Like many young men he is patriotic, adventurous and headstrong. He also feels assured of a bright future with his sweetheart Catherine. Patrick’s world comes crashing down around him when he becomes a pawn in the political aspirations of the United Irishmen under Wolfe Tone. He finds himself in prison sentenced to transportation to the penal colony of New South Wales and begins a downward spiral into rage and depression. Patrick’s saviour comes in the form of Father Michael O’Court, the chaplain of the prison ship Boddington. Over time Patrick is guided out of his depression and is able to accept the vastly different directions that his life’s journey has taken. He also finds an unlikely mentor in one Preston Balfour, a British Army officer who was originally his target for assassination, but who ultimately provides him with the means of restoring his life in a new land. Patrick’s life is complete when tragic circumstances eventually lead to him being reunited with Catherine for a new life in a new land. He comes to realise that the most important journey we travel is not measured in miles but by our changes within. Patrick’s Journey is a work of fiction, but is based on the real life history of the author’s great (6 times removed) grandfather.

     Note to readers: In the UK, this book is published under the title The Love Letter.Keeping secrets is a dangerous game. When Sir James Harrison, one the greatest actors of his generation, passes away at the age of ninety-five, he leaves behind not just a heartbroken family but also a secret so shocking, it could rock the English establishment to its core. Joanna Haslam, an up-and-coming reporter, is assigned to cover the legendary actor’s funeral, attended by glitzy celebrities of every background. But Joanna stumbles on something dark beneath the glamour: the mention of a letter James Harrison has left behind—the contents of which many have been desperate to keep concealed for over seventy years. As she peels back the veil of lies that has shrouded the secret, she realizes that she’s close to uncovering something deadly serious—and the royal family may be implicated. Before long, someone is on her tracks, attempting to prevent her from discovering the truth. And they’ll stop at nothing to reach the letter before she does.

    A melancholic cloth that whispered and rustled. Who could say what it foretold.' Dublin, 1840: Rhia Mahoney watches in despair as her father's linen warehouse goes up in flames. Her family is ruined. Her imagined future, full of pattern and colour, plum brocades and beetle-green taffeta, crumbles to ashes. Seeking work as a governess in dismal London, Rhia's life is changed beyond all imagination when her uncle, a shipping merchant, commits suicide. Rhia cannot - will not - believe he would take his own life, but before she can investigate, she is accused of a crime she didn't commit, and forced to board a prison ship bound for New South Wales. The voyage is one of dry biscuits and endless sea, made bearable by the women's daily chore: to sew scraps of cloth into an elaborate quilt. What Rhia does not realise is that with every stitch, she binds herself closer to a journey of discovery that will not end in Australia ...Weaving death, love and adventure into a vivid tale of the world at the height of Empire, The Silver Thread is plotted like a murder mystery, but narrated with the skill and style of a literary storyteller.

    Even though the commission seems to answer the aspirations of each one of them, their own desires and ambitions threaten its completion. As each struggles to see the book come into being, it will change everything they have understood about their place in the world.Set in London just before the Peasants' Revolt - that remarkable, revolutionary uprising of the lower classes - this is a story about power the place of women in the roiling and turbulent world of the early fourteenth century; what power they have, how they wield it, and just how temporary and conditional it is.Rich, deep, sensuous and full of life, Book of Colours is also, most movingly, a profoundly beautiful story about creativity and connection, and our instinctive need to understand our world and communicate with others through the pages of a book.Praise for The Anchoress:'Sarah's story is so beautiful, so rich, so strange, unexpected and thoughtful - also suspenseful. I loved this book.' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love'Affecting ... finely drawn ... a considerable achievement.' Sarah Dunant, New York Times'Elegant and eloquent' Irish Mail'Cadwallader's writing evokes a heightened attention to the senses: you might never read a novel so sensuous yet unconcerned with romantic love. For this alone it is worth seeking out. But also because The Anchoress achieves what every historical novel attempts: reimagining the past while opening a new window - like a squint, perhaps - to our present lives.' Sydney Morning Herald'A novel of page-turning grace' Newtown Review of Books

    An immediate impediment arises when she becomes involved in a murder investigation. Helping solve the crime is crucial, but Bella must work with Constable Jackson Hastings. Once part of her life, Jax turned his back on Bella after her brother, his best friend, died in the trenches. His cold attitude hasn’t softened, but she can’t let that stop her. Both her hometown and family resort, once popular tourist destinations, may not survive if the crime isn’t solved quickly.Jax, a war veteran, faces his own challenges. Wounded in body and spirit, his dreams shattered, he finds himself doing what he said he’d never do—follow in his father’s footsteps as constable. When a wave of crimes hit the town, culminating in murder, his competence is questioned. In a struggle to find the killer and save his job, Jax needs all the help he can get—but he doesn’t want assistance from Bella. Not when he feels responsible for her brother’s death. But more is at stake than his job. He can’t stand by and let Moreley become a ghost town. Nor can he watch while Bella loses Ballantyne.Working together is the only way to solve the crime and offer hope—to their community and for themselves. Will their efforts succeed, or will it be a precarious homecoming?

    Tabitha Bird has gifted us this wonder’ Cass MoriartyMeet Willa Waters, aged 8 . . . 33 . . . and 93.On one impossible day in 1965, eight-year-old Willa receives a mysterious box containing a jar of water and the instruction: ‘One ocean: plant in the backyard.’ So she does - and somehow creates an extraordinary time slip that allows her to visit her future selves.On one impossible day in 1990, Willa is 33 and a mother-of-two when her childhood self magically appears in her backyard. But she’s also a woman haunted by memories of her dark past – and is on the brink of a decision that will have tragic repercussions . . .On one impossible day in 2050, Willa is a silver-haired, gumboot-loving 93-year-old whose memory is fading fast. Yet she knows there’s something she has to remember, a warning she must give her past selves about a terrible event in 1990. If only she could recall what it was.Can the three Willas come together, to heal their past and save their future, before it’s too late?'A courageous and magical debut novel that reminds us that while we can’t change events from our past, we do have the power to change the story we tell ourselves about them.' Sally Piper

    Britain's underbelly was exposed.The Dark Ages had begun... Rome had abandoned Britannia, leaving its people undefended. Anglo Saxon warriors, previously employed as mercenaries, now saw themselves as conquerors. The scene was set, as more war bands crossed the North Sea to take British gold, slaves, and land. One Briton, alone in the forest, wanting only to live as a hunter and trapper, was about to have his life changed forever. Dominic would become the hope of abandoned Britons. Dominic the wolf slayer would become the nemesis of any evil that entered his forest realm.

    But when a new businessman in the form of Joseph Dawson enters their lives, both Charlotte and her father decide he's the man for her and, within six months, Charlotte marries the dashing mill owner from Accrington.Then a young mill worker is found dead in the swollen River Ribble. With Joseph's business nearly bankrupt, it becomes apparent that all is not as it seems and Joseph is not the man he pretends to be. Heavily pregnant, penniless and heartbroken, Charlotte is forced to face the reality that life may never be the same again . . .

    Nine momentous days. An unforgettable novel of love and folly and heartbreak.It is 1939 and Australia is about to go to war. Deep in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Richmond it is business—your own and everyone else's—as usual. And young Kip Westaway, failed scholar and stablehand, is living the most important day of his life.Ambitious in scope and structure, triumphantly realised, this is a novel about one family and every family. It is about dreams and fights and sacrifices. And finally, of course, it is—as it must be—about love.Toni Jordan has a BSc in physiology and qualifications in marketing and professional writing. Her debut novel, Addition, has been published in sixteen countries and won numerous awards. Jordan lives in Melbourne, Australia.

    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.

    Annabelle Archer, the brilliant but destitute daughter of a country vicar, has earned herself a place among the first cohort of female students at the renowned University of Oxford. In return for her scholarship, she must support the rising women's suffrage movement. Her charge: recruit men of influence to champion their cause. Her target: Sebastian Devereux, the cold and calculating Duke of Montgomery who steers Britain's politics at the Queen's command. Her challenge: not to give in to the powerful attraction she can't deny for the man who opposes everything she stands for. Sebastian is appalled to find a suffragist squad has infiltrated his ducal home, but the real threat is his impossible feelings for green-eyed beauty Annabelle. He is looking for a wife of equal standing to secure the legacy he has worked so hard to rebuild, not an outspoken commoner who could never be his duchess. But he wouldn't be the greatest strategist of the Kingdom if he couldn't claim this alluring bluestocking without the promise of a ring... or could he? Locked in a battle with rising passion and a will matching her own, Annabelle will learn just what it takes to topple a duke....A stunning debut for author Evie Dunmore and her Oxford suffragists in which a fiercely independent vicar's daughter takes on a powerful duke in a fiery love story that threatens to upend the British social order.

    Combining a gripping narrative with vivid historical detail, The Accomplice is a beautiful, terrifying, deeply moving novel of love and anarchy.

    His logical mind draws him towards the pursuit of science and knowledge. Mary, who loves to draw, is passionate and impetuous. The small country town in which they live, in the aftermath of World War II, is not enough to contain her ambitions for life and for love.When Mary escapes to Melbourne in pursuit of sensuality and art, Dominic must shoulder the mantle of family responsibility. Mary begins a new life, exploring the bohemian haunts of a rapidly changing post-war city. Dominic studies hard and eventually finds himself drawn into the field of eugenics, a fraught pseudo-science based on ideology. Then he meets Hanna, the daughter of Jewish refugees, who begins to show him the limitations of his scientific view.But Dominic and Mary are destined to come together, and the past cannot be left behind so easily. When Dominic comes looking for his sister, Mary must decide where her loyalties lie: to her family or to her art.Dominic, meanwhile, bears a secret of his own.This is a powerful novel about the choices we make in pursuit of our ideas, and the inexorable pull of the past. Set in an era of social constraint but profound genetic discovery, The Science of Appearances examines how the complex interplay of heredity and environment makes, shapes, and sometimes breaks us.

    What he lacked in experience and expertise, he made up for in enthusiasm. Or so he hoped.When the family arrived on a lonely hill in northern New South Wales, they had no electricity, no running water, no telephone and no choice but to make that tangle of bush their home. From Angela Wales, eldest of the five kids, comes this extraordinarily vivid and evocative account of the next ten years as they tried to tame six thousand acres and navigate the challenges of country life.Filled with drama and hilarity, joy and back-breaking toil, Barefoot in the Bindis portrays a childhood spent in the bush, and is a sensational picture of Australia past.

    The beginnings of a glorious saga befitting the Viking age! The Norse settled Greenland in 985AD and reached continental North America not long after - almost five centuries before Columbus - but left. What if they had stayed? Imagine what may have happened, how the world we know might be different… Would the British still have built their great empire? What of the Spanish, Portuguese and French imperial expansions?  What about the two catastrophic world wars our timeline has endured? Would there still have been some kind of American Revolution and Civil War? In such an alternate history, might the American Bible Belt celebrate the All-Father Odin, Freya and Thor instead of Jesus Christ? Indeed, what kind of America could have arisen? We begin with The Landing as the Norse arrive on the shores of what we know as Canada’s Labrador. From there we will watch the first of them explore, live, love and in some cases fall. In time they will raise halls and found their first settlements as their colonies spread. They will meet other peoples and face great challenges. Bitter winters will come, but they will be followed by hope-filled springs. And all the while the Norse Gods will look upon the work of their mortal followers as a new civilisation grows. Join me as we explore this amazing alternate history! This boxed set includes: United States of Vinland #1: The Landing  A Short Tale From Norse America #1: Young Ravens & Hidden Blades United States of Vinland #2: Red Winter  United States of Vinland #3: Loki's Rage  Over 1300 pages of Viking exploration and adventure! United States of Vinland #4: Odin's Hall will release in 2019.