Literary Fiction

Rowena’s Field

by Nicholas Jose
Ligature untapped
genre Literary Fiction

Finishing school is an intoxicating feeling; life is about to begin. Who will you be? How will you know? What will it take to find out?

It’s 1970 and Rowena Sonner is confronting these three questions. For her, the answer is to escape—first, from her upper middle class family’s expectations; then from conservative Adelaide and Australia itself—and to live. To love, lose, and learn from it all.

Rowena’s Field captures the generational, class, and cultural tensions of the seventies while exploring timeless questions about how we become ourselves.

‘Men rarely explore the domestic, rarely write the adventures of people’s lives, certainly rarely of women’s lives. For two reasons, then, this book has the fascination of the unusual, the unexpected. Does it work? Yes. Brilliantly.’ — Marion Halligan, The Canberra Times, 1984

First published in 1984, Rowena’s Field, Nicholas Jose’s debut novel, was shortlisted for The Australian/Vogel Award for an unpublished manuscript the previous year.

Nicholas Jose is an acclaimed author and Professor of English and Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide. He’s written seven novels, two collections of short stories, a memoir and was general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (2009). For more information visit www.nicholasjose.com.au.

The Bluebird Cafe

by Carmel Bird
Ligature untapped
genre Literary Fiction

In Tasmania, successful entrepreneur Nancy Best has recreated the defunct mining town of Copperfield as a glass-domed amusement park whose centrepiece is the Bluebird Cafe. The facsimile also includes a wax museum containing a statue of Lovelygod, the midget daughter born to the twins Bedrock and Carrillo Mean, who caused a sensation when she vanished without a trace 20 years before. Bedrock faithfully keeps vigil for her daughter’s return, while Carrillo roams the world in search of her. Also haunted by the mystery is expatriate author Virginia O’Day, who returns to Tasmania from America to write a play, Waiting for Lovelygod …’ Publishers Weekly US, in the publication review of the American edition. Unlike the Australian edition, it has never been out of print.

Described by Kirkus Reviews, US, as ‘a sweet-natured looking-glass version of Twin Peaks’, The Bluebird Café is award-winning author Carmel Bird’s debut novel and announced the arrival of a highly original, talented writer. First published in 1990, The Bluebird Cafe was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award the following year.

Novelist, essayist and non-fiction writer Carmel Bird was the recipient of the Patrick White Award in 2016. Her works include The Bluebird Café (1990) and the thematically-linked Mandala trilogy The White Garden (1995), Red Shoes (1998) and Cape Grimm (2004). Her most recent novel is the acclaimed Field of Poppies (2019) of which Robert Drewe wrote: ‘How to describe Field of Poppies? A lush feast of wit and wisdom? Writing so rich you simply want to devour it? A forensic examination of an Australian country town? Literary tour de force will have to do.’

Where the Queens all Strayed

by Barbara Hanrahan
Ligature untapped
genre Literary Fiction

It’s the beginning of the twentieth century and young Thea Hodge lives with her family in the picturesque Adelaide hills. There’s her father, who’s hiding his drinking from her mother, her mother, who’s hiding from reality, and her older sister who seems all set to get married. But when her sister strays from the path that should lead her down the aisle, Thea comes to realise that in her world, there’s a price to pay for those who don’t conform. An evocative, richly realised novel of a society on the brink of change. First published in 1978.

As Geoff Page wrote in The Canberra Times on its release, ‘The main concern of the novel … [is] the gap between the polite, class-conscious exterior of Edwardian life and its more seamy underside.’

A recent review by Melinda Rackham in The Conversation of ‘Bee-stung Lips’, a travelling exhibition of Hanrahan’s visual art, calls her ‘an Australian feminist artist you need to know’. The inclusion of Where the Queens All Strayed in the Untapped Collection will ensure that her value as a writer is also not forgotten. 

Barbara Hanrahan (1939–1991) was a South Australian writer and artist. Her novels include The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973), The Frangipani Gardens (1980), Kewpie Doll (1984). Her diaries, edited by Elaine Lindsay, were published posthumously in 1998.

Working Bullocks

by Katharine Susannah Prichard
Ligature untapped
genre Literary Fiction

Writing for British publication The Bookman in 1928, John Sleeman declared Working Bullocks to be ‘the high-water mark of Australian literary achievement in the novel so far’.

‘It’s the story of the people of the timber country in the South-West of WA and follows a young man named Red Burke who has a way with horses and bullocks but not people, as he is torn between two women and struggles to make his way in that world.’ So writes Nathan Hobby, Prichard’s biographer on his website. He goes on to lament, ‘Sadly, Working Bullocks is out of print despite being one of Katharine’s finest novels.’

First published in 1926, the Untapped edition brings this fine novel back into circulation. Hobby’s biography of Prichard, The Red Witch, will be released in May, 2022, by Melbourne University Press.

Katharine Susannah Prichard’s novels include The Pioneers (1915) which won the Hodder and Stoughton All Empire Literature Prize for Australasia, Coonardoo (1928), joint winner of The Bulletin Novel Competition, Intimate Strangers (1943) also in the Untapped Collection, and Haxby’s Circus (1930).

To the Burning City

by Alan Gould
Ligature untapped
genre Literary Fiction

The Second World War casts a heavy shadow, and for one family there seem to be only on choice: lean in or turn away. Jeb and his mother turn away: from Europe, from conflict, from husbands and brothers. His father, who was involved in the bombing of Hamburg in 1943, and Len, his half-brother have leaned in, in ways both affecting and, as Jeb discovers, shocking.

‘Underrated Alan Gould, unable to write the pretentious, politically correct, thinly textured fiction that wins publicity in Australia, has managed at least to construct a finely crafted and substantial novel, To The Burning City. When temperate retrospects become possible, this will be regarded as one of the most accomplished novels of recent years.’ — Critic Peter Pierce, The Canberra Times, at the time of the book’s original publication in 1991.

To the Burning City won the NBC Banjo Award for Fiction in 1992 and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award the same year.

Alan Gould is an acclaimed poet, essayist and novelist, and recipient of multiple literary awards. His works include Trawlermen (1975), To the Burning City (1991), The Schoonermaster’s Dance (2000 – also in the Untapped Collection, an ACT Book of the Year and Courier-Mail Book of the Year), The Past Completes Me (2005 – winner of the Grace Leven Poetry Prize), The Seaglass Spiral (2012 – winner of the Canberra Critics Circle Award), and, most recently, The Poet’s Stairwell (2015).

Tomorow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by M. Barnard Eldershaw
Ligature untapped
genre Literary Fiction

A science fiction novel that tells of a 24th century writer and his historical novel of 20th century Australia, critic Colin Steele, writing in The Canberra Times, called Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow an ‘undoubted classic of Australian literature.’ Steele went on to state that Eldershaw’s ‘description of the Depression years and the rise to power of Fascism in the context of a group of working-class Australians stirred Patrick White to state that this was the Australian novel he most wished to see re-published.’

Originally published in 1947 as Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and heavily censored by the Australian Government, this edition is based on the 1983 edition—reviewed by Steele-in which the cuts were reinstated.

M. Barnard Eldershaw was pseudonym of Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987) and Flora Eldershaw (1897–1956). They wrote satire, historical fiction and science fiction, and their novels include A House is Built (1929), and Plaque with Laurel (1937), Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947)—as well as Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1983).

Walk to the Paradise Gardens

by Charmian Clift
Ligature untapped
genre Literary Fiction

Paradise Gardens is not the idyllic holiday escape Charles and Julia Cant imagined. It’s a down-at-heel seaside town where local big man Roy and his wife tempt them to behave in ways they’ll be sure to regret…

In her introduction, Nadia Wheatley asks: ‘is it a romance? A thriller? A melodrama? A tragedy? Is it a Gothic? Is it a lyrical exploration of a physical and emotional landscape? An allegory about Heaven and Hell? Or is it simply an account of an accommodation made in the empty relation­ship of two sort of proto-yuppies?’ She doesn’t answer the questions: it’s for the reader to decide.

First published in 1959, and reissued in 1989, Walk to the Paradise Gardens is the first ‘real’ novel Charmian Clift wrote alone (her earlier works, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me A Lotus were semi-autobiographical). This edition contains the 1989 edition’s introduction by Nadia Wheatley, author of the award-winning biography The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift (2002), who also suggests that Paradise Gardens is a fictionalised Kiama, the south coast town where Clift grew up.

Charmian Clift (1923–1969) was an acclaimed Australian writer. She left Australia and then London to live on the Greek Island of Hydra in the 1950s with her husband George Johnston. Her books include Mermaid Singing (1956), and Peel Me a Lotus (1959), and the Sydney Morning Herald-Literary Competition winning High Valley (1949), co-written with George Johnston and also part of the Untapped Collection.

What I Have Written

by John Scott
Ligature untapped
genre Literary Fiction

‘This tale of obsessive love focuses on the intimate correspondence between a writer and a woman he has met just once. As their letters grow increasingly erotic, they begin their own investigations, betrayals, and confessions—as the story builds toward a startling climax.’ Australian Bookseller and Publisher

First published in 1993, What I have Written won the Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction in the following year. A film version was released in 1995 and Scott won an AWGIE award for the screenplay.

John Scott is an award-winning poet, short-story writer, scriptwriter and novelist. His poetry collection St Clair (1986), joint winner of the C.J. Dennis Award, is also part of the Untapped Collection. His novels include Before I Wake (1996), Blair (1998) and The Architect (2001).