That Deadman Dance

Throughout Bobby Wabalanginy's young life the ships have been arriving, bringing European settlers to the south coast of Western Australia, where Bobby's people, the Noongar people, have always lived. Bobby, smart, resourceful and eager to please, has befriended the settlers, joining them as they hunt whales, till the land, and work to establish their new colony. He is welcomed into a prosperous white family and eventually finds himself falling in love with the daughter, Christine.But slowly - by design and by hazard - things begin to change. Not everyone is so pleased with the progress of the white colonists. Livestock mysteriously starts to disappear, crops are destroyed, there are 'accidents' and injuries on both sides. As the Europeans impose ever-stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the peace, Bobby's Elders decide they must respond in kind, and Bobby is forced to take sides, inexorably drawn into a series of events that will for ever change the future of his country.That Deadman Dance is haunted by tragedy, as most stories of first contact between European and native peoples are. But through Bobby's life, this novel exuberantly explores a moment in time when things might have been different, when black and white lived together in amazement rather than fear of the other, and when the world suddenly seemed twice as large and twice as promising.

Bad form… When Corinne Blakely, a grande dame of international ballroom dancing, is poisoned, the dance community—including champion dancer Stacy Graysin—is left in an uproar. Corinne was penning a tell-all memoir, but now her secrets might well remain hidden, just as the killer perhaps intended. The victim’s dance card was full of people who might have wanted her silenced, if not dead. But when Maurice, a ballroom instructor at Stacy’s dance studio Graysin Motion, becomes the prime suspect, she has no choice but to waltz in and take the lead in another murder investigation. Clearing Maurice’s name by finding the real killer is going to be harder than a running spin turn. But there’s one thing Stacy knows for sure—she’s not about to let the murderer dance away scot-free.

From the two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Award From Kim Scott, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, comes a work charged with ambition and poetry, in equal parts brutal, mysterious and idealistic, about a young woman cast into a drama that has been playing for over two hundred years ... Taboo takes place in the present day, in the rural South-West of Western Australia, and tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar's descendants, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm on which the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by hosting the group he will satisfy his wife's dying wishes and cleanse some moral stain from the ground on which he and his family have lived for generations. But the sins of the past will not be so easily expunged. We walk with the ragtag group through this taboo country and note in them glimmers of re-connection with language, lore, country. We learn alongside them how countless generations of Noongar may have lived in ideal rapport with the land. This is a novel of survival and renewal, as much as destruction; and, ultimately, of hope as much as despair. WINNER OF THE NSW PREMIER'S AWARD BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018 WINNER OF THE NSW PREMIER'S INDIGENOUS WRITER'S PRIZE 2018 WINNER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND FICTION BOOK AWARD 2018 WINNER OF THE VICTORIAN PERMIER'S LITEARRY AWARD FOR INDIGENOUS WRITING 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE PRIME MINISTER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE COLIN RODERICK AWARD 2018 LONGLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD 2018 LONGLISTED FOR THE ABIA LITERARY FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018 LONGLISTED FOR THE INDIE BOOK AWARDS FICTION 2018 LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD 2019 PRAISE FOR TABOO "If Benang was the great novel of the assimilation system, and That Deadman Dance redefined the frontier novel in Australian writing, Taboo makes a strong case to be the novel that will help clarify - in the way that only literature can - what reconciliation might mean" Australian Book Review "Scott's book is stunning - haunted and powerful ... Verdict: Must Read" Herald Sun "Remarkable" Stephen Romei, Weekend Australian "Stunning prose" Saturday Paper "This is a complex, thoughtful, and exceptionally generous offering by a master storyteller at the top of his game" The Guardian "Undaunted, and daring as ever Scott goes back to his ancestral Noongar country in Western Australia's Great Southern region; back in time as well to killings (or a massacre, the point is contested) of whites and Aborigines there in 1880. . . Taboo never becomes a revenge story, whether for distant or recent wrongs . . . The politics of Taboo - not to presume or simplify too much - are quietist, rather than radical. Ambitious, unsentimental [and] morally challenging" Sydney Morning Herald "Scott is one of the most thoughtful, exciting and powerful storytellers of this continent today, with great courage and formidable narrative prowess- and Taboo is his most daring novel yet" Sydney Review of Books

Alexis Wright’s award-winning classic Carpentaria: “a swelling, heaving tsunami of a novel—stinging, sinuous, salted with outrageous humor, sweetened by spiraling lyricism” (The Australian) Carpentaria is an epic of the Gulf country of northwestern Queensland, Australia. Its portrait of life in the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance centers on the powerful Phantom family, leader of the Westend Pricklebush people, and its battles with old Joseph Midnight’s renegade Eastend mob, on the one hand, and with the white officials of Uptown and the nearby rapacious, ecologically disastrous Gurfurrit mine on the other. Wright’s masterful novel teems with extraordinary characters—the outcast savior Elias Smith, the religious zealot Mozzie Fishman, the murderous mayor Bruiser, the moth-ridden Captain Nicoli Finn, the activist Will Phantom, and above all, the rulers of the family, the queen of the garbage dump and the fish-embalming king of time: Angel Day and Normal Phantom—who stand like giants in a storm-swept world. Wright’s storytelling is operatic and surreal: a blend of myth and scripture, politics and farce. She has a narrative gift for remaking reality itself, altering along her way, as if casually, the perception of what a novel can do with the inside of the reader's mind. Carpentaria is “an epic, exhilarating, unsettling novel” (Wall Street Journal) that is not to be missed.

As El Salvador returns to peace after more than a decade of civil war, Eduardo Sosa, an unemployed sociologist, becomes fascinated by a homeless man who lives in a beat-up yellow Chevrolet Assuming his identity, Sosa unleashes a reign of terror on San Salvador with his snake accomplices. A macabre high-speed romp, in which violence and comedy become almost indistinguishable.

Billy is drifting, looking for a place to land. A young school teacher, he arrives in Australia's remote far north in search of his own history, his Aboriginality, and his future. He finds himself in a region of abundance and beauty but also of conflict, dispossession and dislocation. On the desperate frontier between cultures, Billy must find his place of belonging.

Self-styled arctic outdoorsman, John Hornby had already compromised his abilities to survive in the tundra through several incidents of near starvation, and by injuries suffered as a soldier in World War I. He had openly admitted to peers that “he had had enough of the north and wished he had never come”. Yet, foolishly, he conscripted his young cousin, nineteen year-old Edgar Christian, and a willing third party, twenty-nine year-old Harold Adlard, both having no survival training or outdoor experience, to join him on an adventure into the most isolated part of the Canadian northland – the Thelon River in the Northwest Territories. This is a story about the tragic Hornby expedition of 1926. One of Canada’s most legendary stories, the reader embarks on a journey as if they were there with Hornby and his two charges. Wilson adds dialogue to the events that unfold using excerpts from Edgar’s surviving diary. Not sparing any detail, the author applies his own vast knowledge of winter survival to events that led the three to disaster in a land that shows no mercy to the ill-prepared. Wilson bravely delves into the psychology of men in isolation when deprived of hope but not of love.

Originally published: Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2010.