Determined to honour his calling as best he can, he throws himself into the footy mad, two-pub town, navigating the dusty streets, learning the gossip, and striking up a friendship with Jonah Parks, the resident police sergeant and local bona fide hero. A police officer and a priest often find themselves needed at the same place, and Jonah and Matthew’s friendship deepens quickly, as they set about their business of protecting the bodies and souls of Dinbratten’s residents. When a bushfire threatens the town, and Matthew’s inexperience with fire endangers the church buildings, Jonah comes to the rescue, and a reckless kiss in the midst of the chaos takes their friendship to forbidden. Neither Matthew nor Jonah can go back to the way things were before, but continuing their relationship puts everything at risk: their jobs, their friends, even their lives. In the outback town of Dinbratten where everyone knows everything about everyone else, how can they ever expect to keep a secret this explosive?

    Will His Love Endure Once He Learns Her Secret?Three years ago, Captain Brogan Talvis's late wife abandoned their son, leaving no clue as to the boy's whereabouts. After searching relentlessly, Brogan discovers his son was adopted by a New England shipbuilder. And the man's daughter, Lorena Huntley, acts as loving guardian to the child.Lorena, who hides a dark truth, finds herself falling for the handsome captain and ex-privateer who's come to secure ownership of one of her father's ships. She's unaware of Brogan's own secret when another's deceit has her sailing toward Europe against her will.Haunted by thoughts of Lorena in peril, Brogan is compelled to choose between the boy he longs for and the woman who has captured his heart.

    On the second floor of the famous F.G. Goode department store, in Ladies' Cocktail Frocks, the women in black are girding themselves for the Christmas rush. Lisa is the new Sales Assistant (Temporary). Across the floor and beyond the arch, she is about to meet the glamorous Continental refugee, Magda, guardian of the rose-pink cave of Model Gowns.With the lightest touch and the most tender of comic instincts, Madeleine St. John conjures a vanished summer of innocence. The Women in Black is a classic.

    Emma's maid implores the help of Harmon Westbourne, the Earl of Easton, to rescue Emma from her father's home. But Emma's dilemma doesn't end there.

    But Alix also has a secret: she supports her family by stealing designs to create bootlegs for the foreign market. A hidden sketchbook and two minutes inside Hermès is all she needs to create a perfect replica, to be whisked off to production in New York.Then Alix is given her big break – a chance to finally realize her dream in one of the most prominent Parisian fashion houses – but at the price of copying the breakthrough Spring Collection.Knowing this could be her only opportunity, Alix accepts the arrangement. But when a mystery from her past resurfaces and a chance meeting has her falling into the arms of a handsome English war reporter, Alix learns that the slightest misstep – or misplaced trust – could be all it takes for her life to begin falling apart at the seams.

    After the departure of the woman he loves, Frank drives out to a shack by the ocean that he had last visited as a teenager. There, among the sugarcane and sand dunes, he struggles to rebuild his life. Forty years earlier, Leon is growing up in Sydney, turning out treacle tarts at his parents' bakery and flirting with one of the local girls. But when he's drafted to serve in Vietnam, he finds himself suddenly confronting the same experiences that haunt his war-veteran father. As these two stories weave around each other - each narrated in a voice as tender as it is fierce - we learn what binds Frank and Leon together, and what may end up keeping them apart.

    After four harrowing years fighting on the Western Front, Tom Sherbourne returns home to take a job as the lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, nearly half a day's journey from the coast. To this isolated island, where the supply boat comes once a season and shore leaves are granted every other year at best, Tom brings a young, bold, and loving wife, Isabel. Years later, after two miscarriages and one stillbirth, the grieving Isabel hears a baby's cries on the wind. A boat has washed up onshore carrying a dead man and a living baby. Tom, whose records as a lighthouse keeper are meticulous and whose moral principles have withstood a horrific war, wants to report the man and infant immediately. But Isabel has taken the tiny baby to her breast. Against Tom's judgment, they claim her as their own and name her Lucy. When she is two, Tom and Isabel return to the mainland and are reminded that there are other people in the world. Their choice has devastated one of them. M. L. Stedman's mesmerizing, beautifully written debut novel seduces us into accommodating Isabel's decision to keep this "gift from God." And we are swept into a story about extraordinarily compelling characters seeking to find their North Star in a world where there is no right answer, where justice for one person is another's tragic loss.

    His adult children, Martin and Evie, must come to terms with the shock of their father’s death. But a sculpture has gone missing from a museum in Palermo, and Noah is a suspect. The police are investigating.None of it makes any sense. Martin sets off to Palermo in search of answers about his father’s activities, while Evie moves into Noah’s apartment, waiting to learn where her life might take her. Retracing their father’s steps in their own way, neither of his children can see the path ahead.Gail Jones’s mesmerising new novel tells a story about parents and children, and explores the overlapping patterns that life makes. The Death of Noah Glass is about love and art, about grief and happiness, about memory and the mystery of time.

     Caroline Harper has everything she could want--wealth, position, the attention of an eligible bachelor. When her brother’s news destroys all of that, Caroline must decide what kind of life she wants to create for herself. As the Harpers make their way along the grueling thousands of miles of Oregon Trail, Caroline discovers strength, poise and potential she didn’t realize she possessed. Strength that perhaps was not in a spoiled city girl at all. But will it be enough to survive and bring Caroline and her brother all the way to Oregon?

    '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.

    Nestled in Sussex, the Summerhayes mansion seems the perfect country idyll. But with a long-running feud in the Summers family and tensions in Europe deepening, Summerhayes’ peaceful days are numbered.For Elizabeth Summer, the lazy quiet of her home has become stifling. A chance meeting with Aiden Kellaway, an architect’s assistant, offers the secret promise of escape. But to secure her family’s future, Elizabeth must marry well. A man of trade falls far from her father’s uncompromising standards.As the sweltering heat of 1914 builds to a storm, Elizabeth faces a choice between family loyalty and an uncertain future with the man she loves.One thing is definite: this summer will change everything.

    An arsonist, a covetous nurse, and the endearing village idiot are among the few who have ever seen Mary.Newcomers to Mill River -- a police officer and his daughter and a new fourth grade teacher -- are also curious about the reclusive old woman. But only Father Michael O’Brien knows Mary and the secret she keeps -- one that, once revealed, will change all of their lives forever.

    Having petitioned the court for independence from her aristocratic family, the young and vibrant Agneta Lejongård takes control of her destiny. In Stockholm, she explores her bohemian passions in art and free love, joins the suffragette movement with her best friend, and defiantly resists the expectations of women in high society. Then comes news of a tragic accident and an urgent summons to return to the family’s manor house in the country. As for Agneta’s forward path in life, she must now follow it back home.Though the grand horse-breeding estate of Lion Hall stirs some warm memories, what lies ahead tests Agneta’s independent spirit: a disapproving mother locked in the traditions of a woman’s proper place, two men vying for Agneta’s heart, and a twist of fate that upends her life once again. Torn between a daughter’s duty and the freedom she pines for, Agneta struggles not only to rebuild her future, but also to protect the future of Lion Hall itself. Forging a new path brings challenges, rewards, and a true purpose that she never could have imagined.

    But then an unexpected pregnancy puts everything at risk, and Dorothy is left alone – with Robbie nowhere to be seen.Heartbroken, Dorothy picks up the pieces of her life as a working girl in Battersea helping to support her mother and father. But before long, things start to become difficult. Her father’s health is worsening, money is tight and worst of all, Robbie hasn’t come back for her.Can Dorothy find a way back to happiness in the face of real adversity? Will she have the courage to make it on her own – or is someone else waiting in the wings to save her?Gritty and moving, this is the perfect read for fans of Dilly Court and Maggie Hope.

    The masterful narrative makes halt in Mexico, Siberia and East Berlin, climbing the summits and charting the abysses of the 20th century along the way. The result is both a stunning panorama and a monumental German novel that makes history itself tangible through the history of one family. A novel of immense stature, founded on its humanity, its precision and its humour.In Times of Fading Light focuses on three generations. The grandparents, still convinced Communists, return to the fledging East Germany at the beginning of the 1950s to do their part in establishing the new state. Their son returns from the other direction, having emigrated to Moscow and found himself banished to Siberia. He returns with his Russian wife to a country mired in petit bourgeois values, yet also brings with him an unwavering belief that they can be changed. The grandson, meanwhile, feels increasingly constricted in a heimat that was not of his choosing, and heads to the West on the very day that his grandfather, the family patriarch, turns 90. The glittering lights of a political utopia that once shone enticingly seem to be gradually fading as time wears unwaveringly on.