Item category 1: Historical Fiction

Dorothy and her family have moved to the city, and life is very different to the rural one she has known. Ruby Road is bustling - full of families and children, horse-drawn carts and even a mysterious dog. Best of all her new home has a secret writing room that only she knows about. There are man...

It is 1925 and Bert Mueller and his German-Australian family have moved from Ipswich to their new house at 11 Ruby Road. Bert's father has been deported to Germany after the Great War, and with Dad still absent, Bert is unsure about moving away. But the city means opportunity and jobs for his mot...

The rascally Thomas of Hookton, aka Le Batard, and his band of not-so-merry mercenaries are bidden by the Earl of Northhampton to unearth the lost sword of Saint Peter in this recreation of the Battle of the Poitiers in 1356 wherein a severely outnumbered English army defeats the French and captu...

The year is 1794. A young nobleman, Eric Three Roses, languishes in hospital. Some think he would be just at home in the madhouse across the road. Ridden with guilt, he spends his nights writing down memories of his lost love who died on their wedding night. Her mother also mourns her and when no...

The year is 1795 and evil lurks in the winding alleys of eighteenth-century Stockholm. The sinister, vengeful landowner, Tycho Ceton, remains at large after he set a devastating fire that claimed many lives. In 1795, the third and final instalment of Niklas Natt och Dag's historical trilogy, we a...

The German planes patrolled in hunting squads. They flew fast fighting craft streaking across the sky in tight formation. The greatest of them was the Red Baron, the deadliest ace on the Front. Hed shot down twenty-one of our planes in a single month. And now we were in his firing line. The war i...

With Russia out of the war, the Germans have sent all the troops to the Western Front. Almost defeated, a small group of Australians fight to hold the enemy back at Villers-Brettoneux. Weary after years of fighting and deadlock, Ned and his mates know that the war will be lost if they can't turn ...

"Charlotte Sauvin has always seen the world differently. At home on 33 Place Brugmann, in the heart of Brussels, her father and her closest friends and neighbours - the Raphaels from the fourth floor, and Masha from the fifth - have ensured her secret is safe. But when the Nazis invade Belgium, a...

The rebels will be hanged at dawn, and their brotherhood is already plotting revenge. Manchester, 1867: Stephen Doyle, an Irish-American veteran of the Civil War, arrives from New York with a thirst for blood. He has joined the Fenians, a secret society intent on ending British rule in Ireland by...

The rebels will be hanged at dawn, and their brotherhood is already plotting revenge. Stephen Doyle, an Irish-American veteran of the Civil War, arrives in Manchester from New York with a thirst for blood. He has joined the Fenians, a secret society intent on ending British rule in Ireland by any...

1924. When Anastasia's beloved mother dies, she has no choice but to go to rural Skimpole and move in with 'the Aunt' - too fearsome for a first name, an outcast from the village who lives in a dilapidated mansion with two servants and an unruly pack of dogs. The many mysteries of Skimpole are ir...

Caroline lives in two eras simultaneously - disguised as a pirate in 1727 and hunting down mobsters during Prohibition. The secret to her time-crossing gift lies with her mother, who disappeared in the Caribbean. While searching for her, Caroline finds more questions than answers as she embarks o...

London, 1815: Lady Petra Forsyth, daughter of the Earl of Holbrook, has made a shocking proclamation. After losing her beloved fiancé in an accident three years earlier, Petra sees no reason to cede her wealth and freedom to any man now that the love of her life is gone. Instead, she plans to con...

1814: Ashore on leave, Captain Sir Thomas Kydd learns of a dismal harvest and general hardship among the population. In Germany, Napoleon Bonaparte is celebrating victories that once again make his name feared throughout Europe. An armistice is signed and while the Allies lick their wounds Bonapa...

Follow Hermes, the mischievous young messenger god, as he journeys through the fascinating, colourful world of Greek mythology, from Olympus and Hades to Parnassus and beyond. Perseus, Medusa, Jason and Pegasus are just some of the remarkable characters he meets along the way.

Emily Leland sheds no tears when her abusive husband is killed in a bar fight, but what awaits her back home in Sweetwater Crossing is far from the welcome and comfort she expected. First she discovers her father has died under mysterious circumstances. Then the house where the new schoolteacher ...

Restless, ambitious Ilyas was stolen from his parents by the Schutzruppe askari, the German colonial troops; after years away, he returns to his village to find his parents gone, and his sister Afiya given away. Hamza was not stolen, but was sold; he has come of age in the schutztruppe, at the ri...

In this 1884 novel, the last scion of a once-powerful family retreats from his bourgeois life in Paris to an isolated villa where he spends his days in intellectual and aesthetic contemplation. A classic account of the quest for enlarged experience and new sensations, Against Nature scandalized V...

London, 1938. Bookseller Gertie Bingham is facing difficult times, having just lost her beloved husband, Harry, and with a lingering sadness at never having been able to have a child of her own. Struggling to face running the bookshop she and Harry opened together, Gertie is preparing to sell up ...

As the bombs began to fall, the book club kept their hopes alive... London, 1938. Bookseller Gertie Bingham is facing difficult times, having just lost her beloved husband, Harry, and with a lingering sadness at never having been able to have a child of her own. Struggling to face running the boo...

Will Stewart is one of many who have left their old lives behind to seek their fortunes in New Zealand's last great gold rush. The conditions are hostile and the outlook bleak, but he must push on in his uncertain search for the elusive buried treasure. Rose is about to arrive on the shores of So...

Consisting of Justine , Balthazar , Mountolive and Clea - The Alexandria Quartet explores the sexual and political intrigues of a group of expatriates in Egypt before and after the Second World War.

When a madman begins stalking victims on the streets of 1896 New York, a team of investigators is forced to apply radical and untested techniques that include fingerprinting and the controversial science of psychology.

In 1927, the great and the good of Paris gather at the funeral of the wealthy banker, Marcel Pericourt. His daughter, Madeleine, is poised to take over his financial empire (although, unfortunately, she knows next to nothing about banking). More unfortunately still, when Madeleine's seven-year-ol...

The Nazis want everyone to be the same. If you're different, you don't belong. Not belonging is dangerous... Anna's little sister, Eva, is frail and needs time to learn new things. She has a huge heart and a gift for loving, but Hitler doesn't value such riches. And so she's hidden away. Safe for...

When a grieving mother and daughter inherit the tree hollows, they must prove to themselves, the tax collectors and each other that they can bring in a successful honey harvest all on their own. Marytè is a devoted beekeeper. She lives by the old rules: bees choose their masters; bees don't sting...

1946. Three years after a cataclysmic event which tore their lives apart, a mother and daughter flee Poland for Paris, shame and fear at their heels, not knowing how hard it is to escape your past. Nearly eighty years later, Gretel Fernsby lives a life that is a far cry from her traumatic childho...

1918, Belowla, NSW: As the Great War grinds to an end, Adelaide Roberts accompanies her father to a rugged island off the south coast of New South Wales to deliver much-needed supplies. On the windswept rocky outcrop she meets lighthouse keeper Emmett Huxley, a dark-eyed outsider haunted by his s...

For Marie-Laure, blind since the age of six, the world is full of mazes. The miniature of a Paris neighbourhood, made by her father to teach her the way home. The microscopic layers within the invaluable diamond that her father guards in the Museum of Natural History. The walled city by the sea, ...

France, 1914: As war breaks out, Aurelie becomes trapped on the wrong side of the front. When the Germans move into their family's ancestral estate, Aurelie discovers she knows the German Major's aide de camp, Maximilian Von Sternburg. She and the young officer first met during Aurelie's debutant...