Paradise Gardens is not the idyllic holiday escape Charles and Julia Cant imagined. It's a down-at-heel seaside town where local big man Roy and his wife tempt them to behave in ways they'll be sure to regret...In her introduction, Nadia Wheatley asks: 'is it a romance? A thriller? A melodrama? A tragedy? Is it a Gothic? Is it a lyrical exploration of a physical and emotional landscape? An allegory about Heaven and Hell? Or is it simply an account of an accommodation made in the empty relation­ship of two sort of proto-yuppies?' She doesn't answer the questions: it's for the reader to decide.First published in 1959, and reissued in 1989, Walk to the Paradise Gardens is the first 'real' novel Charmian Clift wrote alone (her earlier works, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me A Lotus were semi-autobiographical). This edition contains the 1989 edition's introduction by Nadia Wheatley, author of the award-winning biography The Life and Myth of Charmian...

Two classic travel works by Charmian Clift describing the life she and her Australian family led in Greece in the 1950's in one volume. For Charmian Clift, Greece was the Promised Land. In 1954 she and her husband, George Johnston, abandoned their sophisticated London existence and set off with two new typewriters and two small children to start a new life. In Mermaid Singing - written during the first miraculous year of discovery - she records the family's adaptation to the primitive sponge-diving island of Kalymnos. Peel Me a Lotus continues the exploration as Clift and Johnson buy a house on the island of Hydra, in the middle of the summer tourist trail. Clift's writing about Greece was undervalued at the time of first publication, because she wrote from a women's point of view and recorded the intimate details of daily life. It is exactly this quality which enables this classic to appeal to a new generation of readers.

Before their years on the Greek Island of Hydra, their well-documented friendship with celebrated singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, and their literary celebrity, Charmian Clift and George Johnston collaborated on High Valley, a mystery set in the Himalayas. It won them The Sydney Morning Herald Literary Competition in 1948, and was first published in 1949.Charmian Clift's subsequent works include the autobiographical portraits Peel Me a Lotus (1959) and Mermaid Singing (1956), and the novel Walk to the Paradise Gardens (1960), which is also in the Untapped Collection. George Johnston's novels include the trilogy, My Brother Jack (1964), winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1964, Clean Straw for Nothing (1969), winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1969, and A Cartload of Clay (1971). In 1970, Johnston was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to literature.

The never-before-published novel by Charmian Clift'In those days the end of the morning was always marked by the quarry whistle blowing the noon knock-off. Since everybody was out of bed very early, morning then was a long time, or even, if you came to think about it, a round time—symmetrical anyway, and contained under a thin, radiant, dome shaped cover...'During the years of the Great Depression, Cressida Morley and her eccentric family live in a weatherboard cottage on the edge of a wild beach. Outsiders in their small working-class community, they rant and argue and read books and play music and never feel themselves to be poor. Yet as Cressida moves beyond childhood, she starts to outgrow the place that once seemed the centre of the world. As she plans her escape, the only question is: who will she become?The End of the Morning is the final and unfinished autobiographical novel by Charmian Clift. Published here for the first time, it is the book that...