Secondhand Australian Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2705

Secondhand Australian Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box — 18 Books

A box built around two of Australian literature's most towering figures: four novels by Patrick White, Australia's only Nobel Prize laureate for Literature, and four by Tim Winton, one of the country's most beloved and awarded contemporary writers. Whether you're building a serious Australian literary library or discovering these writers for the first time, this is a remarkable collection at a remarkable price.

1. Shallows — Tim Winton. The novel that announced Winton to the world, winning the Miles Franklin Award in 1984 when he was just twenty-two. Set in the fictional coastal town of Angelus, it weaves together the whaling industry, environmental protest, and questions of faith and belonging with extraordinary assurance for a debut. A landmark of Australian fiction.
2. Scission — Tim Winton. A collection of short stories that showcases Winton's gift for capturing lives lived close to the edge — working-class Western Australian families, sudden violence, quiet grace. Compressed, powerful, and essential.
3. The Turning — Tim Winton. Seventeen linked stories set in the fictional town of Angelus, returning characters across decades of Australian coastal life. A masterwork of interconnected fiction, it won the Christina Stead Prize and demonstrated Winton's total command of both the story and the novel form.
4. Eyrie — Tim Winton. Winton's 2013 novel follows a disgraced environmentalist adrift in a Fremantle high-rise, drawn into the life of a neighbour and her grandson. Urgent, compassionate, and shot through with Winton's characteristic fury at what we're doing to the country and to each other.
5. The Living and the Dead — Patrick White. White's 1941 novel, set in London, traces a brother and sister paralysed by their inability to engage with life while the world moves toward war. One of the finest early works by Australia's Nobel laureate, already marked by White's dense, psychological intensity.
6. The Tree of Man — Patrick White. A foundational novel of Australian literature, following a man and woman who carve a farm from the bush at the turn of the twentieth century. Epic in scope, intimate in detail, and a transformative work in how Australian fiction understood itself. One of White's most accessible masterpieces.
7. Voss — Patrick White. Widely considered White's greatest achievement, inspired by the ill-fated 1848 expedition of Ludwig Leichhardt. The obsessive, charismatic explorer Voss and the Sydney woman Laura Trevelyan conduct a relationship of mutual projection across impossible distance as the expedition unravels in the desert. Dazzling and demanding — one of the great novels in the English language.
8. The Twyborn Affair — Patrick White. White's penultimate novel, following Eddie/Eadith Twyborn across three countries and multiple gender identities, from pre-war France to the Australian outback to London. Daring, moving, and far ahead of its time — shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1979.
9. Bridge of Clay — Markus Zusak. The long-awaited follow-up to The Book Thief, more than a decade in the making. Five brothers, a returning father, a horse named Achilles, and a bridge that must be built — Zusak weaves past and present in a novel about what we build and what we owe to those who shaped us. Ambitious, lyrical, and deeply felt.
10. Rosie Little's Cautionary Tales for Girls — Danielle Wood. A witty, sharp debut from one of Tasmania's finest writers. Taking the form of fairy tales retold for modern women, it's a book that's both playful and wise, feminist without being didactic, and possessed of a voice unlike anyone else in Australian fiction.
11. Heaven Where the Bachelors Sit — Gerard Windsor. A memoir and meditation on the lost Catholic world of Sydney's eastern suburbs in the mid-twentieth century — the rituals, the schools, the friendships, and the particular texture of a vanished way of life. Windsor writes with precision, wit, and genuine feeling.
12. The Harlots Enter First — Gerard Windsor. Windsor's fiction at its sharp, unsentimental best. Stories rooted in Sydney's Catholic milieu, exploring complicity, desire, and the gap between aspiration and reality. A quietly devastating collection.
13. A Short History of Richard Kline — Amanda Lohrey. Winner of the 2012 Patrick White Literary Award. A Sydney trader undergoes a crisis of meaning and turns toward Buddhism — but Lohrey is too intelligent a novelist to make this a simple conversion narrative. It's a serious, probing book about consciousness, suffering, and whether transformation is genuinely possible.
14. The Forger — Robin Wallace-Crabbe. A taut, elegantly written novel built around the Melbourne art world and the dangerous glamour of fakery. Wallace-Crabbe brings both insider knowledge and genuine storytelling craft to a thriller about authenticity — in art and in life.
15. Labourers in the Vineyard — Colin Thiele. From the beloved author of Storm Boy, this novel explores the German Lutheran community of South Australia's Barossa Valley — their faith, their traditions, their complex relationship with Australian identity. Quietly powerful historical fiction from a writer who understood that region like no one else.
16. Coorinna: A Novel of the Tasmanian Uplands — Erle Wilson. A rare find — a novel set in the remote highlands of Tasmania, a landscape rarely captured in Australian fiction. A valuable piece of Australian literary history for those interested in the island's literature and landscape.
17. Poor Man's Wealth — Rod Usher. A novel that examines class, aspiration, and the ambiguities of Australian success, written with sharp social observation and a wry eye. Usher's fiction deserves to be better known.
18. The Skedule and Other Australian Short Stories — Helen Wilson. A collection that gathers Australian voices across the short story form, preserving a sense of Australian life and storytelling that makes it both a literary pleasure and a cultural document.