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Katherine Norbury

Part travelogue, part memoir, The Fish Ladder is a deeply moving story of an adoptee’s search for personal identity set against a backdrop of the finest British nature writing. Katharine Norbury was abandoned as a baby in a Liverpool convent. Raised by a loving adoptive family, she grew into a wanderer, drawn by the landscape of the British countryside.

One summer, following the miscarriage of a much-longed-for child, Katharine sets out—accompanied by her nine-year-old daughter, Evie—with the idea of following a river from the sea to its source. The luminously observed landscape grounds the walkers, providing both a constant and a context to their expeditions. But what begins as a diversion from grief evolves into a journey to the source of life itself: a life threatening illness forces Katharine to seek a genetic medical history, and this new and unexpected path delivers her to the door of the woman who abandoned her all those years ago.

Combining travelogue, memoir, exquisite nature writing, and fragments of poems with tales from Celtic mythology, The Fish Ladder has a rare emotional resonance. It is a portrait of motherhood, of a literary marriage, a hymn to the adoptive family, but perhaps most of all it is an exploration of the extraordinary majesty of the natural world. Imbued with a keen and joyful intelligence, this original and life-affirming book is set to become a classic of its genre.

Kate Howarth

The much-awaited sequel to The Age Non-fiction Book of the Year winner Ten Hail Marys. Following on from Ten Hail Marys, which chronicled her volatile upbringing and the fight to save her son from the forced adoption practices of the time, Kate Howarth’s extraordinary life continues in Settling Day.

Thrust out of her son’s life while he is still a toddler, teenaged Kate has to rely on her wits and courage to start life anew. Filled with remorse and an unwavering determination to be reunited with her son, so begins Kate’s journey as she fights injustice and prejudice to create a better life. She amasses a fortune helping to build one of Australia’s most successful recruitment companies, only to lose it all in a contentious legal battle. Kate once again manages to rebuild her life after a major injury, but is always haunted by her lost son.

Settling Day is a remarkable story of resilience that highlights the still prevalent injustices that many women face at work and at home. It took Kate Howarth more than 50 years to discover the true meaning and power of unconditional love.

Kate Betts

My Paris Dream is a charming and insightful memoir about coming of age as a fashion journalist in 1980s Paris, by former Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar editor Kate Betts, the author of Everyday Icon: Michelle Obama and the Power of Style.

“You can always come back,” my mother said. “Just go.”

As a young woman, Kate Betts nursed a dream of striking out on her own in a faraway place and becoming a glamorous foreign correspondent. After college—and not without trepidation—she took off for Paris, renting a room in the apartment of a young BCBG (bon chic, bon genre) family and throwing herself into the local culture. She was determined to master French slang, style, and savoir faire, and to find a job that would give her a reason to stay.

After a series of dues-paying jobs that seemed only to reinforce her outsider status, Kate’s hard work and willingness to take on any assignment paid off: Her writing and intrepid forays into la France Profonde—true France—caught the eye of John Fairchild, the mercurial fashion arbiter and publisher of Women’s Wear Daily, the industry’s bible. Kate’s earliest assignments—investigating the mineral water preferred by high society, chasing after a costumed band of wild boar hunters through the forests of Brittany—were a rough apprenticeship, but she was rewarded for her efforts and was initiated into the elite ranks of Mr. Fairchild’s trusted few who sat beside him in the front row and at private previews in the ateliers of the gods of French fashion. From a woozy yet mesmerizing Yves Saint Laurent and the mischievous and commanding Karl Lagerfeld to the riotous, brilliant young guns who were rewriting all the rules—Martin Margiela, Helmut Lang, John Galliano—Betts gives us a view of what it was like to be an American girl, learning about herself, falling in love, and finding her tribe.

Kate Betts’s captivating memoir brings to life the enchantment of France—from the nightclubs of 1980s Paris where she learned to dance Le Rock, to the lavender fields of Provence and the grand spectacle of the Cour Carrée—and magically re-creates that moment in life when a young woman discovers who she’s meant to be.

Liz Byrski

In the aftermath of the Battle of Britain, airmen filled a small Sussex town where pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe established revolutionary surgical and therapeutic treatments. For the child Liz Byrski, growing up in a small Sussex town, the burnt faces of these airmen filled her nightmares.In her late sixties, Liz returned to make peace with her memories and to speak not only with the survivors – known as the Guinea Pig Club – but with the nurses who played a vital and unorthodox role in their treatment, sometimes at a significant personal cost.

Kate Betts’s captivating memoir brings to life the enchantment of France—from the nightclubs of 1980s Paris where she learned to dance Le Rock, to the lavender fields of Provence and the grand spectacle of the Cour Carrée—and magically re-creates that moment in life when a young woman discovers who she’s meant to be.

Osamah Sami

Meet Osamah Sami: a schemer, a dreamer and a madcap antihero of spectacular proportions whose terrible life choices keep leading to cataclysmic consequences … despite his best laid plans to be a Good Muslim Boy.

By the age of thirteen, Osamah had survived the Iran–Iraq war, peddled fireworks and chewing gum on the Iranian black market, proposed ‘temporary marriage’ not once but three times, and received countless floggings from the Piety Police for trying to hold hands with girls in dark cinemas.

And the trouble didn’t stop when Osamah emigrated to Australia. As much as he tried to be a Good Muslim Boy – his father was the lead cleric in Melbourne, after all – life was short and there were beaches with girls in bikinis to skip school for, a medical degree to fake because the son of a cleric should become a doctor, and an arranged marriage to run away from because his heart belonged to someone else.

Good Muslim Boy is a hilarious and heartbreaking memoir of loss, love and family. It’s about what we’ll do to live up to expectations – and what we must do to live with ourselves.

Li Feng

Li Feng grew up in Mao’s communist China with her mother’s motto burning in her ears – success demands two things: unconditional sacrifice and absolute mental focus. Finally breaking free of her mother’s overbearing clutches and fleeing to Sydney as an adult, Li struggled to make sense of her own lost childhood by piecing together her family’s history.

What she found was a heartbreaking tale of love and loss that echoed across four generations of women – from Silver Dollar, who fought to regain her dignity and change her destiny after being sold into a loveless marriage at the age of 13; to Ming Xiu, who was forced to make a choice no mother should ever have to make following the execution of her husband; to Li’s mother Rong, who grew up as an outcast on the periphery of society but never gave up hope of a better life for herself and for her daughters.

Despite economic and political upheaval, these women battled to offer their children a better future through sheer determination in the face of unimaginable adversity. FORGED FROM SILVER DOLLAR is an inspiring true story about modern China, iron will and the strength of a mother’s love.

Mark Billingham

The astonishing thirteenth Tom Thorne novel is a story of kidnapping, the tabloid press, and a frightening case of mistaken identity.Tom Thorne is on holiday with his girlfriend DS Helen Weeks, when two girls are abducted in Helen’s home town. When a body is discovered and a man is arrested, Helen recognizes the suspect’s wife as an old school-friend and returns home for the first time in twenty-five years to lend her support.

As his partner faces up to a past she has tried desperately to forget and a media storm engulfs the town, Thorne becomes convinced that, despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt, the police have got the wrong man. There is still an extremely clever and killer on the loose and a missing girl who Thorne believes might still be alive.

Hannah Tunnicliffe

Francesca ‘Frankie’ Caputo has it all figured out. She’s finally going to marry the man she loves and then they will live happily ever after. But when a freak accident cuts her fiancé Alex’s life tragically short, all of Frankie’s future plans suddenly disintegrate.

Drowning in grief, Frankie flees from her overbearing Italian-American family, and escapes to an abandoned cabin owned by Alex’s parents in a remote part of Washington forest.

As her heart slowly begins to heal, Frankie discovers a freedom that’s both exhilarating and unsettling to everything she has always known for sure. So when her old life comes crashing back in, Frankie must decide: will she slip quietly back into her safe, former existence? Or will a stronger, wiser Frankie Caputo stand up and claim her new life?

Nelson DeMille

After a showdown with the notorious Yemeni terrorist known as The Panther, Corey has left the Anti-Terrorist Task Force and returned home to New York City taking a job with the Diplomatic Surveillance Group. Although Corey’s new assignment with the DSG-following Russian diplomats working at the U.N. Mission-is thought to be “a quiet end,” he’s happy to be out of the FBI. But Corey realizes something the U.S. government doesn’t: The all-too-real threat of a newly resurgent Russia.

Prescient and chilling. DeMille’s new novel takes us into the heart of a new Cold War with a clock-ticking plot that has Manhattan in its crosshairs.

Julian Leatherdale

Angie loved Mr Fox’s magnificent, absurd hotel. In fact, it was her one true great love. But … today Angie was so cross, so fed up with everybody and everything, she would probably cheer if a wave of fire swept over the cliff and engulfed the Palace and all its guests.

A sweltering summer’s day, January 1914: the charismatic and ruthless Adam Fox throws a lavish birthday party for his son and heir at his elegant clifftop hotel in the Blue Mountains. Everyone is invited except Angie, the girl from the cottage next door. The day will end in tragedy, a punishment for a family’s secrets and lies.

In 2013, Fox’s granddaughter Lisa, seeks the truth about the past. Who is this Angie her mother speaks of: ‘the girl who broke all our hearts’? Why do locals call Fox’s hotel the ‘palace of tears’? Behind the grandeur and glamour of its famous guests and glittering parties, Lisa discovers a hidden history of passion and revenge, loyalty and love.

A grand piano burns in the night, a seance promises death or forgiveness, a fire rages in a snowstorm, a painter’s final masterpiece inspires betrayal, a child is given away. With twist upon twist, this lush, strange mystery withholds its shocking truth to the very end.