Books like Wake in Fright
John Grant, a bonded schoolteacher in a tiny outback town, stops overnight in the mining town of Bundanyabba on his way to Sydney for the holidays, loses his money at two-up and can't get out.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Wake in Fright
Drylands
In a dying town in the Queensland outback, Janet Deakin, who runs the newsagency, writes a novel about her neighbours, and their stories of cruelty and leaving fill the book.
The Glass Canoe
Life inside the Southern Cross, a working-class pub in Sydney, told in short episodes by Meat Man, one of its regulars.
The Well
Hester Harper, a lonely middle-aged farmer's daughter, takes in Katherine, an orphan girl, and driving home one night they hit something on the road and drop it down the well.
To the Islands
Heriot, an ageing missionary on a mission in the far north-west of Western Australia, believes he has killed a man in a rage, and walks out into the wilderness with an Aboriginal companion, Justin, towards the islands of the dead.
The Man with the Golden Arm
Frankie Machine, a card dealer in Chicago's Polish neighbourhood, back from the war with a morphine habit, wants to be a jazz drummer and to get clear of the life.
Men in the Sun
Three Palestinian refugees of different ages pay a smuggler to get them across the desert from Basra to Kuwait inside the empty tank of a water truck.
The White Girl
In a small Australian country town in the 1960s, Odette Brown, an Aboriginal grandmother raising her granddaughter Sissy, sees the new policeman taking an interest in the girl's fair skin.
Too Much Lip
Kerry Salter, a Bundjalung woman on a stolen motorbike with warrants out, comes home to northern New South Wales to farewell her dying grandfather, and finds the mayor planning a prison on sacred land.
Breath
Bruce Pike, a paramedic in middle age, remembers growing up in a sawmill town in Western Australia in the 1970s, when he and his friend Loonie fell in with Sando, an ageing surfer who taught them to take risks.
All the Birds, Singing
Jake Whyte, a woman living alone on a sheep farm on an English island, finds her sheep being killed one by one, while her past in Australia closes in.
Exile and the Kingdom
Six stories of exile, among them a French schoolteacher on an Algerian plateau told to deliver an Arab prisoner to the police, and a wife who slips out of her bed at night into the desert.
Swords and Crowns and Rings
Jackie Hanna, a boy who stops growing, and Cushie Moore, the girl he loves, grow up together in a small New South Wales town before the Depression drives them apart.