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Griffin Dunne
At nine, Sean Connery saved him from drowning. At thirteen, desperate to hook up with Janis Joplin, he attended his aunt Joan Didion’s legendary L.A. party for the publication of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. In his early 20s, he shared an apartment in Manhattan’s Hotel Des Artistes with his best friend and soulmate Carrie Fisher, while she was filming some sci-fi movie called Star Wars and he was a struggling actor working as a popcorn seller at Radio City Music Hall.

A few years later, he produced and starred in the now-iconic film After Hours, directed by Martin Scorsese. In the midst of it all, Griffin’s 22-year-old sister Dominique, a rising star in Hollywood, was brutally strangled to death by her ex-boyfriend, leading to one of the most infamous public trials of the 1980s, which ended in a travesty of justice that also somehow marked the beginning of their father Dominick Dunne’s career as a bestselling author of true crime narratives. And yet, for all its bold-face cast of characters and jaw-dropping scenes, The Friday Afternoon Club is no celebrity memoir.
It is, down to its bones, a family story that brilliantly embraces the poignant absurdities and best and worst efforts of its loveable, infuriating, funny and moving characters – its author most of all – finding wicked, self-deprecating humour and glints of surprising light in even the most harrowing and painful of circumstances.

Bill Edgar
A private investigator with a haunting past, Bill Edgar’s life was never destined to be ordinary. Rising to international fame as the ‘Coffin Confessor’ – the man who crashes funerals on behalf of the deceased, giving voice to their last wishes – Bill dismantled many of the assumptions we hold about truth, dignity and the business of dying.

Swindlers, cheaters, vultures, liars and con-artists – there isn’t a musty corner of the human soul Bill hasn’t confronted. Loved and loathed in equal measure, his only concern is being the caretaker of the secrets and desires his clients have entrusted to him. Shame and outrage, healing and comfort are left up to those left behind.

But it’s a request from one woman to hand-deliver a bottle of wine to her husband on the anniversary of her death that raises deeper What do we make out of the handful of days we’re given? If hate and injustice are so hard to bury, why does love have a knack for triumphing? Are the most profound acts in life sometimes the most quiet ones?

Patricia Collins
When Cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin on Christmas Day 1974, it was the worst natural disaster Australians had ever experienced. Stationed in the city with the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service, Patricia Collins not only lived through Tracy but was part of the massive clean-up effort. This is her extraordinary story. The experience of living through a terrifying natural disaster is chillingly told by Collins as she recounts her own dark hours that Christmas along with those of her contemporaries.

They sat huddled in doorways and bathtubs as the winds raged, lifting off roofs, picking up cars and sinking ships. Most of the city was destroyed. Seventy-one people died. The Navy suffered terrible losses.
The cyclone’s devastating aftermath tested the mettle of many. It is arguable that the template for Australians’ responses to the ongoing natural disasters of the past few years was made in Darwin in 1974. We look for answers and stories to help us deal with those natural disasters and manage them better next time. Those answers and stories are in Rock and Tempest.

Patricia Collins joined the Navy to serve in a time of peace, but Rock and Tempest is a testament to the courage and resolve needed by members of the Defence Force at any time. It is fascinating and moving, and absolutely essential reading.

Tony Park
Professor Denise ‘Doc’ Rado is South Africa’s expert on pangolins, busting poachers and freeing the endangered anteaters in elaborate undercover stings. After a risky operation backfires, Doc’s life is shattered, but she still has to lead an eclectic group of donors on a wildlife tour of southern Africa. But there’s a target on her back.

As the safari ventures deep into Africa, Doc fears they’re being followed and she will do anything to keep them all safe – especially Ian Laidlaw, a handsome Australian businessman turned accidental philanthropist.

Is Doc being hunted by the poachers she once fought, or is there some other bloodthirsty predator prowling the wilderness?

Lloyd Richards
A gripping thriller from Lloyd Devereux Richards author of TikTok sensation, Stone Maidens. He’s in too deep… And almost out of time. Martin Gabriel is a runner for Ben. He runs errands. He runs deliveries. And now he is running for his life… When a deal goes wrong, Martin realizes Ben isn’t the legitimate businessman he thought he was.

He flees before Ben catches up with him, unaware that Ben’s criminal network and the FBI are also on his tail.
No longer a runner, but still on the run.
Is Martin fast enough to get away from his past?

Shirley Barret
On a rainy night in 1871, an idealistic school mistress arrives on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. Mrs Hopkins doesn’t know what to expect from the notorious Biloela Industrial School for Girls, but nothing could prepare her for what she encounters inside the high sandstone the conditions are dismal, the rules are largely conceptual, and the girls spend most of their time finding creative ways to outsmart the adults.

Very quickly, Mrs Hopkins realises that noble intentions won’t be enough to plough through the chaos around her. An unconventional school requires unconventional methods, and Mrs Hopkins is going to have to find her own ways to reach her lively, lost charges. But her own ghosts have followed her to Cockatoo Island, and refuse to stay hidden for much longer.

This witty, surreal and poignant final novel from Shirley Barrett is about what destroys us, what sustains us, and what we carry with us from one world into the next.

Gabriel Bermoser
The Driver:
Ahead he could see only the stretch of unending road, on either side brown-scorched plains of dirt and scrub, above it all a soaring blue sky and blinding sun. Desolation that looked, to him, a hell of a lot like freedom. He wasn’t playing by anyone’s rules anymore.

The Hitchhiker:
Have you ever done something bad? The question was like a clawed hand seizing his guts. It had taken everything he’d had not to whimper, to cower away and beg. But as he’d deflected, he’d told himself to stay calm. To be in control. He had to be in control here.

The Fugitive:
She’d made a mistake. Wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last. Ever since she’d left, all she’d found was more trouble. More fights. More secrets. More scars. Now here she was, still alive but a long way from anywhere, and with options dwindling fast.

From the award-winning author of The Hunted comes a fast-paced outback thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Hayley Krischer
Shade and Jadis are everything to each other. They share clothes, toothbrushes, and even matching stick-and-poke tattoos. So when Shade unexpectedly joins the cheerleading team, Jadis can hardly recognize who her best friend is becoming.

Shade loves the idea of falling into a group of girls; she loves the discipline it takes to push her body to the limits alongside these athletes . Most of all, Shade finds herself drawn to The Three Chloes–the insufferable trio that rules the squad–including the enigmatic cheer captain whose dark side is as compelling as it is alarming.

Jadis won’t give Shade up so easily, though, and the pull between her old best friend and her new teammates takes a toll on Shade as she tries to forge her own path. So when one of the cheerleaders dies under mysterious circumstances, Shade is determined to get to the bottom of her death. Because she knows Jadis–and if her friend is responsible, doesn’t that mean she is, too?

Shelly Davidow
It’s 1989 and for a young Jewish-Australian violinist, a scholarship to Berlin is the chance of a lifetime. Germany is on the verge of change as the wall is torn down, and Susanna is swept along by the tumultuous event. Under the careful guidance of Stefan Heinemeyer, her renowned violin teacher and the grandson of a Nazi, she begins a composition in memory of her grandmother, Mirla, who died in the Buchenwald concentration camp during the Second World War, and Susanna is inspired to retrace Mirla’s final footsteps.

It’s a journey that reconnects Susanna to her heritage and propels her musical gift to extraordinary heights. Yet as a forbidden yearning for Stefan begins to unfurl, Susanna’s life is forever changed, and the repercussions will echo through decades and across continents.

In a world where history, society and inherited traumas threaten to silence Susanna and prevent her from ever becoming her true self, can she find the courage to reclaim her power as a woman, a musician, and a composer, and in so doing, lay her haunted past to rest?

Julian Borger
In 1938, Jewish families are scrambling to flee Vienna. Desperate, they take out adverts offering their children into the safe keeping of readers of a British newspaper, the Manchester Guardian. The right words in the right order could mean the difference between life and death. Eighty-three years later, Guardian journalist Julian Borger comes across the advert that saved his father, Robert, from the Nazis. Robert had kept this a secret, like almost everything else about his traumatic Viennese childhood, until he took his own life.

Drawn to the shadows of his family’s past and starting with nothing but a page of newspaper adverts, Borger traces the remarkable stories of his father, the other advertised children and their families, each thrown into the maelstrom of a world at war. From a Viennese radio shop to the Shanghai ghetto, internment camps and family homes across Britain, the deep forests and concentration camps of Nazi Germany, smugglers saving Jewish lives in Holland, an improbable French Resistance cell, and a redemptive story of survival in New York, Borger unearths the astonishing journeys of the children at the hands of fate, their stories of trauma and the kindness of strangers.

I Seek a Kind Person is a gripping family memoir of grief, courage and hope, connecting us with multiple generations, distant continents and the hidden histories of our almost unimaginable past.