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The uncaged sky

Kylie Moore-Gilbert
The extraordinary true story of Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s fight to survive 804 days imprisoned in Iran. On September 12, 2018 British-Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert was arrested at Tehran Airport by Iran’s feared Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Convicted of espionage in a shadowy trial presided over by Iran’s most notorious judge, Dr Moore-Gilbert was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Incarcerated in Tehran’s Evin and Qarchak prisons for 804 days, this is the full and gripping account of her harrowing ordeal. Held in a filthy solitary confinement cell for months, and subjected to relentless interrogation, Kylie was pushed to the limits of her endurance by extreme physical and psychological deprivation.

Kylie’s only lifeline was the covert friendships she made with other prisoners inside the Revolutionary Guards’ maximum-security compound where she had been ‘disappeared’, communicating in great danger through the air vents between cells, and by hiding secret letters in hava khori, the narrow outdoor balcony where she was led, blindfolded, for a solitary hour each day.

Cut off from the outside world, Kylie realised she alone had the power to change the dynamics of her incarceration. To survive, she began to fight back, adopting a strategy of resistance with her captors. Multiple hunger strikes, letters smuggled to the media, co-ordinated protests with other prisoners and a daring escape attempt led to her transfer to the isolated desert prison, Qarchak, to live among convicted criminals. On November 25, 2020, after more than two years of struggle, Kylie was finally released in a high stakes three-nation prisoner swap deal orchestrated by the Australian government, laying bare the complex game of global politics in which she had become a valuable pawn.

Written with extraordinary insight and vivid immediacy, The Uncaged Sky is Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s remarkable story of courage and resilience, and a powerful meditation on hope, solidarity and what it means to be free.

An awesome ride

Cameron Miller
‘Hi guys. I have some bad news I want to tell you all.’ So said seventeen-year-old Shaun Miller on YouTube in May 2012, shortly after receiving a devastating diagnosis about his heart condition. The clip has now been viewed millions of times. In 1994, when Cameron Miller found out he was going to be a father, he hoped his boy would have an easier childhood than he’d had. Cameron had been in and out of hospital with chronic asthma and been relentlessly bullied. As it turned out, that had been the easy part. Life was about to get a lot tougher.

Before he was two weeks old, Cameron’s son, Shaun, had his first operation. Suffering from Congenital Heart Disease (CHD), he had his second heart transplant when he was thirteen. Ultimately, he endured about 1000 medical procedures.

Through it all, Shaun maintained an incredibly positive outlook, inspiring children and adults alike. In his final days, he fulfilled his dream of making a cameo appearance on Neighbours and appeared on the AFL Footy Show, exchanging banter with his heroes. Tragically, Shaun passed away only a few weeks after he’d posted his video, and his father struggled to cope. Suffering from crippling grief, Cameron attempted suicide and spent time in a psychiatric institution.

An Awesome Ride, however, is a story of hope. Only after reaching rock bottom did he come to understand Shaun’s message. Today, with the establishment of the Shaun Miller Foundation, Cameron is a warrior for all children with CHD and their families, just as he had been for his son.

Through his father, and through this book, Shaun’s unbreakable spirit lives on.

Diplomatic: a Washington memoir

Joe Hockey
In September 2015, Joe Hockey’s promising political career was brought to a dramatic end when Malcolm Turnbull successfully challenged Prime Minister Tony Abbott for the Liberal leadership. After felling the Abbott/Hockey government, Turnbull informed Hockey that he would no longer be treasurer of Australia – a deal had been struck with Scott Morrison. Instead, Turnbull offered Hockey a new role: Australia’s Ambassador to the United States.

Traversing the worlds of politics, business and diplomacy, Joe Hockey’s Diplomatic is an insightful, honest and at times hilarious insider’s memoir recounting the former treasurer’s unique diplomatic style. It chronicles the evolution, depth and complexity of the US–Australian relationship, from the final year of the Obama administration, the triumph and chaos of the Trump presidency and then on to the two nations’ shared future under President Joe Biden and beyond.

Based in Washington, DC, Ambassador Hockey immediately found himself in the middle of the historic 2016 presidential campaign between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Despite strong objections from his own government, Hockey reached out to the Trump campaign early on. Betting on the electoral appeal of the brash, anti-establishment candidate, Hockey secured priceless early diplomatic contacts within the Trump campaign and then his administration.

Anchored by Hockey’s direct interaction with Trump’s dysfunctional White House, Diplomatic reveals for the first time the aftermath of the leaked phone call between the US president and Prime Minister Turnbull. Hockey recalls his personal dealings with Trump on the golf course and the cavalcade of characters who came in and out of Trump’s Oval Office, including Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller and Mick Mulvaney.

Donald Trump’s unconventional presidency turned politics and diplomatic relations in Washington, DC on its head. When Joe Hockey found himself an unlikely diplomat in this new world order, his unorthodox dealmaking instincts placed him in the hot seat at precisely the right moment in history.

The distant echo

Val McDermid
It was a winter morning in 1978, that the body of a young barmaid was discovered in the snow banks of a Scottish cemetery. The only suspects in her brutal murder were the four young men who found her: Alex Gilbey and his three best friends. With no evidence but her blood on their hands, no one was ever charged.

Twenty five years later, the Cold Case file on Rosie Duff has been reopened. For Alex and his friends, the investigation has also opened old wounds, haunting memories-and new fears. For a stranger has emerged from the shadows with his own ideas about justice. And revenge.

When two of Alex’s friends die under suspicious circumstances, Alex knows that he and his innocent family are the next targets. And there’s only way to save them: return to the cold-blooded past and uncover the startling truth about the murder. For there lies the identity of an avenging killer..

Lazarus

Lars Kepler
Sometimes the past won’t stay buried. All across Europe, the most ruthless criminals are suffering gruesome deaths. At first, it seems coincidental that their underworld affiliations are finally catching up to them. But when two of the victims are found to have disturbing connections to Detective Joona Linna, it becomes clear that there’s a single killer at work. Still, police are reluctant to launch an investigation. If a mysterious vigilante is making their jobs easier, why stand in his way? Joona, however, is convinced this is no would-be hero. These deaths serve a much darker purpose.

Desperate for help, Joona turns to Saga Bauer. If his hunch is correct, she’s one of the few people who stands a chance at bringing this criminal mastermind down. But Saga is fighting her own demons–and the killer knows just how to use them to his advantage. He continues to strike with impunity, and no one, it seems, is safe. When the killer begins targeting those closest to Saga and Joona, it appears more and more likely that Joona has been right all along, and that tracking down the person responsible will force him to confront a ghost from his past . . . the most terrifying villain he’s ever had to face.

You are dead

Peter James
The last words Jamie Ball hears from his fiancée, Logan Somerville, are in a terrified mobile phone call. She has just driven into the underground car park beneath the block of flats where they live in Brighton. Then she screams and the phone goes dead. The police are on the scene within minutes, but Logan has vanished, leaving behind her neatly parked car and mobile phone.

That same afternoon, workmen digging up a park in another part of the city, unearth the remains of a woman in her early twenties, who has been dead for thirty years. At first, to Detective Superintendent Roy Grace and his team, these two events seem totally unconnected. But then another young woman in Brighton goes missing – and yet another body from the past surfaces.

Meanwhile, an eminent London psychiatrist meets with a man who claims to know information about Logan. And Roy Grace has the chilling realization that this information holds the key to both the past and present crimes . . . Does Brighton have its first serial killer in over eighty years?

Dead tomorrow

Peter James
The body of a teenager dredged from the seabed off the coast of Sussex is found to be missing its vital organs. Soon two more young bodies are found.

Caitlin Beckett, a fifteen-year-old in Brighton, will die if she does not receive an urgent liver transplant. When the health system threatens to let her down, Lynn, her mother, turns in panic to the internet and discovers a broker who can provide her with a black-market organ – but at a price.

As Superintendent Roy Grace investigates the recovered bodies, he unearths the trail of a gang of child traffickers operating from Eastern Europe. Soon Grace and his team will find themselves in a race against time to save the life of a young street kid, while a desperate mother will stop at nothing to save her daughter’s life…

Walking on trampolines

Frances Whiting
From the day Annabelle Andrews sashays into her classroom, Tallulah ‘Lulu’ de Longland is bewitched by Annabelle, by her family, and their sprawling, crumbling house tumbling down to the river.

Their unlikely friendship intensifies through a secret language where they share confidences about their unusual mothers, first loves, and growing up in the small, coastal town of Juniper Bay. Their lives become as entwined as Annabelle’s initials engraved beneath the de Longland kitchen table.

But the euphoria of youth rarely lasts, and the implosion that destroys their friendship leaves lasting scars and a legacy of self-doubt that haunts Lulu into adulthood.

Years later, Lulu is presented with a choice: remain the perpetual good girl who misses out, or finally step out from the shadows and do something extraordinary. And possibly unforgiveable.

In the time of the Manaroans

Miro Bilbrough
At fourteen Miro Bilbrough falls out with the communist grandmother who has raised her since she was seven, and is sent to live with her father and his rural-hippy friends. It is 1978, Canvastown, New Zealand, and the Floodhouse is a dwelling of pre-industrial gifts and deficiencies set on the banks of the Wakamarina River, which routinely invades its rooms.

Isolated in rural poverty, the lives of Miro and her father and sister are radically enhanced by the Manaroans—charismatic hippies who use their house as a crash pad on journeys to and from a commune in a remote corner of the Marlborough Sounds. Arriving by power of thumb, horseback and hooped canvas caravan, John of Saratoga, Eddie Fox, Jewels and company set about rearranging the lives and consciousness of the blasted family unit.

In the Time of the Manaroans brilliantly captures a largely unwritten historical culture, the Antipodean incarnation of the Back to the Land movement. Contrarian, idealistic, sexually opportunistic and self-mythologising too, this was a movement, as the narrator duly discovers, not conceived with adolescents in mind.

Searching for Charlotte

Kate Forsyth
For almost 140 years, the author of Australia’s first book for children was a mystery. Known only by the description ‘a Lady Long Resident in New South Wales’, she was the subject of much speculation. It was not until 1980, after a decade of sleuthing, that legendary bibliographer Marcie Muir gave her a name: Charlotte Waring Atkinson. And not only a name, but an extensive creative family history, connecting her to two of the nation’s celebrated contemporary children’s writers, Kate Forsyth and Belinda Murrell.

To Forsyth and Murrell, Atkinson (also known as Barton) is great-great-great-great grandmother and the subject of the stories they grew up on—part of a thread of creative women that runs through the history of their family. Hers is one of the great lost stories of Australian history: a tale of love, grief, violence and triumph in the face of overwhelming odds.

After spending half her life educating the children of the well-to-do in England, in 1826, at 30 years of age, Charlotte Waring accepted a job on the other side of the world. She was to teach the children of Maria Macarthur, daughter of former New South Wales governor Philip Gidley King. But on the voyage, love diverted her to a different future: marriage to the eligible James Atkinson meant she spent just seven short months with her charges. What followed were years of hardship in the New South Wales bush, including the death of Atkinson and her subsequent marriage to an abusive drunk, a brutal attack by bushrangers, penury and the threat of having her children taken away.

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