The Text Publishing Company: 414 books

Shanghai, 1927: hot, teeming, mysterious. Kenneth Ayres, a disciple of Freud, is an anonymous expatriate treating the lonely wives and daughters of British colonials. When Julia Paradise, the wife of an Australian missionary, is sent to him for psychoanalysis, he is seduced into her world, a kaleidoscope...

He thought of his dream, of how he had looked up out of his hole, his pit, his wolf-pit, and seen the foreign leaves, which had formed themselves into a face… Laid low by a tropical disease and an accompanying malaise, Crispin Clare returns to his ancestral home in East Anglia. Local folklore...

The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke, a comic verse novel, was first published in book form in 1915 and sold more than sixty thousand copies in nine editions within a year. By the mid-1970s nearly three hundred thousand copies had been sold internationally. One of the most famous works of Australian...

A cult hit later made into a film starring John Clarke, Sam Neill and Zoe Carides, Death in Brunswick is a classic Australian comedy. Down on his luck and hard up for cash, Carl works in the kitchen of a seedy rock 'n' roll joint in ethnically diverse Brunswick. The bouncers and bosses terrify...

Our minds are like those maps at the entrance to the Metro stations in Paris. They are full of unilluminated directions. But when we know where we want to go and press the right button, the route is illuminated before us in electric clarity. Diana von Flugel warned her husband: a piece of toast...

I want to die. I do not want to be mad...It is like my body is a house, and some visitor has come, and attacked the person who lived there. After an Australian patrol officer commits suicide on a remote New Guinea island in 1959, five witnesses are called to a government inquiry. Each has a...

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award, 1987. Lark Watter had always planned to run away from her stifling suburban life in 1960s Sydney. At university she encounters an American, Tom, and with him the promise of escape. Following Tom to the other side of the world by freighter is a journey to...

Amy Witting was a master of the short story, the genre in which she felt ‘most at home’. Her subjects—childhood and school, marriage and loneliness, the cruelty of men and women—are rendered in a crisp, understated style, at once compassionate and unsentimental. This new selection of twenty...

A passionate and controversial novel, set in turn-of-the-century Europe. Henry Handel Richardson's debut, published in London in 1908, is set in the music scene of Leipzig, a cosmopolitan centre for the arts drawing students from around the world. Among them is Maurice Guest, a young Englishman,...

Abandoned by her feckless husband during the Depression, Amy decides to leave her country town, and her three infant children, and try her luck in the big smoke. Life in wartime Sydney is far from easy, but for Amy there are the hard-won satisfactions of an office job and a house of her own....

A group of Jewish refugees are thrown together on board a dilapidated freighter charting a course for Australia. Fleeing terrible scenes of destruction in Europe, they are bound by a deep sense of loss and the uncertainty of their fate. As the ship lists, inner conflicts burst to the surface...

Lillipilly Hill is a delightful coming-of-age story that is all at once sweet and adventurous, sensitive and exciting. Lillipilly Hill is the story of Harriet Wilmot and her family, who have come to live in an inherited house in the New South Wales town of Barley Creek at the end of the nineteenth...

It has never been my way to say much about my private life. Rightly or wrongly, I believed this only concerned myself. And I trusted to my husband to supply, on my death, any further information that might be asked for. Now that he is gone, however, there is no one to take his place, and so I propose...

The Chantic Bird is the confession of a teenage anarchist, who combines a contempt for contemporary society with a great tenderness and warmth for his younger siblings and for Bee, the girl who looks after them. The first of David Ireland's masterful novels, The Chantic Bird contains the same...