Our Books
Cherrystone Lane
David L. Hume
David L. Hume
A portrait artist lives along a road built of the pips and stones from orchard fruit. He watches the other residents come and go and paints portraits of them, imagining their lives.
Each portrait, each story, comes together to form a picture of Cherrystone Lane and reveals who gave the painter a black eye and how the most recent resident was guided to misadventure.
David L Hume has written a gentle, compelling history in a series of short vignettes of the addresses that make up Cherrystone Lane and the lives of the people who have made the lane home.
Each portrait, each story, comes together to form a picture of Cherrystone Lane and reveals who gave the painter a black eye and how the most recent resident was guided to misadventure.
David L Hume has written a gentle, compelling history in a series of short vignettes of the addresses that make up Cherrystone Lane and the lives of the people who have made the lane home.
Not Missing a Single Thing
Ian Jamieson
Ian Jamieson
Not Missing a Single Thing is the story, the comprehensive story, of Ray and his journey from 'car crash' to triumph! Ray is a precocious ten year old boy who has had to endure numerous obstacles and difficulties, including the cruelties of bullies and the idiocy of an incompetent teacher. With the encouragement of one of his favourite teachers, he writes down his 'car crash' story as a means of getting the bad stuff out of his system.
Five years later, and a fifteen year old Ray is ready to continue his story. Armed with his trusted HB pencils he chronicles his adventures with unblinking honesty and zest. Will he find love, friendship, happiness, understanding, purpose? Is he capable of saving someone’s life, and will he find out if magic really exists? Will he tell a story so resplendent that it can only be compared to a Rajasthani onion and potato curry?
Five years later, and a fifteen year old Ray is ready to continue his story. Armed with his trusted HB pencils he chronicles his adventures with unblinking honesty and zest. Will he find love, friendship, happiness, understanding, purpose? Is he capable of saving someone’s life, and will he find out if magic really exists? Will he tell a story so resplendent that it can only be compared to a Rajasthani onion and potato curry?
It Grows on Trees
Jonathan Griffiths
Jonathan Griffiths
A coming of age story in a family where chaos is normal, the ludicrous is everyday, and the improbable is unexceptional. When you're growing up in such a turbulent environment, what could make it worse? Try adding lots of money, unequally shared!
It Grows on Trees is a rollicking ride for Nelson and his astonishing collection of relatives and hangers-on that takes him across generations, several nations, affairs (both love and financial), and somehow or other… out the other side.
It Grows on Trees is a rollicking ride for Nelson and his astonishing collection of relatives and hangers-on that takes him across generations, several nations, affairs (both love and financial), and somehow or other… out the other side.
Smothered
Graeme Sparkes
Graeme Sparkes
When Alan’s mother rings to beg him to return to the family home for the final weeks of his father’s life, he baulks, unwilling to be around the man who tried to control every moment of his childhood and adolescence. But he is at the sick man’s bedside when his father makes an extraordinary request. Alan is tempted but does he follow through?
Smothered is the coming of age story of a socially isolated young man told with unsparing skill and sympathetic insight.
Alan grows up in a baffling world of stifling normality. His father, Tosh, is an ambitious man of more energy than talent; his mother is a caring woman who accepts the necessity of being seen to respect a conventional life. As he struggles to find purpose and worth, Alan is drawn through a tangle of drugs, self-harm, and self-serving friendships, always unable to free himself from the quagmire of family life and expectation. His final confrontation with his father and his past is both terrifying and consoling.
Smothered is a work of great understanding, told with skill, humour, and compassion.
Smothered is the coming of age story of a socially isolated young man told with unsparing skill and sympathetic insight.
Alan grows up in a baffling world of stifling normality. His father, Tosh, is an ambitious man of more energy than talent; his mother is a caring woman who accepts the necessity of being seen to respect a conventional life. As he struggles to find purpose and worth, Alan is drawn through a tangle of drugs, self-harm, and self-serving friendships, always unable to free himself from the quagmire of family life and expectation. His final confrontation with his father and his past is both terrifying and consoling.
Smothered is a work of great understanding, told with skill, humour, and compassion.
Hidden Valley
David L. Hume
David L. Hume
Hidden Valley is a multi faceted love story that examines its human actors as searchingly and lovingly as it examines a town and its history. It is a love letter to an entire town, a region, and its history.
David L. Hume has created an exquisite story of love, folly, strength, weakness, and weaves it all into a tender history of the lives of generations of ordinary and extraordinary people. It glows with the author's love of his subject.
David L. Hume has created an exquisite story of love, folly, strength, weakness, and weaves it all into a tender history of the lives of generations of ordinary and extraordinary people. It glows with the author's love of his subject.
Last Time Around
Will Clattenburg
Will Clattenburg
With a nod to The Decameron and The Divine Comedy, Last Time Around moves through three sections or “books”, as the four central characters travel from German beer garden to Brooklyn music venue to Polish diner. Along the way, the characters eulogize and disparage former acquaintances, lovers, and total strangers in an attempt to mask the tender spots in their own lives.
The book’s narrator, Ian, is himself going through a significant period of change when the novel opens. He is starting a new job, moving apartments, and attempting to get over his ex-girlfriend Olivia.
Hovering on the periphery of the evening is Nick Amante, Ian’s nemesis from Yale—a vague but continuous and haunting presence. Amante is a young writer whose most recent book, Inferno, has earned minor recognition. Even while Ian dismisses Amante as a hack (quoting liberally from Inferno’s most purple passages), it becomes clear that Amante has a guide-like role to play in Ian’s life. The night ends in a room full of fake mariachis where Ian finally connects with Amante and Olivia, and receives the inspiration to write his own story.
The book’s narrator, Ian, is himself going through a significant period of change when the novel opens. He is starting a new job, moving apartments, and attempting to get over his ex-girlfriend Olivia.
Hovering on the periphery of the evening is Nick Amante, Ian’s nemesis from Yale—a vague but continuous and haunting presence. Amante is a young writer whose most recent book, Inferno, has earned minor recognition. Even while Ian dismisses Amante as a hack (quoting liberally from Inferno’s most purple passages), it becomes clear that Amante has a guide-like role to play in Ian’s life. The night ends in a room full of fake mariachis where Ian finally connects with Amante and Olivia, and receives the inspiration to write his own story.
For Emma and Elvis
Charles Hall
Charles Hall
In the northern summer of 1977 Australians Michael Byrne and Emma Riley are holidaying in Spain. On arriving back in London they are shocked to learn that Elvis is dead; news that will have a profound effect on their lives.
For Emma and Elvis follows Michael and Emma as they make their way through the turmoil of the sixties and seventies – the social and political upheavals, the joy and the grief – in Australia and the world, an era that has gone forever. Australia in the sixties, when a 20-pack of king-size filters was forty cents, as was a 26 oz bottle of beer, or a gallon of petrol. When men too young to vote were conscripted to fight and die in Vietnam, and violence against women was deemed a domestic of no consequence.
For Emma and Elvis is a joyful, thoughtful evocation of a past era, but it highlights powerful messages for today.
For Emma and Elvis follows Michael and Emma as they make their way through the turmoil of the sixties and seventies – the social and political upheavals, the joy and the grief – in Australia and the world, an era that has gone forever. Australia in the sixties, when a 20-pack of king-size filters was forty cents, as was a 26 oz bottle of beer, or a gallon of petrol. When men too young to vote were conscripted to fight and die in Vietnam, and violence against women was deemed a domestic of no consequence.
For Emma and Elvis is a joyful, thoughtful evocation of a past era, but it highlights powerful messages for today.
If I Can, You Can
Karen O'Sullivan
Karen O'Sullivan
“If I can, you can” is a love story and the life story of Hayden Walsh, a 30-year-old who lives with cerebral palsy. Hayden is a partner, a father, a disability advocate and has a special bond spanning more than 20 years with former AFL Collingwood Coach Nathan Buckley, who has provided a moving foreword for this book.
Hayden’s life journey has been filled with challenges from the day he was born, physical, mental and emotional. With an infectious smile and equally contagious zest for life, Hayden overcomes countless hurdles with good humour and humility, becoming a role model and inspiration for those he encounters.
Karen O'Sullivan, acclaimed television journalist, tells Hayden's engaging, warm, and ultimately triumphant story with humour and understanding. An important book for anyone seeking to understand how to face the challenges life can set us.
Hayden’s life journey has been filled with challenges from the day he was born, physical, mental and emotional. With an infectious smile and equally contagious zest for life, Hayden overcomes countless hurdles with good humour and humility, becoming a role model and inspiration for those he encounters.
Karen O'Sullivan, acclaimed television journalist, tells Hayden's engaging, warm, and ultimately triumphant story with humour and understanding. An important book for anyone seeking to understand how to face the challenges life can set us.
Morrison & Mr Moore
Michael Hyde
Michael Hyde
Morrison is 17. Smart, sarcastic, annoying, and very angry.
Mr Moore, a school principal on the verge of retirement, has seen it all. Now coping with a wife who has Alzheimers, his plans for his life in retirement are in tatters. The last thing he needs is someone like Morrison.
What happens when two unlikely people find strength in each other?
This unique story is captivating and surprising, wrenching and uplifting, and offers brilliant insights into the nature of friendship and the problems of ageing at every age.
A novel of strength, hope, humility, and acceptance… and that strange kid who wears petticoats…
Mr Moore, a school principal on the verge of retirement, has seen it all. Now coping with a wife who has Alzheimers, his plans for his life in retirement are in tatters. The last thing he needs is someone like Morrison.
What happens when two unlikely people find strength in each other?
This unique story is captivating and surprising, wrenching and uplifting, and offers brilliant insights into the nature of friendship and the problems of ageing at every age.
A novel of strength, hope, humility, and acceptance… and that strange kid who wears petticoats…
The Hand of Justice
Phil Copsey
Phil Copsey
Bogdan Vulpe's empire is ruled with an iron fist. No one disobeys. That had been his way in Romania; so why should the City of Melbourne be any different?
Killing Justice leads you into a world of unbridled violence. Murder, extortion and anything else that Volpe needs to succeed will be used. If he has to take retribution against officers of the highest court in the land, so be it.
This latest challenge to Tony Signorotto and his loyal team is his toughest yet. Not only is he battling a violent criminal gang, but changes in the ranks of his beloved Carlton police force will pit him against an ambitious, careerist police Superintendent more interested in glory than justice. The fight to uphold the laws of the State continue in the gripping fourth instalment in the Tony Signorotto crime series.
Killing Justice leads you into a world of unbridled violence. Murder, extortion and anything else that Volpe needs to succeed will be used. If he has to take retribution against officers of the highest court in the land, so be it.
This latest challenge to Tony Signorotto and his loyal team is his toughest yet. Not only is he battling a violent criminal gang, but changes in the ranks of his beloved Carlton police force will pit him against an ambitious, careerist police Superintendent more interested in glory than justice. The fight to uphold the laws of the State continue in the gripping fourth instalment in the Tony Signorotto crime series.
The Hand of Justice
Phil Copsey
Phil Copsey
Senior Sergeant Tony Signorotto and his loyal team of blue have fought many battles against crime in the heartland of the inner Melbourne suburb of Carlton. Now a new threat has emerged, and it is one of their own. Do they trust him to see if he can save himself and his career? Or do they give him just enough rope to hang himself?
This thrilling addition to Copsey's Justice series will take the Carlton police on a journey that spans illegal gambling, the Russian mafia, an international begging scam, and down a one-way path of murder and kidnapping.
In a fight to contain the destruction, Tony Signorotto and Phil Stone will put their careers on the line. Signorotto leads from the front and tries to save his wayward colleague; Stone faces the ignominy of a forced retirement if they cannot stop a ruthless Russian gangster. Can a local police force do its job when international diplomacy is muddying already muddy water?
The Hand of Justice is an intriguing mix of politics, policing, and power. The stakes are high and reputations will be made or lost.
This thrilling addition to Copsey's Justice series will take the Carlton police on a journey that spans illegal gambling, the Russian mafia, an international begging scam, and down a one-way path of murder and kidnapping.
In a fight to contain the destruction, Tony Signorotto and Phil Stone will put their careers on the line. Signorotto leads from the front and tries to save his wayward colleague; Stone faces the ignominy of a forced retirement if they cannot stop a ruthless Russian gangster. Can a local police force do its job when international diplomacy is muddying already muddy water?
The Hand of Justice is an intriguing mix of politics, policing, and power. The stakes are high and reputations will be made or lost.
The Calibre of Justice
Phil Copsey
Phil Copsey
The second instalment of the Tony Signorotto series sees the hard bitten police officer newly promoted to the rank of Senior Sergeant. Still stationed at his beloved Carlton Police Station, but out of the firing line of day-to-day street policing, Tony is hoping that the old street wars that raged between him and his mafia relatives are battles of the past.
Life should be less complicated now. He has made the sacrifice of life on the edge for nine-to-five and the paperwork routine surrounding his mahogany foxhole - until the rumours of a possible firearms raid on the Victoria Police Department. Enough handguns, if stolen, to flood the streets of Carlton and every major city in Australia.
Fast-paced, and brilliantly plotted, The Calibre of Justice is also frighteningly real!
Life should be less complicated now. He has made the sacrifice of life on the edge for nine-to-five and the paperwork routine surrounding his mahogany foxhole - until the rumours of a possible firearms raid on the Victoria Police Department. Enough handguns, if stolen, to flood the streets of Carlton and every major city in Australia.
Fast-paced, and brilliantly plotted, The Calibre of Justice is also frighteningly real!
Blue Justice
Phil Copsey
Phil Copsey
Blue Justice is an Australian crime novel with a difference: this is cops on the beat. This is a book about real policing. There are no tortured detectives puzzling over motive or building a case on fragments of lucky finds of evidence. Forget the bizarre clues, the mastermind criminals. This is blood-on-the-floor police work.
Sergeant Tony Signorotto has good friends, plenty of enemies, and the sort of family connections that just might get you killed. He may be an old-school cop in a rapidly changing world, but even fashionable Carlton still has a few old-fashioned problems to sort out. And Tony Signorotto is just the man to have on hand to solve them.
Phil Copsey served with Victoria State Police Force, Australia, for forty years. His experience fighting crime on the streets of multicultural Melbourne inspired him to write his debut novel, Blue Justice. His depictions of characters and crimes are infused with authentic operational details.
Sergeant Tony Signorotto has good friends, plenty of enemies, and the sort of family connections that just might get you killed. He may be an old-school cop in a rapidly changing world, but even fashionable Carlton still has a few old-fashioned problems to sort out. And Tony Signorotto is just the man to have on hand to solve them.
Phil Copsey served with Victoria State Police Force, Australia, for forty years. His experience fighting crime on the streets of multicultural Melbourne inspired him to write his debut novel, Blue Justice. His depictions of characters and crimes are infused with authentic operational details.
Macaulay Station
Graeme Sparkes
Graeme Sparkes
Macaulay Station is a lament and a celebration. Frank Munro has lost his close friend Charlie, dead just one year, his career is a mundane casualty of the technological revolution, his youth is a memory, another casualty of the tyranny of time.
Frank Munro has had change thrust upon him. He’s trying to adapt. Once an award winning journalist, Frank has been put out to pasture, but he is fighting to renew his purpose, renew his life, and save the woman he loves from her disastrous infatuation.
Can a conversation with a dead man on Macaulay Station point the way?
A novel for anyone who has glimpsed the future and didn't like what they saw.
Frank Munro has had change thrust upon him. He’s trying to adapt. Once an award winning journalist, Frank has been put out to pasture, but he is fighting to renew his purpose, renew his life, and save the woman he loves from her disastrous infatuation.
Can a conversation with a dead man on Macaulay Station point the way?
A novel for anyone who has glimpsed the future and didn't like what they saw.
Male Pattern Behaviour
Howard Firkin
Howard Firkin
The hilarious, touching, and sometimes tragic story of Thomas Furphy: writer, dreamer, con man, lover. A man with more than a few skeletons in his closet (and in his backyard).
Male Pattern Behaviour charts this one, very singular, man’s journey to discover meaning in the male role, reform the Australian political system, and regain sexual function. All while evading a psychopath and society more generally.
Male Pattern Behaviour charts this one, very singular, man’s journey to discover meaning in the male role, reform the Australian political system, and regain sexual function. All while evading a psychopath and society more generally.
At Daytrap
Reginald Wells
Reginald Wells
Reginald Wells' explosive tales of life in rural Australia.
Previously only circulated in ragged samizdat manuscript, this bizarre collection of short stories, at once hilarious, profane, bawdy, tawdry, and unlikely, is now available in an authoritative version. Destined to become an Australian classic.
Not everyone is happy at the rural, Australian way of life depicted in these stories, of course. The eminent Sir Pelham Corrie has written: "One final word. It is not inconceivable that one day some ignorant, jumped-up, crypto-intellectual johnny-come-lately, academic bounder will come along and try to claim that the central character in these stories, the so-called ‘Uncle Vern’, was some kind of modern Sisyphus pushing rocks downhill, a modern Prometheus giving matches to children, some kind of symbol of our times. Well, he certainly is not that. He is nothing but a mountebank, and a living slur on the good name of decent rural folk who are and always have been and always will be the backbone of this great nation of ours."
So don't say you weren't warned. Not recommended for anyone under the age of eighteen. Not recommended for those of delicate or sophisticated taste.
Previously only circulated in ragged samizdat manuscript, this bizarre collection of short stories, at once hilarious, profane, bawdy, tawdry, and unlikely, is now available in an authoritative version. Destined to become an Australian classic.
Not everyone is happy at the rural, Australian way of life depicted in these stories, of course. The eminent Sir Pelham Corrie has written: "One final word. It is not inconceivable that one day some ignorant, jumped-up, crypto-intellectual johnny-come-lately, academic bounder will come along and try to claim that the central character in these stories, the so-called ‘Uncle Vern’, was some kind of modern Sisyphus pushing rocks downhill, a modern Prometheus giving matches to children, some kind of symbol of our times. Well, he certainly is not that. He is nothing but a mountebank, and a living slur on the good name of decent rural folk who are and always have been and always will be the backbone of this great nation of ours."
So don't say you weren't warned. Not recommended for anyone under the age of eighteen. Not recommended for those of delicate or sophisticated taste.
Animalcule
Anthony Riddelll
Anthony Riddelll
Anthony Riddelll's remarkable novella, Animalcule, poses the question, "Should humans have tails?"
Join Dr Bingbang, Ichabod Snell, Strawberrie, Pablo Tater and a host of others as they avoid answering this and many, many other questions.
You will learn, however, the singular of BANANA.
Join Dr Bingbang, Ichabod Snell, Strawberrie, Pablo Tater and a host of others as they avoid answering this and many, many other questions.
You will learn, however, the singular of BANANA.
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