New Books / Reviews
Reviews of New Books Spring 2026
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese man who, never before having left his village, finds himself fighting as a so-called “Chocolat” soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man’s Land.
Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa’s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German’s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa’s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn’t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?
Set in France and America, News of Our Loved Ones is a haunting and intimate examination of love and loss, beauty and the cost of survival, witnessed through two generations of one French family, whose lives are all touched by the tragic events surrounding the D-Day bombings in Normandy.
Over four long years, the Delasalle family has struggled to live in their Nazi occupied village in Normandy. Maman, Oncle Henri, Yvonne, and Françoise silently watched as their Jewish neighbors were arrested or wordlessly disappeared. Now in June 1944, when the sirens wail each day, warning of approaching bombers, the family wonders if rumors of the coming Allied invasion are true—and if they will survive to see their country liberated. For sixteen-year-old Yvonne, thoughts of the war recede when she sees the red-haired boy bicycle past her window each afternoon. Murmuring to herself I love you, I love you, I love you, she wills herself to hear the whisper of his bicycle tires over the screech of Allied bombs falling from the sky.
Yvonne’s sister, Geneviève, is in Paris to audition for the National Conservatory. Pausing to consider the shadow of a passing cloud as she raises her bow, she does not know that her family’s home in Normandy lies in the path of British and American bombers. While Geneviève plays, her brother Simon and Tante Chouchotte, anxiously await news from their loved ones in Normandy.
When a battered suitcase containing the dismembered body of a young man washes up on the shore of the river Thames, Detective Erika Foster is shocked. But it’s not the first time she’s seen such a brutal murder.
Two weeks earlier, the body of a young woman was found dumped in an identical suitcase. What connects the two victims? As Erika and her team set to work, they quickly realise they are on the trail of a serial killer who has already made their next move. Yet just as Erika starts to make headway with the investigation, she is the target of a violent attack. Forced to recover at home, and with her personal life falling apart, everything is stacked against her, but nothing will stop Erika.
As the body count rises, the case takes an even more twisted turn when the twin daughters of Erika’s colleague, Commander Marsh, are suddenly put in terrible jeopardy. The stakes are higher than ever before, but can Erika save the lives of two innocent children before it’s too late? She’s running out of time and about to make a disturbing discovery…there’s more than one killer.
When the Black Death enters England through the port in Dorsetshire in June 1348, no one knows what manner of sickness it is—or how it spreads and kills so quickly. The Church cites God as the cause, and fear grips the people as they come to believe that the plague is a punishment for wickedness.
But Lady Anne of Develish has her own ideas. Educated by nuns, Anne is a rarity among women, being both literate and knowledgeable. With her brutal husband absent from the manor when news of this pestilence reaches her, she looks for more sensible ways to protect her people than daily confessions of sin. She decides to bring her serfs inside the safety of the moat that surrounds her manor house, then refuses entry to anyone else, even her husband. Lady Anne makes an enemy of her daughter and her husband’s steward by doing so, but her resolve is strengthened by the support of her leading serfs…until food stocks run low. The nerves of all are tested by continued confinement and ignorance of what is happening in the world outside. The people of Develish are alive. But for how long? And what will they discover when the time comes for them to cross the moat again?
Nick Chester is working as a sergeant for the Havelock police in the Marlborough Sound, at the top of New Zealand’s South Island. If the river isn’t flooded and the land hasn’t slipped, it’s paradise. Unless you are also hiding from a ruthless man with a grudge, in which case, remote beauty has its own kind of danger. In the last couple of weeks, two local boys have vanished. Their bodies are found, but the Pied Piper is still at large.
Marlborough Man is a gripping story about the hunter and the hunted, and about what happens when evil takes hold in a small town.
Friendship is a million little moments, but can it survive this one? Three friends embark on a luxury cruise to celebrate their ten-year reunion in this heartfelt story of how long-held secrets can catch up with even the best of friends Life was about living, experiencing and emotions. The good and the bad. You had to laugh to cry. You had to love to hurt. You had to jump to fall or fly.
Best friends Abbie, Jess and Ricki are set to recreate a school trip they took ten years earlier to the historic port town of Albany, the oldest city on the stunning turquoise coastline of Western Australia. Ricki, a dedicated nurse, harbours a dream she hasn’t chased. Is she actually happy or stuck in a rut? Jess, a school teacher and single mother to little Ollie, had a tough upbringing but found her way through with the help of her closest male friend, Peter. But Peter has bought an engagement ring and is ready to propose to Ricki . Abbie had it all: a career, a loving boyfriend and a future, but a visit to the doctor bears scary news. Her world is tumbling down and she feels adrift at sea.
‘What on earth is this?’ interrupted Julian.
‘It’s cauliflower rice,’ said Anne.
‘So is it rice? Or cauliflower?’ I’m confused.’
Join Julian, George, Dick, Anne and Timmy the dog as they try to have a jolly good time, just without gluten. But will our intrepid friends embrace the spiralizer?
Kateryn Parr, a thirty-year-old widow in a secret affair with a new lover, has no choice when a man old enough to be her father who has buried four wives, King Henry VIII, commands her to marry him.
Kateryn has no doubt about the danger she faces: the previous queen lasted sixteen months, the one before barely half a year. But Henry adores his new bride and Kateryn’s trust in him grows as she unites the royal family, creates a radical study circle at the heart of the court, and rules the kingdom as regent. But is this enough to keep her safe? A leader of religious reform and a published author, Kateryn stands out as an independent woman with a mind of her own. But she cannot save the Protestants, under threat for their faith, and Henry’s dangerous gaze turns on her. The traditional churchmen and rivals for power accuse her of heresy, the punishment is death by fire and the king’s name is on the warrant.
Gabriel Allon, art restorer and legendary spy, is in Venice when he receives an urgent call from the Italian police.
The art dealer Justin Isherwood has stumbled upon a chilling murder scene, and is being held as a suspect. The dead man is a fallen spy with a secret, a trafficker in stolen artwork, sold to a mysterious collector. To save his friend, Gabriel must track down the world’s most iconic missing painting: Caravaggio’s Nativity with St. Francis and St. Lawrence. Gabriel’s mission takes him on an exhilarating hunt from Marseilles and Corsica, to Paris and Geneva, and, finally, to a private bank in Austria, where a dangerous man stands guard over the ill-gotten wealth of one of the world’s most brutal dictators.
Television producer Laurie Moran is delighted when the pilot for her reality drama, Under Suspicion, is a success. Even more, the program—a cold case series that revisits unsolved crimes by recreating them with those affected—is off to a fantastic start when it helps solve an infamous murder in the very first episode.
Now Laurie has the ideal case to feature in the next episode ofUnder Suspicion: the Cinderella Murder. When Susan Dempsey, a beautiful and multi-talented UCLA student, was found dead, her murder raised numerous questions. Why was her car parked miles from her body? Had she ever shown up for the acting audition she was due to attend at the home of an up-and-coming director? Why does Susan’s boyfriend want to avoid questions about their relationship? Was her disappearance connected to a controversial church that was active on campus? Was she close to her computer science professor because of her technological brilliance, or something more? And why was Susan missing one of her shoes when her body was discovered?
With the help of lawyer and Under Suspicion host Alex Buckley, Laurie knows the case will attract great ratings, especially when the former suspects include Hollywood’s elite and tech billionaires. The suspense and drama are perfect for the silver screen—but is Cinderella’s murderer ready for a close-up?
Not since Cheryl Strayed gifted us with her adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail in her memoir, Wild, has there been such a powerful epic adventure by a woman alone. In Wild by Nature, National Geographic Explorer Sarah Marquis takes you on the trail of her ten-thousand-mile solo hike across the remote Gobi desert from Siberia to Thailand, at which point she was transported by boat to complete the hike at her favourite tree in Australia.
Against nearly insurmountable odds and relying on hunting and her own wits, Sarah Marquis survived the Mafia, drug dealers, thieves on horseback who harassed her tent every night for weeks, temperatures from subzero to scorching, life-threatening wildlife, a dengue fever delirium in the Laos jungle, tropic ringworm in northern Thailand, dehydration, and a life-threatening abscess.
This is an incredible story of adventure, human ingenuity, persistence, and resilience that shows firsthand what it is to adventure as a woman in the most dangerous of circumstance, what it is to be truly alone in the wild, and why someone would challenge themselves with an expedition others would call crazy. For Marquis, her story is about freedom, being alive and wild by nature.
Wretched writing is the lowest of the low; it is a felonious assault on the English language. Exuberantly excessive, it is a sin committed often by amateurs and all-too-frequently by gifted writers having an off day. In short, it’s very bad writing. Truly bad. Appallingly bad.
It’s also very funny.
A celebration of the worst writing imaginable, Wretched Writing includes inadvertently filthy book titles, ridiculously overwrought passages from novels, bombastic and confusing speeches, moronic oxymorons, hyperactive hyperbole, horribly inappropriate imagery in ostensibly hot sex scenes, mangled clichés, muddled metaphors, and unintended double entendres.
Sit back and enjoy these deliciously dreadful samples, and try not to cringe too much.
Jérôme Morval has been found dead in the stream that runs through the gardens at Giverny, where Monet did his famous paintings.
In Jérôme’s pocket is a postcard of Monet’s ‘Water Lilies’ with the words: Eleven years old. Happy Birthday.
Entangled in the mystery are three women: a young painting prodigy, the seductive village schoolteacher and an old widow who watches over the village from a mill by the stream.
All three of them share a secret.
But what do they know about Jérôme’s death? And what is the connection to the mysterious ‘Black Water Lilies’, a rumoured masterpiece by Monet that has never been found?
This is the story of how the car changed a society.
Graeme Davison, Australia’s leading urban historian, explores the Melbourne he knows so well to show us how the car entered our consciousness – as an object of desire, a symbol of status, a creator of freedoms, a shaper of sexual mores. His is a fascinating journey through landscapes changed and cities redesigned by the car, of mayhem on the road and influence in the world of politics, of communities challenged and the environment threatened, and of an ongoing love affair with a machine.
John E. Wills’s masterful history ushers us into the worlds of 1688, from the suicidal exaltation of Russian Old Believers to the ravishing voice of the haiku poet Basho.
Witness the splendour of the Chinese imperial court as the Kangxi emperor publicly mourns the death of his grandmother and shrewdly consolidates his power. Join the great caravans of Muslims on their annual pilgrimage from Damascus and Cairo to Mecca. Walk the pungent streets of Amsterdam and enter the Rasp House, where vagrants, beggars, and petty criminals laboured to produce powdered brazilwood for the dyeworks. Through these stories and many others, Wills paints a detailed picture of how the global connections of power, money, and belief were beginning to lend the world its modern form.
1814 promises to be another eventful season, but not, this author believes, for Anthony Bridgerton, London’s most elusive bachelor, who has shown no indication that he plans to marry. And in truth, why should he? When it comes to playing the consummate rake, nobody does it better. Lady Whistledown’s Society Papers, April 1814
But this time, the gossip columnists have it wrong. Anthony Bridgerton hasn’t just decided to marry—he’s even chosen a wife! The only obstacle is his intended’s older sister, Kate Sheffield—the most meddlesome woman ever to grace a London ballroom. The spirited schemer is driving Anthony mad with her determination to stop the betrothal, but when he closes his eyes at night, Kate is the woman haunting his increasingly erotic dreams…
Contrary to popular belief, Kate is quite sure that reformed rakes do not make the best husbands—and Anthony Bridgerton is the most wicked rogue of them all. Kate is determined to protect her sister—but she fears her own heart is vulnerable. And when Anthony’s lips touch hers, she’s suddenly afraid she might not be able to resist the reprehensible rake herself.
“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.
Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”
Simply written, but powerful and unforgettable, The Man Who Planted Trees is a parable for modern times.
In the foothills of the French Alps the narrator meets a shepherd who has quietly taken on the task of planting one hundred acorns a day in an effort to reforest his desolate region. Not even two world wars can keep the shepherd from continuing his solitary work. Gradually, this gentle, persistent man’s work comes to the region is transformed; life and hope return; the world is renewed.
A girl grows up happily with her adoptive parents, a big sister and a little sister, and friends galore in a vibrant, close-knit community she adores.
That’s never been in question until a creature from outer space falls from the sky and claims (correctly) that she looks more like him than any of the beings she knows and loves. He urges her to go back with him. She doesn’t belong here. Can he be right? Shaun Tan’s masterpiece is a uniquely powerful, funny, and insightful exploration of identity, and what it means to be “home.”
The story follows Azure, a genetically enhanced, gene-boosted, and cybernetically upgraded contract assassin who works to pay off his debts.
Set in a futuristic cyberpunk world where the ultra-wealthy (“Lifers”) have found a way to live forever, limited resources have led to a legal system where crowd-funded and authorized hitmen can legally hunt and eliminate these immortals.
Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.
Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company. His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.
The Lancet Journal has identified hearing loss as the #1 modifiable factor for the prevention of dementia. ‘Modifiable’ meaning there is something you can do about it.
More than just a minor nuisance, research shows that untreated hearing loss is linked with an increased dementia risk of between 200 to 500 percent. Hearing and Brain Health explores the physical and mental impact associated with untreated hearing loss, and how to overcome the common barriers to addressing it and why it’s crucial that you do.
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Los Angeles, December 4th – exactly three weeks until Christmas day.
Angela Wood, a master in the art of pickpocket, has just finished for the day, six hundred and eighty-seven dollars, not bad for less than fifteen minutes work. As she celebrates her profitable day with a cocktail, one of the patrons in the lounge she’s in catches her attention by being rude to an old man. Angela decides to teach him a lesson, and steals the man’s expensive-looking leather bag. Inside is no money, no laptop computer, nothing of any value, at least not to Angela. Just a black, leather-bound book, surprisingly heavy. Curiosity takes over and in the comfort of her apartment, Angela quickly leafs through the pages. That is when the worst nightmare of her life begins.
When location manager Claire Montgomery arrives in rural Queensland to work on a TV mini-series, she’s captivated by the beauty of Starlight Creek and the surrounding sugarcane fields.
Working in a male-dominated industry is challenging, but Claire has never let that stop her pursuing her dreams until now. She must gain permission to film at Australia’s most historically significant art deco cinema, located at Starlight Creek. But there is trouble ahead. The community is fractured and the cinema’s reclusive owner, Hattie Fitzpatrick, and her enigmatic great nephew, Luke Jackson, stand in her way, putting Claire’s career launching project and her heart at risk.
In Shadow Gate, the source of corruption of the Guardians is still a mystery to the mortals who fight to withstand the forces that have turned against them.
And when three new Guardians emerge, a struggle begins among the immortals, with nothing less at stake than the future of the land and its gods.
Two hundred years after the Forbidding was broken, Santhenar is locked in war with the lyrinx, intelligent, winged predators who will do anything to gain their own world.
Despite the development of battle clankers and mastery of the crystals that power them, humanity is losing. Tiaan, a lonely crystal worker in a clanker manufactory, is experimenting with an entirely new kind of crystal when she begins to have extraordinary visions. The crystal has woken her latent talent for geomancy, the most powerful of all the Secret Arts and the most perilous. Falsely accused of sabotage by her rival, Irisis, Tiaan flees for her life. Struggling to control her talent and hunted by the lyrinx, Tiaan follows her visions all the way to Tirthrax, greatest peak on all the Three Worlds, where a nightmare awaits her.
Santhenar is on its knees. War with the forces from beyond the Void shows no sign of ending. And there is worse to come.
The Aachim have invaded with a fleet of formidable battle constructs and the price for their withdrawal is half the globe. The future of the world now rests in the hands of just three flawed individuals: Tiaan, whose knowledge holds the key to a power that can yet destroy all foes; Nish who has sworn to bring the renegade geomancer to justice; and Irisis, whose great talents are hidden even from herself. Now Tiaan is leading her people in a last desperate stand against the Lyrinx… but if they are to survive she must master her new powers or be destroyed.
The Node has failed, rendering humanity’s battle clankers and the Aachim’s constructs useless.
Hordes of alien lyrinx are swarming from the tar pits of Snizort. The fate of humanity is dependent on one wily old man, the Scrutator Xervish Flydd. But he has been condemned to die a brutish death.
All resistance has been crushed. In a few minutes of overwhelming violence the Council’s air-dreadnought fleet has destroyed Fiz Gorgo’s defences. Xervish Flydd, Irisis and their allies have been condemned to die in a brutal aerial spectacle designed to reinforce Chief Scrutator Ghorr’s power and majesty.
Nish is their one remaining hope. But Nish is trapped in a burning watchtower, and hunted by both the scrutators and his former lover, Ullii, whose twin brother he accidentally killed. Before Nish can hope to rescue his friends, he must convince Ullii to spare him, then overcome the most powerful cabal of mancers in the world as well as the Council’s four hundred crack guards. And even if he succeeds, to win the war the allies still have to defeat the scrutators and overthrow Nennifer, the corrupt Council’s dread bastion, before the rampaging lyrinx overwhelm all Santhenar.
France, 1915. An English nurse and German doctor fall in love. He is a prisoner of war; she has never cared for rules. Their love is visceral and urgent, forbidden and doomed, and it would have gone unrecorded if not for a series of drawings found more than a century later.
At first the drawings seem insignificant, but the woman who finds them glimpses moments of intimacy and can’t look away. The images become part of a puzzle she wants to solve: who were the lovers, what became of them, and what story of war was the artist trying to tell?
It’s business as usual for Ship Leader Parnell Shi-Sawahla and the crew of the corvette Sassafras. Ride a Massif to a new system, fight the enemy, repeat.
For more than two hundred years humans have been hitching rides on these sentient, star faring mountain ranges, colonizing planets and exporting an on and off again war between Earth and Mars. But the big questions are always there, behind every battle, every new colony, every new star system discovery. Why do the Massifs carry humans to the stars? Why do they help us export our wars? What’s in it for the Massifs? Ship crews aren’t supposed to ask these questions, they aren’t supposed to think about these questions, and they definitely aren’t supposed to go deep and talk to Massif avatars. But now Parnell and his tight-knit crew must try to find the answers, to save not only themselves but the future of humanity.
Leslie had felt for some time that life was a series of things that just happened to her. When her physiotherapist husband dumps her for a woman with superior posture, she finds herself lost without a map.
A ticket out of her misery comes in the form of an all-expenses paid trip to the bright lights of Las Vegas. Wonder, Leslie discovers, can be found in the most unexpected of places. Soon she falls in love with the beauty of the desert, its art and its people and finds her way back to herself.
November 1936. Mayor La Guardia’s political future buckles under a missing persons case in New York City. Simultaneously, Lane unravels devastating secrets in the outskirts of Detroit.
As two crimes converge, judging friends from enemies can be a dangerous game. Finally summoning courage to face the past, Lane Sanders breaks away from her busy job at City Hall to confront childhood nightmares in Rochester, Michigan. An unknown assailant left Lane with scattered memories after viciously murdering her parents. However, one memory of a dazzling solid gold pawn piece remains and with it lies a startling connection between the midwestern tragedy and a current mystery haunting the Big Apple.
Lady Anne Barnard lived at the heart of Georgian society, yet was never fully part of it. The Prince of Wales counted among many friends and she was brilliant in company.
But she was seen as an eccentric, an outsider. What defined this poet and musician, artist and hostess, was defiance of convention. High-born yet an egalitarian, she rejected numerous suitors, lived independently by buying and renting houses and travelled alone to observe the French Revolution. When she did marry it was to a junior army officer, twelve years younger than she, and together they withdrew to Africa. Her curious ways attracted gossip right into her final years when she raised a mysterious dark-skinned child at her home in Berkeley Square.
Freya thought she could relax when Ryan’s best mate Jamie got engaged to her best friend Hannah. Two couples, four friends – what could be better than that?
But a day before the wedding Freya’s torn between keeping the peace or blowing it up. Hannah’s perfect wedding is hours away and she’s daydreaming of a honeymoon in Tahiti and starting the family she longs for when she hears the first-responder sirens. Is it a grass fire? Worse? And why aren’t Ryan or Jamie answering their phones?
When a car veers off the road with devastating consequences, the small wheatbelt town of Garringarup is left reeling, but no one’s world is more shattered than Hannah and Freya’s. As disturbing details surrounding the accident emerge and questions pile up, ugly secrets rise to the surface.
From the soft green hills of Ireland to the wild Shipwreck Coast of southern Victoria, the rich farm lands of New South Wales to the sudden battlefields of Ballarat, this is an epic story of the cost of freedom and the value of love in a far-flung corner of the world where a new nation struggles to be born.
1851: After the death of her father, young Eve Richards is destitute. Her struggle to survive sees her deported in chains to the colony of New South Wales, penniless and alone. But here in this strange new world fortune smiles on the spirited, clever Eve in the shape of a respectable job offer that will lead to a quiet, secure life. Then the fiery and charismatic Irishman Kieran Clancy crosses her path.
Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n’ roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things. Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road. Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.
A Cargo of Women traces the chequered story of one hundred women transported together as convicts in 1829 on the ship Princess Royal. Caught in an England convulsed by industrial change, they became the unwitting and unwilling pioneers of a new land. Framing them all is the story of the indomitable Susannah Watson who, trapped in the crowded filthy slums of Nottingham, stole because she “could not bear to see her children starving”. Separated forever from her husband and four children, Susannah was transported for 14 years but served 16. She endured the convict system at its worst, yet emerged triumphant to die in her bed aged 83 singing Rock of Ages.
It’s the winter of 2049 and Daniel is elderly and long isolated. Soon after yet another devastating storm, this time destroying his beloved longan tree, he finds his fragile peace threatened by a growing friendship with a widowed neighbour and the appearance of a young reporter digging into a shameful event buried deep in his past.
As the novel moves back to autumn 2000 and then to summer 1949 and finally to the spring of the mid-nineteenth century, Daniel’s family’s history unspools, until we meet a Chinese bushranger, Ah Yang.
Edda Mussolini was Benito’s favourite daughter: spoilt, venal, uneducated but clever, faithless but flamboyant, a brilliant diplomat, wild but brave, and ultimately strong and loyal. She was her father’s confidante during the 20 years of Fascist rule, acting as envoy to both Germany and Britain, and playing a part in steering Italy to join forces with Hitler.
From her early twenties she was effectively first lady of Italy. She married Galeazzo Ciano, who would become the youngest Foreign Secretary in Italian history, and they were the most celebrated and glamorous couple in elegant, vulgar Roman fascist society. Their fortunes turned in 1943, when Ciano voted against Mussolini in a plot to bring him down, and his father-in-law did not forgive him. In a dramatic story that takes in hidden diaries, her father’s fall and her husband’s execution, an escape into Switzerland and a period in exile, we come to know a complicated, bold and determined woman who emerges not just as a witness but as a key player in some of the twentieth century’s defining moments.
On a sweltering Friday afternoon in Durton, best friends Ronnie and Esther leave school together. Esther never makes it home. Ronnie’s going to find her, she has a plan. Lewis will help. Their friend can’t be gone; Ronnie won’t believe it.
Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels can believe it, she has seen what people are capable of. She knows more than anyone how, in a moment of weakness, a person can be driven to do something they never thought possible. Lewis can believe it too. But he can’t reveal what he saw that afternoon at the creek without exposing his own secret. Five days later, Esther’s buried body is discovered. What do we owe the girl who isn’t there?
When Ivan Novak is shot dead putting out his garbage bins in Sydney’s west, his family wants revenge, especially his father Milan, a notorious crime boss.
It’s a job for the second son, Ivan’s younger brother Johnny. But Johnny loves his wife Amy and their son Sasha. And she’s about to deliver her ultimatum: either the three of them escape this wave of killing or she’ll leave, taking Sasha. Torn between loyalty to his family and love for his wife, Johnny plans the heist of a lifetime and takes a huge risk. Is he prepared to pay the price? And what choice will Amy make?
Tholdi is a romantic. A musical prodigy whose brilliant future is extinguished when the horror unfolding across Europe arrives at his door. One day he’s captivated by the beautiful, mysterious Lyuba who he meets on his sixteenth birthday; the next he wakes to the terrors of war as the Nazi-allied Romanians attack his town of Czernowitz.
A ghetto is built to imprison the town’s Jews before herding them onto trains bound for the concentration camps of Transnistria. With each passing day, Tholdi and his parents await their turn. And then Fate intervenes, giving them all a reprieve. At the weaving mill Tholdi secures work that spares him. He is elated. Until he discovers the two brothers who run the mill are Nazi collaborators hiding a terrible secret: the threat of transportation remains. When Tholdi sees one of the brothers with Lyuba, he glimpses a way to save himself and his family. But the stakes of his gamble are high. Will Lyuba be the key to their survival, or will Tholdi’s infatuation with her become a dangerous obsession that guarantees their death?
Sydney Redesdale, known as ‘Muv’, is often portrayed as different from her daughters – outside of that exclusive girl gang.
Without doubt, she was a divisive character, her daughters squabbling about the ‘real Muv’ for even longer than they argued about their political differences. Was she a scapegoat or saint, mother or manager? Even later biographers couldn’t quite pin her down. Just who was this elusive woman who nurtured such colourful children?
Yeongju is burned out. With her high-flying career, demanding marriage, and bustling life in Seoul, she knows she should feel successful, but all she feels is drained.
Haunted by an abandoned dream, she takes a leap of faith and leaves her old life behind. Quitting her job and divorcing her husband, Yeongju moves to a quiet residential neighbourhood outside the city and opens the Hyunam-dong Bookshop.
The transition isn’t easy. For months, all Yeongju can do is cry. But as the long hours in the shop stretch on, she begins to reflect on what makes a good bookseller and a meaningful store. She throws herself into reading voraciously, hosting author events, and crafting her own philosophy on bookselling. Gradually, Yeongju finds her footing in her new surroundings.
Authors Juniper Hayward and Athena Liu were supposed to be twin rising stars. But Athena is a literary darling while June is a nobody. Who wants stories about basic white girls?, June thinks.
So when June witnesses Athena’s death in a freak accident, she acts on impulse, stealing Athena’s just-finished masterpiece, an experimental novel about the unsung contributions of Chinese labourers during World War I. So what if June edits Athena’s novel and sends it to her agent as her own work? So what if she lets her new publisher rebrand her as Juniper Song, complete with an ambiguously ethnic author photo? This piece of history deserves to be told, whoever the teller. That is what June believes, and The New York Times bestseller list agrees.
Katherine O’Dell is an Irish theatre legend. As her daughter Norah retraces her mother’s celebrated career and bohemian life, she delves into long-kept secrets, both her mother’s and her own.
Katherine began her career on Ireland’s bus-and-truck circuit before making it to London’s West End, Broadway, and finally Hollywood. Every moment of her life is a star turn, with young Norah standing in the wings. But the mother-daughter romance cannot survive Katherine’s past or the world’s damage. With age, alcohol, and dimming stardom, her grip on reality grows fitful and, fuelled by a proud and long-simmering rage, she commits a bizarre crime
CeCe D’Aplièse has never felt she fitted in anywhere. Following the death of her father, the elusive billionaire Pa Salt, so-called by the six daughters he adopted from around the globe and named after the Seven Sisters star cluster, she finds herself at breaking point. Dropping out of art college, CeCe watches as Star, her beloved sister, distances herself to follow her new love, leaving her completely alone.
In desperation, she decides to flee England and discover her past; the only clues she has are a black-and-white photograph and the name of a woman pioneer who lived in Australia over one hundred years ago.
It is late at night on a notorious council estate in east London. A van garishly painted with a grinning clown’s face on the side is being driven erratically. When the police pull over the driver to question him, they discover, inside the van, the body of a young woman. A murder suspect, an arrest, a confession. A case done and dusted? But their suspect claims his victim is not his first, but his third.
Five years earlier, a 13-year-old girl disappeared in broad daylight on a busy London street. DCS James Langton headed the investigation and left no stone unturned. The fact that case was not solved has haunted him ever since. The enquiry has opened up again but, unable to lead it due to ill health, Langton brings in DCI Anna Travis. Meanwhile the murder team begins the laborious task of verifying the details of the confessions and uncovering the identity of the second victim. And then the suspect changes his story. They know they have a murderer in custody but is he a serial killer or just a compulsive liar?
Six months after the body of Josh Reynolds, a London nightclub owner, was found and determined by police and coroner to be a suicide, DCS James Langton tasks DCI Anna Travis to review the case.
Reynolds died from a single gunshot wound to the head, the gun held in his right hand. But details are emerging that suggest someone else may have fired the gun… As soon as she wraps up the case, Langton tells Anna, she can join him at the FBI Academy in Virginia for training. Meanwhile, a Senior FBI Agent, Jessie Dewar, crime scene expert, is seconded to Anna’s team as part of her research and immediately the competence of the original investigation team is questioned.
For Australia, a new nation with a relatively small population, the death of 60,000 soldiers during World War I was catastrophic. It is hardly surprising, then, that Australians evaluating the consequences of the conflict have tended to focus primarily on the numbing number of losses ― on the sheer quantity of all those countrymen who did not return. That there must have been extraordinary individuals among them has been implicitly understood, but these special Australians are unknown today. This book seeks to retrieve their stories and to fill the gaps in our collective memory. Farewell, Dear People contains ten extended biographies of young men who exemplified Australia’s gifted lost generation of World War I. Among them are accounts of an internationally acclaimed medical researcher; a military officer described by his brigadier as potentially an Australian Kitchener; a rugby international who became an esteemed administrator and a rising Labor star; an engineer who excelled on Mawson’s Antarctic mission; a visionary vigneron and community leader who was renowned for successful winemaking at an unusually young age; a Western Australian Rhodes scholar assured of a shining future in the law and/or politics; a Tasmanian footballer who dazzled at the highest level; and a budding architect from Melbourne’s best-known creative dynasty who combined an endearing personality with his family’s flair for writing and drawing.
John Cantwell, Queensland country boy, enlisted in the army as a private and rose to the rank of major general. He was on the front line in 1991 as Coalition forces fitted bulldozer blades to tanks and buried Iraqi troops alive. He served in Baghdad in 2006 and saw what a car bomb does to a crowded marketplace. He was commander of Australian forces in Afghanistan in 2010 when ten of his soldiers were killed. He came home in 2011 to be considered for the job of chief of the Australian Army. Instead, he ended up in a psychiatric hospital.
Exit Wounds is the deeply human account of one man’s tour of the War on Terror, the moving story of life on a modern battlefield: from the nightmare of cheating death in a field strewn with mines, to the utter despair of looking into the face of a dead soldier before sending his body home to his mother. Cantwell hid his post-traumatic stress disorder for decades, fearing it would affect his career.
In this third title in Joel Shepherd’s gripping quartet, we are reunited with the fearless heroine Sasha, Errollyn and the other familiar characters from Sasha and Petrodor.
The net is really closing in now, with the whole of Rhodia at war and the serrin – the beautiful and dangerous people from beyond the Bacosh – fighting for survival. The revolutionary politics of Tracato, and the clandestine attempts by the feudalists to hold onto power, are gripping and full of intrigue. The characters who were developing in the previous title blossom into their roles here, sharing the arena with Sasha, giving this novel an extra dimension that readers will love.
No period in British history has more resonance and mystery today than the sixteenth century. New Worlds, Lost Worlds brings the atmosphere and events of this great epoch to life.
Exploring the underlying religious motivations for the savage violence and turbulence of the period-from Henry VIII’s break with Rome to the overwhelming threat of the Spanish Armada-Susan Brigden investigates the actions and influences of such near-mythical figures as Elizabeth I, Thomas More, Bloody Mary, and Sir Walter Raleigh.
On a freezing night in January 2013, a hooded assailant hurled acid in the face of the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet.
The crime, organized by a lead soloist, dragged one of Russia’s most illustrious institutions into scandal. The Bolshoi Theatre had been a crown jewel during the reign of the tsars and an emblem of Soviet power throughout the twentieth century. Under Putin in the twenty-first century, it has been called on to preserve a priceless artistic legacy and mirror Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions. The attack and its torrid aftermath underscored the importance of the Bolshoi to the art of ballet, to Russia, and to the world.
The tiny South Island town of Franz Josef is perched precariously on New Zealand’s Alpine Fault. It already faces devastating earthquakes, floods and landslides. And now it harbours a killer.
When a body is discovered suspended in a glacier, detectives Nick Chester and Latifa Rapata are sent to investigate. More victims surface, as does a web of corruption stretching from the international aid industry to the blood-soaked fields of a civil war.
What antique would you kill for?
Freya Lockwood is shocked when she learns that Arthur Crockleford, antiques dealer and her estranged mentor, has died under mysterious circumstances. She has spent the last twenty years avoiding her quaint English hometown, but when she receives a letter from Arthur asking her to investigate, sent just days before his death, Freya has no choice but to return to a life she had sworn to leave behind. Joining forces with her eccentric Aunt Carole, Freya follows clues and her instincts to an old manor house for an advertised antiques enthusiast’s weekend. But not all is as it seems.
It’s 1679 and into the tumult, politics and colour of Restoration London and its lively theatre scene comes the fierce and opinionated Tribulation Johnson.
Cast out from her family as ungodly and unworthy, Tribulation is determined to forge her own remarkable path. Arriving in London, Tribulation is astonished to discover that the widowed cousin she’s been sent to live with is none other than the most infamous woman in the former spy and traitor’s mistress, the playwright and polemical poetess, Aphra Behn. Tribulation cannot believe her good fortune as she is thrust into city life and the heady, mercurial milieu of the theatre. Under Aphra’s guidance, Tribulation is encouraged to write, think and speak for herself. But women aren’t supposed to have a voice, or ideas, let alone wield a pen and write for a living, and there are harsh consequences for those who don’t obey society’s rules.
Featuring 80 diverse and cook-able recipes for home by the city’s best food innovators. With added context about why chefs do things the way they do, it’s a book that will teach people how to cook, not just follow a recipe. The featured dishes are not about taking something out of a restaurant and serving it at home, but about the perfect dish for home.
This is a celebration of the diversity, positivity and innovation that defines Melbourne food culture, and which evolved into something even more special in 2020. That year changed dining in Melbourne and how we think about chefs, restaurants and their place in our lives. We turned to chefs and our city’s food community for lessons and inspiration on how to cook simple things well. We couldn’t go to restaurants, so we brought the restaurants to us.