Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Historical novel set around ENGLAND (Birmingham)
Ten Great Books set in AUSTRALIA
13th December 2025
Ten great books set in Australia. Australia is the planet’s smallest continent but one of its largest countries, defined by its incredible geographical diversity and unique fauna. While most of its highly urbanised population lives along the temperate eastern and southern coasts (home to major cities like Sydney and Melbourne), the vast interior is the arid, legendary Outback.
The country is famous for the Great Barrier Reef, the colossal red monolith Uluru, and amazing wildlife like kangaroos and koalas. With a deep history stretching back over 65,000 years to its Aboriginal inhabitants, Australia offers a captivating blend of ancient culture, modern metropolitan life, and stunning natural wonders
The Swooping Magpie by Liza Perrat
The thunderclap of sexual revolution collides with the black cloud of illegitimacy. Sixteen-year-old Lindsay Townsend is pretty and popular at school. At home, it’s a different story. Dad belts her and Mum’s either busy or battling a migraine. So when sexy school-teacher Jon Halliwell finds her irresistible, Lindsay believes life is about to change.
She’s not wrong.
Lindsay and Jon pursue their affair in secret, because if the school finds out, Jon will lose his job. If Lindsay’s dad finds out, there will be hell to pay. But when a dramatic accident turns her life upside down, Lindsay is separated from the man she loves. Events spiral beyond her control, emotions conflicting with doubt, loneliness and fear, and Lindsay becomes enmeshed in a shocking true-life Australian scandal. The schoolyard beauty will discover the dangerous games of the adult world. Games that destroy lives. Lindsay is forced into the toughest choice of her young life. The resulting trauma will forever burden her heart.
Reflecting the social changes of 1970s Australia, The Swooping Magpie is a chilling psychological tale of love, loss and grief, and, through collective memory, finding we are not alone.
The Dry by Jane Harper
Set 500 miles from Melbourne.
Amid the worst drought to ravage Australia in a century, it hasn’t rained in small country town Kiewarra for two years. Tensions in the community become unbearable when three members of the Hadler family are brutally murdered. Everyone thinks Luke Hadler, who committed suicide after slaughtering his wife and six-year-old son, is guilty.
Policeman Aaron Falk returns to the town of his youth for the funeral of his childhood best friend, and is unwillingly drawn into the investigation. As questions mount and suspicion spreads through the town, Falk is forced to confront the community that rejected him twenty years earlier. Because Falk and Luke Hadler shared a secret, one which Luke’s death threatens to unearth. And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, secrets from his past and why he left home bubble to the surface as he questions the truth of his friend’s crime
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
Cloudstreet is Tim Winton’s epic family drama, a story of love and turmoil spanning decades.
No. 1 Cloudstreet: a broken-down house on the wrong side of the tracks, a place teeming with memories, with shudders and shadows and spirits. From separate catastrophes, two families – the Pickles and the Lambs – flee to the city and find themselves thrown together, forced to start their lives afresh. As they roister and rankle, the place that began as a roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.
Full of boisterous energy, joy and heartbreak, Tim Winton’s vivid portrayal of the of the Australian landscape is nowhere more extraordinary than in this classic.
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent–a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms–could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex. And only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback.
The War Widow by Tara Moss
The first in an internationally bestselling historical mystery series featuring straight-talking, champagne-drinking, fast-driving female private investigator and former war reporter Billie Walker. Perfect for fans of Jacqueline Winspear and Lisa Scottoline.
It’s 1946 and WWII may be over, but journalist Billie Walker’s search for a missing young man will plunge her right back into the danger and drama she thought she’d left behind in Europe.
War correspondent Billie Walker is happy to finally be back home in glamorous Sydney, for her the heady post-war days are tarnished by the loss of her father and the disappearance of her husband, Jack. To make matters worse, newspapers are now sidelining her reporting talents to prioritise jobs for returning soldiers.
Determined to take control of her future, she reopens her late father’s private investigation agency, and, slowly, clients come knocking.
At first, Billie’s work consists of tailing cheating husbands But when a young man goes missing, Billie finds herself on a dangerous new trail that will lead her to the highest levels of society, and down into its underworld.
As the risk mounts, Billie realises that there is much more than one man’s life at stake. Though the war was won, it is far from over.
Down Outback Roads by Alissa Callen
Kree Garrett’s younger brother Seth is all the family she has left, so when he goes missing in the Australian outback, she doesn’t think twice about leaving her American home to find him. When Seth is rescued Kree vows to find a way to thank the small town of Glenalla. It isn’t long before she falls in love with the tight-knit rural community. But is it really the town she’s falling for?
Ewan Mackenzie has given up everything for his brother’s family, but he can never give enough to assuage his guilt at what happened one dark night, years ago . . . Ewan knows he doesn’t deserve a second chance at happiness, but when beautiful, open-hearted Kree stays to fight to save his home town, he finds it hard to keep his distance.
Can Kree and Ewan leave their pasts behind for long enough to find a future together?
Flight to Coorah Creek by Janet Gover
What happens when you can fly, but you just can’t hide? Only Jessica Pearson knows the truth when the press portray her as the woman who betrayed her lover to escape prosecution. But will her new job flying an outback air ambulance help her sleep at night or atone for a lost life?
Doctor Adam Gilmore touches the lives of his patients, but his own scars mean he can never let a woman touch his heart.
Runaway Ellen Parkes wants to build a safe future for her two children. Without a man … not even one as gentle as Jack North.
In Coorah Creek, a town on the edge of nowhere, you’re judged by what you do, not what people say about you. But when the harshest judge is the one you see in the mirror, there’s nowhere left to hide.
Wed, Then Dead on The Ghan by Hazel Edwards
Sleuth Quinn is on ‘The Ghan’ booked to celebrate a ‘real”wedding at the sunrise breakfast stop out in the Australian desert at Marla. But things go wrong.
The train manager has devised an Agatha Christie role-playing mystery to attract international fans.Themed tourism is trending. Onboard Agatha Christie fans joke about ‘Murder on the Orient Express’.
Intriguingly the ‘Wed, Then Dead on the Ghan’ offers opportunities to ‘dress up’, find clues and act out the mystery while seeing wildlife and the star eco-beauty of the desert.
Quinn deals with the Scandinavian Book Club members passionate to see ‘kangaroos’ ,opal fraud, missing indigenous artifacts,inheritances and the mystique of long distance train travel.
Plus performing a wedding for the descendant of one of the original Ghan cameleers. ‘Wed,Then Dead on The Ghan’ is not what the role-playing tourists expected.
Baggage by Emily Barr
At eighteen, your closest friend commits suicide.
At twenty-nine, you’re backpacking in the Australian outback when you see her. She has a husband. She has a ten-year-old son. She has a baby on the way. She claims to be someone else. But you’d recognise her anywhere.
Back in England you tell your journalist boyfriend. While he never knew her, he always knew of her – her name is Daisy Fraser and she was awaiting trial over the deaths of four people when she jumped off the Severn Bridge. He thinks: This could be the scoop of the century. He says: Happy Christmas – I’m taking you to Australia to find Daisy.
Nights in the Asylum by Carol Lefevre
Written in spare yet sensuous prose, Nights in the Asylum is the story of three people seeking shelter: it is also a story of home, of belonging, of leaving one home and trying to make another, where-ever and how-ever you can. Stricken with grief and guilt following the death of her daughter, Miri flees the city for the quiet calm of Havana Gardens, a once fine but now dilapidated mansion built for her grandmother. On the road she rescues Aziz, an Afghan refugee on the run from detention: then, in the attic of the old house, Miri discovers Suzette Moran and her baby daughter hiding, and grants them refuge. Slowly, in the hot confined spaces of the house, the three runaways unravel their stories, but when Suzette’s policeman husband comes looking for her, it sparks a chain of events that will disrupt their already fragile peace.…
Enjoy our selection of ten great books set in Australia. And click here to see our full list of lost 500 books set in the country.
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