The wind is whispering in Woody Creek. Change is in the air. It's 1958 and Woody Creek is being dragged kicking and screaming into the swinging sixties. Jenny's daughters, Cara and Georgie, are now young women. They have inherited their mother's hands, but that is where their similarity ends. Raised separately, they have never met. A mistake from Cara's teenage years looms over her future, but she believes emphatically in the white wedding and happily ever after myth. Georgie has seen enou...

At a time when the world waits anxiously to see what will happen next in Zimbabwe – when there is little food in the country's shops, life expectancy is plunging and Zimbabweans are fleeing repression and unemployment - this book gets to grips with the man at the helm of a corrupt regime; the man behind the monster. Holland's tireless investigation begins with her having dinner with Mugabe the freedom fighter and ends in a searching interview with Zimbabwe's president in December 2007, mor...

In the final instalment of Joy Dettman’s beloved Woody Creek series, we return to the small timber town where it all began … When a house fire takes the life of her sister and burns her home to the ground, Georgie is lost. She flees town with nothing but a cardboard box and the determination to be somebody, anybody else. After almost losing her adopted daughter, Cara’s decided that life is to be lived and love is to be cherished. But is any love great enough to overcome an unimaginable bur...

Growing up in an Australian country town before World War I, Jackie Hanna and Cushie Moy are carefree and innocent in their love for each other. But Jackie is a dwarf, and his devotion to the beautiful Cushie is condemned by her parents. This is the story of their life-long odyssey, and of the triumph of a special kind of courage. In Swords and Crowns and Rings Ruth Park brilliantly captures the mood and tempo of Australian life from 1907 until 1931.

With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention, she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people's lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the...

Early one Sunday, the town of Molliston wakes to the news that a young bride is dead. The year is 1929. The Great War with Germany has been fought and won, but at an immense cost to the small community. Death is too familiar here. So many sons were lost. So many daughters would never be wives; so many grandchildren would never be born. Racial hatred is like a bushfire in the belly of some. And the dead girl is found only yards from the property of old Joe Reichenberg, a German. Tom Thompso...

Beginning in a small village on the Chinese-Russian border in the final days of World War II, White Gardenia tells the story of a mother and daughter separated by war. In a district of the city of Harbin, a haven for white Russian families since Russia's Communist revolution, Alina Kozlova must make a heartbreaking decision if her only child, Anya, is to live. White Gardenia sweeps across cultures and continents, from the glamorous nightclubs of Shanghai to the harshness of Cold War Soviet...

It’s the swinging 60s, Sydney. Post-war Australia is booming and the excitement of the city lures two young women, Rose and Margot, eager for adventure in these rapidly changing times. At a coffee bar in cosmopolitan Kings Cross, they encounter two debonair Europeans, Stefan and Josef, former Polish army officers seeking to rebuild their lives. Yet romance between Rose and Stefan is thwarted by lingering wartime trauma. And Margot, well, she has no intention of marrying a penniless immigra...

Courtesan, countess, bestselling author – the tempestuous true story of a woman far ahead of her time ... Born in the gutters of Paris in 1824, Céleste made her name as a dancer in the Parisian dance halls, where it is said she invented the can-can. Then, as an equestrienne at the Paris hippodrome, her daring feats on horseback thrilled the crowds. However, it was as the city's most celebrated courtesan that the young Parisian found genuine fame and fortune. Strikingly beautiful and charis...

The Enlightenment has been nothing if not divisive, being blamed for bloody disasters – Auschwitz, the gulags, Islamic terrorism – as well as being heralded as the harbinger of reason and equality. To this day historians disagree over when it was, where it was, and what it was (or whether it still is). Kieron O’Hara deftly traverses these conflicts, presenting the history, ideology, culture, and social life of the Enlightenment – not as a simple set of easily enumerated ideas, but an evolv...

The outstanding stories of eight courageous women. One brave nursing sister Hilda Samsing became a whistle blower. Nursing aboard the hospital ship Gascon, outraged by the bungled evacuation of wounded Anzacs which was censored out of the press she let her diary be shown in high places which raised questions in the House of Commons. In Belgium, Louise Creed, a Sydney journalist caught in the besieged city of Antwerp made a hair-raising escape from a German firing squad and lived to tell th...

Joice Loch was an extraordinary Australian. She had the inspired courage that saved many hundreds of Jews and Poles in World War II, the compassion that made her a self-trained doctor to tens of thousands of refugees, the incredible grit that took her close to death in several theatres of war, and the dedication to truth and justice that shone forth in her own books and a lifetime of astonishing heroism. Born in a cyclone in 1887 on a Queensland sugar plantation, she grew up in grinding po...