International Authors Book Club

Read an author of your choosing from a predetermined country. March’s nation is Australia. We will meet each third Thursday of the month to discuss your author, their works, and any themes they explore.

To get you started, check out our list of a few literary award-winning authors. The bolded fiction titles are available through your Santa Fe Public Library as books or ebooks (Hoopla or Overdrive/Libby).

For disability accommodations, please contact a Programs Manager for SFPL at 505-955-6786 or 505-955-2817.

Suggested authors:

Peter Carey, author of True History of the Kelly Gang and Oscar and Lucinda

Winner of the 2001 Booker Prize, True History of the Kelly Gang describes the life of Australia’s greatest outlaw in his own words, as we see what motivations lie behind the actions of this notorious bushranger. Combining fact with fiction (Carey admitted it’s around 90% made up, ‘but it really respects the 2%’ that is true), the story follows Kelly’s short life from his teenage years to his death at the age of 26, after he’d become one of the most wanted men in the country.

Carey provides insight into the major themes of the era, spotlighting the police corruption and violence prevalent in 19th-century Australia. Carey is one of only four writers to have won the award twice, for Kelly Gang and 1988’s Oscar and Lucinda.

Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Flanagan was born in a remote mining town in Tasmania and was inspired to write the 2014 Booker Prize winner, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by his father’s experience on the Burma Death Railway during World War II.

The story centers around Australian doctor Dorrigo Evans, a war veteran who is lauded for his actions as a prisoner of war in charge of 700 men, but wracked with guilt and a sense of failure, haunted by an affair with his uncle’s wife.

Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career

Franklin's 1901 ground-breaking debut was an instant sensation and enjoyed a renewed interest with the popularity of the 1979 film.  This classic is the candid tale of the aspirations and frustrations of 16-year-old Sybylla Melvin, a headstrong country girl constrained by middle-class social arrangements, especially the pressure to marry. Trapped on her parents' outback farm, she longs for a more refined lifestyle-to read, to think, to sing-but most of all to do great things. Suddenly her life is transformed when she is whisked away to live on her grandmother's gracious property. There Sybylla falls under the eye of the rich and handsome Harry Beecham. Soon she finds herself choosing between everything a conventional life offers and her own plans for a 'brilliant career.'

Helen Garner, author of This House of Grief (ebook) and The Children’s Bach

On Father’s Day 2005, separated husband Robert Farquharson was driving his three young sons back to their mom’s house when the car veered off the road and plunged into a dam. Farquharson survived the crash, but his boys drowned. Was this a tragic accident, or an act of revenge? The court case that followed became a national obsession—a macabre parade of witnesses, family members, and the defendant himself, each forced to relive the unthinkable for an audience of millions. In This House of Grief, Garner tells the definitive and deeply absorbing story of it all, from crash to final verdict, in this acclaimed work of literary journalism.

The Children's Bach follows Dexter and Athena Fox, a husband and wife who live with their two sons in the inner suburbs of early-1980s Melbourne. Dexter is gregarious, opinionated, and old fashioned. Athena is a dutiful wife and mother, stoic yet underestimated. When a friend from Dexter's past resurfaces, she and her cast of beguiling companions reveal another world to Dexter and Athena: a bohemian underground, unbound by routine and driven by desire, where choice seems to exist independent of consequence.

Jane Harper, author of The Dry (Book #1 of the Detective Aaron Falk series)

After getting a note demanding his presence, Federal Agent Aaron Falk arrives in his hometown for the first time in decades to attend the funeral of his best friend, Luke. Twenty years ago when Falk was accused of murder, Luke was his alibi. Falk and his father fled under a cloud of suspicion, saved from prosecution only because of Luke's steadfast claim that the boys had been together at the time of the crime.

Now, amid the worst drought in a century, Falk and the local detective question what really happened to Luke. As Falk investigates, long-buried mysteries resurface, as do the lies that have haunted them.  Other books in the series are The Survivors, Force of Nature and Exiles.

Shirley Hazzard, author of The Bay of Noon, Transit of Venus and The Great Fire

Her first book, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories, was published in 1963. Her other books include The Evening of the Holiday, People in Glass Houses, The Bay of Noon, Greene on Capri, Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case, Defeat of an Ideal, and The Ancient Shore: Dispatches From Naples written with her husband Francis Steegmuller. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1980 for The Transit of Venus and the National Book Award for fiction in 2003 for The Great Fire.

Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s Ark (republished as Schindler’s List)

The 1982 Booker-winning Schindler’s Ark tells the story of Oskar Schindler, flawed hero and businessman, who was a serving member of the Nazi Party during the Second World War. Schindler risked his life in the process of saving approximately 1,200 Polish Jews from the death camps, employing them in his enamelware and ammunition factories in Brněnec, in what is now the Czech Republic. Keneally stumbled upon the story while buying a briefcase in Beverly Hills, in 1980, at a shop owned by Leopold Pfefferberg, one of the individuals saved by Schindler.

The novel was adapted into the film, Schindler’s List, winner of seven Oscars. Keneally has been nominated for the Booker Prize four times. He is well known for his historical fiction – The Daughters of Mars, Napoleon’s Last Island, Shame and the Captives and Australian history books, as well as The Place Where Souls Are Born: A Journey into the American Southwest, available in SFPL’s Southwest collections at all three locations.

David Malouf, author of Remembering Babylon and Ransom

A tale of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, Ransom is a retelling of one of the most famous stories in all of literature--Achilles's slaughter and desecration of Hector, and Priam's attempt to ransom his son's body in Homer's "The Iliad."

Remembering Babylon was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize, while Malouf’s body of work was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2011.

Melina Marchetta, author of Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil

Marchetta grew up in an Italian immigrant family in Australia, giving her a unique perspective on Australian society, notably in Looking for Alibranid. Her most successful novels often explore themes of identity, community, and displacement such as the mystery Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil.

Liane Moriarty, author of Three Wishes, The Husband's Secret, Big Little Lies, and Truly Madly Guilty

Three Wishes is the heart-warming first novel from Moriarty, also the author of not-so-charming The Husband's Secret, Big Little Lies, and Truly Madly Guilty. Lyn, Cat, and Gemma Kettle, beautiful 33-year-old triplets, seem to attract attention everywhere they go. Together, laughter, drama, and mayhem seem to follow them. But apart, each is dealing with her own share of ups and downs. Lyn has organized her life into one big checklist, Cat has just learned a startling secret about her marriage, and Gemma, who bolts every time a relationship hits the six-month mark, holds out hope for lasting love.

Patrick White, author of The Eye of the Storm and Riders in the Chariot

In White's 1973 classic, The Eye of the Storm, terrifying matriarch Elizabeth Hunter is facing death while her impatient children -- Sir Basil, the celebrated actor, and Princess de Lascabane, an adoptive French aristocrat -- wait. He won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Literature for “his considerable contributions to Australian literature in the 20th Century.”

Charlotte Wood, author of Stone Yard Devotional and The Weekend

Shortlisted for the 2004 Booker Prize, Stone Yard Devotional is an exploration of grief, faith and forgiveness. The novel follows an unnamed woman who, after leaving her failing marriage and life in Sydney, retreats to a religious community in her childhood hometown. In the stillness of her new life, a series of disturbing events force her to confront deep questions about her past.

Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank, and steadfast. But when one dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. The Weekend explores growing old and growing up, and what happens when we’re forced to uncover the lies that we tell ourselves.