Twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award and an Officer of the Order of Australia for his contribution to Australian literature, Christopher Koch returns with Lost Voices, a remarkable new novel that confirms him as one of our most significant and compelling novelists. Twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, Christopher Koch returns with a remarkable novel of gripping narrative power. Young Hugh Dixon believes he can save his father from ruin if he asks his estranged great-uncle Walter- a wealthy lawyer who lives alone in a tasmanian farmhouse passed down through the family-for help. As he is drawn into Walter's rarefied world, Hugh discovers that both his uncle and the farmhouse are links to a notorious episode in the mid nineteenth century. Walter's father, Martin, was living in the house when it was raided by members of an outlaw community run by Lucas Wilson, a charismatic ex-soldier attempting to build a utopia. But like later societies with communitarian ideals,...

Jakarta, 1965. Waiting for explosions, the city smells of frangipani, kretek cigarettes, and fear. It is THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY. the charismatic god-king Sukarno has brought Indonesia to the edge of chaos - to an abortive revolution that will leave half a million dead. For the Western correspondents here, this gathering apocalypse is their story and their drug, while the sufferings of the Indonesian people are scarcely real: a shadow play. Working at the eye of the storm are television correspondent Guy Hamilton and his eccentric dwarf cameraman Billy Kwan. In Kwan's secret fantasy life, both Sukarno and Hamilton are heroes. But his heroes betray him, and Billy is driven to desperate action. As the Indonesian shadow play erupts into terrible reality, a complex personal tragedy of love, obsession and betrayal comes to its climax. 'A profound and beautiful book' - Les Murray, the Sydney Morning Herald 'A richly and fully realised work of fiction, well conceived and...

The brilliant companion volume to HIGHWAYS TO A WAR. This masterful novel tells the story of a man who suffers exile through fighting for the future of his people. A leader of the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848, Robert Devereaux is an Irish gentleman who is prepared to hazard a life of privilege in the fight for his country's freedom. transported to Van Diemen's land as a political prisoner, he enters a life that greatly changes him, falling in love with a young Irish convict woman. through Kathleen O'Rahilly he comes to know the people he's long romanticised; but his cause, and the life he has lost, will not let him go. 'these novels (Out Of Ireland and Highways to A War) will surely become Australian classics.' - the Australian's Review of Books 'Koch is both painter and poet - an acute observer of detail with a language so distilled in its purity as to create the illusion that the reader is also the observer.' Sydney Morning Herald 'that it succeeds so well is mainly because...

Francis Cullen, growing up in the island of Tasmania, is outwardly a very ordinary boy. But his inner life is dominated by dreams of a place he calls the Otherland: a transfigured world beyond the real one. In childhood, he glimpses it in the landscapes of his native island; and when he falls in love with a country girl, the dream is central to his feelings for her. After Heather is lost to him, Francis comes more and more under the influence of Lewie Matthews - a youth whose ambition is to become a criminal. Now the Otherland′s location is seen as the mainland of Australia, where a mythical life of wildness and crime beckons. Francis, Lewie and their friends pursue this life in Melbourne - until a climax of destruction shatters the dream. Christopher Koch′s first novel moves always on the level of poetry, resembling in its themes Wordsworth′s Intimations of Immortality. It records those visions seen in childhood which...

'How do we pierce the skin? Did they teach you that at University?' Clive Broderick, guitar-teacher and occultist - the Doubleman of the title of this acclaimed novel - is speaking of power, and of a realm beyond reality. this is a fable of the sixties, when shared belief-systems crumbled, and the spiritual bazaars of today opened up. Christopher Koch's theme is illusion; and all his characters are bound by it. the Rymers are an electric folk group enjoying mounting success in Sydney. their producer, Richard Miller, came under Broderick's spell during his youth in tasmania; so did the guitarists Brady and Burr. Now, years after his death, Broderick's presence remains with all three. through his disciple, Burr, it will lead to nightmare. tHE DOUBLEMAN was winner of the 1985 Miles Franklin Award. 'Why have I not heard of Koch before, I wonder? He has an extraordinary power of evoking place, and I feel now that tasmania is part of my memory.' - Graham Greene 'As universal in its...