Cirrus@Austlit

'Robert Hillman’s previous novel, The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, captivated readers around the world.

'His new novel is also a story about unlikely love. World War II is over and Hiroshima lies in a heap of poisoned rubble when young Quaker Wesley Cunningham returns home to the village of Almond Tree. He served as a stretcher-bearer and has seen his fair share of horror. Now he intends to build beautiful houses and to marry, having fallen in love with his neighbour Beth Hardy.

'Beth has other plans. An ardent Communist, she is convinced that the Party and Stalin’s Soviet Union
hold the answers to all the world’s evils. She doesn’t believe in marriage; in any case, her devotion is to the cause.

'Beth’s ideals will exact a ruinously high price. But Wes will not stop loving her. This is the story of their journey through the catastrophic mid-twentieth century—from summer in Almond Tree to Moscow’s bitter winter and back again—to find a way of being together.

'The Bride of Almond Tree is a book of great loves and difficult choices.' (Publication summary)

'Tom Hope doesn’t think he’s much of a farmer, but he’s doing his best. He can’t have been much of a husband to Trudy, either, judging by her sudden departure. It’s only when she returns, pregnant to someone else, that he discovers his surprising talent as a father. So when Trudy finds Jesus and takes little Peter away with her to join the holy rollers, Tom’s heart breaks all over again.

'Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic smalltown bookseller: the second Jew—and the most vivid person—Tom has ever met. He dares to believe they could make each other happy.

'But it is 1968: twenty-four years since Hannah and her own little boy arrived at Auschwitz. Tom Hope is taking on a batttle with heartbreak he can barely even begin to imagine.' (Publication Summary)

'Robert Hillman goes behind the public knowledge to find out what makes Les tick, where he came from, who and what made him Australia’s number one advocate for our most vulnerable young people. And what of his private life, if he has one at all? Take a journey with one of Australia’s living treasures to the ugliest side of life and to the best.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Baba Schwartz's story began fifteen years before the Holocaust could have been imagined. It is the story of a spirited girl in a warm and loving Jewish family, living a normal life in a small town in eastern Hungary. In The May Beetles, Baba describes the innocence and excitement of her childhood, remembering her early years with verve and emotion, remarkably unaffected by what took place after the Nazis arrived.

'What did happen was unspeakable horror. Baba describes the shattering of her family and their community from 1944, when the Germans transported the 3000 Jews of her town to Auschwitz. She lost her father to the gas chambers, yet she and her two sisters survived this concentration camp and several others to which they were transported as slave labour. They eventually escaped the final death march and were liberated by the advancing Russian army. Baba writes about this period of horror with the same directness, freshness and honesty as she writes about her childhood.

'Baba wrote this book in 1991 but only revealed the manuscript last year, when she was eighty-eight. The May Beetles, prepared with the assistance of Robert Hillman, has a story to tell that will affect all readers deeply.' (Publication summary)

' A remarkably warm-hearted, uplifting and inspiring story of one boy's survival against the odds.

'Abdi's world fell apart when he was only fifteen and Somalia's vicious civil war hit Mogadishu. Unable to find his family and effectively an orphan, he fled with some sixty others,heading to Kenya. On the way, death squads hunted them and they daily faced violence, danger and starvation. After almost four months, they arrived in at refugee camps in Kenya - of the group he'd set out with, only five had survived.

'All alone in the world and desperate to find his family, Abdi couldn't stay in Kenya, so he turned around and undertook the dangerous journey back to Mogadishu. But the search was fruitless, and eventually Abdi made his way - alone, with no money in his pockets - to Romania, then to Germany, completely dependent on the kindess of strangers. He was just seventeen years old when he arrived in Melbourne. He had no English, no family or friends, no money, no home. Yet, against the odds, he not only survived, he thrived. Abdi went on to complete secondary education and later university. He became a youth worker, was acknowledged with the 2007 Victorian Refugee Recognition Award and was featured in the SBS second series of Go Back to Where You Came From.

'Despite what he has gone through, Abdi is a most inspiring man, who is constantly thankful for his life and what he has. Everything he has endured and achieved is testament to his quiet strength and courage, his resilience and most of all, his warm-hearted, shining and enduring optimism.' (Publication summary)

'My revenge on Hitler is … a lifetime in which delight has reached me from a hundred sources, and been welcomed.

'A story of courage, unconventionality and lust for life.

'Vera Wasowski was just seven years old when German soldiers marched her and her family into the Lwów Jewish ghetto in Poland. She watched her father take his own life and her mother accede to sexual blackmail in order to ensure their survival. Her story is one of a child surviving hell.

'After the war, Vera studied journalism at Warsaw University, where she threw herself into the bohemian scene. In 1958, she migrated to Australia with her husband and young son, to escape rising anti-Semitism. There she would carve out a bold career as a TV researcher and producer at the ABC on pioneering programs such as This Day Tonight. It was a wild time for politics, arts and the media, and Vera was at the centre of things, mixing with the Hawkes in the eighties, and forming a close friendship with artist Mirka Mora.

'In his inimitable style, acclaimed biographer Robert Hillman captures Vera’s fierce and passionate take on life and tells her amazing story.' (Publication summary)

'Tess Wachowicz is a woman of great beauty and accomplishment. Her second marriage at the age of forty to Leon Joyce, a privately wealthy dealer in fine and rare books, puzzles her friends and admirerers. Tess is famously libidinous; Leon is asexual. The assumption is that Tess has made an ‘arrangement’ with Leon, but the arrangement is stranger than anyone imagines. When Tess falls fatally ill and dies after months of struggle, her husband’s grief drives him to the brink of madness. He retreats to Joyful, an old property in rural Victoria, once the site of an utopian community run by his great-aunt. There, Leon faces harrowing secrets kept from him by Tess, and also uncovers the hidden life of the long-ago utopian community.

'Leon’s grief and sense of betrayal is mirrored in the concurrent story of Emmanuel Delli and his wife Daanya, Kurds who adopted Australia after the Gulf War to escape the nightmare of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Emmanuel arrived in Australia with an international reputation in Mesopotamian studies; Daanya is a pediatrician. Their daughter Sofia, a musical protégé of Tess Wachowicz, takes her own life in a Melbourne hotel after the failure of an ill-advised relationship with her father’s closest friend. Emmanuel experiences his daughter’s death as a betrayal of his love for her, and like Leon, he is driven close to madness.

'Circumstances eventually bring Leon and Emmanuel face-to-face at Joyful, where their separate struggles to overcome grief and betrayal merge, and find resolution.' (Source: Author's website)

'Malini lives with her parents and young sister, Banni, in northern Sri Lanka. As the civil war heads towards its catastrophic end, Malini and her family are herded by Tamil Tiger troops towards the coast where they will act as human shields, along with thousands of other Tamil civilians. When Malini's father pushes a mobile phone into her hands and tells her to run off into the forest with Banni, Malini does as she is told. But then the shelling begins, and Malini has no way of finding her mother and father.

'With the role of parent thrust upon her, Malini has no choice but to travel to her grandfather's village a long way inland. She and Banni will need to keep off the highways and stay alert for soldiers from all sides. But where will the next meal come from? Who can they trust? Where will they shelter? And will they ever be reunited with their parents again?

'The uplifting story of one girl's odyssey through war-torn Sri Lanka.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.