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Karen Harrland –

Leaping into a nature conservation project in the Simpson Desert with your new husband is one thing; coping with the reality of 45-degree heat, drought and isolation in the face of an unplanned and difficult pregnancy is quite another. Fortunately, Karen Harrland survived to tell her tale and to reflect on both the beauties and the hardships of outback living in her book Spinifex Baby.

Karen and her husband Al Dermer were planning on building a house in the cold, lush green climate of Tasmania when an impulse decision on Karen’s part led them to accept a nature conservation position in central Australia. For most of their time on the station, they had only each other for company – even the postman only came out every couple of weeks – and when Karen fell pregnant unexpectedly, things took a turn for the worse. Through a difficult pregnancy and overwhelming post-natal depression, she learnt that the harsh environment was not the biggest challenge she had to face:

‘This desert with its rolling dune fields is an unforgiving land that relentlessly destroys even its own ancient beauty. It is a place where, compared to the age of the landscape, a single life means less than a grain of sand. I could not have known that the biggest challenge I would face would not be from the piercing sun, not from the unforgiving dust, not even from the aching loneliness of isolation, but from the treachery of my own self.’

Karen conjures up wonderfully evocative images of life in the desert, that sit beautifully alongside the minutiae of daily life as a new mother, including her battles to push a pram up a sand dune and coping with the realisation that the first solid food her baby ate was a massive blowfly.

Joanna Rakoff –

Poignant, keenly observed, and irresistibly funny: a memoir about literary New York in the late nineties, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing, where a young woman finds herself entangled with one of the last great figures of the century.

At twenty-three, after leaving graduate school to pursue her dreams of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff moves to New York City and takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. She spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office, where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and old-time agents doze at their desks after martini lunches. At night she goes home to the tiny, threadbare Williamsburg apartment she shares with her socialist boyfriend. Precariously balanced between glamour and poverty, surrounded by titanic personalities, and struggling to trust her own artistic instinct, Rakoff is tasked with answering Salinger’s voluminous fan mail. But as she reads the candid, heart-wrenching letters from his readers around the world, she finds herself unable to type out the agency’s decades-old form response. Instead, drawn inexorably into the emotional world of Salinger’s devotees, she abandons the template and begins writing back. Over the course of the year, she finds her own voice by acting as Salinger’s, on her own dangerous and liberating terms.

Rakoff paints a vibrant portrait of a bright, hungry young woman navigating a heady and longed-for world, trying to square romantic aspirations with burgeoning self-awareness, the idea of a life with life itself. Charming and deeply moving, filled with electrifying glimpses of an American literary icon, My Salinger Year is the coming-of-age story of a talented writer. Above all, it is a testament to the universal power of books to shape our lives and awaken our true selves.

Clive Small –

Milat – the serial killer who preyed on young hitchhikers. The backpackers – the innocent victims of a brutal murderer. Belanglo – a place that became synonymous with pure evil.

It was the biggest and most complex manhunt in Australian history, an investigation that gripped a nation. Behind the many false leads and dead ends, precious clues emerged that pointed to one man.
This is the story of how Ivan Milat was caught. Clive Small takes us inside the operation he led as his team painstakingly pieced together the evidence that put Milat behind bars. But questions remain. Did he act alone? Were there other victims? How much did his family know? And what of his great-nephew, who brutally killed a young man in 2010?

Chilling, forensic, compassionate – this is the definitive story that could only be told by someone at the centre of the police operation. It is also a powerful argument for the investigation of more than a hundred unsolved murders.

John Lever –

Adventurer, storyteller, traveller, John Lever has a dry, laconic wit and a life-long love of crocodiles. For almost half a century the crocodile has fascinated him; he counted, cajoled and courted them as a wildlife officer in the remote highlands of Papua New Guinea, before returning home to Australia to establish the first commercial crocodile farm in outback Queensland.

As the owner of Koorana Crocodile Farm, home to more than 3000 crocodiles, John knows almost everything there is to know about the Australian ‘Salty’. Kissed by a Croc is the story of a very big life lived among very big crocs.

This is the story of the original crocodile man.

Peter Grose-

They kept their heads down, they kept their mouths shut and they stuck together to offer sanctuary and shelter to over 3500 Jews in their small villages in the isolated upper reaches of the Loire. This is one of the great modern stories of unknown heroism and courage.

Nobody asked questions, nobody demanded money. Villagers lied, covered up, procrastinated and concealed, but most importantly they welcomed.

This is the story of an isolated community in the upper reaches of the Loire Valley that conspired to save the lives of 3500 Jews under the noses of the Germans and the soldiers of Vichy France. It is the story of a pacifist Protestant pastor who broke laws and defied orders to protect the lives of total strangers. It is the story of an eighteen-year-old Jewish boy from Nice who forged 5000 sets of false identity papers to save other Jews and French Resistance fighters from the Nazi concentration camps. And it is the story of a community of good men and women who offered sanctuary, kindness, solidarity and hospitality to people in desperate need, knowing full well the consequences to themselves.

Powerful and richly told, A Good Place to Hide speaks to the goodness and courage of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

Peter Stanley –

Australians remember the dead of 25 April 1915 on Anzac Day every year. But does anyone know the name of a single soldier who died that day? What do we really know about the men supposedly most cherished in the national memory of war? Peter Stanley goes looking for the lost boys of Anzac: the men of the very first wave to land at dawn on 25 April 1915 and who died on that day. There were exactly 101 of them: the first to volunteer, the first to go into action, and the first of the 60,000 Australians killed in that conflict.

Lost Boys of Anzac traces who these men were, where they came from, and why they came to volunteer for the AIF in 1914. It follows what happened to them in uniform and, using sources overlooked for nearly a century, uncovers where and how they died, on the ridges and gullies of Gallipoli—where most of them remain to this day. It shows how the lost boys were remembered by those who knew and loved them, and how they have since faded from memory.

John Connolly –

Prosperous, and the secret that it hides beneath its ruins . . .

The community of Prosperous, Maine has always thrived when others have suffered. Its inhabitants are wealthy, its children’s future secure. It shuns outsiders. It guards its own. And at the heart of the Prosperous lie the ruins of an ancient church, transported stone by stone from England centuries earlier by the founders of the town . . .

But the death of a homeless man and the disappearance of his daughter draw the haunted, lethal private investigator Charlie Parker to Prosperous. Parker is a dangerous man, driven by compassion, by rage, and by the desire for vengeance. In him the town and its protectors sense a threat graver than any they have faced in their long history, and in the comfortable, sheltered inhabitants of a small Maine town, Parker will encounter his most vicious opponents yet.

Charlie Parker has been marked to die so that Prosperous may survive.

Louisa Young –

The much-awaited sequel to the bestselling Richard and Judy bookclub pick, My Dear I Wanted to Tell You. London, April 1919. The war is over and Riley Purefoy and Nadine Waveney are free to start their married life. At only 23 it is all before them. But Riley’s physical damage from the war has left awkward tensions between him and Nadine – will the aftermath threaten to keep them at a distance from each other forever?

At Locke Hill, Peter and Julia Locke are facing their own trauma. With Peter living a reclusive life and drinking heavily to blot out the memories of war, can their marriage have a future? As each family must contend with the scars of the war, their lives become firmly intertwined. But after all those years of orders and terror and imminent death, can they ever truly move forward?

The highly anticipated sequel to the beautiful bestselling MY DEAR I WANTED TO TELL YOU sees the return of some much-loved characters and the devastating effects the war has had on them.

Wendy James –

From the bestselling author of The Mistake comes a hauntingly powerful story about families and secrets and the dark shadows cast by the past. Angie’s a looker. Or she’s going to be. She’s only fourteen, but already, heads turn wherever she goes. Male heads, mainly . . .

Jane worships her older cousin Angie. She spends her summer vying for Angie’s attention. Then Angie is murdered. Jane and her family are shattered. They withdraw into themselves, casting a veil of silence over Angie’s death.

Thirty years later, a journalist arrives with questions about the tragic event. Jane is relieved to finally talk about her adored cousin. And so is her family. But whose version of Angie’s story – whose version of Angie herself – is the real one? And can past wrongs ever be made right?

The shocking truth of Angie’s last days will force Jane to question everything she once believed. Because nothing – not the past or even the present – is as she once imagined.

Deborah Rodriguez –

From Kabul to a home by the Mexican sea … A life-affirming, sea-change memoir by the author of the international bestseller The Little Coffee Shop Of Kabul.

‘I hadn’t been planning on making Mexico my new home, but the little house on the sea was all that I had left…’ When her family faces kidnap threats after the publication of her first book, Deborah Rodriguez is forced to flee Kabul, leaving behind her friends, her possessions, the beauty school she helped found and her two beloved businesses: a beauty salon and a coffee shop. But life proves no easier ‘back home’.

After a year living on top of a mountain in the Napa Valley and teetering on the edge of sanity, Deborah makes a decision. One way or another she’s going to get the old Deb back. So, at the age of forty-nine, she packs her life and her cat Polly into her Mini Cooper and heads south to a pretty seaside town in Mexico.

Home is now an unassuming little house on Carnaval Street. There she struggles to learn Spanish, works out with strippers and spends her Sunday nights watching clowns. And maybe – just maybe – the magic of Mexico will finally give her what she’s always dreamed of: a life on her own terms . . .