War is being fought on a horrific scale in the trenches of France, but it might as well be a world away from sixteen–year–old New Zealander Midge Macpherson, at school in England learning to be a young lady. But the war is coming closer: Midge's brothers are in the army, and her twin, Tim, is listed as 'missing' in the devastating defeat of the ANZAC forces at Gallipoli.Desperate to do their bit – and avoid the boredom of school and the restrictions of Society – Midge and her friends Ethel and Anne start a canteen in France, caring for the endless flow of wounded soldiers returning from the front. Midge, recruited by the over–stretched ambulance service, is thrust into carnage and scenes of courage she could never have imagined. And when the war is over, all three girls – and their ANZAC boys as well – discover that even going 'home' can be both strange and wonderful.Exhaustively researched but written with the lightest of touches, this is Jackie French at her very best.

    After Kitty is discovered in a compromising position with an unscrupulous adventurer, her reputation is left in shreds. In desperation, her mother banishes Kitty to the colonies in disgrace, under the guardianship of her dour missionary uncle and his long-suffering wife. Against the backdrop of the wild and unruly Bay of Islands in the period leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Kitty meets and falls in love with Ryan Farrell, a rude, aloof and atheistic ships captain. When she discovers he is also a gun runner, her loyalties are torn and her tempestuous nature leads to an estrangement. The path to true love is tortuous, involving rampaging Maori war parties, illicit sexual liaisons and incarceration in Sydney's Hyde Park Barracks, forgery, betrayal and death at sea. A tempestuous romance and a lively adventure with a fiery and memorable heroine, Kitty is a stand-alone novel, with potential as an ongoing saga of love and adventure on the high seas in the Pacific of the 1800s, by one of our leading historical novelists.

    Estranged from her parents, and living with her grandfather who is drowning in sadness, Oli faces the reality of life beyond university alone. When she wakes on a boat with no recollection of how she got there, she accepts the help of two strangers who change the course of her future forever. With Mac and Maggie, Oli learns to navigate a life upon open ocean and the world flowers into colours she's never seen before. Four years later, Oli, fluent in the language of the sea, is the only woman among men on a yacht delivery from Noumea to Auckland. In the darkness below deck, she learns that at sea, no one can hear you scream. Moving to London, Oli's life at sea is buried. When she meets Hugo, the wind changes, and her memories are dust blown into shapes. Reminding her of everything. Below Deck is about the moments that haunt us, the moments that fan out like ripples through the deep. So that everything else, becomes everything after.

    But why does she still feel trapped. A gripping psychological drama by the author of Mothers and Daughters and Into My Arms.Charlie Johnson is 13 and in her first year of high school. She loves her family, netball and Liam, the cute guy who sits next to her in Science - but most of all she loves horses and horse-riding. Charlie's parents have leased her a horse, Tic Tac, from the local pony club, but one day they go out for a ride in the national park and only Tic Tac returns...Four months later, long after the police and the SES have called off the search, Charlie is found wandering injured and filthy, miles from where she was last seen. Her family rejoice in her return, but can anyone truly recover from what Charlie's been through? When a life has been shattered, how do you put the pieces back together?

    This is the story of the girl who stole it.Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the ‘Scriptorium’, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word ‘bondmaid’ flutters to the floor. Esme rescues the slip and stashes it in an old wooden case that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. While she dedicates her life to the Oxford English Dictionary, secretly, she begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape the world and our experience of it.

    When Zach's wealthy mother goes missing, Rebecca – the truckie's daughter – is implicated in her disappearance. In the weeks that follow, Rebecca and Zach are drawn into a treacherous, adult world. Eager to please, Rebecca finds herself in danger of living up to the schoolyard taunts she so hates, while Zach channels his feelings through the sights of his gun.In the fading summer light, grudges are nursed and tempers fray, and as old lies unravel it seems nobody can be relied on. But beyond the fallout, the hard lessons in love and betrayal have not been wasted. Rebecca and Zach realise that judgements can be flawed – and that trust is better earnt than given.Original, unsettling and compelling, The Good Daughter is the much-anticipated second novel from Honey Brown.

    But when the handsome John Beck-a former Methodist preacher turned novice whaler with a mysterious past-arrives at the Davidson's door pleading to join her father's crews, suddenly Mary's world is upended.As her family struggles to survive the scarcity of whales and the vagaries of weather, and as she navigates sibling rivalries and an all-consuming first love for the newcomer John, nineteen-year-old Mary will soon discover a darker side to these men who hunt the seas, and the truth of her place among them. Swinging from Mary's own hopes and disappointments to the challenges that have beset her family's whaling operation, RUSH OH! is an enchanting blend of fact and fiction that's as much the story of its gutsy narrator's coming-of-age as it is the celebration of an extraordinary episode in history.

    The most famous work by the Australian novelist and poet, For the Term of His Natural Life is a powerful tale of an Australian penal settlement, which originally appeared in serial form in a Melbourne paper.

    As rumours of Satanic rituals swirl, schoolteacher Tom Witter becomes convinced he holds the key to the disappearance. When the police won't listen, he takes matters into his own hands with the help of the missing girl's father and a local neighbourhood watch group.But as dark secrets are revealed and consequences to past actions are faced, Tom learns that the only way out of the darkness is to walk deeper into it. Wild Place peels back the layers of suburbia, exposing what s hidden underneath guilt, desperation, violence and attempts to answer the question: Why do good people do bad things?From the international bestseller Christian White, Wild Place is a white-knuckle descent into a street near you.

    A young woman is hiding out in a sleepy North Queensland tourist town, trying to stay under the radar, when she stumbles across a dangerous drug cartel. Anyone else might back away shaking their head, pretend they hadn't seen anything, keep quiet, even though people are getting hurt. But Maggie is no ordinary girl. She's got skills, as well as plenty of secrets to keep, burdens to carry - and anger to burn.When circumstances mean that she has to get out of town - fast - she heads towards Melbourne, where she just might find the answers that she needs - answers about her family and who she really is. With a bent cop for a dubious ally, the police tracking her and furious bikers on her trail, Maggie is in deep trouble. She's only got her ingenuity and wits on her side - and a determination not to inherit the sins of her father.A powerhouse, fast-paced, high-adrenaline and tense thriller from Gabriel Bergmoser, author of the critically acclaimed bestselling outback noir The Hunted.PRAISE FOR THE INHERITANCE'A heroine you can't look away from, pure thrills and wallop, wilder and gamier than your average Aussie noir, this is fierce storytelling.' Kyle Perry, bestselling author of The Bluffs'The Inheritance locks the reader in the trunk and puts the pedal to the metal for twenty-two blistering chapters.' Jack Heath, bestselling author of Hangman'The Inheritance captures the pedal-to-the-metal pace and thrills of Bergmoser's first book, but adds a more substantial plot and richer characters. The story unfolds quickly, and it swiftly builds to an explosive climax. A ferocious tale about a troubled heroine who makes most of the fictional tough guys look like wimps.' Canberra WeeklyPRAISE FOR THE HUNTED'An original and high-octane read, it makes Deliverance look like Picnic at Hanging Rock.' The Times/Sunday Times Crime Club'This slice of outback noir is ... at once exhilarating, gleefully vicious and totally race-to-the-finish-line unputdownable.' The Observer'An audacious walk on the wildest side of outback noir ... a vivid thriller.' The Sydney Morning Herald'A perfectly paced, thrilling read with an unrelenting sense of dread and menace ... building suspense at every turn of the page. Crime and thriller readers will love this savage Rottweiler of a novel that will clamp its jaws around their throat and shake them to the end.' Books+Publishing'Tough, violent, suspenseful and peopled with great characters, The Hunted could well be the Australian thriller of the year. This is Jack Reacher for adults.' Canberra Weekly

    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.

    of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false.”In True History of the Kelly Gang, the legendary Ned Kelly speaks for himself, scribbling his narrative on errant scraps of paper in semiliterate but magically descriptive prose as he flees from the police. To his pursuers, Kelly is nothing but a monstrous criminal, a thief and a murderer. To his own people, the lowly class of ordinary Australians, the bushranger is a hero, defying the authority of the English to direct their lives. Indentured by his bootlegger mother to a famous horse thief (who was also her lover), Ned saw his first prison cell at 15 and by the age of 26 had become the most wanted man in the wild colony of Victoria, taking over whole towns and defying the law until he was finally captured and hanged. Here is a classic outlaw tale, made alive by the skill of a great novelist.

    The old man was brought up expecting to marry the heiress to Kuran Station—a grand estate in the Australian Outback—only to be disappointed by his rejection and the selling off of the land. He has devoted his life to putting the estate back together and has moved into the once-elegant mansion.   McIvor tries to imbue William with his obsession, but his hold on the land is threatened by laws entitling the Aborigines to reclaim sacred sites. William’s mother desperately wants her son to become John McIvor’s heir, but no one realizes that William is ill and his condition is worsening.

    Arriving in the small rural town she finds nothing much has changed there – including Jamie McBride, who lives on the neighbouring farm to her and is as ridiculously good looking as he was when they were seventeen and madly in love.Desperate to bring back her grandmother’s smile, Erin goes through old photo albums with her. Though frail and confused her grandmother tells vivid stories about the past, including memories of a soldier she once loved. Erin’s curiosity about the man deepens when she finds an engagement ring he once gave her grandmother.Meanwhile, Jamie McBride seems intent on rekindling their relationship, even though Erin’s not at all sure she wants to risk heartache again…From the bestselling author of Poppy’s Dilemma and Gemma’s Bluff, this poignant, heartfelt story of old loves and new possibilities is inspirational and entertaining.

    for the first time, a post-WWII story of the war brides who crossed the seas by the thousands to face their unknown futures.1946. World War II has ended and all over the world, young women are beginning to fulfill the promises made to the men they wed in wartime. In Sydney, Australia, four women join 650 other war brides on an extraordinary voyage to England—aboard HMS Victoria, which still carries not just arms and aircraft but a thousand naval officers. Rules are strictly enforced, from the aircraft carrier’s captain down to the lowliest young deckhand. But the men and the brides will find their lives intertwined despite the Navy’s ironclad sanctions. And for Frances Mackenzie, the complicated young woman whose past comes back to haunt her far from home, the journey will change her life in ways she never could have predicted—forever.