Transit Lounge: 71 books

In 1896 Louis and his father, seduced by the allure of North Africa, travel to Algeria in search of a better life. There, Louis befriends Imez, a Berber boy, and the two become firm friends. They grow and prosper, and become like brothers.Years later, Nicolette, an Australian photojournalist, is drawn...

As deviously weighty as a good pop song. - Anson Cameron, author of Stealing Picasso, Nice Shootin, Cowboy and Silences Long Gone. In these sixteen tales, Robert Power captures the joys and frailties of seemingly ordinary lives with extraordinary perception and wit. The stories take us from a Manhattan...

This is the joyful yet heartbreaking true story of four friends who walk a 21- day pilgrimage from the sea to the source of Melbournes Yarra River. There is no path for most of the way, but offers of campsites and boats, and free access to private lands, illustrates the generosity shown to pilgrims even...

In the spirit of Patti Smith’s M Train, Road Series is both love story and elegy. Renowned musician Hugo Race’s evocations of Melbourne, Sydney, the USA, Europe and Mali, and the life of a rock musician on the road are revealing, incisive and exquisitely written.‘A cerebral “road-poem” of...

Prepare to be swept away by a story that is intimate, true, and utterly compelling. Margi Gibb’s much-loved father dies and, with her immediate family largely gone, her life is changed irrevocably. Immersing herself more deeply in art and music, she travels to America to study the sacred art of...

Arriving late in Kyoto Patrick Holland cannot find a room for the night. Homeless and disorientated and in a place where loitering is not encouraged his only solution is to ride the trains. The train journey is the starting point for a book that also describes travels through Vietnam, mountains in the...

One of the most exciting narrative histories to come out of India.' William DalrympleIt was a scandal that rocked the highest echelons of the British Raj. In 1891, a notorious jeweller and curio dealer from Simla offered to sell the world’s largest brilliant-cut diamond to the fabulously wealthy...

Journalist Dominic Dunnes travels have rarely been ordinary, despite his best intentions. He has been travelling all his life, from the time his parents started their annual pilgrimage to the opal fields of Lightning Ridge. Since then he has trekked all over Australia and to some 60 countries, spending...

Michele Lee describes herself as the fence-sitting middle child in a large Hmong-Australian family. Banana Girl is the explosive and poignant memoir of her rites of passage. Sexy, irreverent and nuanced, Lee isnt afraid to lay herself and her relationships bare. Intimacy in an on-line world, sexual...

From Las Vegas to Melbourne, from Europe to a doomed airplane in mid-flight, from a seedy motel to the local bookstore, the true setting of these stories is the human heart. A son spends the day at work having left his father dying on the kitchen floor, a woman finds herself unexpectedly alone in...

Eleven stories. Each like a matchstick struck to illuminate the darkness. Evocations of place ranging from a Bangla jungle to the deep, blue Danube to a winter beach in Melbourne excite and seduce. But what truly draws the reader in are the unexpected landscapes of people's lives, explored with rare...

The darkest little room in the world is the human heart, she said at last. Even yours, perhaps, has black secrets that you would never let into the light.Patricks Hollands haunting new novel arises from his experiences in Indochina. An atmospheric literary thriller, it tells the story of Joseph, an Australian...

‘Insightful, sensitively written and compelling.’ Libby Lester, Head of Journalism, Media and Communications, University of Tasmania‘An unflinching dissection of the relationships between journalists and their subjects a compelling exposé of journalistic culture.’ John Dale, author of HucksteppSonya...

Anonymous, the keeper of the diary, deputy director of a publishing company in a nameless city in China, is a happily married man with a daughter until he succumbs fully to his sexual desires, forever searching for new erotic experiences and secret liaisons. Anonymous is able to hoard a fortune, by embezzlement...