New Books / Reviews
Reviews of New Books Winter 2025
In this raw memoir, Gayle invites readers to walk alongside her through the darkest corners of family struggle, the deep disconnect and dysfunction caused by undiagnosed mental illness and addiction, eventually resulting in life-altering tragedy. With unmatched honesty and relatability, Gayle opens her heart, sharing the “warts and all” moments of her journey to healing so that others, too, can feel seen and understood in their own struggles, all while feeling inspired to boldly step into change.
Amid the quiet of grief, Gayle was able to reawaken her connection to her intuition, finding the strength to rebuild herself, rediscovering her voice and her sense of purpose. Through the pain and loss, she found a path to compassion and forgiveness that allowed her to reconnect with her childhood family, fostering a future of love and hope. With a wicked sense of humour, heart full of ambition, and deep passion for helping others, Gayle offers not only her story but a beacon of hope for those seeking to heal and rebuild the relationships that matter most. This book is for anyone searching for strength, resilience, and a brighter, more connected future.
Venice, 1486. Across the lagoon lies Murano. Time flows differently here, like the glass the island’s maestros spend their lives learning to handle.
Women are not meant to work with glass, but Orsola Rosso flouts convention to save her family from ruin. She works in secret, knowing her creations must be perfect to be accepted by men. But perfection may take a lifetime.
Skipping like a stone through the centuries, we follow Orsola as she hones her craft through war and plague, tragedy and triumph, love and loss. The beads she creates will adorn the necks of empresses and courtesans from Paris to Vienna, but will she ever earn the respect of those closest to her?
Mercy Callahan thought she’d escaped the cult decades ago, but its long fingers are reaching out for her again in this electrifying novel in the Sacramento series by New York Times bestselling author Karen Rose.
Seventeen years ago. That was the last time Mercy Callahan saw Ephraim Burton, the leader of the twisted Eden cult where she was raised. But even though she escaped the abuse and terror, they continue to haunt her. When her brother Gideon discovers new evidence of the cult’s and their victims’ whereabouts, Mercy goes to Sacramento to reconnect with him. There, she meets Gideon’s closest friend, homicide detective Rafe Sokolov. From Rafe, she receives an offer she never knew she needed: to track down Ephraim and make him pay for everything.
But Ephraim, who had thought Mercy long dead, discovers she is in fact alive and that she is digging around for the cult’s secrets. And now he’ll do anything to take her back to Eden, dead or alive.
Lucas Davenport has seen many terrible murder scenes. This is one of the worst. In the small Minnesota town of Wayzata, an entire family has been killed, husband, wife, two daughters, dogs.
There’s something about the scene that pokes at Lucas’s cop instincts, it looks an awful lot like the kind of scorched-earth retribution he’s seen in drug killings sometimes. But this is a seriously upscale town, and the husband was an executive vice president at a big bank. It just doesn’t seem to fit.
Until it does. And where it leads Lucas will take him into the darkest nightmare of his life.
When it comes to relationships, Colin Singleton’s type is girls named Katherine. And when it comes to girls named Katherine, Colin is always getting dumped. Nineteen times, to be exact. On a road trip, miles from home, this anagram-happy, washed-up child prodigy has ten thousand dollars in his pocket, a bloodthirsty feral hog on his trail, and an overweight, Judge Judy, loving best friend, riding shotgun but no Katherines.
Colin is on a mission to prove The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability, which he hopes will predict the future of any relationship, avenge Dumpees everywhere, and finally win him the girl. Love, friendship, and a dead Austro-Hungarian archduke add up to surprising and heart-changing conclusions in this ingeniously layered comic novel about reinventing oneself.
Richard Ainsworth’s French B&B has been taken over by a production company shooting an historical film at the Château de Valençay. But everything grinds to a halt with the sudden passing of an actor under suspicious circumstances.
To get to the bottom of things, Valérie Dorçay and Richard offer catering services to the hastily resumed production. There they discover that the vanity, duplicity and murder of an 18th century French court is nothing compared to that of a 21st century film set, with more heads yet to roll.
Logan McRae’s personal history is hardly squeaky clean, but now that he works for Professional Standards it’s his job to police his fellow officers.
When Detective Inspector Bell turns up dead in the driver’s seat of a crashed car it’s a shock to everyone. Because Bell died two years ago, they buried him. Or they thought they did. As an investigation is launched into Bell’s stabbing, Logan digs into his past. Where has he been all this time? Why did he disappear? And what’s so important he felt the need to come back from the dead?
There is a serial killer on the loose, preying on vulnerable women. The only identifiable mark the killer leaves are letters, sometimes one, sometimes two, all carved into the torsos of his victims. Together they spell “Sydney.” When he grabs Daisy Dawson, he believes he has found his next victim. But despite her small stature, she fights back with an expertise that quickly frees her. Before fleeing the scene, Daisy also manages to grab what proves to be crucial evidence: a necklace from around the killer’s neck.
The necklace is more than a trivial item; it is a link to a cold case that Special Agent Gideon Reynolds has been tracking for seventeen years. With Daisy’s help, Gideon finally has the opportunity to get closer to the truth than ever before.
When an old woman storms into the Rijksmuseum demanding the return of her painting, archivist Ruth Braams cannot quell her curiosity. Ruth delves into the history of the piece of looted Nazi art and discovers an enigmatic picture with a disturbing wartime provenance. It also appears that the elderly Lydia is not the only claimant and, against strict bureau regulations, Ruth endeavours to help strengthen her case.
Days later, Ruth begins to receive sinister anonymous threats, warning her to stay away from Lydia and the painting. As the threats escalate, Ruth realizes that there must be far more to the painting’s popularity, and she enters a series of increasingly lethal adventures as she investigates its secret symbolism.
Lizzie Harvey, a convict transported to Sydney Cove, is starving and overworked.
She can barely find time to dream about the way things used to be, let alone write in her diary. But write she must. It is her only hope of reaching out to the home she has left behind, all those thousands of miles away across the sea.
Detective Chief Inspector Roberta Steel got caught fitting up Jack Wallace, that’s why they demoted her and quashed his sentence. Now he’s back on the streets and women are being attacked again.
Wallace has to be responsible, but if Detective Sergeant Steel goes anywhere near him, his lawyers will get her thrown off the force for good. Steel knows Wallace is guilty. And the longer he gets away with it, the more women will suffer. The question is: how much is she willing to sacrifice to stop him?
Detective Jack Warr is haunted by the gruesome legacy of serial killer Rodney Middleton and reeling from a series of events that has left him deep in depression. Refusing the Met-offered counselling service, Jack instead finds solace instead through renewing a dangerous friendship with the artist and master forger, Adam Border.
When a body is discovered nailed to a giant cross in a framer’s shop, Jack feels a connection to the case even though it is not in his jurisdiction. But is his involvement that of a detective or witness?
In 1940, as the Nazis sweep toward Lithuania, Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara defies his own government and secretly issues thousands of visas to Jewish refugees desperate to flee. After the war, Sugihara is dismissed and disappears into obscurity.
Three decades later, in Australia, Rachael Margol, her father and her grandmother live disconnected from one another and haunted by unspoken tragedies. When Rachel announces her engagement to a Greek Orthodox man, it detonates a long-held secret. The Margols are actually the Margolins: they are Jewish, and her family has concealed their identity from her and the world. But why? As Rachel struggles to understand this deception, an opportunity arrives to visit Chiune Sugihara, the man who risked his life to save them during World War II. Rachel becomes determined to meet him, but will a journey to Japan, and the secrets it uncovers, heal the Margolins or fracture them for good?
Kasey Chambers’ Just Don’t Be a D**khead and Other Profound Things I’ve Learnt is a whirlwind of great stories, rock-solid life lessons and Kasey Chambers at her most heartfelt and honest.
From her childhood in the Australian outback to the heights of her chart-topping international success as a singer/songwriter, Kasey has trusted her gut, stuck to her values and learned some hard truths, always while trying to live by the best advice she’s ever received: just don’t be a d**khead.
Oxford 1863: Young Samuel Speed sets a barley stack alight in the hope it will earn him a bed in prison for the night. He wants nothing more than a morsel of food in his belly and a warm place to sleep off the streets. What he receives is a sentence of seven years’ servitude, to be served half a world away in the penal colony of Fremantle, Western Australia.
When Samuel boards the transport ship Belgravia, he is stripped of his clothing and even his name, and given regulations about when to rise, eat, clean and sleep. On arrival at Fremantle Prison, hard labour is added to the mix and he wonders if life can get any worse. The only solace he finds is a love of reading, which allows the likes of Tom Sawyer and Oliver Twist to become his lifelong friends.
Samuel is granted a ticket of leave in 1867 and full freedom in 1871, but what sort of life can a man forge for himself in the colony, with no skills, no money and no family? Will it be the beginning of the life he has always dreamed of, or do some sentences truly never end?
Ellen Kelly was born during the troubles in Ireland. When she arrived in Melbourne in 1841 aged nine, British convict ships were still dumping their unhappy cargo in what was then known as the colony of New South Wales. When she died at the age of 91 in 1923, having outlived seven of her 12 children, motor cars plied the highway near her bush home north of Melbourne, and Australia was a modern sovereign nation.
The wife of a convict, Ellen, like so many Australian pioneering women, led a life of great hardship. She was a mother of seven when her husband died after months in a police lock-up, lived through famine and Australian drought, saw her babies die, listened through the prison wall while her eldest son was hanged and saw the charred remains of another of her children who’d died in a shoot-out with police. One son became Australia’s most infamous (and ultimately popular) outlaw. Another became a highly decorated policeman, an honorary member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a worldwide star on the rodeo circuit.
Single & Free is about the scheme administered by the London Emigration Committee to assist free women to migrate to Australia from Great Britain and IreIand. In the 1830s, approximately 3000 women took advantage of this scheme, representing an enormous influx to the population of the two eastern colonies of Australia, New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land.
The book analyses the women’s motivations and life-experiences, challenging contemporary criticisms that they were the ‘sweepings of the gutters’. Many women migrated in family groups, or were joining family and friends in the colonies. They came from a wide cross-section of nineteenth-century society. They were bold and enterprising, and made ideal workers and wives in the new colonies.
(Review from Royal Historical Society of Victoria website).
In the ancient city of Nineveh, on the bank of the River Tigris, King Ashurbanipal of Mesopotamia, erudite but ruthless, built a great library that would crumble with the end of his reign. From its ruins, however, emerged a poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh, that would infuse the existence of two rivers and bind together three lives.
In 1840 London, Arthur is born beside the stinking, sewage-filled River Thames. With an abusive, alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, Arthur’s only chance of escaping destitution is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a leading publisher, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, and one book in particular catches his interest: Nineveh and Its Remains.
In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a ten-year-old Yazidi girl, is diagnosed with a rare disorder that will soon cause her to go deaf. Before that happens, her grandmother is determined to baptize her in a sacred Iraqi temple. But with the rising presence of ISIS and the destruction of the family’s ancestral lands along the Tigris, Narin is running out of time.
In 2018 London, the newly divorced Zaleekah, a hydrologist, moves into a houseboat on the Thames to escape her husband. Orphaned and raised by her wealthy uncle, Zaleekah had made the decision to take her own life in one month, until a curious book about her homeland changes everything.
When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan.
Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.
Public prosecutor J.P. “Kaj” Cardozo has only lived in New Orleans for six months, and he’s already working on a high-profile celebrity sexual assault case that’s made headlines all over the country. But when his son becomes the target of a kidnapping attempt as a threat to Kaj, he is desperate to keep him safe and turns to a private investigative firm famous for their protection services.
A veteran Marine, Val Sorensen is glad to have found a new career with Broussard Investigations. Her latest assignment as the bodyguard to ten-year-old Elijah Cardozo. Through her duties, Val grows fond of the boy and his handsome father.
But when the high-stakes investigation reveals an explosive network of crime through a revived drug gang, lingering deep-seated corruption in the NOPD, and a group of murderers-for-hire targeting Kaj, Elijah, and his star client, they’re all left scrambling for safety.
As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled away to a small town in Maine by her ex-husband and on-again, off-again friend, William. For the next several months, it’s just Lucy, William, and their complex past together in a little house nestled against the moody, swirling sea.
Rich with empathy and emotion, Lucy by the Sea vividly captures the fear and struggles that come with isolation, as well as the hope, peace, and possibilities that those long, quiet days can inspire. At the heart of this story are the deep human connections that unite us even when we’re apart, the pain of a beloved daughter’s suffering, the emptiness that comes from the death of a loved one, the promise of a new friendship, and the comfort of an old, enduring love.
A mother and her teenage daughter are found murdered in a remote farmhouse, one defiled by multiple stab wounds and the other posed like Sleeping Beauty waiting for her Prince. Joe O’Loughlin is drawn into the investigation when a former student, trading on Joe’s reputation by calling himself the “Mindhunter,” jeopardizes the police inquiry by leaking details to the media and stirring up public anger.
With no shortage of suspects and tempers beginning to fray, Joe discovers a link between these murders and a series of brutal attacks where the men and women are choked unconscious and the letter “A” is carved into their foreheads. As the case becomes ever more complex, nothing is quite what it seems and soon Joe’s fate, and that of those closest to him, become intertwined with a merciless, unpredictable killer.
In the brief golden years of King Edward VII’s reign, Rosie McCosh and her three sisters are growing up in an idyllic and eccentric household in Kent, with their ‘pals’ the Pitt boys on one side of the fence and the Pendennis boys on the other. But their days of childhood innocence and adventure are destined to be followed by the apocalypse that will overwhelm their world as they come to adulthood.
For Rosie, the path ahead is full of challenges: torn between her love for two young men, her sense of duty and her will to live her life to the full, she has to navigate her way through extraordinary times. Can she, and her sisters, build new lives out of the opportunities and devastations that follow the Great War?
Windsor, 1940: Secretly tasked with foiling a suspected plot, Sophie Klein is placed in the Royal Library at Windsor castle, where the princesses reside.
But when she learns that Windsor is compromised, Sophie must sacrifice everything she knows to save the future queen of England.
Philadelphia, Present day: Looking through her grandmother’s papers, Lacey Jones comes across a mysterious letter stamped with the Windsor Castle crest. But how did it come to be in her family’s possession? So begins a journey that will take Lacey deep into the heart of the oldest inhabited castle in the world, and change her life forever.
Katherine Gallagher has a loyal readership both in the UK and in her native Australia and her latest book from Arc will not disappoint.
Ranging in time and place from her childhood in the Australian outback to heady youthful days in Paris of the ‘60s, to slower-paced recent years in the gardens and open spaces around her north London home, these poems are full of a colour and energy that paint a picture of life lived to the full, and also a reflectiveness, a gentle humour, and occasionally a sense of loss, as the poet looks back on times past. Publisher’s Review
The Overstory is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of, and paean to, the natural world.
From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours, vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
Baking is the most difficult aspect of the gluten-free diet to overcome, but using clever substitutes and ingenious baking methods, experienced baker Hannah Miles has created a delicious selection of gluten-free versions of everyone’s favourites.
This book is a must for the gluten intolerant or for those who bake for gluten-intolerant family members or friends.
This guide to making risotto includes chapters on vegetables and vegetarian risottos, cheese and eggs, poultry and game, meat and bacon, fish and seafood, and other ways with risotto.
Included are step-by-step instructions along with advice on cooking your own stock and selecting and sourcing the best ingredients.
With this accessible guide, meditators (and non-meditators) can understand how to attain extraordinary states with relative ease.
Blended with contemporary examples and pragmatic “how to” instructions that anyone can try, Focused and Fearless provides a wealth of tools to cultivate non-distracted attention in daily life and on retreat. Shaila Catherine has a friendly, wise approach to the meditative states ( jhanas) that lead to liberating insight.
To most of Regency high society, forty-two-year-old Lady Augusta Colebrook, or Gus, and her twin sister, Julia, are just unmarried ladies of a certain age. But the Colebrook twins are far from useless old maids. They are secretly protecting women and children ignored by society and the law.
When Lord Evan, a charming escaped convict who has won Gus’s heart, needs to hide his sister, Hester, from their vindictive brother, Gus and Julia take Hester and her lover into their home. But Lord Evan’s complicated past puts them all in danger. Gus knows they must clear his name of murder if he is to survive the thief takers who hunt him. No easy task, the fatal duel was twenty years ago and a key witness is nowhere to be found.
Croydon, 1964. Helen Hansford is in her thirties and an art therapist in a psychiatric hospital where she has been having a long love affair with a charismatic, married doctor.
One spring afternoon they receive a call about a disturbance from a derelict house not far from Helen’s home. A mute, thirty-seven-year-old man called William Tapping, with a beard down to his waist, has been discovered along with his elderly aunt. It is clear he has been shut up in the house for decades, but when it emerges that William is a talented artist, Helen is determined to discover his story.
Plants evolved seeds to hack time. Thanks to seeds they can cast their genes forward into the future, enabling species to endure across seasons, years, and occasionally millennia.
When a 2000-year-old extinct date palm seed was discovered, no one expected it to still be alive. But it sprouted a healthy young date palm. That seeds produced millennia ago could still be viable today suggests seeds are capable of extreme lifespans. Yet many seeds, including those crucial to our everyday lives, don’t live very long at all. In The Age of Seeds Fiona McMillan-Webster tells the astonishing story of seed longevity, the crucial role they play in our everyday lives, and what that might mean for our future.
If you think Australia’s history is straightforward, you’re dead wrong. This is a land of the strange, the spooky and the unexplained. From the eerie ball of light that stalked a terrified family across the Nullarbor, to the whereabouts of Victoria’s parliamentary mace, to the unidentified body found propped up on an Adelaide beach, and, yes, to the whereabouts of Ned Kelly’s skull, you’ll find our history has plenty of mysterious twists and unanswered questions.
With his signature wit, Eamon Evans investigates Australia’s most curious mysteries, digs up the evidence and lays it out for the court of public opinion to decide. Whatever Happened to Ned Kelly’s Head? will have you scratching your head and wondering long after the last page.
Poet, novelist, singer-songwriter, artist, prophet, icon, there has never been a figure like Leonard Cohen. He was a true giant in contemporary western culture, entertaining and inspiring people everywhere with his work. From his groundbreaking and bestselling novels, The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, to timeless songs such as “Suzanne,” “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and “Hallelujah,” Cohen is a cherished artist. His death in 2016 was felt around the world by the many fans and followers who would miss his warmth, humour, intellect, and piercing insights.
Leonard Cohen, Untold Stories chronicles the full breadth of his extraordinary life. The first of three volumes, The Early Years, follows him from his boyhood in Montreal to university, and his burgeoning literary career to the world of music, culminating with his first international tour in 1970.
Frida Kahlo was a colourful Mexican artist who endured great pain and hardship, but used her bright, vivid brushstrokes to express her emotions and reveal her true personality.
She created over 50 self-portraits, and is considered to be one of the most influential and inspirational artists of the 20th century.
Lismore resident Rob, a happily married empty-nester, enjoying his late middle age, has always defined himself by the quality of the roof over his head and the state of his family life. Solid. Safe. Stable. But when the 2022 flood hits, he and his wife Sal find themselves homeless, their lives now the very opposite of secure and predictable.
While government and insurance investigations drag on, Rob and Sal are left with no choice but to rent while they wait to find out the fate of their badly damaged home. After a mix-up with contracts, they reluctantly agree to share a home unit in Ballina with a slightly older hippy couple, also impacted by the floods, who couldn’t be more different from their new flatmates. A two-bedroom, one-bathroom flat with very thin walls, surely they can stick it out for six months? They’re all grown-ups, right? As each awkward, yet entertaining week rolls into the next, they graciously try to deal with one another’s personal quirks while waiting for life to get back to normal.
Hanging Ned Kelly looks at the life and times, crimes and demise of Australia’s most famous antihero from a new perspective: that of the ‘rogue and vagabond’ who finally put the noose around his neck.
Elijah Upjohn was the latest in a long line of flogging hangmen allowed to run amok because they’d do the dirty work that let officials keep their hands clean. Despite being duly appointed ‘finishers of the law’, Upjohn and his fellow boozing bunglers were so hated they were hunted by angry mobs. As one writer asked: ‘Who shall hang the hangman?’
When X, an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter, falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified.
Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.
Growing flowers can bring colour and life to the garden, and also give you an abundance of sustainable floral material to use at home. This handbook shows you how to plan a cutting garden, grow the perfect plants for the vase and nurture them so they thrive from season to season. Whether you have a few pots or a dedicated patch, you can grow beautiful blooms and learn how to cut, condition and arrange them for garden-gathered floral designs all year round, all without the carbon footprint of most shop-bought flowers! Cut Flowers includes a directory of flowers, bulbs and foliage to grow, plus pro advice on creating dreamy designs.
In present-day Greece, deep in an ancient forest, lives a family: Irini, a musician, who teaches children to read and play music; her husband, Tasso, who paints pictures of the forest, his greatest muse; and Chara, their young daughter, whose name means joy. On the fateful day that will forever alter the trajectory of their lives, flames chase fleeing birds across the sky. The wildfire that will consume their home, and their lives as they know it, races toward them.
Months later, as the village tries to rebuild, Irini stumbles upon the man who started the fire, a land speculator who had intended only a small, controlled burn to clear forestland to build on but instead ignited a catastrophe. He is dying, although the cause is unclear, and in her anger at all he took from them, Irini makes a split-second decision that will haunt her. As the local police investigate the suspicious death, Tasso mourns his father, who has not been seen since before the fire. Tasso’s hands were burnt in the flames, leaving him unable to paint, and he struggles to cope with the overwhelming loss of his artistic voice and his beloved forest. Only his young daughter, who wants to repair the damage that’s been done, gives him hope for the future.
Morocco, 1968: Two siblings, unusual for their biracial parentage, their father is Moroccan, their mother French, search for their place in a world not made to fit them. Aicha, strong-willed and studious, dreams of leaving Morocco to study medicine in her mother’s homeland. Her younger brother, Selim, the family’s errant misfit, will forge a path of rebellion among the European hippies descending en masse to practice drugs and free love. Children of the revolution, now coming of age in the violent, nihilistic “years of lead,” they seem destined to echo their homeland’s fate: teetering between liberation and corruption, idealism and compromise. Enduring racism and abandonment, and experiencing the thrills and terrors of freedom and the iron thralls of desire, they navigate a path toward themselves: who they are, and who they dream of becoming. In Watch Us Dance, Leila Slimani draws on her family’s inspiring story to craft a bold, powerful chronicle of the relentless human quest for freedom and self-knowledge.
What if we could redefine leadership? What if kindness came first?
Jacinda Ardern grew up the daughter of a police officer in small-town New Zealand, but as the 40th Prime Minister of her country, she commanded global respect for her empathetic leadership that put people first. This is the remarkable story of how a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt made political history and changed our assumptions of what a global leader can be.
Forty thousand years ago, humanity fled a dying Earth. Traveling in massive arkships, these brave pioneers spread out across the galaxy to find a new home. After traveling thousands of light-years, one fleet of arkships arrived at Centauri, a dense cluster of stars with a vast array of potentially habitable planets. The survivors of Earth signalled to the remaining arkships that humanity had finally found its new home among the stars.
Thousands of years later, the Centauri Cluster has flourished. The original settlers have evolved into advanced beings known as Celestials and divided themselves into powerful Dominions. One of the most influential is that of the Crown Celestials, an alliance of five great houses that controls vast areas of Centauri. As arkships continue to arrive, the remaining humans and their descendants must fight for survival against overwhelming odds or be forced into serving the Crown Dominion.
On the chilly dawn morning of 3 December 1854 British soldiers and police of the Victorian colonial government attacked and stormed a crudely-built fortification erected by insurgent gold miners at the Eureka lead on the Ballarat Gold Diggings. The fighting was intense, the carnage appalling and the political consequences of the affair profound.
This book, for the first time, examines in great detail the actual military events that unfolded during the twenty minutes of deadly fighting at Eureka. Many of the old assumptions about what occurred that day are turned on the heads, raising in their places provocative questions. Were the intentions of the Eureka diggers as pacific as tradition insists? How was it that men supposedly poorly armed and taken completely by surprise in their sleep were able to deliver ‘sharp and well directed’ fire on their attackers? How close, in fact did the assaulting infantry come to failing in their task, and why has the pivotal part played by the police in the battle been ignored in every retelling of the Eureka story? Why have the Americans, who played a decisive part in the defence of the stockade been all but ignored?
It’s 1951 in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. Blackburn Gant, his life irrevocably altered by a childhood case of polio, seems condemned to spend his life among the dead as the sole caretaker of a hilltop cemetery.
It suits his withdrawn personality, and the inexplicable occurrences that happen from time to time rattle him less than interaction with the living. But when his best and only friend, the kind but impulsive Jacob Lampton, is conscripted to serve overseas, Blackburn is charged with caring for Jacob’s wife, Naomi, as well.
When Melbourne lawyer Nathan Smithson takes on the case of mad, wealthy Edward Fonçeca’s inheritance trial against his ruthless brother in 1902, he must unearth long-buried family secrets to have any chance of winning.
Brazil, 1852: François, the Count de Castelnau and French Consul to Bahia falls dangerously ill on a naturalist expedition and is delivered by a rainforest tribesman to the Fonçeca household. Carolina Fonçeca is 16 years old and longing to leave the confines of her family’s remote Brazilian sugar plantation. With a head full of Balzac and dreams of Parisian life, she is instantly beguiled by the middle-aged Frenchman. What Carolina doesn’t know is that François has a wife and son back in France. Desperate for a new life, she makes a decision that will haunt her forever.
This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century.
This colourful, personal, anecdotal, indiscreet and admiring memoir charts the course of Muriel Spark’s life revealing her as she really was. Once, she commented sitting over a glass of chianti at the kitchen table, that she was upset that the academic whom she had appointed her official biographer did not appear to think that she had ever cracked a joke in her life. Alan Taylor here sets the record straight about this and many other things.
When a teenage joyrider crashes a stolen car and ends up in a coma, a routine DNA test reveals a connection to an unsolved murder from twenty-two years before. Finding the answer to the cold case should be straightforward. But it’s as twisted as the DNA helix itself.
Meanwhile, Karen finds herself irresistibly drawn to another mystery that she has no business investigating, a mystery that has its roots in a terrorist bombing two decades ago. And again, she finds that nothing is as it seems.
Is it violence if it’s virtual? The outspoken women targeted by the increasingly cruel internet trolls and bullies would probably say so. For some of them, the torrents of bile and vicious threats prove too much. They begin to silence themselves in a series of high-profile suicides.
Or do they? Tony Hill isn’t convinced. But he’s the only one. Former cop Carol Jordan is too busy messing up her life to care. Until she gets an unexpected second chance. Now it’s game on, and the stakes have never been higher.
Maia D’Apliese and her five sisters gather together at their childhood home, “Atlantis”, a fabulous, secluded castle situated on the shores of Lake Geneva, having been told that their beloved father, who adopted them all as babies, has died. Each of them is handed a tantalizing clue to her true heritage, a clue which takes Maia across the world to a crumbling mansion in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Once there, she begins to put together the pieces of her story and its beginnings.
Eighty years earlier in Rio’s Belle Epoque of the 1920s, Izabela Bonifacio’s father has aspirations for his daughter to marry into the aristocracy. Meanwhile, architect Heitor da Silva Costa is devising plans for an enormous statue, to be called Christ the Redeemer, and will soon travel to Paris to find the right sculptor to complete his vision. Izabela, passionate and longing to see the world, convinces her father to allow her to accompany him and his family to Europe before she is married. There, at Paul Landowski’s studio and in the heady, vibrant cafes of Montparnasse, she meets ambitious young sculptor Laurent Brouilly, and knows at once that her life will never be the same again.
In a hail of fire and flashing sword, as the burning city of Acre falls from the hands of the West in 1291, The Last Templar opens with a young Templar knight, his mentor, and a handful of others escaping to the sea carrying a mysterious chest entrusted to them by the Order’s dying Grand Master. The ship vanishes without a trace.
In present day Manhattan, four masked horsemen dressed as Templar Knights emerge from Central Park and ride up the Fifth Avenue steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during the black-tie opening of a Treasures of the Vatican exhibit. Storming through the crowds, the horsemen brutally attack anyone standing between them and their prize. Attending the gala, archaeologist Tess Chaykin watches in silent terror as the leader of the horsemen hones in on one piece in particular, a strange geared device. He utters a few cryptic Latin words as he takes hold of it with reverence before leading the horsemen out and disappearing into the night. In the aftermath, an FBI investigation is led by anti-terrorist specialist Sean Reilly. Soon, he and Tess are drawn into the dark, hidden history of the crusading Knights, plunging them into a deadly game of cat and mouse with ruthless killers as they race across three continents to recover the lost secret of the Templars.
After completing her tours with the Marines in Iraq, Molly Sutton knew she could take down any bad guy she met. But when her law enforcement agency in North Carolina turned against her, she joined up with her former CO Burke Broussard, who left New Orleans PD to set up a private investigative service for people who couldn’t find justice elsewhere.
Gabe Hebert saw the toll that working for the NOPD took on his dad and decided instead to make a name for himself as one of the best young chefs in the French Quarter. But when his father’s death is ruled a suicide after a deliberately botched investigation by his former captain, Gabe knows his dad stumbled onto a truth that someone wants silenced. Gabe goes to his father’s best friend, Burke, for help. Burke assigns the toughest member of his team, Molly, to the case. Molly can’t believe she’s being asked to work with the smoking hot chef whose chocolate cake is not the only thing that makes her mouth water. Sparks fly as they follow the leads Gabe’s dad left them, unravelling a web of crimes, corruption, and murder that runs all the way to the top.
Inspector Logan McRae is looking forward to a nice simple case, something to ease him back into work after a year off on sick leave.
But the powers-that-be have other ideas. The high-profile anti-independence campaigner, Professor Wilson, has gone missing, leaving nothing but bloodstains behind. There’s a war brewing between the factions for and against Scottish Nationalism; infighting in the police ranks, and it’s all playing out in the merciless glare of the media. Logan’s superiors want results, and they want them now.
A little-known story of two Australian battalions abandoned in Java during World War II and the heroes who kept them alive in the worst of Japan’s prisoner of war camps.
They were thrown into a hopeless fight against an overwhelming enemy. Later, hundreds died as prisoners of war on the Thai-Burma Railway and in the freezing coal mines of Taiwan and Japan. Through it all, wrote Weary Dunlop, they showed ‘fortitude beyond anything I could have believed possible’.
Until now, the story of the 2,000 diggers marooned on Java in February 1942 has been a footnote to the fall of Singapore and the bloody campaign in New Guinea. Led by an Adelaide lawyer, Brigadier Arthur Blackburn VC, and fighting with scrounged weapons, two Australian battalions plus an assortment of cooks, laundrymen, and deserters from Singapore held up the might of the Imperial Japanese Army until ordered by their Dutch allies to surrender. Drawing on personal diaries, official records and interviews with two of the last living survivors, this book tells the extraordinary story of the ‘lads from Java’, who laid down their weapons, but refused to give in.
This biography tells the story of George Morrison, an Australian journalist who reported on China for the London Times during the era of the Boxer Rebellion.
This is both the personal story of an intrepid journalist who became a national hero and the broader story of the emergence of China onto the world stage. Morrison’s involvement in the behind-the-scenes power struggles and his role as advisor to the fledgling government are covered in detail.
If you are not a citizen of Voorstand, you may not be familiar with the strange case of Tristan Smith and his illegal appropriation of Bruder Mouse.
Even if you are a citizen of faraway Efica, you will only have heard rumours about the juggling, the somersaulting, the Burro Plasse tunnel, and the motel on the border. Here, for the first time, is the truth about Tristan Smith. This fully annotated edition follows Tristan’s career from his birth in the Republic of Efica in the year 371 to the present day.
People of the Deer is Canadian author Farley Mowat’s first book, and brought him literary recognition.
The book is based upon a series of travels the author undertook in the Canadian barren lands, of the Keewatin Region, Northwest Territories.
Lyrebirds are brilliant mimics, so if they mimic a woman screaming in terror and begging for her life, they have witnessed a crime.
But how does a young, hung over PHD student and a wet behind the ears new detective, convince anyone that a native bird can be a reliable witness to a murder, especially when there is no body and no missing person? And what happens when they turn out to be right?
In 2003, seventeen-year-old Australian exchange student Hannah Kent arrives at Keflavík Airport in the middle of the Icelandic winter. That night she sleeps off her jet lag and bewilderment in the National Archives of Iceland, unaware that, years later, she will return to the same building to write Burial Rites, the haunting story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, the last woman executed in Iceland. The novel will go on to launch the author’s stellar literary career and capture the hearts of readers across the globe.
Always Home, Always Homesick is Hannah Kent’s exquisite love letter to a land that has forged a nation of storytellers, her ode to the transcendent power of creativity, and her invitation to us all to join her in the realms of mystery, spirit and wonder.
From the moment she was born in 1886, Annette Kellerman was a force of nature. After a diagnosis of rickets as a young girl she took up swimming, and her extraordinary tenacity and bravery made her an Australian champion, beating boys, breaking records, and astonishing huge crowds by diving from great heights. At eighteen, Annette had her sights set on swimming the English Channel and challenging endurance records in the Thames, and later in the Seine, Boston Harbour and the Danube, and famously scandalized the public with her one-piece swimming costume, which changed fashion forever and drew legions of women into the water, allowing them to swim freely.
Annette’s appetite for excitement and thrills was legendary – once flinging herself into a pool of live crocodiles for one film and jumping from the wings of a biplane for another. But she also had a shrewd business mind, lecturing and publishing books about fitness and designing her clothing range, all to help women become healthier, stronger and more beautiful.
For years the boglands of Northern Europe have given up bodies of the long-deceased. Bodies that are thousands of years old, uncannily preserved. Bodies with strange injuries that suggest ritual torture and human sacrifice.
When a corpse is found in a bog in Galway, Cormac Reilly assumes the find is historical. But closer examination reveals a more recent story. The dead man is Thaddeus Grey, a local secondary school principal who disappeared two years prior.
Gwyn Weaver is as resilient as anyone could be. Having survived an attempted murder, she has rebuilt her life and reclaimed her dignity and strength. She’s always known about her feelings for defence attorney Thomas Thorne, but as her friend and a colleague there could be no chance of anything more or could there?
Thorne has known violence and pain all his life. He’s overcome the hardships that have been thrown at him thanks to his own steel, and the love of his loyal friends. Now he’s thinking it might finally be time to let his guard down, and allow himself to let in the woman he’s always admired from afar.