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The First Anzacs
George Hulse and Jimmy Thomson
Description
This is the unknown story of the combat engineers who kept World War I running. Although it has been repeatedly denied by the army, they were the first Australians and New Zealanders to land at Anzac Cove: in any combat, even today, sappers are always the first in and last out.
They were airbrushed out of history. Official historian Charles Bean claimed the first Australian ashore at the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915 was an infantry officer. But Bean wasn't there, and a bunch of Australian and New Zealand army engineers were. Even today, the army is reluctant to accept that sappers were among the very first ANZACs ashore.
This is the untold story of World War I Australian and New Zealand sappers-combat engineers-with extracts from their diaries. They were always in the vanguard, clearing defences, and building bridges, roads and walkways, usually under fire, for the troops who followed. At Gallipoli, strafed by machine guns and targeted by snipers, they dug trenches and tunnels to advance on the Turkish defences. On the Western Front, they burrowed under the German lines to plant massive explosives. In Egypt they demolished a Turkish railway in a day.
From Gallipoli to the sands of the Middle East, to the blood-soaked battlefields of France and Belgium, engineers put down their tools to also fight as combat soldiers at every major battle and campaign, often with heroic feats of astonishing courage. Three sappers stole a giant field gun from under German noses at Amiens. Sappers were classic larrikins, indefatigably practical men who don't take kindly to bureaucracy. Typically under-appreciated, two were cheated of their well-earned VCs by a British general after they, working alone, tricked a German platoon into surrendering.
Book Details
For human use
Sarah G Pierce
Description
Modern dating is dead.
Finding a human connection online has become impossible. Enter Liv: a dating app that matches people with dead bodies. Somehow, it has taken the world by storm. Millions of users are convinced that life with a corpse presents a better alternative to conventional relationships.
Flailing against Liv’s popularity, venture capital superstar Tom Williamson—whose company is funding Liv—isn’t buying it. Mostly because dating an embalmed cadaver, let alone monetizing it, is obscene.
Believing that Liv is the future, Auden White, the insufferable ‘visionary’ behind the app begins demanding more and more funding, quickly making enemies with Tom.
It's no secret that Tom struggles with people, dead or alive, but when he has a chance meeting with the woman who knows Auden (and his secrets) best, Mara Reed, he realizes everything is about to change for all three of them.
With Liv’s userbase growing by the day, the need for cadavers rapidly increases. Humanity might not want to connect with other living, breathing people anymore, but they do want to connect with something. What could go wrong?
Book Details
Big nobody
Alex Kadis
Description
For Constance ‘Connie’ Costa, life is just beginning. She dreams of leaving behind her dull, dreary life in ‘70s East London, shaking off her deeply embarrassing Greek-Cypriot community of interfering Aunties and pretend ‘cousins’, and running away with her best mate Vas (fellow misfit; NHS specs; soul of a poet). She is determined to take her rightful place alongside her hero, David Bowie, onstage at Wembley Stadium.
Only one thing stands in her way: her father, The Fat Murderer. No longer content with being an absolute imbecile and general abomination of nature, he has dialled up his campaign to ruin Connie’s life ever since the untimely death of her mother.
If she ever wants to claim the destiny that is rightfully hers, Connie has only one option left: to kill him.
Book Details
Sea stone sisters
Eleanor Buchanan
Description
Like the stones in their rings, the sisters were meant to stay together.
Now they were scattered across the world.
1931. When Iris Blackmore's father knocks down the Sisters of Skara standing stones, a dark shadow falls on her family that will echo down through generations. With their fortune lost, the four Blackmore sisters are scattered to the four winds, taking only the rings they inherited from their beloved mother.
Present day. Grieving and adrift, Roz Chatton leaves her home in Australia, arriving in London with little other than her late mother's ring. When she stumbles upon a painting of four ancient standing stones, she feels the past calling to her. Drawn to Scotland, Roz begins to unearth a long-forgotten mystery, and a secret that lies waiting for her within her mother's ring ...
Four lost sisters. An epic journey home. Will you follow?
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Simply beside herself
Judith Katherine
Description
When Elizabeth finds a dead body on a park bench – her own – she knows it’s a sign that she needs to make some big changes in her life.
Staff at her retirement home are too busy to listen when she tries to get their attention, but she is persuaded she must leave its suffocating routine without further delay. In opening the door and walking away, Elizabeth makes an audacious decision – something she had forgotten she could do – in search of a better future and a connection to her past.
Elizabeth’s daughter, Lara, drowning in her own roles and schedules, experiences a stunning trifecta of tipping points following her mother’s escape. Along with her troubled teenage daughter, Evie, Lara is forced into taking responsibility for herself and facing change. Having discovered how easy it is to get lost, all three soon realise how important it is to be found again.
Book Details
Evil is Forever
Trilina Pucci
Description
It’s been two years since Evie and Chase clawed their way out of the real-life horror movie that would define most people. They’ve finally moved on.
Or so they thought.
Evie’s doing special effects for a new slasher film. Chase is preparing to open his own restaurant. But it’s not work that’s getting to them—it''s each other. While Chase still has his heart-eyed sights set on Evie, she’s got hers on the nearest exit. And she’s dreaming up the best comeback to whatever annoying thing he says next.
So what if he saved her life? She’s already kissed him more than enough times. They’re even now, right?
But when fate (or some nefarious plot) forces them into the same living quarters, things between Evie and Chase go from lukewarm to red hot. Trouble is, their romantic rendezvous aren’t as private as they think.
Someone’s watching. And if they don’t figure out who, their next brush with death could be their last.
Book Details
The Boyfriend Clause
Bridie Blake
Description
Sabrina's new Melbourne cafe, her lifelong dream, is struggling-despite her exceptional baked goods and fabulous coffee. Her love life isn't faring much better-she just keeps dating the wrong kind of guy. And time is running out on the boyfriend clause in the loan agreement she has with her parents- she must be in a committed relationship in a matter of months or pay back the loan in its entirety. And that would mean losing the cafe.
What could be worse? Making up a fake boyfriend, and accidentally giving him the name of the rude and brooding famous writer in her apartment block, the one she inadvertently insulted when he moved in-that's what!
And when that leads to the rude and brooding writer joining her rambunctious family on a trip to England and a charade of perfect romance, Sabrina finds herself navigating a whirlwind of contradictory emotions. Including an unignorable awareness of just how infuriatingly hot the insufferable writer is. It's surely only a matter of time before the boundary between what's all show for her family and what might be a real romance starts to blur. That is, until Sabrina discovers what the man of her desires is writing about in his new novel.
Book Details
Brigid
Kim Curran
Description
In a wild, ancient grove at the edge of winter, a desperate girl prays to the gods for her freedom.
Born to a slave mother, sold in marriage to a brutal husband, none have ever listened to Brigid s prayers.
But this time, a goddess answers . . . with a vision that will transform Brigid s path forever.
Ireland lies on the precipice of change. The new Christian god is coming, a faith that Brigid can bend to her will, building a sisterhood and sanctuary for women with nowhere else to turn. As their numbers grow, so too do the rumours of just what powers women can hold when they come together.
But power, like a flame, consumes as it grows. As Brigid rises, challenging kings, defying bishops, soon she must reckon with what she herself has become.
And as her enemies draw closer, eager to reclaim all she has taken from them, what or who will she sacrifice to hold on to her legacy?
A radical reimagining of Ireland s most beloved saint, Brigid is the story of a woman who could never be caged by men, by gods, or even by history itself.
Book Details
A better life
Lionel Shriver
Description
Gloria Bonaventura, a divorced mother of three living with her 26-year-old son Nico in a sprawling house in Brooklyn, decides to participate in a new city programme – Big Apple, Big Heart – that would pay her to take in a migrant as a boarder. Gloria is thrilled when sweet, kind, helpful Martine arrives. But Nico is sceptical. A classic live-at-home, unemployed Gen Zer with no interest in adulthood, Nico resents the indignity of moving from his self-contained basement flat and back into his childhood bedroom.
As the months go by, Martine endears herself to both Nico’s sisters, while finding her way into Gloria’s heart. But as Martine’s disturbingly dodgy compatriots begin to show up, Nico grows only more hostile to both his mother’s altruism and the ‘migrant crisis’ in general – though turns out to be anything but a reliable narrator himself.
Book Details
The Girls Before
Kate Alice Marshall
Description
There is a girl in a basement.
The door has stopped opening.
The light is gone.
Stranger is trapped in the dark, with only her imagination and the scribbles on the wall left by long-dead girls to keep her company. Nearly out of food and water, she makes one last attempt to escape. But if the door opens at last, will it mean salvation, or only the beginning of her fight to survive?
Audrey is a search and rescue expert who never stopped looking for her best friend, Janie, who disappeared when they were teenagers. Janie used to love the local legend of a forest witch who saves girls from bad men, but Audrey knows now that for every one saved, there's always another one lost.
When she stumbles upon evidence in the forest that a teenage runaway might have actually been kidnapped from land belonging to the town's most prominent family, she must dig through decades of secrets to reveal the biggest one of all: what happened to the girls before?
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