Christos Tsiolkas

At a festive barbecue in the Melbourne suburb a man slaps the child of another couple, triggering a court case and a variety of confrontations within the lives of the the families and friends present.

Matt Collingsworth: Texas charm, cowboy cache and totally loaded with male sex appeal!Coming to a woman's rescue was all in a day's work for the billionaire rancher. Little did Matt know that the woman in jeopardy he'd jumped off his horse to save was working undercover, investigating him.By way of his mother, no less!Trouble had never looked so good to Shelly Lane. Exposing the Collingsworths was a golden opportunity to prove she had what it took to be a real agent. But she could not let Matt Collingsworth distract her. Even though the man could fill out a pair of jeans--oh my!What Shelly had to do involved the highest national security and would in the end devastate the Collingsworth empire...and surely destroy her chances for a date with Matt.

Contemporary fiction. Love, sex, death, family, friendship, betrayal, tenderness, sacrifice and revelation. This incendiary collection of stories from acclaimed bestselling international writer Christos Tsiolkas takes you deep into worlds both strange and familiar, and characters that will never let you go.

'Dead Europe' is an unsettling ghost story ahout blood lust, blood libel and blood revenge, a novel of blazing brilliance about the truths and lies of mythology and history. Isaac a young Australian photographer, is travelling through Europe. His whole life he longed for the sophistication and wealth of his father's stories, the Europe at the centre of civilisation and culture. But behind the facade of a unified and globalised contemporary society, he finds a history-blasted wasteland, a place forever condemned by the ghosts of its unspeakable past. In the mountain village where his mother was born, he unearths ancient terrors that have not been laid to rest, and perhaps never can be.

'They kill us, they crucify us, they throw us to beasts in the arena, they sew our lips together and watch us starve. They bugger children in front of fathers and violate men before the eyes of their wives. The temple priests flay us openly in the streets and the Judeans stone us. We are hunted everywhere and we are hunted by everyone. We are despised, yet we grow. We are tortured and crucified and yet we flourish. We are hated and still we multiply. Why is that? You must wonder, how is it we survive?' Christos Tsiolkas' stunning new novel Damascus is a work of soaring ambition and achievement, of immense power and epic scope, taking as its subject nothing less than events surrounding the birth and establishment of the Christian church. Based around the gospels and letters of St Paul, and focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ, as well as Paul (Saul) himself, Damascus nevertheless explores the themes that have always obsessed Tsiolkas as a writer: class, religion, masculinity, patriarchy, colonisation, refugees; the ways in which nations, societies, communities, families and individuals are united and divided - it's all here, the contemporary and urgent questions, perennial concerns made vivid and visceral. In Damascus, Tsiolkas has written a masterpiece of imagination and transformation: an historical novel of immense power and an unflinching dissection of doubt and faith, tyranny and revolution, and cruelty and sacrifice.

While on a trip to the Florida Keys with his grandfather, Jim hopes to do some fishing but becomes involved in a mystery about an old crime linked to the owner of the resort where they are staying on vacation.