Archive | New Releases

Helene Cronin

This book celebrates the history of Buderim from its early days as a little village, starting with the original settlers to the “Near North Coast”, as the region was then known. It tells how Buderim developed and changed over time, providing dates, locations, events, and personal observations, particularly of its tramway and the role the tramway played in shaping the development of Buderim and district.

The book delves into the town’s rich history and is something the author hopes will preserve the legacy of the tramway, and Buderim, for generations to come.

“It’s 10 years of research and a culmination of photographs, historical documents and memoirs,” Ms Cronin says. “It started off as notes for me to learn more about the tramway and then turned into this.”

Roland Perry

The 1932-33 Ashes was the most notorious and polarising series in the history of cricket. The events of that turbulent summer centred around Don Bradman, the greatest batsman ever to play the game.

With him in their side, Australia appeared unbeatable. And yet England alleged they had found the one shortcoming in Bradman’s extraordinary technique. Their ruthless attempts to exploit that real or imagined vulnerability created an international crisis that threatened the very fabric of the Empire.

Using new material and his previous unparalleled access to Sir Donald Bradman, Roland Perry has written the definitive account of Bradman and the Bodyline series. Compelling, extensively researched and full of new insights, Bradman vs Bodyline takes us behind the scenes as first Arthur Carr then Douglas Jardine planned a ‘fast leg theory’ attack designed to potentially injure Australia’s unstoppable batsman, and the rest of the team, to allow England to retake the Ashes.

From Bodyline’s genesis in English county cricket to the key protagonists of Jardine, Harold Larwood and Bradman himself, Roland Perry has written the complete and captivating story of a sporting outrage that came closer to destroying the relationship between Australia and England than anything before or since.

Dan Liebke

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them by virtue of their skills with ball and bat. This book is about the latter.

Australia’s favourite sport has a proud history of turning nobodies into somebodies and ordinary men and women into heroes of international renown. From the black-and-white belligerence of Ian Chappell to the colourful celebrity of Shane Warne, the diplomacy of Adam Gilchrist to the ruthlessness of Meg Lanning, the pantheon of Australia’s greatest cricketers is as mottled as the crowds that cheer them on. But who is the greatest of them all?

In The 50 Greatest Australian Cricketers, sports journalist and comedy writer Dan Liebke relives the careers, characteristics and enduring legacies of the finest Australian cricket players of the past 50 years.

Cindy Solonec

This extraordinary and heartfelt story chronicles the lives of the Rodriguez family of Debesa Station in the West Kimberley; their livelihood through difficult times, love of family, place and culture, and the challenges of day-to-day living on a small sheep station amid huge pastoral properties.

Spanning four generations from the 1880s when the author’s maternal great-grandfather, Indian deckhand, Jimmy Casim, met and lived with Nigena woman, Lucy Muninga on Yeeda Station near Derby, Debesa centres on the unlikely partnership of Cindy’s parents: Frank Rodriguez, once a Benedictine novice monk from Spain, and Katie Fraser, who had been a novitiate in a very different sort of abbey – a convent for ‘black’ women at Beagle Bay Mission, 130 kilometres north of Broome.

Together, Frank and Katie Rodriguez established Debesa, where Cindy and her three siblings grew up with the rich cultural heritage of their Spanish, Nigena and English ancestors.

Debesa is a sweeping social history of one family’s struggles and triumphs set against the backdrop of the beauty of the West Kimberley.

Guy Hull

Dangerous predators and ravenous herbivores: the story of Australia’s feral nightmare. Isolation was once the impenetrable barrier that protected Australia and its unique fauna. But a little over two hundred years ago a foreign power took possession and brought with it the foreign animals that now dominate the country’s ecosystem. They are the enemy within.

Since that time, around 10 per cent of Australia’s endemic terrestrial mammalian species have become extinct. Today Australia is dealing with the damage caused by all hard-hoofed animals, domestic and feral.

Yet the bigger feral story is the ravages of acclimatisation, caused as new settlers tried to make the colony more like their homeland and released the rabbit, the fox, the hare, feral cats, common mynas, starlings, sparrows, redfin perch, and the many other invasive species that have brought native Australia to its knees.

In this book, Guy Hull details the history and toll of the numerous animal species that have contributed to the decimation of Australian species, their assault on land and agriculture, and the modern strategies that are – hopefully – reclaiming the country for our native fauna and its human population.

Garry Disher

Set in a beach-shack town an hour from Melbourne, The Way It Is Now tells the story of a burnt-out cop named Charlie Deravin. Charlie is living in his family’s holiday house, on forced leave since he made a mess of things at work.

Things have never been easy for Charlie. Twenty years earlier his mother went missing in the area, believed murdered. His father has always been the main suspect, though her body was never found.

Until now: the foundations are being dug for a new house on a vacant block. The skeletal remains of a child and an adult are found—and Charlie’s past comes crashing in on him.

The Way It Is Now is the enthralling new novel by Garry Disher, one of Australia’s most loved and celebrated crime writers.

Minette Walters

Dorset, 1642. England is on the cusp of civil war.
Jayne Swift, a daughter of the Dorset gentry, has resisted all offers of marriage and instead trained as a physician, using her skills to tend to her Royalist father’s tenants and the local population. When civil war sweeps England she vows to remain neutral and aid the injured whether they be Royalist or Parliamentarian.

William Harrier is first introduced to Jayne as footman to Lacy Alice, a Dorchester parliamentarian, but every time she encounters him, he seems to be in a different guise, and it’s not always clear which side of the war he’s fighting for.

As the battles continue to rage, bringing pain and suffering to both sides, Jayne never wavers in her vow of neutrality. Throughout it all, from the terrifying siege of Lyme Regis, to the execution of the King, she always seems to find herself drawn back to William. But what does she really know of him? His past is a mystery, and his future seems uncertain.

The Swift and the Harrier is a sweeping tale of adventure and loss, sacrifice and love with a unique and unforgettable heroine at its heart.

Jock Serong

Eliza Grayling, born in Sydney when the colony itself was still an infant, has lived there all her thirty-two years. Too tall, too stern—too old, now—for marriage, she looks out for her reclusive father, Joshua, and wonders about his past. There is a shadow there: an old enmity.

When Joshua Grayling is offered the chance for a reckoning with his nemesis, Eliza is horrified. It involves a sea voyage with an uncertain, probably violent, outcome. Insanity for an elderly blind man, let alone a drunkard.

Unable to dissuade her father from his mad fixation, Eliza begins to understand she may be forced to go with him. Then she sees the vessel they will be sailing on. And in that instant, the voyage of the Moonbird becomes Eliza’s mission too.

Irresistible prose, unforgettable characters and magnificent, epic storytelling: The Burning Island delivers everything readers have come to expect from Jock Serong. It may be his most moving, compelling novel yet.

Fiona McIntosh

Evie, a widow and stationmaster’s daughter, helplessly looks out for the weekly visit of the handsome man she and her sister call The Southerner on their train platform in the wilds of northern England. When polite salutations shift to friendly conversations, they become captivated by each other’s reticent manner. After so much sorrow, the childless Evie can’t believe love and the chance for her own family has come into her life again.

With rumours coming out of Germany that Hitler may be stirring up war again, local English authorities have warned against spies. Even Evie becomes suspicious of her new suitor, Roger. But all is not what it seems.

When Roger is arrested, Evie comes up with an audacious plan to prove his innocence that means moving to Germany and working as a British counter-spy. Wearing the disguise of dutiful, naïve wife, Evie must charm the Nazi Party’s dangerous officials to bring home hard evidence of war mongering on the Führer’s part.

But in this game of cat and mouse, it seems everyone has an ulterior motive, and Evie finds it impossible to know who to trust. With lives on the line, ultimate sacrifices will be made as she wrestles between her patriotism and saving the man she loves.

From the windswept moors of the Yorkshire dales to the noisy beer halls of Munich and grand country estates in the picture-book Bavarian mountains, this is a lively and high-stakes thriller that will keep you second-guessing until the very end.

Brian Freeman

Three years ago, Jason Bourne embarked on a mission in Estonia with his partner and lover, a fiery Treadstone agent codenamed Nova. Their job was to rescue a Russian double agent, recently been smuggled out of St. Petersburg in the midst of an FSB manhunt. They failed. Their charge died at the hands of a shadowy assassin.

Now, three years later, everything has changed. Nova is gone, killed in a mass shooting in Las Vegas. Bourne is a lone operative working in the shadows for Treadstone. He’s awaiting his next assignment when his handler bring him shocking news.

The Estonian mission was a set up. The double agent is still alive, deep in hiding from the Russian State Intelligence Agency. In order to find her, Bourne will have to come face to face with the errors of his past and the death of the woman he love. And with the body count rising. he comes to an invevitable conclusion:

Some secrets should stay buried.