Archive | New Releases

Kerry McGinnis –

Kelly Roberts finds refuge in the rugged and remote cattle country of northern Australia, but when tragedy strikes she is forced to find a new life for herself and her children outside of Rainsford Station. She retreats to the family’s only asset – a freehold block of land owned jointly by her eccentric father-in-law, Quinn.

In the valley at Evergreen Springs, Quinn hopes the fractured family might all come together to start over again. Life in Queensland’s far north is wildly unpredictable, with daily challenges and the wet season, in all its wild majesty, to survive. But when twelve-year-old Rob makes the gruesome discovery of a dead body in the valley, real peril comes far too close to home.

Tracking North is a beautiful family story about life in the stunning Gulf Country, one of the world’s most unique and fascinating places.

Josephine Moon –

Kate Fullerton, talented tea designer and now co-owner of The Tea Chest, could never have imagined that she’d be flying from Brisbane to London, risking her young family’s future, to save the business she loves from the woman who wants to shut it down. Meanwhile, Leila Morton has just lost her job; and if Elizabeth Clancy had known today was the day she would appear on the nightly news, she might at least have put on some clothes. Both need to start again.

When Kate’s, Leila’s and Elizabeth’s paths unexpectedly cross, they throw themselves into realising Kate’s magical vision of London’s branch of the newest and most delectable tea shop, The Tea Chest. But every time success is within their grasp, increasing tensions damage their trust in each other. With the very real possibility that The Tea Chest will fail, Kate, Leila and Elizabeth must decide what’s important to each of them. Are they willing to walk away or can they learn to believe in themselves?

An enchanting, witty novel about the unexpected situations life throws at us, and how love and friendship help us through. Written with heart and infused with the seductive scents of bergamot, Indian spices, lemon, rose and caramel, it’s a world you won’t want to leave.

Natalie Haynes –

When you open up, who will you let in?

When Alex Morris loses her fiancé in dreadful circumstances, she moves from London to Edinburgh to make a break with the past. Alex takes a job at a Pupil Referral Unit, which accepts the students excluded from other schools in the city. These are troubled, difficult kids and Alex is terrified of what she’s taken on.

There is one class – a group of five teenagers – who intimidate Alex and every other teacher on The Unit. But with the help of the Greek tragedies she teaches, Alex gradually develops a rapport with them. Finding them enthralled by tales of cruel fate and bloody revenge, she even begins to worry that they are taking her lessons to heart, and that a whole new tragedy is being performed, right in front of her.

Sebastian Faulks –

Bertie Wooster (a young man about town) and his butler Jeeves (the very model of the modern manservant)—return in their first new novel in nearly forty years: Jeeves and the Wedding Bells by Sebastian Faulks.

P.G. Wodehouse documented the lives of the inimitable Jeeves and Wooster for nearly sixty years, from their first appearance in 1915 (“Extricating Young Gussie”) to his final completed novel (Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen) in 1974. These two were the finest creations of a novelist widely proclaimed to be the finest comic English writer by critics and fans alike.

Now, forty years later, Bertie and Jeeves return in a hilarious affair of mix-ups and mishaps. With the approval of the Wodehouse estate, acclaimed novelist Sebastian Faulks brings these two back to life for their legion of fans. Bertie, nursing a bit of heartbreak over the recent engagement of one Georgina Meadowes to someone not named Wooster, agrees to “help” his old friend Peregrine “Woody” Beeching, whose own romance is foundering. That this means an outing to Dorset, away from an impending visit from Aunt Agatha, is merely an extra benefit.

Almost immediately, things go awry and the simple plan quickly becomes complicated. Jeeves ends up impersonating one Lord Etringham, while Bertie pretends to be Jeeves’ manservant “Wilberforce,”—and this all happens under the same roof as the now affianced Ms. Meadowes.

From there the plot becomes even more hilarious and convoluted, in a brilliantly conceived, seamlessly written comic work worthy of the master himself.

Jeff Lindsay –

Hollywood gets more than it bargained for when television’s hottest star arrives at the Miami Police Department and develops an intense, professional interest in a camera-shy blood spatter analyst named Dexter Morgan. Mega-star Robert Chase is famous for losing himself in his characters. When he and a group of actors descend on the Miami Police Department for “research,” Chase becomes fixated on Dexter Morgan, the blood spatter analyst with a sweet tooth for doughnuts and a seemingly average life.

To perfect his role, Chase is obsessed with shadowing Dexter’s every move and learning what really makes him tick. There is just one tiny problem. Dexter’s favorite hobby involves hunting down the worst killers to escape legal justice, and introducing them to his special brand of playtime. It’s a secret best kept out of the spotlight and away from the prying eyes of bloated Hollywood egos if Dexter wants to stay out of the electric chair. The last thing he needs is bright lights and the paparazzi, but even Dexter isn’t immune to the call of fame.

Jeff Lindsay’s razor sharp, devilish wit, and immaculate pacing prove that he is in a class of his own, and this new novel is his most masterful creation yet.

Fleur McDonald –

Laura Murphy will need to call on all her grit and determination to retain her beloved farm… But will her fierce self reliance close her off to the possibility of love? Since inheriting Nambina, the property that’s been in her family for generations, Laura Murphy has worked wonders. Rather than just focus on farming she has set up a successful school, teaching women the basics of managing a property – from fencing and mustering to handling the financial side of the business. But the notoriously self-reliant Laura is lonely and still scarred by a tragedy from her past. She’s also grappling with the hostility of her nearest neighbour and former best friend, Meghan Hunter. The fact that Laura’s ex-boyfriend Josh is Meghan’s brother only makes things worse.
When a solicitor contacts Laura saying his clients may have a claim over Nambina, her entire world is turned upside down, and she has to call on all her determination to hold on to the property she’s worked so hard to build. In the process she realises she must reach out to friends and loved ones or risk losing everything.
By the bestselling author of Red Dust, this inspirational novel celebrates strength in the face of adversity as well as the enriching power of love.

This warm, gentle novel reads like a love letter to bookshops. It follows the life of A.J. Fikry, a man who is left as the sole owner of a small bookstore after his young wife tragically dies in a car accident. A.J. is drowning his sorrows in alcohol, alienating everyone in his life and doing a pretty bad job of running his business when an unexpected turn of events changes everything – a two-year-old girl, Maya, is abandoned in his store. His life becomes entwined with Maya’s, and the novel follows them over the ensuing years.

This is a charming tale of the small moments in one man’s life. A.J. and his friends grapple with grief, fall in love, build unconventional families and find solace in literature. There is no high drama, but journeying through these everyday moments makes for comforting, and surprisingly compelling, reading.

One of the main themes of the narrative is the importance of books to each character. The novel is filled with discussions of contemporary literature, and devoted readers (especially those who spend a lot of time in bookshops, and belong to book clubs) will find much to enjoy. Sentimental but not cloying,  this book is a feel-good story (the kind that just might reduce you to weeping in its final chapters). The less you expect from this quiet book, the more you’ll find.

Garry Disher –

Gunshots have been reported just out of town and Constable Paul Hirschhausen is sent to investigate. Back in uniform, he runs a one-man cop shop in Tiverton, a bump-on-the-highway town three hours from Adelaide. If things go bad out on Bitter Wash Road his nearest backup would be his boss, Sergeant Kropp, and a couple of constables 40km away in Redruth. But the Redruth constables have made it clear they consider him a dog and a maggot. Cop logic says if the rest of his squad went down for corruption and he didn’t, then he must have survived by selling out his mates. They reckon Hirsch has a bullet coming and it can’t come soon enough to suit them – a pistol cartridge left in his mailbox makes that clear.

Hirsch covers his patch in a four-wheel-drive police-issue Toyota Hilux, casually raising a finger off the steering wheel to acknowledge oncoming drivers. We never sight a kangaroo but Disher puts us dead centre in rural Australia with that casual, iconic gesture. In Tiverton and its surrounds and people, Disher has drawn both a vivid and visceral picture of a backblocks bush town, its inhabitants ground down by the stresses of isolation, hard work and irregular, relentlessly shrinking incomes.

The next call-out takes Hirsch to a real crime: a body, female, dumped beside the highway – 16-year-old local girl Melia Donovan. His investigation of Melia’s death leads Hirsch on a trail of corruption and intrigue, with echoes of the past and bent cops that he’d prefer to leave behind. The story pulls no punches, with Hirsch uncovering a complicated web of cronyism, corruption, racism, infidelity, misogyny, rape and murder – Disher never letting up on the pace.

There is a lot to like in this story, with several unexpected and surprising changes in direction combined with Disher’s usual deft plotting and economically drawn but fully fleshed out main and peripheral characters. What resonates most however is Hirschhausen’s painful sense of isolation within an already isolated community. The corruption case in Adelaide ended his marriage, though he knows no copper’s relationship could ever survive a posting to Tiverton.

The role of lone cop in a small town sets Hirsch up as a protector, of course, but also as a father figure – the adolescents and young adults who populate the story are beautifully realised characters in all their naivety and surliness, and Hirsch’s interactions with them show a different, gentler side to his character.

Professor Earl Owen –

Under the Microscope is the story of an extraordinary man, his many life-changing inventions, and his exceptional life and special friendships. Born into a family of doctors – on the paternal and maternal sides – with a birth defect that no one knew how to treat, Earl Owen was given a dose of radiation before anyone knew what radiation treatment could do to a human body, let alone a newborn baby. Earl Owen’s medical parents, aunts and uncles failed to notice that as he grew he walked with a limp and when he was eleven he had an accident in a school race, which left him in hospital for a year enduring a series of excruciating surgeries in an attempt to remedy his damaged bones.

Whilst lying in bed alone in a dark basement room in the hospital, he decided he would grow up to be a new kind of surgeon – one who would deal delicately and carefully with birth defects and would communicate sensitively with patients.

When he was discharged from the hospital he took up piano lessons and discovered he was a talented musician. As he came out of his teens, he had to decide whether to pursue a career as a concert pianist or a surgeon. To say this man is a high achiever barely touches on his gifts and talents. He was one of the earliest, most inventive and enterprising pioneers of microsurgery; he designed instruments and microscopes for his operations; he did the first finger replacement on a child (for which he was sacked from the Sydney Children’s Hospital, even though it was successful operation); co-led the team that completed the first successful hand transplant (whose recipient turned out to be an ex-con from New Zealand, who had lost his arm in jail); and trained the team that completed the first double-hand transplant. Earl Owen was the first surgeon to be able to reverse vasectomies and complete fallopian tube ligatures (using his microsurgical prowess).

And he designed the chairs in the Sydney Opera House! He has done more in his eighty years than most of us could dream of, and this book is his story in his words.

Josh Ruxin –

One couple’s inspiring memoir of healing a Rwandan village, raising a family near the old killing fields, and building a restaurant named Heaven. Newlyweds Josh and Alissa were at a party and received a challenge that shook them to the core: do you think you can really make a difference? Especially in a place like Rwanda, where the scars of genocide linger and poverty is rampant?

While Josh worked hard bringing food and health care to the country’s rural villages, Alissa was determined to put their foodie expertise to work. The couple opened Heaven, a gourmet restaurant overlooking Kigali, which became an instant success. Remarkably, they found that between helping youth marry their own local ingredients with gourmet recipes (and mix up “the best guacamole in Africa”) and teaching them how to help themselves, they created much-needed jobs while showing that genocide’s survivors really could work together.

While first a memoir of love, adventure, and family, A THOUSAND HILLS TO HEAVEN also provides a remarkable view of how, through health, jobs, and economic growth, our foreign aid programs can be quickly remodelled and work to end poverty worldwide.