What Days are For - A Memoir


Robert Dessaix - 2014
    One Sunday night in Sydney, Robert Dessaix collapses in a gutter in Darlinghurst, and is helped to his hotel by a kind young man wearing a T-shirt that says F**K YOU. What follows are weeks in hospital, tubes and cannulae puncturing his body, as he recovers from the heart attack threatening daily to kill him. While lying in the hospital bed, Robert chances upon Philip Larkin's poem 'Days'. What, he muses, have his days been for? What and who has he loved - and why? This is vintage Robert Dessaix. His often surprisingly funny recollections range over topics as eclectic as intimacy, travel, spirituality, enchantment, language and childhood, all woven through with a heightened sense of mortality

Dear Fran, Love Dulcie: Life and Death in the Hills and Hollows of Bygone Australia


Victoria Twead - 2021
    Both are newly-weds; Dulcie has a baby girl and Fran is expecting a baby. But there the similarities end.Fran is a Detroit city girl enjoying modern conveniences. Dulcie is a pineapple farmer’s wife enduring the extremes of Australia. Bushfires, floods, cyclones, droughts, dingo attacks and accidents are all too common. Regardless, Dulcie’s optimism shines through, revealing her love of the land and fascination for the wild creatures that share her corner of Queensland.Each book purchased will help support Careflight, an Australian aero-medical charity that attends emergencies, however remote.

The Complete Stories


David Malouf - 2007
    These tender, subtle, and intimate stories give us men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others.Heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying, The Complete Stories also includes David Malouf’s short fiction from Dream Stuff, Antipodes, and Child’s Play. It is a major literary event.

One Boy Missing


Stephen Orr - 2014
    He didn't really know whether he'd seen anything at all, though. Maybe an abduction? Maybe just a stressed-out father.Detective Bart Moy, newly returned to the country town where his ailing, cantankerous father still lives, finds nothing. As far as he can tell no one in Guilderton is missing a small boy. Still, he looks deeper into the butcher's story — after all, he had a son of his own once.But when the boy does turn up, silent, apparently traumatised, things are no clearer. Who is he? Where did he come from and what happened to him?For Moy, gaining the boy's trust becomes central not just to the case but to rebuilding his own life. From the wreckage of his grief, his dead marriage and his fractured relationship with his father may yet come a chance for something new.A mystery, a meditation on fatherhood, a harrowing examination of love and loss: a new departure in literary crime from Stephen Orr.

A Universe of Sufficient Size


Miriam Sved - 2019
    I cannot recommend this book highly enough.' Heather Morris, author of The Tattooist of AuschwitzI have wished so many times that I had acted differently.I wish that I had been more worthy of you...Eventually the war will end, and then we will find each other.Until then, remember me.Budapest, 1938. In a city park, five young Jewish mathematicians gather to share ideas, trade proofs and whisper sedition.Sydney, 2007. Illy has just buried her father, a violent, unpredictable man whose bitterness she never understood. And now Illy's mother has gifted her a curious notebook, its pages a mix of personal story and mathematical discovery, recounted by a woman full of hopes and regrets.Inspired by a true story, Miriam Sved's beautifully crafted novel charts a course through both the light and dark of human relationships: a vivid recreation of 1930s Hungary, a decades-old mystery locked in the story of one enduring friendship, a tribute to the selfless power of the heart.LONGLISTED FOR THE COLIN RODERICK AWARD 2020PRAISE FOR A UNIVERSE OF SUFFICIENT SIZE'A fascinating, compelling, beautifully written novel.' Liane Moriarty, author of Big Little Lies and The Husband's Secret 'A taut, tender novel about family, secrets, genius and survival. Sved shows great insight into the complicated emotional architecture of family created in the aftermath of trauma.' Emily Maguire, author of An Isolated Incident'A superbly structured novel of family, history, secrets, trauma, and mathematics, stretching from 1930s Budapest to Sydney in the 2000s' Andrea Goldsmith'Sved's prose is as sinewy and powerful as her characters - beautifully controlled and full of revealing moments that... glow in the memory.' Cate Kennedy'A beautifully imagined inter-generational portrait of friendship, love and loss, set across three continents.' Julienne van LoonPRAISE FOR MIRIAM SVED'The best kind of storyteller... hypnotic, startling almost.' Clementine Ford, author of Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys'At times I found myself being reminded of the American author Jennifer Egan. Both authors share the ability to surprise with character insights, something so traditional yet so mentally refreshing. The prose is limpid yet razor sharp. Highly recommended.' The Australian

Goose Girl


Joy Dettman - 2001
    Sally De Rooze is almost thirty. She survived the accident that killed her father and brothers. Her mother never forgave her for that. But she survived her mother too. Surviving is what she does best. Farmer Ross Bertram, who offers her his acres and safety, is the answer for a while. Until he starts pushing for a wedding. Sally wants ... wants more. Wants to know great love. Wants to find herself. One year. That's what she wants. One year of freedom in the big, bad city. Her survival skills are tested in the urban sprawl and she discovers more about herself than she had ever dared to imagined.

The Chrysanthemum, the Cross, and the Dragon


Iver P. Cooper - 2018
    Cooper's latest alternate history novel, a new contribution to Eric Flint's 1632 Universe, the romance between Juan Cardona, an officer in Spain's Manila garrison, and Huang Mingyu, a young, beautiful Chinese woman, is threatened when a Dutch-Japanese force launches a surprise attack on 17th century Manila. Manila falls and Juan is rescued by Huang Mingyu, who proves to have hidden talents and connections. It is then up to Juan to warn the incoming Manila galleon of the Dutch-Japanese threat before it blunders into Manila Bay, and to prove his worth to Mingyu's family. Who have interests of their own in the region....Will true love prevail when Japan (the chrysanthemum), Spain (the cross) and China (the dragon) come into conflict?For readers unfamiliar with the 1632 universe, it posits a cosmic catastrophe -- the RIng of Fire -- that throws the West Virginia town of Grantville into 17th century Germany. By 1633, the ripples caused by this event have reached East Asia, and the Japanese are determined to forestall the missionary-instigated Shimabara Rebellion of 1637.

Afternoons with Harvey Beam


Carrie Cox - 2018
    The words aren’t coming out right, Harvey’s mojo is fading and a celebrity host is eyeing his timeslot.Back in Shorton, Harvey’s father Lionel appears at long last to be dying. It seems it’s finally time for Harvey Beam to head home and face a different kind of music.In wading through a past that seems disturbingly unchanged, the last thing he expects is a chance encounter with a wonderful stranger …

Black & Blue


James Patterson - 2016
    But new clues point to a more chilling predator than she ever could have imagined.BookShotsLIGHTNING-FAST STORIES BY JAMES PATTERSON- Novels you can devour in a few hours- Impossible to stop reading- All original content from James Patterson

Mazarine


Charlotte Grimshaw - 2018
    What clues can Frances find in her own history, and who is the mysterious Mazarine? Following the narrative thread left by her daughter, she travels through cities touched by terrorism and surveillance, where ways of relating are subtly changed, and a startling new fiction seems to be constructing itself.

The First Fleet


Rob Mundle - 2014
    Bestselling Maritme Biographer, Rob Mundle, is back on the ocean with a blockbuster. First Fleet tells the extraordinary story of the eighteenth century convoy of eleven ships that left England on 13th May 1787 for the 'land beyond the seas'. Aboard were seafarers, convicts, marines and a few good citizens - some 1300 hundred in all - who had been consigned to a virtually unknown land on the opposite side of the world where they would establish a penal colony, and a nation. The fleet stopped at Tenerife, Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town before sailing across the notorious and challenging Southern ocean, bound for Botany bay. Somehow all 11 ships arrived safely between 18 and 20 January 1788. But it's what happened during 252 days at sea while sailing halfway around the world, and subsequently on land, that is almost beyond belief. No nation has ever been founded in such a courageous and dangerous manner. It's the basis for one hell of an adventure

Silver Wattle


Belinda Alexandra - 2007
    There, Adela becomes a film director at a time when the local industry is starting to feel 
 the competition from Hollywood.But while success is imminent, the issues of family and an impossible love are never far away. And ultimately dreams of the silver screen must compete with the bonds of a lifetime ...Silver Wattle confirms Belinda Alexandra as one of our foremost story-tellers. Weaving fact into inspiring fiction with great flair and imagination, this is a novel as full of hope, glamour and heartbreak as the film industry itself.'An absorbing story of hope and despair, loyalty and love' - Woman's Day'Readers are kept on their toes ... and it's a worthwhile wait' - Courier-Mail

The Writing On The Wall


Juliet Rieden - 2019
    She longed to have relatives and knew precious little about her Czech father's childhood as a refugee.On the night before Juliet's father died, in 2006, Juliet's father suddenly looked up and said: 'The plane is in the hangar.' In the years after his death, Juliet comes to truly understand the significance of these words.On a trip to Prague she is shocked to see the Rieden name written many times over on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue memorial. These names become the catalyst for a life-changing journey that uncovers a personal Holocaust tragedy of epic proportions.Juliet traces the grim fate of her father's cousins, aunts and uncles on visits to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps and learns about the extremes of cruelty, courage and kindness.Then in a locked box in Britain's National Archives, she discovers a stash of documents including letters from her father that reveal intimate details of his struggle.Meticulously researched and beautifully told, this is the moving story of a woman's quest to piece together the hidden parts of her father's life and the unimaginable losses he was determined to protect his children from.PRAISE FOR THE WRITING ON THE WALL'Rieden sets out to chart her story with a journalist's rigour: facts, timelines, archival material. She does it brilliantly. But it is the small, powerful resonant moments within a harrowing arc that bring her story alive.' The Australian

Lucky's


Andrew Pippos - 2020
    Lucky's is a story of family.It is also about a man called Lucky.His restaurant chain.A fire that changed everything.A New Yorker article which might save a career.The mystery of a missing father.An impostor who got the girl.An unthinkable tragedy.A roll of the dice.And a story of love, lost, sought and won again, (at last).

Dustfall


Michelle Johnston - 2018
    He travels to the isolated town of Wittenoom and takes charge of its small hospital, a place where no previous doctor has managed to stay longer than an eye blink. Instead of settling into a quiet, solitary life, he discovers an asbestos mining corporation with no regard for the safety of its workers and no care for the truth.Thirty years later, Dr Lou Fitzgerald stumbles across the abandoned Wittenoom Hospital. She, too, is a fugitive from a medical career toppled by a single error. Here she discovers faded letters and barely used medical equipment, and, slowly the story of the hospital’s tragic past comes to her.Dustfall is the tale of the crashing consequences of medical error, the suffering caused by asbestos mining and the power of storytelling.