Garry Disher
Garry Disher has a BA from Adelaide University, an MA from Monash University and a Dip. Ed. from La Trobe University.
In 1978 he was awarded a fellowship to the creative writing school at Stanford University in California. On his return to Australia he taught creative writing part-time, becoming a full-time writer at the end of 1987. He has now written over 40 books, many of which have been translated. His works include literary, crime and children’s/young adult novels and story collections, history texts, anthologies and writers’ handbooks.
Garry’s novel The Sunken Road was nominated for the Booker Prize. He is twice the winner of the German Crime Fiction Award. The Bamboo Flute won the CBC Children’s Book of the Year Award. The Divine Wind was the winner of the Ethel Turner Prize for Young People's Literature, and has sold over 100,000 copies in Australian and foreign editions.
Garry lives on the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria.
Books by Garry Disher
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The Stencil Man
In the long hot afternoons of an Australian summer, Martin Linke makes stencils for his children, writes in his journal and dreams of freedom. He came to Australia 17 years ago from Germany, but now it is wartime and he deemed an enemy alien and interned. The Stencil Man is a novel of uneasy alliances, treachery, and escape.
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Flamingo Gate
A lawyer addicted to gritty 1950’s crime films tracks a serial killer…A father is unnerved by his daughter’s drawings…An edgy man invites strangers into his house…The stories and novellas collected here centre around the Flamingo Gate apartment complex, an icon for a world in which surface is everything and the underside dark and obsessive.
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Kickback
Wyatt robs banks, and lifts payrolls. Most men like him are dead or in gaol. But Wyatt stamps a cold, pitiless style on his heists and makes sure he never gets caught. In the world of Kickback there is no yielding, no redemption.
Kickback is the first book in the Wyatt series and is followed by Paydirt, Deathdeal, Crosskill, Port Vila Blues, and The Fallout.
Winner German Crime Fiction Prize, 2000
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Paydirt
Wyatt reappears in the South Australian outback, intent on snatching a payroll. But he is not the only one eyeing the funds. The Outfit has business with Wyatt and it will only be finished when he faces the hitman's gun.
Paydirt is the second book in the Wyatt series which began with Kickback. There are four more books in the series: Deathdeal, Crosskill, Port Vila Blues, and The Fallout.
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The Bamboo Flute
Paul is a dreamer, his head alive with rippling pianos, gentle violins and the smiles of Margaret, the one he loves. But in the cold light of day Margaret snubs him at school, the piano has been sold, his father is battling to keep the farm, and dejected men are tramping the roads.
The Bamboo Flute is an evocative story of hardship, hope, respect and recognition, set during the Great Depression.
CBC Book of the Year, Younger Readers, 1993
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PW Best 50 Books of the Year 1994 -
Deathdeal
Wyatt, professional hold-up man, is back in another tight, remorseless thriller.
The third Wyatt book in the series which began with Kickback and Paydirt and continues with Crosskill, Port Vila Blues and The Fallout.
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Ratface
For Max and Christina, the White League is all they’ve ever known. What are they to do when an outsider tells them the teachings of Ratface and the White League are wrong? A compelling story of escape from a way of life that has gone horribly wrong.
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Switchcat
Evangelina: supple, proud, satiny, sleek. Ms Whiz: scruffy, torn, fishbreathy, mean. Two cats…two girls, completely mismatched. Ms Whiz knows where she belongs — so does Evangelina.
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Crosskill
Hardboiled sleuth Wyatt confronts the Outfit to get his money back in Garry Disher's 4th Wyatt novel. The others in the series are Kickback, Paydirt, Deathdeal, Port Vila Blues and The Fallout.
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Restless
It’s a great feeling, breaking away from home, school and the restrictions of your childhood years, testing yourself in the world at last. First flight, first love, first job, first holiday alone, first place to call your own. Wait, there’s a final test — if you can survive it.
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Good one, Erm
It’s not easy moving house and making new friends. Especially not when the neighbours think you’re weird. And not when Ermyntrude, your grand piano, sends wolfhounds and comets after the man next door. And sirens, and horses and roosters, and barn owls. A warm and moving story of cranky neighbours and family love.
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Blame The Wind
The House: remote, long abandoned, harbouring terrible secrets. The cousin: sly, arrogant, sure of himself. Rob: shy, wary, feeling his way through the greatest challenge of his life. Anna: from nowhere, with secrets of her own. Who will remain steadfast and true when faced by the terrible presence of the night? What will tales the walls of the old house tell?
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Port Vila Blues
Wyatt snatches the cash easily enough. He bypasses the alarm system, eludes the cops, makes it safely back to his bolthole in Hobart. Port Vila Blues is Wyatt's fifth heist, this time leading him to a final reckoning far from home.
The other books in the Wyatt series are Kickback, Paydirt, Deathdeal, Crosskill, and The Fallout.
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The Sunken Road
The Sunken Road sparkles. Details accumulate, secrets rise to the surface, and slowly we are granted tantalising insights into the passions and heartaches of one of the most memorable characters in Australian fiction.
Nominated for the Booker Prize
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Shortlist National Book Council Award
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The Half Dead
The shadow of the Black Hall broods over the City of the Half Dead — a place where almost all the men and boys have lost a hand, an arm, a leg in mysterious accidents — or are they accidents? Renny, a teenage loner living rough, stumbles upon the Hall’s grisly secrets.
Illustrated by Shaun Tan
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Walk Twenty Run Twenty
Rick’s cousins are two specks floating on the horizon, leaving him far behind on the treacherous bush track. He looks at his punctured tyres in dismay. Ten kilometres. If he walks, he’ll be too late to save them. If he runs, he’ll expire in the heat. But now is no time to hesitate…Ian and Nina are depending on him. Then the voice of his dead father comes back to him: ‘Don’t use up all your energy at once. Walk twenty, run twenty.’
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The Fallout
In this, the sixth Wyatt novel, Wyatt takes on his most dangerous job yet - and it might be his last.
The previous Wyatt novels are: Kickback, Paydirt, Deathdeal, Crosskill, and Port Vila Blues.
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The Apostle Bird
The year is 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression. The place is a settlement of miner’s dugouts far from the nearest town. 15 year old Neil and his parents have come from Adelaide, hoping to strike it lucky, but the gold is elusive.
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Straight Bent & Barbara Vine
Twelve dazzling crime stories by an award-winning author writing at the peak of his ability, introduced by an elegant testament to the writing process itself.
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The Divine Wind
The Divine Wind depicts the lives of a group of young people living in Broome during WWII, tracing the painful effects the war has on all they hold dear.
Ethel Turner Prize for Young Adult Fiction, 1999
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Shortlist CBC Book of the Year
Shortlist NSW Ethnic Affairs Award
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The Dragon Man
This taut, complex crime novel set on the Mornington Peninsula is Disher's first Inspector Challis novel. The other books in the series are Kittyhawk Down and Snapshot
Winner German Crime Prize 2002
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Below The Waterline
Disher has assembled a fascinating collection of stories representing the very best of contemporary writing. The anthology brings together both new and established writers. Each of them have selected what they consider to be their best story, going on to explain the particular significance of the piece.
Anthology
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Your Friend Louis Deane
When Louis’ parents decide to move from the city to a small coastal town, Louis finds himself at odds with everything around him. He’s an outsider at school where he is at the mercy of bullies. He misses the city and his friends. The only person he can talk to is the ‘windmill man’, Mr. Chatters.
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Past The Headlands
There was a time when Neil Quiller's logbooks had kept him safe in the air. But it's 1941 now, he's a photo-reconnaissance pilot in Malaya, and Kimberley landmarks are no good to him at all.
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Writing Fiction
Clearly and concisely explains the fundamentals of good fiction-writing, with examples from wide variety of known writers.
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Moondyne Kate
Canongate was a colourful town in 1865 — convicts, a gold rush, marauding bushrangers — but nothing much happens now. Nat Whistler can’t wait to get out of this place. But then he discovers a thrilling link to the past: he’s descended from the Whistler, who robbed banks and gold escorts with the notorious Captain Kidd and was shot dead by troopers at the age of 15. As Nat peels away the layers of the past, his life takes a dangerous turn.
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Maddie Finn
Maddie Finn lives with her mother above a converted stables in the grounds of the big house owned by the gloomy Harold Delamore. When they are unexpectedly evicted by Delamore’s brattish daughter, Maddie’s world changes forever.
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Kittyhawk Down
An unidentified man is fished out of the sea with an anchor wrapped around his waist. And for Detective Inspector Hal Challis, this sparks the beginning of a mysterious series of deaths and strange events.
The second book in the Inspector Challis series which began with The Dragon Man and continues with Snapshot.
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Eva’s Angel
A chilling tale of love and art set in Venice.
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Two-Way Cut
Leah Flood is on the run. The cops are after her and she has to find herself a place to hide, a bolthole. The irony is, Leah is a cop too.
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Snapshot
Winter is closing in on the coastal community of Waterloo, and behind the closed doors of their neat suburban houses the residents of the peninsula have some peculiar ways of keeping warm. When Detective Inspector Hal Challis is called to investigate the brutal murder of Janine McQuarrie, his progress is hampered by a web of lies and secrets. Everybody has something to hide, something to lose, and someone in Waterloo is determined to kill again.
Snapshot is the third book in the Challis detective series which began with The Dragon Man and continued with Kittyhawk Down. Text Publishing re-issued both titles in 2006.
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Chain of Evidence
The fourth book in the Challis and Destry series, Chain of Evidence is the best yet.
Ten-year-old Katie Blasko is missing.
Detective Sergeant Ellen Destry, alert to rumours of a paedophile ring operating on the Peninsula, is thinking abduction. Her colleagues are thinking bad family, truancy. Her boss is thinking about the media. And everyone, including Ellen, is wondering whether she's good enough to handle this without D. I. Challis.
But Hal Challis is a thousand kilometres away, watching his father die. Ellen Destry's running the show on her own. And if she's right, Katie Blasko may be running out of time.
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