Thea Astley won the coveted Miles Franklin Award for the third time with this powerful, bitterly funny novel, her favourite among her own works. Many lives orbit around the radiant genius of Jack Holberg - including wife, lover, child and acolyte - all slowly destroyed by their devotion to the blind musician.

This will be a book for the world’s last reader, she decided, chewing pen-end over an open exercise book. In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads—‘full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.’ Drylands is the story of the townsfolk’s harsh, violent lives. Trenchant and brilliant, Thea Astley’s final novel is a dark portrait of outback Australia in decline. Thea Astley was born in Brisbane in 1925. Her first novel, Girl with a Monkey, was published in 1958 and her third, The Well Dressed Explorer (1962), won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Many notable books followed, among them the groundbreaking A Kindness Cup (1974), which addressed frontier massacres of Indigenous Australians, and It’s Raining in Mango (1987). Her last novel was Drylands (1999), her fourth Miles Franklin winner. Her fiction is distinguished by vivid imagery and metaphor; a complex, ironic style; and a desire to highlight oppression and social injustice. One of the most distinctive and influential Australian novelists of the twentieth century, Astley died in 2004. ‘It is impossible to put this book down. It seethes with energy and passion.’ Herald Sun 'Wonderful.' Australian

This is the first biography of one of Australia's most beloved novelists, Thea Astley (1925–2004). Over a 50-year writing career, Astley published more than a dozen novels and short story collections, including The Acolyte, Drylands, and The Slow Natives, and was the first person to win multiple Miles Franklin Awards. With many of her works published internationally, Astley was a trailblazer for women writers. In her personal life, she was renowned for her dry wit, eccentricity, and compassion. Karen Lamb has drawn on an unparalleled range of interviews and correspondence to create a detailed picture of Thea the woman, as well as Astley the writer. She has sought to understand Astley's private world and how that shaped the distinctive body of work that is Thea Astley's literary legacy.

This second edition includes an updated bibliography.Astley's signature is a highly allusive, layered and self-conscious prose style, non-linear and open-ended (Gillian Whitlock, JASAL: Journal of Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 6, 2007, p. 154.)The essays offer insights into issues of language, art, gender and religion ... as well as Astley's evolving body of writing and the historical and literary context of her work (Lyn Jacobs, Australian Literary Studies v.23, n.3, 2008, p.358).

Wafer, who saw his father blown apart by a bomb in the second world war, and who grew up under the shadow of the nuclear bomb, seeks to spend his middle years in a place of solitude where he can prepare for the inevitable... Allbut, scarcely a dot on the map in the vast Queensland outback, seems to be the perfect place. But Wafer's peace-loving ways are not understood by the clean and decent locals and when it comes, the final blast is not the one he expected.

One family traced from the 1860s to the 1980s, beginning with Cornelius Laffey, an Irish-born journalist. Wresting his kin from the easy living of nineteenth-century Sydney, he takes them to northern Queensland where thousands of hopefuls are digging for gold in the mud. The family confronts the horror of Aboriginal dispossession, and Cornelius is sacked for reporting the slaughter. The cycles of generations turn, one over the other. Only some things change. That world and this world both have their Catholic priests, their bigots, their radicals. Winner of the inaugural Steele Rudd Award, this is an unforgettable tale of the other side of Australia's heritage.

Comprised of two interlinked novellas - 'The Genteel Poverty Bus Company' and 'Inventing the weather'.

• This May, Text will concurrently publish four Text Classics by the prolific and highly awarded Thea Astley • As with previous suites of Text Classics by Randolph Stow, Christina Stead, Amy Witting and Robin Klein, the concurrent publication of these four Astley novels demonstrates Text’s belief in the importance of this author • Astley is among the most significant Australian woman writers of the twentieth century—typified by her ironic style and her social consciousness, particularly of the injustices faced by indigenous Australians • At the time of her death in 2004, she held the record for the most Miles Franklin Literary Award wins by one author, a record she now jointly holds with Tim Winton • Collectively these four works of fiction are an opportunity for readers to rediscover parts of Astley’s catalogue that have been unjustly out-of-print, guided by two established and two emerging contemporary Australian woman authors • Reaching Tin River won the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction when first published in 1990 • A woman becomes obsessed with the story of a long-dead colonial pioneer, and her research becomes a way of coming to terms with her own past • This Text Classics edition will be introduced by Sydney Morning Herald 2017 Young Novelist of the Year and author of Our Magic Hour and Pulse Points, Jennifer Down

Pompous, vain and a self-professed charmer, George Brewster moves from one unfulfilling journalism job to the next, one empty relationship to another, his faithful wife and daughter ever the afterthought. The Well Dressed Explorer is the story of a man of his time, but as a story of toxic workplaces and an Australia where comfort and self-interest breed men like George, it might well feel familiar to a new generation of readers.Described as a 'formidable and enduring novel' by the American magazine Publishers Weekly on its original publication in 1962, The Well Dressed Explorer won the Miles Franklin Literary Award at same year. Thea Astley AO (1925-2004) went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award three more times, for the novels The Slow Natives (1965), The Acolyte (1972) which is also part of the Untapped Collection, and Drylands (1999). Other awards for her work include The Age Book of the Year, the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award's Christina Stead Prize for Fiction, and the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Best Fiction Book. She also received multiple personal awards including, in 1989, Patrick White Award and in 2002, a New South Wales Premier's Special Award for a lifetime's achievement in literature.

Queensland? place of barren land and wild politics with subtropical weather, beaches, and natural wonders's the subject of this rich literary history. Chronicling a wide range of literature, from the first days of European settlement to the present day, this collection touches upon thematic topics such as travel stories, writing for children, and indigenous writings. The role of institutions such as schools, public libraries, the press, and publishers, as well as how they have contributed to the shaping of Queensland? literary development, is also included.