Fans of Nikki Gemmell who have read 'Alice Springs' should be aware that 'Cleave' is the original title of that novel, as it was released in Australia, Nikki's land of origin. By any name, this is a compelling tale of relationships, particularly that of father and daughter, and coming to terms with each other and an unforgiving landscape. While released as 'Alice Springs' in the US, very little of the story takes place in the Alice, which is a much friendlier and greener place than the stark outback in which the main drama of this story unfolds.

A picture of Australia at the time of its foundation, focused on the hostility between early British settlers and native Aboriginals. It is essentially the story of a boy caught between both worlds. David Malouf, himself an Australian, is the prize-winning author of THE GREAT WORLD.

Australian debut novelist Chloe Hooper's A Child's Book of True Crime is the chillingly erotic account of a disturbed young woman's adulterous journey to her own sexually dark core. When vulnerable trainee teacher Kate Byrne embarks on an affair with her most gifted student's father, she exposes herself to nightmare visions of the repercussions of her sins--the themes of crime and punishment hang heavily over the narrative, which is set in the former penal colony of Tasmania. Kate grows to identify so much with Ellie Siddell, whose bizarre 1983 murder at Black Swan Point is the subject of her lover's wife's true crime novel, that she imagines the pair are trying to kill her, just as Margot Harvey and her veterinary husband, Ellie's boss and lover, were implicated in Ellie's vicious murder. As anyone who has read the Brothers Grimm will testify, fairy tales are far from innocently penned ditties and the wolf lying in wait for Red Riding Hood can be interpreted in many ways. Hooper knows this and plays with it. The novel opens with Kitty Koala and Terence Tiger stumbling across the bloody crime scene and interspersed between the episodes with the animals' investigating Ellie's murder is a very adult tale of deceit and treachery. In Stalinist Russia, blacklisted writers and artists had embedded secret messages in children's literature. Beautiful books were created, full of allegory, and the adults would read them before bedtime and remain fast asleep; disguised as the na

A picture of Australia at the time of its foundation, focused on the hostility between early British settlers and native Aboriginals. It is essentially the story of a boy caught between both worlds. David Malouf, himself an Australian, is the prize-winning author of THE GREAT WORLD.

Critically acclaimed novel in which Hypatia Montrose tells the story of her mother, Frances, an English teacher with a passion for mathematics, who makes an astonishing mathematical discovery. The author's other publications include the novel and play 'Painted Woman'.

For three very different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilization rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men -sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.