Knowing what you want is hard. Accepting what is possible is harder still ...It is the mid-1980s. In Australia, stay-at-home wives jostle with want-it-all feminists, while AIDS threatens the sexual freedom of everyone. On the other side of the world, the Soviet bloc is in turmoil.Mikhail Gorbachev has been in power for a year when twenty-four-year-old book illustrator Galina Kogan leaves Leningrad — forbidden ever to return. As a Jew, she's inherited several generations worth of Russia's chronic anti-Semitism. As a Soviet citizen, she is unprepared for Australia and its easy-going ways.Once settled in Melbourne, Galina is befriended by Sylvie and Leonard Morrow, and their adult son, Andrew. The Morrow marriage of thirty years balances on secrets. Leonard is a man with conflicted desires and passions, while Sylvie chafes against the confines of domestic life. Their son, Andrew, a successful mosaicist, is a deeply shy man. He is content...

Gracious Living plunges into the excesses of the 1980s. Adrian Dadswell, an entrepreneur, is the owner of a holiday resort that boasts everything from an indoor golf range to a fake rain forest. Adrian has a former wife and a disabled daughter who, together with their friends, live very differently from Adrian and his white-shoe brigade. It is these women—young and old, married and single, lesbians and mothers—who come to dominate the novel. The book explores the value of diversity, while at the same time presenting a harshly witty examination of materialism.

A rich and epic novel of two families spanning the turbulence of the twentieth century over three continents. Alice Lewin, the sole survivor of her family from World War II in Germany, makes a journey across the world to find the thief and his unimaginable theft. Shortlisted for the 2003 Miles Franklin Literary Award.There are thieves who prosper. But are there thefts which can never be forgiven?The Prosperous Thief covers the turbulent sweep of the twentieth century. Rich in ideas and emotions, it is an epic story of the entwined lives of two vastly different families spanning three continents.Alice Lewin survived the war as a young child. After decades of burying her past she decides to visit the Kindertransport archive, where she learns of the existence of a possible relative, Henry Lewin. She travels to Australia to hear his story, but it's a story that she's in no way prepared to hear.The truth has profound ramifications and both Alice's son, Raphe, and Henry's daughter, Laura, struggle to deal with their connected lives. But just as the thefts of the Second World War define their past, so deception threatens their future.From the horrors of war to the fiery landscape of one of the world's most active volcanoes, this compelling novel generates its own unsettling shadows. a twisting, turning, tantalisingly open-ended moral and romantic thriller' Advertiser, Katharine England With the sensuous pace of a poet, she unravels an epic tale of two families, spanning the world of pre-war Berlin to late-20th century Melbourne, and counting the cost of the horror from both sides of the moral fence. It is a rare novel; endowed with intelligence and beauty.' Canberra Times, Ian McFarlane this is a novel that seeks to provoke questions rather than provide answers; a novel about theft and appropriation in myriad disguises as much as it is an attempt to understand the Holocaust's dark shadow.' The Courier-Mail, Bron Sibree

Five brilliant and ambitious friends. Where has life taken them twenty years on? Five brilliant and ambitious friends. Where has life taken them 20 years on? Old friendships are expected to maintain their shape despite distance, lovers, careers, new friends. But 20 years is a long time. Ava is an internationally acclaimed novelist who carries with her a lifetime of secrets. Helen, a brilliant and dedicated molecular biologist, is faced with unexpected moral dilemmas as she finds herself drawn into bioterrorism research. Conrad is a philosopher with a popular media profile and a desire for a much younger woman. And Jack, whose career has stalled in the light of his long unrequited love for Ava, is a scholar of the history and culture of Islam. It is Ava's husband, Harry, a man for whom the others can barely conceal their disdain, who has drawn them back to Melbourne where they first met at university. As they deal with the reality of their present lives and their memories of the...

A novel about memory, music, friendship, family rifts and reconciliation, this is an intelligent, compelling read set in Melbourne.Nina Jameson, an international consultant on memorial projects based in London, has been happily married to Daniel for twelve years. When her her life falls apart she accepts a job in her hometown of Melbourne. There she joins her sister, Zoe, embroiled in her own problems with Elliot, an American biographer of literary women. And she finds herself caught up in age-old conflicts of two friends from her past: the celebrated pianist Ramsay Blake and his younger brother, Sean.All these people have been treading thin ice for far too long. Nina arrives home to find work, loves and entrenched obsessions under threat.A rich and compelling story of marriage, music, the illusions of love and the deceits of memory, THE MEMORY TRAP's characters are real, flawed and touchingly human.