With a roar like a train in a tunnel, the war enters its final days. Ellie has to be on that train. There's no more sitting around, no more waiting. There's only fast decisions, fast action, fast thinking. And she'd better get it right. With all their being, Ellie and her friends want to stay alive. But there's a war out there. And it has to be won.

15-year-old Simone is lured by her new boyfriend with promises of a better life in a big city. On the run from a dangerous environment and her drug addicted sister, she arrives in Palmino with stars in her eyes and hope in her heart. Simone's story is the story of a society in which no child was going to have to live in poverty: a land of milk and honey, which for some people turns sour and is filled with despair. The way it is? Not necessarily...

That's what war does for you – either kills you in one hit or destroys you slowly. One way or the other, it gets you ... unless you fight back ...

They are the enemy. And they're still out there. They're in your street, your home, the safest places you know. You feel their hot breath ... even in the depths of hell. Ellie and Homer are out there too. Lee and Fi and Kevin. They've forgotten what it means to be safe. Sometimes they feel like there's nowhere left for them. They may be right.

What's the biggest danger you can think of? This is bigger. What's the toughest challenge you can imagine? This is tougher. What's the greatest fear you have? You're about to find out. They came in summer. They fell upon the land swiftly and suddenly. Through autumn they spread, like locusts, like mice, like a plague. Now it's winter. They're still here. But so too are Ellie and Homer and their friends.

The town of Wirrawee is emerging from war, slowly. School's back in, Juicy's is open for coffee, farmers are bidding at the cattle sales. Ellie Linton at last gets what she longed for and what she fought for, to be back on the farm with her parents. But it's not the same. A new nation is on the other side of a new border. Suddenly the war is about to explode into Ellie's life again. The effects are devastating. The consequences will change her forever.

While Ellie and her friends are away in the bush, the world changes. Suddenly they are in the toughest situations humans can confront, facing life and death decisions. They are thrown into a world where they find courage, initiative, spirit and wisdom, or they die...

Georgie Jutland is a mess. At 40, with her career in ruins, she finds herself stranded in White Point with a fisherman she doesn't love and two kids whose dead mother she can never replace. Leached of all confidence, she spends her days in isolated tedium and her nights in a blur of vodka self-recrimination. One morning, in the boozy pre-dawn gloom, she sees, a shadow drifting up the beach below – a loner called Luther Fox, with danger in his wake.

In a dying country town lives Satchel O'Rye, a young man fighting the future; Chelsea Piper, a young woman fighting the past; and a long-lost creature that can teach them both the art of survival. Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf is a shimmering, ultimately joyful novel, a story of journeying towards courage and freedom, of finding the will to live a life beyond expectation.

Luna-C is madness for music, for performing. Luna-C is two friends, one dream, one man. It's an obsession and a gift, a sacrifice and a celebration. Luna-C is the story of a band, and the people in it.

When you're on your knees there's only one thing to do ... stand up again! Ellie and her friends have stared defeat in the face. They have felt its hot breath. They have been bashed and battered by it, brought to breaking point. Now it's time to hit back. Now it's time to come out fighting. Now they really are burning for revenge ...

Sarah and Ginny have been best friends since school. They both had their share of adolescent problems but now things are working out for Sarah. She's met Tom. He's handsome, a journalist and totally devoted to her. Her TV reporting career is taking off. She and Tom have moved into a stunning inner-city apartment. But Ginny has not been so lucky. She wanted Tom, but she didn't get him. She wants the ease and grace with which Sarah lives her life. She wants what Sarah has. She wants it all. ...