The inheritance

Trisha Sakhlecha
Meet the Agarwals, who have gathered on a private, luxury island off the west coast of Scotland for a much-anticipated family reunion. Raj, the patriarch and a business tycoon, is about to announce to his wife and three children the succession plan for his multimillon-dollar Delhi-based company.

Shalini, the fragile matriarch, is ready to have her husband to herself after years of sacrifice to the family business. Myra, the golden child, owner of the island and host of the reunion, is, unbeknownst to her family, on the brink of bankruptcy. Aseem, the son and supposed heir, is torn between his love for his wife and his duty to family. Aisha, the youngest, a party girl whose antics are legendary, can’t pass up an opportunity to wreak havoc. And then there’s Zoe, Aseem’s wife, the outsider whose #InstaPerfect life is built on a foundation of lies.

They’ve all got secrets they would die to protect. Who will survive this high-stakes reunion, and who will become a victim of their own greed? One thing is certain: this family gathering will shatter more than just their illusions of unity.

Weekends with the Sunshine Gardening society

Sophie Green
Noosa Heads, 1987: Newly-divorced Cynthia has returned to her hometown from Los Angeles to reconnect with her 19-year-old daughter, who is pregnant and determined not listen to her mother’s advice. Cynthia’s former best friend Lorraine has been stuck mowing lawns as part of a business she shares with her husband – his dream, not hers. When Cynthia convinces Lorraine to join the local Sunshine Gardening Society, they meet young widow Elizabeth , and rootless, heartbroken Kathy.

The four women soon discover the society is much more than an opportunity to chat about flowers. Rather, it offers them the chance to lend a helping hand to people whose lives need a bit of care and attention right along with their gardens.

Between pulling up weeds and planting sweet wattle, strelitzias and bromeliads, the women learn from each other that some roots go deep, and others, shallow; that seeds can lie dormant for a long time before they spring to life, and that careful tending is the key to lives and friendships that reach their full potential.

Intermezzo

Sally Rooney
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.

Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.

For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Sisters of the resistance

Jina Bacarr
Paris, 1942: Two sisters in Paris had their lives torn apart. Now they must choose – save themselves, or fight the Nazis to the very end… I’d given up everything to fight for the Resistance. But nothing prepared me for discovering my sister was a traitor. Kept by a Nazi SS officer, outwardly she barely resembles my beloved Justine anymore.

But I guessed her secret. About her beautiful, fragile little child. The baby she’ll do anything to protect. And I believe that deep down she still knows what is right.

As the Nazis threaten everything we ever held dear, I know I have one chance. I must convince her to betray the evil she seems to have chosen. I need her to find her true self once more.

Because I need her to join the fight…

The fine art of uncanny prediction

Robert Goddard
Umiko Wada never set out to be a private detective, let alone become the one-woman operation behind the Kodaka Detective Agency. But so it has turned out, thanks to the death of her former boss, Kazuto Kodaka, in mysterious circumstances.

Keen to avoid a similar fate, Wada chooses the cases she takes very carefully. A businessman who wants her to track down his estranged son offers what appears to be a straightforward assignment. Soon she finds herself pulled into a labyrinthine conspiracy with links to a twenty-seven-year-old investigation by her late employer and to the chaos and trauma of the dying days of the Second World War.

As Wada uncovers a dizzying web of connections between then and now, it becomes clear that someone has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the past buried. Soon those she loves most will be sucked into the orbit of one of the most powerful men in Tokyo. And he will do whatever it takes to hold on to his power…

The goddess of Warsaw

Lisa Barr
When the famous actress Lena Browning is threatened by someone from her war-time past, she must put her skills into play to protect herself, her illustrious career, and those she loves, then and now.
Before she was a “Living Legend”, Lena Browning was Bina Blonski, a wealthy Polish Jew whose life and prominent family were destroyed by the Nazis and imprisoned with the rest of Warsaw’s Jews in a ghastly ghetto.

Determined to fight back, the beautiful, blonde Aryan-looking Bina becomes a spy and an assassin, gaining information and stealing weapons outside the Warsaw ghetto to protect her family and fellow Jews. While Bina accomplishes amazing feats of bravery, she sacrifices much in the process – including a forbidden love.
More than a decade after escaping the horrors of the war, Lena Browning rises to fame in Hollywood. Yet she cannot help but hunger for revenge against the Nazis who escaped justice after the war. Fierce and fearless, Lena uses her star power to right the past’s wrongs . . . and perhaps even finds the happy ending she never had.

Stone yard Devotional

Charlotte Wood
A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn’t know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident.

As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can’t forget. Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signaling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand – then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.

With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished? A meditative and deeply moving novel from one of Australia’s most acclaimed and best loved writers.

The Empress murders

Toby Schmitz
It’s 1925 and the Empress of Australia is making her regular Atlantic crossing, New York–bound, with a full manifest of passengers. When a dead body is uncovered onboard, it is up to Inspector Archie Daniels to find the killer. But solving one murder quickly turns into solving two, then three, and it becomes clear that Daniels must act fast to avoid an all-souls-lost–level calamity.

No one, from the horrendously wealthy and entitled first-class passengers to those they consider the dregs of empire below deck, is safe. And no one can get off …

The Empress Murders is a razor-sharp, mind-bendingly clever novel that is both a witty, bloodthirsty whodunnit and an excoriating look at the excesses of the British Empire, just as the sun begins to set on it.

Barren Capes

Michelle Prak
An abandoned resort seems the perfect place to hide, but is Barren Cape a refuge or a trap? Former housemates Mac and Erika are homeless. Well, Erika is fine, she just has to live with her parents until she can find another rental. Mac’s situation is much worse – family isn’t an option and she’s surfing the couches of her increasingly exasperated friends.

Driving around one lonely afternoon, Mac discovers Barren Cape. Once destined to be a luxury escape, now it’s just wire fence and gray cement.

It’s stark, but quiet. There’s no harm in staying a little while…

South of nowhere

Jeffery Deaver
When a levee collapses in Hinowah, a small town in Northern California, Colter Shaw is brought on by his sister, Dorion, a disaster response specialist, to help locate a family swept away by the raging water, with mere hours to survive.

But after a surprise attack along the river obstructs Colter’s urgent search, the siblings are forced to consider a new Is the levee at risk of failing from natural causes, or is someone sabotaging it? Colter and Dorion must race against a ticking clock to uncover the truth and save the citizens before the village washes out completely, destroying everything and everyone in its path.

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