The Playmaker
Thomas Keneally, The Playmaker
(1780s English officer guides convicts in Australia through production of a Restoration comedy)
Australian Life (the funny side)
Rodney Hall, Kisses of the Enemy
Peter Carey, Illywacker
Howard Jacobson, Redback
Elizabeth Jolley, The Funny Side
Convicts (prison as living Hell)
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (19th-century England: corrupting effects of money, and life in the Marshalsea Debtors" Prison)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (20th-century USSR: unsparing account of life in labour-camp for dissidents)
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (19th-century France honest man wrongly convicted to the galleys tries to rehabilitate himself)
John Cheever, Falconer (20th-century USA: life in "correctional facility" as experienced by mentally unstable, middle-class wife-murderer)
Faction (novels embroidering real events)
John Fowles, A Maggot (witchcraft, murder and possible UFOs in18th-century England)
Tony Weeks-Pearson, Dodo (extermination of dodo brings culture-shock to native inhabitants of idyllic Pacific island)
Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal (plot to assassinate General de Gaulle of France)
E.L. Doctorow, The Book of Daniel (lives of children of US immigrants executed for espionage)
Martin Cruz Smith, Stallion Gate (Mexican magic versus development of first atomic bomb)
Frontiers of Civilisation
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (religious hysteria and persecution in Puritan New England)
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Nigerian tribal life, the rhythms of civilisation, disrupted by coming of white missionaries)
Brian Moore, Black Robe (Jesuit priest in 17th-century Huron Indian country: irreconcilable culture-clash)
Plays and Plays-Actors ("luvvies" is not the word)
Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost (amateurs in 1950s Canadian university town)
Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (thoughts and feelings of everyone involved in village historical pageant)
Noel Langley, There"s a Porpoise Close Behind Us (sour success of "bright young things" on 1930s London stage)
Paul Bailey, Peter Smart"s Confessions (testimony of unsuccessful, mentally unstable actor)
The Australian Past (Aboriginal culture and the pain brought, and felt, by whites)
Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves (shipwrecked 1910s woman learns survival by assimilating Aborigine culture)
William Golding, Close Quarters (life on 1790s convict-ship sailing from England to Australia)
Bruce Chatwin, The Song Lines (writer travels modern Australia, investigating Aboriginal sacred places)
Eleanor Dark, The Timeless Land (first white settlers in Australia)