Perhaps what you are facing is yourself.Sixteen-year-old Stephanie West has been dragged from Sydney to remote Maatsuyker Island off the coast of Tasmania by her parents, hoping to recapture a childhood idyll and come to terms with their grief over the death of Steph's twin brother. Cut off from friends and the comforts of home, exiled to a lonely fortress and a lighthouse that bears the brunt of savage storms, the months ahead look to be filled with ghosts of the past.Steph's saviour is Tom Forrest, a 19-year-old deckhand aboard a crayfishing boat. When the weather allows, Tom visits the island, and he and Steph soon form an attraction. But Tom must conceal at all costs the illegal fishing he takes part in, orchestrated by his tyrannical brother. And he dare not dwell on his fear of the sea or his deep-worn premonition that the ocean will one day take him.Wildlight is an exquisite, vividly detailed exploration of the wayward journey of adolescence, and how the intense experience of a place can change the course of even the most well-planned life.PRAISE FOR WILDLIGHT"There is much to admire in Wildlight: the skilful unravelling of the overriding mystery and the spectacular location given life. Mundy offers compelling answers to the dramatic tension she creates, even if she leaves us curious about why." The Australian"Wildlight could easily be devoured in a weekend and leaves one with a longing to escape the city and explore Australia's natural wilderness. It is a beautifully crafted story about love, human personas, remembering the past, and finding peace." NSW Writers' Centre

    Inspired by a real-life case of an IVF laboratory mix-up.Grace and Dan Arden are in their forties and have been on the IVF treadmill since the day they got married. Six attempts have yielded no results, and with each failure a little piece of their hope dies. Priya Laghari and her husband Nick Archer are being treated at the same fertility clinic, and while they don’t face the same time pressure as the Ardens, the younger couple have their own problems. On the same day that Priya is booked for her next IVF cycle, Grace goes in for her final, last-chance embryo transfer. Two weeks later, both women get their results. A year on, angry and heartbroken, one of the women learns her embryo was implanted in the other’s uterus and must make a devastating choice: live a childless life knowing her son is being raised by strangers or seek custody of a baby who has been nurtured and loved by another couple.

    A fateful connection is made, and an unlikely friendship blooms. Slowly, we learn what led Sam and Vic to the bridge that night. Bonded by their suffering, each privately commits to the impossible task of saving the other.Honeybee is a heart-breaking, life-affirming novel that throws us headlong into a world of petty thefts, extortion plots, botched bank robberies, daring dog rescues and one spectacular drag show.At the heart of Honeybee is Sam: a solitary, resilient young person battling to navigate the world as their true self; ensnared by a loyalty to a troubled mother, scarred by the volatility of a domineering step-father, and confounded by the kindness of new alliances.Honeybee is a tender, profoundly moving novel brimming with vivid characters and luminous words. It's about two lives forever changed by a chance encounter -- one offering hope, the other redemption. It's about when to persevere, and when to be merciful, as Sam learns when to let go, and when to hold on.

    The graffiti on the holding room wall says it all: 'Gunyah is hell on earth'. And Ellen's about to find out why. Ellen was never the daughter her mother wanted. Patent leather shoes and frilly dresses just weren't her thing and, at age fourteen, she's ready to leave school and find her own way. No one is going to stop her from going where she wants, doing what she wants, and hanging out with Robbie. Or so she thinks. But when the police turn up, Ellen is deemed to be in 'moral danger' and is sentenced to the Gunyah Training School for Girls. Suddenly, she's no longer Ellen, she's Girl 43, and she has to follow the rules, work hard and - most importantly - stay quiet. When it's discovered that she's pregnant, there's no respite from the staff. Told she isn't capable of bringing up a child, they twist the truth to make her cooperate. But however hard they try, they can't destroy the connection between a mother and her child . . . or can they? Drawn from experiences in Parramatta Girls' Home in the seventies, "Girl 43" is a story that could have come straight from today's headlines about the shocking treatment of innocent children and teens by people in the very institutions that were supposed to protect them.

    All he wants is to fit in. He wants to sit at the cool bench. He wants to be a star athlete. He wants his first kiss.He also wants his mum to survive.When his mum is suddenly diagnosed with advanced breast and brain cancer, Mike knows it's a long shot, but if he manages to achieve his dreams, maybe it'll give his mum enough strength to beat an incurable disease.In the meantime, he has to live with his African dad whom he doesn't really know, a man who has strange foreign ways - and who Mike doesn't really feel comfortable sharing his teenage desires and deepest fears with. He doesn't even want to think about what it might mean if his mum never comes home from the hospital.Based on his award-winning stand-up show, and the loss of his own mother when he was 12, Matt Okine's coming-of-age novel, Being Black n Chicken and Chips, is a funny, heart-warming, and sometimes surreal look at how young people deal with grief, the loss of loved ones, and becoming an adult - all whilst desperately trying to fit in with the other kids.

    By daybreak, her world has shifted. Max Carlisle, a troubled AFL star, can't stop what comes next. And Ruby, a single woman from the apartment block, is left with questions when she sees Jordi leave.In this remarkable novel, Rachel Matthews captures the characters of Jordi and her family, the players, and the often loveable inhabitants of a big city with a deceptive lightness of touch that seduces the reader. Siren reveals the often unnoticed life of a city while simultaneously drawing us deep into a dark and troubling world. What happens has an unexpected effect on all those who are both directly and indirectly involved.The result is a powerful and haunting novel about cultural stereotypes and expectations, love, loneliness, family and our struggle to connect. In so many ways, Matthews subtly sounds the siren on sexual violence and its prevalence in our culture.

    Australia is on its second. For the best part of the nineteenth century, Australia was the world's richest country, a pioneer for democracy and a magnet for migrants. Yet our last big boom was followed by a fifty-year bust as we lost our luck, our riches and our nerve, and shut our doors on the world. Now we're back on top, in the position where history tells us we made our biggest mistakes. Can we learn from our past and cement our place as one of the world's great nations? Showing that our future is in our foundation, Australia's Second Chance goes back to 1788, the first contact between locals and migrants, to bring us a unique and fascinating view of the key events of our past right through to the present day. With newly available economic data and fresh interviews with former leaders (including the last major interview with Malcolm Fraser), George Megalogenis crunches the numbers and weaves our history into a compelling thesis, brilliantly chronicling our dialogue with the world and bringing fresh insight into the urgent question of who we are, and what we can become. 'Megalogenis has emerged as something of a polymath. He slaps history and politics and culture like mortar in and around his knowledge of economics and numbers to build compelling, even thrilling, theses about the country of his birth and where it stands in the world.' Tony Wright, Saturday Age

    A woman's adopted mother dies, reawakening childhood memories and grief. A couple's decision to move to an isolated location may just be their undoing. A young woman forms an unexpected connection at a summer school in Hungary.Set in southern Tasmania, these interlinked stories bring into focus the inhabitants of small communities, and capture the moments when life turns and one person becomes another. With insight and empathy, Melissa Manning interrogates how the people we meet and the places we live shape the person we become.

    But it’s not actually a joke. Having a spouse who takes care of things at home is a Godsend on the domestic front. It’s a potent economic asset on the work front. And it’s an advantage enjoyed – even in our modern society – by vastly more men than women.Working women are in an advanced, sustained, and chronically under-reported state of wife drought, and there is no sign of rain.But why is the work-and-family debate always about women? Why don’t men get the same flexibility that women do? In our fixation on the barriers that face women on the way into the workplace, do we forget about the barriers that – for men – still block the exits?The Wife Drought is about women, men, family and work. Written in Annabel Crabb’s inimitable style, it’s full of candid and funny stories from the author's work in and around politics and the media, historical nuggets about the role of ‘The Wife’ in Australia, and intriguing research about the attitudes that pulse beneath the surface of egalitarian Australia.Crabb's call is for a ceasefire in the gender wars. Rather than a shout of rage, The Wife Drought is the thoughtful, engaging catalyst for a conversation that's long overdue.

    It tracks their individual journeys during that first crucial year—and the group’s collective one—as they navigate motherhood and the shifting ground of their relationships with their partners. Each woman struggles in her own way to become the mother she wants to be, and finds herself becoming increasingly reliant on the friendship and support of the mother’s group members. Until one day, when an unthinkably shocking event changes everything.The Mother’s Group is an unflinching and compelling portrait of love, sex, marriage and parenting in an increasingly complicated world. Moving, provocative, tender and utterly gripping, it will draw you in and never let you go.

    A sports legend resides in a nursing home who encounters and unexpected life journey.West’s AMOS is an imposing landscape of human drama and emotion – hear-rendering, timeless, hilarious, stunning, joyful, - an incredible story, a book that rips readers early and late, a novel they don’t want to end… a page turner with heart, a joy to read, a treasure to cherish.Ever so often, indifference and neglect mutate into unmitigated evil and then humanity goes on trial.  Rarely, someone stands in the breach and shouts “No” with only courage and dignity as weapons.  Amos was a man who thought he’s experienced all that life had to offer, when with a capricious turn of fate, he fell through the cracks of society’s institutions, in to the merciless cogwheels of human apathy and carelessness.  His struggle not only to survive, but, to overcome is a compelling testimony to the inner strength and irrepressible spirit of man.  Against devastating odds and arrogant brutality, Amos finds a triumph he never expected.

    Clarence and Bernadette Malcolm have come five thousand miles in search of prosperity, but find the Mother Country not at all as has been promised them; Solly and Dora Lazarus, too, are strangers in a strange land, struggling to belong even as they try to make sense of their past; and Michael and Mary Lockhart take with both hands all that the world owes them, wherever it leads them, whatever the cost. In the street markets and tenements of Bethnal Green the three families live and work together in uneasy harmony, until Michael shatters the balance between them, his hunger for betterment changing the courses of all their lives over decades and generations.Reaching across forty years and capturing a city and a people in a time of tumultuous change, What Was Promised is a breathtaking novel by a master storyteller.

    Rendered unable to speak, read, or write after a Vietnam War injury thirty years earlier, Howard Kapostash feels trapped by his disability until his high school sweetheart, recently forced into rehab, asks him to care for her nine-year-old son.

    The attached tag bears his own name and address. Who is she? And why would a complete stranger send her to him? As Solly attempts to find the answers, other Ballygurry inhabitants are drawn into the mystery. Their inquiries lead to the secluded monastery of Santa Eulalia on the medieval trail to Santiago de Compostela. As the Ballygurry pilgrims begin to thaw in the Spanish sunshine, a number of interwoven mysteries from the past gradually unfurl to rekindle old hatreds--"and restore old passions.

    She had no intention of sticking around any longer than absolutely necessary and certainly no intention of rekindling her relationship with the man who had shattered her tender, eighteen year old heart. If only he didn’t still make her body sizzle with desire… The moment Scott Armstrong set eyes on Jenny Hynes again, he was determined to win her back. But a decade is a long time and she was no longer the shy, impressionable girl who had won his heart. The new Jenny was confident, worldly and very, very guarded. It would take all his patience, persistence and a healthy dose of chemistry to convince her they were meant to be together.