Lush with a melancholy beauty, this intensely introspective novel focuses on the experiences of 14-year-old Plum as she leaves behind the quiet ease of childhood and steps into the cacophony of her teen years in 1980s Australia. Read full book review >

Told in gorgeous prose that reads more like poetry, the elderly Matilda relates the story of her life to a young boy she finds in her parlor one day. Read full book review >

Marcelle and Coco, "two skinny, flash-eyed little girls, wild as kittens born under stables," aged ten and eight respectively, discover a blind British soldier, an army deserter, in the woods near their French village. Read full book review >

A literary psychological thriller, hauntingly told, of a lonely, ostracized boy who "since childhood had been building a wall meant to protect [him] from the worst of the harm." Read full book review >

Satchel O'Rye, 23 and going nowhere fast, lives with his parents in a dying Australian town. Read full book review >

A bleakly haunting novel focuses its lens on a child struggling to survive in a family of emotional cripples. Read full book review >

Hartnett (Princes, 1998, etc.) tells a fantastic tale of an ordinary life during the Great Depression. Read full book review >

An ambitious novel by the author of Wilful Blue (1994) about a family that runs a farm-cum-trailer park in Australia, although the tale would be just as at home in the rural US. Read full book review >