Kirsten Tranter
The Legacy

What has happened to Ingrid?

Beautiful Ingrid inherits a fortune and leaves Australia, and her friends, and Ralph who loves her, to marry Gil Grey and set up home amid the New York art world. There she becomes the stepmother to Gil’s teenage artist daughter Fleur, a former child prodigy, and studies at Columbia University. But at 9:00 a.m. on September 11, 2001, she has an appointment downtown. She is never seen again.

Or is she? Searching for clues about Ingrid’s life a year later, her friend Julia uncovers only further layers of mystery and deception.

Both an unputdownable mystery and a compelling meditation on the nature of art, truth, friendship and love, The Legacy announces the arrival of a major new talent.

“Ingrid’s New York life unravels in a satisfying mystery, yet The Legacy is much more sophisticated than a typical genre novel. Tranter’s characters are well-written, her prose sophisticated and rich (but never heavy handed, despite many literary references), and self-conscious in the right moments so that it never dips into cliché. This is the most satisfying novel I’ve read all year. I can’t wait to see what she does next.” – Hannah Francis, Australian Bookseller and Publisher

Fourth Estate/ HarperCollins Launch: 10 February 2010

Follow Kirsten’s internet diary: www.kirstentranter.com

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Murray Waldren:

The Mind and Times of
Reg Mombassa

Christopher O’Doherty, aka Reg Mombassa, has infiltrated our culture for more than thirty years with a unique, laconic view of our world… and of his. His wit, sense of mischief and larrikin energy resonated in the songs and performances of one of Australia’s most beloved bands, Mental As Anything. His eye for the absurd and his unapologetic idealism captured another generation or three with his irreverent, frequently macabre and always distinctive designs for the original Mambo label.

Yet long before he became a Mental or transformed shirts into collector’s items, Mombassa was first and foremost an artist. From his idiosyncratic pop art to the delicately realised fine art landscapes and images that celebrate and elevate the suburban, his artworks are sought by collectors around the world. Who else could stage the biggest one-man art show in history at the Sydney Olympics? Who else could have Elvis Costello producing his records, or Johnny Rotten and Crowded House seeking his record cover designs?

But there is much more to Reg Mombassa, as fellow New Zealand-born writer and painter Murray Waldren shows in this illuminated journey, illustrated with over 300 artworks, photographs, posters and band memorabilia, published by HarperCollins Australia in 2009.

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Will Elliott

In 2006 Will Elliott’s first novel The Pilo Family Circus won five major literary awards, including the coveted Golden Aurealis Award for Best Novel. He was named one of the best young novelists for 2007 by the Sydney Morning Herald and was shortlisted for the 2006 International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel in the US. It was published by Quercus in the UK and sold into Sweden, Italy, and the US.

Will’s next publication is Strange Places, a memoir of Will’s life as a schizophrenic. Strange Places takes us on a journey through psychosis and out the other side, documenting the delusions, the drugs and the insights that recovery brings: a beautifully written memoir of a harrowing part of this young man’s life. Strange Places was released by HarperCollins in May 2009.

“I’ve been to places that no one else on this planet will ever go. Me, I’ve lived for a short time as a werewolf. As a vampire. As a revolutionary. As a psychic. As a magician. As someone who cannot be hurt by physical force. As someone who can speak to the dead… for a while, it was all real… I will never feel so alive as I felt the night I ran barefoot from hospital, hearing vampires rustle in the trees above, seeing a war zone around me, seeing battalions and guarded castles in the houses to either side of me, the air thick with magic, crackling with an energy that exists on the far boundary of the human mind, which, once crossed, we’re not supposed to return from… nothing will ever again make me feel so alive as I felt that night. Nothing.”

Rights available: US and Canada: through ALM World rights: Annabel Blay: annabel[dot]blay[ât]harpercollins[dot]com[dot]au

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Nobel Prize for Literature 2000

Chinese playwright, novelist and artist Gao Xingjian became a critic of the Communist regime as a young man. He fled Beijing and has lived for many years in France where his first novel, Soul Mountain, was first published and became a bestseller, going into five editions. In 2000 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mabel Lee’s English translation of Soul Mountain has been a success worldwide.
     Gao’s second novel One Man’s Bible focuses the political horrors of the twentieth century through the lens of desire and memory. It has received rave reviews in the US.
     In 2004 Gao published a collection of short stories, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather. In September 2006 HarperCollins Australia released A Case for Literature, a collection of thought-provoking essays.
     Mabel Lee is Gao’s English-language translator. She is represented by Australian Literary Management, and ALM is the lead agent for the English language translations of Gao’s writing.
      You can read the first chapter of Soul Mountain on this website, as well as Mabel’s perceptive and informative Introduction to the book, the Swedish Academy’s bibliographical note published on the occasion of the 2000 Nobel Prize, and a note about the author.
     Rights in the English language translation of Soul Mountain have been sold to HarperCollins Australia, HarperCollins US, and HarperCollins UK.