The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

$29.99 AUD

Category: Popular Fiction

On Christmas Eve, 1617, the sea around the remote Norwegian island of Vardø is thrown into a reckless storm. As Maren Magnusdatter watches, forty fishermen, including her father and brother, are lost to the waves, the menfolk of Vardø wiped out in an instant. Now the women must fend for themselves. Eigh teen months later, a sinister figure arrives. Summoned from Scotland to take control of a place at the edge of the civilized world, Absalom Cornet knows what he needs to do to bring the women of Vardø to heel. With him travels his young wife, Ursa. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa finds something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty and terrible evil, one he must root out at all costs. Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1621 witch trials, Kiran Millwood Hargrave's The Mercies is a story about how suspicion can twist its way through a community, and a love that may prove as dangerous as it is powerful.   ...Show more

If I Can't Have You by Charlotte Levin

$32.99 AUD

Category: Popular Fiction

If I Can't Have You by Charlotte Levin is an all-consuming novel about loneliness, obsession and how far we go for the ones we love. What if the problem with your love life is you? Samuel, the day we met I knew I'd finally found what I've been waiting for.You.Happiness, at last. Then you left me.And now I am alone. Everyone I love leaves in the end. But not this time.I'm not giving up on us. I'm not giving up on you. When you love someone, you never let them go. That's why for me, this is just beginning. ...Show more

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

$22.99 AUD

Category: Popular Fiction | Reading Level: Adult

#1 New York Times Bestseller A Reese Witherspoon Hello Sunshine Book Club Pick   "I can't even express how much I love this book I didn't want this story to end " - Reese Witherspoon   "Painfully beautiful." - The New York Times Book Review   "Perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver." - Bustle   For year s, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life - until the unthinkable happens.   Perfect for fans of Barbara Kingsolver and Karen Russell, Where the Crawdads Sing is at once an exquisite ode to the natural world, a heartbreaking coming-of-age story, and a surprising tale of possible murder. Owens reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps. ...Show more

Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton

$19.99 AUD

Category: Popular Fiction | Reading Level: very good

An utterly wonderful debut novel of love, crime, magic, fate and a boy's coming of age, set in 1980s Australia and infused with the originality, charm, pathos, and heart of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The mind can take you anywhere you want to go. Eli Bell's life is complicated. His father is lost, his mother is in jail, and his stepdad is a heroin dealer. The most steadfast adult in Eli's life is Slim--a notorious felon and national record-holder for successful prison escapes--who watches over Eli and August, his silent genius of an older brother. Exiled far from the rest of the world in Darra, a seedy suburb populated by Polish and Vietnamese refugees, this twelve-year-old boy with an old soul and an adult mind is just trying to follow his heart, learn what it takes to be a good man, and train for a glamorous career in journalism. Life, however, insists on throwing obstacles in Eli's path--most notably Tytus Broz, Brisbane's legendary drug dealer. But the real trouble lies ahead. Eli is about to fall in love, face off against truly bad guys, and fight to save his mother from a certain doom--all before starting high school. A story of brotherhood, true love, family, and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universe is the tale of an adolescent boy on the cusp of discovering the man he will be. Powerful and kinetic, Trent Dalton's debut is sure to be one of the most heartbreaking, joyous and exhilarating novels you will experience. ...Show more

The Winter Sea by Di Morrissey

$9.99 AUD

Category: Popular Fiction

Discovering her dreams would come at a price. Escaping to the country from her unhappy city life, Cassie Holloway moves to the little town of Whitby Point. Here she meets the Aquino family, whose fishing business was founded by their ancestor, Giuseppe, an immigrant Italian, some ninety years before. Li fe for Cassie on the south coast is sweet as she sets up a successful restaurant and falls in love with Giuseppe's great-grandson Michael. But when the family patriarch dies, a devastating family secret is revealed which threatens to destroy her dreams. Cassie's future happiness now rests on her quest for the truth. A novel about finding your true place in world. ...Show more

Arcadia PB by Di Morrissey

$9.99 AUD

$19.99 (50% off)

Category: Popular Fiction

A modern mystery born in a timeless Tasmanian forest from Australia's favourite storyteller, with new novel The Last Paradise out soon. A breathtaking Tasmanian tale of ancient forests; of art and science; of love and, above all, of friendship.In the 1930s, in an isolated and beautiful corner of souther n Tasmania, a new young wife arrives at her husband's secluded property - Arcadia. Stella, an artist, falls in love with Arcadia's wild, ancient forest. And when an unknown predator strikes, she is saved by an unusual protector...Two generations later, Stella's granddaughter, Sally, and her best friend, Jessica, stumble over Stella's secret life in the forest and find themselves threatened in turn.What starts as a girls' adventurous road trip becomes a hunt for the story of the past, to solve the present, and save their future...PRAISE FOR DI MORRISSEY'There's no denying the beauty and opulence of Morrissey's rendering of place...She is a master of the genre.' Weekend Australian ...Show more

Gould's Book Of Fish by Richard Flanagan

$19.99 AUD

Category: Popular Fiction

From the winner of the Man Booker Prize 2014, his Commonwealth Writers' Prize-winning novel. Once upon a time that was called 1828, before all fishes in the sea and all living things on the land were destroyed, there was a man named William Buelow Gould, a white convict who fell in love with a black wom an and discovered too late that to love is not safe. Silly Billy Gould, invader of Australia, liar, murderer & forger, condemned to the most feared penal colony in the British Empire and there ordered to paint a book of fish. Once upon a time, there were miracles . . . ...Show more

Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak

$19.99 AUD

Category: Popular Fiction | Reading Level: very good

Let me tell you about our brother. The fourth Dunbar boy named Clay. Everything happened to him. We were all of us changed through him. The Dunbar boys bring each other up in a house run by their own rules. A family of ramshackle tragedy - their mother is dead, their father has fled - they love and figh t, and learn to reckon with the adult world. It is Clay, the quiet one, who will build a bridge; for his family, for his past, for his sins. He builds a bridge to transcend humanness. To survive. A miracle and nothing less. Markus Zusak makes his long-awaited return with a profoundly heartfelt and inventive novel about a family held together by stories, and a young life caught in the current: a boy in search of greatness, as a cure for a painful past. Yes, always for us there was a brother, and he was the one - the one of us amongst five of us - who took all of it on his shoulder. ...Show more

HRT: Husband Replacement Therapy by Kathy Lette

$32.99 AUD

Category: Popular Fiction

Ruby is generous, sunny and funny - which is why all her friends, family and colleagues have turned up to celebrate her 50th birthday. But with a few too many glasses of champers under her belt, Ruby's speech doesn't go exactly to plan. Instead of the witty and warm words guests are expecting, Ruby take s her moment in the spotlight to reveal what she really thinks of them. Shocking them all, she also accuses her husband, Harry, of having an affair, and reads to the audience the evidence she found on his phone that very morning. And, saving the best till last, Ruby lambasts her calculatingly cruel mother for spending her life playing her three daughters against each other. It's blisteringly brutal. As the stunned gathering gawk at Ruby, the birthday girl concludes her bravura monologue with the throwaway comment that she has terminal cancer. She has cashed out her life savings and plans on taking her two sisters cruising until she dies. Only, do they really want to go with her? And, was it her medical results she read?     ...Show more

A Strange Country by Muriel Barbery

$29.99 AUD

Category: Popular Fiction

'Where did you come from?' he asked. 'From the bridge,' Petrus answered. 'The bridge that links our world to yours.' Then, after a silence: 'It is invisible to you.' During the longest war humankind has endured, two young Spanish officers abandon their post to follow the charismatic Petrus across a bri dge only he can see. In a place of lingering mists, poetry, music and natural wonders, the fate of our world and its living creatures will be decided. Yet this world too is under threat. Will harmony and beauty prevail over darkness and death? An ode to the power of the imagination, the sequel to The Life of Elves echoes our own global border disputes and climate disaster. A Strange Country, by the author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog, is a literary fantasy for fans of Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell.    ...Show more

Enter the Aardvark by Jessica Anthony

$24.99 AUD

Category: Popular Fiction

A Republican Congressman struggles to save his career after a stuffed aardvark appears on his doorstep in this original and uproarious novel of politics, power, and sexuality. Early one morning on a hot day in August, millennial Congress-bro Alexander Paine Wilson (R) is planning his reelection campaign when a mysterious FedEx delivery arrives at his townhouse. Inside is a gigantic taxidermied aardvark.What does it mean?To find out, this outrageous, edge-of-your-seat novel hurtles between present day Washington, DC, where Wilson tries to get rid of the unsightly beast before it destroys his career, and Victorian England, where we meet the aardvark's taxidermist and the naturalist who hunted her, and learn the secret that binds them all. More than a ghost story, a love story, or even a political satire, Enter the Aardvark is a stunningly prescient exploration of the consequences for all of us when repressed male love meets oppressive male power. It is also that rarest of creatures-a work of art so utterly original and masterfully built that it seems to have sprung fully formed from its visionary maker's head. ...Show more

Gulliver's Wife by Lauren Chater

$32.99 AUD

Category: Popular Fiction

Birth. Death. Wonder ... One woman's journey to the edge of love and loyalty from the bestselling author of The Lace Weaver London, 1702. When her husband is lost at sea, Mary Burton Gulliver, midwife and herbalist, is forced to rebuild her life without him. But three years later when Lemuel Gulliver is brought home, fevered and communicating only in riddles, her ordered world is turned upside down. In a climate of suspicion, poverty and violence, Mary is caught in a crossfire of superstition and fear driven by her husband's outlandish claims of the wonders he has seen, and it is up to her to navigate a passage to safety for herself and her daughter, and the vulnerable women in her care. But when a fellow sailor, a dangerous man with nothing to lose, appears to hold sway over her husband, Mary's world descends deeper into chaos, and she must set out on her own journey to discover the truth of Gulliver's travels ... and the landscape of her own heart. Praise for The Lace Weaver 'A beautifully written and utterly compelling story of love and war ... exquisite as the lace the women of the story weave' Kate Forsyth 'I was captivated from the first page' Natasha Lester 'Full of hope and heartache' Books+Publishing ...Show more