Fiction & related items

It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a charming young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom's awkward energy, and their connection is instant. Tom finds himself deeply and desper...

Through fairy tales, childhood friends and old lovers, a story of treachery, tragedy and shame unfolds. Can Anita and Beth overcome the legacy of the past, or will they stay trapped in their roles as children of 'Bernard and the Cloth Monkey'?

On a hot day in 1960s Maine, six-year-old Joe watches his little sister Ruthie, sitting on her favourite rock at the edge of the blueberry fields, while their family, Mi'kmaq people from Nova Scotia, pick fruit. That afternoon, Ruthie vanishes without a trace. As the last person to see her, Joe w...

Fourteen-year-old Maryam and Zahra have always been the best of friends, despite their different backgrounds. Maryam takes for granted that she will stay in Karachi and inherit the family business; while Zahra keeps her desires secret, and dreams of escaping abroad. This year, 1988, anything seem...

Fourteen-year-old Maryam and Zahra have always been the best of friends, despite their different backgrounds. Maryam takes for granted that she will stay in Karachi and inherit the family business; while Zahra keeps her desires secret, and dreams of escaping abroad. This year, 1988, anything seem...

Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty and violence - both from outside the family and also, devastatingly, from within. When her family's darkest secrets are brought to light, Betty has no ch...

Serial monogamist Fran has waited years for her chance to be single, and now's her time to shine. She wants to date as much as she can. She's got Big Date Energy. But her Mum has other ideas. She's desperate for Fran to find real love and nominates her for a new TV dating show, The Meet-Cute, whi...

Zara is planning her wedding. She loves her fiance Dan, but the pressure is huge: a marriage to a British-Asian from a good family has been her mother's dream for Zara since she was six. In desperation, Zara turns to her granny, who is planning her own Big Day: her funeral. Granny's snobbish frie...

Emmett Farmer is working in the fields when a letter arrives summoning him to begin an apprenticeship. He will work for a Bookbinder, a vocation that arouses fear, superstition, and prejudice - but one neither he nor his parents can afford to refuse. He will learn to hand-craft beautiful volumes,...

When X - an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarizing shape-shifter - dies suddenly, her widow, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognised as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, ...