Cory Taylor is one of Australia’s celebrated novelists, the author of the brilliant Me and Mr Booker (winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, Pacific region), and My Beautiful Enemy (shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award). At the age of sixty, she is dying of melanoma-related brain cancer. Her illness is no longer treatable. As she tells us in her remarkable last book, Dying: A Memoir, she now weighs less than her neighbour’s retriever. Written in the space of a few weeks, in a tremendous creative surge, this powerful and beautifully written book is a clear-eyed account of what dying has taught Cory: she describes the tangle of her feelings, she reflects on her life, and she remembers the lives and deaths of her parents. She tells us why she would like to be able to choose the circumstances of her own death. Dying: A Memoir is a breathtaking book about vulnerability and strength, courage and humility, anger and acceptance. It is...

A heartbreaking story of love and loss set against the backdrop of a Japanese internment camp in Victoria during WW2.Arthur Wheeler is haunted by his infatuation with a Japanese youth he encountered in the enemy alien camp where he worked as a guard during WW2. Abandoning his wife and baby son, Arthur sets out on a doomed mission to rescue his lover from forced deportation back to Japan, a country in ruins. Thus begins the secret history of a soldier at war with his own sexuality and dangerously at odds with the racism that underpins the crumbling British Empire. Four decades later Arthur is still obsessed with the traumatic events of his youth. He proposes a last reunion with his lost lover, in the hope of laying his ghosts to rest, but this mission too seems doomed to failure. Like Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and Snow Falling On Cedars, My Beautiful Enemy explores questions of desire and redemption against the background of...

Shortlisted, Commonwealth Book Prize 2012 I told them about my mother and father.'They broke up,' I said. 'So now I am emotionally scarred for life. At least that's my excuse.' 'For what?' said Mrs Booker. 'I don't know,' I said. 'It hasn't happened yet.' Looking back, Martha could've said no when Mr Booker first tried to kiss her. That would've been the sensible thing to do. But she's sixteen, she lives in a small dull town-a cemetery with lights-her father is mad, her home is stifling, and she's waiting for the rest of her life to begin. Of course Martha would kiss the charming Englishman who brightened her world with style, adventure, whiskey, cigarettes and sex. But Martha didn't count on the consequences. 'Hands down, one of the best coming-of-age novels I've ever read.' Benjamin Law, author of The Family Law