Fred Scully waits at the arrival gate of an international airport, anxious to see his wife and daughter. After two years in Europe, they are finally settling down. He sees a new life before them, a stable outlook again, a fresh start, a cottage in the Irish countryside that he's renovated by hand. He's waited, sweated on this reunion. He does not like to be alone—he's that kind of man.The flight lands, the doors at the airport hiss open...Scully's life falls apart.

Abel Jackson lives with his mother, Dora, at Longboat Bay, an isolated stretch of coast whose waters teem with fish. Theirs is a simple life. It’s tough. And at times it’s lonely. But Abel has friends in the sea, particularly the magnificent old groper he meets one day while diving for abalone. Abel learns that the sea and its treasures are precious. And as Longboat Bay is threatened by greedy developers and overfishing, Abel and his mum wonder how they can keep their homeplace safe.

Jerra and his best mate Sean set off in a beaten-up old VW to go camping on the coast. Jerra's friends and family want to know when he will finish university, when he will find a girl. But they don't understand about Sean's mother, Jewel, or the bush or the fish with the pearl. They think he needs a job, but what Jerra is searching for is more elusive. Only the sea, and perhaps the old man who lives in a shack beside it, can help.

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At 40, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Leached of all confidence, she spends her days in isolated tedium and her nights in a blur of vodka self-recrimination. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she sees a shadow drifting up the beach below - a loner called Luther Fox, with danger in his wake.

Tim Winton's first collection of stories deals with men, women and children whose lives are coming apart and whose hearts are breaking. These spare, jagged stories, in which people struggle with change and disintegration, are vintage Winton.

Jaxie dreads going home. His mum’s dead. The old man bashes him without mercy, and he wishes he was an orphan. And then, in one terrible moment, his life is stripped to little more than what he can carry and how he can keep himself alive. There’s just one person left in the world who understands him and what he still dares to hope for. But to reach her he’ll have to cross the vast saltlands on a trek that only a dreamer or a fugitive would attempt.

Two rural families flee to the city and find themselves sharing a great, breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives from scratch. For 20 years they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.

Night falls. In a lonely valley called the Sink, four people prepare for a quiet evening. Then in his orchard, Murray Jaccob sees a moving shadow. Across the swamp, his neighbour Ronnie watches her lover leave and feels her baby roll inside her. And on the veranda of the Stubbs place, a small dog is torn screaming from its leash by something unseen. And nothing will be quite the same again.

Ort knows the sky is watching. And he knows all about watching, because he spends half the night listening at doors and peering through cracks. Especially since his dad’s accident. Everything at home is falling apart. His father’s withering away, his sister is consumed by rage and fear, his grandmother is losing it entirely and his mother is brave but no longer coping. And then, out of nowhere, a stranger appears at their door. Has he come to rescue Ort and his family, or is he just another problem?

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the incident. In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the 21st century.

The film Rabbit-Proof Fence is based on this true account of Doris Pilkington's mother, Molly, who as a young girl led her two sisters on an extraordinary 1,600 kilometre walk home. Under Western Australia's invidious removal policy of the 1930s, the girls were taken from their Aboriginal families at Jigalong on the edge of the Little Sandy Desert, and transported halfway across the state to the Native Settlement at Moore River, north of Perth. Here Aboriginal children were instructed in the ways of white society and forbidden to speak their native tongue.

Lockie Leonard, hot surf-rat, is in love. The human torpedo is barely settled into his new school and already he's got a girl on his mind. And not just any girl: it has to be Vicki Streeton, the smartest, prettiest, richest girl in the class. But what chance have you got when your dad's a cop, your mum's a frighteningly understanding parent, your brother wets the bed and the teachers take an instant dislike to you and then you fall in love at 12-and-three-quarter years old? It can only mean trouble, worry, mega-embarrassment and some wild, wild times.

Josephine Alibrandi is 17 and in her final year of school. Dealing with her mum and the ways of her Nonna are daunting enough as she prepares for her exams. But Josie is about to discover real life gets in the way of her carefully-made plans.

The world's toughest car race. Twenty-one days of searing heat and rock-hard desert tracks; of blowouts and breakdowns; of subterfuge and sabotage. Ten thousand miles of dust and glory. Driving at breakneck speed over Australia's roughest roads and through the most appalling conditions imaginable, six competitors break free from the pack and fight for the lead, gradually finding themselves entangled in a web of deceit, betrayal and danger. Dust and Glory is best-selling author Evan Green's stirring account of the most grueling race of them all.

Ned West dreams of sailing across the river on a boat of his very own. To Ned, a boat means freedom–the fresh open water, squid-rich reefs, fires on private beaches–a far cry from life on Limberlost, the family farm, where his father worries and grieves for Ned's older brothers. They're away fighting in a ruthless and distant war, becoming men on the battlefield, while Ned–too young to enlist–roams the land in search of rabbits to shoot, selling their pelts to fund his secret boat ambitions. But as the seasons pass and Ned grows up, real life gets in the way.