They have lost everything but each other.When Grace Hooper, on the verge of womanhood, and her nine-year-old brother Billy are left orphaned by a freak accident at the beginning of a long, hot summer, they find themselves cast adrift from their old life and numb with grief. Sent to stay with their estranged grandfather on the remote farm where their mother grew up, there they must try and uncover a new understanding of the world and their place in it. But in the relentless heat and...

Escaping the PastBilly Martin runs from home, burying his past in the quest for a future. He finds it in Queensland's spectacular Gulf Country, on the sprawling cattle runs.Embracing the LandThe Gulf breeds tough men, and Billy is quickly drawn to the excitement and adventure of working with the fiery cattleman and ex-con Blake Reilly and his daughter Jo.Billy finds mateship, danger and romance in the Gulf, but he also finds...

Set in hardscrabble farming country around the show jumping circuit that flourished in Australia prior to the Second World War, Foal's Bread tells the story of two generations of the Nancarrow family and their fortunes as dictated by the vicissitudes of the land.When Noah Childs meets Roley Nancarrow at a country show, a union is forged which will last the length of their lives. Their love finds its greatest expression in their lucky charm, a heart-shaped foal's bread which hangs f...

A spellbinding animal story from War Horse author and former Children's Laureate, Michael Morpurgo.Bullied at school, nagged in Aunty May's tenth-floor council flat, there's only one place ten-year-old Billy really feels alive – in the wilderness by the canal. There he watches a cygnet on the water and protects a family of fox cubs. Then his secret place is discovered and the fox family decimated. Unwanted and unloved, Billy and the last fox run for their lives …

The third memoir from the author of bestsellers Salvation Creek and The House at Salvation Creek.The third memoir from the author of bestsellers Salvation Creek and The House at Salvation Creek.In The House on the Hill, Susan Duncan reaches an age where there’s no point in sweating long-term ramifications. There aren’t any. This new understanding delivers an unexpected bonus – the emotional freedom and moral clari...

Small Beneath the Sky is a tender, unsparing portrait of a family. It is also a book about place. Growing up in a small prairie city, where the local heroes were hockey players and curlers, Lorna Crozier never once dreamed of becoming a writer. Nonetheless, the grace, wisdom, and wit of her poetry have won her international acclaim. In this marvellous volume of recollections, she charts the geography that has shaped her character and her sense of ...

After seven years on the road with her family, Kerry McGinnis is tired of the wandering life and yearns for a proper home. When her father, the irascible but loveable Mac, buys a property in Queensland's Gulf Country, it seems like she might have found one.But not everything goes smoothly. In their struggle to make a go of things, the McGinnis family encounters fire, flood, a three-metre python, and other, human obstacles. Sian, the eldest son, is at loggerheads with his father, wh...

Country folk have their own way of doing things and their own sense of humour too. They are naturally wary of men in suits and university types, and such people have to be put to the test before they can be accepted. They are not too keen on new-fangled ways of doing things either; a meal of mountain oysters is one thing, but washed down with a glass of bull’s semen? What’s the world coming to? 'Once Upon A Cowpat' is a hugely enjoyable collection of rural yarns, with subjects ranging from...

Join the little girl in the candy-striped dress as Milly-Molly-Mandy rides a horse, minds a baby and goes to the seaside – whatever she and her friends are up to, you're sure to have fun when they're around!The much-loved stories of Milly-Molly-Mandy and her everyday adventures in the countryside have charmed generations of children since their first publication in 1928. Perfect for reading aloud, the six stories in Joyce Lankester Brisley's Milly-Molly-Mandy's...

When young Elliot gets a labourers job at Mr Evanss after being sacked from a pig farm for liberating six of its sows, he thinks hell have even more opportunities to lean on gates or stare at fields. But his best mate Spike keeps getting him into trouble, first by showing him what is being grown in a tucked-away polytunnel, and then turning up at his caravans door with a van full of weed. As Elliot tries to help his friend get rid of the hot merchandise, they find themselves at the receivi...

A young lawyer in Los Angeles is called back to his family's farm in rural Australia and plunged into a complex struggle between past and present, town and country, and the secrets that haunt them all.When he learns of his mother's ailing health, Daniel Rawson must leave Los Angeles and travel half a world away to the family's horse farm on Wedding Bush Road, one hundred miles outside of Melbourne. Estranged from his parents, Daniel is hesitant to revisit their history: long divorc...

In a huge, dark forest somewhere in the north, a round, rather simple hedgehog called Pork emerges from a pile of leaves in the night… and sets in motion this powerful – and unusual – collection of animal stories for adults. There is mystery and terror in the great woodland, and there is love. It is a world where fear and death and the survival of the fittest are the pitiless underlying themes. Though they are loosely linked, the stories are written to be read as separate tales, usually wi...