by Nam Le | Australia
Stories that take us from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea-- while taking us to the heart of what is means to be human.
by Tim Winton | Australia
After two separate catastrophes, two very different families leave the country for the bright lights of Perth. The Lambs are industrious, united, and—until God seems to turn His back on their boy Fish—religious. The Pickleses are gamblers, boozers, fractious, and unlikely landlords.
Change, hardship, and the war force them to swallow their dignity and share a great, breathing, shuddering house called Cloudstreet. Over the next twenty years, they struggle and strive, laugh and curse, come apart and pull together under the same roof, and try as they can to make their lives
by Jill Ker Conway | Australia
A woman of intellect and ambition describes growing up on an Australian ranch, coping with her father's death and her mother's depression, her intellectual awakening at the university, and her path to becoming Smith College's first woman president.
by Andrew McGahan | Australia
His father dead by fire and his mother plagued by demons of her own, William is cast upon the charity of his unknown uncle – an embittered old man encamped in the ruins of a once great station homestead, Kuran House. It's a baffling and sinister new world for the boy, a place of decay and secret histories.
by Epeli Hau'ofa | Fiji
Oilei Bomboki wakes one morning with an excruciating pain that sends him anxiously searching for a cure. Unsuccessful treatments at the hands of various healers and doctors, culminating in a bizarre operation, lead the desperate Oilei to seek the help of Babu Vivekanand - sage, yogi, and conman. Through Babu's teachings Oilei learns to love and respect the source of his own (and, ultimately, everyone's) complaint.
by Hanya Yanagihara | Micronesia
Joining an anthropologist's 1950 expedition to discover a lost tribe on a remote Micronesian island, a young doctor investigates and proves a theory that the tribe's considerable longevity is linked to a rare turtle, a finding that brings worldwide fame and unexpected consequence.
by Teweiariki Teaero | Kiribati
A collection of the author's poetry, prose, drawings and paintings, containing reflections on a dark period in his personal life, and on crime and politics in his homeland of Kiribati.
by Jack Niedenthal | Marshall Islands
By using firsthand accounts by the people of Bikini describing their half-century of nuclear exodus, this important book journeys through the Marshallese and Bikinian cultures from ancient to modern times.
by Robert Barclay | Marshall Islands
On Good Friday, 1981, Rujen Keju and his two sons come face to face with their complicated inheritance--one that includes years of atomic testing and the continued military presence of the U.S. in the Pacific. In this highly original work of history and adventure, novelist Robert Barclay weaves together characters and stories from mythological times with those of the present-day to give readers a rare and unsparing look at life in the contemporary Pacific.
by Chandra Bhushan S. Mishra | Nauru
This book is based on the writer's journey to pleasant Island- Republic of Nauru - what he experienced during his stay and work on the Island.
by Keri Hulme | New Zealand
This unusual novel, set in New Zealand, concentrates on three people: Kerewin Holmes, a part-Maori painter who has chosen to isolate herself in a tower she built from lottery winnings; Simon, a troubled and mysterious little boy; and Joe Gillayley, the Maori factory worker who is Simon's foster father. Elements of Maori myth and culture are woven into the novel's exploration of the passions and needs that bind these three people together, for good or ill. It's not easy reading, but the story is compelling despite its stylistic eccentricities and great length.
by Eleanor Catton | New Zealand
Arriving in New Zealand in 1866 a weary Englishman, Walter Moody, lands in a gold-mining frontier town on the coast of New Zealand to make his fortune and forever leave behind his family's shame. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to investigate what links three crimes that occurred on a single day, events in which each man finds himself implicated in some way. Moody finds himself drawn into a series of unsolved crimes and complex mysteries.
by Lloyd Jones | New Zealand
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, on which survival is a daily struggle, eccentric Mr. Watts, the only white man left after the other teachers flee, spends his day reading to the local children from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations.
by Maurice Shadbolt | New Zealand
Based on a gory series of skirmishes near Wellington between 1868 and 1869, this novel combines a knockout of a war story, a tour of as yet unexploited Maori country, an account of British imperialism and a portrait of native life and customs to create a vivid pageant of colonial New Zealand.
by Vincent Eri | Papua New Guinea
Set in Papua New Guinia in the 1940s. Hoiri Sevese knows he must avenge himself on the sorcerers who have caused his wife to be eaten by a crocodile. He must also come to terms with colonial rule, with himself and with the crocodile.
by Lily King | Papua New Guinea
English anthropologist Andrew Bankson has been alone in the field for several years, studying a tribe on the Sepik River in the Territory of New Guinea with little success. Increasingly frustrated and isolated by his research, Bankson is on the verge of suicide when he encounters the famous and controversial Nell Stone and her wry, mercurial Australian husband Fen. But when Bankson leads them to the artistic, female-dominated Tam, he ignites an intellectual and emotional firestorm between the three of them that burns out of anyone's control.
by Russell Soaba | Papua New Guinea
The only child of the last chief of Makawana village, Maiba struggles to hold her people together in face of the polarizing forces of convention and modernization. Both protective and painfully aware of the weaknesses of her own community, Maiba acquires the wisdom she needs to face the future.
by Albert Wendt | Samoa
A Pacific epic, this novel stretches hundreds of years before the arrival of Papalagi to the present day and fuses the great indigenous oral traditions of storytelling and Western poetry.
by Sia Figiel | Samoa
A novel on Samoa featuring Alofa, a girl who is coming of age in a society afraid of losing its soul. Through her eyes is seen the clash of traditional and Western cultures, the latter roundly criticized by her aunt.
by John Saunana | Solomon Islands
Includes work from new and well-established writers from nine Pacific communities: Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Samoa. The legacy of colonialism and the problems of development and political change are among the themes explored.
by Epeli Hau'ofa | Tonga
Tiko, a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, faces a tidal wave of D-E-V-E-L-O-P-M-E-N-T, which threatens to demolish ancestral ways and the human spirit.
by Epeli Hau’ofa | Tonga
A collection of essays, fiction, and poetry that challenge prevailing notions about Oceania and prescriptions for its development. He highlights major problems confronted by the region and suggests alternative perspectives and ways in which its people might reorganize to relate effectively to the changing world.
by Sethy John Regenvanu | Vanuatu
An autobiography of one of the men who took a leading role in the struggle to free Vanuatu from the colonial stranglehold of the Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides and establish an independent republic.