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 Dominic Smith

In the waning years of the nineteenth century there was a hunger for tribal artifacts, spawning collecting voyages from museums and collectors around the globe. In 1897, one such collector, a Chicago insurance magnate, sponsors an expedition into the South Seas to commemorate the completion of his company’s new skyscraper–the world’s tallest building. The ship is to bring back an array of Melanesian weaponry and handicrafts, but also several natives related by blood.
Caught up in this scheme are two orphans–Owen Graves, an itinerant trader from Chicago’s South Side who has recently proposed to the girl he must leave behind, and Argus Niu, a mission houseboy in the New Hebrides who longs to be reunited with his sister. At the cusp of the twentieth century, the expedition forces a collision course between the tribal and the civilized, between two young men plagued by their respective and haunting pasts.
An epic and ambitious story that brings to mind E. L. Doctorow, with echoes of Melville and Robert Louis Stevenson, Bright and Distant Shores is a wondrous achievement by a writer known for creating compelling fiction from the fabric of history.

 Ana Howard

In You’ll Be Sorry! Ann Howard honours grandmothers and mothers in a superb account of women’s participation in the Services during World War II, and their ensuing battle for equal opportunity that set the foundation for the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 70s.
You’ll Be Sorry! is an absorbing account of the experiences of women serving in the Australian Women’s Army Service, and other Services.
Ann Howard captures the resistance and prejudice 66,000 women experienced as they left home to join the Services in WWll.
Their stories range across Australia and are recounted with unflagging honesty. Howard presents a vivid account of women’s growing confidence as they were given responsible positions, only to find there was no place for them outside the home after peace was declared. They returned to find the men had taken the jobs. There was a social expectation that they should return to their homes, have babies and carry on as before and care for the often traumatised returning men. Many of their stories are horrendous.
This book is a result of previous material published in the 1990s, and still in great demand. Many of the wonderful women Howard interviewed are no longer with us, so these accounts are historically invaluable.

 Lilia Tarawa

In this personal account, Lilia Tarawa exposes the shocking secrets of the cult, with its rigid rules and oppressive control of women. She describes her fear when her family questioned Gloriavale’s beliefs and practices.

When her parents fled with their children, Lilia was forced to make a desperate choice: to stay or to leave. No matter what she chose, she would lose people she loved.

In the outside world, Lilia struggled. Would she be damned to hell for leaving? How would she learn to navigate this strange place called ‘the world’? And would she ever find out the truth about the criminal convictions against her grandfather?

 Clive Cussler

Hired to search for a collection of paintings worth half a billion dollars, Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon soon find themselves in much deeper waters. The vicious leader of a Filipino insurgency is not only using them to finance his attacks, he has stumbled upon one of the most lethal secrets of World War II: a Japanese-developed drug, designed, but never used, to turn soldiers into super-warriors. To stop him, the Oregon must not only take on the rebel commander, but a South African mercenary intent on getting his own hands on the drug, a massive swarm of torpedo drones targeting the U.S. Navy, an approaching megastorm–and, just possibly, a war that could envelop the entire Asian continent.

 Rodriguez. Oman

The ancient land of frankincense, wind-swept deserts, craggy mountaintops and turquoise seas. Into this magical nation come three remarkable women, each facing a crossroad in her life.
Rachel, an American war photographer, who is struggling to shed the trauma of her career. Now she is headed to Oman to cover quite a different story – for a glossy travel magazine.
Ariana Khan, a bubbly English woman who has rashly volunteered as Rachel’s ‘fixer’, a job she’s never heard of in a country she knows nothing about.
And Miza, a young woman living far from her beloved homeland of Zanzibar. As the second wife of Tariq, she remains a secret from his terrifying ‘other’ wife, Maryam. Until the day that Tariq fails to come home…
As the three women journey together across this extraordinary land, they quickly learn that, in Oman, things aren’t always what they appear to be…
The Zanzibar Wife is a bewitching story of clashing cultures and conflicting beliefs, of secrets and revelations, of mystery and magic, by the author of the beloved international bestseller The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul.

 Di Morrissey

In The Red Coast , Di Morrissey returns to the red earth of the Kimberley with a passionate story of resistance and resilience under its soaring blue skies.

After the upheaval which separated Jacqui Bouchard from her beloved son, she has finally settled in Broome, a magical remote town on the northwest coast of Australia.

But when a proposed mining development is unveiled, the town begins to tear itself apart. Rifts run deep, as friends, families and lovers are faced with a battle that could change their lives irrevocably.

As everyone takes sides, Jacqui confronts her own dilemma: to stay or leave? Who to trust . . . Who to love?

 Lee Child

Reacher takes a stroll through a small Wisconsin town and sees a class ring in a pawn shop window: West Point 2005. A tough year to graduate: Iraq, then Afghanistan. The ring is tiny, for a woman, and it has her initials engraved on the inside. Reacher wonders what unlucky circumstance made her give up something she earned over four hard years. He decides to find out. And find the woman. And return her ring. Why not?

So begins a harrowing journey that takes Reacher through the upper Midwest, from a lowlife bar on the sad side of small town to a dirt-blown crossroads in the middle of nowhere, encountering bikers, cops, crooks, muscle, and a missing persons PI who wears a suit and a tie in the Wyoming wilderness.

The deeper Reacher digs, and the more he learns, the more dangerous the terrain becomes. Turns out the ring was just a small link in a far darker chain. Powerful forces are guarding a vast criminal enterprise. Some lines should never be crossed. But then, neither should Reacher.

 Jeffery Archer

Nearly a decade after his last volume of short stories was published, Jeffrey Archer returns with his eagerly awaited collection of short stories, Tell Tale, giving us a fascinating, exciting and sometimes poignant insight into the people he has met, the stories he has come across and the countries he has visited during the past ten years.
Find out what happens to the hapless young detective from Naples who travels to an Italian hillside town to find out ‘Who Killed the Mayor?’ and the pretentious schoolboy in ‘The Road to Damascus’, whose discovery of the origins of his father’s wealth changes his life in the most profound way.
Revel in the stories of the woman who dares to challenge the men at her Ivy League university during the 1930s in ‘A Gentleman and a Scholar’, and another young woman who thumbs a lift and gets more than she bargained for in ‘A Wasted Hour’.
These wonderfully engaging and always refreshingly original tales prove not only why Archer has been compared to Dahl and Maugham, but why he was described by The Times as ‘probably the greatest storyteller of our age’.

 Michael Connelly

Harry Bosch searches for the truth in the new thriller from #1 NYT bestselling author Michael Connelly

Harry Bosch is back as a volunteer working cold cases for the San Fernando Police Department and is called out to a local drug store where a young pharmacist has been murdered. Bosch and the town’s 3-person detective squad sift through the clues, which lead into the dangerous, big business world of pill mills and prescription drug abuse.

Meanwhile, an old case from Bosch’s LAPD days comes back to haunt him when a long-imprisoned killer claims Harry framed him, and seems to have new evidence to prove it. Bosch left the LAPD on bad terms, so his former colleagues aren’t keen to protect his reputation. He must fend for himself in clearing his name and keeping a clever killer in prison.

The two unrelated cases wind around each other like strands of barbed wire. Along the way Bosch discovers that there are two kinds of truth: the kind that sets you free and the kind that leaves you buried in darkness.

 Fiona McIntosh

Dr Isla Fenwick has a life that most modern women of 1933 might envy – her career gives her status, her pedigree adds freedom, and her oldest crush, Jovian Mandeville, has reappeared in her life with a marriage proposal.

Her life is beginning to feel complete. However, she insists on keeping a private promise she made to her late mother to work at the coalface of medicine in India before committing to life as a dutiful wife. With Jove’s blessing, Isla sails to Calcutta to set up a new midwifery clinic. What she can’t anticipate is how India will test everything she relies upon within, challenging her professionalism and her loyalties.

But it is the fateful meeting of enigmatic Professor Saxon Vickery that will call into question what she trusts most about herself. When the pair travel into the foothills of the Himalaya for a stay on a tea plantation outside Darjeeling, Isla must make the most important choice of her life. And at the roof of the world – where heaven and earth collide – a price will be exacted for glimpsing heaven.

From England’s squally seaside town of Brighton to India’s slums of Calcutta and breathtaking Himalayan mountains, this is a heartbreaking story about the pursuit of passion by the bestselling author of The Chocolate Tin.