There he finds a manuscript, and from the moment his mother catches him in the act, Gerard Freeman's life is irrevocably changed. What is the invisible, ever-present threat from which his mother strives so obsessively to protect him? And why should stories written a century ago entwine themselves ever more closely around events in his own life? Gerard's quest to unveil the mystery that shrouds his family, and his life, will lead him from Mawson to London, to a long-abandoned house and the terror of a ghost story come alive.

    The Summer of ’82 is the hilarious and heartfelt story of a boy becoming a man in suburban Australia.Dave O’Neil is one of our most loved comedians. He has been performing stand-up for over twenty-five years, has been part of some of Australia’s most successful FM radio teams, and is a regular on our TV screens, where he holds the honour of having the most guest appearances on ABC’s iconic Spicks and Specks (over fifty!). He is also a successful writer, columnist and actor. The Summer of ’82 is his fifth book.

    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.

    Years before he'd been robbed of the world title that had his name on it - and then drugs, his brother, and the disappearance and murder of his girlfriend and had done the rest. Out of the blue, a young would-be biographer comes knocking and stirs up memories Dennis thought he'd buried. It takes Dennis a while to realise that she's not there to write his story at all.Daring, ambitious, dazzling, The Life is also as real as it gets - a searing, beautiful novel about fame and ambition and the price that must sometimes be paid for reaching too high.Malcolm Knox is the author of Summerland, A Private Man and Jamaica, which was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Award last year and won the Colin Roderick Award. He is also a Walkley-Award-winning journalist and author of many non-fiction titles. He came late to surfing, but is now an obsessively enthusiastic surfer, and writes about surfing and the surf with authority and great passion.

    She's breathing gently, long slow breaths. I imagine her soul going in and out: wanting to leave, wanting to come back, wanting to leave, wanting to come back. The day will soon harden into what we need to do. But for now we have each other. . . ."He met Candy amid a lush Sydney summer. Gorgeous, sexy, free-spirited Candy. They fell in love fast, lots of laughter and lust, the days melting warmly into each other. He never planned to give her a habit. But she wanted a taste. And wasn't love, after all, about sharing lives? Candy had a bit of money and in the beginning, everything was beautiful. Heady, heroin-hazed days, the world open and inviting. But when the money ran out, the craving remained, and the days ceased their luxurious stretch.But there was still love. Only now, it was a threesome. Heroin had its own demands, its own timetable, and thoughts of nabbing the next fix hurled them into each day. Then, when desperation sets in, Candy will stop at nothing to secure a blast, as she and her lover become hostage to the nightmarish world of addiction. Painful, sexy, tender, and charged with dark humor, Candy provocatively charts the daily rituals of two lovers maintaining a long-term junk habit. Told in stunningly vivid prose and set against the backdrop of suburban and urban Australia, Candy is both an electrifying and frightening glimpse of contemporary life and love.

    Inspired by a true story, "People of the Book" is a novel of sweeping historical grandeur and intimate emotional intensity by an acclaimed and beloved author. Called "a tour de force" by the San Francisco Chronicle, this ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain. When it falls to Australian rare book expert Hanna Heath to conserve this priceless work, the tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—a butterfly wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock the book’s deep mysteries and unexpectedly plunges Hanna into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultra-nationalist fanatics.

    They all have a curled fourth toe – Diana, Lucy, Pearl.When Pearl’s grandmother Nell dies unexpectedly, Pearl and her family – mother Diana, sister Lucy – return to Kangaroo Island to mourn and farewell her. Each of them knew Nell intimately but differently, and each woman must reckon with Nell’s passing in her own way. But Nell had secrets, too, and as Pearl, Diana and Lucy interrogate their feelings about the island, Pearl starts to pull together the scraps Nell left behind – her stories, poems, paintings – and unearths a connection to the island’s early history, of the early European sealers and their first contact with the Ngarrindjeri people.As the three women are in grief pulled apart from each other, Pearl’s deepening connection to their history, the island’s history, grounds her, and will ultimately bring the women back to each other. Heart of the Grass Tree is an exquisite, searing and hope-filled debut about mothers and daughters and family stories, about country and its living history.

    It involves three of her old school mates, forgetting the husband she's just separated from, and an odyssey into the Australian outback. These warm, wise, feisty, fabulous 50-something women are all approaching the 'Age of Invisibility' - but they won't go quietly into that gentle night. . .The comedic audio drama by esteemed writer Nikki Gemmell (author of 'The Bride Stripped Bare') is a pertinent multicast story about female friendship and embracing the next phase of life. 'The Invisible Women's Society' explores the experience of middle-age female invisibility through the eyes of the newly separated Lou and her friends as they return to the dustbowl hometown they'd long left behind. Tensions mount as a school reunion goes awry, betrayals resurface, old flames are revisited and visits to estranged parents get awkward.These women all become someone else as the trip into this desert heartland progresses. Perhaps they are becoming the people they'd always wanted to be. Looser, braver, wilder,. Because the Age of Invisibility has been bearing down upon them all. Ungrateful kids, husbands (or not quite), being ignored at bars, sexual discrimination and job restlessness be damned, these women won't go out with a whimper. The time has come to ROAR.This series contains mature themes, and listener discretion is advised.©2019 Audible Australia Pty Ltd. (P)2019 Audible Australia Pty Ltd

    Hope Farm sticks out of the ragged landscape like a decaying tooth, its weatherboard walls sagging into the undergrowth. Silver's mother, Ishtar, has fallen for the charismatic Miller, and the three of them have moved to the rural hippie commune to make a new start. At Hope, Silver finds unexpected friendship and, at last, a place to call home. But it is also here that, at just thirteen, she is thrust into an unrelenting adult world — and the walls begin to come tumbling down, with deadly consequences. Hope Farm is the masterful second novel from award-winning author Peggy Frew, and is a devastatingly beautiful story about the broken bonds of childhood, and the enduring cost of holding back the truth.

    Haunted by memories and grappling with the shame of his desires, he runs away to remote Scotland with a piece of experimental tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to only use it three times, Jeff – self-indulgent, isolated and deteriorating – ignores this advice.In the late 1860s, Leonora lives a contented life in the Scottish Highlands, surrounded by nature, her hands and mind kept busy. Contemplating her future and the social conventions that bind her, a secret romantic friendship with the local laird is interrupted when her father sends her to stay with her aunt in Edinburgh – an intimidating, sooty city; the place where her mother perished.But Leonora’s ability to embrace her new life is shadowed by a dark presence that begins to lurk behind her eyes, and strange visions that bear no resemblance to anything she has ever seen or known…A Superior Spectre is a highly accomplished debut novel about our capacity for curiosity, and our dangerous entitlement to it, and reminds us the scariest ghosts aren’t those that go bump in the night, but those that are born and create a place for themselves in the human soul.

    He and his wife are attempting to escape the stifling conservatism of 1930s Australia by inviting other like-minded artists to live and work with them at their family home. As Lily’s friendship with Eva grows, she becomes infatuated with this makeshift family and longs to truly be a part of it.Looking back on those years later in life, Lily realises that this utopian circle involved the same themes as Evan Trentham’s art: Faustian bargains and terrible recompense; spectacular fortunes and falls from grace. Yet it was not Evan, nor the other artists he gathered around him, but his own daughters, who paid the debt that was owing.The Strays is an engrossing story of ambition, sacrifice and compromised loyalties from an exciting new talent.

    In this startling debut novel, Matt Nable follows the fortunes of Charlie, Tess, and their families and neighbours. Their lives intertwine, unravel, straighten, and become tangled again. A father tries to relive his football career through his son; a mother deserts her children in an attempt to find herself; a daughter purges to take control of her life.This is a portrait of plans gone wrong, a lament of what could have been, a salute to the power of redemptive love, and a brave examination of contemporary society.

    These are tales of love, secrets, doubt and torment, the everyday and the extraordinary. A sleepy town is gripped by delusory grief after the movie being filmed there wraps and leaves. A lingering heartbreak is replayed on Facebook. An ordinary family walks a shaky line between hopelessness and redemption. Brilliant, shocking and profound, these tales will leave you reeling in ways that only a great short story can. Kate Grenville * Mandy Sayer * Penni Russon * Favel Parrett * Tegan Bennett Daylight * Sonya Hartnett * Isabelle Li * Gillian Essex * Brenda Walker * Gillian Mears * Fiona MacFarlane * Joan London * Karen Hitchcock * Charlotte Wood * Tara June Winch * Cate Kennedy * Alice Pung * Anna Krien * Delia Falconer * Rebekah Clarkson

    But in the aftermath of 9/11, Flynn leaves his wife and children, resigns his teaching position and heads west, only to get lost in his guilt and in the mountains of Colorado. When he ends up stuck overnight in a snow drift during a blizzard on the Continental Divide, he realizes he needs to remake himself into the kind of man his children need him to be. With wit and insight, David Hicks turns a compassionate but unblinking eye on what it means to be human—to be lost while putting yourself back together again, to be cowardly while being brave, to fail and fail again on the way to something that might be success.With wit and insight, David Hicks turns a compassionate but unblinking eye on what it means to be human—to be lost while putting yourself back together again, to be cowardly while being brave, to fail and fail again on the way to something that might be success.

    It is a truly original and absorbing approach to revisiting Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner as artists and people, as well as realigning our ideas around the cultural legacy of Whitlam’s purchase of Blue Poles in 1973.It is also the story of Alyssa, and a contemporary relationship, in which Angela O’Keeffe immerses us in the essential power of art to change our personal lives and, by turns, a nation.Moving between New York and Australia with fluid ease, Night Blue is intimate and tender, yet surprisingly dramatic. It is a glorious exploration of how art must never be undervalued.