First with your head and then with your heart... So says Hoppie Groenewald, boxing champion, to a 7-year-old boy who dreams of being the welterweight champion of the world. For the young Peekay, it is a piece of advice he will carry with him throughout life. Born in a South Africa divided by racism and hatred, this one small boy will come to lead all the tribes of Africa. Through enduring friendships with Hymie and Gideon, Peekay gains the strength he needs to win out. And in a final confl...

Jessica is based on the inspiring true story of a young girl's fight for justice against tremendous odds. A tomboy, Jessica is the pride of her father, as they work together on the struggling family farm. One quiet day, the peace of the bush is devastated by a terrible murder. Only Jessica is able to save the killer from the lynch mob - but will justice prevail in the courts? Nine months later, a baby is born... with Jessica determined to guard the secret of the father's identity. The riva...

Towards the end of the Great Depression a young boy goes with his sister to stay at a farm while their mother is ill. There, during a scorching African summer, he witnesses a trial and punishment which will forever remind him of white men's cruelty to black people. The Night Country is a fable for all ages – a powerful account of the strength that lives within us all.

It is 1942 in the Dutch East Indies, and Nick Duncan is a young Australian butterfly collector in search of a single exotic butterfly. With invading Japanese forces coming closer by the day, Nick falls in love with the beguiling Anna van Heerden. Their time together is brief, as both are forced into separate, dangerous escapes. They plan to reunite and marry in Australia but it is several years before their paths cross again, scarred forever by the dark events of a long, cruel war. In The ...

Born in a South Africa divided by racism and hatred, little six-year-old Peekay learns that small can beat big. Armed with this knowledge, he resolves to take on the injustices of his country, and sets his heart on becoming the welterweight champion of the world. Peekay starts to take boxing lessons, makes new friends, collects cacti and plays the piano. Above all, he learns to think with his head and then with his heart. Peekay discovers that nothing can defeat the determination to be tru...

The four fires in this story are passion, religion, warfare and fire itself. While there are many more fires that drive the human spirit, love being perhaps the brightest flame of all, it is these four that have moulded us most as Australian people. The four fires give us our sense of place and, for better or for worse, shape our national character.

Nicholas Duncan is a semi-retired shipping magnate who resides in idyllic Beautiful Bay in Indonesia. Grieving the loss of his wife, Anna, he is suffering for the first time from disturbing flashbacks to WWII, the scene of their first meeting. His other wartime lover is the striking Marg Hamilton, a powerful Australian political player still close to Nick. Encouraged by a Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Specialist, Nick sets about writing his life, drawing us into the compelling tale of the...

Tandia is a child of all Africa: half Indian, half African, beautiful and intelligent, she is only sixteen when she is first brutalised by the police. Her fear of the white man leads her to join the black resistance movement. With her in the fight for justice is the one white man Tandia can trust, the welterweight champion of the world, Peekay. Now he must fight their common enemy in order to save both their lives. A compelling story of good and evil from Australia's most popular storytell...

Each of us has a place to return to in our minds, a place of clarity and peace, a place to think, to create, to dream. For Bryce Courtenay this place was a waterhole in Africa where he used to escape to as a boy, in search of solitude. One evening, while lingering there, he witnessed the tallest of the great beasts drinking from the waterhole in the moonlight, and was spellbound. Ever since, he drew inspiration from this moment. The Silver Moon gathers together some of the most personal an...

Billy O'Shannessy, once a prominent barrister, is now on the street where he sleeps on a bench outside the State Library. Above him on the windowsill rests a bronze statue of Matthew Flinders' cat, Trim. Ryan is a ten-year-old, a near street kid heading for all the usual trouble. The two meet and form an unlikely friendship. Appealing to the boy's imagination by telling him the story of the circumnavigation of Australia as seen through Trim's eyes, Billy is drawn deeply into Ryan's life an...

The story of Sylvia Honeyeater, who sings like an angel and can literally charm the birds from the trees, this epic tale of a Europe torn by religious intolerance also features the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Francis of Assisi, the Muslim Sultan and his harem, as well as the fervour that became the Children's Crusade and then later the Crusades.

In the 1930s, two opportunities existed for boys of Balmain, a working-class Sydney suburb: to be selected into Fort Street Boys School or to excel as a sportsman. At just sixteen years Danny Dunn has everything going for him: brains, looks, sporting aptitude - and luck with the ladies. His parents run The Hero of Mafeking ('Maffos'), the favourite local watering hole, and the whole of Balmain is proud of Danny's sporting prowess. His mother, though, steers Danny towards a university educa...