Literary Fiction

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Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms · 鉄条網と桜

by Anita Heiss
Ligature finest
genre Historical Fiction · Literary Fiction · Romance

A story about a love that transcends all boundaries, from one of Australia’s best loved authors—in a new Japanese translation by Noriko Oka with Professor Donna Weeks.

In August 1944, over 1000 Japanese soldiers break out of their prison compound on the fringes of Cowra. Many are killed or recaptured, and some take their own lives. But one soldier, Hiroshi, manages to escape. At a nearby Aboriginal mission, Banjo Williams discovers Hiroshi, distraught and on the run, and he and his fellow townsfolk offer him refuge. Banjo’s daughter Mary is intrigued by the softly-spoken stranger, and charged with his care. Love blossoms between them, and they each dream of a future together. But how long can Hiroshi be hidden safely and their bond kept a secret?


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Day’s End

by Garry Disher
Ligature finest
genre Crime · Literary Fiction

The pandemic has found its way even to Tiverton—the remote South Australian town where Constable Paul Hirschhausen was finally getting the measure of the place—layering new divisions and disruptions on top of the old ones. The rich and the poor, the old and the new, authority and sovereignty, all playing out in a tiny population spread over a vast geography.

A Belgian doctor comes looking for her son, last seen working on an endless sheep station; and someone’s started a scrub fire out of town. The usual kind of thing for a country cop’s wide-ranging beat. But then there’s the body in the suitcase …

Day’s End is the sequel to Bitter Wash Road, Peace and Consolation, rounding out an extraordinary sequence that stands at the pinnacle of rural noir.

‘Crime fiction at its best … took this reader’s breath away.’—Canberra Times


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Consolation

by Garry Disher
Ligature finest
genre Crime · Literary Fiction

Winter has arrived in Tiverton, the outback South Australian town where Constable Paul Hirschhausen is serving his exile. There’s snow on the peaks and frost on the plains—and a snowdropper in town, swiping women’s underwear from clotheslines. It’s a nuisance offence that leads Hirsch to more chilling crimes—of obsession, exploitation and conspiracy.

And just when Hirsch thinks he’s untangling the seams of trust and resentment that wind through the streets and backroads of this hard landscape—he finds himself at the centre of them all, not sure he’ll make it out alive.

Consolation is the sequel to Bitter Wash Road and Peace, and unveils an entirely new kind of rural noir.


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Peace

by Garry Disher
Ligature finest
genre Crime · Literary Fiction

Christmas is coming to Tiverton, the outback South Australian town where Constable Paul Hirschhausen is making peace with his exile. That means rising temperatures—and tempers—and all Hirsch wants is a general absence of mayhem.

But the usual brawls and bingles give way to something darker: animal slaughter, dead bodies, missing children, as the insidious gaze and reach of social media deepens the fissures in this isolated rural community.

Peace is the first sequel to Bitter Wash Road and confirms Hirsch and the landscape he is fused to as the new heroes of Australian crime fiction.

‘A scorchingly good novel.’ —Michael Robotham

‘An utterly compelling mystery with rare heart and humanity.’ —Dervla McTiernan

‘Disher is the gold standard for rural noir.’ —Chris Hammer


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Bitter Wash Road

by Garry Disher
Ligature finest
genre Crime · Literary Fiction

Constable Paul Hirschhausen—‘Hirsch’ to his friends, where he can find them—has been exiled to remote South Australia for failing to go along with his crooked colleagues.

But far from the city he finds older and deeper corruptions, from cosy understandings to harassment and bigotry. When shots are fired off Bitter Wash Road, in the shadow of the new wind turbines, Hirsch is set on a path that leads him through lonely deaths to terrible secrets, pitting him against enemies old and new—and the hardscrabble country itself.

Bitter Wash Road announces a new hero from award-winning writer Garry Disher, as striking and complicated as the land where he finds himself.

‘A terrific story … easily one of the best Australian crime novels of the year.’ —Canberra Times


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The Mistake

by Wendy James
Ligature finest
genre Crime · Literary Fiction · Mystery

Jodie Garrow’s life isn’t perfect, but she’s come a long way—a beautiful house in the middle of town, two children, a successful husband readying a run for mayor. She could almost forget that one mistake, years ago, that could have cost her everything: an unwise affair, an unwanted pregnancy, an adoption arrangement that wasn’t entirely by the book.

But a chance reunion leads to disaster: a police investigation, a media storm, a search for a missing child, allegations of murder—and a reckoning with everyone in Jodie’s life. Suddenly it seems she could lose everything she’s worked so hard to build. Can she prove her innocence? What is the truth, and does it even matter?

The Mistake is an acclaimed thriller of buried secrets, the lies we tell each other and ourselves—and what we become when we smell blood in the water.


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Where Have You Been?

by Wendy James
Ligature finest
genre Literary Fiction · Mystery

Susan and Ed Middleton are perfectly happy in their model middle-class family on Sydney’s northern beaches. But everything changes when Susan’s mother wills half her estate to Karen, Susan’s sister—a sister who disappeared twenty years earlier and has never been seen again.

The woman who turns up, claiming to her sister, isn’t the Karen she remembers—but that was a lifetime ago. Are there glimpses of the girl she knew, or is it just her imagination? Karen’s disappearance and presumed death all but destroyed her parents’ lives—but will her return threaten the new life and family that Susan has worked so hard for?

Where Have You Been? is a mystery and a thriller, a story of hope, of betrayal—and the fragility of all we take for granted.


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Why She Loves Him

by Wendy James
Ligature finest
genre Literary Fiction · Short Stories

Twenty-one short stories from award-winning writer Wendy James, ranging from the vignette to the compact epic, the suburban kitchen to the outback and the world, an instant to a lifetime and beyond.

A stay-at-home father is consumed by his frustrations. In Salzburg, a fortepiano maker struggles to preserve his family. Generations of women recall the family matriarch—was she really a witch? And in a kaleidoscopic tour de force, a young mother finds herself on the run with a desperate criminal.

These are stories about memory and perspective, patterns and deviations, longing and escape: a glittering collection from a master of the form.


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The Lost Girls

by Wendy James
Ligature finest
genre Crime · Literary Fiction

Summer, Sydney, 1978. Jane is in awe of her older cousin: Angie’s only fourteen, but she’s already making waves in their tight beachside community with the promise of who she’s about to be.

But Angie is murdered, devastating Jane and shattering her family. They retreat into a broken silence, unable to come to terms with the horror of a life cut so short.

Thirty years later, Jane has a family of her own—but she still feels the pull of that old tragedy. When a reporter with an agenda turns up asking questions, Jane can finally give voice to her emotions—but the picture that emerges is even darker and more troubling than she had recognised.

As the truth comes into terrible focus, Jane is forced to question everything she once believed—and fight to hold onto whatever is left.


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The Steele Diaries

by Wendy James
Ligature finest
genre Historical Fiction · Literary Fiction · Mystery

Zelda Steele is destined for great things. The talented daughter of two celebrity artists, raised by wealthy art patrons in Sydney’s sixties art scene, artistic success is hers for the taking. But Zelda dies young, leaving only the possibility of the artist she could have become—as well as two young children and the rumour of secret diaries.

Years later, Zelda’s daughter Ruth returns to her hometown to search for those diaries. What she finds there takes her deep into the mysteries of her parents’ and grandparents’ lives, and shifts the foundations of her own.

Weaving together the lives of three very different women across three eras, The Steele Diaries is a rich triptych of the tensions between ambition and responsibility, art and family, the past and present and future.