Cirrus@Austlit

I't wasn't just the bad break-up that caused Eleanor's life to unravel. It was the cancer. And the demons that came with it. Freshly single and thoroughly traumatised from the ordeals of breast cancer, Eleanor Mellett starts a new job as a teacher in a remote mountain hamlet. It's certainly peaceful enough, almost too peaceful. But what's become of the previous teacher, the saintly Miss Barker, who has disappeared abruptly under mysterious circumstances? And what's with all those locks on the door? And what the hell is that bus doing idling outside her house late, late at night?

'When the local priest offers to exorcise Eleanor of her 'cancer demon', she probably should have declined. Because that's when all her troubles start in earnest. That's when the visitors come a-knocking.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'When the eldest daughter of a whaling family in Eden, New South Wales, sets out to chronicle the particularly difficult season of 1908, the story she tells is poignant and hilarious, filled with drama and misadventure.

Swinging from her own hopes and disappointments, both domestic and romantic, to the challenges that beset their tiny whaling operation, Mary's tale is entirely relatable despite the hundred-odd years that separate her world from ours.

Chronicling her family's struggle to survive the season and her own attempts to navigate an all-consuming crush on an itinerant whaleman with a murky past, Rush Oh! is also a celebration of an extraordinary episode in Australian history when a family of whalers formed a fond, unique allegiance with a pod of Killer whales - and in particular, a Killer whale named Tom.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Meredith, 30 and unmarried, arrives at a remote lighthouse island with her uncle, the new head keeper. Bad weather and misadventure leave her marooned with only the sullen and withdrawn assistant keeper, Fleet, for companionship. A tender, faltering courtship ensues.'

Source: Screen Australia.