Martin Frobisher has been beating close family members about the head with an epergne. Frobisher, successful publisher and community leader, is in the City Remand Centre, awaiting trial for murder. What shadow has fallen across the comfortable lives of Frobisher, his ambitious wife Coralie and her flaky sister Madeleine? What has led a cultivated and reflective man, known to shoo spiders and earwigs out of the harm's way, to such reckless acts of violence?With the prospect of impri...

'I felt always that the crumbling paper must hold something that was more like speaking flesh and blood that somewhere amid these shreds I would learn something of this family lost to silence; something about a house that was quickly abandoned and a family divided, and then all gates shut on the past.'A young Australian man arrives in riot-ravaged Paris, armed with an old manuscript written in French and an obsessive desire to piece together the fragments of a mystery that...

I felt always that the crumbling paper must hold something that was more like speaking flesh and blood . . . that somewhere amid these shreds . . . I would learn something of this family lost to silence; something about a house that was quickly abandoned and a family divided, and then all gates shut on the past.A young Australian man arrives in riot-ravaged Paris, armed with an old manuscript written in French and an obsessive desire to piece together the fragments of a mys...

‘I want to tell a story. A long but simple story. A tale of long recovery. A tale of love. A tale of lost and found.’In his remarkable new novel, award-winning Australian author Michael Meehan sensitively explores the links between generational conflict, family, and the creative act.At its heart An Ungrateful Instrument is a novel that portrays a son’s struggle to be more than a mere instrument of the father’s ambition. Antoine Forqueray and later his son ...

The qualities and achievements of eighteenth century English literature have suffered denigration as a result of a prevailing Whig interpretation of literary history. It is the contention of this book, originally published in 1986, that an alternative form of Whig interpretation is possible and even desirable. It has as its sphere of interest the ways in which views on the nature and benefits of political freedom, and various "whiggish" readings of literary history, political theory and ae...

On the edge of the remote salt flats of Australia, a young woman blows in from nowhere and disturbs the precarious equilibrium of a family farm. The boy is fascinated by her, his mother despises her, and the brutish farmhand wants to possess her. When the woman mysteriously disappears, the only trace of her a bloodied dress, the boy sets out in search of an Indian hawker who may or may not have the answers. As he journeys through the broken landscape, accompanied only by his horse and his ...

#1 National Bestseller and New York Times BestsellerParis, 1878. Following her father’s sudden death, Marie van Goethem is dispatched to the Paris Opéra, where for a scant wage she is trained to enter the famous Ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work—and the love of a dangerous young man—as an extra on the stage. Marie is soon modeling in the studio of renowned artist Edgar Degas, who will immortalize her image forever, while Antoinette must make...

A New York Times bestseller!The gritty finale of the World of the First Law trilogy, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Blade Itself**.**"The battles are vivid and visceral, the action brutal, the pace headlong, and Abercrombie piles the betrayals, reversals, and plot twists one atop another to keep us guess...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Sarah's Key and A Secret Kept comes an absorbing new novel about one woman's resistance during an époque that shook Paris to its very core.Paris, France: 1860's. Hundreds of houses are being razed, whole neighborhoods reduced to ashes. By order of Emperor Napoleon III, Baron Haussman has set into motion a series of large-scale renovations that will permanently alter the face of old Paris, moul...

In 1903 a mysterious, desperate young woman flees alone across the west, one quick step ahead of the law. She has just become a widow by her own hand. Two vengeful brothers and a pack of bloodhounds track her across the western wilderness. She is nineteen years old and half mad. Gil Adamson's extraordinary novel opens in heart-pounding mid-flight and propels the reader through a gripping road trip with a twist -- the steely outlaw in this story is a grief-struck young woman. Along the way ...

A national bestseller. "A riveting tale of the American past and a brilliantly realized journey into the heart of darkness." — The Boston GlobeWinner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary PrizeWhen Robey Childs's mother has a premonition about her husband, a soldier fighting in the Civil War, she does the unthinkable: she sends her only child to find his father on th...

An 'utterly gripping' tale of love and espionage in Occupied France by the Man Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Glass Room (Daily Mail)Marian Sutro is an outsider: the daughter of a diplomat, brought up on the shores of Lake Geneva and in England, half French, half British, naive yet too clever for her own good. But when she is recruited from her desk job by SOE, the Special Operations Executive, to go undercover in wartime France, it seems ...