They maintain their sanity through a friendship built on black humour, but as the constant exposure to trauma takes its toll, both, in different ways, must fight to preserve their mental health and relationships – even with one another. How much pressure can they handle, and what will happen when they finally crack?With each chapter revolving around an emergency – some frightening, some moving, some simply funny –Rachael Mead digs beneath the surface of gore and grit to lay bare the humanity of emergency services personnel and their patients. This breathtaking novel reveals not only the trauma of a life lived on the front line of medicine, but also the essential, binding friendships that make such a life possible.

    Bella Tucker has come a long way. Born illegitimate and banished to the London slums by her vindictive stepmother, at six Bella is rescued by her grandfather and brought up as a member of the aristocratic Richmond family. Her future seems assured when shefalls passionately in love with Charles Hardy, heir to the wealthy Hardy estate — until her grandfather’s death changes everything…Heartbroken and headstrong, Bella flees to Australia, where she is offered a job by the charismatic Garth Tucker, owner - of Miranda Downs, a vast cattle station in the stunning and remote Pilbara region. After several near disasters, she finds herself falling in love with Garth amidst the dust, heat and the endless expanse of bush.Together, Bella and Garth become major players in the new mining industry, allowing Bella to build her dream home, the sprawling homestead, ‘Desire’. But after Garth’s unfortunate death, Bella is forced to deal with circumstances that bring the family close to ruin… and the business Bella and Garth have built to the brink of collapse.Can Bella untangle the lies and save the business and her family home? And will she ever lay eyes again on the man she never ceased to love, Charles Hardy?

    But darkness is found both in the iconic setting as well as in the disturbing behaviour of one of the family.As he tilted the blinds she saw her mother in her tennis whites, standing at the kitchen bench, staring out into the dark bushland that bordered their houses. That was what Tricia did these days, looked into the bush as though it would attack one of them.On a sweltering day in a cliff-top beach shack, Jack and Lou Bright grow suspicious about the behaviour of their charismatic, unpredictable father, Charlie. A girl they know has disappeared, and as the day unfolds, Jack's eruptions of panic, Lou's sultry rebellions and their little sister Phoebe's attention-seeking push the family towards revelation.Twenty years later, the Bright children have remained close to the cliff edges, russet sand and moody ocean of their childhood. Behind the beautiful surfaces of their daily lives lies the difficult landscape of their past, always threatening to break through. And then, one night in late summer, they return to the house on the cliff...Gripping and evocative, Bluebottle is a story of a family bound by an inescapable past, from the award-winning author of The River Baptists and Hannah and Emil.

    Sally Morgan traveled to her grandmother’s birthplace, starting a search for information about her family. She uncovers that she is not white but aborigine—information that was kept a secret because of the stigma of society. This moving account is a classic of Australian literature that finally frees the tongues of the author’s mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.

    Ranging over a period of some six years, the story is set during the late 1930s and early 1940s; but it is not so much a tale of this period as Herbert's analysis and indictment of the steps by which we came to the Australia of today. Herbert parallels an intimate personal narrative with a tale of approaching war and the disconnect between modern Australia and its first inhabitants. With enduring portraits of a large cast of local and international characters, Herbert paints a scene of racial, familial, and political disparity. He lays bare the paradoxes of this wild land, both old and wise, young flawed. Winner of the Miles Franklin Award on first publication in 1975, Poor Fellow, My Country is masterful storytelling, an epic in the truest sense. This is the decisive story of how Australia threw away her chance of becoming a True Commonwealth. It is undoubtedly Herbert's supreme contribution to Australian literature.

    Thowra, the magnificent silver stallion, is king of the brumbies. But he must defend his herd from the mighty horse, The Brolga, in the most savage of struggles. But that is not the only danger. Thowra needs all his speed and cunning to save his herd from capture by man. In a desperate chase through the mountains, it seems there is no longer anywhere for him to run to...

    After a hailstorm destroys the château’s orchards, gardens and fields, an ambitious young Welshman, David Stronach, accepts the commission to plan new gardens in the hope of making his name as a landscape designer. However, the love that blossoms between them is doomed: Viviane is betrothed to a duke, and David is forced to leave the property. In the aftermath, Viviane enters an unhappy marriage and moves to Versailles, while David embarks upon a mission to China to procure the secrets of tea-growing. There, he is inspired by the story of the Blue Rose, a fable of impossible love. Can he and Viviane - a world apart - ever hope to rekindle what they had together?

    No word could better capture the essence of Australia...In this hilarious history, David Hunt reveals the truth of Australia’s past, from megafauna to Macquarie – the cock-ups and curiosities, the forgotten eccentrics and Eureka moments that have made us who we are.Girt introduces forgotten heroes like Mary McLoghlin, transported for the crime of “felony of sock”, and Trim the cat, who beat a French monkey to become the first animal to circumnavigate Australia. It recounts the misfortunes of the escaped Irish convicts who set out to walk from Sydney to China, guided only by a hand-drawn paper compass, and explains the role of the coconut in Australia’s only military coup.Our nation’s beginnings are steeped in the strange, the ridiculous and the frankly bizarre. Girt proudly reclaims these stories for all of us.Not to read it would be un-Australian.

    As the weeks pass, both Ilona and her nine-year-old daughter Zidra get to know the townsfolk. But a gruesome discovery shows that Jingera is not quite the utopia Ilona imagines it to be.

    In the Valley, where the rates of crime were the highest in the state, more than thirty people were known to police as firebugs. But the detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn’t know.The Arsonist takes readers on the hunt for this man, and inside the strange puzzle of his mind. It is also the story of fire in this country, and of a community that owed its existence to that very element. The command of fire has defined and sustained us as a species – understanding its abuse will define our future. A powerful real-life thriller written with Hooper’s trademark lyric detail and nuance, The Arsonist is a reminder that in an age of fire, all of us are gatekeepers.

    'In the beginning, it was the summers I remembered - long warm days under the palest blue skies, the cornflowers and forget-me-nots lining the road through the Lys forest, the buzz of insects going about their work, Violet telling me lies.' Iris is getting old. A widow, her days are spent living quietly and worrying about her granddaughter, Grace, a headstrong young doctor. It's a small sort of life. But one day an invitation comes for Iris through the post to a reunion in France, where she served in a hospital during WWI. Determined to go, Iris is overcome by the memories of the past, when as a shy, naive young woman she followed her fifteen-year-old brother, Tom, to France in 1914 intending to bring him home. On her way to find Tom, Iris comes across the charismatic Miss Ivens, who is setting up a field hospital in the old abbey of Royaumont, north of Paris. Putting her fears aside, Iris decides to stay at Royaumont, and it is there that she truly comes of age, finding her capability and her strength, discovering her passion for medicine, making friends with the vivacious Violet and falling in love. But war is a brutal thing, and when the ultimate tragedy happens, there is a terrible price that Iris has to pay, a price that will echo down the generations. A moving and uplifting novel about the small, unsung acts of heroism of which love makes us capable.

    From the civil rights struggle in the United States to the Nazi crimes against humanity in Europe, there are more stories than people passing one another every day on the bustling streets of every crowded city. Only some stories survive to become history.Recently released from prison, Lamont Williams, an African American probationary janitor in a Manhattan hospital and father of a little girl he can’t locate, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly patient, a Holocaust survivor who was a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau.A few blocks uptown, historian Adam Zignelik, an untenured Columbia professor, finds both his career and his long-term romantic relationship falling apart. Emerging from the depths of his own personal history, Adam sees, in a promising research topic suggested by an American World War II veteran, the beginnings of something that might just save him professionally, and perhaps even personally.As these men try to survive in early-twenty-first-century New York, history comes to life in ways neither of them could have foreseen. Two very different paths—Lamont’s and Adam’s—lead to one greater story as The Street Sweeper, in dealing with memory, love, guilt, heroism, the extremes of racism and unexpected kindness, spans the twentieth century to the present, and spans the globe from New York to Chicago to Auschwitz.Epic in scope, this is a remarkable feat of storytelling.

    The woman quotes a phrase from the Karlson fragments that Caddie knows does not exist—and yet to Caddie, who knows Inga Karlson’s work like she knows her name, it feels genuine.Caddie is electrified. Jolted her from her sleepy, no-worries life in torpid 1980s Brisbane, she is driven to investigate: to find the clues that will unlock the greatest literary mystery of the twentieth century

    Inside a brand new, palatial home, her three young children need more than she can give. Clem, a wilful four year old, is intent on mimicking her grandmother; the formidable matriarch Pat Cormac. Arthur is almost three and still won't speak. At least baby Robbie is perfect. He's the future of the family. So why can't Emma hold him without wanting to scream? Beyond their gleaming windows, a lake vista is evaporating. The birds have mostly disappeared, too. All over Shorehaven, the Cormac family buys up land to develop into cheap housing for people they openly scorn.After: The summers have grown even fiercer and the Cormac name doesn't mean what it used to. Arthur has taken it abroad, far from a family unable to understand him. Clem is a young artist who turns obsessively to the same dark subject. Pat doesn't even know what legacy means now. Not since the ground started sinking beneath her. Meanwhile, a nameless woman has been released from state care. She sticks to her twelve-step program, recites her affirmations, works one day at a time on a humble life devoid of ambition or redemption. How can she have an after when baby Robbie doesn't?

    Believing he will offer her protection, Hana reluctantly accepts Karel's advances only to find herself alone and abandoned in Auschwitz. Decades later, Karel carries his regrets to Sydney where he and his family try to make a new life for themselves.Despite her devotion to the family, Karel's wife is a troubled woman, haunted by a secret that will not leave her. Meanwhile, the couple's daughter continues to reel from her husband's infidelities as, unbeknownst to any of them, their cherished granddaughter becomes more and more entangled with her married boss.Outwardly harmonious, this is a fractured family whose lives are built on foundations of lies and deceptions—foundations that threaten to completely collapse as old transgressions re-emerge in the lead up to a long-awaited family wedding. Inspired by a true story of wartime betrayal, The Deceptions is a searing, compassionate tale of love and regret within a family whose secrets might better be left alone.