Cirrus@Austlit

'Beautiful, warm and evocative, this stunning picture book reveals an older brother's hopes for the amazing experiences he will share with his new baby brother - when he's older. A triumph of illustration and storytelling.

'Baby brother, I can't wait until you're older.
Just imagine the adventures that lie ahead...

'An exquisitely illustrated and deeply joyful celebration of the bond between brothers. Join them as they explore the far reaches of this wild and amazing world, side by side every step of the way. From two highly acclaimed and award-winning creators.' (Publication summary)

'Kady, Ezra, Hanna and Nik narrowly escaped with their lives from the attacks on Heimdall station and now find themselves crammed with 2,000 refugees on the container ship, Mao. With the jump station destroyed and their resources scarce, the only option is to return to Kerenza--but who knows what they'll find seven months after the invasion?

'Meanwhile, Kady's cousin, Asha, survived the initial BeiTech assault and has joined Kerenza's ragtag underground resistance. When Rhys--an old flame from Asha's past--reappears on Kerenza, the two find themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. With time running out, a final battle will be waged on land and in space, heroes will fall, and hearts will be broken.' (Publication summary)

'Everyone deserves a bit of grand . . .

'From ordinary to extraordinary, Vincent and the Grandest Hotel on Earth is a marvellous ride that will delight readers of all ages.

'Perched high on the snowy slopes of the Mabombo Ranges lies The Grandest Hotel on Earth. It’s wilder than the African savanna, more fantastical than Disneyland and more magical than Shangri-la.

'So when ordinary eleven-year-old Vincent meets the hotel’s young Florence he sets off on a path leading into his most wondrous dreams.

'But of course, dreams have a funny way of taking strange and surprising turns and, before long, Vincent is torn between right and wrong, friendship and family and the most enticing of desires – to see into the future . . .

'Warning: this book includes insanely cute pocket dogs, travelling by llama or jet pack, chocolate fountains and shoes that play Bach.' (Publication summary)

'The exhilarating sequel to the New York Times bestselling and award-winning Illuminae.

'Moving to a space station at the edge of the galaxy was always going to be the death of Hanna’s social life. Nobody said it might actually get her killed.

'The saga that began with the breakout bestseller Illuminae continues on board the space station Heimdall, where two new characters will confront the next wave of BeiTech’s assault. Hanna is the station captain’s pampered daughter, Nik the reluctant member of a notorious crime family. But while they are struggling with the realities of life aboard the galaxy’s most boring space station, little do they know that Kady Grant and the Hypatia are headed to Heimdall, carrying news of the Kerenza invasion.

'When an elite BeiTech team invades the station, Hanna and Nik are thrown together to defend their home. But alien predators are picking off the crew one by one, and a malfunction in the station’s wormhole means the space-time continuum may be ripped in two before dinner. Soon, Hanna and Nik aren’t just fighting for their own survival. The fate of everyone on the Hypatia - and possibly in the known universe - is in their hands.

'But relax. They’ve totally got this. They hope.

'Featuring guest journal illustrations by bestselling author Marie Lu.' (Publication summary)

'This morning, Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the hardest thing she’d have to do.

'This afternoon, her planet was invaded.

'The year is 2575, and two rival megacorporations are at war over a planet that’s little more than an ice-covered speck at the edge of the universe. Too bad nobody thought to warn the people living on it. With enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra—who are barely even talking to each other—are forced to fight their way onto one of the evacuating fleet, with an enemy warship in hot pursuit.

'But their problems are just getting started. A deadly plague has broken out and is mutating, with terrifying results; the fleet’s AI, which should be protecting them, may actually be their enemy; and nobody in charge will say what’s really going on. As Kady hacks into a tangled web of data to find the truth, it’s clear only one person can help her bring it all to light: the ex-boyfriend she swore she’d never speak to again!

'Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents—including emails, schematics, military files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more—Illuminae is the first book in a heart-stopping, high-octane trilogy about lives interrupted, the price of truth, and the courage of everyday heroes.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'On a radiant day in Sydney, four adults converge on Circular Quay, site of the iconic Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Crowds of tourists mix with the locals, enjoying the glorious surroundings and the play of light on water.

'But each of the four carries a complicated history from elsewhere; each is haunted by past intimacies, secrets and guilt: Ellie is preoccupied by her sexual experiences as a girl, James by a tragedy for which he feels responsible, Catherine by the loss of her beloved brother in Dublin and Pei Xing by her imprisonment during China's Cultural Revolution.

'Told over the course of a single Saturday, Five Bells describes four lives which chime and resonate, sharing mysterious patterns and symbols. But it is a fifth person, a child, whose presence at the Quay haunts the day and who will overshadow everything that unfolds. By night-time, when Sydney is drenched in a rainstorm, each life has been transformed.' (From the publisher's website.)

'I still hadn't fully absorbed the terrible possibility that I might actually be a werewolf. A werewolf. I kept stumbling over that word; it made no sense to me. How could I be a werewolf? Werewolves didn't exist.

'When Tobias Richard Vandevelde wakes up in hospital with no memory of the night before, his horrified mother tells him that he was found unconscious. At Featherdale Wildlife Park. In a dingo pen.

'He assumes that his two rambunctious best friends are somehow responsible, until he discovers that they're just as freaked out as he is. Then the mysterious Reuben turns up, claiming that Toby has a rare and dangerous "condition". Next thing he knows, Toby finds himself involved with a strange bunch of sickly insomniacs who seem convinced that he needs their help.

'It's not until he's kidnapped and imprisoned that he starts to believe them - and to understand what being a paranormal monster really means.' (From the publisher's website.)

This is a story that can only be told in a whisper...

In the remote outback of Western Australia during the Second World War, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife, Stella, raise a lonely child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary: in a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl's limited education. Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary come to call one another sister and to share a very special bond. They are content with life in this remote corner of the globe, until a terrible event lays waste to their lives.

Through this exquisite story of Perdita's troubled childhood, Gail Jones explores the values of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice with a brilliance that has already earned her numerous accolades for her previous novels, Dreams of Speaking and Sixty Lights.

'Is it possible to be too much in love? After ten years in London, Martin Blackman returns to Adelaide with his wife and fellow psychiatrist Lucy, blissfully happy. But then he introduces her to his old friend Felix, once a brilliant surgeon, now barred from practising and changed beyond recognition. In the complex triangle that develops, Martin must decide just how far he is prepared to go for Felix. So begins the darkest of journeys for all three of them...' (Publication summary)

'Adam discovers a body buried in a silage pit. Is it one of the teenage girls who went missing from Falcon Ridge six years ago?

'And where is the author of the diary Adam finds in the old farmhouse? Some locals are willing to do anything to get their hands on the missing pages. Will Adam be able to piece together the mystery in time to save himself?

'Murderer's Thumb is a novel about what happens when outsiders uncover secrets that have been hidden for too long.' (Publisher's blurb)

'Crack the code, or tomorrow is history!

Tane and Rebecca aren’t sure what to make of it. A sequence of 1s and 0s, the message looks like nothing more than a random collection of alternating digits. As they work to decode it, and the ones that follow, it slowly it becomes clear—the messages are being sent back in time from Tane and Rebecca’s future! Something there has gone horribly wrong, and it’s up to them to prevent it from happening. 

Tane and Rebecca follow the message’s cryptic instructions, but it’s not long before they begin to suspect that worst—that the very survival of the human race may be at stake...'

Source: Author's blurb.

By the time ninth grade begins, Ishmael Leseur knows it won't be long before Barry Bagsley, the class bully, says, "Ishmael? What kind of w'ussy-crap name is that?” Ishmael's perfected the art of making himself virtually invisible. But all that changes when James Scobie joins the class. Unlike Ishmael, James has no sense of fear—he claims it was removed during an operation.

Now nothing will stop James and Ishmael from taking on bullies, bugs, and Moby Dick, in the toughest, weirdest, most embarrassingly awful . . . and the best year of their lives.' (Publication summary)

“Photography has without doubt made her a seer; she is a woman of the future, someone leaning into time, beyond others, precarious, unafraid to fall.”

In 1860, when they are just eight and ten, Lucy Strange and her brother Thomas are orphaned. Left now in the care of their uncle, the children begin slowly, frighteningly, to find their place in the difficult world. And so begins Lucy's adolescent journey of discovery, one which will take her away from her childhood home in Australia, first to London, then to Bombay and finally, to her death, at the age of twenty-two. It is a life abbreviated, but not a life diminished. Lucy is a remarkable character, forthright, gifted and exuberant; she touches the lives of all who know her.

Written in confident, finely interwoven and intricate layers, Sixty Lights is the powerful chronicle of a modern and independent young woman’s life in the Victorian world. Objects evoke memories and hint at the future in a narrative that flows between pleats in time. Through her observation of such objects Lucy’s photographic vision is apparent. Her world is a series of still images which one day, printed on albumen paper, she will leave as affecting mementoes of her own extraordinary life.

'Against the backdrop of Darwin, that small, tropical hothouse of a port, half-outback, half-oriental, lying at the tip of northern Australia, a young and newly arrived southerner encounters the 'maestro', a Viennese refugee with a shadowed past. The occasion is a piano lesson, the first of many... ' (Publication summary)