Author Archive | admin

 Nicky Pellegrino

Kat has never wanted to live a small life. She’s an adventurer, a food writer who travels the world visiting far-flung places and eating unusual things. Now she is about to embark on her biggest adventure yet – a relationship.

She has fallen in love with an Italian man and is moving to live with him in Venice where she will help him run his small guest house, Hotel Gondola. Kat has lined up a book deal and will write about the first year of her new adventure, the food she eats, the recipes she collects, the people she meets, the man she doesn’t really know all that well but is going to make a life with.

But as Kat ought to know by now, the thing about adventures is that they never go exactly the way you expect them to…

 Robert Bryndza

Beneath the water the body sank rapidly. She would lie still and undisturbed for many years but above her on dry land, the nightmare was just beginning.

When Detective Erika Foster receives a tip-off that key evidence for a major narcotics case was stashed in a disused quarry on the outskirts of London, she orders for it to be searched. From the thick sludge the drugs are recovered, but so is the skeleton of a young child.

The remains are quickly identified as seven-year-old Jessica Collins. The missing girl who made headline news twenty-six years ago.

As Erika tries to piece together new evidence with the old, she must dig deeper and find out more about the fractured Collins family and the original detective, Amanda Baker. A woman plagued by her failure to find Jessica. Erika soon realises this is going to be one of the most complex and demanding cases she has ever taken on.

Is the suspect someone close to home? Someone is keeping secrets. Someone who doesn’t want this case solved. And they’ll do anything to stop Erika from finding the truth.

From the million-copy bestselling author of The Girl in the Ice and The Night Stalker, comes the third heart-stopping book in the Detective Erika Foster series.

 Lisa Genova

From neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice comes a powerful exploration of regret, forgiveness, freedom, and what it means to be alive.

An accomplished concert pianist, Richard received standing ovations from audiences all over the world in awe of his rare combination of emotional resonance and flawless technique. Every finger of his hands was a finely calibrated instrument, dancing across the keys and striking each note with exacting precision. That was eight months ago.

Richard now has ALS, and his entire right arm is paralyzed. His fingers are impotent, still, devoid of possibility. The loss of his hand feels like a death, a loss of true love, a divorce—his divorce.

He knows his left arm will go next.

Three years ago, Karina removed their framed wedding picture from the living room wall and hung a mirror there instead. But she still hasn’t moved on. Karina is paralyzed by excuses and fear, stuck in an unfulfilling life as a piano teacher, afraid to pursue the path she abandoned as a young woman, blaming Richard and their failed marriage for all of it.

When Richard becomes increasingly paralyzed and is no longer able to live on his own, Karina becomes his reluctant caretaker. As Richard’s muscles, voice, and breath fade, both he and Karina try to reconcile their past before it’s too late.

Poignant and powerful, Every Note Played is a masterful exploration of redemption and what it means to find peace inside of forgiveness.

  Clive Cussler

Everywhere, the waters are rising–and that is just the beginning of the world’s peril, unless the NUMA crew can beat the clock. The thrilling new NUMA Files novel from the #1 New York Times-bestselling grand master of adventure.

An alarming rise in the world’s sea levels–much larger than could be accounted for by glacier melt–sends Kurt Austin, Joe Zavala, and the rest of the NUMA scientific team rocketing around the globe in search of answers. What they find at the bottom of the East China Sea, however, is even worse than they imagined: a diabolical plan to upset the Pacific balance of power–and in the process displace as many as a billion people.

A rare alloy unlike anything else on earth, a pair of 500-year-old Japanese talismans, an assassin so violent even the Yakuza has disowned him, an audacious technological breakthrough that will become a very personal nightmare for Kurt Austin – from the shark-filled waters of Asia to the high-tech streets of Tokyo to a forbidden secret island, the NUMA team must risk everything to head off the coming catastrophe.

 Austin Galt

‘God made Colombia the most beautiful country in the world so he had to balance it by inhabiting it with the worst people in the world.’ Old Colombian Proverb

Australian writer Austin Galt arrived in Colombia looking for a life less ordinary. He found it – or did it find him? On Austin’s first day in the country he was hauled off a bus to look down the barrel of a gun as he was detained and questioned by the AK-47-toting Revolutionary Armed Forces. Welcome to Colombia!

In the days, months and years that followed, Austin travelled all over Colombia, tracing the Narcos’ trail and walking in the shadows of drug lords such as Pablo Escobar and the Cali Cartel. While meeting local gangsters and international coke traffickers, he attended underworld parties and was lured into the sex, drugs and danger-fuelled life of an underworld kingpin.

What he discovered in those crazy days and white nights shocked, scared and, ultimately, seduced him.

 Fiona Harari

When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he quickly began to realise his dream of a racially superior nation free of ‘inferior’ groups. His goal included the eradication of European Jewry, a plan that would ultimately claim six million lives. By 1945, almost two in three European Jews were dead. So were millions of other victims of Nazism.

For those who survived, liberation came with the enormous weight of guilt and memory as they began the second part of their lives, often in faraway places such as Australia, which would become home to one of the world’s highest per capita communities of Holocaust survivors.

Now the last of those adult survivors have reached an age once considered unattainable. They outlasted Nazism, and today, in their tenth and eleventh decades, have outlived most of their contemporaries. Eighteen of these Australians, originally from all over Europe, tell what it is like to have endured those years, and how they lived long after them.

 Andrew Lloyd Webber

A record of several exciting and turbulent decades of British and American musical theatre and the transformation of popular music itself, Unmasked is ultimately a chronicle of artistic creation. Lloyd Webber looks back at the development of some of his most famous works and illuminates his collaborations with luminaries such as Tim Rice, Robert Stigwood, Harold Prince, Cameron Mackintosh, and Trevor Nunn. Taking us behind the scenes of his productions, Lloyd Webber reveals fascinating details about each show, including the rich cast of characters involved with making them, and the creative and logistical challenges and artistic political battles that ensued.

Lloyd Webber shares his recollections of the works that have become cultural touchstones for generations of fans: writings songs for a school production that would become his first hit, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; finding the coterie of performers for his classic rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar; developing his first mega-hit, Evita, which would win seven Tonys Awards, including Best Musical; staking his reputation and fortune on the groundbreaking Cats; and making history with the dazzling The Phantom of the Opera.

Reflecting a life that included many passions (from architecture to Turkish Swimming Cats), full of witty and revealing anecdotes, and featuring cameo appearances by numerous celebrities-Elaine Paige, Sarah Brightman, David Frost, Julie Covington, Judi Dench, Richard Branson, A.R. Rahman, Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone, Richard Rodgers, Norman Jewison, Milos Forman, Plácido Domingo, Barbra Streisand, Michael Crawford, Gillian Lynne, Betty Buckley, and more-Unmasked at last reveals the true face of the extraordinary man beneath the storied legend.

 Hung Le

On the last day of the Vietnam War, nine-year-old Hung jumped on a leaking prawn trawler on the Saigon River, somehow cheating death to become one of the first Vietnamese boat people to arrive Australia, a land where a young man’s potential is limited only by his imagination – that is unless you’re Hung Le.

Defying the stereotype, Hung wasn’t a math or computer whizz, he had no doctoring or lawyering abilities, spoke Vietnamese with an Australian accent, and couldn’t even play the violin. But what he was blessed with was funny bones, and through winning Red Faces on Hey Hey It’s Saturday he managed to make an international career playing the violin out of tune.

The Crappiest Refugee is an hilarious and endearing memoir about a boat person who never found his land legs, but who has always seen the funny side.

 Eddie Ayres

From the former ABC Classic FM classicist comes a remarkable story about the power of music and courage to be one’s self

Eddie Ayres has a lifetime of musical experience – from learning the viola as a child in England and playing with the Hong Kong Philharmonic for many years, to learning the cello in his thirties and landing in Australia to present an extremely successful ABC Classic FM morning radio show. But all of this time Eddie was Emma Ayres.

In 2014 Emma was spiralling into a deep depression, driven by anguish about her gender. She quit the radio, travelled, and decided on a surprising path to salvation – teaching music in a war zone. Emma applied for a position at Dr Sarmast’s renowned Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Kabul, teaching cello to orphans and street kids.

In Danger Music, Eddie takes us through the bombing and chaos of Kabul, into the lives of the Afghan children who are transported by Bach, Abba, Beethoven and their own exhilarating Afghan music. Alongside these epic experiences, Emma determines to take the final steps to secure her own peace; she becomes the man always there inside – Eddie.

 Tim Winton

For years Jaxie Clackton has dreaded going home. His beloved mum is dead, and he wishes his dad was too, until one terrible moment leaves his life stripped to nothing. No one ever told Jaxie Clackton to be careful what he wishes for.

And so Jaxie runs. There’s just one person in the world who understands him, but to reach her he’ll have to cross the vast saltlands of Western Australia. It is a place that harbours criminals and threatens to kill those who haven’t reckoned with its hot, waterless vastness. This is a journey only a dreamer – or a fugitive – would attempt.

Fierce and lyrical, The Shepherd’s Hut is a story of survival, solitude and unlikely friendship. Most of all it is about what it takes to keep hope alive in a parched and brutal world.

. Tim Winton. For years Jaxie Clackton has dreaded going home. His beloved mum is dead, and he wishes his dad was too, until one terrible moment leaves his life stripped to nothing. No one ever told Jaxie Clackton to be careful what he wishes for.

And so Jaxie runs. There’s just one person in the world who understands him, but to reach her he’ll have to cross the vast saltlands of Western Australia. It is a place that harbours criminals and threatens to kill those who haven’t reckoned with its hot, waterless vastness. This is a journey only a dreamer – or a fugitive – would attempt.

Fierce and lyrical, The Shepherd’s Hut is a story of survival, solitude and unlikely friendship. Most of all it is about what it takes to keep hope alive in a parched and brutal world.