A dark, brooding and erotic ghost story. Can you imagine what it must be like to take the souls of others? Marcello Mansini has been dead for more than two months, his body lost in the icy depths of Lac Leman. But when Aaron and Rebecca stumble across his gravestone, their hearts full of human despair, Mansini slips into their lives like the ancient viper he is. Soon, very soon, he will summon them both into the freezing darkness of the lake ... but only when their fear and horror have reached sickening heights.
Beginning in the sulphur mines of Sicily over a century ago, Black Mountain takes you on a journey through time and back again. When a boy sold into slavery finds the courage to escape his brutal life, he is saved by a mysterious stranger, who raises the boy as his own. Renamed Cesare Montenero after SicilyOCOs own ?black mountainOCO, Mount Etna, the boy grows up to discover that his rescue was no accident, that his physical strength is unnatural, and that he has more in common with his saviour than he could have imagined. And when he meets the enigmatic Celeste, he suspects for the first time that he many not be alone. Based on factual events and ranging through Italy, Paris and the rural fringes of coastal Australia, Black Mountain is a haunting exploration of what it means to be human.
Sweeping from Sicily to Australia, spanning generations and very different worlds, The Volcano is a novel of power, passion and sheer blazing brilliance from one of our most talented and original writers. A fiercely original, beautifully written, multi-layered tour de force of immense power and humanity, The Volcano tells the tumultuous story of Emilio Aquila, a boy driven mad by love for a woman beyond his reach. His passion turns him into an outcast, forced to live away from his village in the labyrinthine caves high on the slopes of Sicily's Mount Etna. His determination to right the wrongs dealt to him turns him into a kidnapper and a gangster – and compels him to seek a new life half a world away. But will he be able to escape the shadows of the past? And will Australia ever be more to him than a place of suffering and regret? An incandescent novel of abduction, passion and torment from the fiery heart of Sicily.
Armanno writes with such intensity, his words detonate off the page...The real surprise is the unfolding humanity of the novel. Armanno writes of people with a deep and loving kindness...an opera, full-blown and gut-wrenching.' THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD For Romeo Costanzo and the gallery of tempestuous characters he meets in the languid city of Brisbane, barriers of time and family and death barely exist. All that is important is the rage and compassion that may one day lead them to understand the 'river of memory' that twists and turns though their hearts. A passionate story of love and desire, Romeo of the Underworld brilliantly realises the promise of The Lonely Hunter and confirms Venero Armanno as one of our finest and most original writers.
Dealing with the nature of reality and dreams, of love, identity, despair and salvation, this is a truly brilliant and startlingly original novel. An Australian novelist is living in an arts community in Paris, trying to write. He is mourning the death of the love of his life, Kiko. Still drowning in grief, one day he is harassed by a beggar, who claims to be a famous American writer, Sonny Lee. As his life is penetrated by Sonny it begins to unravel. Soon the novelist encounters Zoya, a mute Russian girl with whom he makes love, and in turn she introduces him to Les Belles Endormies - a place where, after drinking a potent green tea, clients fall asleep and experience hallucinogenic dreams about episodes in their past. In the meantime the death of a friend brings the novelist into contact with Emilie, and slowly love begins to seem possible to him again. The story moves from Paris's artistic community to the maelstrom of a dance party in the city's streets to its chilling subterranean catacombs to the eerie thermal springs of Pamukkale in Turkey.
Rock and jazz drummer Max is dead. Now, in his coffin as his friends prepare to bury him, Max is surrounded by the ghosts of his life and the dreams that never faded. All the old music is back too - from raw seventies rock-and-roll to the type of cool jazz that made legends of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. In this sea of memory, Max recalls the tragedies, people and relationships that defined his life. From his first love Maree Kilmister he learned about sex; from his great love Debbie Canova he learned about loss; and from the enigmatic Laetecia Sparks, he learned about hope. As the players in his life gather for his funeral, he has one last chance to relive his past and see it for what it was. Driven by music and passion, The Dirty Beat shimmers with an electric intensity.
From one of Australia's hottest writers comes a brooding novel of suspense and dark secrets, retribution and rock 'n roll. A lonely road on a dark night when the rain comes sheeting down. A motel room in a small town where fantasies fester and money changes hands. One man determined to preserve the past, at any cost. Another man trying to escape it. And between them a young woman with ink-black hair and secrets she doesn't want to tell. Joe's a man with memories he'd rather forget. Memories of driving through the rain one night when the world turned upside down. Now the rain's come again and Joe's world is spinning out of control.
Charlie Smoke is living out his early retirement from the boxing ring as a bricklayer. It is the mid-1970s and he believes his best days are behind him. He's lost his wife and daughter to his questionable past, but when he meets Holly Banks and her teenage son, Ricky, he has a chance to do things differently. As an unlikely friendship develops with Ricky, Charlie is unwittingly pulled back into the gambling underworld he thought he'd left behind. In order to make a new future, first he must help settle some old scores. Burning Down is a searing new novel from acclaimed storyteller Venero Armanno about family, regret, love and the promise of salvation.
Love, blood and pasta over three decades in Brisbane. She used to sell her kisses for caramels; her lips went for long licks of liquorice and her touch for tangerines and tutti frutti. She looked as Irish as rain out of a sunny blue day and as English as green meadows where wildflowers grow, and her name was Gabriella Maria Santuzza Zazo. When Gabriella moves in next door to 14-year-old Sam with her parents and her ageing grandfather - a man who carries the secrets of their Mediterranean island inside his slowly darkening mind - Sam knows that his life will never be the same. Set in Brisbane's Sicilian community over three decades, from 1975 to 1995, Firehead is an eerie story of generations of love, of police corruption and a city's changing terrain, and of searching for one place in the world you can finally say is home. This is sensuous, compelling storytelling with an aching mystery at its heart.
A novel of great strength and imagination, The Lonely Hunter is a journey into evil and redemption by one of Australia's most original and passionate writers. Rich, successful Eddie Bevelacqua has it all, or so it seems to his poor second cousin and gardener, Romeo. But while Eddie is intent on a strange psychological odyssey to purge himself of 'the tapestry of sins' in his past, there is only one thing the romantic Romeo really covets: Eddie's wife, Kelly. Watching Eddie's descent into Hell, trying to win Kelly's heart but shackled by his own mistakes and memories, Romeo can only dream of his own salvation and try to make sense of 'the dark romance of this world'. A novel of great strength and imagination, The Lonely Hunter is a journey into evil and redemption, into the 'twistings and turnings and treacheries of the human heart'.
Themes of friendship and belonging On the very first day that Nic and Naomi became friends they discovered that there were two things they both liked the best. The first was that they liked to run fast. They found that they could run faster than anyone just after Naomi and her mother moved into the little wooden falling-down house right at the end of Rabbit Street. Nic and Naomi have a race down Rabbit Street straight off and then discover all the other fun and funny things they have in common...
Rock and jazz drummer Max is dead. Now, in his coffin as his friends prepare to bury him, Max is surrounded by the ghosts of his life and the dreams that never faded. All the old music is back too - from raw seventies rock-and-roll to the type of cool jazz that made legends of John Coltrane and Miles Davis. In this sea of memory, Max recalls the tragedies, people and relationships that defined his life. From his first love Maree Kilmister he learned about sex; from his great love Debbie Canova he learned about loss; and from the enigmatic Laetecia Sparks, he learned about hope. As the players in his life gather for his funeral, he has one last chance to relive his past and see it for what it was. Driven by music and passion, The Dirty Beat shimmers with an electric intensity.
Sweeping from Sicily to Australia, spanning generations and very different worlds, The Volcano is a novel of power, passion and sheer blazing brilliance from one of our most talented and original writers. A fiercely original, beautifully written, multi-layered tour de force of immense power and humanity, The Volcano tells the tumultuous story of Emilio Aquila, a boy driven mad by love for a woman beyond his reach. His passion turns him into an outcast, forced to live away from his village in the labyrinthine caves high on the slopes of Sicily's Mount Etna. His determination to right the wrongs dealt to him turns him into a kidnapper and a gangster – and compels him to seek a new life half a world away. But will he be able to escape the shadows of the past? And will Australia ever be more to him than a place of suffering and regret? An incandescent novel of abduction, passion and torment from the fiery heart of Sicily.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.