Award Winners

"From the Man Booker Prize-winner, a brilliant and moving novel about celebrity, sexual power, and a daughter's search to understand her mother's hidden truths. Katherine O'Dell is an Irish theatre legend. As her daughter Norah retraces her mother's celebrated career and bohemian life, she delves into long-kept secrets, both her mother's and her own. Katherine began her career on Ireland's bus-and-truck circuit before making it to London's West End, Broadway, and finally Hollywood. Every moment of her life is a star turn, with young Norah standing in the wings. But the mother-daughter romance cannot survive Katherine's past or the world's damage. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, her grip on reality grows fitful and, fuelled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime. Her mother's protector, Norah understands the destructive love that binds an actress to her audience, but also the strength that an actress takes from her art. Once the victim of a haunting crime herself, Norah eventually becomes a writer, wife, and mother, finding her way to her own hard-won joy. Actress is finally a book about the freedom we find in our work and in the love we make and keep."

Winner of the Best Debut Fiction, Indie Awards, 2008 and longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award, 2009.Addition is a stylish, moving love story. Grace is witty, flirtatious and headstrong. She's not a bit sentimental but even so, she may be about to lose track of the number of ways she can fall in love.Grace Lisa Vandenburg counts.The letters in her name (19). The steps she takes every morning to the local cafe (920); the number of poppy seeds on her slice of orange cake, which dictates the number of bites she'll take to finish it.Grace counts everything, because numbers hold the worlds together. And she needs to keep an eye on how they're doing.Seamus Joseph O'Reilly (also a 19, with the sexiest hands Grace has ever seen) thinks she might be better off without the counting. If she could hold down a job, say. Or open her kitchen cupboards without conducting an inventory, or make a sandwich containing an unknown number of sprouts. Grace's problem is that Seamus doesn't count. Her other problem is, he does.Toni Jordan was born in Brisbane. She has worked as a sales assistant, molecular biologist, quality control chemist and marketing manager. In 2006 she received a Varuna Awards master class for Addition. Her second novel, Fall Girl, was released in 2010. Toni now lives in Melbourne where she works as a freelance copywriter.

It's an author's job to create a new world in the pages of a book. But when lines start to blur and reality begins to fade, getting lost in a story can be dangerous - especially if you can't find your way back. Madeleine d'Leon doesn't know where Edward came from. He is simply a character in her next book. But as she writes, he becomes all she can think about. His charm, his dark hair, his pen scratching out his latest literary novel - Edward McGinnity can't get Madeleine out of his mind - softly smiling, infectiously enthusiastic, and perfectly damaged. She will be the ideal heroine for his next book. But who is the author and who is the creation? And as the lines start to blur, who is affected when a killer finally takes flesh?

Every day we draw in two thousand gallons of air - and thousands of living things. From the ground to the stratosphere, the air teems with invisible life. In Air-Borne, New York Times columnist and Baillie Gifford-shortlisted author Carl Zimmer leads us on an odyssey through the living atmosphere and through the history of its discovery.

I had a body once before. I didn't always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it. I knew better than to wish for this. This is the story of Yun. It's the story of Adam. Two young people. A familiar chase. But this is not a love story. It's a story of revenge, transformation, survival. Feel something, the body commands. Feel this. But it's a phantom . . . I go untouched. They want their body back. Who are we, if we lose hold of the body? What might we become? The Airways shifts between Sydney and Beijing, unsettling the boundaries of gender and power, consent and rage, self and other, and even life and death. A powerful, inventive, and immersive novel from award-winning author Jennifer Mills.

Acutely observed, evocative collection of short stories from the Man Booker Prize-longlisted author of Unexploded, blending fiction, biography and memoir.Hovering on the border of life and death, these stories form a ground-shifting collection, taking us into history, literature and the hidden lives of iconic figures. In 1920s Nova Scotia, as winter begins to thaw, a woman emerges from mourning and wears a new fur coat to a dance that will change everything. A teenager searches for his lover on a charged summer evening in 2011, as around him London erupts in anger. A cardiac specialist lingers on the edge of consciousness as he awaits a new heart and is transported to an attic room half a century ago. In an ancient Yorkshire churchyard, the author visits Sylvia Plath's grave and makes an unexpected connection across time. On a trip to Brighton, reluctant jihadists face the ultimate spiritual test. And at Charleston, Angelica Garnett, child of the Bloomsbury Group, is overcome by the past, all the beloved ghosts that spring to life before her eyes. Precise, playful and evocative, these exquisitely crafted stories explore memory, the media and mortality, unfolding at the line between reality and fiction. Written with vigorous intelligence and delicate insight, this collection captures the surprising joys, small tragedies and profound truths of existence.

In the summer of 1979, Stefan Hertmans fell in love with a dilapidated house in Ghent. He rescued it from decay and it became his peaceful sanctuary. Decades on, he learns that a bust of Hitler once sat on the mantelpiece, and a war criminal and his family relaxed in its rooms. This shocking discovery sends Hertmans to the archives, where he uncovers the secrets of the house and the atrocities committed by its former owner Willem Verhulst. Drawing on the historical record and interviews with Verhulst’s family, Hertmans reimagines the life of a weak, narcissistic man who climbed the ranks of the SS. Hertmans also uncovers the marital drama that took place in the house: Verhulst’s commitment to the SS was at odds with the outlook of his wife, a deeply religious pacifist. The Ascent is an immersive tale of war, family and individual fate, in which Hertmans demonstrates his mastery at spinning a personal story into an epic narrative.Stefan Hertmans is the prize-winning author of many literary works, including poetry, novels, essays, plays, short stories and a handbook on the history of art. His novel War and Turpentine was longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, and was chosen as a book of the year in The Times, the Sunday Times and the Economist, and as one of the ten best books of the year in the New York Times.David McKay is a translator of Dutch literature living in The Hague. He received the 2017 Vondel Prize for his translation of Hertmans’ War and Turpentine.

Chance encounters have life-changing consequences. As the doctor's journey spirals back into his own family story, memories and ghosts shadow the seductions of the present. "Avenue of Eternal Peace", a kaleidoscopic novel of healing and hope, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and filmed as "Children of the Dragon" with Bob Peck and Lily Chen. This is a new, revised edition.