It's been ten months since Jack died, and Sandra, a tightly wound academic, copes with her grief by immersing herself in the history of textiles. When she and Martha, a gifted knitter, meet over an unconscious body on the footpath, the unlikely threads of their lives tangle into each other. Sandra invites Martha to join her in a professional collaboration, but what begins as a working relationship becomes something deeply personal. Martha seems at ease with herself, in spite of her own exp...

In 1943, when Grace and Leo Waterhouse married in Australia, they were part of a young generation ready to sacrifice themselves to win the war, while being confident they would survive. Sixty years on, as Grace recounts what happened to her doomed hero, she can say what she suspected then: that for many men, bravery is its own end. The tale she tells is one of great love, lost innocence, a charismatic but unstable Irish commander, dashing undercover missions against the Japanese in Singapo...

In her flat above Drylands' newsagency, Janet Deakin is writing a book for the world's last reader. Little has changed in her 50 years, except for the coming of cable TV. Loneliness is almost a religion, and still everyone knows your business. But the town is being outmanoeuvred by drought and begins to empty, pouring itself out like water into sand. Small minds shrink even smaller in the vastness of the land. One man is forced out by council rates and bigotry; another sells his property, ...

Loving Daughters is a brilliant, unsentimental portrait of two sisters – one artistic and restless, the other houseproud, her father's favourite. The entry of an eligible young man into their lives creates a disturbing triangle of desire and rivalry.

At 18, Liz is separated from her first true love. Across the miles she dreams of the day he will return to marry her, but fate has other plans and love is lost. Thirty-seven years later, she picks up the telephone to hear a voice from the past that still has the power to stop her in her tracks. This is an extraordinary, true story of love lost, and love found. Crossing the continents and decades it is a testament to the power of the passion and the triumph of the heart.

In this inspiring book, Susanna de Vries profiles the love, dedication and selflessness of eleven outstanding women over the course of two world wars: from Olive Kin, who saved countless lives in the war-ravaged Balkans, although she lost her heart; to Gallipoli nurse Alice Kitchen, who also served in France; to Vivian Bullwinkel, who survived the Bangka Island Massacre only to face more than three years watching her colleagues die as Japanese prisoners of war. Focussing not only on the as...

In the 1890s, when a woman's role was seen as marrying well and raising a family, Daisy Bates reinvented herself from humble governess to heiress, traveller and woman of science. She would become one of the best-known and most controversial ethnologists in history, and one of the first people to put Aboriginal culture on the map. Born into tough circumstances, Daisy's prospects were dim; her father an alcoholic boot maker, her mother dying of consumption when Daisy was only four years old....

Sunburnt Country is an outstanding selection of autobiographical stories and short fiction about Australia and Australians. From childhood, through adolescence, work and marriage, to old age, these stories provide a lively, at times moving, sometimes funny, glimpse into many aspects of life in Australia.

It is October 1942. From the doorway of this small three-roomed cottage, which houses thirty-two of us, we look out beyond to a steaming jungle in Sumatra. In 1942 a group of sixty-five Australian Army nursing sisters was evacuated from Malaya a few days before the fall of Singapore. Two days later their ship was bombed and sunk by the Japanese. Of the fifty-three survivors who scrambled ashore, twenty-one were murdered and the remaining thirty-two taken prisoner. White Coolies is the engr...

On the edge of a small town in New South Wales, far from the battlefields of the Second World War, lies a prisoner-of-war camp housing Italian, Korean and Japanese soldiers. For their guards and the locals, many with loved ones away fighting, captive or dead, it is hard to know how to treat them - with disdain, hatred or compassion?Alice, a young woman leading a dull life on her father-in-law's farm, is one of those with a husband held prisoner in Europe. When Giancarlo, an Italian...

It was 1786 when Arthur Phillip, an ambitious captain in the Royal Navy, was assigned the formidable task of organizing an expedition to Australia in order to establish a penal colony. The squalid and turbulent prisons of London were overflowing, and crime was on the rise. Even the hulks sifting at anchor in the Thames were packed with malcontent criminals and petty thieves. So the English government decided to undertake the unprecedented move of shipping off its convicts to a largely unex...

It is the winter of 1985. 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. But here, at just thirteen, she is thrust into an unrelenting adult world, and the walls begin to come tumbling down, with deadly consequences.