Paradise Gardens is not the idyllic holiday escape Charles and Julia Cant imagined. It's a down-at-heel seaside town where local big man Roy and his wife tempt them to behave in ways they'll be sure to regret...In her introduction, Nadia Wheatley asks: 'is it a romance? A thriller? A melodrama? A tragedy? Is it a Gothic? Is it a lyrical exploration of a physical and emotional landscape? An allegory about Heaven and Hell? Or is it simply an account of an accommodation made in the empty relation­ship of two sort of proto-yuppies?' She doesn't answer the questions: it's for the reader to decide.First published in 1959, and reissued in 1989, Walk to the Paradise Gardens is the first 'real' novel Charmian Clift wrote alone (her earlier works, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me A Lotus were semi-autobiographical). This edition contains the 1989 edition's introduction by Nadia Wheatley, author of the award-winning biography The Life and Myth of Charmian...

Two classic travel works by Charmian Clift describing the life she and her Australian family led in Greece in the 1950's in one volume. For Charmian Clift, Greece was the Promised Land. In 1954 she and her husband, George Johnston, abandoned their sophisticated London existence and set off with two new typewriters and two small children to start a new life. In Mermaid Singing - written during the first miraculous year of discovery - she records the family's adaptation to the primitive sponge-diving island of Kalymnos. Peel Me a Lotus continues the exploration as Clift and Johnson buy a house on the island of Hydra, in the middle of the summer tourist trail. Clift's writing about Greece was undervalued at the time of first publication, because she wrote from a women's point of view and recorded the intimate details of daily life. It is exactly this quality which enables this classic to appeal to a new generation of readers.

THE END OF EVERYTHING WAS HER BEGINNING It's December 2023 and the world as we know it has ended. The human race has been wiped out by a virus called 6DM ('Six Days Maximum' - the longest you've got before your body destroys itself). But somehow, in London, one woman is still alive. A woman who has spent her whole life compromising what she wants, hiding how she feels and desperately trying to fit in. A woman who is entirely unprepared to face a future on her own. Now, with only an abandoned golden retriever for company, she must travel through burning cities, avoiding rotting corpses and ravenous rats on a final journey to discover if she really is the last surviving person on earth. And with no one else to live for, who will she become now that she's completely alone?

The world can be a very strange and alienating place. Jen has known this all her life, and at last she may have found someone else who knows it too. But time is fleeting, as Jen is all too aware, and no matter how desperately she wants to prevent its passing, it seems she never can. Perhaps the answer lies within the grandfather clock…The Rise of Germania ~ The Warlord has stolen the greatest treasure that the 5th Worlde has ever known, and he flees the Oriental Empire, heading homeward. Empress Wu is perusing her former lover, who is accompanied by a ragged Holy Man, a Templar Knight, and the Brothers Polo.In Germania, Old King Henry, the Lion of Bavaria is murdered. His wife, Matilda, The Holy Roman Empress plots to cease the throne and use the might of Bavaria to reclaim her title as the true Queen of England, and of its empire.However, she has not allowed for the ambition of the Head Eunuch and Volker, the chancellor, who intend to usurp the power and rule through the puppet prince.Yet the Warlord and his hedge priest have plans of their own.Milo and his brother Ziggy, are poor Bavarian country boys, fresh from the battle of Bronhöved, they are now caught up in the High Fuhrer's war, as the Unification of Germania begins.

Before their years on the Greek Island of Hydra, their well-documented friendship with celebrated singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, and their literary celebrity, Charmian Clift and George Johnston collaborated on High Valley, a mystery set in the Himalayas. It won them The Sydney Morning Herald Literary Competition in 1948, and was first published in 1949.Charmian Clift's subsequent works include the autobiographical portraits Peel Me a Lotus (1959) and Mermaid Singing (1956), and the novel Walk to the Paradise Gardens (1960), which is also in the Untapped Collection. George Johnston's novels include the trilogy, My Brother Jack (1964), winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1964, Clean Straw for Nothing (1969), winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1969, and A Cartload of Clay (1971). In 1970, Johnston was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to literature.

The never-before-published novel by Charmian Clift'In those days the end of the morning was always marked by the quarry whistle blowing the noon knock-off. Since everybody was out of bed very early, morning then was a long time, or even, if you came to think about it, a round time—symmetrical anyway, and contained under a thin, radiant, dome shaped cover...'During the years of the Great Depression, Cressida Morley and her eccentric family live in a weatherboard cottage on the edge of a wild beach. Outsiders in their small working-class community, they rant and argue and read books and play music and never feel themselves to be poor. Yet as Cressida moves beyond childhood, she starts to outgrow the place that once seemed the centre of the world. As she plans her escape, the only question is: who will she become?The End of the Morning is the final and unfinished autobiographical novel by Charmian Clift. Published here for the first time, it is the book that...

A Death in Geneva is a fast-paced thriller set against the background of late-1970s terrorism that crisscrosses Europe, the United States, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic as mysterious assailants terrorize one of America's richest industrialist families. The action begins when Constance Burdette, the newly appointed American ambassador to the European office of the United Nations—and the President's secret lover—is cut down by machine gun fire in a bloody, well-planned strike against her chauffeured limousine in Geneva. The three assassins, continue their attack by stalking the late Ambassador's brother, Thomas Madison Starring, America's leading shipbuilder and owner of an international shipping fleet. As the assassins close in on their prey, the tense plot moves to a final, devastating act of terror.

Smithy's cupboard has always been his refuge despite its different locations and uses. It serves him well in his childhood days on the Wimmera area broad-acre farm in Victoria where he was born and grew up. He plays with his toy soldiers inside the secret place. As he grows to observe wild life and later hunt game, he makes hides. His career in the army leads him to join the SAS as one of Australia's top snipers. His clever use of hides and secret areas makes him well known and respected, and he is drawn deeply into CIA operations. A family tragedy changes his outlook and leads him into a crime of vengeance. He uses various means to assist him in his own personal therapy and he frequently seeks the confessional, yet perdition ticks away inside his mind like a noisy metronome

Letters to Montgomery Clift is a novel of endurance and hope. It is a tale of growing up, coming out, and going home

The sequel to Smithy's Cupboard finds Dave Smith's daughter Suzie in the USA on tour with her country and western band. She impersonates Johnny Cash and June Carter with her rendition of 'She Walks the Line'. However, she also has a top secret mission: after courageously disarming a crazed man outside the entrance to the White House, she has been recruited to gather intelligence for the Secret Service. Suzie falls in love with an agent who has a lot of military experience and an undiscovered enemy lurking. Extreme danger follows Suzie, with twists, turns and dramas which she overcomes in her uncompromising fashion. The spirit of her mother offers encouragement and cautions her about aping her father, but in the end she knows what she must do to stop the stalker, because Suzie Smith is her father's daughter—a natural born killer.