Yuwonderie’s seven founding families have lorded it over their district for a century, growing ever more rich and powerful. But now—in startling circumstances—one of their own is found dead in a ditch and homicide detectives Ivan Lucic and Nell Buchanan are sent to investigate. Could the murder be connected to the execution of the victim’s friend thirty years ago—another member of The Seven—or even to the long-forgotten story of a servant girl on the brink of the Great War?
In June 2021, the whole world was listening as Britney Spears spoke in open court. The impact of sharing her voice—her truth—was undeniable, and it changed the course of her life and the lives of countless others. The Woman in Me reveals for the first time her incredible journey—and the strength at the core of one of the greatest performers in pop music history.
Brisbane, 1985: A lost father, a mute brother, a junkie mum, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crim for a babysitter. It’s not as if Eli Bell’s life isn’t complicated enough already. He’s just trying to follow his heart and understand what it means to be a good man, but fate keeps throwing obstacles in his way – not the least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary Brisbane drug dealer.
Defence attorney Mickey Haller has agreed to represent a woman who is in prison for killing her husband, a sheriff’s deputy, and Haller enlists his half-brother, retired LAPD Detective Harry Bosch, as investigator. Even after four years in prison, his new client maintains her innocence. Reviewing the case, Bosch sees something that doesn’t add up and senses the sheriff’s department close ranks as he pursues the truth.
If, like Kane, you’re a Denied Access Area spy for the CIA, then boundaries have no meaning. Your function is to go in, do whatever is required, and get out again – by whatever means necessary. You know when to run, when to hide – and when to shoot. But some places don’t play by the rules. Some places are too dangerous, even for a man of Kane’s experience. The badlands where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet are such a place – a place where violence is the only way to survive.
Under the clamour of the Sydney Harbour Bridge being built nearby, Grace Fairweather is working in her father’s grocery shop in The Rocks when she begins making her own confectionery. Her colourful creations of toffees, lollies and chocolates soon become crowd favourites, and Grace begins to dream of one day opening her own sweetshop.
When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book. Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other. Obviously, that didn’t pan out.
It is 1929. The world is about to change. Finn Evans is a successful Boston banker harboring a secret that threatens to unravel his carefully constructed idyllic life. Isabelle Lazar, a young Ukrainian farmer, endures unspeakable hardships in her homeland as she fights to save her family from the Soviet Union’s iron grip. Barely escaping the Terror-Famine, she washes up alone on America’s distant shores.
Grace is both mysterious and hard to define. It can be found when we create ways to find meaning and dignity in connection with each other, building on our shared humanity, being kinder, bigger, better with each other. If, in its crudest interpretation, karma is getting what you deserve, then grace is the opposite: forgiving the unforgivable, favouring the undeserving, loving the unlovable.
In 1977, twenty-seven-year-old Robyn Davidson set off with a dog and four camels to cross 1,700 miles of Australian desert to the sea. A life of almost constant travelling followed. From the deserts of Australia, to Sydney’s underworld; from Sixties street life, to the London literary scene; from migrating with nomads in Tibet, to ‘marrying’ an Indian prince, Davidson’s quest was motivated by an unquenchable curiosity about other ways of seeing and understanding the world.
There’s nothing quite so beautiful as Paris in the spring; and when you add in the chance to learn the French way of food, in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, who can resist? Not Gabi Picabea or Kate Evans who have come from Australia to Sylvie Morel’s Paris Cooking School. Both are at a crossroads, and learning to cook the French way in Paris, far away from all their troubles, seems like the perfect escape.
The quiet coastal community of Pippi Beach is rocked when a party of young Hollywood movie stars and influencers arrives for the summer. Like most of the locals, mum Lydia is thrilled but her teenage daughter Lily finds the Hollywood types are superficial and arrogant – especially Dorian Khan, the most famous of them all. She is soon to discover that first impressions can be deceiving.
1992. Two strangers bring a hospital patient a list of names. They ask him for one more, but it’s a question the patient can’t answer. Minutes later he is dispatched through the 12th floor window. His death generates some unexpected attention. That attention comes from the Secretary of Defence, who brings in an inter-agency task force to investigate. Jack Reacher, recently demoted from Major to Captain, is assigned as the Army’s representative.
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.
From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter.
Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside. The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organisation that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.
A girl and her mother have been on the run for sixteen years, from police and the monster they left in their kitchen with a knife in his throat. They’ve found themselves a home inside a van with four flat tyres parked in a scrapyard by the edge of the Brisbane River.
The House that Joy Built is about the transformative power of finding joy through creativity, and offers a jump-start for anyone whose desire to create is flattened by fear. Fear of feeling vulnerable, of criticism and judgement from others, of not being good enough, of having ‘bad’ ideas, of being ‘too much’. This book is for everyone who has ever felt stuck creatively. It is for those yearning to write, and also for anyone who longs to create but doesn’t know how to find a way into, or back to their imagination.
For as long as they can remember, Jessica, Norah and Alicia have been told how lucky they are. Rescued from family tragedies and raised by a loving foster mother on an idyllic farming estate, they were given an elusive second chance of a happy family life. But their childhood wasn’t the fairy tale everyone thinks it was. And when a body is discovered under the home they grew up in, the foster sisters find themselves thrust into the spotlight as key witnesses. Or are they prime suspects?
All Hanna Fischer ever wanted to do was to study physics under the great Albert Einstein. But when, as a teenager in 1919, her life is suddenly turned upside-down, she is catapulted into a new and extraordinary life – as a secretary, a scientist, a sister and a spy. From racist gangs in Berlin to gangsters in New York City, Nazis in the 1930s and Hitler’s inner circle during the Second World War, Hanna will encounter some of history’s greatest minds and most terrible moments, all while desperately trying to stay alive.
High-powered businesswoman Lana Rubicon has a lot to be proud of: her keen intelligence, impeccable taste, and the L.A. real estate empire she’s built. But when she finds herself trapped 300 miles north of the city, convalescing in a sleepy coastal town with her adult daughter Beth and teenage granddaughter Jack, Lana is stuck counting otters instead of square footage—and hoping that boredom won’t kill her before the cancer does.
Tessa is a thoroughbred. A young, brilliant barrister from a working-class background now at the top of her game: defending, cross-examining and lighting up the shadows of doubt in any case. The law is a game and she is its most talented player. One sickening night, though, Tessa finds herself in a position countless women – one in three – have been in before her. And she’s faced with a gut-wrenching, life-changing decision. Will she take the stand to testify about her rape, with the full awareness that the system has not been built to protect her?
Hera Stephen is clawing through her mid-twenties, working as an underpaid comment moderator in an overly air-conditioned newsroom by day and kicking around Sydney with her two best friends by night. Instead of money or stability, she has so far accrued one ex-girlfriend, several hundred hangovers and a dog-eared novel collection.
An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing. As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home.
Nedd Brockmann isn’t afraid to dream big. Fresh after running fifty marathons in fifty days, the twenty-three-year-old had an idea: a 4000-kilometre run across Australia, averaging 100 kilometres per day with the aim of completing it in the fastest known time of 43 days. He wasn’t chasing fame or public recognition. He just wanted to test his limits and raise a million dollars for homelessness in the process.
It is February 1942. Amid the turmoil of World War II, a group of Australian Army nurses, among them Nesta James and Vivian Bullwinkel, have just arrived in Singapore. The women have fled there from Malaya, where they had been stationed to care for Allied troops – and they are reluctant to move on again. Their hope is to remain in the beleaguered British colony to continue their mission of treating the sick and wounded.