Archive for the ‘Literary fiction’ Category

The Eyes of the Tiger

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

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The Eyes of the Tiger is a novel of friendship, love and corruption. Set in Brisbane during the disastrous 1974 flood, two very different men, the immunologist Mark and the charismatic ‘Prince of Spice’ Sannes, struggle for the affection of the high-spirited, fiercely independent lawyer Jessica. In a highly charged, profoundly disturbing relationship, betrayal of friendship and violation of love interact and collide with the ever-increasing moral deterioration of ‘the Moonlight State’.

Jurgensen’s new novel depicts evil as a seductively demonic power of rampant decomposition, generating from the realm of personal intimacy to the corruption of civilised society. Its narrative of power and passion takes the reader on a frightening journey, culminating in apparitions of a predatory god.

March 2004, 400pp
Paperback, 234 x 153 mm
Literary fiction, 1st edition
ISBN 1 92078711 9
RRP $aud 27.95
ISBN-13 9781920787111

The Author
Originally from Denmark, Manfred Jurgensen settled in Australia at the age of twenty-one, working as actor, playwright and reviewer. Manfred started publishing poetry in the early seventies and to date, he has produced thirteen collections.

He taught literature at Melbourne, Monash and Queensland University where he was appointed to a Personal Chair. From 1984 to 1996 he edited the influential journal of multicultural literature, Outrider. In 1988 he edited the bicentennial Penguin anthology, Australian Writing Now (co-editor Robert Adamson).

Over the last twenty years Manfred has published novels, plays, film scripts, diaries, essays, short stories, literary criticism and poetry. In addition to his writings in English, much of his literary and academic work appears in German. He is a prolific translator and advocate of contemporary Australian literature.

Manfred’s books published by Indra, are The Trembling Bridge and The Eyes of the Tiger.

Taking A Fool to Paradise

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

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Henry Ditassio is a repressed clerk living a claustrophobic life. His repetitive compulsive existence at A.G. Muir’s office has left no room for prospect until he meets bored narcissistic manipulative Arb Ginghus whose obsession with Henry can only explode in a kind of madness.

In this story of mad imagination & taut relationships Kirwan puts popular wisdom and our concepts of time on its head. As Arb Ginghus says, “If there is one thing I despise it is common sense for it will teach you nothing that is worth knowing; it is the obscure, the impractical, the impulsive which tells you what is what.”

Kirwan’s mordant wit takes us on a journey where recollection and perception become confused, strangely echoing our own lives.

A beautifully crafted, disarming novel.

For readers who like psychological thrillers, dark fantasy, a surrealist take on life.

December 2004, 160 pp
Paperback, 210 x 138 mm
ISBN 1 92078706 2
Literary fiction, 1st edition
RRP $aud 23-95
ISBN-13 978

The Author
For twenty years since the mid-seventies, Valerie Kirwan was something of a legend in Melbourne theatre, writing, directing and performing plays which challenged and enchanted her audiences.

More recently, Valerie is writing novellas and short stories in which she tests her characters against the subconscious stresses that exist below the surface of our outwardly normal, everyday world. Through intrigue, suspense, and more than a little sardonic humour, Valerie challenges us to join in her psychological dramas.

Valerie’s published books
Taking A Fool to Paradise (Indra 2004)
Lovers and Losers of the Last Century (Indra 2001)
The Disease of the Silkworm (Hornets Nest 2000)
The Moon is Bloodshot (Hornets Nest 1999)
The Will to Fall (Penguin 1984)

Lovers & Losers of the Last Century

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

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Valerie Kirwan’s sharp observation and sharper wit presents us with these four cameos of love loved and love lost in the last decades of the twentieth century. Local stories with universal themes, the novellas reflect the emotional roller coaster of the century of alienation.

And then there were the good nights – a novella about love, friendship and good times over two decades 1974 to 1994 – focuses on a small group of friends whose lives revolve around theatre and their relationships.

In the cold morning light – a mystery thriller and a story of elusive love. When Aysin returns alone to Charles’s isolated house without Bebe, her lover, she becomes obsessed with questions about Bebe’s fate and Charles’s role in her disappearance.

Michael – a story of illusory love – portrays a domineering mother through the eyes of Anna, her son’s girlfriend. Domination and alienation mark the bleak days spent at Michael’s mother’s house, days that culminate in Anna’s losing Michael as he withdraws into a new identity, which allows her no place in his life.

Mrs Wedge’s Waterford and a crate of champagne – a black comedy about life without love – is Lou Wedge’s story of coping with her irascible ailing mother and her own frustrated loneliness.

Feb 2001, 210pp
Paperback, 215 x 138 mm
ISBN 0 9585805 1 0
RRP $aud 20.95
Literary fiction; Novellas
ISBN-13 978

The Author
For twenty years since the mid-seventies, Valerie Kirwan was something of a legend in Melbourne theatre, writing, directing and performing plays which challenged and enchanted her audiences.

More recently, Valerie is writing novellas and short stories in which she tests her characters against the subconscious stresses that exist below the surface of our outwardly normal, everyday world. Through intrigue, suspense, and more than a little sardonic humour, Valerie challenges us to join in her psychological dramas.

Valerie’s published books
Taking A Fool to Paradise (Indra 2004)
Lovers and Losers of the Last Century (Indra 2001)
The Disease of the Silkworm (Hornets Nest 2000)
The Moon is Bloodshot (Hornets Nest 1999)
The Will to Fall (Penguin 1984)

Fish Lips

Sunday, August 5th, 2007

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A powerful love story that moves recklessly back and forth through time to the most intimate meetings of cultures, histories and bodies. Nicholas Jose

Gillian Hindmarsh is an Australian researcher, investigating architectural history in Penang, Malaysia. From a city archive, she souvenirs a photograph of Rose, a young English woman from the 1940s. In Gillian’s imagination, Rose is a black and white romantic fantasy taken from an old forties movie.

Rose, however, was real. She has no family name to identify her. Her ghost is seen from time to time by fisherman in the waters off Georgetown, and in 1982, when disturbed by dredging for a bridge to the mainland, she looks for a body into which to reincarnate. And she wants her lover, Li-tsieng to reincarnate also.

Wang Li-tsieng, the dissolute son of a wealthy Straits Chinese family, returned from the safety of exile in Chile, to be with his English Rose. Shortly after his return, they were killed by a bomb, as they danced in the underwater dining hall of one of the Wang family mansions in Georgetown.

Patrick Dreher, Gillian’s lover, is a dredging engineer who rents a house on Jalan Dunn, where he is disturbed by Rose’s spectral presence. Rose makes a significant choice by allowing herself to be seen by Gillian, in Patrick’s house.fishlips weaves together issues of history and memory, east and west, body and spirit, coloniser and colonised in a fiction that interrogates the ways we order both individual and collective histories to make sense of our own worlds.

In this dark romance, loss and madness hover just below the surface.

September 2001, 200 pp
Paperback, 216 x 138 mm
ISBN 0 9585805 9 6
Literary fiction; First Edition
RRP $aud 22-95
ISBN-13 978 0958580595

The Author
Carolyn van Langenberg grew up in the rural hinterland of the Far North Coast of New South Wales. She has travelled in Southeast Asia and Europe.

Carolyn’s books reflect her background in Australian and English literature, Asian history and creative writing. She lives with her husband in the Blue Mountains.

The fish lips trilogy, set in Malaysia and Australia from the 1940s to the 21st century, looks at three angles on love: heterosexual, homosexual and tortured.

In fish lips, Rose, Li-tsieng’s paramour, becomes a ghost when the Japanese bombed Penang in 1941. Was she ever real?

Fiona Hindmarsh in The Teetotaller’s Wake longs to be back with her new girlfriend during the family ceremonies that follow her mother’s death.

In Blue Moon, urban conservationist Badul Mukhapadai tries to save Penang, Malaysia, from developers and falls in love with the clean air of Byron Bay, Australia, where he consummates his passion for the prickly historian, Gillian Hindmarsh.

The Fish Lips Trilogy…by Carolyn van Langenberg

Fish Lips, 2001
$aud22.95
ISBN: 0 95858059 6

The Teetotaller’s Wake, 2003
$aud22.95
ISBN: 0 95787358 1

Blue Moon, 2004
$aud27.95
ISBN: 1 92078710 0

Blue Moon

Wednesday, July 4th, 2007

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The third book of Carolyn van Langenberg’s Fish Lips trilogy completes the saga of a troubled farming family based in North Eastern New South Wales and their connections over two generations with families in the Malaysian island of Penang. Blue Moon, though the third title in the trilogy, is not a sequel to the prior novels.

Jacqueline Dark is a social worker specialising in emergency housing for the poor in Sydney during the 1990s. Jacq and her brother Kel hit a bad mid-life patch when memories of their rural childhood with their crazy mother Lydia destabilise them. Jacq takes stress leave to Penang in Malaysia. While there, she tries to solve the mystery of her mother’s belief that there is a family connection with Penang.

Lydia’s life is paralleled by Ng Chu Yee in Penang, Malaysia, who is also frustrated, in her case by her husband’s gambling.

Crisply written and tightly structured, Blue Moon is one of those novels that is hard to put down.

December 2004, 336 pp
Paperback, 216 x 138 mm
ISBN 1 92078710 0
Literary fiction; First Edition
RRP $aud 27-95
ISBN-13 978

The Author
Carolyn van Langenberg grew up in the rural hinterland of the Far North Coast of New South Wales. She has travelled in Southeast Asia and Europe.

Carolyn’s books reflect her background in Australian and English literature, Asian history and creative writing. She lives with her husband in the Blue Mountains.

The fish lips trilogy, set in Malaysia and Australia from the 1940s to the 21st century, looks at three angles on love: heterosexual, homosexual and tortured.

In fish lips, Rose, Li-tsieng’s paramour, becomes a ghost when the Japanese bombed Penang in 1941. Was she ever real?

Fiona Hindmarsh in The Teetotaller’s Wake longs to be back with her new girlfriend during the family ceremonies that follow her mother’s death.

In Blue Moon, urban conservationist Badul Mukhapadai tries to save Penang, Malaysia, from developers and falls in love with the clean air of Byron Bay, Australia, where he consummates his passion for the prickly historian, Gillian Hindmarsh.

The Fish Lips Trilogy… by Carolyn van Langenberg

Fish Lips, 2001
$aud22.95
ISBN: 0 95858059 6

The Teetotaller’s Wake, 2003
$aud22.95
ISBN: 0 95787358 1

Blue Moon, 2004
$aud27.95
ISBN: 1 92078710 0