Pangamonium is a comic novel that parodies travel adventure stories and satirises globalisation. It is a tongue-in-cheekadventure romp, a mock epic.Francis is a modern Don Quixote who tries to be a cynical journalist looking out for himself but ends up trying to liberate a bunch of child slaves making sex toys for the West. Toss in an African pilgrim named Easter on a quest to find hisgrandfather's grave filled with pirate gold, a military regime oppressing the citizens of Panga, and a Bollywood romance--pandemonium ensues.

Consumed with despair, Palestinian Nassrin walks into the ocean with her baby in her arms. Susanna dares to take a stand against gay-bashers. By starlight, Bodil sees the city of Malmo from the roof of a church. Estella meets her tough little half-brother for the first time. Lonely Rhyme seeks shelter in a tree full of fairy lights. And all around them, the hum of concrete.

James Brandt didn't look back when he got away from his rural hometown as a teenager. Now he has returned to Kippen for the first time in twenty years because his cousin Tony has been found dead under the local bridge. The news that Tony has left him the entire family farm triggers James's journalistic curiosity - and his anxiety - both of which cropped up during his turbulent journey to adulthood. But it is the unexpected homophobic attack he survives that draws James into a hunt for the reasons one lonely Kippen farm boy in every generation kills himself. Standing in the way is James's father, the town's recently retired top cop, who is not prepared to investigate crimes no-one reckons have taken place. James must use every newshound's trick he ever learned in order to uncover the brutal truth.

One sultry October morning in Darwin, hemp-wearing army wife Amy Silva grips a trembling fist around two pink lines on a plastic stick. Struggling to come to terms with her rampant fertility, disillusioned with a haughty obstetrician, and infuriated by an inordinate amount of peeing, Amy finds solace in a decision to homebirth. After all, it worked for the cavewomen, right? But as a tropical cyclone threatens to whip down the main street, Amy finds herself facing more than biology. Peace, Love & Khaki Socks explores what it is to be a woman, an expectant mother, a lover and a friend in a patriarchy. Sometimes horrifying, sometimes hilarious and always honest, this unforgettable story is one woman’s struggle to turn the ordinary into something extraordinary.

1901. The slide clunks into the lantern, and Phantoms come alive on the wall. The father-son Magic Lantern team of Bert and Tom Eliot are masters of the Art of the Story. The only problem is that they are missing a wife and mother. Then one morning eleven-year-old Tom wakes to find his father missing, too. The Lanternist's apprentice is thrown out of home, forced to work for the arch-criminal Jimmy Sacks, arrested and imprisoned. Will he ever be able to escape with his new friend Max and make the long, flea-bitten, rat-infested journey to Sydney in search of his parents?The Lanternist is a story about stories, and how they show us a way through life, despite the callous landladies, corrupt officials, criminal companions and the problems with living in incinerators. But mostly, it is about searching, and making your own endings.

"It's 1665. Rats have infested homes and alleys in Marie Perrin's provincial French town. Twelve-year-old Marie is set to become a maid, although she hungers for adventure. However, one mistake alters her fate and as punishment she is forced to apprentice for an intimidating rat-catcher. Away from her parents and twin brother, and handling gnarly rat traps under Gustave Renard's unusual mentorship, Marie must overcome a new set of challenges which come after a plague enters her town. Are rats responsible for the spread of the illness? Can Marie find a way out of the bubbling danger around her?"--Publisher's description.

1987. The Philippine government fights a total war against insurgency. The village of Iraya is militarised. The days are violent and the nights heavy with fireflies in the river where the dead are dumped. With her twelve-metre hair, Estrella, the Fish-hair Woman, trawls corpses from the water that tastes of lemon-grass. She falls in love with the Australian Tony McIntyre who disappears in the conflict. Ten years later, his son travels to Manila to find his father. From the Philippines to Australia, Hawai'i, to evocations of colonial Spain, this transnational novel spins a dark, epic tale. Its storytelling is expansive, like the heart -- How much can the heart accommodate? ... Only four chambers but with infinite space like memory, where there is room even for those whom we do not love.

The hilarious, tender and heartbreaking story of a watershed day in the life of Stephen - aimless, unhappy and unfulfilled, this stiflingly hot December day is the day he has decided to dump his girlfriend. A sharply observed, 24-hour urban love story.

Beneath the Mother Tree is a spine-chilling mystery and contemporary love story, played out in a unique and wild Australian setting interwoven with Indigenous history and Irish mythology. This spiritual subtext becomes a stage for unforgettable characters who navigate vital questions of identity and belonging. The result is a compelling portrait of how our dark history and dreaming landscape can make extraordinary things of ordinary lives. Wrought with sensuousness and lyricism, D.M. Cameron¿s debut novel is a thrilling journey, rhythmically fierce and eagerly awaited.

Told with the perfect mix of humour and tragedy, this is a tale for all families who have ever questioned how well a relative can really ever know another. It is customary to bring gifts to a wedding. But as daughter Luna prepares to marry her dream husband, the Smith family instead have in tow their own idiosyncratic brands of emotional baggage. Her father, Graham, struggles to write his own own obituary; her mother, Velma, attempts to negotiate her mid-life crisis with a lover seventeen years her junior; her brother, Ginsberg, tries to come to term with being a homosexual who has inadvertently fallen in love with his wife; and her obese uncle, Darren, starts an obsession with the absurd hero Ignatius J Reilly of John Kennedy toole's A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES. Can these hopelessly misguided attempts to unravel the complexities of family, legacy, sexuality and, ultimately, love and death, ever come to a resolution? A stunning debut novel by Heather taylor Johnson, PURSUING LOVE AND DEAtH is a darkly comic family saga, written with wit, lyricism and poignancy. It asks just how well we can really know our own family members, and what might be 'good enough' for them, as well as for ourselves. With clashing personalities uniting for the first time in years, the result is explosive. 'A novel where comedy and small tragedies are dealt a generous hand ... this is a work brimming with poetic carnality' Brian Castro 'An impressively confident debut .. Funny, poignant and messy' Caroline Baum