Home stretch

Graham Norton
It is 1987 and a small Irish community is preparing for a wedding. The day before the ceremony, a group of young friends, including the bride and groom, are involved in an accident. Three survive. Three are killed.

The lives of the families are shattered and the rifts between them ripple throughout the small town. Connor survived, but living among the angry and the mourning is almost as hard as carrying the shame of having been the driver. He leaves the only place he knows for another life, taking his secrets with him. Travelling first to Liverpool, then London, he eventually makes a home—of sorts—for himself in New York, where he finds shelter and the possibility of forging a new life.

But the secrets—the unspoken longings and regrets that have come to haunt those left behind—will not be silenced. Before long, Connor will have to confront his past.

A powerful and timely novel of emigration and return, Home Stretch demonstrates Norton’s keen understanding of the power of stigma and secrecy—and their devastating effect on ordinary lives.

Letters from the past

Erica James
With its winding high street lined with a greengrocers, post office, pub and church, Melstead St Mary is the perfect English village. Neighbours look out for neighbours, and few things trouble the serene surface of the community.

But when residents start to receive anonymous letters containing secret information about their pasts – secrets that no one else is meant to know – life in Melstead St Mary is about to change, possibly forever…

Marrying Simone

Anna Jacobs
In Australia Simone has been widowed for 4 years and is ready to make a more interesting life. Her friends are driving her mad introducing her to eligible men; her busy daughters are just the opposite, wanting her available for baby-sitting. When she is offered a house swap with a couple in the UK she takes it, not without some trepidation.

In the UK, Russ has just taken possession of his new house and wants only peace and quiet after a few months of rehab following a serious injury. Can these two help one another avoid meddling friends and relatives, and build new lives?

The newcomer

Fern Britton
It’s springtime in the Cornish coastal village of Pendruggan, and a newcomer is causing quite a stir… She arrived in the village on the spring tide and hoped to be at the heart of it, knowing its secrets and weathering its storms.

It was to be a new beginning…

It’s springtime in the Cornish village of Pendruggan and as the community comes together to say a fond farewell to parish vicar, Simon, and his wife, Penny, a newcomer causes quite a stir…

Reverand Angela Whitehorn came to Cornwall to make a difference. With her husband, Robert, by her side, she sets about making changes – but it seems not everyone is happy for her to shake things up in the small parish, and soon Angela starts to receive anonymous poison pen letters.

Angela has always been one to fight back, and she has already brought a fresh wind into the village, supporting her female parishioners through good times and bad. But as the letters get increasingly more personal, Angela learns that the secrets are closer to home.

With faith and friends by your side, even the most unlikely of new beginnings is possible.

Confessions of a bookseller

Shaun Bythell
“Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?”
Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms.

Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don’t understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices.

The Diary of a Bookseller (soon to be a major TV series) introduced us to the joys and frustrations of life lived in books. Sardonic and sympathetic in equal measure, Confessions of a Bookseller will reunite readers with the characters they’ve come to know and love.

Laptop from hell

Miranda Devine
The inside story of the laptop that exposed the president’s dirtiest secret. When a drug-addled Hunter Biden abandoned his waterlogged computer at a Mac repair shop in Delaware in the spring of 2019, just six days before his father announced his candidacy for the United States presidency, it became the ticking time bomb in the shadows of Joe Biden’s campaign.

The dirty secrets contained in Hunter’s laptop almost derailed his father’s presidential campaign and ignited one of the greatest media coverups in American history.

This is the unvarnished story of what’s really inside the laptop and what China knows about the Bidens, by the New York Post journalist who brought it into the open.

It exposes the coordinated censorship operation by Big Tech, the media establishment, and former intelligence operatives to stifle the New York Post’s coverage, in a chilling exercise of raw political power three weeks before the 2020 election.

A treasure trove of corporate documents, emails, text messages, photographs, and voice recordings, spanning a decade, the laptop provided the first evidence that President Joe Biden was involved in his son’s ventures in China, Ukraine, and beyond, despite his repeated denials.

This intimate insight into Hunter’s dissolute lifestyle shows he was incapable of holding down a job, let alone being paid tens of millions of dollars in high-powered international business deals by foreign interests, unless he had something else of value to sell—which of course he did. He was the son of the vice president who would go on to become the leader of the free world.

The Cowra breakout

Matthew McLachlan
The riveting story of the missing piece of Australia’s World War II history, told by bestselling historian Mat McLachlan (Walking with the Anzacs, Gallipoli: The Battlefield Guide).

During World War II, in the town of Cowra in central New South Wales, Japanese prisoners of war were held in a POW camp. By August 1944, over a thousand were interned and on the icy night of August 5th they staged one of the largest prison breakouts in history, launching the only land battle of World War II to be fought on Australian soil. Five Australian soldiers and more than 230 Japanese POWs would die during what became known as The Cowra Breakout.

This compelling and fascinating book, written by one of Australia’s leading battlefield historians, vividly traces the full story of the Breakout. It is a tale of proud warriors and misfit Australian soldiers. Of negligence and complacency, and of authorities too slow to recognise danger before it occurred – and too quick to cover it up when it was too late. But mostly it is a story about raw human emotions, and the extremes that people will go to when they feel all hope is lost.

The shipwreck

The true story of the Dunbar, the disaster that broke the colony’s heart and forged a nation’s spirit

Larry Writer
The Dunbar was one of the most advanced and celebrated sailing ships of the mid-19th century. Built to carry passengers in speed and luxury on the long route from Britain to Australia, it was the Titanic of its day.

Late at night on 20 August 1857, after an 81-day voyage from Plymouth, the Dunbar was caught by massive waves and storm-force winds near the cliffs of The Gap at Sydney’s South Head and smashed to pieces on the rocks. All but one of the 123 passengers and crew perished: drowned, broken on the cliff face or mauled by sharks.

The catastrophe was one of the worst in Australia’s history, and happened on the doorstep of the young city of Sydney. Bodies and wreckage swept through the Heads and washed up on the harbour’s beaches for days. It demonstrated the precariousness of the colony’s link to the mother country and devastated the city. Its aftermath saw enormous changes to navigation and maritime safety, including the building of the lighthouse that still stands overlooking the Heads.

Dark music

David Langercrantz
Inspired by Sherlock Holmes, an exhilarating new thriller from the bestselling author of The Girl in the Spider’s Web–a murder investigation in which two unlikely allies race to uncover a shadowy international conspiracy.

Professor Hans Rekke is a world authority on interrogation techniques, capable of dizzying feats of logic and observation. He was born into wealth and power and has a picture-perfect wife and daughter. But he also has a fragile psyche that falls apart under pressure.

Micaela Vargas is a street-smart police officer, daughter of Chilean political refugees, who grew up in the projects on the outskirts of Stockholm and has two brothers on the wrong side of the law. She is tenacious and uncompromising, and desperate to prove herself to her fellow cops.

Micaela needs Hans’s unique mind to help her solve the case of a murdered asylum-seeker from Afghanistan. Hans needs Micaela to save him from himself. Together, they need to find the killer before they’re both silenced for good.

Cobalt blue

Matthew Reilly
For 35 years, the United States and Russia each had their own superhero.

Three days ago, America’s hero died.

Today will be bad.

In the face of an overwhelming attack, one young woman-unassuming and anonymous-might be America’s only hope.

Her codename… COBALT BLUE.

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