Books /
Literary Fiction

Nominated for the Man Booker Prize, this moving, powerful story is Garry Disher’s proudest achievement. At the height of the Great Depression, a young mother is taken by a shark in the shallows at Henley Beach. Her grieving husband flees north with his baby son to the regional town of Pandowie. In time, the boy will have a daughter: the wilful auburn-haired Anna Tolley—who lives through momentous changes and earns the envy, love and hatred of those around her.

Australia, 1909.  A scrap man buys a scab-kneed three-year-old girl for nine shillings and sixpence.  Her name is scarcely known or remembered.  But way back in the corner of her mind is a thought she is almost too frightened to shine a light on: one day she will run away.

There was a time when Neil Quiller, bush pilot, felt at home in the air, but now it’s 1941 and he’s a photo-reconnaissance pilot in Malaya, flying over unknown territory.

Betrayed by a traitor, shot down, trapped in Singapore, he escapes ahead of the advancing Japanese and, armed with hand-drawn maps and a school atlas, begins a treacherous journey home across land and sea.

In the long hot afternoons of an Australian summer, Martin Linke makes stencils for his children and dreams of freedom.  “I’m not at war,” he’d protested, when the internment order came.  He had left Germany seventeen years ago.  But it is wartime, and he is an alien.

The Stencil Man is a novel of uneasy alliances, treachery and flight across the disturbing landscape of Australia in wartime. 

 Twelve dazzling stories by an award-winning author writing at the peak of his ability.