Donna Leon
In the thirty-second installment of Donna Leon’s bestselling series, a connection to Guido Brunetti’s own youthful past helps solve a mysterious murder On a cold November evening, Guido Brunetti and Paola are up late when a call from his colleague Ispettore Vianello arrives, alerting the Commissario that a hand has been seen in one of Venice’s canals. The body is soon found, and Brunetti is assigned to investigate the murder of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant.

Because no official record of the man’s presence in Venice exists, Brunetti is forced to use the city’s far richer sources of information: gossip and the memories of people who knew the victim. Curiously, he had been living in a small house on the grounds of a palazzo owned by a university professor, in which Brunetti discovers books revealing the victim’s interest in Buddhism, the revolutionary Tamil Tigers, and the last crop of Italian political terrorists, active in the 1980s.
As the investigation expands, Brunetti, Vianello, Commissario Griffoni, and Signora Elettra each assemble pieces of a puzzle—random information about real estate and land use, books, university friendships—that appear to have little in common, until Brunetti stumbles over something that transports him back to his own student days, causing him to reflect on lost ideals and the errors of youth, on Italian politics and history, and on the accidents that sometimes lead to revelation.

Sandie Docker
HOPE
Single mother Sarah is guilt-ridden when an accident leaves her young daughter Melody seriously injured and their once music-filled lives silent. When she discovers her grandmother Rosalie’s war correspondence, she thinks she might have found a way to save her family, but it will require a leap of faith …

HEARTACHE
In 1945 Rosalie is desperate to forge a career as a journalist, and taking photos for soldiers serving in the war might just lead to the job of her dreams. But when two brothers she’s been corresponding with come home to Redgum River, her life is turned upside down, and she flees, vowing to never return.

HEALING
Decades on, the hope that a music retreat can help Melody lures the three generations of women to Redgum River, where Sarah draws together the threads of Rosalie’s past. A heartbreaking family mystery comes to light, and they discover that the ghosts of the past can lead them to their future, and they might all be more in tune than they first thought.

Welcome to the Redgum River Retreat, where harmony is found when hope is lost.

Dominic Smith
A nearly abandoned Italian village, the family that stayed, and long-buried secrets from World War II. On a hilltop in Umbria sits Valetto. Once a thriving village-and a hub of resistance and refuge during World War II-centuries of earthquakes, landslides and the lure of a better life have left it neglected. Only ten residents remain, including the widows Serafino – three eccentric sisters and their steely centenarian mother – who live quietly in their medieval villa. Then their nephew and grandson, Hugh, a historian, returns.

But someone else has arrived before him, laying claim to the cottage where Hugh spent his childhood summers. The unwelcome guest is the captivating and no-nonsense Elisa Tomassi, who asserts that the family patriarch, Aldo Serafino, a resistance fighter whom her own family harboured, gave the cottage to them in gratitude. Like so many threads of history, this revelation unravels a secret – a betrayal, a disappearance and an unspeakable act of violence – that has impacted Valetto across generations. Who will answer for the crimes of the past?

Dominic Smith’s Return to Valetto is a riveting journey into one family’s long-buried story, a page-turning excavation of the ruins of history and our commitment to justice in a fragile world. For fans of Amor Towles, Anthony Doerr and Jess Walter, it is a deeply human and transporting testament to the possibility of love and understanding across gaps of all kinds – even time.

Lynne Olson
In 1941, a thirty-one-year-old Frenchwoman born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour became the leader of a vast Resistance organization–the only woman to hold such a role. Brave, independent, and a lifelong rebel against her country’s conservative, patriarchal society, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was temperamentally made for the job. Her group’s name was Alliance, but the Gestapo dubbed it Noah’s Ark because its agents used the names of animals as their aliases. Marie-Madeleine’s codename was Hedgehog.

No other French spy network lasted as long or supplied as much crucial intelligence as Alliance–and as a result, the Gestapo pursued them relentlessly, capturing, torturing, and executing hundreds of its three thousand agents, including her own lover and many of her key spies. Fourcade had to move her headquarters every week, constantly changing her hair color, clothing, and identity, yet was still imprisoned twice by the Nazis. Both times she managed to escape, once by stripping naked and forcing her thin body through the bars of her cell. The mother of two young children, Marie-Madeleine hardly saw them during the war, so entirely engaged was she in her spy network, preferring they live far from her and out of harm’s way.

In Madame Fourcade’s Secret War, Lynne Olson tells the tense, fascinating story of Fourcade and Alliance against the background of the developing war that split France in two and forced its citizens to live side by side with their hated German occupiers.

Christine Kenneally
The shocking secret history of twentieth-century orphanages—which for decades hid violence, abuse, and deaths within their walls. For much of the twentieth century, a series of terrible events—abuse, both physical and psychological, and even deaths—took places inside orphanages. The survivors have been trying to tell their astonishing stories for a long time, but disbelief, secrecy, and trauma have kept them from breaking through. For ten years, Christine Kenneally has been on a quest to uncover the harrowing truth.

Centering her story on St. Joseph’s, a Catholic orphanage in Vermont, Kenneally has written a stunning account of a series of crimes and abuses. But her work is not confined to one place. Following clues that take her into the darkened corners of several institutions across the globe, she finds a trail of terrifying stories and a courageous group of survivors who are seeking justice. Ghosts of the Orphanage is an incredible true crime story and a reckoning with a past that has stayed buried for too long, with tragic consequences.

Françoise Malby-Anthony

Françoise Malby-Anthony is the owner of a game reserve in South Africa with a remarkable family of elephants whose adventures have touched hearts around the world. The herd’s feisty matriarch Frankie knows who’s in charge at Thula Thula, and it’s not Francoise. But when Frankie becomes ill, and the authorities threaten to remove or cull some of the herd if the reserve doesn’t expand, Françoise is in a race against time to save her beloved elephants . . .

The joys and challenges of a life dedicated to conservation are vividly described in The Elephants of Thula Thula . The search is on to get a girlfriend for orphaned rhino Thabo – and then, as his behaviour becomes increasingly boisterous, a big brother to teach him manners. Françoise realizes a dream with the arrival of Savannah the cheetah – an endangered species not seen in the area since the 1940s – and finds herself rescuing meerkats kept as pets. But will Thula Thula survive the pandemic, an invasion from poachers and the threat from a mining company wanting access to its land?

As Françoise faces her toughest years yet, she realizes once again that with their wisdom, resilience and communal bonds, the elephants have much to teach us.

Russell Cooper
This entertaining and revealing memoir charts the evolution of the grazier turned politician Russell Cooper through his ‘fires of experience’ from life on the land to the halls of State Parliament.

He writes candidly about his youth, the people and the Party that influenced him politically, providing a rare insight into his trademark decisive approach to Queensland’s prisons and police powers and to the nation shaping event of gun law reform.

Russell Cooper writes like he speaks, at pace and without fear – his distinctive voice and turn of phrase hits the page and the reader. He addresses some mis-truths, misunderstandings and misgivings with surprising honesty, from his heady days in the Young Country Party to taking on the top job for the Queensland Nationals.

Gregory Blake
The Eureka Stockade is the epic account of the battle for the Eureka Stockade, an iconic moment in Australian history. On the chilly dawn morning of 3 December 1854 British soldiers and police of the Victorian colonial government attacked and stormed a crudely-built fortification erected by insurgent gold miners at the Eureka lead on the Ballarat Gold Diggings. The fighting was intense, the carnage appalling and the political consequences of the affair profound.

This book, for the first time, examines in great detail the actual military events that unfolded during the twenty minutes of deadly fighting at Eureka. Many of the old assumptions about what occurred that day are turned on the heads, raising in their places provocative questions. Were the intentions of the Eureka diggers as pacific as tradition insists? How was it that men supposedly poorly armed and taken completely by surprise in their sleep were able to deliver ‘sharp and well directed’ fire on their attackers? How close, in fact did the assaulting infantry come to failing in their task, and why has the pivotal part played by the police in the battle been ignored in every retelling of the Eureka story? Why have the Americans, who played a decisive part in the defense of the stockade been all but ignored?

The author argues convincingly that Eureka was not a wanton massacre of innocents, as it has been portrayed. Rather it was a hard fought military engagement. Eureka was a decisive moment in Australian history and in this book it comes alive in a rousing and original manner.

James Patterson
Detective Lindsay Boxer put serial killer Evan Burke behind bars. Now a new killer has recreated Burke’s most infamous crimes-and disappeared without a trace. Detective Lindsay Boxer put serial killer Evan Burke in jail.

Reporter Cindy Thomas put Burke on the bestseller list, in her true-crime book about the case.

An obsessed fan is studying every detail-and committing fresh horrors that carry Burke’s signature.

Now Lindsay’s tracking an elusive suspect, one who’s penning a deadly playbook featuring Cindy’s name in blood-red ink.

Nikki Mottram
Fleeing problems in her own marriage, child protection worker Dana Gibson leaves Sydney for a job in the Queensland town of Toowoomba. Her first house call is to nearby Crows Nest to assess the children of Sandra Kirby, which results in her getting both her new boss and a local detective offside. Dana soon learns that, in the country, city rules do not apply.

When Sandra and her best friend are found shot dead, Dana is drawn into an investigation that will force her to strip away the friendly veneer of small-town life, while grappling with ghosts of her own. As buried secrets, bitter tensions and corruption come to light, how far will locals go to stop her uncovering the truth of what happened?