books in order

Janette Turner Hospital Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Ivory Swing (1982)
  2. The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (1983)
  3. Borderline (1985)
  4. Charades (1988)
  5. A Very Proper Death (1991)
  6. The Last Magician (1992)
  7. Oyster (1996)
  8. The Book of Secrets (1999)
  9. Due Preparations for the Plague (2003)
  10. Orpheus Lost (2007)
  11. The Claimant (2016)

Collections

  1. Dislocations (1986)
  2. Isobars (1990)
  3. Collected Stories: 1970 To 1995 (1995)
  4. Collected Stories (2001)
  5. North of Nowhere, South of Loss (2004)

Anthologies edited

  1. Inheritance (2001)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Janette Turner Hospital Books Overview

Borderline

Three people, strangers to one another, arrive at a border crossing. Felicity, an American gallery owner, Gus, a Canadian salesman, and a refugee from El Salvador. Their lives become dangerously and inextricably linked.

The Last Magician

The Last Magician is about power and betrayal, sexual obsession and social ostracism. At its center is Lucy, a good girl and a who*re, whose nights are spent in a kaleidoscope of identities as she dons the masks her customers demand. Charlie is a photographer, filmmaker, voyeur, and The Last Magician monitoring Lucy, piecing together the splinters of evidence surrounding the death of a child and a murder that happened half a lifetime ago. A New York Times Notable Book. Reading group guide included.

Oyster

‘A tour de force…
by one of the best female novelists currently writing in English.’ said The Observer, London. ‘Janette Turner Hospital’s fine new novel concerns a place, called Outer Maroo, which is literally off the map; so far out in the back of the Australian Outback that it has escaped the prying eyes of the Government surveyors…
a place riddled with secrets, with hidden and nasty history, possessed of nothing remarkable but, as one character says, ‘the lure of nowhere.’ ‘ Two strangers arrive in the opal mining town a place of two opposing cultures: the rough, boozing bushfolk and the churchgoing fundamentalists searching for a stepdaughter and a son who have mysteriously disappeared. Have they fallen under the spell of the mysterious and charismatic Oyster, drawn to the town by opals but also by the prospect of power? Young people in search of a better life drift under his spell and into his cult community. This brilliant novel will evoke the holocaust at Waco, but it is also about the destructive power of greed, the racism of rural Australia, and the nature of good and evil. Hospital’s ‘language is fascinating and extraordinarily powerful and her narrative shimmers and shifts like the displaced reality in the heat of Outer Maroo itself.’ The Observer

Due Preparations for the Plague

‘In this bracing, visceral thriller…
Hospital continually locates, in human events, the unyieldingly human experience.’ San Francisco ChronicleJanette Turner Hospital’s electrifying novel chronicles the lives of two strangers connected by the tragic loss of parents in a hijacked Paris New York flight. As an adult, Samantha, one of the children set free by the terrorists, has become obsessed with the hijacking. Under the guise of her senior thesis, she pulls Lowell, the son of a victim, into a web of terror, death, and betrayal that he has spent his adult life trying to forget. Hospital’s electrifying novel is a tightly woven web of familial and national histories, of sexual and political passions, and of individual and national complicities in the age of terrorism. She probes with astonishing acuity the murky worlds of espionage and intelligence gathering, and the painful meaning of survival.

Orpheus Lost

In this powerful and passionate new novel, Janette Turner Hospital tackles head on questions of national security, art, terrorism, and love. Leela is a mathematician who has escaped her Southern hometown to study in Boston. She meets an Australian musician, Mishka, and from the moment she first hears him play his music grips her; they quickly become lovers. Then one day Leela is picked up off the street and taken to an interrogation center somewhere outside the city. There has been an explosion in the subway; terrorism is suspected. The interrogator an old childhood friend now reveals to her that Mishka may not be all he seems. In this compelling reimagining of the Orpheus story, Leela travels into an underworld of kidnapping, torture, and despair in search of her lover. Janette Turner Hospital, whose works are ‘richly imbued with a highly lyrical and luminous quality’ San Diego Union Tribune again shows her genius, interweaving a literary thriller with a story of passion and the triumph of decency in confusing and dangerous times.

Dislocations

From the author of the highly praised novel Oyster, Dislocations is filled with ‘sensuous, speculative fictions about the experience of dislocation…
. Stories develop like poems or meditations.’ New York Times Book Review These stories help us to find our place in a world in which we have all become rootless travelers. Janette Turner Hospital’s characters are exiles who share an intimate knowledge of dislocation: from their culture, from their native countries, from themselves. Her intimate stories capture the turning points in her character’s lives: Indian lovers on a last romantic weekend before their arranged marriages; a daughter’s welcome home after years of travel.

Collected Stories

Brings together in one distinguished volume all the published stories of this internationally acclaimed author.

North of Nowhere, South of Loss

These internationally acclaimed stories chart the author’s nomadic trajectory from Deep North Australia to America’s Deep South. In these prize winning stories, Janette Turner Hospital explores the infinite incarnations of loss lovers meeting again in midlife re experience, through the memory of photographs both real and imagined, the passion that both frightened and thrilled them; a young dental hygienist adrift, living in a hostel in northern Australia, receives a heart wrenching visit from her drug dependent brother; a mother and adolescent daughter move into a new house, and their sense of safety is shaken when the previous owner reappears, desperate to reclaim what he has lost. Hospital’s characters oscillate between estrangement and intense connectedness, between a permanent sense of dislocation and a yearning to belong.

Inheritance

Inheritance is a collection of 36 award winning South Carolina short stories. These stories, chosen by editor Janette Turner Hospital, are among the winners of the long running South Carolina Fiction Project conducted by the S.C. Arts Commission.

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