Folklorist Scott has expanded the field of Australian folklore beyond traditional tales and arts by examining the urban folktale or contemporary legend, verbatim yarns like the tall tale and the folklore perpetuated in the schoolroom and the playground, particularly the range of games played, the need to document these in the Australian context, also the need to document the folklore that arose around World War II, how our higher education institutions have mostly neglected the study of our own folklore, except perhaps in the area of the anthropology of Aboriginal culture, and the lack of a central repository for Australian folklore research.

Peter Carey's highly charged, recklessly funny new novel is narrated by artist Butcher Bones and idiot-savant brother, Hugh. It recounts their adventures after Butcher's plummeting prices and spiralling drink problem force them to retreat to northern New South Wales, where the formerly famous artist is reduced to acting as caretaker for his patron and nurse to his brother. Then, one stormy night, mysterious American beauty Marlene turns up, clad in a pair of Manolo Blahniks. Claiming that the brothers' neighbour owns an original Jacques Leibovitz, she sets in motion a chain of events that could be the making or ruin of them all.

Paperback reprint in the 'Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics' series of the second novel by the Australian winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Set in London in the 1930s, it portrays the complex rhythms of relationships within a family. First published in 1941. The author's other novels include 'The Tree of Man' and 'The Eye of the Storm'.

Winner of the 1988 American Institute of Physics Prize, Ferris's book offers the listener 'an exhilarating, wide-ranging journey that takes us from the shores of the Mediterranean, where the second-century astronomer Claudius Ptolemy fashioned his creaky celestial spheres, to modern-day research institutes, where theorists contemplate this and other universes bubbling out of a quantum vacuum.' (The New York Times)