AustLit

'Breaking their poses like trees snapping branches, the women urgently regarded each other, cleared away all signs of work in an instant, examined their souls for defects, in a sense crossed themselves, and waited.

'After Laura and Clare are abandoned by their mother, Felix is there to help, even to marry Laura if she will have him. Little by little the two sisters grow complicit with his obsessions, his cruelty, his need to control.

'Set in the leafy northern suburbs of Sydney during the 1940s, The Watch Tower is a novel of relentless and acute psychological power.' (Publication summary)

'Zoe Howard is seventeen when her brother, Russell, introduces her to Stephen Quayle. Aloof and harsh, Stephen is unlike anyone she has ever met, ‘a weird, irascible character out of some dense Russian novel’. His sister, Anna, is shy and thoughtful, ‘a little orphan’.

'Zoe and Russell, Stephen and Anna: they may come from different social worlds but all four will spend their lives moving in and out of each other’s shadow.

'Set amid the lush gardens and grand stone houses that line the north side of Sydney Harbour, In Certain Circles is an intense psychological drama about family and love, tyranny and freedom.' (Publication abstract)

The fateful years between Sydney and Hamburg.

Three sisters, two continents: Each of the three sisters went their own way. Elsa works in Sydney, Mina married her secret fiance William, and Carola lives happily with Werner in Hamburg. But then a death shocked the family to its core. Then, the world is at war and suddenly Carola, Elsa and Mina live in enemy countries. Can the bond that holds together the three sisters be stronger than the shadow of war?

The moving life of Australian sisters between war and peace.

Australia, 1891. The lives of Carola, Mina and Elsa changed abruptly when her mother dies shortly after birth of the youngest child. While Carola, the eldest, is sent to distant Germany, Mina and Elsa remain in Australia. As different as the lives of three young women are, they have one thing in common: they do not give up when it comes to fight for their dreams.

A highly emotional saga of the lives of three extraordinary sisters - based on a true story.

From Hamburg to Sydney.

The daughter of a shipyard owner Emilia grew up in Hamburg. Her parents arrange a marriage for her, but not the man with whom she has fallen in love. Carl Gotthold Lessing is the great-nephew of the famous poet. He has earned a captain's license and borrowed money to build a ship. He wants to marry Emilia, but her family is strongly opposed. The two begin an affair and Emilia decides to travel with him. Their first child is born in South America and the second in Hamburg . But they have another goal: Australia...

'The year is 1967 and the world teeters on the brink of nuclear holocaust as the Cold War goes relentlessly on. On a beautiful spring day in the little city of Holloman, Connecticut, home to prestigious Chubb University and armaments giant Cornucopia, chief of detectives Captain Carmine Delmonico has more pressing concerns than finding a name for his infant son: twelve murders have taken place in one day, and Delmonico is drawn into a gruesome web of secrets and lies.

'Supported by his detective sergeants Abe Goldberg and Corey Marshall, and new team member the meticulous Delia Carstairs, Delmonico embarks on what looks like an unsolvable mystery. All the murders are different, and they all seem unconnected. Are they dealing with one killer, or many? How is the murder of Dee-Dee Hall, a local prostitute, related to the deaths of a mother and her disabled child? How is Chubb student Evan Pugh connected to Desmond Skeps, head of Cornucopia? And as if twelve murders were not enough, Carmine soon finds himself pitted against the mysterious Ulysses, a spy giving Cornucopia′s armaments secrets to the Russians. Are the murders and espionage different cases, or are they somehow linked?

'As the overtaxed police force contends with small town politics, academic rivalry, and corporate greed, the death toll mounts, and Carmine and his team discover that the answers are not what they seem -- but then, are they ever?'  Source: www.harpercollins.com.au/ (Sighted 17/03/2010).

'A guy who howls. A girl on a mission to forget.

'In the suburb of Shyness, where the sun doesn't rise and the border crackles with a strange energy, Wolfboy meets a stranger at the Diabetic Hotel. She tells him her name is Wildgirl, and she dares him to be her guide through the endless night.

'But then they are mugged by the sugar-crazed Kidds. And what plays out is moving, reckless ... dangerous. There are things that can only be said in the dark. And one long night is time enough to change your life.' (From the publisher's website.)

Dermot Nolan is an award-winning bestselling author who seems to have it all—a successful career, fame, fortune, and a beautiful wife. Between the royalties coming in from his most recent book and the revenue he has received from the film company that bought the rights, Dermot seems every bit the literary darling.And yet, for the last year, he has suffered from a bout of writer’s block, and in the process has grossly overspent his income. So when Dermot comes across an unsolicited manuscript stuffed into his mailbox, he cannot help but feel intrigued. It tells the story of the homicidal “Dream Healer,” who snares his victims via his website, worstnightmares.net, seduces them into revealing their innermost fears, and then kills them by revisiting their very own nightmares upon them.

Dermot, with the help of his wife, begins to rework the novel, while simultaneously researching the individual dream stories. In his search, he very slowly begins to realize that the novel may not be entirely fictional, that these poor characters may have perished at the hands of a twisted torturer. Could the Dreamhealer be real? Could these innocent cyber-surfers have fallen victim to a raving maniac? Just how far is fact from fiction? And could Dermot be writing his own ticket to death...his very own worst nightmare?

Source: Publisher's Blurb

"Set against the backdrop of the Great Famine, this is the story of the triumph of one woman amidst Ireland's despair. It is August 1845. In Dublin's Botanic Gardens, Phytophora infestans is discovered for the first time. The bacteria was to result in the Great Famine, an event of holocaust proportions that affected every man, woman and child in Ireland. England's shame; Ireland's tragedy . Ellen O'Malley is one such victim. She loses her husband, is duped into going to Australia to lead a better life, leaving three of her beloved children behind. She travels aboard a coffin ship and arrives emaciated and ill with her new baby. But Ellen, a woman with an indomitable spirit, rises above her oppression and eventually returns to wreak revenge on those perpetrators of her misery."

-Publisher's blurb.

''He told me this much...that he's met a woman in Paris and that they'd been writing to each other. That their letters had become increasingly erotic.'

'A man who can no longer talk to his wife. His brief encounter with another woman. The beginnings of a possible affair in letters. Letters which might be turned into a novel, or a confession. There are the facts.

'But the facts begin to shift. Fiction and reality become indistinguisable in one person's search for truth and another's realisation of desire. What I Have Written is a novel of sexual obsession, a literary puzzle in which what is written is far from what it seems.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.