Archive | New Releases

Julie Bennett
A captivating tale of love, glamour and betrayal, inspired by the life of 1920s Australian film icon Annette Kellerman, for readers of Kate Morton and Taylor Jenkins Reid.

Blue Mountains, 2023: Working on a documentary at the historic Carrington Hotel, videographer Emma Quinn rescues a box of vintage film reels destined for landfill. Trawling through the box, Emma finds a series of handwritten letters hidden beneath the reels – letters that seem to belong to Rose Carey, golden girl of the silent film era.
Intrigued, Emma begins to read the letters and is fascinated by what she uncovers. And as her relationship with her wife fractures under the stress of IVF, she becomes increasingly obsessed with Rose’s story, at the heart of which lies a deadly secret.
Sydney, 1923: Rose Carey knows her glittering Hollywood days are numbered after a near-death experience following the filming of her latest epic. On top of that, she faces bankruptcy. Rose is no quitter, though – she has reinvented herself many times before, overcoming several obstacles to transform into one of Hollywood’s glamour girls. She can’t stop now, and so she throws herself into planning a spectacular production that will take the world by storm. But when she suffers another life-threatening accident, Rose realises that someone close to her wants her out of the way. Who in her close-knit circle has the most to gain? Can she trust anyone, other than herself?

Lily Samson
When young couple Elena and Adam are offered the chance to house-sit in their dream neighborhood for a few months, they jump at the opportunity. The leafy South London enclave is a world away from everything they know, complete with grand homes, lush gardens, and quaint local coffee shops.

Soon Elena crosses paths with the beautiful and enigmatic artist Sophia and her husband, Finn, and she and Adam are pulled into their orbit. Sophia is everything Elena isn’t—glamorous, alluring, successful—and Finn exerts a mysterious pull on Elena that she can’t seem to shake.

Elena’s infatuation with Finn grows stronger by the day, and when Sophia proposes a thrilling game to her new friend—to swap partners in secret—Elena quickly agrees. It’s not long before Elena experiences a sexual awakening that blossoms into an illicit love affair, but Sophia’s plans are far more dangerous than Elena could ever have imagined. . .

Sophie Matthieson
A beautifully crafted debut novel from a compelling new voice in Australian fiction. For the past seven years, Clare has been living in London. She works for a judge on child protection cases. Her partner, Miriam, is devoted to raising their young son, Rupert – their days are dominated by nap times, laundry, and hiding from each other.

When Clare returns to Melbourne to visit her ailing father, another crisis looms – her brother Max’s long-term drug addiction. She turns her efforts towards helping Max into rehab, but is this at the expense of her family back in London?

Moving, heartbreaking and devastatingly insightful, Together We Fall Apart is a story about running away and coming home.

Sophie Green
Mornington Peninsula, 1999. Wife and now grandmother Joan has checked into the grand old Duchess Hotel to find herself again after thirty-five years of being who her husband and family have wanted her to be. Peninsula local and soon-to-be octogenarian Frances is distracting herself from getting old, and avoiding her self-interested son by escaping to the warmth of the Duchess where the hotel staff treat her like the person she still is.

Meanwhile Frances’s daughter, Alison, is trying to manage significant disruptions at home while hoping to finally prove to her mother that she’s just as worthy of love as her brother. New to the Duchess, hotel maid Kirrilyis feeling the weight of a lifetime of responsibility, struggling to balance bills and work and family, and keeping thoughts of how there must be more to life at bay.

With its old-world glamour, sprawling seaside grounds and air of possibility, the Duchess Hotel might just be the place to help the women rediscover who they are and bring some spark back to their lives.

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.