Thea Farmer, a reclusive and difficult retired school principal, lives in isolation with her dog in the Blue Mountains. Her distinguished career ended under a cloud over a decade earlier, following a scandal involving a much younger male teacher. After losing her savings in the financial crash, she is forced to sell the dream house she had built for her old age and live on in her dilapidated cottage opposite.

A forthright investigation of human frailty and emotion with a plot that keeps you in its thrall until the last word.

Greer Gordon lives in Italy with Mischa Svoboda, a driven Czech-born painter with a booming international reputation. She and Mischa met in the 1970s, when his debut show at the small Melbourne art gallery where Greer then worked created a sensation. He was unknown at the time, a recently arrived refugee from Prague. Their explosive love affair caused Greer to abandon her husband, job and autocratic boss Verity, sever all contact with home and embark on a nomadic life with Mischa.

Twenty-five years later, Tony, a young American art critic, has been researching a biography of Mischa and arrives in the small Italian hilltop community where they now live. Greer is consumed by anxiety, fearing ‘the biographer’ may have unearthed something that happened as a consequence of her meeting Mischa, a buried secret she had intended to write out of her life story. Greer and Tony play out a gripping cat-and-mouse game in which she tries to glean who he has spoken to and what, if anything, he knows, while he lets drop, with calculated casualness, graded snippets of information designed to keep her guessing. Read more…

“A tremendous first novel possessing real charm, a kind of freshness and guilelessness that is very potent – and a toughness and reality that I genuinely applaud” – William Boyd

Nobody told me there’d be days like these,
Strange days indeed.
‘Nobody Told Me’, John Lennon

Hilarious, tragic and always brilliant, Days Like These is a sophisticated, witty and tragicomic novel about a cathartic few months in the lives of four expatriate Australians living in London.

It’s 1984, London, and after a horrific breakup with her famous playwright lover, Louisa, an international journalist, has returned to the comforting fold of her closest friends from university – friendships that were forged almost 20 years ago. But instead of finding the calming atmosphere of a steady and stable haven of intimate friends content in their middle age, Lou discovers that chaos, change and catharsis rule supreme, with hilarious – and tragic – consequences. Read more…