Item category 2: Newmarket - Aussie authors

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...

When plans are upended, who can turn them the right way up? Kind-hearted and practical psychologist Colin Palmer has spent decades helping his clients. Now he's under pressure to retire and hit the road in a new caravan with his wife Joyce. However, when Joyce abruptly heads off on her own advent...

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...

On a small island off the coast of Scotland, an isolated community is grieving. Eighteen-year-old Alan Ferguson was found at the foot of the lighthouse - an apparent suicide. DIs Georgina Lennox and Richard Stewart are sent to investigate. A raging storm keeps them trapped on the island for four ...

When English teacher Brian Chapman accidentally purchases a one-euro mansion after a big night out, it lands him with a headache much bigger than any hangover. Still sore from a recent divorce and armed only with his primary school edition of Personal Italian Grammar, Old Brian sets out to create...

Left alone on the vast cattle station with her baby while her husband, Alex, works the farm, Hallie Donaldson is having trouble adjusting to the flies, dust, snakes and isolation in the Flinders Ranges. At least today, Hallie knows that she and their daughter Ruby can watch Alex on the security c...

When you dig, will you strike gold... or unearth dangerous secrets? After a scandal, investigative reporter Zara Ellison and her partner, policeman Jack Higgins have moved to Kalgoorlie - each struggling with this fresh start. This wild mining town has its own rules, and its inhabitants - drawn b...

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...

In September 1883, the South Australian town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets and enormous dust storms. One of its own has gone missing - six-year-old Denny Wallace - and the whole town is intent on finding him.

When Emily's beautiful cousin Aspen goes missing somewhere in the Outback, no one seems to take it seriously, not even the police. After all, Aspen has a history of drug use and a string of broken relationships to her name. Emily knows that her disappearance is totally out of character, even for ...

"Jimmy Sharman is a conundrum. Raised in a large poor catholic family, becoming a tent boxer at age eleven. He blinds another boxer and is racked by guilt for the rest of his life yet develops an extremely profitable and popular showground fixture. We learn about Sharman's boxing tent spruiking, ...

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...

From the author of the Miles Franklin Award shortlisted Storyland, comes a rich, layered and thrilling novel of love, war and friendship, To Sing of War. 'Transcends the boundaries of historical fiction' Books+Publishing DECEMBER 1944 In New Guinea, a young Australian nurse, Lotte Wyld, chances...

Beat Zen and the art of Dave is the latest travel memoir by Australian author, David McNamara. His new book expands on the world of independent global travel, to capture how the wonderment of an outbound adventure conspires towards an equally profound inner journey. It is a personal account that ...

For years the boglands of Northern Europe have given up bodies of the long-deceased. Bodies that are thousands of years old, uncannily preserved. Bodies with strange injuries that suggest ritual torture and human sacrifice. When a corpse is found in a bog in Galway, Cormac Reilly assumes the find...

The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At eighteen, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and devote her life to...

Khadija is packing up her home of fifty years. In her box of special belongings are the last reminders she has of her son Ahmed, missing for more than twenty years. Her belongings take her back to her village childhood, her marriage and move to Marrakesh, and the birth of Ahmed when she was just ...

Matilda and Lara are half-sisters who share an unreliable mother and a chaotic past. In every other way, though, they are very different from each other. Lara, ten years younger than Matilda, is a model, living and working in Paris - for her, life is expansive, carefree, beautiful, careless. Mati...

Stasya lives in an isolated farming village on the edge of the mysterious Heartwood Forest with her unusual dog for company. Thought odd by the locals, she is tolerated for her rare gift with animals. Engaging with her fellow humans is difficult, with one exception: goatherd Lukas, who shares her...

What happens when a quirky Australian town faces the imminent arrival of a huge fiery comet? Do the residents embrace all possibilities or run like hell? WARNING, WARNING, WARNING. Cactus Bob, a grizzled pensioner in a red beanie, thought surviving a death-roll by a monster saltwater crocodile wa...

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...

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...

Kate Delaney has made the biggest mistake of her life. She picked the wrong guy to humiliate on a girls' night out and now she is living every woman's worst nightmare. Kate finds herself brutalised, bound and gagged in the back of a car being driven god knows where by a man whose name she doesn't...

Jude's life has been about survival. She works on rebuilding - fixes roofs, trucks supplies, transports refugees. Tries to stay free from attachments and obligations. But Jude won't talk about her past. Or her sister Celeste, lost in the tragic failure of a space station that was supposed to save...

Stephen Bolin leaves a bizarre note by his deathbed, asking his sisters to take his body back to his birthplace in Far North Queensland. When they ignore his request, Stephen's corpse makes the nocturnal pilgrimage alone. But what is compelling him and what will he find there? His journey, as a k...

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...

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...

Bird follows Carson, a youmg, cerebral Aboriginal man who traverses his way in and out of the prison system in Western Australia. The story is told through the multiple white characters Carson encounters along his journey. The novel is similar stylistically and thematically to Irvine Welsh's Trai...

The arrival of a hotshot New York composer brings a rare touch of glamour and excitement to the peaceful country town of Fig Tree River. For Leonie, Madison, Sarita and Chrissie, four women involved in the local musical theatre, it's a welcome distraction from the pressures of daily life. Then a ...

Lost to the world for more than four decades, A season on Earth is the essential link between two acknowledged masterpieces by Gerald Murnane: the lyrical account of boyhood in his debut novel, Tamarisk Row, and the revolutionary prose of The Plains. It is Murnane's second novel as it was intende...