Sometimes you need to delve into the past, to make sense of the present.Alice had not expected to spend most of the twenty-first century writing about Leonard Woolf. When she stood on Morell Bridge watching fireworks explode from the rooftops of Melbourne at the start of a new millennium, she had only two thoughts. One was: the fireworks are better in Sydney. The other was: is Y2K going to be a thing? Y2K was not a thing. But there were worse disasters to come: Environmental collap...

Three women from very different backgrounds, bound by friendship, separated by destinyIt was impossible, but in full view of the church, the Governor and wedding guests ...The bride had vanished.Some girls are born to be loved, some are born to be useful.Some girls are born to be bad.Indulged and wealthy Kat Fitzhubert is seemingly 'sold off' in an arranged marriage in a colony across the world. Lady Viola Montefior...

GET OUT. BEFORE THEY SAVE YOU.Early 1800s. Thomasina Trelora is on her way to the colonies. Her fate: to be married to a clergyman she's never met. As the Australian coastline comes into view a storm wrecks the ship and leaves her lying on the rocks, near death. She's saved by an Aboriginal man who carries her to the door of a grand European house, Willowbrae.Tom is now free to be whoever she wants to be and a whole new life opens up to her. But as she's dr...

Robyn Ayres works as the camp caretaker on Finch Island, a former leper colony off the coast of Queensland. Her current clients are a group of ex-military men who run a tough-love program for troubled teens. The latest crop looks like the usual mix of bad boys and sad boys. Then Robyn takes a second look at a kid called Darren. Last time she saw him his name was Aaron, and Robyn was his primary school teacher. And she was somehow at the centre of a vicious small-town custody battle involvi...

Glen Walsh and Steven Alward were childhood friends in their tight-knit working-class community in Shortland, on the outskirts of Newcastle, New South Wales. Both proud altar boys at the local Catholic church, they went on to attend the city's Catholic boys' highs schools: Glen to Marist Brothers and Steven to St Pius X. Both did well: Steven became a journalist; Glen a priest. But when Glen discovered another priest was sexually abusing boys, he reported the offending to police, breaking ...

Lenny Spinx is the sister of a giant. Her little brother, Davey, has a rare form of gigantism that puzzles his doctors and astounds his friends, neighbours and teachers. Together, Lenny and Davey escape to a more wondrous reality by obsessing over the entries in their monthly installment of Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia set. They lose themselves in passages about abominable snowmen, jellyfish, peregrine falcons and quicksand. Lenny vows to become a beetle expert, while Davey deci...

Pip never wants to be at home nowadays. There’s no laughter anymore and her mum isn’t happy. She spends most of her time alone, daydreaming and digging for treasure by the dirty creek. But one night, Pip finds something incredible – a dragon. Tiny, possibly dying, but definitely a dragon. She quickly realises that dragons don’t come with instructions – what do you feed a dragon? Where could it have come from? And how can Pip cope with the enormous changes this creature will bring into her ...

**'Memoirs such as this will ensure we do not lose the struggle against "forgetting" - that sly accomplice of tyranny' Magda SzubanskiIn 1939, as Hitler's troops march on Prague, a Jewish couple makes a heartbreaking decision that will save their eight-year-old son's life but change their family forever.**Australian journalist Juliet Rieden grew up in England in the 1960s and 70s always sensing that her family was different in some way. She longed to have relatives...

'What we are suggesting is nothing,' the man mutters darkly, as I pass through the door and into the brightly lit hall. 'Nothing. Far worse can happen.' Far worse. I have a baby, two shillings, no reputation and nowhere to go, but even so I cannot imagine what far worse might be. Out of the Silence is the stunning tale of three women from very different worlds: Maggie Heffernan, a spirited working-class country girl; Elizabeth Hamilton, whose own disappointment in love has served only to s...

Kitty Hawke, the last inhabitant of a dying island sinking into the wind-lashed Chesapeake Bay, has resigned herself to annihilation... Until one night her granddaughter rows ashore in the midst of a storm, desperate, begging for sanctuary. For years, Kitty has kept to herself – with only the company of her wolfdog, Girl – unconcerned by the world outside, or perhaps avoiding its worst excesses. But blood cannot be turned away in times like these. And when trouble comes following her grand...

A continuation of the acclaimed novel Thunderhead, Fireweather follows Winona Dalloway as she struggles to come to terms with the unrecognizable world around her.It all began when they started running away . . .Life for Winona Dalloway is not as it should be. Her husband is no longer her husband, her children are not at home with her, and the city in which she lives is besieged by fires. Black ash falls like snow, songbirds screech like dinosaurs, and the doctors are callin...

A black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman’s struggle to be free.When Winona Dalloway begins her day — in the peaceful early hours before her children, that ‘tiny tornado of little hands and feet’, wake up — she doesn’t know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed.On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices — a mind both wild...