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Rat Daniels
Alex Sawyer
Description
An unforgettable coming-of-age story from a stunning new voice in Australian fiction, for those who love Mark Brandi, Favel Parrett and Tim Winton.
I was six, turning seven, and all I really remember is the loneliness, and the lumpy feeling that I was somehow doing everything wrong. And then I met Rat.
Jimmy Quinn is only a boy when he meets Rat Daniels down by the creek. Until that moment, Rat wasn't called Rat, and Jimmy didn't have a best friend. That day at Edens Ridge is the beginning of everything.
Mercurial, wild and rebellious, Rat is thrillingly far from Jimmy's tidy world. But there is a dangerous current in Rat that scares Jimmy sometimes. So do the things that happen in Rat's house: the yelling, the fighting and, most of all, Rat's hatred for a man named Davey Callaghan.
As they get older, Rat slips toward the darker elements of the Ridge. Ziplock bags and wadded-up foil balls - there's money to be made, and Rat has a plan that needs money. For the two friends, allegiances will be stretched and intentions questioned. Some days, Jimmy's not sure if he even likes Rat anymore.
Then a devastating fire on the Callaghan farm forces Jimmy to wrestle with his conscience and his memories. People are dead. The police are investigating. Jimmy will have to decide how far his loyalty will go, and just who his friend really is.
Book Details
Enough
Dawn French
Description
ETTA'S FOUND THE CURE FOR OLD AGE. BUT HER FAMILY WON'T LIKE IT . . .
Etta is sixty-eight years old. Happy, healthy and an active participant in her world, she’s gathered her family together for an unforgettable weekend.
Tick.
At 5am that Saturday morning, Etta wakes her daughter, her granddaughter, her son and her daughter-in-law up to lead everyone down to the beach. To ‘Etta’s Hollow’, where a roaring fire has already been lit. Drowsy but delighted – the sun is just starting to rise for a glorious dawn – Etta’s family bask in the beauty of the moment. A memory to be cherished forever.
Tick.
Until twenty minutes later, when Etta announces to her assembled beloveds something as shocking as it is alarming. ‘I have brought you all down to the beach this morning to tell you something important. You see, the thing is, today is my last day alive.’
Boom.
Over the next twenty-four hours, Etta and her family are about to have the most surprising, affecting and life-affirming day of all their lives.
Book Details
Eye of the Needle
Christopher Raja
Description
In 1882 a young Afghan named Kadir lands in Port Augusta. He has arrived with six camels to make his fortune, and so becomes the transport for a scientific expedition into the red centre.
More than a century later a young man named Kris comes of age in the Melbourne suburbs, having emigrated from India with his family when he was just a boy. After the trauma of his father's mysterious death, Kris gravitate to St Kilda in search of a bigger world.
Fate will lead Kris to drugs and sex and love. He will learn what it truly takes to write a novel about the visionary life: the tale of a cameleer who comes across the seas from Asia and is drawn into the dazzling heart of the continent, where all is revealed-the ancient peoples, power and possession, lies and lust, death, love and what really matters.
Across time and space, Kris's and Kadir's ecstatic and devastating journeys weave through Christopher Raja's unexpected page-turner, Eye of the Needle.
Book Details
The Butcher of Aberdeen
Rojé Augustin
Description
The Butcher of Aberdeen explores the chilling true crime story of Katherine Knight, delving into a life shaped by childhood trauma, violent relationships, and a relentless descent into madness.
A mother living in a small country town stabs her partner to death thirty-seven times before decapitating him, skinning him, and serving up slices of his cooked flesh at a table set for his children.
Born into a dysfunctional family in rural Australia, Katherine Knight was raised in an environment of neglect, violence, sexual abuse, and emotional turmoil, setting the stage for a life marked by intense instability. As an adult, she would become notorious for her sexual manipulations, violent outbursts, her inability to maintain healthy relationships, and the brutal nature of her crimes.
This gripping account, based on true events, explores the terrifying devolution of Knight’s character, from her tumultuous early years to her “dream job” at the local abattoir, where she became skilled in the deadly act of slaughtering animals. Katherine’s turbulent relationships with men paint the portrait of a woman tormented by a fear of abandonment and driven by a desperate need for control.
At the heart of this story lies Katherine’s profound inner conflict: a constant battle between the need for love and a tendency to violence, between a desire for connection and an overwhelming urge for revenge. This conflict led to increasingly dysfunctional relationships and caused her violent tendencies to spiral out of control, culminating in a shocking act of murder that would forever mark her as one of Australia’s most infamous killers.
With a careful balance of psychological insight and chilling detail, The Butcher of Aberdeen takes readers on a journey through the dark and twisted psyche of a woman whose central driving question is: “Will she ever learn to take responsibility for her actions and find peace?” Katherine Knight’s story is a tragic exploration of the consequences of childhood trauma, the complexities of human nature, and the unthinkable path that some lives can take if left unexamined.
Book Details
Just Like the Night
Michael Caleb Tasker
Description
When is it time to stop protecting family, and time to start running?
Out on parole after serving over eight years in prison, Sera Olin can't shake her past. As a child travelling around America, her charismatic father introduced her to a life of crime, easy cons and fixed card games before they escaped to Australia to go straight—but walking the line isn't that easy for Sera. As she tries to settle into an honest life in Sydney, all she wants is to see her estranged daughter, Lena. But Lena is grown up now, and involved with people far worse than Sera understands.
When Sera is drawn further into the quagmire of Lena's choices, she is forced to confront the possibility that a mother's sacrifice might not be enough.
Set in the bleak underbelly of Sydney, Just Like the Night is a gripping exploration of loneliness, conscience and the ties that bind.
Book Details
Fighting for Country
James Saunders
Description
The story of Captain Reginald Saunders MBE, Australia's first recognised Indigenous officer, a true leader who served with daring and distinction in World War II and Korea, as told by his nephew James Saunders.
April 1940: Reginald Saunders, a 19-year-old Gunditjmara man, walks into the enlistment office in Milltown, Victoria, following in the footsteps of his father 24 years earlier. It's the beginning of an extraordinary journey of service and adventure for Reg - a journey that will take him across three continents and two wars. He will be decorated, discriminated against, wounded, bereaved, forsaken - but ultimately victorious.
Captain Reg Saunders had, by any measure, an exceptional military career, serving with distinction in North Africa, Greece and New Guinea during World War II, and later in the Korean War. His exploits - including surviving on the run from the Nazis in Crete for eleven months and leading a company of soldiers against a massive Chinese force in the pivotal Battle of Kapyong - have become part of Australian Army folklore. In November 1944 he made history by becoming the first openly Indigenous officer in the Australian armed forces.
Fighting for Country is more than the story of Reg's military career: it is also the story of his family and his people, the Fighting Gunditjmara of Western Victoria, and of Reg's postwar life of struggle and service. James Saunders, Reg's nephew, has drawn on military archives and family records to bring this incredible story vividly to life.
Book Details
Truth Under Fire: Australia's Second World War Correspondents
Daniel Seaton
Description
The story of six remarkable men who shaped the way Australians witnessed and remember war
This is a biography of six of Australia’s most notable Second World War correspondents, who were also significant cultural figures: Kenneth Slessor, Damien Parer, Chester Wilmot, George Johnston, Osmar White and George Silk.
Some believe Chester Wilmot was the best Allied war correspondent of all, especially as seen in his book The Struggle for Europe. Kenneth Slessor is now regarded as one of Australia’s finest poets. Damien Parer, George Silk and Osmar White made their names bringing the New Guinea campaign to the world’s attention. George Johnston is remembered for his Miles Franklin Award–winning novel My Brother Jack and his writing partnership with wife Charmian Clift.
Daniel Seaton argues that to truly understand these journalists, we must consider them not just individually but as a network. Connected by work, social relationships, artistic ambitions and their engagement with the Anzac legend, their significance is clearest when we read them as a group. In this vivid, groundbreaking book, Seaton does just that. A must-read for anyone interested in Australian military history and writing.
Book Details
Strange New World : Belsen's First Year of Freedom
Nadia Wheatley
Description
The liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 15 April 1945 was portrayed as the jewel in the crown of British victory over Nazi Germany. Yet a quarter of the 55,000 survivors of the ‘Horror Camp’ died over the next five weeks, and for many others there was disillusionment and despair. Evacuated to a nearby army barracks converted into a Displaced Persons’ camp – which became the largest such camp in Europe – they lived behind barbed wire and under military rule, and continued to suffer endemic health problems.
Josef Rosensaft, the political leader of the Jewish organisation in Belsen DP camp, described the first twelve months of freedom as being ‘more oppressive to our souls than the years in the hell of Auschwitz and Belsen’. He added that when the hoped-for ‘day of Liberation’ came, ‘we saw before us a new kind of world, cold and strange’.
Strange New World takes the reader into the untold story of the survivors’ first year of freedom. Despite the alienating circumstances of the post-war world, this is also a story of new life and hope, and of survivors asserting their own agency and independence.
Book Details
Hell's Half Acre
Sherrilyn Kenyon
Description
Being the heir to hell comes with enemies. Being a pawn in someone else's game? That's where Luke draws the line.
Luke Tievel has always known his enemies outnumber his friends. When your inheritance is the underworld, that comes with the territory. But divine politics have escalated to a new level—and now both Luke and his partner, Detective Sorcha O'Malley, have targets on their backs.
Old factions are rising. Heaven and hell are circling. And every side wants the same thing: total control of the mortal world and the destruction of anyone who won't kneel.
Luke has never minded being the center of attention. But he's no one's pawn—and he likes the world the way it is. Broken, messy, human. Worth saving.
Now he and Sorcha must hold the line against preternatural forces tired of playing by the old rules. The stakes aren't just their lives. It's humanity's extinction''and the only thing standing in the way is an heir who refuses to inherit and a detective who doesn't know how to quit.
Darkly witty and relentlessly paced, Hell's Half Acre is urban fantasy for readers who like their heroes irreverent, their stakes apocalyptic, and their demons on both sides of the fight.
Book Details
Major Hashida's Notebook
Craig Collie
Description
In January 1941, the dapper, slightly built Major Hashida arrived at Circular Quay carrying only a small suitcase. It was eleven months before Pearl Harbor and a year before the attack on Sydney Harbour.
Japan was claiming to be neutral in the war. Believing there were no grounds to prevent Hashida from landing, the Army consulted its intelligence section, which proposed that he be 'closely shepherded' with a strict watch on his movements.
He was met by Japanese businessmen and consular officials and made his way around the country, stopping at each major city and gathering pieces of intelligence on everything from Australia's fortifications to its car industry. But what was the true purpose of his mission?
In Major Hashida's Notebook, acclaimed author Craig Collie has used Hashida's own diaries, along with military and police archives, to tell the long-buried story of one of the most intriguing espionage operations ever conducted on our shores.
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