AustLit

'Margot Baumann has left school to take up her sister's job in the mailroom of a large prison. But this is Germany in 1944, and the prison is Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin.

'Margot is shielded from the camp's brutality as she has no contact with prisoners. But she does handle their mail and, when given a cigarette lighter and told to burn the letters, she is horrified by the callous act she must carry out with her own hands. This is especially painful since her brother was taken prisoner at Stalingrad and her family have had no letters from him. So Margot steals a few letters, intending to send them in secret, only to find herself drawn to their heart-rending words of hope, of despair, and of love.

'This is how Margot comes to know Dieter Kleinschmidt - through the beauty and the passion of his letters to his girlfriend.

'And since his girlfriend is also named Margot, it is like reading love letters written for her.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The most enchanting debut novel of 2018, this is an irresistible, deeply moving and romantic story of a young girl, daughter of an abusive father, who has to learn the hard way that she can break the patterns of the past, live on her own terms and find her own strength.

'An enchanting and captivating novel, about how our untold stories haunt us - and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

'After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak.

'Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family's story. In her early twenties, Alice's life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.

'Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows Alice's unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'It's been ages since Jo, Helen, Ereka and CJ first became friends through their mothers' group-back then, life revolved around their small children. Now their kids are pre-teens and teenagers with attitudes, iPods and raging hormones, and life is feeling emptier for some mothers, more liberating for others.

'While away together in an old country house with a couple of new friends and plenty of wine and food, it's not long before the women are discussing men, marriage and parenting, sharing intimacies and confiding vulnerabilities. Friendships are put on the line as the bonds between them are tested and the weekend takes some unexpected turns.

'Picking up where the international bestseller Secret Mothers' Business left off, The Reunion is an insightful, funny and often biting novel about the challenges women face as their bodies change, dreams fade and kids grow up. Ultimately it explores what it means to be a good friend, a good person and a good mother-and suggests that all love is about learning to let go.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Meet Merlin. He's Lucy's bright, beautiful son - who just happens to be autistic. Since Merlin's father, the reserved, cerebral workaholic Jeremy, left them in the lurch shortly after Merlin's diagnosis, Lucy has made Merlin the centre of her world. Struggling with the joys and tribulations of raising her adorable yet challenging son, Lucy doesn't have room for any other man in her life... so why bother trying to find one?

'When Lucy realises she's becoming increasingly cynical about life in general, she finally resolves to dip a toe back into the world of dating. Things don't go quite to plan, yet just as Lucy is resolved to a life of singledom once more, the most imperfectly perfect man for her and her son lands on her doorstep. But then, so does Jeremy, begging for forgiveness and a second chance...' (From the publisher's website.)

'Shelley and her mom have been menaced long enough. Excused from high school where a trio of bullies nearly killed her, and still reeling from her parents’ humiliating divorce, Shelley has retreated with her mother to the quiet of Honeysuckle Cottage in the countryside. Thinking their troubles are over, they revel in their cozy, secure life of gardening and books, hot chocolate and Brahms by the fire. But on the eve of Shelley’s sixteenth birthday, an unwelcome guest disturbs their peace and something inside Shelley snaps. What happens next will shatter all their certainties—about their safety, their moral convictions, the limits of what they are willing to accept, and what they’re capable of.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This is the spellbinding follow-up to Kate Holden's memoir In My Skin, but it has a different story to tell. The Romantic describes Kate's journey from Melbourne to Rome and Naples, from romance and sex to love, from loss to understanding—and back again.

'This is a book about everything from sex with strangers to the heartbreaking realities of being in love. It's about the pride of fierce independence and the crushing weight of loneliness. It's about losing yourself in love and then finding yourself through your lover.

'But most of all, The Romantic is the story of one woman's pilgrimage to discover who she really is. And to learn to like what she finds.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Olivier is a young aristocrat, one of an endangered species born in France just after the Revolution. Parrot, the son of an itinerant English printer, wanted to be an artist but has ended up in middle age as a servant.

When Olivier sets sail for the New World - ostensibly to study its prisons, but in reality to avoid yet another revolution - Parrot is sent with him, as spy, protector, foe and foil. Through their adventures with women and money, incarceration and democracy, writing and painting, they make an unlikely pair. But where better for unlikely things to flourish than in the glorious, brand-new experiment, America?

A dazzlingly inventive reimagining of Alexis de Tocqueville's famous journey, Parrot and Olivier in America brilliantly evokes the Old World colliding with the New. Above all, it is a wildly funny, tender portrait of two men who come to form an almost impossible friendship, and a completely improbable work of art.' (From the publisher's website.)

'Julie Catt misspent her youth in Columbia, Missouri lining up tequila shots and winning wet T-shirt competitions. So maybe it wasn't such a stretch to think that twenty years on, mother to six kids from four different paternity arrangements, she'd be sobbing to a therapist about her irrepressible white-trash heritage. Or that her birth parents would turn up, trailing a whole new family. Or even that she'd be living on the other side of the world, having followed her hot butch Australian girlfriend to Sydney.

'But happily married? With a respectable profession? That would be weird...

'Normal is a left-of centre memoir in the mould of Running with Scissors: a funny, insightful, moving and relentlessly frank account of a messy and richly lived life. A complete delight to read, it is a tribute and a reassurance to people in unconventional families everywhere - which, of course, means most of us.' (From the publisher's website.)

'When Lucy's husband of eighteen years runs out on her, she'll do anything to win him back. Including climbing out of her bedroom window at one in the morning wearing her daughter's mini skirt.

'Jasper has left Lucy for her best friend, the chic and thin interior decorator Renee. To make matters worse, her teenage daughter Tally, blames her Mum. "Dad left because you've let yourself go, you're overweight and you nagged him. No wonder he buggered off."

'While Tally is busy trying to find a loophole in her birth certificate so she can put herself up for adoption, Lucy tries to accept that a child is for life and not just for Christmas. Although a signed-up member of Underachievers Anonymous, in Lucy's quest to win back her husband she learns to be a surf life saver, loses weight and gets a job. She also falls in lust, finding herself torn between an older and a much younger man.But it's not until Lucy makes the Freudian discovery that her toy boy is also dating her daughter - and that he's been paid to do so by her conniving ex as ammunition for a custody battle, that she finally learns to stand on her own two stilettos.' (Publisher's blurb)

''And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.'

'Faith isn't so different from most women her age; She's thirty-two, single, has the requisite dysfunctional family, an even more dysfunctional best friend, a busy and challenging job, and in her weaker moments dreams of perhaps some day meeting a man that will ignite her senses and take her away from all this.

'The trouble is, while she aches to see the good in the world, Faith is constantly confronted by the bad. After having heard one too many love-gone-wrong stories and being left feeling helpless in the aftermath of yet another woman fleeing yet another violent man, Faith, a legal counsellor in a women's crisis centre, has just about given up. Not just on the big ideas like hope, love and trust, but even on the chance of getting a decent haircut or meeting an ordinary, non-psychotic, bloke.

'One night a twist of fate finds Faith wringing out years of unshed tears in a suburban veterinary clinic. It is a night that will slowly change the way Faith sees herself and that will allow her to finally understand what she has always needed to know: that before you can save others you have to save yourself.' (Publisher's blurb)

"Steve Irwin's sudden and tragic death made headline news around the world. Shock and grief followed. The world lost a man of heroic proportions. A man who as the Crocodile Hunter touched and changed lives everywhere. "Wildlife Warrior" charts Steve Irwin's amazing life - from his childhood catching snakes in Victoria, Australia, through to his work in the wilderness and in his zoo. It follows his love story with his wife Terri and his rise to fame. A down-to-earth adventurer with a love of all animals, he was passionate about wildlife conservation, life and his family. The book details his lesser-known work saving endangered habitats and furthering knowledge of crocodile behaviour, as well as his many adventures in the bush and further afield."

"I watched the glaze of headlights, the windscreens of oncoming cars: a series of trapezoids with the silhouette of a single male driver. One pulled up in front of me; I reached over and opened the door, slid in. The smell of an unfamiliar car. A middle-aged man looking at me. 'Hi', I said. 'How are you?"...

'There was no single moment when someone looked at Kate Holden and said, 'Why don't you have some?' No one made her try heroin. There was only the sense, with her friends setting out on this forbidden adventure, that she would lose something if she didn't. Just once: to know. So this book is the story of a journey. From a loving family home to the streets of St Kilda; from a shy, bookish life to the ambivalent glamour of an inner-city brothel, Kate Holden describes with breathtaking lyricism and poignancy her travels in an unknown world. Contains explicit sexual scenes.' (Source: Vision Australia Information and Library Service)