Made for each other, clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplastrier are gamblers - one obsessive, the other compulsive - incapable of winning at the game of love.

This story is the song of Australia, and it sings its protest in a voice at once crude and delicate, menacing and heart-wrenching. The author gives us Ned Kelly as orphan, as Oedipus, as horse thief, farmer, bushranger, reformer, bank-robber, police-killer and as his country's Robin Hood.

Georgie Jutland has lost her way. Living with a fisherman she doesn't love, feeling alienated from her neighbours, she spends her nights in a blur of vodka and pointless loitering in cyberspace. Until one morning, in the pre-dawn gloom, she looks up from her computer screen to see a shadow on the beach below her. Luther Fox, the local poacher.

Cloudstreet: a broken-down house of former glories on the wrong side of the tracks, a place teeming with memories of its own, a place of shudders and shadows and spirits. From separate catastrophes, two families flee to the city and find themselves sharing this great sighing structure and beginning their lives again from scratch.

Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This book is a story of: a girl; an accordionist; some fanatical Germans; a Jewish fist fighter; and quite a lot of thievery.

On a property in New South Wales, a man named Holland lives with his daughter Ellen. As years pass and Ellen grows into a beautiful young woman, her father announces his decision: she will marry the first man who can name all the species of the eucalypt, down to the last tree.

William Thornhill is a waterman on the River Thames. Life is tough but bearable until William makes a mistake, for which he and his family are made to pay dearly. His sentence: to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. They arrive in this harsh land that they cannot understand and which feels like a death sentence.

Illywhacker is a dazzling comic narrative, from the lips of the 139-year-old Herbert Badgery, the 'illywhacker' or confidence trickster of the title. Overflowing with magic, jokes and inventions, peopled with aviators, car salesmen, Chinamen and impresarios, Peter Carey's novel is a contemporary classic.

A three-generation biography of an Australian family.

In 1828, before all living things were destroyed, William Buelow Gould, a convict in Van Diemen's Land, fell in love with a black woman and discovered, too late, that love is not safe.

Adapted for the screen by the author from her enormously successful novel about Josie Alibrandi and her relationship with her friends and family in her last year at school. Includes stills from the film and an introduction from the author.

The story of a young girl's dreams, aspirations and melodramas told with zest and verve by the 16-year-old author

On St Valentine's day in 1900, a party of Australian schoolgirls set off with two schoolmistresses on a picnic to a place called Hanging Rock. Some were never to return. What began as a pleasant and happy day out ended in terror.

Fred has decided to leave Australia to carve a new life for himself and his family. He labours alone to make their dilapidated cottage habitable, but when he arrives at the airport to pick up his wife and child, only his daughter steps off the plane. So begins Scully's odyssey across Europe, searching for the person he thought he'd never lose.

Jack Maggs, raised and deported as a criminal, has returned from Australia in secret and at great risk. What does he want after all these years, and why is he so interested in the comings and goings at a plush town-house in Great Queen Street?

Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo, this work presents an exploration of art, fraud, responsibility and redemption. It is narrated by the twin voices of the artist, Butcher Bones, and his 'damaged two-hundred-and-twenty-pound brother', Hugh.

In Melbourne in the late 1940s, a young conservative poet named Christopher Chubb decides to teach his country a lesson about pretension and authenticity. But over the ensuing years, his audacious act of literary ventriloquism takes on a much darker resonance.

* The Australian answer to GONE WITH THE WIND * 'One of the biggest-selling, most widely read books in the history of fiction' Observer

Peter Carey's novel is a fast-moving extravaganza, both funny and gripping, about a man who, recovering from death, is convinced that he is in hell.

A novel of obsessive love in an age of obsessive materialism, Seven Types of Ambiguity is Elliot Perlman's stunning follow-up to his highly acclaimed debut novel Three Dollars. Following years of unrequited love, an out-of-work schoolteacher decides to take matters into his own hands, kidnapping his beloved's young son and triggering a chain of events no one could have anticipated.