If you loved THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY, THE LITTLE COFFEE SHOP OF KABUL and THE THORN BIRDS you will devour this story of five different women united by one need: to overcome the vast distances of Australia’s Top End with friendship, tears, laughter, books and love.
Hay, New South Wales, 1923. Martha, a classics scholar from the coast, comes to teach in a man’s town in the outback. She falls in love with Henry, a local man, and they find their dream place on the river where they raise a family and breed a flock of sheep with fine wool. The unforgiving climate erodes their dreams. When Henry leaves, Martha takes on the outside work and learns to drive. Seven-year-old Anna is her main helper and confidante.
Like a dark unsettling road movie, Hide takes us on a chilling ride from 80s urban Britain to the menace of the Australian outback.
When a lethal bushfire tore through Myrtle, nestled in Victoria’s breathtaking Otway Ranges, the town’s buildings – and the lives of its residents – were left as smouldering ash. For three women in particular, the fire fractured their lives and their relationships. With her sharp eye for human foibles, bestselling author Fiona Lowe writes an evocative tale of everyday people fighting for themselves, their families and their town – as only this distinctively Australian storyteller can.
For Cass Tuplin, proprietor of the Rusty Bore Takeaway (and definitely not an unlicensed private investigator), its weird enough that her neighbour Vern has somehow acquired a lady friend. But then he asks Cass to look into the case of the dead rats someone’s dumped on Joanne’s doorstep. Cass is back on the case!
Australia 1945.
Until now Kate Dowd has led a sheltered life on Amiens, her family’s sprawling sheep station in northern New South Wales. The horrors of war have for the most part left her untouched. But with her father succumbing to wounds he’s borne since the Great War, the management of the farm is increasingly falling on Kate’s shoulders
1948 The world is struggling to regain a sense of balance after the devastation of World War II, and the sugar cane-growing community of Piri River in northern Queensland is no exception. Rosie Stanton finds it difficult to return to the family farm after years working for the Australian Women’s Army Service. Reminders are everywhere of the brothers she lost in the war and she is unable to understand her father’s contempt for Italians, especially the Conti family next door. When her father takes ill, Rosie challenges tradition by managing the farm, but outside influences are determined to see her fail. When a long-hidden family secret is discovered and Tomas’s mysterious past is revealed, everything Rosie believes is shattered. Will she risk all to rebuild her family or will she lose the only man she’s ever loved?
A mother’s secret, a father’s betrayal, a town on the edge…
When social worker Aimee arrives in the mining town of Kalgoorlie, she is ready for a fresh start. But Aimee has a dark secret and as the past reaches out towards her once more, she realises that somehow her secret is connected to this unfamiliar but hardly beautiful town and its inhabitants.
Dustfall is the tale of the crushing consequences of medical error, the suffering caused by asbestos mining and the power of storytelling.
1932, Ernie and Lily Hass, and their daughter, Girlie, have lost almost everything in the Depression; all they have keeping their small family together are their secrets. Abandoning their failing wheat farm and small-town gossip, they make a new start on the west coast of Australia where they begin to build a summer guesthouse. But forming new alliances with the locals isn’t easy.
It’s 1969 and a remote Australian coastal town is poised to play its part in the Moon Landing. An influx of expat NASA employees working at the tracking station on the sand dune just out of town shake things up. A pink and grey galah cockatoo emerges from a cage at the back door of the Kelly household and uncovers some tightly-held secrets.
Jack McPhail is a man on the run from his past, a drifter who lands by accident in the sleepy rural town of Banjo Crossing in the fertile region known as The Plains.
Despite himself, Jack becomes slowly drawn into the town, its community, its characters and its concerns. Nevertheless, acceptance of this newcomer is based on a lie, and Jack fears rejection should someone discover the truth.
If you loved THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY, THE LITTLE COFFEE SHOP OF KABUL and THE THORN BIRDS you will devour this story of five different women united by one need: to overcome the vast distances of Australia’s Top End with friendship, tears, laughter, books and love.
] Wry, rich and unsettling, All Fall Down is a starkly Australian gothic novel about a community divided, the secrets we keep, and a chilling
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