Author Archive | admin

 Roxane Dhand

A distant land. A dangerous husband. A forbidden love.

The year is 1912. Nineteen-year-old Maisie Porter watches from the deck as England fades from view. Her destination is Buccaneer Bay in Australia’s far north-west. Her fate: marriage to distant cousin Maitland Sinclair, a man she has never met.

When Maisie arrives in her new home, she finds a stifling small town bound by Victorian morals. Shocked at her new husband’s callous behaviour towards her, she is increasingly drawn to the intriguing William Cooper, a British diver she met on board ship. It soon becomes clear that secrets surround her husband, as turbulent as the waters that crash against the bay. Secrets that somehow link to her own family – and secrets that put Cooper and his fellow British divers in great danger…

From the drawing rooms of London to the latticed verandas and gambling dens of Buccaneer Bay, The Pearler’s Wife is a sweeping, epic read, inspired by a lost moment in history.

 Ruth Rendell

New and uncollected tales of murder, mischief, magic and madness.

Ruth Rendell was an acknowledged master of psychological suspense: these are ten (and a quarter) of her most chillingly compelling short stories, collected here together for the first time.

In these tales, a businessman boasts about cheating on his wife, only to find the tables turned. A beautiful country rectory reverberates to the echo of a historical murder. A compulsive liar acts on impulse, only to be lead inexorably to disaster. And a wealthy man finds there is more to his wife’s kidnapping than meets the eye.

Atmospheric, gripping and never predictable, this is Ruth Rendell at her inimitable best.

The stories are: Never Sleep in a Bed Facing a Mirror; A Spot of Folly; The Price of Joy; The Irony of Hate; Digby’s Wives; The Haunting of Shawley Rectory; A Drop Too Much; The Thief; The Long Corridor of Time; In the Time of his Prosperity; and Trebuchet.

 Fiona McCallum

Does one simple act of kindness have the power to completely turn someone’s life around?

It’s been a year since Hannah Ainsley lost her husband and parents – her whole family – in a car crash on Christmas morning. Despite her overwhelming loss, she’s worked hard to pull the pieces of her life together with the help of a group of dear, loyal friends. But while Hannah is beginning to become excited about the future again, she’s concerned that her best friend and talented artist Sam is facing a crisis of her own. It’s now Hannah’s turn to be Sam’s rock – can she save Sam’s dreams from unravelling?

When Hannah returns to work after her holidays, she can’t settle. She’s loved her job for a decade, and it’s been her lifeline during her grief. But something’s changed. She’s changed. And for all this time she’s avoided knowing the details of the accident or investigation – what would be the point, she’d thought, when nothing will bring her loved ones back? But after a chance meeting, it’s all there in front of her – and, like ripples in a pond, it extends beyond her own experiences. Could knowing be the key to her recovery? Could her involvement be the key to someone else’s?

From Australia’s master storyteller comes an uplifting story of new and old friendships, letting go of the past and looking to the future…

 Clair Macintosh

The police say it was suicide.
Anna says it was murder.
They’re both wrong.

One year ago, Caroline Johnson chose to end her life brutally: a shocking suicide planned to match that of her husband just months before. Their daughter, Anna, has struggled to come to terms with their loss ever since.

Now with a young baby of her own, Anna misses her mother more than ever and starts to question her parents’ deaths. But by digging up their past, she’ll put her future in danger. Sometimes it’s safer to let things lie…

 Amanda McClelland

In 2015, Amanda McClelland was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal, in recognition of an extraordinary career dedicated to making a difference. As a nurse and a humanitarian aid worker she has battled against extreme poverty, disease epidemics and natural disasters, helping to rebuild broken lives and strengthen communities across the globe.

From nursing in remote Indigenous communities in Australia’s Top End to re-building villages after the devastating Boxing Day Tsunami in Aceh, from fighting famine in Sub Saharan Africa to facing kidnapping on the war-torn streets of Mogadishu, from battling cyclone damage in PNG to heading up the Red Cross’s West African Ebola response, Amanda has faced huge challenges and collected incredible stories along the way.

Emergencies Only is not a compendium of tragedy, but an eye-opening life-lesson in practicality, compassion and good humour, written with empathy and an eye for detail, and filled with the human stories that lie behind the headlines.

Robert Muchamore

Britain, 1941. The government is building a secret army of intelligence agents to work undercover, gathering information and planning sabotage operations. Henderson’s boys are part of that network: kids cut adrift by the war, training for the fight of their lives. They’ll have to parachute into unknown territory, travel cross-country and outsmart a bunch of adults in a daredevil exercise.
In wartime Britain, anything goes.

 Andrew Morton

“You have no idea how hard it is to live out a great romance.” -Wallis Simpson
Before she became known as the woman who enticed a king from his throne and birthright, Bessie Wallis Warfield was a prudish and particular girl from Baltimore. At turns imaginative, ambitious, and spoiled, Wallis’s first words as recalled by her family were “me, me.” From that young age, she was in want of nothing but stability, status, and social acceptance as she fought to climb the social ladder and take her place in London society. As irony would have it, she would gain the love and devotion of a king, but only at the cost of his throne and her reputation.
In WALLIS IN LOVE, acclaimed biographer Andrew Morton offers a fresh portrait of Wallis Simpson in all her vibrancy and brazenness as she transformed from a hard-nosed gold-digger to charming chatelaine. Using diary entries, letters, and other never-before-seen records, Morton takes us through Wallis’s romantic adventures in Washington, China, and her entrance into the strange wonderland that is London society. During her journey, we meet an extraordinary array of characters, many of whom smoothed the way for her dalliance with the king of England, Edward VIII.
WALLIS IN LOVE goes beyond Wallis’s infamous persona and reveals a complex, domineering woman striving to determine her own fate and grapple with matters of the heart.

 Michael Pembroke

This is an absorbing account of one of the world’s most important trouble spots, Korea – its ancient past, troubled history and the current tragedy.
The Korean war became the first of America’s failed modern wars. It marked the true beginning of the American century – opening the door to ever-increasing military expenditure; launching the long era of American global force expansion; and creating the festering and unresolved geopolitical sore of North Korea.
As Alistair Horne once observed so wisely, ‘How different world history would have been if MacArthur had had the good sense to stop on the 38th parallel’.

 Nicola Tallis

“Good people, I am come hither to die, and by a law I am condemned to the same.” These were the heartbreaking words of a seventeen-year-old girl, Lady Jane Grey, as she stood on the scaffold awaiting death on a cold February morning in 1554. Minutes later her head was struck from her body with a single stroke of a heavy axe. Her death for high treason sent shockwaves through the Tudor world, and served as a gruesome reminder to all who aspired to a crown that the axe could fall at any time.

Jane is known to history as “the Nine Days Queen,” but her reign lasted, in fact, for thirteen days. The human and emotional aspects of her story have often been ignored, although she is remembered as one of the Tudor Era’s most tragic victims. While this is doubtlessly true, it is only part of the complex jigsaw of Jane’s story. She was a remarkable individual with a charismatic personality who earned the admiration and affection of many of those who knew her. All were impressed by her wit, passion, intelligence, and determined spirit. Furthermore, the recent trend of trying to highlight her achievements and her religious faith has, in fact, further obscured the real Jane, a young religious radical who saw herself as an advocate of the reformed faith—Protestantism—and ultimately became a martyr for it.

 Jamelle Wells

From true crime to petty crime – this is the memoir of one of Australia’s most experienced court reporters. As a seasoned court reporter, the ABC’s Jamelle Wells has filed thousands of stories on murderers, sex offenders, thieves, bad drivers, family feuds and business deals gone wrong. In more than 10 years, Jamelle has witnessed many of Australia’s most notorious and high-profile court cases. In the line of duty, she has sat next to criminals and their families, been chased, spat on, stalked and carted off by ambulance for emergency surgery after an accident outside ICAC. Every day in courts across Australia the evidence, facts and theories are played out in a kind of theatre, with their own characters, costumes and traditions. But ever-present is the human tragedy of ordinary people’s lives disrupted, destroyed and forever altered. The judges, the lawyers and barristers, the witnesses and the victims – all striving to play their part in the quest for fairness, justice and always, the truth of what really happened. From the calculated and cruel, to the unfair and unlucky, from pure evil to plain stupid – Jamelle Wells has seen it all. The Court Reporter is a tough and fearless journalist’s memoir that looks at the cases that have shocked, moved and never left us.