The Text Publishing Company: 414 books

Australian politics and national life are trapped in a permanent present. There are few opportunities to imagine the future, and even fewer to create it. Politics, commerce, media all focus relentlessly on the here and now. This breeds a corrosive cynicism. Yet when alternatives are presented they...

It starts in a suburban backyard with Darren Keefe and his older brother, sons of a fierce and gutsy single mother. The endless glow of summer, the bottomless fury of contest. All the love and hatred in two small bodies poured into the rules of a made-up game. Darren has two big talents: cricket...

Late last year, after a decade of what was at times a bitter and divisive debate, Australians made it clear that their understanding of equality included formal recognition of the most intimate relationships. The parliament responded to the voice of the people and passed legislation to allow same-sex...

After forty-five years in Sydney, Cassandra Aberline returns to her home town in the Western Australian wheat belt in the same way she left: on the Indian Pacific train. As they cross the emptiness of the vast Australian inland, Cassie travels back through her memories, too, frightened that...

An enthralling detective story about evolution and natural history. In mid-1994 a National Parks & Wildlife ranger abseiling in the Wollemi Wilderness outside Sydney, came upon an extraordinary sight: a canyon filled with massive pines. These trees towered above the surrounding foliage,...

When he died in 1992 Brett Whiteley left behind decades of ceaseless activity—some works bound to a particular place or time, others that are masterpieces of light and line. Whiteley had arrived in Europe in 1960 determined to make an impression. Before long he was the youngest artist to...

*What right did I possess, as a child of survivors, to recreate an account of the Holocaust as if I was there? *In writing The Fiftieth Gate, Mark Baker describes a journey from despair and death towards hope and life; it is the story of a son who enters his parents’ memories and, inside the darkness,...

Shortlisted, WA Premier's Book Awards, 2011 Shortlisted, Victorian Premier's Book Awards, 2012 Shortlisted, Melbourne Prize for Literature, Best Writing Award, 2012 The Cook, Wayne Macauley's breakout novel, is funny and sad, strange and satirical, and weirdly moving. At Cook School,...

Blueprints for a Barbed-Wire Canoe, Wayne Macauley's first novel, is a bitingly dark take on the great Australian dream. Fable-like, effortlessly readable and ultimately moving, it shows us the depth of Macauley's talent. Bram and his fellow residents are drawn by a dream: the promise of a...

‘I read it in a gulp. I seem to know this girl.’ Helen Garner In the 1980s in the Melbourne suburb of Fawkner, Josie’s father is drinking himself to an ugly and appalling death. Josie’s mother is a factory machinist, bringing home piecework to keep the family afloat. And Josie...

Long-listed, Miles Franklin Literary Award, 2015, Australia. Sylvie is five. It's the 1950s and she lives in Burley Point, a fishing village south of the Coorong on Australia's wild southern coast. She worships her older brother Dunc. She tries to make sense of her brooding mother, and her...

Peta Wheeler measures time differently now. Before the couch. After the couch.  Before the couch, Peta knew who she was. A 34-year-old information-dissemination professional, married to the man of her dreams and thinking about motherhood. She'd never been late for work, drunk beer or kissed...

Winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature, Best Writing Award 2012. The Amateur Science of Love is the debut novel by Craig Sherborne, author of the acclaimed memoirs Hoi Polloi and Muck. Colin dreams of escaping his parents' farm for a grand stage career. He makes it to London and...

I cannot really remember how I came to know about Belsen and my father’s work there, or even when. Had I overheard my parents talk about it before I found the photographs? Was finding the photographs the beginning? Helen Lewis was just a child when she found an old suitcase hidden in a cupboard...