Archive | New Releases

Lisa Jewell
He’s the perfect man. It’s a perfect lie. Nina Swann is intrigued when she received a condolence card from Nick Radcliffe, an old friend of her late husband, who is looking to connect after her husband’s unexpected death. Nick is a man of substance and good taste. He has a smile that could melt the coldest heart and a knack for putting others at ease.

But to Nina’s adult daughter, Ash, Nick seems too slick, too polished, too good to be true. Without telling her mother, Ash begins digging into Nick’s past. What she finds is more than unsettling…

Martha is a florist living in a neighboring town with her infant daughter and her devoted husband, Alistair. But lately, Alistair has been traveling more and more frequently for work, disappearing for days at a time. When Martha questions him about his frequent absences, he always has a legitimate explanation, but Martha can’t share the feeling that something isn’t right.

Nina, Martha, and Ash are on a collision course with a shocking truth that is far darker than anyone could have imagined. And all three are about to wish they had heeded the same warning: Don’t let him in. But the past won’t stay buried forever.

Sinead Nolan
Count to ten. Only one of us comes home again.
1995, Ireland
Panic grips the village of Drumsuin when a teenage girl goes missing in the nearby forest.

Saoirse is not the first girl to disappear in those woods. And when it’s revealed she was playing the Counting Game that day – a ritual believed to ward off the forest’s evils – old superstitions send the community into turmoil.

One person saw what happened to Saoirse. But 9-year-old Jack won’t tell the Gardai. Freya, an English psychotherapist with her own history of grief, is brought in to help the investigators break his silence.

As the race to find Saoirse alive accelerates, can Freya make Jack talk? Why is he keeping the forest’s secrets? And who is hell bent on driving Freya out of Drumsuin before the truth is discovered?

Sam Guthrie
Political hatchet man Charlie will do anything to protect Sebastian, government minister and his best friend since their brutal private school days. Rising to power and prominence through international diplomatic postings and then the rough and tumble of Australian politics, they are as close as brothers – or so Charlie thinks – while both keep the secret that lies at the very heart of their relationship – a secret that in one way or another will change the world.

But then a single phrase in Mandarin is spoken in Sebastian’s ear and he does the unthinkable. As Charlie tries to piece it all together – from their youth spent in Hong Kong to the recent past in Beijing and Washington – things in the outside world start to fall apart too. Planes can’t land, the phone lines go down and the power is out. Then the secret intelligence services comes knocking. Charlie wonders, what the hell did Sebastian do?

Sadake Teiko Okuda
Sadako was living in Osaki-shimo, an island off the mainland of Japan, when the bomb hit Hiroshima on the 6th of August 1945. Even sixty kilometers from the city, it was clear something horrific had happened. There was a blinding flash and the window next to Sadako smashed, a shard of glass leaving a painful burn on her neck. Soon, news came that her niece and nephew who lived in Hiroshima were missing.

There was only one thing she could do – leave the relative safety of the island and set off into the city to find them.

In the seven long days that followed, Sadako roamed the ruins of the city, desperately hoping that she would catch sight of her family and in the meantime coming across dozens of other children who were alone, distraught and in pain. Carrying only water and a little medicine, she did her best to nurse the children and offer what care, compassion and tenderness she could in unimaginable circumstances. And in turn, they helped her to find hope in the very darkest of times.

Alison Weir
Step into the thrill and intrigue of Tudor England in the rich, compelling new novel from Sunday Times bestseller Alison Weir – and witness the rise and fall of Cardinal Wolsey. It begins with Thomas, the son of a Suffolk tradesman. A brilliant boy sent to study at Oxford at the tender age of eleven.

It ends with a disgraced Cardinal, cast from the King’s side and estranged from those he loves. In her groundbreaking new novel, Alison Weir draws out the inner man for the first time and tells his story. It is one of a scholar, a lover and a father, a rival, a politician and a priest. A man who built an empire in England while leading a secret second life, who paid the highest price for his success.

These many faces of Thomas Wolsey chart his incredible rise and tragic fall, and reveal a tale of power, passion and ambition. By turns riveting and surprising, this is Wolsey as you’ve never seen him before.

K.D. Aldyn
Three sisters. One killer. Which one is SHE? The Rowling sisters have always been people you can understand – with partners and children, homes and dreams. And secrets, the sisters have those too. But when Kate, the eldest, finally returns to buy her late grandfather’s home, the dark things each sister has kept buried soon rise to the surface.

Is Kate having unexplained visions tied to a past she can hardly recall? Is Aurora, the married mother of two, finally acting out in the face of her sisters’ indiscretions? Is Peggy, the youngest and a recovering addict, able to move on from the memories that haunt her?

And then there’s SHE.

SHE is one of them, but SHE is not like them at all. SHE is defined only by the carnage she lets the world see, the murders that have swept through their coastal community. And as the police close in on their newest serial killer, scrutiny lands on the Rowlings, forcing them to face their demons and reveal all they have kept hidden.

Angie Martin
A country town, a brutal murder, a shameful past, a reckoning to come… The injustices of the past and dangers of the present envelop Aboriginal policewoman Renee Taylor, when her unwilling return to the small outback town of her childhood plunges her into the investigation of a brutal murder.

Renee Taylor is planning to stay the minimum amount of time in her remote hometown – only as long as her mum needs her, then she is fleeing back to her real life in Brisbane.

Seconded to the town’s sleepy police station, Renee is pretty sure work will hold nothing more exciting than delivering speeding tickets. Then a murdered woman is found down by the creek on the outskirts of town.

Leading the investigation, Renee uncovers a perplexing connection to the disappearance of two young women thirty years earlier. As she delves deeper and the mystery unfurls, intergenerational cruelties, endemic racism, and deep corruption show themselves, even as dark and bitter truths about the town and its inhabitants’ past rise up and threaten to overwhelm the present…

Maggie Stiefvater
January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweetwater washing away all of high society’s troubles.

Local girl-turned-general manager June Porter Hudson has guided the Avallon skillfully through the first pangs of war. The Gilfoyles, the hotel’s aristocratic owners, have trained her well. But when the family heir makes a secret deal with the State Department to fill the hotel with captured Axis diplomats, June must persuade her staff—many of whom have sons and husbands heading to the front lines—to offer luxury to Nazis. With a smile.

Meanwhile FBI Agent Tucker Minnick, whose coal tattoo hints at an Appalachian past, presses his ears to the hotel’s walls, listening for the diplomats’ secrets. He has one of his own, which is how he knows that June’s balancing act can have dangerous consequences: the sweetwater beneath the hotel can threaten as well as heal.

June has never met a guest she couldn’t delight, but the diplomats are different. Without firing a single shot, they have brought the war directly to her. As clashing loyalties crack the Avallon’s polished veneer, June must calculate the true cost of luxury.

Alex North
Dan Garvie’s life has been haunted by the crime he witnessed as a child—narrowly escaping an encounter with a notorious serial killer. He has dedicated his life since to becoming a criminal profiler, eager to seek justice for innocent victims. So when his father passes away under suspicious circumstances, Dan revisits his small island community, determined to uncover the truth about his death. Is it possible that the monster he remembers from his childhood nightmares has returned after all these years?

With his signature shock and suspense, Alex North brings us The Man Made of Smoke. In turn emotional, introspective, and utterly terrifying, this is a story of fathers and sons, shadows and secrets, and the fight we all face to escape the trauma of the past.

Cheng Lei
Journalist Cheng Lei spent more than three gruelling years in a Beijing prison after being wrongly accused of espionage. Harrowing, fierce and often darkly humorous, her memoir is about the power of the human spirit; bravery in the face of cruelty and pettiness; the consolations of letters, music and books; and how unexpected friendships and the love of family can unlock the courage we all have within us to prevail.

In August 2020, Cheng Lei was the precise and polished anchor of China’s government-run, English-language Global Business TV show, familiar to millions of viewers. A veteran business journalist, the Chinese-born Australian mother of two young children was at the pinnacle of her career when eight words texted to a friend led to devastating consequences.

Arriving for work one morning, Lei was met by officers from the notorious Ministry of State Security. After searching her apartment, they blindfolded her and drove her to a secret location. Detained, isolated and interrogated, she was cut off from all contact with her family and friends. She simply disappeared from TV screens, her flat, her life.

Lei was eventually coerced into agreeing to a five-year prison term in a country she loved but no longer recognised. On the outside, her story triggered a desperate fight for her release, a diplomatic row and global news. On the inside, her own struggle for freedom and her sanity in the face of the inconceivable had just begun.

It would be ten months before Lei saw her lawyer, a year and a half before a 90-minute show trial, more than two years before she would briefly hear the voices of her children, and three years and two months before she saw the entirety of the sky again – after her release was secured and she made it home to Australia.