The classic thriller by the five-time winner of the Ned Kelly Award. Introduction by Les Carlyon. When Mac Faraday's best friend is found hanging, the assumption is suicide. But Mac is far from convinced, and he's a man who knows not to accept things at face value. A regular at the local pub, a mainstay of the footy team, Mac is living the quiet life of a country blacksmith - a life connected to a place, connected to its people. But Mac carries a burden of fear and vigilance from his old life. And as this past of secrets, corruption, abuse and murder begins to close in, he must turn to long-forgotten resources to hang on to everything he holds dear, including his own life. Peter Temple is one of Australia's finest writers, the winner of Australia's premier prize for literature in 2010, the Miles Franklin Award, and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for his novel Truth. Born in South Africa, Peter Temple settled in Australia in 1980 and worked as a journalist and teacher before becoming a full-time novelist. Temple has written nine novels and has won the Ned Kelly Award for crime fiction five times. Les Carlyon is the author of Gallipoli, a bestseller in Australia, Britain and New Zealand, The Great War, which was voted book of the year at the Australian Book Industry Awards, and The Master: A Personal Portrait of Bart Cummings. 'Peter Temple has a way with words and the richness of his language alone makes this book rewarding...This is a great book.' Sacramento/San Francisco Book Review 'Temple invests his characters' thought, speech, and deeds with an arresting immediacy and freshness.' Booklist 'A wonderfully controlled piece of writing with some delightfully wry observations...the quality of the prose alone makes the book worth reading.' Opinionator 'A must for thriller seekers.' Who Weekly 'Fast, funny and assured.' Australian Book Review 'The coolest and most elegant of Australian crime writers.' Age 'Temple is a phenomenon.' Sydney Morning Herald 'An Iron Rose has Temple's usual grizzled police veteran as the central character, a despicable and mystifying crime and a support crew of goodies and baddies...Temple's dry Australian vernacular and wit should be required reading for everyone above the age of 16. This edition is introduced by Les Carlyon, a better match for Temple's writing I could not imagine.' Melbourne Weekly

'When men in police uniforms came to execute me on the roadside, beside dark fields, it was a definite sign that my new life was over.' A regular at the local pub, a mainstay of the footy team, Mac Faraday is a man with a past living the quiet life of a country blacksmith. But when his best friend Ned Lowey is found hanged, Mac - who has learned the hard way never to accept things at face value - isn't convinced he committed suicide and starts asking questions. Why did Ned keep press cuttings about the skeleton of a girl found in an old mine shaft? What was he doing at Kinross Hall, the local detention centre for juvenile girls? Who was the beaten girl found naked beside a lonely road? As Mac's search for answers pushes deeper into the past, it resurrects the terrifying spectre of what he calls his 'old life', forcing him to turn to long-discarded skills not only to discover why his best friend died, but also to save his own life.

Certain that she is really a male trapped in a female body, Mary Ward pursues this elusive identity, much to the consternation of her mother, her brother, and a neighbor's son.

Down on his luck and hard up for cash, Carl works in the kitchen of a seedy rock 'n' roll joint in ethnically diverse Brunswick. The bouncers and bosses terrify him, he's desperately in love with a much younger Greek waitress, and to make matters worse his mother has come down from Sydney to stay with him. Then a dead body turns up.

Shooting Star is classic Peter Temple, and now a Text Classic.

Alex and Andrew are friends. And Barbara...Barbara is a goddess. Here is the eternal triangle, the story of three people in an unhappy tangle of emotions, none able to articulate the precise quality of their longing and dissatisfaction. Are any of them truly interested in reaching the ‘paradise’ they claim to be seeking, or are they actually trying to avoid it? In St. John’s hands, what is commonplace is transformed and transcendent. This is the work of an extraordinary writer. MADELEINE ST JOHN was born in Sydney in 1941. Her father, Edward, was a barrister and Liberal politician. Her mother, Sylvette, committed suicide in 1954, when Madeleine was twelve. Her death, she later said, ‘obviously changed everything’. St John studied Arts at Sydney University, where her contemporaries included Bruce Beresford, Germaine Greer, Clive James and Robert Hughes. In 1965 she married Chris Tillam, a fellow student, and they moved to the United States where they first attended Stanford and later Cambridge. From Cambridge, St John relocated to London in 1968 with the hope that Chris would follow. The couple did not reunite and the marriage ended. St John settled in Notting Hill. She worked at a series of odd jobs, and then, in 1993, published her first novel, The Women in Black, the only book she set in Australia. When her third novel, The Essence of the Thing (1997), was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, she became the first Australian woman to receive this honour. St John died in 2006. She had been so incensed after seeing errors in a French edition of one of her novels that she stipulated in her will that there were to be no more translations of her work. ‘Not much in the way of folly escapes Madeleine St John, and the oubliette she opens into the darker reaches of the spirit is unsettling.’ The Times ‘St John proves herself a comic, humane observer.’ Newsday ‘Madeleine St John is brilliant on the elliptical way lovers talk to each other.’ Daily Telegraph

The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, a comic verse novel, was first published in book form in 1915 and sold more than sixty thousand copies in nine editions within a year. By the mid-1970s nearly three hundred thousand copies had been sold internationally.

Written with unerring skill and insight, The Dyehouse is a masterly portrait of postwar Australia, when industrial work was radically transformed by new technologies and society changed with it. Mena Calthorpe—who herself worked in a textile factory—takes us inside this world, vividly bringing to life the people of an inner-Sydney company in the mid-1950s: the bosses, middlemen and underlings; their dramatic struggles and their loves. This powerful and affecting novel was first published in 1961, and is the hundredth book in the Text Classics series. The new edition comes with an introduction by Fiona McFarlane, acclaimed author of The Night Guest. Mena Calthorpe was born in Goulburn, New South Wales, in 1905, and grew up there. After marrying, Calthorpe moved to Sydney and lived for most of her life in the Sutherland Shire. Working in office jobs and writing in her spare time, she was active in literary groups and in the Labor Party—for some years she was a member of the Communist Party, and she opposed B. A. Santamaria’s attempts to stop communism in trade unions. The Dyehouse (1961) was followed by The Defectors (1969), which dramatised unions’ internal power struggles. Mena Calthorpe’s third and final novel was The Plain of Ala, an Irish migrant story, which was published in 1989. She died in 1996. ‘[The Dyehouse] is executed with a singular combination of charm, grace and tough-mindedness.’ Meanjin ‘The Dyehouse is an extraordinary book—a true ensemble novel, written with astonishing control and animated by compassionate intelligence. With its indelible Sydney setting, it deserves—more than deserves—to take its place among the great Australian novels about work, and to be celebrated as the 100th Text Classic.’ Fiona McFarlane ‘A reminder of how rarely these days fiction tackles the world of work that so dominates our lives...Worth reading as much for its social history and its understanding of human nature as its rendering of the labour/capital clash.’ Australian ‘Vivid, fresh and utterly unsentimental...Re-reading The Dyehouse now I am struck by how technically accomplished it is, and how each of its many characters is made distinct and alive with extraordinary economy...Calthorpe's own experience of factory and office work provides The Dyehouse with many authentic touches (including much detail about the dyeing process) but that is not what generates this novel's compelling power. What is so remarkable is how it captures and presents a microcosmic world, in which the human elements are all parts of a moving whole.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘The Dyehouse has themes that are as true today as they were at the time of writing...Beautifully written.’ Booksellers New Zealand ‘A masterly portrait of post-war Australia...vividly bringing to life the people of an inner-Sydney company in the mid-1950s.’ Womankind ‘The Dyehouse is the perfect novel for the Text Classics centenary. It’s a shining example of a book ‘we’ve never heard of’ that is very good reading indeed...I started reading The Dyehouse last night when I went to bed at 10 o’clock. I became so absorbed in it, that I didn’t turn the light out till four o’clock in the morning. That speaks for itself, I think!’ ANZ LitLovers ‘Fresh and lively...I really can’t recommend this book enough.’ Whispering Gums ‘[A] fascinating novel of women and work.’ Australian Women’s Weekly

Four English orphans - Cherry, Nigel, Brick and Nippy - migrate to Tasmania, to the care of their Aunt Jandie on her farm outside Hobart. Their arrival is greeted with enthusiasm by young farm boy Tas, and weeks of exploration and good times follow before Aunt Jandie goes to hospital, leaving the children in the care of Ma and Pa Pinner, her foreman and housekeeper. A few days of tyrannical treatment by the Pinners forces the children to seek refuge in a secret cave, where they set up home to await the return of Jandie. Despite Pa's repeated efforts to recapture them, the children stay, fending for themselves in the bush, until Nigel's secret trip to town uncovers a plot by the Pinners to abandon the farm and swindle Aunt Jandie. Nan Chauncy was born in England and emigrated to Tasmania with her family in 1912. She became one of Australia's most beloved authors, winning the CBCA Book of the Year three times and becoming the first Australian writer to win the Hans Christian Anderson Diploma of Merit. They Found a Cave was first published in 1949. It was made into a popular feature film in 1962, which won Best Children's Film at the Venice Film Festival. The Children's Book Council of Australia presents the Nan Chauncy Award to recognise an outstanding contribution to the field of children's literature in Australia. Nan Chauncy died in 1970. textclassics.com.au