Item category 1: General Fiction

Fredy built a wall against suffering in their hearts... At the dark heart of the Holocaust, there was a wooden hut whose walls were painted with cartoons; a place where children sang, staged plays and wrote poetry. Safely inside, but still in the shadow of the chimneys, they were given better foo...

Good News: The worst has already happened. Bad News: Even worse is on the way. This is a fictional theory, a rant, a manifesto, an engagement or disengagement with the times, a record; it is bearing witness, a dramatisation of actual events, a horror-scape, either a monologue or dialogue, a testa...

The young women studying at the Grimaldi yearn for new kinds of life. Monitored by the nuns who run the college, eight of them form a close group, sharing confidences and hopes for the future. But each, too, has her private secrets -- a child from an early love affair, frustrated artistic ambitio...

It's the day before her daughter's wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines. First thing, she loses her job - or quits, depending who you ask. Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door expecting to stay for the festivities. He doesn't even have a suit. Instead, he's brought memori...

1863. After their mother dies, Haidie Richards and her younger brother, Boots, are put to work in an orphanage. Their father left four years earlier to find a gold mine in Colorado Territory, and since then he's sent only three letters. Still, Haidie is certain that he is alive, has struck gold, ...

Warning: You are about to read my utterly biggest secrets. Can I trust you? OK then. I'm Ella, and this is my diary. Ella is on holiday in beautiful Bali! The whole family wear sarongs, and visit super special temples and gardens. Ella even meets girls her own age who are amazing dancers. But whe...

Remember, words are your weapons, they're your tools, your currency. On a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar. A plucky young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic colu...

Andie has no memory of the man who pushed her out of the way of a speeding car. A week before Corals biggest career highlight, her mum has a fall. And the last thing Mara wants is to be assigned to work at the hospital bedside of the much-despised senior partner of her law firm. Andie, Coral and ...

When Russ Callaghan and Aurora Roberts cross paths at a college party, a drinking game results in a passionate one-night stand. Never one to overstay her welcome (or expect much from a man), Aurora slips away before Russ even has the chance to ask her full name. Imagine their surprise when they b...

Three women. Three secrets. A deadly silence. Kate is a psychologist juggling work, finances, children, and her ailing relationship to Ryan, a musician too engrossed with his band to help at home. She finds herself nostalgic about her first love. Tori, the owner of a successful second-hand clothi...

As fall paints the Pennsylvania countryside in flaming colors, Sylvia Bergstrom Compson is contemplating the future of her beloved Elm Creek Quilts. Unexpected financial difficulties have beset them and the Bergstrom family's stately nineteenth-century manor. Now in her eighth decade, Sylvia is d...

The story of 'Paper perfect' explores the Japanese philosophy of wabi sabi and the kintsugi artform in a new context and encourages the reader to consider how mistakes can be converted into something that is more beautiful because of its imperfections.

Novelist, cultural observer and social satirist Lionel Shriver is among the sharpest talents of our age. A writer who embraces 'under-expressed, unpopular or downright dangerous' points of view, she regularly deplores the conformity of thought and attitude that has overtaken society. Bringing tog...

In the Black Mountains of Pakistan, the discovery of an unconscious, unknown man is the first stone in an avalanche of chaos. The head of the village is beset with problems, including the injured stranger and failing to find his way out. His daughter receives a love letter and incurs her father's...

Grace, Zoe and Imogen are three women whose worlds are linked by unseen connections to friends, family and lovers. In this psychological drama, set in contemporary Hobart, they move inexorably towards an event that will change them all forever. The Accident is an insightful exploration of the way...

Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived at her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for the big, impersonal city. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. She reads advice listicles and watches videos online and thinks about how to fit i...

Ella is going on a school trip to Adventure Island where her class will compete in teams to see who will win the big trophy. But then she gets split up from her BFFs, and ends up on a team with her arch rival, Peach. If Ella and Peach can't work together, there's no way their team will win!

Painter Remedios Varo and her lover, poet Benjamin Peret escape the Nazis by fleeing Paris and arriving at a safe house for artists on the Rivieria. Along with Max Ernst, Peggy Guggenheim, and others, the two anxiously wait for exit papers. As the months pass, Remedios begins to sense that the ot...

A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country, from LA to NY. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an en...

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...

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.

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 ...

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...

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...

From Russia's Anna Karenina to Vietnam's Lady Trieu, from Cio-Cio-San to Frankenstein's second creature, suffering, madness, or death is the fate of far too many women in classic literature. Anna Karenina Isn't Dead undoes that. In this anthology of literary women, these women live. Do they have ...

How do you help the people you love create a future you're proud to leave behind? As Lan lies dying, she makes a promise that binds her long into the Beyond. A decade later her teenage granddaughter is caught up in an international storm of outrage that unleashes the rage of a whole, failed gener...

After a year of distance-learning, Emily Sofer finds her world turned upside down: she has to leave the only school she's ever known to attend a public school in Chinatown. For the first time, Emily isn't the only Chinese student around... but looking like everyone else doesn't mean that understa...

Mornington Peninsula, 1999: Wife and now grandmother Joan has checked into the grand old Duchess Hotel to find herself again, having spent thirty-five years being who her husband and family have wanted her to be. Peninsula local and soon-to-be octogenarian Frances is distracting herself from gett...

When 79-year-old Arthur Edwards gathers his family together to share some important news, no one is prepared for the bombshell he drops: he's gay, and after a lifetime in the closet, he's finally ready to come out. Arthur's 21-year-old grandson, Teddy, has a secret of his own: he's also gay, and ...

Elliot. Joe. Tommy. Nathanael. Wren. Oliver. Malik. Zach. Frank. Patrick. Noah. These are the men Margot has loved, liked, lusted over. Since she was seventeen, she's pictured them like stepping stones, each one bringing her closer to finding someone to share her life with and, eventually, father...