* Zora Neale Hurston's masterpiece is perhaps the most widely read and highly regarded novel in the entire canon of African American literature.

'A brilliant memoir...it is about being Chinese in the way A Portrait of the Artist is about being Irish; it is an investigation of soul, not landscape, its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire; its crises are the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it...Maxine Hong Kingston writes with bitter and relentless love. Her voice, now, is as clear as the voice of Ts'ai

A reflective, poignant novel of independence and love from one of America's greatest contemporary Southern writers.

Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.

Published for the first time in the VMC, the complete collected short stories of one of America's greatest living writers.

Jill Ker Conway grew up in New South Wales in the 1940s and '50s. This is her account of an Australian childhood in the outback, and subsequently in Sydney, encompassing family tragedy, a devastating struggle with the desert environment, and an evocation of the Australian landscape.