Archive | New Releases

Martin Thomas
What really happened when Charles Mountford led a quarrelsome team of Australian and American scientists to explore traditional Aboriginal life in Arnhem Land in 1948. ‘Here was I with the status of little more than a telephone mechanic, taking out the biggest scientific expedition in history’.

In this way the legendary Charles Mountford immodestly described his biggest assignment: to lead an expedition of American and Australian scientists to Arnhem Land in northern Australia, investigating traditional Aboriginal life and the tropical environment. Backed by National Geographic, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Australian government, it was also a display of the friendship between Australia and the US.

But the adventure turned out to be anything but friendly. In this compelling account, award-winning historian Martin Thomas tells how they set out with fanfare in 1948 and how quickly the expedition turned toxic. Thomas uncovers the secrets, scandals, and unlikely achievements. He also reveals how Indigenous communities, including the elders known as ‘clever men’, dealt with the intrusion of these foreign ‘experts’.

Raynor Winn
Just days after Raynor learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years, is terminally ill, their home and livelihood is taken away. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall.

They have almost no money for food or shelter and must carry only the essentials for survival on their backs as they live wild in the ancient, weathered landscape of cliffs, sea and sky. Yet through every step, every encounter, and every test along the way, their walk becomes a remarkable journey.

The Salt Path is an honest and life-affirming true story of coming to terms with grief and the healing power of the natural world. Ultimately, it is a portrayal of home, and how it can be lost, rebuilt, and rediscovered in the most unexpected ways.

Joshua Gilbert
Yarning across history and into the future, Joshua Gilbert explores a new approach to Indigenous culture and farming, combining ancient knowledge and practices with new technology and insights.

Starting from his own Worimi Country, where his family history is captured in the journals of the Australian Agricultural Company – among the earliest written records of agricultural practice on this continent – Josh listens to yarns about the farming that has always been and continues to take place on that Country, which demonstrate that Indigenous culture is not static; it can account for and inform our approaches to land and climate even as they are changing.

As he contemplates these stories and histories, Josh seeks to provide a new understanding that Australians, as a nation of farmers and land managers, need to develop our agricultural system into one where Indigenous and Western knowledges converge. One where we acknowledge the realities of Australia’s farming heritage, both positive and negative, and find ways to feed our population while caring for Country and ensuring the livelihood of Australia’s farming towns.

He explores what it means to be an Aboriginal person today, what it means to be a farmer and even what it means to say you are Australian. Where these notions overlap, and how we might start to weave a common story that brings together all these ideas. So that we can create a truly Australian agricultural yarn – one that we all build together.

Stuart McBride
Don’t stoke the flames unless you want to get burned . . . It’s not going well for Aberdeen’s NE Division: half the force is off sick, all leave has been cancelled, someone has firebombed a hotel full of migrants and there’s a massive protest march happening this Saturday.

With officers dropping like flies, Detective Inspector Logan McRae has to kick off a major murder investigation with a skeleton staff of misfits, idiots and malingerers until the top brass can arrange back-up from other divisions.

But, as bad as everything seems, things are about to get much, much worse.

Natasha Solomons
The favored daughter of the Pharaoh, Egyptian Princess Cleopatra spent her childhood hiding amid the scrolls in the great library of Alexandria, dreaming of one day writing her own story. When her father dies, naming both Cleopatra and her selfish brother Ptolemy as his successors to the throne, danger arises. While the young Queen sails the Nile to greet her people, her brother plots to eliminate her and rule the empire alone.

But while Ptolemy has the power of the kingdom behind him, Cleopatra has her cunning wits. When the great Caesar arrives from Rome, she realizes he could be the key to her salvation—though courting this powerful man could cost her everything.

Can Cleopatra save her life, her throne, and her beloved Egypt and finally write her own history?

Michael Robotham
Philomena McCarthy has defied the odds to become a young officer with the Metropolitan Police because her father and her uncles are notorious London gangsters. On patrol one night, Philomena finds a barefoot child, covered in blood, who says she can’t wake her mother. Meanwhile, three miles away, a London jeweler has a bomb strapped to his chest in his ransacked store and millions are missing.

These two events collide and threaten Philomena’s career, her new marriage, and her life. In too deep, and falling further, Phil must decide who she can trust—her family or her colleagues—and on what side of the thin blue line she wants to live.

Jessica Dettmann
When Margot receives an email from her best friend it comes as a shock … seeing as Tess died twenty years ago. Margot is catapulted back to 2000, meeting the confident English backpacker visiting Sydney, where their intense friendship led to plans to travel back to Europe together. But then Margot fell in love with Johnny, and she never made it to London. Margot still feels guilty for letting Tess down.

Now Tess is providing Margot with the means to fly to London and have the trip they never got to do together. But there are stipulations to Tess’s beyond-the-grave generosity—Margot must scatter her ashes and carry out ‘tasks’ in the company of Leo, Tess’s stepbrother.

Margot can’t help but compare the dreams and aspirations of the girl who partied with Tess to the bored, exhausted woman she has become. How could Tess have predicted that Margot would need a second chance to get on that plane?

Andrea Mara
You press send and your message disappears. Full of secrets about your neighbors, it’s meant for your sister. But it doesn’t reach her – it goes to the entire local community WhatsApp group instead.

As rumor spreads like wildfire through the picture-perfect neighborhood, you convince yourself that people will move on, that this will quickly be forgotten. But then you receive the first death threat. The next day, a woman has been murdered. And what’s even more chilling is that she had the same address as you – 26 Oakpark – but in a different part of town. Did the killer get the wrong house? It won’t be long before you find out…

James Patterson
The three detectives make a formidable team, solving a series of seemingly impossible crimes which expose the dark underbelly of the city; from priceless art theft, a high-stakes kidnapping, and a decades-old unsolved murder, to a gruesome subterranean prison, and corruption and bribery at the highest levels of power.

But it’s not long before their headline-grabbing breakthroughs, unconventional methods – and untraceable pasts – attract the attention of the NYPD and the FBI.

After all, it’s no surprise that there’s a mystery or two to unravel in the city that never sleeps . . . not least, who really are Holmes, Marple and Poe?

Don Bently
Jack Ryan, Jr. is the one man who can prevent a second Korean War in the latest thrilling entry in the #1 New York Times bestselling series. When the leader of North Korea is catastrophically injured, his incapacitation inadvertently triggers a “dead-man’s switch,” activating an army of sleeper agents in South Korea and precipitating a struggle for succession.

Jack Ryan, Jr. is in Seoul to interview a potential addition to the Campus. But his benign trip takes a deadly turn when a wave of violence perpetrated by North Korean operatives grips South Korea’s capital. A mysterious voice from North Korea offers Jack a way to stop the peninsula’s rush to war, but her price may be more than he can afford to pay.