Romantic Comedy

Curtis Sittenfeld

Sally Miz has abandoned all hopes in the search for love. But when her friend and fellow writer begins to date a glamorous actress, he joins the growing club of interesting but average-looking men who get romantically involved with accomplished, beautiful women. Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch, poking fun at this ‘social rule’. The reverse never happens for a woman. Then Sally meets Noah, a pop idol with a reputation for dating models. But this isn’t a romantic comedy - it’s real life. Would someone like him ever date someone like her?

The Mud of a Century

Several days after a once-in-a-century flood moves through the Indian city of Chennai, choking the Adyar River with the titular mud, a Japanese woman contracted to an IT company as a language instructor finds herself caught up in a deluge of flashbacks and memories, reflecting on unspoken words and unlived lives and contemplating the muddy chaos of her own karma.

Everything Is Beautiful And Everything Hurts

Mickey’s new-found talent makes her realise she’s everything she thought she wasn’tpowerful, strong and special. But her success comes at a cost, and the relentless training and pressure to win leaves Mickey broken, her dream in tatters. Years later, when Mickey is working in a dead-end job with a drop-kick boyfriend, her mother becomes seriously ill. After nursing her, Mickey realises the only way she can overcome her grief - and find herself - is to run again.

Ada’s Realm

In a small village in West Africa, in what will one day become Ghana, Ada gives birth again, and again the baby does not live. Centuries later, Ada will become the mathematical genius Ada Lovelace; Ada, a prisoner forced into prostitution in a Nazi concentration camp; and Ada, a young, pregnant Ghanaian woman with a new British passport who arrives in Berlin in 2019 for a fresh start. Ada is not one woman, but many, and she is all women. A spellbinding novel.

What I’d Rather Not Think About

The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult liveshow her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely. Full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour, this novel explores the perspective of the sister who both loves and resents her twin, struggles to understand him, and misses him terribly.

Greek Lessons

The islands of Prospera lie in a vast ocean: in splendid isolation from the rest of humanity, or whatever remains of it. Citizens of the main island enjoy privileged lives, attended to by the support staff who live on a cramped neighbouring island, where whispers begin to grow into cries for revolution. Meanwhile, life for Prosperans is perfection - and when it’s not, their bodies are sent to the mysterious third island. Proctor Bennett is a Ferryman, who shepherds the soon-to-be retired into the unknown. He never questioned his work until the day he is delivered a cryptic message that unravels something he has secretly suspected. Something that could change the fate of humanity itself.

In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them together. Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity - their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to expression.

To Battersea Park

Written in four parts, To Battersea Park explores the strata and sediment of a single place and time. It shows what brings us together, through love, through the clashes of what we want to do and what the world wants to do with us. Set in a large crowded city where we are forbidden to approach strangers, this is about what we share: humanity, imagination, and the love that emerges from many acts of telling.

The Flying Nurse

Prudence Wheelwright

Nurse and midwife Prue Wheelwright has worked in the most remote parts of Australia and around the world. In isolated, far-flung locations and on dangerous front lines, this passionate and dedicated nurse has put her heart, and often her safety, on the line, day after day, year after year. Prue shares all the challenges, the joys and the heartbreaks in her life. Prue will inspire you and move you with her tales of life at its most raw and real.

I Had a Father in Karratha

What happens when your father dies and you fly 4500 kms across to lay him at rest and find his estate is a spectacular mess of hoarded junk, bank debts, lost paperwork and rundown properties in a mining town gone bust? Annette Trevitt tracks her twoand-a-half-year epic undertaking of cleaning up her father’s mess in Karratha, Western Australia. A fly-in fly-out marathon as she holds together her life with her teenage son in Melbourne. This is a story of commitment, responsibility, doggedness and love.

Running Strong

Candice Warner knows all about the damaging consequences of living life in front of the cameras and has learned a lot about how to insulate from the worst of public life - for herself, as a wife and as a mother. But she has never been stronger or more determined to forge the space she and her family need to be safe, and to live a life filled with love, purpose, ambition and optimism. Candid, raw and uplifting, Candice tells it straight about all of the ups and downs and the regenerative power of running.

The Stable Boy of Auschwitz

Of the 2,011 Jews who were rounded up by the Gestapo and deported from Cologne, Henry Oster was one of only 19 Germanspeaking Jewish boys to emerge alive from the concentration camps after the war. Torn from their home, Henry and his family were deported to the Lodz Ghetto in Poland. Then, one terrifying night, Henry found himself herded onto a stifling, filth-ridden cattle car, on a ride to a place whose name has come to symbolise the worst of humanity: Auschwitz. From risking his life hiding scraps of food in the stables to sustain himself, to escaping selections for the gas chambers, Henry somehow found the strength to keep going. This is his story.

Releasing This May

Fat Girl Dancing

Fat child, self-denying adolescent, hungry young woman; a body now burgeoning uncontrolled into middle age. Kris Kneen has borne the usual indignities- the confrontations with clothes that won’t fasten, with mirrors that defame, with strangers whose gaze judges and dismisses. This is the story of how Kris learned to look unblinkingly at their recalcitrant body, and ultimately found the courage to carry it to freedom.

The thousands of academic refugees Esther Simpson helped rescue are well remembered. But who was she and why has history forgotten her? For a woman who kept regular correspondence with her refugee ‘children’ and who could count among her pen pals Albert Einstein and Ludwig Wittgenstein, surprisingly little is known of her private life. This is the story of Esther Simpson, a remarkable woman whose selfless actions left an indelible mark on the cultural and intellectual landscape of the modern world.

Still Standing

Chrissie Foster is the mother who brought the rich and powerful Catholic Church to its knees over its global abuse of children, including two of her daughters, Emma and Katie. But nobody could’ve seen what came next. Grieving the death of Emma and the catastrophic accident that left Katie largely using a wheelchair and unable to care for herself, and bullied by the Catholic Church, Chrissie Foster somehow found the strength to win and bring about changes in child safety that she hopes will last forever.

Mary Rodgers was the daughter of Richard Rodgers, who, with Oscar Hammerstein, wrote some of the biggest musicals of the 20th century. Shy is the story of how Mary went from angry child, constrained by a self-absorbed mother and her father’s overwhelming gift, to finally living life on her own terms-falling in love, often unwisely, marrying twice, having six children, and forging a career of her own.