The so-called “mail-order bride” phenomenon developed to fill the needs of lonely men, particularly in regional Australia. But the marriages did not always work out.Nilanthi was such a bride. The youngest of five daughters in a family where status was higher than income, her parents had difficulty providing a dowry large enough to attract a suitably well-to-do husband for her. Believing all westerners were rich, she chose to take her chances with an unknown suitor, a farmer in far-away Australia.

When Nilanthi goes missing, her parents in Sri Lanka ask Laura, a Sydney history teacher, for help in finding their daughter. To find the young woman, Laura has to travel a thousand kilometres inland and fifty years back into her own family’s tragic past.

March 2004, 248pp
Fiction, 1st edition
ISBN 1 92078702 X
Paperback, 210 x 138 mm
RRP $aud 23.95
ISBN-13 9781920787025

The Author see also: Worm in the Bud

June Duncan Owen’s training and experience in history (MA from Sydney University), social work (University of Adelaide), teaching and farming inform her writing. Her later book, Worm in the Bud, was well received by readers throughout Australia.

June’s published works include
The Missing Wife, Indra Publishing 2004
Mixed Matches: Interracial Marriage in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, 2002
Writing and Selling Articles (Australian/New Zealand Guide), Hale & Iremonger, 1997
How to Write and Sell Articles, Penguin Books, 1992
The Heart of the City, Kangaroo Press, 1987.

Her father’s old friend, a consul at the Australian Embassy, offers to get her legal help but she refuses to talk to him. Her brother and their uncle arrive from Sydney expecting to at least win her bail from prison, but she violently rejects their assistance. Sensing a story, the beautiful Bangkok correspondent for a Sydney television channel works on the brother for information. Meanwhile, the consul and her uncle manage to bribe a corrupt Army colonel to release Candy from prison. Much to her dismay, she is released.

And then the colonel discovers he has been compromised by a news report about her release.

In The Betrayers we read the story as told by six very different participants: Candy’s brother, the consul, his mistress, the reporter, the uncle, and finally Candy herself.

Crime fiction, 1st Edition
December 2004
Paperback, 144pp
210 x 138 mm
ISBN: 1 92078704 6
RRP$aud22-95
The Author
In 1993, Robert D. Morrison left his profession in print, television and radio journalism in Australia and overseas to concentrate on creative writing. Even in childhood, Robert was a voluminous reader with a strong interest in writing. By the time he was in his twenties he had written many short stories that were published, and three novels that weren’t. In the seventies, two of his one-act plays, The Nightwatchman and Liberated, were performed in Sydney.

In Robert’s writing the idea at the centre of his narrative is paramount and its exploration is the purpose of the story.

Robert’s earlier published books
Last Journey (2000)

For young adults
The Secret Sandwich (Margaret Hamilton Books, 1994) short-listed for the Australian Multicultural Children’s Book Award
Javta’s Ghost (Margaret Hamilton Books, 1996)