Ligature: 45 books

Everyone recognises the famous physicist with the wild, white hair. But what sort of person was the young Albert Einstein, before he became universally acclaimed as the archetypal genius? And how did his genius unfold? In this compact, brilliant work, scientist Robyn Arianrhod blends biography...

Dorothy Porter’s fourth verse novel follows the orbits of an astronomer, an astrobiologist and a dying scholar as they move around each other in an unstable conjunction. Alex is searching for signs of life—in polar ice cores, in volcanic chimneys on the sea floor, on the moons of Jupiter,...

Dorothy Porter’s sixth poetry collection (1997–2001) travels the solar system for comets, distant moons and other heavenly bodies before returning to South America and the Northern Territory and finishing with a selection of commissioned works—including one for the 2000 Sydney Olympics and one...

Dorothy Porter's fourth poetry collection is an exhilarating ride through passions found, imagined and richly lived. From a modern, petrol-headed Carmen and Don José to pairs of polar explorers and silent twins, an intersection of birds and asylums, reflections on vanished love and new desire,...

Dorothy Porter’s third verse novel deepens her work on Akhenaten and the groundbreaking The Monkey’s Mask with a dark story of sex, death and psychology set in and around Sydney’s iconic asylum Callan Park. It’s 1968, and the sexual revolution, Freudian psychoanalysis and electroshock...

Fortinbrasse is the tragedy of Hamlet’s mirror and foil, the Prince of Norway. It builds on the handful of references Shakespeare gives us in Hamlet with further details from his sources together with my own speculation about the circumstances that eventually lead to Fortinbrasse’s bittersweet...

While British soldiers and settlers colonised Australia, French scientists continued to explore its coastlines and study its strange flora and fauna.  Lapérouse and Labillardière, Baudin and Bougainville and others left their own, lighter marks on the country in the name of human knowledge. This...

Solstice is a novel in verse set over the twenty-four hours of the longest day of the year, in Adelaide, South Australia. It is a story of love and exploration told in sonnet form, one verse for each few minutes of the day. It shows how much can change in a day — the whole world, and at the same...

Foxspell is a fable of shape-shifters and animal spirits, of teenage gangs and schoolyard friends and finding your place in the world—or worlds—all concentrated in a dense, vivid corner of the half-wild Adelaide hills. A Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers,...

Before The Hunger Games—even before Battle Royale—there was the Galax-Arena, where children are pitted against each other for the benefit of a shadowy audience that feeds on their fear. A Children's Book Council of Australia Honour Book for Older Readers, Galax-Arena is a dark, uncompromising...

Death of the Author is a serial killer thriller with a literary twist. In the 1990s, the genre of serial killer fiction is emerging into a serious literary occupation. The world's pulpiest authors converge on a sleepy southern city once described by Salman Rushdie as "the ideal setting...

Solstice is a novel in verse set over the twenty-four hours of the longest day of the year, in Adelaide, South Australia. It is a story of love and exploration told in sonnet form, one verse for each few minutes of the day. It follows five characters as their paths cross, tangle and separate:...

A challenging, mesmerising young adult novel that brings role-playing dice games, the nuclear nightmare, a phantom graffiti artist and a curious alien anthropologist together in a remote beachside town. A Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers, Beyond the Labyrinth...

‘On the screen the spaceman continued to zap the space demons, twisting, turning and firing, but the chair where he had sat was empty, and the joystick did not move...’ Andrew has never seen a computer game like Space Demons before—a mysterious experiment, captivating in every way, blurring...