Peter Brune
Between 1946 and 1966 large numbers of displaced persons (DPs) came to Australia to escape the horrors of war-torn Europe. Peter Brune’s latest work had its genesis in more than 40 interviews he conducted with DPs in the period 2001—2022. He spoke to migrants from Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece and Hungary.

Inspired by their resilience, their enterprise and their determination to make a new life for themselves in Australia, the author has written about their harrowing war experiences-—drawing largely on their own words—-their reception in Australia and their first responses to an alien culture. Their subsequent reflections on the journeys they undertook and how they fared here are both moving and revelatory.
Peter also analyses the Chifley government’s immigration policies, which were driven by Arthur Calwell, and the selection criteria that were applied to assess applicants. Both Chifley and Calwell saw the need for a greater population for economic and security reasons; but they also felt an obligation to alleviate the deprivations suffered by millions of Europeans.
Suffering, Redemption and Triumph is an extraordinary exposition of how mass postwar immigration created the modern, multicultural society in which we now live. Peter makes the case that it is one of the most significant periods in the Australian story.

Joanne Harris
Bernie Moon is feeling invisible. She’s given her life to other people – her husband, her son, her mother, her friends (not that she has any of them left). At 16, she was full of promise and power. Now, facing 50, she’s a fading light.

But when a young woman is killed in her local area, it sparks childhood memories of a talent she used to have, one long since hidden.

She said she’d never use it again.

She knows it could destroy not only her, but everyone around her.

Bernie Moon is no longer invisible, but is everyone else ready for what she’s about to become?

Lucy Campbell
1987: It’s late summer and a time of change when a 17-year-old girl leaves the local shopping centre in the sleepy town of Lowbridge and is never seen again. Her unsolved disappearance is never far from the town’s memory. There’s those who grew up in the shadow of her loss whose own lives were altered forever, and those who know more than they’re saying. It just takes an outsider to ask the right questions.

2018: Katherine Ashworth, shattered by the death of her daughter, moves to her husband’s hometown. Searching for a way to pick up the pieces of her life, she joins the local historical society and becomes obsessed with the three-decades-old mystery. As Katherine digs into that summer of 1987, she stumbles upon the trail of a second girl who vanished and was never missed because no one cared enough to see what was happening in plain sight. Her trail could lead right to Katherine’s door.

In a town simmering with divisions and a cast of unforgettable characters, Lowbridge is a heart-wrenching mystery about the girls who are lost, the ones who are mourned and those who are forgotten.

Tony Park
Captain Sannie van Rensburg and safari guide Mia Greenaway are caught in the crossfires of a decades-old feud between five veterans of South Africa’s apartheid-era Border War.

Haunted by the deadly mission that shaped their lives forever, the ex-paratroopers must finally confront their demons, and each other, at the funeral of a comrade in the red dunes of the Kalahari Desert.

But their scars run deep, and as the truth emerges, each man must ask When serving your country, what makes you a hero and what secrets are worth dying for?

Nina Georga
In a small town in balmy Provence, Marie-Jeanne has a gift.
She can see the marks Love has left on the people around her. Glowing faces, hands that shimmer brighter when enclosed in another. Before long, Marie-Jeanne is playing matchmaker.

When her foster father, Francis, sets up a mobile library travelling the many mountain towns of the Nyons region, Marie-Jeanne takes her quest further. Their library offers entertainment, guidance, reassurance and comfort – but for Marie-Jeanne, the books also allow her to bring soulmates together.
The only person that Marie-Jeanne can’t seem to find a partner for is herself. She has no glow of her own, though she waits and waits for it to appear.
Everyone must have a soulmate, surely – but will Marie-Jeanne be able to recognise hers when Love finally comes her way?

Scott Bennet
France, 1919. One year after the guns fell silent across the Western Front, Lieutenant Wilfred Rhodes receives his final classified mission before he can return to Australia. He must end the command of Captain Charlie Kingsley, the unhinged radical leader of the Graves Recovery Unit.

Still haunted by the loss of his platoon in the Battle of Passchendaele, Rhodes infiltrates Kingsley’s unit and works with the war-weary men to exhume the Australian dead. As the peaceful French countryside begins to heal Rhodes, he realises those behind his assignment are hiding something from him about that fateful night in Passchendaele.

Rhodes quickly faces a crossroads as he feels the pressure from his superiors, and the allure of Kingsley’s promise of a new utopian life for him and the soldiers. Tensions mount, old wounds are reopened and the threat of further blood spilled on French soil looms in the air …

Anna Funder
At the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue.

“I’ve always loved Orwell,” Funder writes, “his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on.” So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and work. But then she read about his forgotten wife, and it was a revelation.

Eileen O’Shaughnessy married Orwell in 1936. O’Shaughnessy was a writer herself, and her literary brilliance not only shaped Orwell’s work, but her practical common sense saved his life. But why and how, Funder wondered, was she written out of their story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder re-creates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in London. As she peeks behind the curtain of Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer—and what it is to be a wife.

Marele Day
Jean Kay, my skipper, fellow adventurer, my friend. My brother.
Jean Kay, soldier of fortune, opportunist, embezzler, hijacker. In her youth, amidst the throes of a reckless grief, aspiring Australian writer Marele Day is caught up in a shipwreck adventure and forges an unlikely bond with an international fugitive travelling under a pseudonym. For the next thirty years they correspond before reuniting, both older and wiser, in France.

Marele is now an accomplished crime writer, and while she knew of her travel companion’s previous reputation as ‘the hijacker with a big heart’ and ‘brother to the poor’, she is intrigued to discover his connection to the disappearance of eight million francs and a secret dossier that made global headlines.

Brilliantly crafted, Reckless tells the story of how Marele uncovers the truth about Jean Kay’s identity and motives by piecing together clues from their letters, her diaries and a stash of newspaper clippings, and how, in the process of telling his story, she ultimately makes peace with the reckless ghosts of her past.

Belinda Alexandra
How do you begin your life again when you’ve lost everything you’ve worked for and your dreams have been shattered? That was the question beloved Australian author Belinda Alexandra faced one freezing winter night when she ran from her home in terror, clutching only her wallet, her phone and her latest manuscript on a USB stick.

To pull herself up from rock bottom, Belinda drew strength from the real life women who had inspired her bestselling historical fiction: her mother, Tatiana Morosoff, a White Russian who had fled a home more than once due to wars and revolutions; Virginia Hall, an American who lost her leg in an accident but went on to become one of the most revered Allied agents in World War II France; Carmen Amaya, who despite being born into abject poverty in Barcelona rose to become the greatest Flamenco dancer of all time; Edna Walling, who lost her own dream home in a freak fire but created garden designs that made her one of Australia’s most celebrated landscape designers.

They were women who had faced seemingly insurmountable challenges and found ways to forge ahead on their own terms.