Maggie Stiefvater
January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweetwater washing away all of high society’s troubles.

Local girl-turned-general manager June Porter Hudson has guided the Avallon skillfully through the first pangs of war. The Gilfoyles, the hotel’s aristocratic owners, have trained her well. But when the family heir makes a secret deal with the State Department to fill the hotel with captured Axis diplomats, June must persuade her staff—many of whom have sons and husbands heading to the front lines—to offer luxury to Nazis. With a smile.

Meanwhile FBI Agent Tucker Minnick, whose coal tattoo hints at an Appalachian past, presses his ears to the hotel’s walls, listening for the diplomats’ secrets. He has one of his own, which is how he knows that June’s balancing act can have dangerous consequences: the sweetwater beneath the hotel can threaten as well as heal.

June has never met a guest she couldn’t delight, but the diplomats are different. Without firing a single shot, they have brought the war directly to her. As clashing loyalties crack the Avallon’s polished veneer, June must calculate the true cost of luxury.

Alex North
Dan Garvie’s life has been haunted by the crime he witnessed as a child—narrowly escaping an encounter with a notorious serial killer. He has dedicated his life since to becoming a criminal profiler, eager to seek justice for innocent victims. So when his father passes away under suspicious circumstances, Dan revisits his small island community, determined to uncover the truth about his death. Is it possible that the monster he remembers from his childhood nightmares has returned after all these years?

With his signature shock and suspense, Alex North brings us The Man Made of Smoke. In turn emotional, introspective, and utterly terrifying, this is a story of fathers and sons, shadows and secrets, and the fight we all face to escape the trauma of the past.

Cheng Lei
Journalist Cheng Lei spent more than three gruelling years in a Beijing prison after being wrongly accused of espionage. Harrowing, fierce and often darkly humorous, her memoir is about the power of the human spirit; bravery in the face of cruelty and pettiness; the consolations of letters, music and books; and how unexpected friendships and the love of family can unlock the courage we all have within us to prevail.

In August 2020, Cheng Lei was the precise and polished anchor of China’s government-run, English-language Global Business TV show, familiar to millions of viewers. A veteran business journalist, the Chinese-born Australian mother of two young children was at the pinnacle of her career when eight words texted to a friend led to devastating consequences.

Arriving for work one morning, Lei was met by officers from the notorious Ministry of State Security. After searching her apartment, they blindfolded her and drove her to a secret location. Detained, isolated and interrogated, she was cut off from all contact with her family and friends. She simply disappeared from TV screens, her flat, her life.

Lei was eventually coerced into agreeing to a five-year prison term in a country she loved but no longer recognised. On the outside, her story triggered a desperate fight for her release, a diplomatic row and global news. On the inside, her own struggle for freedom and her sanity in the face of the inconceivable had just begun.

It would be ten months before Lei saw her lawyer, a year and a half before a 90-minute show trial, more than two years before she would briefly hear the voices of her children, and three years and two months before she saw the entirety of the sky again – after her release was secured and she made it home to Australia.

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?