Archive | New Releases

The school that hope built

Madeliene Kelly
An extraordinary account of Gemma Sisia’s twenty years as the founder of St Jude’s, a school that is changing the lives of some of the poorest children in Tanzania. From a country town in Australia to a small village in Tanzania, Gemma Sisia has built a truly remarkable legacy.

In 2002, Gemma founded The School of St Jude in her husband’s home country of Tanzania, with the goal of empowering local Tanzanians to build a school community unlike any other.

From humble beginnings, with just three students and one volunteer teacher, St Jude’s now provides free education to over 1,800 Tanzanian school students and supplies more than 10,000 government school students with volunteer teachers each year. St Jude’s also supports its alumni to become the doctors, engineers, tradespeople, entrepreneurs and teachers of the next generation.

Vanished

Nicole Morris
They just vanished … Disappeared. Gone. Lost. No answers. Still missing. Imagine the pain, confusion and emotional roller-coaster that families experience when a loved one goes missing. What would you do? How would your family cope?

This is a heart- wrenching collection of true stories told through the eyes of family members who have experienced the trauma of a missing loved one. It follows their journeys from the desperate searches in the first days, through the Police investigations and, in many cases, the heartbreak as the years roll by without any news.

These stories are just a glimpse into ten of the thousands of missing persons still out there, waiting to be found. From two young girls who might have been early victims of Ivan Milat and a woman who was last seen walking alongside a Victorial highway to a teenage boy likely murdered and fed to crocodiles in Kakadu and two Tasmanian men who disappeared under strange circumstances … the cases are all different, but the impact on the families devastating.

Nicole Morris is the founder of the Australian Missing Persons Register. She has written this book to develop awareness of the plight of the courageous families of missing persons and raise public awareness to help find those people who seem to have vanished into thin air.

City on fire

Don Winslow
Two criminal empires together control all of New England. Until a beautiful woman comes between the Irish and the Italians, launching a war that will see them kill each other, destroy an alliance, and set a city on fire.

Danny Ryan yearns for a more “legit” life and a place in the sun. But as the bloody conflict stacks body on body and brother turns against brother, Danny has to rise above himself. To save the friends he loves like family and the family he has sworn to protect, he becomes a leader, a ruthless strategist, and a master of a treacherous game in which the winners live and the losers die.

From the gritty streets of Providence to the glittering screens of Hollywood to the golden casinos of Las Vegas, two rival crime families ignite a war that will leave only one standing. The winner will forge a dynasty.

How to be remembered

Michael Thompson
On an ordinary night in an ordinary year, Tommy Llewellyn’s doting parents wake in a home without toys and diapers, without photos of their baby scattered about, and without any idea that the small child asleep in his cot is theirs. That’s because Tommy is a boy destined to never be remembered.

On the same day every year, everyone around him forgets he exists, and he grows up enduring his own universal Reset. That is until something extraordinary happens: Tommy Llewellyn falls in love.

Determined to finally carve out a life for himself and land the girl of his dreams, Tommy sets out on a mission to trick the Reset and be remembered. But legacies aren’t so easily won, and Tommy must figure out what’s more important – the things we leave behind or the people we bring along with us.

A home among the snow gums

Stella Quinn
Hannah Cody grew up sunny, carefree and loved in the Snowy Mountains town of Hanrahan, but a vicious prank at university in Sydney changed that. Instead of studying medicine, she moved to a small regional centre, switched to veterinary science and swore off romance for life. Ten quiet years later, she’s settled. She’s safe. And yeah, she hasn’t left Hanrahan in years, but that’s not agoraphobia is it? It’s not hiding if you’re happy.

After many years abroad as a naval analyst, Tom Krauss is drawn home by his estranged father’s deteriorating health and his own secret injury. But as soon as he sets eyes on Hannah again, he realises that he’s never forgotten the engaging little sister of his best friend. He loved her when he was a teenager, and now he knows he never stopped. Problem: romance is a no-go. There’s a piece of shrapnel wedged against his spine, and the countdown is on for him to make a surgical decision that could free him from pain … or paralyse him.

But the Hanrahan townsfolk have other ideas: it’s time for Hannah to work out that living with your heart wide open is worth the risk, and it’s time for Tom to learn that love is messy and wonderful and necessary. Change is afoot in this small town, and these two will have to work out if they can be brave enough to make changes too…

Immaculate

Anna McGahan
All Frances wants is a cure for her daughter, but that would take a miracle, and miracles aren’t something Frances believes in anymore. Newly divorced from her pastor ex-husband and excommunicated from the church community she once worked within, she wrestles alone with the prognosis of her terminally ill child. Any suggestion of ‘divine intervention’ is salt in the wound of her grief. So when Frances is forced to take in a homeless and pregnant teenage girl who claims to have had an immaculate conception, she’s deeply challenged.

But sixteen-year-old Mary is not who she seems, and soon opens the door to perspectives that profoundly shift Frances’s sense of reality, triggering a chain of astonishing events. It seems that where there is the greatest suffering lies an unexpected magic. Frances begins to hold hope for her family’s future, but the miracle prayed for is not always the one received.

Immaculate is a provocative and tender exploration of loss, identity and healing, and the secret worlds we hide within in order to survive.

Winter at Bletchley Park

Molly Green
When Rosie Frost was jilted on her wedding day, she didn’t think life could get any worse. But six years later in the throes of the Second World War, she is unceremoniously dismissed from her job after they discover her illegitimate child.

Thankfully, top secret war office Bletchley Park recognises Rosie’s talent and recruits her to decipher their Italian naval signals. Proud to be doing her bit for the war effort, Rosie settles into her new life.

But when she spots a familiar face at the Park, Rosie’s world threatens to come crashing down once more. Can she put the past behind her in order to excel at the job she was born to do? And will her hard work help safeguard her nation’s future…?

Estella

Kathy George
At just three years of age, Estella is taken from her mother, adopted by the wealthy but eccentric Miss Havisham and taught how to break men’s hearts. Satis House is dark and oppressive and life with the vengeful Miss Havisham a confusion of contradictory lessons, but the kindness of the household cook and Estella’s love of the nearby marshes bring her some joy. Forced to play with Pip, a local boy from a lowly background, Estella captivates his soul and breaks his heart, exactly as Miss Havisham has planned.

Years later, Estella returns from school in France as a young woman and is thrust into London society. There she meets Pip again, who has acquired an unknown benefactor and come into money. Miss Havisham recruits Pip to help find Estella a husband, much to her distress. She seems forever fated to be the plaything of others, locked into the destructive cycles her adoptive mother set in motion.

Estella is beautiful, headstrong, enigmatic – but who is she, really? Will she ever be able to break free from the constraints of society’s expectations and her own childhood? Will Estella finally find a way to tell her own story?

The ferryman

Justin Cronin
Founded by a mysterious genius, the archipelago of Prospera lies hidden from the horrors of a deteriorating outside world. In this island paradise, Prospera’s lucky citizens enjoy long, fulfilling lives until the monitors embedded in their forearms, meant to measure their physical health and psychological well-being, fall below 10 percent. Then they retire themselves, embarking on a ferry ride to the island known as the Nursery, where their failing bodies are renewed, their memories are wiped clean, and they are readied to restart life afresh.

Proctor Bennett, of the Department of Social Contracts, has a satisfying career as a ferryman, gently shepherding people through the retirement process–and, when necessary, enforcing it. But all is not well with Proctor. For one thing, he’s been dreaming–which is supposed to be impossible in Prospera. For another, his monitor percentage has begun to drop alarmingly fast. And then comes the day he is summoned to retire his own father, who gives him a disturbing and cryptic message before being wrestled onto the ferry.

Meanwhile, something is stirring. The Support Staff, ordinary men and women who provide the labor to keep Prospera running, have begun to question their place in the social order. Unrest is building, and there are rumors spreading of a resistance group–known as “Arrivalists”–who may be fomenting revolution.

Soon Proctor finds himself questioning everything he once believed, entangled with a much bigger cause than he realized–and on a desperate mission to uncover the truth.

Fighting fate

Justin Yerbury
Justin Yerbury made a promise to his mother while she was dying of motor neurone disease (MND) that he would do everything he could to find a cure. MND had already taken several members of Justin’s family, and he learned that they carried a rare genetic form of the disease that gave them a fifty-fifty chance of inheritance.

Desperate to help his loved ones, Justin went to university to study science, eventually becoming a professor of molecular biology at the University of Wollongong and one of the world’s leading experts on MND. While in New York, delivering a lecture on his groundbreaking research, Justin felt his thumb stop working – ‘the beast’ that had lurked so long in the shadows had caught up with him.

Now 99 per cent paralysed and able to move only his eyeballs, Justin refuses to yield. With eye-tracking software, he has written his extraordinary memoir to shine light on this terrible disease and to show that, even in the bleakest of moments, there is always a reason to keep fighting.

3 Main St Buderim - QLD 4556
(07) 5445 3779