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21 17 y separately published work icon The Salamander Morris West , London : Heinemann , 1973 Z529698 1973 single work novel

'An Italian general is found dead in his apartment Next to his body is a small card inscribed with a salamander in a bed of flames. Is it suicide or murder?

Dante Matucci, a captain in the Italian secret service, begins an investigation that leads him into a maze of political violence and intrigue. He meets the general's former mistress, Lili Anders, and embarks on a dangerous affair with the beautiful one-time spy. Soon he is drawn into the net of the great Salamander himself, millionaire industrialist Bruno Manzini, who is pitting his wits against the elaborate machinery threatening Italy's government.

'In a game of high stakes, how much is Matucci prepared to pay to survive?'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Allen & Unwin, 2017)
1 y separately published work icon Ladies of Missalonghi; Tim Colleen McCullough , London : Book Club Associates , 1987 Z1305194 1987 selected work novel
4 y separately published work icon Oriental Hotel Janet Tanner , London : Century , 1984 Z1531205 1984 single work novel historical fiction romance
16 y separately published work icon Proteus Morris West , London : Collins , 1979 Z1407023 1979 single work novel

'Big John Spada is a self-made millionaire. From his headquarters in New York, he directs enterprises around the world with military precision. Privately, Spada also funds Proteus, a clandestine movement that works to free political prisoners and combat tyrants wherever they may be.

'Then news arrives from Argentina that the Buenos Aires secret police have arrested Spada's daughter Teresa, a doctor, after she performed emergency surgery on a man with gunshot wounds. They then take her husband Rodolfo whose outspoken editorials have angered the country's fascist government.

'A scheme is hatched by Proteus to rescue them, but soon the enemies of Proteus begin to target Spada himself.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Allen & Unwin, 2017).
35 49 y separately published work icon The Thorn Birds Colleen McCullough , New York (City) Sydney : Harper and Row , 1977 Z95593 1977 single work novel

The Thorn Birds is the unforgettable story of the Clearys, spanning three generations; a sweeping family saga of dreams, titanic struggles, dark passions, and forbidden love in the Australian Outback. (Source: Trove)
7 y separately published work icon The Finalists Russell Braddon , London : Michael Joseph , 1977 Z813920 1977 single work novel
8 y separately published work icon High Road to China : A Novel Jon Cleary , London : Collins , 1977 Z807287 1977 single work novel
7 66 y separately published work icon The Middle Parts of Fortune : Somme and Ancre, 1916 Frederic Manning , London : Piazza Press , 1929 Z572961 1929 single work novel war literature

'The drumming of the guns continued, with bursts of great intensity. It was as though a gale streamed overhead, piling up great waves of sound, and hurrying them onwards to crash in surf on the enemy entrenchments. The windless air about them, by its very stillness, made that unearthly music more terrible to hear.

'First published anonymously in 1929 because its language was considered far too frank for public circulation, The Middle Parts of Fortune was hailed by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, by Lawrence of Arabia and Ernest Hemingway, as an extraordinary novel. Its author was in fact Frederic Manning, an Australian writer who fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and who told his story of men at war from the perspective of an ordinary soldier.' (Publication summary : Text Classics)
5 25 y separately published work icon Season in Purgatory Thomas Keneally , London Sydney : Collins , 1976 Z558722 1976 single work novel 'The Island of Mus lies in the Adriatic off the coast of Yugoslavia. There Tito's partisans maintained a precarious base while the Germans ruled over almost all the country; there David Pelham, a young surgeon, was sent to minister to the Yugoslav wounded evacuated from the ferocious fighting on the mainland; there Moja Javich came to help him as a nurse, orderly, aide-de-camp, provider of material resources and spiritual solace; there they made love. Through the searing heat of summer and the winter cold; through the dirt, the smells, the omnipresent flies; through the apathy of idleness and the awful carnage of battle, their love kept them sane and transcended all the horrors of day-to-day existence. Mus for Pelham was to become "the place of youth, the place of blood-sacrifice and wine, of love and the smell of gangrene. Above all of near madness". Their love itself was near madness. And in the end they all went away and Mus returned to its primordial calm.' (Source: dustjacket, 1976 Collins edition)
15 1 y separately published work icon The Navigator Morris West , London : Collins , 1976 Z529900 1976 single work novel

'Son of a Norwegian master-mariner and grandson of Kaloni, the last of the great Polynesian navigators, Gunnar Thorkild is a man consumed by a dream. Convinced that the Polynesians' legendary Island of the Dead is real, he risks his career, his life—and those of his fellow adventurers—to find it.

'Shipwrecked on the very island they seek, the castaways are forced to leave behind everything they know and rely upon. To survive in this lush tropical paradise, they must make new laws of power and property, of sex and marriage.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Allen & Unwin, 2017).
1 y separately published work icon The October Horse Pauline Marrington , Sydney : Hodder and Stoughton , 1975 Z1246674 1975 single work novel
2 103 y separately published work icon Poor Fellow My Country Xavier Herbert , Sydney : Fontana , 1975 Z354809 1975 single work novel
6 1 y separately published work icon Peter's Pence : A Novel Jon Cleary , London : Collins , 1974 Z276436 1974 single work novel crime
2 26 y separately published work icon Blood Red, Sister Rose Thomas Keneally , London Sydney : Collins , 1974 Z559163 1974 single work novel historical fiction 'Blood Red, Sister Rose is the story of Joan of Arc - Jehannette - a story that has often been told but perhaps never with such immediacy and drama. It is based upon much study of the hard facts of history: dates, places, births, battles, violent deaths. But in the interpretation that bridges these facts we see a Joan we have never met before: a tough radical, an instinctive soldier in the manner of Lawrence of Arabia, a nagging prophet, a vulnerable girl...Thomas Keneally has captured with astonishing vividness the taste, the smell, the texture of the fifteenth century.' (Source: dustjacket, 1974 Collins edition)
15 3 y separately published work icon Harlequin : A Novel Morris West , London : Collins , 1974 Z529800 1974 single work novel

'Paul Desmond admires his close friend George Harlequin for his impeccable European breeding. Head of a prestigious Swiss bank, Harlequin belongs to a vanishing class of gentlemen whose handshake is their bond.

'Then their gilded world is blown apart. A computer printout identifies the Harlequin et Cie bank as the target of a gigantic takeover. The mastermind is Basil Yanko, a ruthless financial genius whose instruments are fraud, blackmail and terror.

'As the conflict moves from Zurich to London, New York and Mexico, Harlequin must become a 'villain by necessity'. Can Desmond help his friend save his bank—and his family?'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Allen & Unwin, 2017).
19 184 y separately published work icon The Tree of Man Patrick White , New York (City) : Viking , 1955 Z470597 1955 single work novel (taught in 6 units)

'Stan Parker, with only a horse and a dog for company journeys to a remote patch of land he has inherited in the Australian hills. Once the land is cleared and a rudimentary house built, he brings his wife Amy to the wilderness. Together they face lives of joy and sorrow as they struggle against the environment.' (Publication summary)
7 142 y separately published work icon The Vivisector Patrick White , London : Jonathan Cape , 1970 Z480331 1970 single work novel "Hurtle Duffield, a painter, is incapable of loving anything except what he paints. The men and women who court him during his long life are, above all, the victims of his art. He is the vivisector, dissecting their weaknesses with cruel precision: his sister's deformity, a grocer's moonlight indiscretion, and the passionate illusions of his mistress Hero Pavloussi.

It is only when Hurtle meets an egocentric adolescent whom he sees as his spiritual child does he experience a deeper, more treacherous emotion in this tour de force of sexual and psychological menace that sheds brutally honest light on the creative experience."

Source: Penguin Books Australia.
15 156 y separately published work icon The Eye of the Storm Patrick White , London : Jonathan Cape , 1973 Z463974 1973 single work novel (taught in 7 units)

"Elizabeth Hunter, an ex-socialite in her eighties, has a mystical experience during a summer storm in Sydney which transforms all her relationships: her existence becomes charged with a meaning which communicates itself to those around her. From this simple scenario Patrick White unfurls a monumental exploration of the tides of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, impotence and and longing that fester within family relationships."

Source: Penguin Books Australia.
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