Lost your heart to the headstrong Sybylla? Dreaming of an outback romance? If the sassy new Netflix adaption of My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin’s 1901 classic novel, has you dreaming of life Down Under, these five Australian classics might just be the perfect tonic…
The Well by Elizabeth Jolley
The wide expanses of rural Australia have never seemed more claustrophobic than in this jet-black gem of a novel, winner of the 1986 Miles Franklin award. When eccentric Hester Harper brings a young woman to live on her isolated sheep farm, they create a strange neverland together – until the night they run down a man on the lonely farm track, and throw his body down the well . . .
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
Named by the Guardian as one of the 100 best novels of all time, Hazzard’s dazzling, mysterious masterpiece follows two sisters, Caro and Grace Bell, who leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. But as the decades pass and their paths weave and cross across the world – from Sydney to London, New York to Stockholm – two slow-burning secrets wait in ambush for them.
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
This sweeping 1977 epic romance was adapted into one of the most-watched miniseries of all time, and the book has lost none of its hypnotic power. Forget Fleabag and discover the original Hot Priest, Ralph de Bricassart, in this scandalous forbidden romance that spans three generations in the rugged Australian Outback.
The Women in Black by Madeleine St John
Sybylla’s irrepressible spirit lives on in this charming comic novel set in a 1950s Sydney department store, as the women of Ladies’ Cocktail Frocks cope with wayward husbands, exam results, love affairs and the Christmas rush. Tender, poignant and joyful, Madeleine St John conjures a vanished summer of innocence.
The Dry by Jane Harper
Australian crime writing roared into the bestseller charts almost ten years ago with this stunning debut thriller. Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, three members of the Hadler family are found brutally murdered – and secrets from the past bubble to the surface. The unforgiving landscape of rural Kiewarra is a protagonist in itself in this stunningly atmospheric mystery.
