Archive | New Releases

Craig Semple

Before eighteen-year-old Craig Semple joined the New South Wales Police Force in 1988, he was someone who preferred to steer clear of trouble. But like so many young police officers, he gradually built resilience to fear through a process of selflessly, and often recklessly, turning towards danger. By the time he started locking horns with some of Australia’s most notorious outlaw motorcycle gangs, Craig believed himself to be bulletproof.

After his brother, a rookie police officer, was near-fatally stabbed by a drug dealer in 1998, Craig’s life suddenly jumped the track, his fight against drug crime becoming an obsession that took him to the brink of personal, professional and marital destruction. Attempting to give his family and career a new start, he moved to the New South Wales north coast, where he too became the victim of a violent crime, at the hands of outlaw bikies.

Trained and shaped in an era of alcohol abuse and maverick culture within the force, Craig saw just about everything in a career spanning a quarter of a murder, suicide, armed robbery, organised crime and much more. This unforgiving environment would eventually take its toll. After many years struggling with his deteriorating mental health, Craig retired with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. Ahead of him was a challenging journey that would take him to the lowest point of his life and provide him with an opportunity to find a new purpose inspiring others as a mental health educator.

Brendan Watkins
A stunning memoir of one man’s search for his birth parents, which uncovered an astonishing global scandal at the heart of the Catholic Church. Brendan Watkins was eight years old when his parents told him he was adopted. When he was in his late twenties, he started searching for his birth parents and eventually discovered the identity of his birth he was told she was a Catholic nun. And she wanted nothing to do with him. For the next thirty years Brendan had no clues as to the identity of his birth father.

In 2018, a DNA test proved that he was the son of a priest. His father had studied in a Trappist monastery in Ireland, returned to Australia and become a celebrated outback missionary.

After decades of searching and obstruction from the Catholic church, the whole truth was finally exposed. Brendan Watkins’ birth parents were a Catholic priest and a nun. Tell No One reveals the moving story of that incredible discovery, and explores the questions, anxieties and reflections arising from his hidden past.

Colin Burgess
During those perilous years surviving in squalid conditions, Sister Jeffrey kept a secret diary of day-to-day events which, after the war, was turned into a book and radio serial: White Coolies. She would often write of the powerful sisterhood that evolved as the POWs took strength from each other, even forming an ‘orchestra’. White Coolies was a major inspiration for the 1997 Bruce Beresford film Paradise Road, starring Glenn Close, Frances McDormand and Cate Blanchett amongst others.

Sisters in Captivity builds on those diaries to not only re-live the years the nurses spent as POWs but also learn of the early life and influences that encouraged Betty Jeffrey into a life of nursing, and the outstanding work she carried out for the rest of her life. Featuring personal photos of Betty courtesy of her family and her drawings from the prison camps.

Melissa Levi
Do you get the sense that something’s just not quite right with yourself, Mum or Grandpa? Does your family avoid having the big conversations about ageing? Are you confused and overwhelmed?
You are not alone.

Clinical psychologist Melissa Levi has helped more than a thousand older people, and their families, navigate the ageing journey. While every family’s story is unique, Melissa has come to know that we all share common fears and questions about ageing – the same questions her own family had when her grandfather was diagnosed with dementia.

In We Need to Talk About Ageing, Melissa encourages us to understand that while getting older is inevitable, our journeys don’t need to be overwhelming, or clouded with uncertainty or confusion. She provides expert information on what to expect as you get older, what’s ‘normal’, how to identify symptoms of common medical and psychiatric conditions in later life, and, most importantly, what you can do and where to go for help.

Melissa shares practical, actionable strategies, tips and discussion prompts, so you are equipped to have the big conversations about ageing, to maintain connection, to find your way through the aged-care maze, to make informed, values-aligned decisions and so much more.

We Need to Talk About Ageing is a comprehensive guide that will empower your family to plan for the future, experience greater meaning, joy and connection, and navigate the ageing journey with confidence and grace.

Melissa Levi has specialised in older people’s mental health and dementia for over a decade. She is committed to educating and empowering families to better understand ageing, have the big conversations and plan for the future, so they can take control of their ageing journeys. Her mission inspired We Need to Talk About Ageing and her website Talking Ageing – resources she wishes had been available for her own family when her grandfather was diagnosed with dementia.

Daniel Silva
On the morning after the Venice Preservation Society’s annual black-tie gala, art restorer and legendary spy Gabriel Allon enters his favorite coffee bar on the island of Murano to find General Cesare Ferrari, the commander of the Art Squad, eagerly awaiting his arrival. The Carabinieri have made a startling discovery in the Amalfi villa of a murdered South African shipping tycoon—a secret vault containing an empty frame and stretcher matching the dimensions of the world’s most valuable missing painting. General Ferrari asks Gabriel to quietly track down the artwork before the trail goes cold.

“Isn’t that your job?”
“Finding stolen paintings? Technically speaking, yes. But you’re much better at it than we are.” The painting in question is The Concert by Johannes Vermeer, one of thirteen works of art stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. With the help of a most unlikely ally, a beautiful Danish computer hacker and professional thief, Gabriel soon discovers that the painting has changed hands as part of an illicit billion-dollar business deal involving a man code-named the Collector, an energy executive with close ties to the highest levels of Russian power. The missing masterpiece is the lynchpin of a conspiracy that if successful, could plunge the world into a conflict of apocalyptic proportions. To foil the plot, Gabriel must carry out a daring heist of his own, with millions of lives hanging in the balance.

Kathy Reichs
Called in to examine what is left of a body struck by lightning, Tempe traces an unusual tattoo to its source and is soon embroiled in a much larger case. Young men—tourists—have been disappearing on the islands of Turks and Caicos for years. Seven years ago, the first victim was found in a strange location with both hands cut off; the other visitors vanished without a trace. But, recently, tantalizing leads have emerged and only Tempe can unravel them.

Maddeningly, the victims seem to have nothing in common—other than the strange locations where their bodies are eventually found, and the fact that the young men all seem to be the least likely to be involved in foul play. Do these attacks have something to do with the islands’ seething culture of gang violence? Tempe isn’t so sure. And then she turns up disturbing clues that what’s at stake may actually have global significance.

It isn’t long before the sound of a ticking clock grows menacingly loud, and then Temper herself becomes a target.

Kerry Taylor
For most of his 76 years, Bill Smith preferred solitude over socialising, horses over people and confidentiality over confidantes. As a jockey, he was known for always turning up already fully kitted out in his silks. But now, in his advancing years, a fall lands him in full-time care and it becomes impossible to maintain his privacy. Nurse Maureen Bannon resents having to look after ‘the geries’, especially grumpy old buggers like Mr Smith, but when she discovers Bill’s secret an unlikely alliance is formed.

Bill was assigned female at birth, a fact that shaped his life but never limited his ambition. With Mr Smith’s health declining and time running out, Maureen wants to find someone who knows and loves him, but only one name seems to mean anything to Bill – Catherine, his first love. Can Maureen find out more to help Bill find peace?

Gabbie Stroud
The staff of St Margaret’s Primary School are hanging by a thread. There’s serious litigation pending, the school is due for registration, and a powerful parent named Janet Bellevue has a lot to say about everything. As teachers they’re trying to remain professional, as people they’re fast unravelling.

There’s Tyson, first year out of uni and nervous as hell, Derek the Assistant Principal who’s dropped the ball on administration, Bev from the office who’s confronting a serious diagnosis, and Sally-Ann who’s desperate for a child of her own.

Thank goodness for kids like Lionel Merrick. Lionel is the student who steals your heart and makes the whole teaching gig he’s cheerful, likeable and helpful – and devoted to his little sister Lacey. But Lionel has a secret of his own. As his future slides from vulnerable to dangerous, will someone from St Margaret’s realise before it’s too late?

As secrets threaten to be exposed and working demands increase, each staff member begins to lose sight of the things that matter most.

Robyn Harding
A deliciously twisted story of friendship, retribution, and betrayal about a homeless woman fleeing a dangerous past—and the wealthy society wife she saves from drowning, who pulls her into a dark web of secrets and lies.

Lee Gulliver never thought she’d find herself living on the streets—no one ever does—but when her restaurant fails, and she falls deeper into debt, she leaves her old life behind with nothing but her clothes and her Toyota Corolla. In Seattle, she parks in a secluded spot by the beach to lay low and plan her next move—until early one morning, she sees a sobbing woman throw herself into the ocean. Lee hauls the woman back to the surface, but instead of appreciation, she is met with fury. The drowning woman, Hazel, tells her that she wanted to die, that she’s trapped in a toxic, abusive marriage, that she’s a prisoner in her own home. Lee has thwarted her one chance to escape her life.

Out of options, Hazel retreats to her gilded cage, and Lee thinks she’s seen the last of her, until her unexpected return the next morning. Bonded by disparate but difficult circumstances, the women soon strike up a close and unlikely friendship. And then one day, Hazel makes a shocking request: she wants Lee to help her disappear. It’ll be easy, Hazel assures her, but Lee soon learns that nothing is as it seems, and that Hazel may not be the friend Lee thought she was.

Hester Fox
World War I England, a young woman inherits a mysterious library and must untangle its powerful secrets. With the stroke of a pen, twenty-three-year-old Ivy Radcliffe becomes Lady Hayworth, owner of a sprawling estate on the Yorkshire moors. Ivy has never heard of Blackwood Abbey, or of the ancient bloodline from which she’s descended. With nothing to keep her in London since losing her brother in the Great War, she warily makes her way to her new home.

The abbey is foreboding, the servants reserved and suspicious. But there is a treasure waiting behind locked doors: a magnificent library. Despite cryptic warnings from the staff, Ivy feels irresistibly drawn to its dusty shelves, where familiar works mingle with strange, esoteric texts. And she senses something else in the library too, a presence that seems to have a will of its own.

Rumors swirl in the village about the abbey’s previous owners, about ghosts and curses, and an enigmatic manuscript at the center of it all. And as events grow more sinister, it will be up to Ivy to uncover the library’s mysteries in order to reclaim her own story—before it vanishes forever.