NEW RELEASES
NOVELS
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
THE CRYING FOREST
The Crying Forest will tantalise your love of the dark, twisted and terrifying.
Agata Rosso, a once-mighty yet now prematurely aged European witch, believes that the special gifts in a young girl named Lía Munro can restore youth and vitality both to herself and her bedridden husband. She sets a deadly plan in motion to capture and use Lía-but will the girl have enough power to protect herself, plus the father she loves so much?
BURNING DOWN
A novel About family, regret, love and the promise of salvation.
What if you had one last chance to make amends? This gripping novel asks what’s the high price of success. Charlie Smoke is living out his early retirement from the boxing ring as a bricklayer. It is the mid-1970s and he believes his best days are behind him. He’s lost his wife and daughter to his questionable past, but when he meets Holly Banks and her teenage son, Ricky, he has a chance to do things differently. As an unlikely friendship develops with Ricky, Charlie is unwittingly pulled back into the gambling underworld he thought he’d left behind. In order to make a new future, first he must help settle some old scores. Burning Down was shortlisted for the 2018 Queensland Literary Awards, People’s Choice Queensland Book of the Year Award.
THE DIRTY BEAT
Driven by music and passion, The Dirty Beat shimmers with an electric intensity.
Rock and jazz drummer Max is dead. Now, in his coffin as his friends prepare to bury him, Max is surrounded by the ghosts of his life and the dreams that never faded. All the old music is back too – from raw seventies rock-and roll to the type of cool jazz that made legends of John Coltrane and Miles Davis.
In this sea of memory, Max recalls the tragedies, people and relationships that defined his life. From his first love Maree Kilmister he learned about sex; from his great love Debbie Canova he learned about loss; and from the enigmatic Laetecia Sparks, he learned about hope. As the players in his life gather for his funeral, he has one last chance to relive his past and see it for what it was.
THE VOLCANO
Sweeping from Sicily to Australia, spanning generations and very different worlds, this is a novel of power, passion and sheer blazing brilliance.
Winner of the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for Best Fiction Book (2002) and Shortlisted for the Courier Mail Best Book Award (2002).
The Volcano is a story about Emilio Aquila, a boy driven mad by love for a woman beyond his reach. His passion turns him into an outcast, forced to live away from his village in the caves high on the slopes of Sicily’s Mount Etna. His determination to lead life on his own terms leads him to Australia, but he cannot escape the past. When the book was released in 2001, Murray Waldren wrote a nice piece in The Australian.
CANDLE LIFE
This 2005 novel deals with the nature of reality and dreams, of love, identity, despair and salvation.
An Australian novelist is living in an arts community in Paris, trying to write. He is mourning the death of the love of his life, Kiko. Still drowning in grief, one day he is harassed by a beggar, who claims to be a famous American writer, Sonny Lee. As his life is penetrated by Sonny it begins to unravel. Soon the novelist encounters Zoya, a mute Russian girl with whom he makes love, and in turn she introduces him to Les Belles Endormies – a place where, after drinking a potent green tea, clients fall asleep and experience hallucinogenic dreams about episodes in their past.
In the meantime the death of a friend brings the novelist into contact with Emilie, and slowly love begins to seem possible to him again. The story moves from Paris’s artistic community to the maelstrom of a dance party in the city’s streets to its chilling subterranean catacombs to the eerie thermal springs of Pamukkale in Turkey.
MY BEAUTIFUL FRIEND
A dark, brooding and erotic ghost story.
Can you imagine what it must be like to take the souls of others? Marcello Mansini has been dead for more than two months, his body lost in the icy depths of Lac Leman. But when Aaron and Rebecca stumble across his gravestone, their hearts full of human despair, Mansini slips into their lives like the ancient viper he is. Soon, very soon, he will summon them both into the freezing darkness of the lake … but only when their fear and horror have reached sickening heights.
AUST & EUROPE COVER
US COVER
FIREHEAD
A missing girl. A haunting mystery. An unspeakable secret. A very Sicilian love story.
At fifteen, Sam Capistrano is a normal Australian teenager. The object of his desire is Gabriella, the Italian-Irish girl next door. Then one day Gabriella disappears abandoning Sam. Bitter and resentful, Sam moves on with his life: into the shady side of Brisbane. Over the next two decades, Sam and Gabriella will find their lives inextricably, painfully, and passionately linked.
A NOTE ON THE COVERS:
Around late 1999, just before Firehead was published in Australia, a literary agent in the US went a bit nuts for that manuscript and started something of a bidding war among publishers based in NYC. The winning American publisher suggested a change of title, so Firehead became Gabriella’s Book of Fire. The novel was published under its original name in Australia, Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland, Israel, but remains with the latter name in the USA. I think it’s my bestselling book to date.
STRANGE RAIN
From one of Australia’s hottest writers comes a brooding novel of suspense and dark secrets, retribution and rock ‘n roll.
A lonely road on a dark night when the rain comes sheeting down. A motel room in a small town where fantasies fester and money changes hands.
One man determined to preserve the past, at any cost. Another man trying to escape it. And between them a young woman with ink-black hair and secrets she doesn’t want to tell.
Joe’s a man with memories he’d rather forget. Memories of driving through the rain one night when the world turned upside down. Now the rain’s come again and Joe’s world is spinning out of control.
ROMEO OF THE UNDERWORLD
‘Armanno writes with such intensity, his words detonate off the page…The real surprise is the unfolding humanity of the novel. Armanno writes of people with a deep and loving kindness…an opera, full-blown and gut-wrenching.’
THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
For Romeo Costanzo and the gallery of tempestuous characters he meets in the languid city of Brisbane, barriers of time and family and death barely exist. All that is important is the rage and compassion that may one day lead them to understand the ‘river of memory’ that twists and turns though their hearts.
A passionate story of love and desire, Romeo of the Underworld brilliantly realises the promise of The Lonely Hunter and confirms Venero Armanno as one of our finest and most original writers.
THE LONELY HUNTER
A novel of great strength and imagination, The Lonely Hunter is a journey into evil and redemption by one of Australia’s most original and passionate writers.
Rich, successful Eddie Bevelacqua has it all, or so it seems to his poor second cousin and gardener, Romeo. But while Eddie is intent on a strange psychological odyssey to purge himself of ‘the tapestry of sins’ in his past, there is only one thing the romantic Romeo really covets: Eddie’s wife, Kelly. Watching Eddie’s descent into Hell, trying to win Kelly’s heart but shackled by his own mistakes and memories, Romeo can only dream of his own salvation and try to make sense of ‘the dark romance of this world’.
A novel of great strength and imagination, The Lonely Hunter is a journey into evil and redemption, into the ‘twistings and turnings and treacheries of the human heart’.
TRAVEL UNDER ANY STAR
My first story collection in nearly 25 years. This 2016 book contains a new novella (the 50,000 word title story), plus novellas and stories spanning a two decades.
As one reviewer wrote: ‘Travel Under Any Star is a collection of stories – old and new – in a style I now think of as Armanno-esque. Fans will know exactly what I mean: passionate men who grapple with fatal flaws, siren women who lure them to their doom, family legacies that haunt one generation after another, mundane happenings in exotic locations – and vice versa.’
JUMPING AT THE MOON
A novel of great strength and imagination, The Lonely Hunter is a journey into evil and redemption by one of Australia’s most original and passionate writers.
Rich, successful Eddie Bevelacqua has it all, or so it seems to his poor second cousin and gardener, Romeo. But while Eddie is intent on a strange psychological odyssey to purge himself of ‘the tapestry of sins’ in his past, there is only one thing the romantic Romeo really covets: Eddie’s wife, Kelly. Watching Eddie’s descent into Hell, trying to win Kelly’s heart but shackled by his own mistakes and memories, Romeo can only dream of his own salvation and try to make sense of ‘the dark romance of this world’.
A novel of great strength and imagination, The Lonely Hunter is a journey into evil and redemption, into the ‘twistings and turnings and treacheries of the human heart’.