This is not my story. It is the story of Frances Montrose, an Australian woman with no formal mathematics training who carried across the world, in a borrowed suitcase bulging with a friend's balldresses, something no one knew about the discovery of a new number.

In this masterly collection of stories, Elizabeth Jolley has created a splendid array of characters, all of whom fail to achieve the expected. Her stories are sometimes slyly comic, sometimes disturbing - but always they are written with a delicacy and compassion as moving as the characters themselves.

Mount Perfect Ranges, western Victoria, 1872. Henry Fanshaw has stumbled upon one of the largest nuggets ever found in the colony. But it isn't on his land and Fanshaw's troubles are only just beginning. The gold is stolen and Fanshaw, not able to approach the law, calls upon the services of John 'Black' Perry, a touring pugilist, sharpshooter and horseman, to track the thieves

Ellie and her friends leave home one quiet morning, wave goodbye to their parents, and head up into the hills to camp out for a while; seven teenagers filling in time during school holidays. The world is about to change forever. Their lives will never be the same again. Would you fight? Would you give up everything? Would you sacrifice even life itself?

With his PEA licence restored and strapped for cash, Cliff Hardy is reluctantly drawn into a scheme to claim the reward on a 17 year old abduction case. Hardy is distracted by a hot new lover, but when one of the schemers turns up dead, the case gets his full attention. Who paid the cops to suppress the ransom note and how come they're always one jump ahead of Hardy?

Francesca is at the beginning of her second term in Year Eleven at an all boys' school that has just started accepting girls. She still misses her old friends, and, to make things worse, her mother has had a breakdown and can barely move from her bed. But Francesca has not counted on the fierce loyalty of her new friends, or falling in love, or finding that it's within her power to bring her family back together.

David Malouf is one of the finest writers in contemporary literature. This volume offers a well balanced, compact selection of his intricately connected work. Short stories, poems, essays, interviews, and classic novel Johnno, reproduced in full, show the range of his remarkable achievement

This collection of stories finds Cliff Hardy in his usual milieu of inner Sydney mixing with the good, the bad and the quirky as he works on his cases.

When Oscar Bach's body was found crushed under rubble, his death was classified as another tragic statistic of the Newcastle earthquake. So how could he have been seen alive five minutes after the quake? Who would want this man dead? Oscar's quiet life was not all it appeared to be. He was a man with no apparent past. But something and someone has caught up with him now, and they are trying to stop Cliff Hardy finding the answers....

Carl Matt hasn't got much. There's just his younger brother Harley and the old red barge to Wiseman's Cove. And nothing's going to take those away from him. He's an awkward, lumpy fifteen year old. Not the hero type. Yet Carl has become one of the most memorable characters in Australian literature