tench stepped ashore at Botany Bay with the First Fleet. His account of the infant colony is the first classic of Australian literature.
-
More »A Difficult Young Man
Martin Boyd
Martin Boyd’s much loved novel is an elegant, witty and compelling family tale about the contradictions of growing up.
-
More »A Woman of the Future
David Ireland
An imaginative tour de force, it is the story of the young life of Anthea Hunt—from conception to sexual awakening. It is controversial and brilliant, and unlike anything else in Australian literature.
-
More »All the Green Year
Don Charlwood
All the Green Year is the story of a boy’s journey towards adulthood—‘not only the humour of it but its drama and pain’, as the 96-year-old Don Charlwood writes in his revised afterword.
-
More »An Iron Rose
Peter Temple
When Mac Faraday’s best friend is found hanging, the assumption is suicide. But Mac is far from convinced, and as his past of secrets, corruption, abuse and murder begins to close in, he must turn to long-forgotten resources to hang on to everything he holds dear.
-
More »Bring Larks and Heroes
Thomas Keneally
A South Pacific penal colony in the late eighteenth century. Poet, soldier, lover and grand innocent, Phelim Halloran must confront his destiny in a place of tyranny and searing horror.
-
More »Bush Studies
Barbara Baynton
Barbara Baynton’s short-story collection Bush Studies is famous for its stark realism—for not romanticising bush life, instead showing all its bleakness and harshness.
-
More »Careful, He Might Hear You
Sumner Locke Elliott
Careful, He Might Hear You is one of the most extraordinary portraits of childhood in Australian fiction. Set during the Great Depression, six-year-old PS is an orphan whose life is turned upside down when his Aunt Vanessa decides to take care of him.
-
More »Cosmo Cosmolino
Helen Garner
A fragile domestic balance is about to explode amid the smashing of ukeleles, the unexpected ascension of an angel, and a sudden shower of jonquils.
-
More »Dark Places
Kate Grenville
Dark Places is the tale of a man with a comically grand exterior who believes he has the right, and the duty, to conquer the mocking flesh of any woman. Even his own daughter.
-
More »Death in Brunswick
Boyd Oxlade
A cult hit later made into a film starring John Clarke, Sam Neill and Zoe Carides, Death in Brunswick is a classic Australian comedy.
-
More »Diary of a Bad Year
J. M. Coetzee
With its three simultaneous voices, Diary of a Bad Year is not only a novel about loneliness, friendship and the possibility of love, it changes the logic of reading itself.
-
More »Eat Me
Linda Jaivin
Julia is a photographer, Chantal edits a fashion magazine, Helen is a feminist academic and Philippa is a writer. These four friends haunt the cafés of inner-city Sydney, eyeing the passing talent and swapping outlandish tales.
-
More »Happy Valley
Patrick White
Based on Patrick White’s own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South Wales, Happy Valley paints a portrait of a community in a desolate landscape. It is a jagged and restless study of small-town and country life.
-
More »Hills End
Ivan Southall
On a fateful day in Hills End, seven children and their teacher set off to explore caves in the nearby mountains. While they are deep inside the mountain caves a storm of tremendous violence all but sweeps the town away and threatens to leave them stranded.
-
More »Homesickness
Murray Bail
Thirteen men and women travel the world on a package tour but wherever they go nothing is as it seems. Challenged by the unexpected, by differences and subtleties, Bail’s tourists are in turn repelled and attracted—and all are altered.
-
More »I Own the Racecourse!
Patricia Wrightson
Andy Hoddel was different from other boys. He never really understood the game they played, in which they ‘owned’ the factories, the library and the police station in their town, but he longed to tell them he owned something too.
-
More »Life and Adventures 1776–1801
John Nicol
Superbly edited and introduced by Tim Flannery, this is a classic tale by a brilliant observer of the savagery and tenderness of life when the modern age was in its infancy.
-
More »Maurice Guest
Henry Handel Richardson
Set in the music scene of turn-of-the-century Leipzig, a cosmopolitan centre for the arts drawing students from around the world—Maurice Guest, a young Englishman, falls helplessly in love with an Australian woman, Louise Dufrayer.
-
More »My Brilliant Career
Miles Franklin
Written with all the high spirits of youth, My Brilliant Career is the unforgettable tale of Sybylla Melvin, a headstrong country girl—passionate, endearing, stubborn, honest—and her fraught journey from rags to riches to rags.
-
More »Selected Stories
Katherine Mansfield
This new selection ranges across Mansfield’s oeuvre and shows the New Zealander’s dazzling brilliance—from ‘A Dill Pickle’ and ‘The Escape’ to ‘The Garden-Party’ and ‘The Fly’.
-
More »Stiff
Shane Maloney
The fiddle at the Pacific Pastoral meat-packing works was a nice little earner for all concerned until Herb Gardiner reported finding a body in number 3 chiller. Enter Murray Whelan, minder, fixer and general dogsbody for the Minister of Industry.
-
More »Strine
Afferbeck Lauder
Here, collected in one volume, are Afferbeck Lauder’s groundbreaking studies of Australian speech, Let Stalk Strine and Nose Tone Unturned. Also included are Fraffly Well Spoken and Fraffly Suite, Lauder’s guides to the strangled dialect of the English upper class.
-
More »Swords and Crowns and Rings
Ruth Park
Ruth Park’s Miles Franklin-winning novel brilliantly evokes Australia in the midst of the Great Depression. Written with warmth and affection, Swords and Crowns and Rings is a powerful story about human nature and the strength of an unlikely love.
-
More »Sydney Bridge Upside Down
David Ballantyne
Sydney Bridge Upside Down is the great unread New Zealand novel—a gothic thriller, a coming-of-age story and a sinister family tragedy.
-
More »Terra Australis
Matthew Flinders
First published in two-volumes in 1814, this is the enthralling account of the circumnavigation of Australia, by the man who gave our country its name.
-
More »The Australian Ugliness
Robin Boyd
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.
-
More »The Cardboard Crown
Martin Boyd
Alice Verso’s unexpected marriage to Austin Langton not only brings financial stability to the Langtons but founds an Anglo-Australian dynasty. But when her grandson finds her diaries and begins to uncover her story he chances on an intricate web of deception and reveals the complex fate of his family over three generations.
-
More »The Commandant
Jessica Anderson
The penal colony of Moreton Bay is under the command of Patrick Logan, a man not afraid of brutal discipline. But the arrival of his sister-in-law Frances will change everything.
-
More »The Dig Tree
Sarah Murgatroyd
Sarah Murgatroyd reveals new historical and scientific evidence to tell the story of Burke and Wills—with all its heroism and romance, its discoveries, coincidences and lost opportunities.
-
More »The Dying Trade
Peter Corris
When the wealthy Bryn Gutteridge hires private investigator, Cliff Hardy, to help his sister, it looks as if blackmail is the problem. Until the case becomes more brutal, twisted and shocking than even Hardy could have guessed.
-
More »The Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse
John Clarke
The definitive collection featuring key works by such famous Australian poets as Gavin Milton, Arnold Wordsworth, Sylvia Blath, Very Manly Hopkins, R.A.C.V. Milne and Dylan Thompson.
-
More »The Fortunes of Richard Mahony
Henry Handel Richardson
Richard Mahony is a restless man. Ballarat, England, Melbourne, Europe, the bush: elsewhere is always better. Searching for a place, a meaning, a life, Mahony and his wife Mary journey from wealth to poverty, order to chaos, sanity to the asylum.
-
More »The Fringe Dwellers
Nene Gare
Set in a remote area of Western Australia, The Fringe Dwellers is the story of two part-Aboriginal sisters, Noonah and Trilby, who live in a family camp on the fringe of white society. Noonah accepts her position—but Trilby refuses to.
-
More »The Getting of Wisdom
Henry Handel Richardson
Described by H. G. Wells as the best school story he knew, The Getting of Wisdom is the classic Australian novel of school days, a compelling and frank account of a young girl’s coming of age.
-
More »The Glass Canoe
David Ireland
Meat Man is a regular at the Southern Cross pub in Sydney. David Ireland’s novel tells his stories, about the pub, its patrons and their women, about the brutal, tender and unexpected places his glass canoe takes him.
-
More »The Home Girls
Olga Masters
The Home Girls is a collection of candid, witty stories about rural and suburban life. Masters was, as the Advertiser remarked, ‘a natural storyteller’.
-
More »The Jerilderie Letter
Ned Kelly
Outlaw, murderer, self-proclaimed victim, Ned Kelly is an Australian icon. But who was he? The Jerilderie Letter is his remarkable manifesto and a startling record of his voice.
-
More »The Long Prospect
Elizabeth Harrower
Sharply observed, bitter and humorous, The Long Prospect is a story of life in an Australian industrial town.
-
More »The Middle Parts of Fortune
Frederic Manning
The Middle Parts of Fortune tells the story of men at war from the perspective of an ordinary soldier. Its author, Frederic Manning, was an Australian writer who fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
-
More »The Mystery of a Hansom Cab
Fergus Hume
Set in the charming and deadly streets of Melbourne, this vivid and brilliantly plotted murder thriller tells the story of a crime committed by an unknown assassin.
-
More »The Odd Angry Shot
William Nagle
The Odd Angry Shot is the seminal account of Australian soldiers in the Vietnam War. Brief and bracing, tragic yet darkly funny, it portrays a close-knit group of knockabout SAS fighters.
-
More »The Plains
Gerald Murnane
A nameless young man arrives on the plains and begins to document the strange and rich culture of the plains families. As his story unfolds, the novel becomes, in the words of Murray Bail, ‘a mirage of landscape, memory, love and literature itself’.
-
More »The Scarecrow
Ronald Hugh Morrieson
This lost masterpiece, first published in 1963, combines Boys’ Own adventure, psychological thriller, small-town saga and family farce to produce a brilliant, hallucinatory novel.
-
More »The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke
C.J. Dennis
One of the most famous works of Australian literature, it tells the story of Bill, a larrikin, who meets a young woman named Doreen. The book chronicles their courtship and marriage, and Bill’s transformation from a thuggish gang member to a contented husband and father.
-
More »The Watch Tower
Elizabeth Harrower
Set in the leafy northern suburbs of Sydney during the 1940s, The Watch Tower is a novel of relentless and acute psychological power.
-
More »The Watcher in the Garden
Joan Phipson
Trespassing in Mr Lovett’s secluded garden was a welcome escape for sixteen-year-old Catherine. But this all changes when Catherine is confronted by Mr Lovett and decides to confide in him. Then, unexpectedly, a third person appears in the garden: an intruder.
-
More »The Women in Black
Madeleine St John
The Women in Black is a fairytale set in the Ladies' Cocktail section at F. G. Goode’s Sydney department store in the 1950s. With the lightest touch and the most tender of comic instincts, Madeleine St John conjures a vanished summer of innocence.
-
More »They Found a Cave
Nan Chauncy
Four English orphans—Cherry, Nigel, Brick and Nippy—migrate to Tasmania, to the care of their Aunt Jandie on her farm outside Hobart. But when Aunt Jandie goes to hospital, everything falls apart.
-
More »They're a Weird Mob
Nino Culotta
They’re a Weird Mob is an hilarious snapshot of the immigrant experience in Menzies-era Australia, by a writer with a brilliant ear for the Australian way with words.
-
More »Wake In Fright
Kenneth Cook
Wake in Fright tells the tale of John Grant’s journey into an alcoholic, sexual and spiritual nightmare. It is the original and the greatest outback horror story.