Montebello
Montebello continues where Robert Drewe's much-loved memoir The Shark Net left off, taking us into his mature years. In the aftermath of events, both man-made and natural, that have left a permanent mark on the landscape and psyche of Western Australia – the British nuclear tests in the Montebello Islands, the mining boom, and shark attacks along the coast – Drewe examines how comfortable and familiar terrain can quickly become a site of danger, and how regeneration and renewal can emerge from chaos and loss. With humility, wit and a clear-eyed view of himself, he intertwines these stories with the events of his own life. His passion for islands – which began with Rottnest Island in his youth and continues to this day – frames the narrative; in the near-solitude of these remote places, he is free to reflect. This is a moving story of what it means to see and survive destruction, to love and to grow old.
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Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
The Shark Net
Aged six, Robert Drewe moved with his family from Melbourne to Perth, the world's most isolated city – and proud of it. This sun-baked coast was innocently proud, too, of its tranquillity and friendliness.Then a man he knew murdered a boy he also knew. The murderer randomly killed eight strangers – variously shooting, strangling, stabbing, bludgeoning and hacking his victims and running them down with cars – an innocent Perth was changed forever.
In the middle-class suburbs which were the killer's main stalking grounds, the mysterious murders created widespread anxiety and instant local myth. 'The murders and their aftermath have both intrigued me and weighed heavily on me for three decades. To try to make sense of this time and place, and of my own childhood and adolescence, I had, finally, to write about it.'
The result is The Shark Net, a vibrant and haunting memoir that reaches beyond the dark recesses of murder and chaos to encompass their ordinary suburban backdrop.
The Shark Net was adapted for ABC and BBC television.
Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
In the middle-class suburbs which were the killer's main stalking grounds, the mysterious murders created widespread anxiety and instant local myth. 'The murders and their aftermath have both intrigued me and weighed heavily on me for three decades. To try to make sense of this time and place, and of my own childhood and adolescence, I had, finally, to write about it.'
The result is The Shark Net, a vibrant and haunting memoir that reaches beyond the dark recesses of murder and chaos to encompass their ordinary suburban backdrop.
The Shark Net was adapted for ABC and BBC television.
Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
A Cry in the Jungle Bar
Big, bullish Dick Cullen, light sleeper, former rugby star and present expert on water buffalo, is lumbering through his tour of duty with a UN agency in Asia. Totally out of his depth among his small, deft, knowing colleagues, he lurches sweatily from bar to bar across various tropical states of emergency. Only in the Nameless Nightclub does he realise it is just a matter of time before his nightmares become reality . . .
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Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
Fortune
A tale of passion and pursuit, Fortune is the story of Don Spargo, a modern explorer who finds a sunken treasure ship off the West Australian coast and becomes a folk hero, a lover, and a hunted and haunted man. Suspenseful, satirical and deeply moving, this novel challenges the nature of reality and legend in those scenes of modern conflict – from the media to art, from politics to crime – that have obsessed the Western individual since World War II.
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Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
Grace
Some relevant facts about Grace Malloy. Apart from being named after a 100 000-year-old skeleton, she was twenty-nine and for much of the past three years she'd been hiding from an erotomaniac.Physically and emotionally besieged, Grace attempts to claw back from her personal territory by abandoning her inner-city life as a film reviewer and fleeing to the remoteness of the Kimberley – where existence and territory have altogether wider implications. Lying low, working in a wildlife park, she slowly reclaims her sanity. Her only links to the outside world are her father and her stalker.
Intricately plotted, breathlessly paced, Grace reflects on the countless varieties of love and the nature of fear. At once intimate and grand in scale, this disquieting and provocatively witty novel reveals the full vigour of an artistic vision in turn poetic and cinematic.
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Intricately plotted, breathlessly paced, Grace reflects on the countless varieties of love and the nature of fear. At once intimate and grand in scale, this disquieting and provocatively witty novel reveals the full vigour of an artistic vision in turn poetic and cinematic.
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Our Sunshine
Our Sunshine is the tale of a man whose story outgrew his life. Robert Drewe's strikingly imaginative re-creation of the inner life of Ned Kelly is written with a brilliant clarity and impressionistic economy. It carries the reader into a dreamworld of astonishing and violent revelation, an entrancing and frightening landscape of murder, sexuality, persecution, robbery, vanity, politics, and corruption.
Our Sunshine was made into the international film Ned Kelly, starring Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom, Naomi Watts, Geoffrey Rush and Rachel Griffiths.
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Our Sunshine was made into the international film Ned Kelly, starring Heath Ledger, Orlando Bloom, Naomi Watts, Geoffrey Rush and Rachel Griffiths.
Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
The Savage Crows
This revelatory story of the most tragic, cruel, brave and misguided episode in Australia's history – the 'saving' of a unique race, the Tasmanian Aborigines – is seen through the eyes of an obsessive young present-day narrator. Breathtaking and visionary in its scope, The Savage Crows breaks new fictional ground in its affecting portrayal of the collision of worlds, generations and mythologies. From suburban apathy and cynicism blossoms a wild, foolhardy and beautiful hinterland of time and space.
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Buy a hard copy here.
The Bay of Contented Men
Witty and seductive, inventive and disturbing, The Bay of Contented Men ranges in location from east to west coast Australia, to the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. This is the neighbourhood of edgy suburbanite Australians whose desires and misadventures are conjured here into intriguing fictions. Robert Drewe's characters face the confrontation of gender, race and generation with an ironic desperation born of love, lust and wistful memory.
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Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
The Bodysurfers
'These stories breathe. Taut yet teeming with life, they are shot through with gritty phrases that catch at one's throat.' - Sydney Morning Herald
Set among the surf and sandhills of the Australian beach - and the tidal changes of three generations of the Lang family - this bestselling collection of short stories is an Australian classic. The Bodysurfers vividly evokes the beach, with the scent of the suntan oil, the sting of the sun and a lazy sensuality, all the while hinting at a deep undercurrent of suburban malaise.
From first publication, these poignant and seductive stories marked a major change in Australian literature.
The Bodysurfers was adapted for ABC and BBC television.
Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
Set among the surf and sandhills of the Australian beach - and the tidal changes of three generations of the Lang family - this bestselling collection of short stories is an Australian classic. The Bodysurfers vividly evokes the beach, with the scent of the suntan oil, the sting of the sun and a lazy sensuality, all the while hinting at a deep undercurrent of suburban malaise.
From first publication, these poignant and seductive stories marked a major change in Australian literature.
The Bodysurfers was adapted for ABC and BBC television.
Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
The Drowner
In the warm alkaline waters of the public bath a headstrong young engineer accidentally collides with a beautiful actress. From this innocent collision of flesh begins a passion that takes them from the Wiltshire Downs to the most elemental choices of life and death in the Australian desert. Their intense romance is but part of the daring story that unfolds.
Mingling history, myth and technology with a modern cinematic and poetic imagination, Robert Drewe presents a fable of European ambitions in an alien landscape, and a magnificently sustained metaphor of water as the life-and-death force.
The Drowner is currently being adapted for film and is now in pre-production stage.
Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
Mingling history, myth and technology with a modern cinematic and poetic imagination, Robert Drewe presents a fable of European ambitions in an alien landscape, and a magnificently sustained metaphor of water as the life-and-death force.
The Drowner is currently being adapted for film and is now in pre-production stage.
Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
The Penguin Book of the Beach
The average Australian has conducted a lifelong love affair with the beach and the ocean shores, bays, dunes, lagoons and rivers of the coast. Until now, however, no one has attempted to match the ancient sensual and artistic preoccupation with the sea to the intuitive appreciation of the coast felt by modern beachgoers.
In this illustrious international selection, Robert Drewe has drawn together twenty-five of the finest contemporary writers whose stories represent the most stimulating, startling, humorous and deeply moving writing about the beach.
Buy a hard copy here.
In this illustrious international selection, Robert Drewe has drawn together twenty-five of the finest contemporary writers whose stories represent the most stimulating, startling, humorous and deeply moving writing about the beach.
Buy a hard copy here.
The Penguin Book of the City
Paris, Los Angeles, Sydney, Tokyo, New York... the city is synonymous with excitement, energy, modernity and glamour. Yet it can also be a place of vice, fear and alienation. The short stories in this outstanding international collection, selected by Robert Drewe, are as diverse and exhilarating as the cities they describe. From the dazzling neons of Tokyo to the literati of London, from the ghettoes of New York to the market stalls of Bombay, urban life is here in all its variety. These daring, darkly humorous stories reflect both the dangers and delights of life in the metropolis.
The Rip
Internationally acclaimed novelist Robert Drewe returns to the short-story territory he has made his own. Set against the backdrop of the Australian coast, as randomly and imminently violent as it is beautiful, The Rip reveals the fragility of relationships between husbands and wives, children and parents, friends and lovers.
You will find yourself set down in a modern Garden of Eden with a disgraced Adam seeking his Eve; sharing the fears of a small boy in a coastal classroom as a tsunami approaches; in an English gaol cell with an Australian surfer on drug charges; and witnessing a middle-ages farmer contemplating murdering the hippie who stole his wife.
Written in a variety of moods, always compassionate, wry and razor sharp, these dazzling stories are crafted by Drewe's incisive wit and passion.
'You will read the powerful short stories in this collection with your heart in your mouth. They are the stories of a writer at the top of his form, and they will attach themselves to you.'
Carmel Bird, THE AGE
'Thirteen exquisitely focused tales, all dealt with through a rich yet limpid literary chemistry, by what might be called a sumptuous minimalism.'
WEST AUSTRALIAN
Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
You will find yourself set down in a modern Garden of Eden with a disgraced Adam seeking his Eve; sharing the fears of a small boy in a coastal classroom as a tsunami approaches; in an English gaol cell with an Australian surfer on drug charges; and witnessing a middle-ages farmer contemplating murdering the hippie who stole his wife.
Written in a variety of moods, always compassionate, wry and razor sharp, these dazzling stories are crafted by Drewe's incisive wit and passion.
'You will read the powerful short stories in this collection with your heart in your mouth. They are the stories of a writer at the top of his form, and they will attach themselves to you.'
Carmel Bird, THE AGE
'Thirteen exquisitely focused tales, all dealt with through a rich yet limpid literary chemistry, by what might be called a sumptuous minimalism.'
WEST AUSTRALIAN
Buy an eBook here.
Buy a hard copy here.
Walking Ella
"It occurs to me that it might be cathartic to write a dog-walker's journal: the true, unsentimental ruminations of a dog-walker with things on his mind more important than dogs. A dog-walker who, frankly, prefers humans. A dog-walker who decides to make the most of this begrudged walk to mull over writing ideas and dilemmas. A prickly, grumpy, even sometimes hungover dog-walker." Robert Drewe.
Buy an eBook here.
Buy an eBook here.
Perth
In this lavishly produced book the images of award winning photographer Francis Andrijich, the essay from Robert Drewe, author of the best-selling memoir The Shark Net and the impressionistic writing of Jeff Bell combine to create a stunning homage to the uniqueness of the city of Perth. From the broad golden beaches and the brilliant sunsets over the sea to the colourful yachts and silver waters of the Swan River; from the wonderful panoramas of Kings Park to the majestic jarrah forests and wildflowers of the Darling Scarp; from the vibrant cafe strips of Fremantle and Northbridge to the passionate football crowds at Subiaco; from the beautiful performances of the Western Australian Ballet to the magical theatre of Barking Gecko, Frances's images capture the essence that makes Perth such a wonderful city to visit and to live in.
Published by Fremantle Press.
Buy a hard copy here.
Published by Fremantle Press.
Buy a hard copy here.
