Don't let the fact this blurb is unusual stop you reading this book there really are few books like it. Yes it has cooking as an underlying theme like many other books but what those books don't have is sheer passion and inspiration and motivation and drive. It is a story about having the will and strength to succeed that is to say knowing what you are and knowing what you want to be and working as hard as it takes to get where you belong.At seventeen Zac is given a choice: either ...

A deliciously warm novel from the best-selling author of Meet Me At The Cupcake Cafe and The Loveliest Chocolate Shop in Paris.Amanda’s old schoolfriends can’t believe it when the social-climbing queen of preen, Satan’s very own PR girl, pulls off the ultimate publicity stunt in getting herself engaged to a Scottish laird. Who cares that Fraser McConnald has worn the same pair of Converse trainers for the last three years and that his castle is a pile of rubble with one calor gas h...

Meet Scout Davis.Investigative journalist. Tea enthusiast. Guerilla knitter.When an American cult moves to the Gold Coast, Scout's investigative antennae start quivering. She sets out to expose the cult's bizarre practices, but when she learns the identity of a recent recruit, her quest becomes personal. And dangerous.Meanwhile, her sister Harper, Head of Sport at a posh school, needs a favour regarding a strange case of vandalism.But Scout has her own secre...

'The suspense is frequently nail-biting . . . beautifully constructed.' Daily Mail'A sweet, charming, witty, romantic book,' BBC Radio 2, The WeekenderThe tiniest things - a coin, a pendant, a photograph, a lie - can make or ruin lives. It is 1939. Deep in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Richmond Kip Westaway, failed scholar and stablehand, is about to live through the most important day in his young life as Australi...

'MR WIGG captivates to the end' Good Reading MagazineIt’s the summer of 1971, not far from the stone-fruit capital of New South Wales, where Mr Wigg lives on what is left of his family farm. Mrs Wigg has been gone a few years now and he thinks about her every day. He misses his daughter, too, and wonders when he'll see her again.He spends his time working in the orchard, cooking and preserving his produce and, when it's on, watching the cricket. It's a full life. Things are...

________________LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2013________________'Perkins is an extraordinary writer ... The Forrests is a novel to be savoured' - Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times'Dexterously communicates some of life's less-syncopated rhythms ... Funny, painful and utterly mesmerising' - Independent on Sunday'The novel I ...

Winner of the Women’s Prize and featured on Elin Hilderbrand’s New York Times ballot for Best Books of the CenturyHarold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, a taller, smarter, and more successful high-flying TV executive, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control the ...

*** Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013 ***** US National Book Award 5 Under 35 **'To play the country-game, we have to choose a country. Everybody wants to be the USA and Britain and Canada and Australia and Switzerland and them. Nobody wants to be rags of countries like Congo, like Somalia, like Iraq, like Sudan, like Haiti and not even this one we live in - who wants to be a terrible place of hunger and things falling apart?'

Longlisted for the 2017 Walter Scott Prize for Historical FictionIn the 1600s Sara de Vos loses her young daughter suddenly to illness. In her grief, she secretly begins painting a dark landscape of a girl watching a group of ice skaters from the edge of a wood.In 1950s New York, Martijn de Groot has At the Edge of a Wood hanging above his bed. Though it is a dark, peculiar painting, he holds it dear and when it is stolen, he is bereft. In Brooklyn, struggl...

The collision of a gangster, a vicar, and a receptionist yields hilarious results in this madcap novel about modern values from a #1 international bestselling author."Comic genius. . . . This book is the funniest, most irreligious fantasy since The Book of Mormon . . . . Jonasson just gets better and better. Highly recommended." — Daily Express (UK)Kille...

Laura Fraser grows up in Sydney, motherless, with a cold, professional father and an artistic bent. Ravi Mendis lives on the other side of the globe -- exploring the seductive new world of the Internet, his father dead, his mother struggling to get by.Their stories alternate throughout Michelle de Kretser's ravishing novel, culminating in unlikely fates for them both, destinies influenced by travel -- voluntary in her case, enforced in his.With money from an inheritance, Laura sets...

As he arrives with his family at the villa in the hills above Nice, Joe sees a body in the swimming pool. But the girl is very much alive. She is Kitty Finch: a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water and into the heart of their holiday. Why is she there? What does she want from them all? And why does Joe's wife allow her to remain? Swimming Home is a subversive page-turner, a merciless gaze at the insidious harm that depression can have on a...