Rowan’s brother Albert, the natural heir to the farm, has died and Rowan’s dad’s health is failing. Although he longs to, there is no way that Rowan can refuse his mother’s request as she prepares the farm for sale.This is the story of the final harvest – the story of a young man in a place he doesn’t want to be, being given one last chance to make peace before the past, and those he has loved, disappear.

    When their mother's appetite for destruction leads the little family into the arms of Ray Crow, Jesse sees the brooding violence and knows that, this time, the trouble is real. But Jesse is just a kid and even as he tries to save his sister, he makes a fatal error that exposes them to the kind of danger from which he has sworn to protect Rachel. As their little world is torn to pieces, the children learn that when you are lost and alone, the only thing you can trust is what's in your blood.

    The family of three journeys across the country, squabbling, bonding, searching and reconnecting.But Loretta isn’t mother material. She’s broke, unreliable, lost. And there’s something else that’s not quite right with this reunion.They reach the west coast and take refuge in a beachside caravan park. Their neighbour, a surly old man, warns the kids to stay away. But when Loretta disappears again the boys have no choice but to ask the old man for help, and now they face new threats and new fears.This beautifully written and gripping debut is as moving as it is frightening, and as heartbreaking as it is tender.

    E. Cummings' most experimental poems as well as some of his most memorable. The volume includes such no-famous celebrations as "i sing of Olaf glad and big" and "if there are any heavens my mother will (all be herself) have," along with such favorites as "Space being (don't forget to remember) Curved," "a clown's smirk in the skull of a baboon," and "somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond."

    

    But Tess senses she's at a hinge moment, poised between the life she thought she wanted and the one she long ago decided against. The demands of her Sydney family seem unrelenting: an uneasy teenage daughter, a father who has just been placed in care, the impending sale of her childhood home. Sent to London for a conference, she's unable to resist the pull of that relinquished life. What, she wonders, would it be like now? And might it have suited her better after all?Deceptively concise, moving, elegant, The Girl with the Dogs was published online in 2014 under the title of Everything Precious.

    This series features classic tales retold with color illustrations to introduce literature to struggling readers. Each 64-page eBook retains key phrases and quotations from the original classics. You'll be kept in suspense with these four Edgar Allan Poe short stories! The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

    Indulged and wealthy Kat Fitzhubert is sold in an arranged marriage to a colony across the world. Lady Viola Montefiore is the dark-skinned changeling of a ducal family, kept hidden and then shipped away. Titania Boot is as broad as a carthorse, and as useful.On the long sea voyage from their homeland of England, these three women are fast bonded in an unlikely friendship. In the turmoil of 1850s Australia - which has reinvented itself from convict colony to a land of gold rushes and illusive riches - one woman forges a business empire, while another turns to illegal brewery, working alongside a bushranger as the valleys around her are destroyed. The third vanishes on her wedding day, in a scandal that will intrigue and mystify Sydney's polite society and beyond.In this magnificent and broad-sweeping saga, award-winning author Jackie French defies the myth of colonial women as merely wives, servants, petty thieves or whores. Instead, in this masterful storyteller's hands, these three women will be arbiters of a destiny far richer than the bewitching glitter and lure of gold.

    They leave the city, fleeing a past and a future that fill then with fear. On the coast they discover a natural world that is both destructive and rejuvenating. Events sweep them up and they must confront what they have tried to put behind them.Veritgo is an enthralling short novel by one of Australia's leading writers.

    In a shipment of old books from Nairobi, Robbie discovers a rare French book of ancient Roman erotica. With only four copies in existence, and valued at twenty million dollars, he is determined to sell it despite Lily's suggestion that they return it to the Italian government. Days later, William, a dashing Russian employed by a fine arts firm in London to retrieve stolen art works, arrives at the shop. Robbie refuses to hand over the book, and disappears, taking his and Lily's life savings with him. What follows is a funny, witty romantic comedy that takes readers from Sydney to Rome, in a whirlwind of pretty dresses (on Lily), daring actions (by William) and clever dialogue... 'First rule of travel - never walk past a toilet without using it.'

    The resonance of this image grows through each section of the book as Hahn skillfully employs theme and variation, counterpoint and mirroring techniques. The ibis first appears as part of an illusion, the disappearing object in a magician’s trick, which then evokes the greatest disappearing act of all—death—where there are no tricks to bring about a reappearance. The rich complexity multiplies as the second section focuses on a disappearing lady and a dramatic final section brings together the bird and the lady in their common plight—both caged by their mortality, their assigned time and role.  All of the illusions fall away during this brilliant denouement as the two voices share a dialogue on the power of metaphor as the very essence of poetry. bird trick iv It’s all about disappearance. About a bird in a cagewith a mirror, a simple twiston the handle at the sidethat makes it come and go at the magician’s insistence. It’s all about innocence.It’s all about acceptance.It’s all about compliance.It’s all about deference.It’s all about silence. It’s all about disappearance.

    At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents' thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a "man's job" of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil, who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback, and who, upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten, began to slide—bereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled her—into depression and dependency.We see Jill, staggered by the loss of her father, catapulted to what seemed another planet—the suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded, noisy, cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University, but with it a yet more demanding course of lessons—Jill embracing new ideas, new possibilities, while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink, pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self.Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to place—or to a dream—can at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free.

    A prize-winning tale about three women - mother, daughter and grandmother - and the conflicts that arise around their genius for mathematics.

    Best known as the lead singer and enigmatic front man, songwriter, bassist of The Church, Steve has experienced both amazing international success and all the excesses that go with it, as well as a well known heroin addiction that delivered some very dark times. The Church has been a significant and constant influence on the Australian music industry and readers will be keen to hear from one of the industry's most successful, creative and long-standing key protagonists. Kilbey is Australian rock and roll royalty and for the first time this is his story. Come inside the world of Steve Kilbey singer songwriter and bassist of one of Australia's best loved bands, The Church. From his migrant ten pound pom childhood through his adolescence growing up during the advent of The Beatles, Dylan and The Stones to his early adventures in garage bands and neighbourhood jams. His misadventures with a full time job and a 9 to 5 life and wild adventures with The Church as they conquer Australia and then the world. The tours. The records. The women. And then the heroin addiction which enslaved him for ten long years. Then the two sets of twins he fathers along the way and branching off into acting, painting and writing. From snowy Sweden to a cell in New York City, from Ipanema beach to Bondi, Kilbey stumbles through his surrrealistic life as an idiot savant that will make you smile as well as want to kick him up the arse. After coming out the other side his tale is simply too good not to be told. Narrated with unusual and often pristine clarity we and with much focus on his considerable musical talent.

    Darwin, 1942, and as Japanese bombs rain down, motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger's daughter, turns once again to the sky for guidance. She carries a stone heart inside a duffel bag next to the map that leads to Longcoat Bob, the deep-country sorcerer who put a curse on her family. By her side are the most unlikely travelling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress and Yukio, a fallen Japanese fighter pilot. Run, Molly, run, says the daytime sky. Run to the vine forests. Run to northern Australia's wild and magical monsoon lands. Run to friendship. Run to love. Run. Because the graverobber's coming, Molly, and the night-time sky is coming with him. So run, Molly, run.All Our Shimmering Skies is a story about gifts that fall from the sky, curses we dig from the earth and the secrets we bury inside ourselves. It is an odyssey of true love and grave danger, of darkness and light, of bones and blue skies; a buoyant, beautiful and magical novel abrim with warmth, wit and wonder; and a love letter to Australia and the art of looking up.