Dustjacket synopsis: "In the warm alkaline waters of the public bath, a naive and headstrong young engineer accidentally collides with a breathtaking actress. From this innocent collision of flesh begins a passion that will take them from the Wiltshire Downs to the mythical source of life in Africa - and to the most elemental choices of life and death in the Australian desert. "While the intense love story of William Dance and Angelica Lloyd is at the heart of The Drowner, it is but a part of the daring story that unfolds. By irresistibly mingling history, myth and technology with a modern cinematic and poetic imagination, Robert Drewe has reached beyond the traditions of the romance and annexed new territory. "Such is the grand scale and original texture of The Drowner that it is at once a fable of European ambitions in an alien landscape, a magnificently sustained metaphor of water as the life and death force and, above all, an intimate and ambitious portrayal - of great resonance and haunting sensuality - of the essence of the differences between men and women. "Lyrical and astringent, vibrant and tender, The Drowner has all the mysterious powers of a dream. Robert Drewe's seventh work of fiction shows an author at the peak of his powers demonstrating the full vigour of his artistic vision."

THE DROWNER

Literature & Fiction

Robert Drewe

Literary

Picador/Pan Macmillan Australia

<p>"The nine smart, thoughtful stories in this collection explore the complex worlds of lovers, poets, lawyers, immigrants, students, and murderers. They tell of corporate betrayals and lost opportunities, and the hopes, fears, and vagaries of desire." A man wakes to find himself in conversation with an ex-lover while a new and younger woman lies naked asleep beside him in "Good Morning Again." A marriage on the brink of extinction is seen through the eyes of a child obsessed with prehistoric reptiles in "In the Time of the Dinosaur," and in the title story a public servant in the death throes of the twentieth century fails to realize his every certainty is about to be washed away by a tidal wave of change. The law figures in two stories - "Manslaughter," an account of murder in suburbia, and "The Hong Kong Fir Doctrine," which chronicles a lawyer's illicit romantic obsession, drawing parallels between pleadings at law and pleadings in love. In "I Was Only In a Childish Way Connected to the Established Order," a failed poet - sustained only by the voice of the celebrated Russian poet Osip Mandelstam - achieves an improbable heroism during an episode of madness and violence, and a young contemporary Job struggles with his family's past and his precarious future in "Spitalnic's Last Year." The final novella-length story, "A Tale in Two Cities," tells the heart-wrenching story of a Russian Jewish family amid the anti-Semitism of Brezhnev's Moscow and their ongoing vulnerability in the West.</p>

The Reasons I Won't Be Coming

elliot-perlman

Gould's Book of Fish: a Novel in Twelve Fish

FLANAGAN, Richard

American Rhapsody

<p>If the Watergate scandal was a previous generation's National Nightmare, then maybe the Clinton scandal was our National Wet Dream, and who better to narrate it than the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas? In American Rhapsody , Eszterhas, whose credits include Basic Instinct and Showgirls, and Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse, for which he was nominated for a National Book Award, takes us through the events that threatened to topple a president and left most of the nation's citizens with, at the very least, a bad taste in their mouths. Taking full advantage of his considerable journalistic and storytelling talents, Eszterhas gives us every fact, rumor, or innuendo surrounding the president's foibles in the context of late century American politics and entertainment. Here Washington and Hollywood do more than just flirt with each other; they share the same bed. From scandalmongers Matt Drudge (who began as a Hollywood gossip) and Ken Starr, to would-be president paramours Sharon Stone and Barbra Streisand, to his final, unimpeachable witness, Willard—none other than President Clinton's talking penis—Eszterhas gives us the goods on the story that nobody could stop talking about and, thanks to American Rhapsody, will be impossible to think about the same way again.</p>

Biographies & Memoirs

Joe Eszterhas

Leaders & Notable People

Puberty Blues

KATHY LETTE

Joe Cinque's Consolation

Politics & Social Sciences

Helen Garner

Social Sciences

In this remarkable and assured debut, Tova Mirvis tells the story of the close-knit, carefully structured world of the Orthodox community in Memphis, Tennessee, a world that unravels when Batsheva, newly widowed and a convert to Judaism, and her five-year-old daughter, Ayala, move in. Batsheva is free-spirited and artistic, and at first the women of the ladies auxiliary discover in her a passion for the traditions and rituals of Judaism which have become stale and routine to them. But when Batsheva becomes close with the restless high-school girls she teaches who are eager to catch glimpses of the non-Kosher world outside, and befriends, maybe a little too intimately, the beloved Rabbi's only son, Yosef, feathers begin to ruffle. When events come to a head, and Batshevea's past is revealed, the women's allegiances begin to split over whether Batsheva should be forced out of the community. Batsheva is an unforgettable character, one who makes her claims on the reader's heart from the first page. The Ladies Auxiliary, beautifully and skillfully told, shows what happens when the outside world leans on a closed community so intent on keeping its children inside its tight walls that it cannot see it is losing them.

The Ladies Auxiliary

Tova Mirvis

Contemporary

The Diary of Petr Ginz 1941-1942

Petr Ginz

Brooklyn

Colm. Toibin

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Books by Picador/Pan Macmillan Australia