Eva Sallis

The Cisco triplets are appalled by their widowed father's behavior. He seems to care more about his gold-digging fiance than he does about his own son and daughters. Even worse, Dad put their spunky grandmother -- head of the family candy company -- in a nursing home against her will. Setting out to spring Granny Cisco, college seniors Sara, Hannah, and Sam soon prove that trouble comes in threes. Apparently, so does love. As the triplets get their grandmother the medical care that will make her independent again, all three find unexpected romance. If everything goes according to plan, there's going to be quite a crowd at Granny's house come Christmas -- and more proof than ever that there's no place like home for the holidays.

A child abandoned in a decaying city finds a home with a pack of dogs and only slowly learns what it means to be human. This outstanding, moving novel has won a host of prizes for its Australian author: - Winner, Fiction category, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, 2010 - Shortlisted, Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 2009 - Shortlisted, ASL Gold Medal, 2010 - Shortlisted, Literary Fiction Book of the Year, ABIA, 2010

This is the story of Dhurgham, a young Iraqi who has lost everything. A powerful, exquisitely written novel that gives a human face to the experiences of exile and migration.Dhurgham As-Samarra'i is a twelve-year-old boy, the youngest child in a middle-class Baghdadi family. He finds himself at the Great Mosque in Damascus in Syria, not knowing what has happened to his parents and sister who fled Baghdad with him. The only thing he knows is that he was told that if the family became separated they were to meet at the Mosque. Alone, he waits and waits.This is the story of what befalls Dhurgham after he realises his family won't be turning up; it is the story of his journey into adulthood, his journey through bitterness to forgiveness, and his journey from Iraq to Syria, to Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand and beyond.Detained after arriving in Australia, Dhurgham, resilient yet unable to deal with his past, becomes an untried criminal existing in limbo as his file is processed. Fleetingly, New Zealand offers a refuge, family and affection but he is caught again in a nightmare of red-tape and confinement until his hope turns into anger and his past must be faced and resolved.What do you do when you belong nowhere, with no family, no homeland, and no hope for the future? Who do you become?A searingly honest story about separation, journeys and unbearable injustice.

The settlement of Wahrheit, founded in exile to await the return of the Messiah, has been waiting longer than expected. Pastor Helfgott has begun to feel the subtle fraying of the community's faith. Then Matthias Orion shoots his wife and himself, on the very day their son Benedict returns home from boarding school. Benedict is unmoored by shock, severed from his past and his future. Unable to be inside the house, unable to speak, he moves into the barn with the horses and chooks, relying on the animals' strength and the rhythm of the working day to hold his shattered self together. The pastor watches over Benedict through the year of his crazy grief: man and boy growing, each according to his own capacity, as they come to terms with the unknowable past and the frailties of being human.

Vibrating with life and woven with evocative Arabic fables, these stories are about the differences between Lebanese and Australian culture: between parents and children, new lives and old. With warmth, humour and insight, Sallis s eloquent prose captures the pain as well as the joys of living in a new land.Zein, Farhan, Rayya and their circle are migrants of the fifties, yearning for both their future and their past. Their children, Salah, Rima, Hussein and their friends are young Australians with a distinctive voice and place, succeeding or failing in the clash between generations, struggling for independence in the face of their parents hopes and dreams. Abdal-Rahman is an Iraqi refugee who has lost everything. And Ali, Ahmad, Akram and Yusuf are children in Palestine and Baghdad who have no future but whose stories soar.Mahjar is about lives, journeys and stories, about exile and theexperiences that push people to new homelands. Through interwovenstories and fables, it evokes Australia s intimate connection with theMiddle East. as well as the joys of living in a new land.

When Nina's antique store burns down, nine-year old reporter Hilde and her sister/photographer, Izzy, are determined to investigate the cause for the Orange Street News--and their main clue is a bird's nest of baby blue jays.

"The Thousand and One Nights was secular literature, not approved by the cultured literary classes as literature at all. It existed as a popular entertainment and much of it expressed the desires, wishes and experiences of a middle to lower class urban and mercantile people. However, that is what it was, once. What it is now is infinitely more complex because it was reborn into an alien environment in 1704, an environment in which its signs were received in a radically different way from their accepted meanings in their culture of birth. Not only were most of its referents unknown, but its signs took on a reference unique to them, a reference to a general system of imaginative perception in which one of the essential components was mystery and a sense of being cut loose from meaning." "Works of literature change as people and cultures who read them change. This study explores the Nights with reference to this view of literature, for the Nights has a history distinguished by transformation."--Jacket.