Cirrus@Austlit

'In 1920, at seventeen years of age, Maddie Bright takes a job as a serving girl on the Royal Tour of Australia by Edward, Prince of Wales. She meets the prince's young staff and the prince himself— beautiful, boyish, godlike. Maddie might be on the adventure of a lifetime. Sixty-one years later, Maddie Bright is living a small life in a ramshackle house in Brisbane. But an unlooked-for letter has arrived in the mail and there's news on the television from Buckingham Palace that makes her shout back at the screen. Maddie Bright's true story may change. In August 1997, London journalist Victoria Byrd is tasked by her editor with the job of finding the elusive M.A. Bright, author of the classic war novel of ill-fated love, Autumn Leaves. It seems Bright has written a second novel and Victoria has been handed the scoop.

'Written with real warmth and wit, these evocative strands twist across the seas and over two continents, intersecting with the lives of Edward and Princess Diana, two of the most hated and loved figures of the twentieth century. The True Story of Maddie Bright is a novel that tells stories and reveals truth; a novel that considers the inescapable ties of mothering, friendship, duty and love.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Memories and secrets buried for over twenty years surfaced after Mary-Rose MacColl gave birth to a much longed-for baby.

'I am by nature a private person. Secrets are different from privacy. They are things you are forced to keep to yourself, by family, friends, by your own shame. Secrets like these come to the surface one day and demand an airing.

'Emerging from an unconventional, boisterously happy childhood, Mary-Rose MacColl was a rebellious teenager. And when, at the age of fifteen, her high-school teacher and her husband started inviting Mary-Rose to spend time with them, her parents were pleased that she now had the guidance she needed to take her safely into young adulthood.

'It wasn't too long, though, before the teacher and her husband changed the nature of the relationship with overwhelming consequences for Mary-Rose. Consequences that kept her silent and ashamed through much of her adult life. Many years later, safe within a loving relationship, all of the long-hidden secrets and betrayals crashed down upon her and she came close to losing everything.

'In this poignant and brave true story, Mary-Rose brings these secrets to the surface and, in doing so, is finally able to watch them float away.' (Publication summary)

'The lone swimmer, turning over now to switch to a perfectly executed back crawl, wasn't Oxford or Cambridge, wasn't a man. It was a woman, a girl. It was Catherine. Of course it was Catherine.

'It's 1925 and fifteen-year-old Catherine Quick longs to feel once more the warm waters of her home, to strike out into the ocean off the Torres Strait Islands and swim, as she's done since she was a tiny child. But now, with her recent move to London where she lives with her aunt Louisa, Catherine feels that everything she values has been stripped away.

'Louisa, a busy, confident London surgeon who fought boldly for equality for women, holds definite views on the behaviour of her young niece. She wants Catherine to pursue an education, just as she did, to ensure her future freedom. Since Catherine arrived, however, Louisa's every step seems to be wrong and she is finding it harder and harder to block painful memories from her past.

'It takes the influence of enigmatic American banker Manfred Lear Black to convince Louisa to come to New York where Catherine can test her mettle against the first women in the world to swim the English Channel. And where, unexpectedly, Louisa can finally listen to what her own heart tells her.

Like Mary-Rose MacColl's bestselling novel, In Falling Snow, Swimming Home tells a story of ordinary women who became extraordinary.' (Publication summary)

' "In the beginning, it was the summers I remembered - long warm days under the palest blue skies, the cornflowers and forget-me-nots lining the road through the Lys forest, the buzz of insects going about their work, Violet telling me lies."

Iris is getting old. A widow, her days are spent living quietly and worrying about her granddaughter, Grace, a headstrong young doctor. It's a small sort of life. But one day an invitation comes for Iris through the post to a reunion in France, where she served in a hospital during WWI. Determined to go, Iris is overcome by the memories of the past, when as a shy, naive young woman she followed her fifteen-year-old brother, Tom, to France in 1914 intending to bring him home. On her way to find Tom, Iris comes across the charismatic Miss Ivens, who is setting up a field hospital in the old abbey of Royaumont, north of Paris.

Putting her fears aside, Iris decides to stay at Royaumont, and it is there that she truly comes of age, finding her capability and her strength, discovering her passion for medicine, making friends with the vivacious Violet and falling in love.

But war is a brutal thing, and when the ultimate tragedy happens, there is a terrible price that Iris has to pay, a price that will echo down the generations. A moving and uplifting novel about the small, unsung acts of heroism of which love makes us capable.' Source: http://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/ (Sighted 04/09/2012).

'As a young journalist at the Courier-Mail newspaper, my mother once met the famous British children's writer Enid Blyton, who stopped in Brisbane briefly. There was a press conference in a hangar out at the airport. Many important people were there — the Australian publisher, someone from the British High Commission, someone from the Prime Minister's Office, along with reporters from Sydney and Melbourne — and my mother, my beautiful young mother, in a panama hat with gloves and white glasses, excited to be there, to be amongst it.' (Extract)