Item category 1: General Fiction

Hubert Bird is not alone in being alone. He just needs to realise it. In weekly phone calls to his daughter in Australia, widower Hubert Bird paints a picture of the perfect retirement, packed with fun, friendship and fulfilment. But Hubert Bird is lying. The truth is day after day drags by witho...

Isabelle Duprees is one of Forbes' most powerful self-made women and has built a reputation as one of New York's savviest investors and sharpest advisors. With a penthouse overlooking Central Park, an open invitation to any event she wishes to attend and a weekly date with a man who won't ask too...

This is supposedly the fictional biography of a street storyteller by the name of Ah Sin, active during the gold-digging days of the 1850s and 1860s in Victoria, Australia, told by Zhang Baohui, a mainland Chinese student working on a PhD thesis in creative writing. As Baohui delves deeper into A...

Morgan Flowers has spent their adolescence following all the rules. Raised by their neuro-divergent father Julian and recently deceased grandmother, nonbinary Morgan grew up painfully aware of all they needed to do to stay out of trouble and maintain their scholarship, and of their mother Zoe's a...

Maddy is sixteen. She has loyal friends, a mother with whom she's unusually close, a father she's never met, devoted grandparents, and a crush on a boy named Jack. Maddy also has cancer. Deeply curious, wry, and vivacious, she's poised at the outset of adulthood, ready to untangle all the mysteri...

In nine stories spanning from the end of the twentieth century to the end of the world as we know it, he explores our youthful years through a character of each of the ages between sixteen and twenty-four-ages oft tick-boxed together. Set in shiny cities, stuffy universities and other alternative...

Sneha tries on adulthood like an ill-fitting suit. Moving to a new city, she embraces all that it has to offer: friends that feel like family, gay bars, house parties and new romances. But when painful secrets rear their heads, corporate jobs go off the rails and evictions loom, Sneha and her com...

Violet helps her sixteen-year-old sister, Lily, travel to an infant asylum in Philadelphia so Lily can have her child in secret. They do not know the asylum's physician is experimenting on the girls with eugenics. After five years, both women are back in Scranton finding their way in marriage and...

Health and wellbeing brought Olive, Elsie and Bree together. After five years, their bustling wellness centre is demanding expansion. A beautiful federation house nestled among the picturesque backdrop of their small town is the perfect place to grow their business. But they don't count on their ...

Twelve-year-old Alba doesn't want to live with her estranged grandmother in Barcelona. She wants to stay with her mom, even if that means enduring her dad's cutting comments to them both. But in her new home, Alba forms a close relationship with her grandmother, gains a supportive father figure a...

After growing up with her life being chronicled and monetized by her entrepreneurial step-mother, Anuri escapes as a young adult but vows to fight the cycle of abuse and save her younger sister from a similar fate.

When Sarah falls for Matthew, she falls hard. So it doesn't matter that he's twenty years older. That he sees her only in secret. That, slowly but surely, she's sacrificing everything else in her life to be with him. Sarah's friends are worried. Her father can't understand how she could allow her...

California Poppy has been dropped off, yet again, with an unsuspecting relative. This time it's her eccentric Great-Aunt Monica, a woman she's never even met. Aunt Monica has no idea what to do with an eleven-year-old, so she puts California to work researching their ancestor, the once-famous eti...

When a freak accident kills a driver on the remote roads outside Duluth, Jonathan Stride is disturbed to discover that the victim appears to be a ghost, with a false identity and no evidence to suggest who he really was. What's worse, the man has a gun locked in the trunk, and it has recently bee...

Mykaela Saunders poses the question, "What might country, community and culture look like in the Tweed if Gooris reasserted their sovereignty?" Each of the stories in Always Will Be is set in its own future version of the Tweed. In one, a group of girls plot their escape from a home they have no ...

I have so many super-amazing things to write about! I'll tell you all about them: Everyone at school is doing super-amazing tricks on the play equipment and we are going to perform an acrobat show. An awesome Circus Skills Workshop has come to town and they will teach us wild gymnastics tricks. B...

One hot summer day, stuck in traffic on her way to pick up the cake for her daughter's sixteenth birthday party, Grace Adams snaps. She doesn't scream or break something or cry or curl into a ball. She simply abandons her car in traffic and walks away. But not from her life, towards it. Towards t...

"A family fractures along the political fault lines of the 1960s, setting off a sequence of events ricocheting from anti-Vietnam activism to the Apollo program, in this sprawling multigenerational novel"-- Provided by publisher.

In Rupert Everett's first collection of stories, he takes us on an exhilarating journey with a cast of extraordinary characters. A blackly humorous story of a chaotic and emotional funeral in Paris. Oscar Wilde's last night in Paris, vividly evocative, unflinching and elegiac. A middle-aged Russi...

"Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulen...

Singapore, 1951. When Josephina is a girl, her parents lock her in a room with the father of the boy to whom she's betrothed. What happens next will determine the lives of generations to come. New Zealand, 1984. Josephina and her family leave Sri Lanka for New Zealand. But their new home is not w...

It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22.00 Greenwich Mean Time when a worm entered the computerised control systems of hundreds of Australian prisons and released the locks in many places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could no...

Danny - formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam - is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he's been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vega...

It's midnight on Ana Koehl's sixtieth birthday, and she is taking stock. Nine years have passed since she last had sex with her kind-hearted but pot-addicted husband, seven since she began an affair with a magnetic gonzo journalist. She's gratified by her work as a book doula, yes, but equally bu...

ADVENTURE STORIES. Josh and Danny have gone for a nice day out at the zoo. Or, should that be, a nice, experimental, day out at the zoo? Petty's developed a new SWITCH spray for snakes! And Josh and Danny are willing volunteers. Things start to go a bit wrong though when they fail to SWITCH back ...

A grandson tries to learn the family story. But what kind of story is it? Is it a prison memoir, about the grandfather imprisoned without charge or trial by a revolutionary government? Is it an oral history of the grandmother left behind to look after the children? Or is it a love story? A detect...

Sylvie and Gabe meet and fall in love at boarding school in Northern California when they are just teenagers. Their headmaster is the enigmatic and mysterious Dr Keller, a man obsessed with the idea that people's waking stress and trauma can be cured in their dreams. The young couple can't help b...

Almost two hundred years ago, Abraham, an illiterate urchin, scavenges on a Suffolk beach and dreams of running away to sea. Naomi, a seventeen-year-old seamstress, sits primly in a second class carriage on the train from Sussex to London and imagines a new life in the big city. George, a private...

Grandpa and Noah are sitting on a bench in a square that gets smaller every day. The square is both strange and familiar, full of their lives' odds and ends. Here they share jokes, discuss their love of mathematics and Grandpa recalls falling in love with his wife and how he dreads the day when h...