Item category 2: Newmarket - Aussie authors

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...

The Soviet Union 1938: Lavrentiy Beria, 'The Boss' of the Georgian republic, nervously prepares a Black Sea resort for a visit from 'The Boss of Bosses', his fellow Georgian Josef Stalin. Under escalating pressure from enemies and allies alike, never certain who he can trust, Beria slowly but sur...

At seventeen, Maeve is naively single-minded about pursuing a life in the theatre. After a rigorous audition process, she secures a position at one of the most competitive drama schools in the country. Leaving behind the security of her childhood home in Queensland, Maeve moves to Melbourne and d...

Kate arrives on the wild, remote island of Rathlin in the freezing Irish Channel for a ten-day writers' retreat. Plagued by memories she can't unravel and desperate to understand the breakdown of her marriage, Kate is determined to leave the retreat with answers. As the retreat's director uses te...

After thirteen years it's time for Mac to return home to face a past he's been running from. A past his best friend Dave has been unable to escape. It was 1990, their final year of school and with an INXS soundtrack, life was moving on. Bus stops, homework and football were giving way to pay slip...

From horse thief to the merchant queen of Sydney Cove, how did one woman rise so far? Born into poverty in eighteenth-century England, her future was predetermined. But throughout her life Molly Thistle refused to follow the path laid out before her. Her headstrong nature, disdain for convention ...

Finn and her best friend Daphne have grown up together in the Blue Mountains, NSW. Bonded by both having lost a younger sister to suicide, they've always had a close -- sometimes too close -- friendship. Now in their twenties, their lives have finally started to diverge: Daphne is at university a...

It's 1989 and for a young Jewish-Australian violinist, a scholarship to Berlin is the chance of a lifetime. Germany is on the verge of change as the wall is torn down, and Susanna is swept along by the tumultuous event. Under the careful guidance of Stefan Heinemeyer, her renowned violin teacher ...

Melbourne, 1945. Born into a well-to-do family, Maggie Johnson wants freedom from her parents' strict conservative beliefs and their unbending desire for her to marry the right sort of man. Instead, Maggie longs to forge her own path in life. Lil Kelly, who lives in the slums, works tirelessly to...

Satanists in Perth. Panthers in Sydney. Inner Melbourne's secret morgue. Australia is stuffed full of stories that need to be taken with a big spoon of salt. Stories that we all know are silly, but that we also just can't help sharing. In Great Australian Urban Legends, Eamon Evans presents you w...

Margot and her sister Roslyn have lived side by side in a little town in the Adelaide Hills most of their lives, supporting each other through thick and thin. Then their neighbour Gunter dies. Surprisingly, his will asks that his house and vineyard be sold and that Roslyn donate the money to a ch...

'I saw my mother for a long time after she died. I would see her out windows, or in the corner of my eye. Always in the periphery, always a dim blur, but unmistakably my mother, the herness skating through every line and flicker'. Charlotte (Lot) and Ellen (Nelly) are sisters who were once so clo...

Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed. Because on this ordinary domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are...

You only take the High Wire if you're desperate -- or up to no good. A notorious unmarked track through outback Australia, the "Wire" crosses slabs of lawless land, body-dumping grounds and mobile phone blackspots. Harvey Buck is certainly desperate. Racing to be with his dying girlfriend, he enc...

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims' families, but its impact travels even further, into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into...

Pushing fifty and reeling from an ugly divorce, Paul has decided it's time for an adventure. With the Bee Gees on the radio and the open road ahead, he sets out into the middle of nowhere, open to whatever comes. But things take a sinister turn when he impulsively decides to pick up a hitchhiker....

Focused on pursuing her dream of becoming a doctor in suburban Sydney, Taylor doesn't have time for love-yet it seems life has other plans when she catches the eye of charismatic Zac. However, betrayal and the financial implications of her parents' impending divorce could destroy both her plans a...

'Translation is longing. You never get it right.' Young academic and emerging translator Fay takes her mother on a package tour holiday to France to celebrate her birthday. It's a chance for the two of them to take a break from work and have a little fun, but they both find it hard to relax. Her ...

Camille is a nurse specialising in supporting families through the difficult decision to donate the organs of their dying loved ones. Camille's mother is a gifted but uncompromising transplant surgeon determined to make it in a man's world until her own life falls apart. And Camille herself is a ...

When Esther wakes with a breathing tube down her throat, she has no idea where she is or how she got there. In terrible physical condition, Esther is tended to by Grace, the only other person in the building. In the half-consciousness of her recovery, Esther is desperate to get back to her young ...

In 2027, Angela Monahan is grappling with the decision of whether to take advantage of a new health service that promises a healthier, stronger baby through gene editing. With a semi-famous mother who has a substance abuse problem and a husband ravaged by the pandemic, there's plenty in her famil...

'The heir to the D'Adamo Family Trust must be the youngest, legal-aged, married male.' - fifteenth-century inheritance clause The time has come. In order to secure the future of his family estate and fix his broken relationship with his father, workaholic lawyer Matthew D'Adamo needs a wife. Ente...

When we spoke, I never knew what Olive would reveal to me. There were nights where she would lie next to me and pour herself out into the darkness, and others where it seemed she was hardly there at all.' Millie is in her final year at a Catholic girls' school, subdued by the conformity of her li...

When human remains are discovered in a forest, police are baffled, the locals are shocked and one group of old friends starts to panic. Their long-held secret is about to be uncovered. It all began in 1999 when sixteen-year-old Aaron ran away from home, drawing his friends into an unforeseeable c...

Handywoman Barb Young has lived in the sleepy coastal town of Bullford Point for over fifty years and frankly, in that time, not much has happened, unless you count that business where a bush turkey managed to board the ferry a couple of years ago. When Joe Griffiths returns from Sydney after six...

Whether it's cancer, a car accident, grief, a natural disaster or a family tragedy, we all experience trauma, and simply surviving takes everything we have. But what happens after that, when you realise that surviving survival might be harder still? With its combination of personal stories and ex...

Connie Mulligan, daughter of a fourth-generation Tasmanian dairy farmer, feels like she doesn't belong, anywhere. She's got big dreams and big ideas, but she made a mess of her university degree and has been sent home in disgrace. The man who was responsible for her failure won't get out of her n...

A tropical paradise is her birthright … but will its dark secrets destroy her dreams? In the 1960s, a tropical island in the Coral Sea hides dark secrets behind its primordial beauty. Thalia – 'Tally' – Ramsey has grown up barefoot, wild and free on the island purchased by her maternal grandfathe...

It's 1914 and Molly Dunnage wants to see change: at home, at work and in underwear.Her burgeoning corsetry business is starting to take off, thanks to some high-profile supporters. She's marching with Melbourne's suffragists for better conditions for women everywhere. And her family - her eccentr...

Stan Grant is talking to his country in a new way. In his most poetic and inspiring work yet, the Wiradjuri writer offers us a means of moving beyond the binaries and embracing a path to peace and forgiveness rooted in the Wiradjuri spiritual practice of Yindyamarra - deep silence and respect. Mu...