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?