NEW WORK BY CELEBRATED NOVELIST AND ESSAYIST NICHOLAS JOSE, SET AGAINST THE TURMOIL OF THE INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT IN EAST TIMORSet in Australia, East Timor and Washington in the lead up to the independence referendum in East Timor in 1999, The Idealist is a novel which explores the entanglement of private and public life. It is a political mystery, the portrait of a marriage, a reflection on friendship, and a study of a personality as it breaks down under pressure. Jake, an Australian defence analyst, is torn between his support for the people of East Timor, whose commitment to independence in the face of mounting violence, he has experienced personally, and his sense of responsibility for, and complicity in, the actions of his government. When he is found dead in the garage of his Washington home, after passing secret intelligence to his American counterpart, his wife Anne wants justice. The narrative is told from changing perspectives, moving through time and memory, in...

Finishing school is an intoxicating feeling; life is about to begin. Who will you be? How will you know? What will it take to find out?It's 1970 and Rowena Sonner is confronting these three questions. For her, the answer is to escape—first, from her upper middle class family's expectations; then from conservative Adelaide and Australia itself—and to live. To love, lose, and learn from it all.Rowena's Field captures the generational, class, and cultural tensions of the seventies while exploring timeless questions about how we become ourselves.'Men rarely explore the domestic, rarely write the adventures of people's lives, certainly rarely of women's lives. For two reasons, then, this book has the fascination of the unusual, the unexpected. Does it work? Yes. Brilliantly.' — Marion Halligan, The Canberra Times, 1984First published in 1984, Rowena's Field, Nicholas Jose's debut novel, was shortlisted for The...

A seductive literary love story set in contemporary Shanghai, The Red Thread intertwines the lives of two pairs of lovers across the centuries. Shen, a young, American-educated appraiser in a Shanghai auction house, is captivated by Ruth, a self-possessed Australian artist who happens into one of his auctions. As they fall in love, Shen finds that their lives are strangely mirrored by those of the characters in a rare Chinese manuscript that is nearly two hundred years old, and of which the last two chapters have never been found. Shen's search for the final chapters goes from one of curiosity to one of desperation when he realizes that the future of their relationship, and the prognosis for Ruth's failing health, seem to be foretold in the missing pages. Interwoven in the novel and presented in red type are passages from the actual nineteenth century memoir Six Chapters of a Floating Life that illuminate the lovers' parallel lives. An elegant and multilayered novel,...

Beijing is a city of opportunity and danger when cancer specialist Wally Frith arrives there from Sydney. Chance encounters have life-changing consequences. As the doctor's journey spirals back into his own family story, memories and ghosts shadow the seductions of the present. "Avenue of Eternal Peace", a kaleidoscopic novel of healing and hope, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and filmed as "Children of the Dragon" with Bob Peck and Lily Chen. This is a new, revised edition.