When Londoner, Rose Porter, arrives on the shores of Sydney with little more than her suitcase, she is forced to take a job as a parlourmaid at the mysterious North Head Quarantine Station. It’s a place of turmoil, segregated classes and strict rules concerning employee fraternisation. But as Rose learns, some rules were made to be broken.2019 ... Over a century later, Emma Wilcott lives a secluded life in Sydney. Still reeling from a devastating loss, her one-hundred-year-old grandmother, Gwendoline, is all she has left. Suffering the early stages of dementia, Gwendoline’s long-term memories take her wandering at night and Emma realises she is searching for something or someone from her past.Emma’s investigation leads her to the Quarantine Station where she meets Matt, the station carpenter, and together they begin to unravel a mystery so compelling it has the power to change lives, the power to change everything Emma ever knew about herself.

     What happened at Essendon, what happened at Cronulla, is only part of the story. From the basement office of a suburban football club to the seedy corners of Peptide Alley to the polished corridors of Parliament House, The Straight Dope is an inside account of the politics, greed and personal feuds which fuelled an extraordinary saga. A football club and coach determined to win, a sports scientist who doesn't play by the rules, an AFL administration hell bent on control, an anti-doping authority out of its depth, a generation of footballers held hostage by scandal and an unpopular government that just wants it to end; for two tumultuous seasons this was the biggest game of all.

    There are two stories here.Hannah Mulvey left her island home as a teenager. But her stubborn, defiant mother is dying, and now Hannah has returned to Chesil, taking up a teaching post at the tiny schoolhouse, doing what she can in the long days of this final year.But though Hannah cannot pinpoint exactly when it begins, something threatens her small community. A girl disappears entirely from class. Odd reports and rumours reach her through her young charges. People mutter on street corners, the church bell tolls through the night and the island's women gather at strange hours...And then the miracles begin.A page-turning, thought-provoking portrayal of a remote community caught up in a collective moment of madness, of good intentions turned terribly awry. A blistering examination of truth and power, and how we might tell one from the other.'Catherine Noske's debut novel grapples with questions of familial obligation, complicity, remorse and the fallibility of memory...The Salt Madonna will appeal to readers who enjoyed Laura Elizabeth Woollett's Beautiful Revolutionary.' Books+Publishing'Catherine Noske's The Salt Madonna is Australian Gothic at its most sublime and uncanny. Superbly atmospheric and darkly unsettling, the characters are haunted by their colonial pasts, manifested in guilty silence...Noske's taut, subversive writing exposes unspeakable truths buried in dazzling stories, miracles and epiphanies.' Cassandra Atherton

    First published in 1934, this dramatic novel covers four days following a car crash where a doctor is critically injured, and the women around him struggle with their hopes, inhibitions and knowledge.

    Her agoraphobic mother, Elaine, has left the house for the first time in twelve years. Mina drops everything to fly home, only to discover that Elaine will not talk about her sudden return to the world, nor why she's spent so much time hiding from it. Their reunion leaves Mina raking through pieces of their painful past in a bid to uncover the truth.Both tender and fierce, heartbreaking and funny, Kokomo is a story about how secrets and love have the power to bring us together and tear us apart.

    Here is a truly joyful and inspiring story of a woman achieving success on her own terms, in her own way. And now she is sharing her life, for the very first time, with us. Now I Can Dance is an uplifting story of love, family, laughter, determination and - of course - song.

    Welcome to a chronicle of broken hearts, fervid pursuits, passionate friendships, deranged letter-writing, the allure of the bottle, the singular charms of musicians, the lost song of youth, and three very awkward evenings with varying prostitutes--exactly zero percent of which the author's parents will want to read. Add to that a slightly misguided attempt to give real-life friends and ex-lovers a 'right of reply' to the stories they appear in and it's fair to say an extended stint in the Witness Protection Program beckons.Confessional, voyeuristic, painful, hilarious and heartfelt, You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead reveals the acerbic wit, unflinching gaze and razor-sharp insight of a writer at the height of her powers-or the unhinged fantasies of a dangerous mind with not enough to do.

    On June 15, 1862 a gang of bushrangers pulled off the largest gold robbery in Australia's history atEugowra Rocks. The gang escaped with bank notes and 77kg of gold, worth about $10 million today. It remains Australia's largest gold robbery. The story of how Ben Hall, Frank Gardiner, John O'Mealley, John Gilbert, Harry Manns, Alex Fordyce, John Bow and Dan Charters - planned and executed the robbery and what happened to all that gold is the stuff of a brilliant, modern, exciting crime book. This is Australian history on the very best crime-writing steroids from Australia's number one true crime writer.

    Unpacking the small towns around where she lives and the communities that keep them going through threat and times of plenty. With half her year spent in Canberra, reporting from Parliament House, and half her year in the sticks, she really does have a unique perspective. The Great Divide between city and country is only one subject that arises. The National Party talks about farmers, but what about those who live in regional towns? Her forensic focus in the nearby towns is on ordinary lives not often seen, and the conversations in this book are broad, national and at times international; immigration, transport, health, the NBN, globalization, and tariffs. Gabrielle also draws on her own observations about community. Newcomers initially face strong distrust based on money or race, but once you are accepted, there is a strong belonging and interaction, much more so than her experience in the city. Middle class people in the city, like Gabrielle, show compassion for poverty or racial difference, but there is little interaction with the "other." That is the gift the country gave her. Gabrielle has spent 30 years covering politics and lived 20 of those years in the country. Her kids were raised in country schools where she did her time on school councils, watching the lives of fellow parents and their kids from the poorest to the richest rural families. Gabrielle served on community groups grappling with loss of population, economic recession and mundane parking issues. She has witnessed fiery town meetings dealing with bank closures and doctor shortages. She has felt parents' extraordinary losses to ordinary causes like car accidents, drugs, and crime in a small town. And all this while documenting the modern Australian political story. This book is both the broad and the narrow, the personal and the public. There is no other book like this in Australia and Gabrielle is the only person to write it.

    Through her music and performing, this beloved Australian artist has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. But what of the stories she used to tell herself? That 'real life' only begins once you're thin or beautiful, that good things only happen to other people.YOUR OWN KIND OF GIRL reveals a childhood punctuated by grief, anxiety and compulsion, and tells how these forces shaped Clare's life for better and for worse. This is a heartbreaking, wise and at times playful memoir. Clare's own story told raw and as it happened. A reminder that even on the darkest of nights, victory is closer than it seems.With startling candour, Clare lays bare her truth in the hope that doing so will inspire anyone who's ever done battle with their inner critic. This is the work of a woman who has found her true power - and wants to pass it on. Happiness, we discover, is only possible when we take charge of the stories we tell ourselves.

    These are the memoirs of 29 year old John Birmingham, who has shared houses and apartments with 89 people and kept notes on all of them.

    Even her childhood, where she and her mother were forced to flee Malaya in the fish-stinking hold of a junk in the dying days of colonialism, was fraught with peril.For a time it seemed she would find safe harbour in Tasmania in the arms of wine-maker Peter Torrance, but her restless spirit cannot be contained. Thea’s ambition is to travel the world as a foreign correspondent but Peter is dedicated to his family vineyard in a blue gum valley: it seems their love must fail.Thea makes her name internationally with her coverage of the assassination of President Kennedy then the escalating war in Vietnam, one of the only women in the field. Her job leads her further into peril and death stalks her all the way, until a return to Tasmania opens the door to a new and exciting career.Will this opportunity allow her to become reunited with the man she used to love? Or has that dream vanished, like mist in the valley of blue gums?

    They are there for one last time, one last weekend, and one last party – but in the course of this weekend, their connections will be affirmed, and their frailties and secrets revealed – to the reader at least, if not to each other. The Hope Fault is a novel about extended family: about steps and exes and fairy godmothers; about parents and partners who are missing, and the people who replace them.

    Sarah Krasnostein's The Trauma Cleaner is a love letter to an extraordinary ordinary life. In Sandra Pankhurst she discovered a woman capable of taking a lifetime of hostility and transphobic abuse and using it to care for some of society's most in-need people.Sandra Pankhurst founded her trauma cleaning business to help people whose emotional scars are written on their houses. From the forgotten flat of a drug addict to the infested home of a hoarder, Sandra enters properties and lives at the same time. But few of the people she looks after know anything of the complexity of Sandra's own life. Raised in an uncaring home, Sandra's miraculous gift for warmth and humour in the face of unspeakable personal tragedy mark her out as a one-off.

    'Something truly amazing is going to happen.' 'To us or to the world?' I say. 'To you.' 'To me?' I laugh. 'Nothing ever happens to me, Stella.' 'But today it will.' 'Will it be good?' She looks thoughtful and then frowns. 'I . . . I don't know.'Peach is 19 and pretty happy with the way things are. She has her college work, two wildly different best friends, her sister, Stella, to look after, and a broken heart to mend. But when she takes a summer job at a café in the old convent, her idea of who she is takes a sharp turn into the past. Where once there were nuns, young girls and women who had fallen on hard times, Peach discovers secrets from three generations of her family. As their stories are revealed, Peach is jolted out of her comfort zone. But does she really want to know who she is? Warm and real, intense and provocative, this novel shows in vivid detail how fate and the choices we make ripple and reverberate through time.