Ligature: 45 books

A sniper on the rooftops of Beirut. A fisherman of bodies in the Yellow River. A medieval geographer waiting for the Mongol invaders. A long-haul flight with a masked stranger and a tormentor from the past. A woman searching for her lover through a war zone. Abbas El-Zein’s new collection of stories...

Leave to Remain is Abbas El-Zein's award-winning memoir of his youth in Lebanon and his years of travel between the Arab and Western worlds. It is powerful and poetic, passionate and elegiac, a clear-eyed and heartfelt examination of the forces that have shaped both his own life and a great deal of...

Beirut. One Sunday in 1975: the day war took the city by surprise. Seven o’clock in the morning. Three teenagers gazed in silence at the world around them. Kareem Kader leads two lives – studying music by day and getting high on drugs and the thrill of battle at night. Kareem is in love...

There are three ways to play a crime story. You can play it straight, making the most of the conventions of the genre. You can bend the conventions and the genre itself all the way around. Or you can take the genre deeper into the human mind and soul. These dozen stories play it every way there...

Two of Garry Disher’s seminal collections of fiction, collected together for the first time. If you love Garry’s literary fiction or crime fiction, his longer or shorter works—this collection has it all, and usually all at once. Flamingo Gate · Melbourne in the last decade of...

Tim Winton’s third play is a haunting exploration of the way in which we try to own our dead, and the way in which they come to own us. Night time. A siren howls by, a phone rings, there’s a knock at the door. Adam and Mary Mans eld are reliving the night they find themselves standing...

From the author of the international best-selling Tales of the Otori comes a new story about the seduction and peril of stories themselves: the power they hold over their tellers and listeners, and the way they can shape both the past and the future. Japan in the late 19th century is...

A concentration camp—on Australian soil. Men are separated from their families by barbed wire. They have committed no crimes; they try to explain to their children that they're not in prison. It feels like prison. They’re told it’s only temporary, there are processes in train. Nothing changes....

Melbourne in the last decade of the millennium feels like a hard-boiled fiction or a noir film, with corruption in the air and on the ground. Six short stories and a novella circle the city's decay, spiral towards a thrilling conclusion and fuse into a new kind of crime fiction. Vignettes...

Past the Headlands is a sweeping story of north-west Australia and south-east Asia at the beginning of the Pacific War in 1941. The fall of Malaya and Singapore and the bombing of Darwin—what looked like the invasion of Australia—ebb and crash over a man’s long search to find a home and...

Albert Einstein kept the portraits of three inspiring predecessors on his study wall: Sir Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday. This is the story of those three explorers in the fundamental language of mathematics.  Imagine you are fluent in a magical language of prophecy, a...

The epic alternative history from the Miles Franklin Award–winning author of The Hand that Signed the Paper reaches its stunning conclusion. 786 ab urbe condita—33 AD. Time is running out for Yeshua Ben Yusuf, on trial for capital crimes after rioting against the moneychangers in the temple. His...

From the best-selling author of The Hand that Signed the Paper, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, comes an epic work of speculative fiction. 784 *ab urbe condita*—31 AD. Jerusalem sits uneasily in a Roman Empire that has seen an industrial revolution and now has cable news and flying machines—and...

The follow-up to the international bestselling The Monkey’s Mask, Dorothy Porter’s Crete is an astonishing collection that traverses Greek myth and Russian poets, the memory of cigarettes and the wild abandon of love. Crete is a heady mix of dark humour, archaeology, breathtaking eroticism,...