Through the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu Miss Hare wanders, half-mad. In the wilderness she stumbles upon an Aborigine artist and a Jewish refugee. They place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. In a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded.

At the turn of the century Stan Parker takes a wife and makes a home as a small farmer in the wilderness of Australia. Amy bears his children and time brings him a procession of ordinary events - achievements, disappointments, sorrows and dreams. The author won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Hurtle Duffield is incapable of loving anything except what he paints. The people who court him are, above all, the victims of his art, and he dissects their weaknesses with cruel precision. The Australian author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973.

Set in 19th-century Australia, this is the story of the secret passion between an explorer and a young orphan. Although they have met only a few times, Voss and Laura are joined by overwhelming, obsessive feelings for each other. The Australian author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973.

Two children are brought to a wild garden on the shores of Sydney Harbour to shelter from the Second World War. The boy's mother has died in the Blitz. The girl is the daughter of a Sydney woman and a Communist executed in a Greek prison.

Happy Valley is a place of dreams and secrets, of snow and ice and wind. In this remote little town, perched in its landscape of desolate beauty, everybody has a story to tell about loss and longing and loneliness, about their passion to escape.

Includes eleven stories which feature such characters as a girl beset by her mother's influence, who marries her father's friend; a young man strangely moved into marriage with a girl like the mother who never understood him; and, a pretty market researcher who learns the ultimate details of love with a difference.