Item category 2: Newmarket - Aussie Authors

Leah has a good life. She lives on the Drove, an inner-city cul-de-sac, with her husband, Moses, and their two children. She and her neighbours - the Drovers - look out for each other. Theirs is a safe, community-oriented enclave and that's the way it's going to stay. When itinerants set up camp ...

In the serene setting of Vanuatu's Santo Island, tranquillity shatters when the lifeless body of a French farmer, Guy Simeon, is discovered on the pristine white sands of Champagne Beach. As they delve deeper, a labyrinth of secrets, coercion, and lies emerges. Simeon's missing wife and strained ...

Edinburgh, 1916: Thomas Wrenfether, a rich Scottish industrialist, is offered the opportunity to take on a startling project: to build a paddle steamer from European cherrywood on the other side of the world, in booming Melbourne, Australia. But nothing goes according to plan. Melbourne, 1993: Ma...

Abraham Quin is in his mid-seventies, a migrant, thrice-divorced, a one-time postman and professor, a writer now living alone in the Adelaide Hills. In The Chinese Postman he reflects on his life with what he calls 'the mannered and meditative inaction of age', offering up memories and anxieties,...

It's 1921, and after years of working for Cadbury's at Bournville, Dorothy Adwell is on her way to a new adventure in the colonies, helping to establish the Firm's new Australian factory. A promotion and a fresh start are just what she needs after the horrors of the Great War and the loss of her ...

Things have not been going well for Zoe Ann Weiss. Once a young novelist full of promise, now she has a failed debut under her belt, a mountain of debt, a dead-end job, and an agent who's about to drop her if she doesn't write something new and brilliant soon. Worst of all, she's blocked. Can't-w...

Alice is only nine years old in 1910 when she is sent to the feared Coast Hospital Lazaret at Little Bay in Sydney, a veritable prison where more patients are admitted than will ever leave. She is told that she's visiting her mother, who disappeared one day when Alice was two years old. Once ther...

"Set between the wars, A Cold Season is rich in voice, character and landscape. It follows the story of fourteen-year-old Beth, who is also the narrator. Beth's brother Sam and her father Owens have gone missing in a freak winter storm. In a small house in the foothills of Mount Kosciusko, Beth i...

"Steels Creek is an idyllic retreat in the Sunshine Coast hinterland. It’s a place where everyone knows their neighbours and no one locks their doors. Investigative journalist Lars Nilsson has moved to the settlement for a quiet life, leaving behind a public fall from grace and the crime reportin...

Compassion is the dramatised life story of one of Julie Janson's ancestors who went on trial for stealing livestock in New South Wales, and it is an exciting and violent story of anti-colonial revenge and roaming adventure. A gripping fictive account of Aboriginal life in the 1800s, Compassion fo...

The conversion was Nick's idea. Nick -- so persuasive, ever the optimist, still boyishly handsome. Always on a quest to design the perfect environment, convinced it could heal a wounded soul. The conversion was Nick's idea, but it's Zoe who's here now, in a valley of old coalmines and new vineyar...

The Christmas Contract by Pamela Cook: No-nonsense lawyer turned farmer Bridie Grainger is determined to make a go of her organic produce business, but life is conspiring against her. Her father is calling time on the loan he gave her to set up the farm. Her ex is demanding more time with their f...

The only door in the room was now closed and sitting before me was a murderer, a rapist, an armed robber and a guy serving six years for grievous bodily harm. Each of them had a sharpened pencil in their hands; a potential weapon. I had been forewarned yet I had handed them out willingly. I looke...

Paul Cutler is a former undercover operative, now working off the books for his handler, Malik Khalil. When Cutler is tasked with investigating the disappearance of an Australian marine scientist on a Taiwanese distant water fishing vessel, Cutler realises that the apparent murder he' s investiga...

When a high-profile murder lands literally at her feet, Detective Emilia Hart sees a chance to expand her caseload beyond the endless succession of domestic violence she is forced to investigate. But this is no simple investigation. Another body, turns up, then another. Then more, a lot more. All...

When someone is taken away, what is left behind? All her life, Till has lived in the shadow of the abduction of a childhood friend and her tormented wondering about whether she could have stopped it. When Till, now twenty-three, senses danger approaching again, she flees her past and the hovering...

It's 1975 and at the threshold of his writing career Andy McPherson is navigating how to be fully present both for his partner Jo and their young daughter. When forced to take a part-time teaching job, Andy meets Lang Tzu, a charismatic and intriguing man. Andy is drawn deeper into a dangerous re...

"Tom Edwards is dying, and cranky. He's made his peace with the dying part. But he'd bet his property - the whole ten thousand acres of it - that there'd be no wailing at his funeral. His kids wouldn't be able to chop down a tree, let alone build a coffin to bury him in. Then Tom has an idea ... ...

Miinaa was a young girl when the white ghosts first arrived. She remembers the day they raised a piece of cloth and renamed her homeland 'Bathurst'. Now she lives at Cloverdale and works for a white family who have settled there. The Nugents are kind, but Miinaa misses her miyagan. Her brother, W...

'Islanders must do everything together. We painted ngatu together. We crossed the ocean together. We settled on isles together. We took up Christianity together. We entered into new citizenships together. We became wage workers together. We lived with generations upon generations stacked in fibro...

For years, Leila Whittaker has been the mediator in her family. She smooths ruffled feathers between her sons; endures the volatile moods of their father, the acclaimed Australian artist Ken Black; and even swallows the bitter pill of Ken's endless affairs. All this, for the quiet hum of creative...

Alice Montgomery goes missing in 2015. Seven years later, her best friend Hannah is bouncing from job to job, city to city, forever feeling the need to outrun something, but unsure what. With the niggling need to move nipping at her heels, Hannah decides to return home - a small coastal town in W...

Saskia Wyle spent one sultry European summer on Ile de Re when she was nineteen. The bright salt flats and sun-soaked beaches are now a distant memory, and one she made herself forget after an unspeakable tragedy. But the French heiress she befriended over twenty years ago has left half of her ma...

The body of a local teenage boy is found on the beach of a sleepy northern New South Wales town. David went for an evening swim and got into trouble. At least, that's what it looks like. Three weeks before, Leila, a young backpacker, didn't turn up for her shift at the local cafe. Benny, the owne...

In the dying town of Drylands, Janet Deakin sells papers to lonely locals. At night, in her flat above the newsagency, she attempts to write a novel for a world in which no one reads -- 'full of people, she envisaged, glaring at a screen that glared glassily back.' Drylands is the story of the to...

Max didn't believe in an afterlife. Until he died. Now, as a reluctant ghost trying to work out why he remains, he watches his girlfriend Hannah lost in grief in the flat they shared and begins to realise how much of her life was invisible to him. In the weeks and months before Max's death, Hanna...

A debut novel from one of Australia's most internationally celebrated playwrights, The End and Everything Before It is a kaleidoscopic story about the way love and loss shape a community. Emma watched her mother's kayak disappear among icebergs in the Arctic Sea. Six years later, her brother, who...

When Yael Silver's world comes crashing down, she looks to the past for answers and finds solace in surprising places. An unconventional new friendship, a seaside safe space and an unsettling amount of dairy help her to heal, as she wrestles with her demons and some truly terrible erotic literatu...

Cassie Prince lives in a beautiful beach suburb with her successful husband Jon and their children Ellie and Danny. Life is perfect, right? Except now she's reached her mid-forties, she can't help wondering what happened to the fun-loving, sexy and accomplished woman she used to be. This isn't...

Botanical artist Jane Saville is devastated when her manipulative mother banishes her to the countryside to protect someone else's honour. Isolated far from home, she is forced to live an impoverished, secretive life to save the family from public shame. Guy Attwood is heir to a fortune, but pref...