Collection: Adult Fiction

This is a comic narrative from the lips of the 139-year-old Herbert Badgery, a con-man and the 'illywhacker' or confidence trickster of the title. This novel is peopled with aviators, car salesmen, Chinamen and impresarios.

Irene Bobs loves fast driving. Her husband is the best car salesman in western Victoria. Together they enter the Redex Trial, a brutal race around the ancient continent over roads no car will ever quite survive. With them is their lanky fair-haired navigator, Willie Bachhuber, a quiz show champio...

Oscar Hopkins, the hydrophobic, noisy-kneed son of a preacher, renounces his father's stern religion in favour of the Anglican Church. Lucinda Leplastrier, a frizzy-haired heiress, impulsively buys a glass factory with the inheritance forced on her by a well-intentioned adviser. When the two fina...

The first Penguin edition of Peter Carey's His Illegal Self, with a cover by Michael Leunig Che is the precocious son of radical student activists at Harvard in the late sixties. Raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother, he yearns for his famous outlaw parents.

The Catchprices may be the most spectacularly contentious family since Dostoevsky's Karamazovs. Granny Catchprice runs her family business, and her family, with senility, cunning, and a handbag full of explosives. Sixteen-year-old Benny dreams of transforming a failing automobile franchise into a...

Olivier is a French aristocrat, the child of survivors of the revolution. Parrot, the son of an English printer, is a restless servant. When Olivier sets sail for the New World -- ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to avoid another revolution -- Parrot is sent with him, as spy, prote...

This is a thrilling and witty journey to the place where the cyber underworld of radicals and hackers collides with international power politics. It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22.00 Greenwich Mean Time when a worm entered the comput...

From separate catastrophes two rural families flee to the city to find themselves sharing a great breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet where they begin their lives again from scratch. For twenty years they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a hom...

All three parts of The Lord of the Rings in one paperback, with brand new packaging and for the first time containing the definitive edition of the text and a revised and expanded index. Since it was first published in 1954, The Lord of the Rings has been a book people have treasured. Steeped in ...

When Cecily Knight sneaks into the Heathen Club's initiation on behalf of a rival gang, she's confident she can slip through the night unnoticed. But the moment she steps into their den, she knows she's made a fatal error. The devil has seen her. Jeremy Volkov may not technically be the devil, bu...