Cirrus@Austlit

'Fleeing their pandemic-stricken homelands, a shipload of migrant workers departs the UK, dreaming of a fresh start in prosperous Australia. For nine-year-old Cleary Sullivan, deaf for three years, the journey promises adventure and new friendships; for Glaswegian songstress Billie Galloway, it’s a chance to put a shameful mistake firmly behind her; while impoverished English schoolteacher Tom Garnett hopes to set his future on a brighter path. But when a crew member is found murdered and passengers start falling gravely ill, the Steadfast is plunged into chaos. Thrown together by chance, and each guarding their own secrets, Cleary, Billie and Tom join forces to survive the journey and its aftermath.

'The Trespassers is a beguiling novel that explores the consequences of greed, the experience of exile, and the unlikely ways strangers can become the people we hold dear.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Tally and Grace are teenage sisters living on the outskirts of society, dragged from one no-hope town to the next by their fugitive father. When an explosion rips their lives apart, they flee separately to the city.

The girls had always imagined that beyond the remote regions lay another, brighter world: glamorous, promising, full of luck. But as each soon discovers, if you arrive there broke, homeless and alone, the city is a dangerous place — a place where commerce and surveillance rule, and undocumented people like themselves are confined to life's shady margins. Now Tally and Grace must struggle to find each other — or just to survive.' (From the publisher's website.)