The Text Publishing Company: 414 books

Written with unerring skill and insight, The Dyehouse is a masterly portrait of postwar Australia, when industrial work was radically transformed by new technologies and society changed with it. Mena Calthorpe—who herself worked in a textile factory—takes us inside this world, vividly bringing...

Patrick White's magnificent debut novel - first published 1939, long out of print and now a Text Classic. Based on Patrick White's own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South Wales, Happy Valley paints a portrait of a community in a...

‘Robin Dalton’s book is an excellent way to while away a summer’s afternoon in her company.’ Mail on Sunday UK At the age of ninety-five, Robin Dalton looks back on her life, particularly on her love life. Married at nineteen, disastrously, Robin has a lucky escape—her ‘Society...

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award 1963, this edition includes an introduction by Robyn Nevin. It's the Great Depression. Six-year-old PS is an orphan. He lives in Sydney with his Aunt Lila. But all that is about to change. Now his Aunt Vanessa has decided to take proper care of him. Careful,...

By the winner of the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, 2018. Since her sister died, Meg has been on her own. She doesn’t mind, not really—not with Atticus, her African grey parrot, to keep her company—but after her house is broken into by a knife-wielding intruder, she decides...

A funny, sad and serious memoir, How to Be Happy is David Burton’s story of his turbulent life at high school and beyond. Feeling out of place and convinced that he is not normal, David has a rocky start. He longs to have a girlfriend, but his first ‘date’ is a disaster. There’s the catastrophe...

Melbourne in winter. Rain. Wind. Pubs. Beer. Sex. Corruption. Murder. A phone message from ex-client Danny McKillop doesn’t ring any bells for Jack Irish. Life is hard enough without having to dredge up old problems: his beloved football team continues to lose, the odds on his latest plunge at the...

It’s late 1938. Thomas Heiselberg has built a career in Berlin as a market researcher for an American advertising company. In Leningrad, twenty-two-year-old Sasha Weissberg has grown up eavesdropping on the intellectual conversations in her parents’ literary salon. They each...

Foreword by Graeme Murphy. It is impossible to tell the story of dance in Australia without focusing on Dame Margaret Scott. The fiftieth anniversary of The Australian Ballet School is a fitting time to launch her biography - she was the first Director of the School and a dancer and teacher...

A lowly eighteenth-century ship’s boy provides an insightful perspective on cross-cultural misunderstandings and ‘first contact’ as he accompanies Bass and Flinders on an expedition by sea. Catherine McKinnon lives in rural New South Wales and is a novelist and playwright/director. 
She...

In this edited selection of his journals, Matthew Flinders, Australia's greatest navigator and the man who named our island continent, describes in captivating detail his epic mission to map our shores between 1796 and 1803. Edited and introduced by Tim Flannery, Terra Australis is a vital...

Winner of the Text Prize for Young Adult and Children's Writing, 2013. Shortlisted, The Children's Book Council of Australia Book of the Year for Older Readers, 2015. Tom survived a devastating flood that claimed the lives of her sister and parents. Now she lives with Bill in his old shed by...

Kat Kelly reckons she's got life sorted. She has a man who cooks and does the dishes. A stepdaughter she adores. And her dream job: scouting locations for a TV production company. All the big dramas are behind her, right? Before she knows it, Kat is out of love and has nowhere to live. Between...

Winner of the TEXT PRIZE FOR YOUNG ADULT AND CHILDREN'S WRITING Sadie is sixteen and bored with life in Perth. It's summer, and lazing on the beach in the stifling heat is a drag. Then something comes out of the sea. Dark menacing forms attack an old man, leaving him for dead and Sadie...