Cirrus@Austlit

'Breaking their poses like trees snapping branches, the women urgently regarded each other, cleared away all signs of work in an instant, examined their souls for defects, in a sense crossed themselves, and waited.

'After Laura and Clare are abandoned by their mother, Felix is there to help, even to marry Laura if she will have him. Little by little the two sisters grow complicit with his obsessions, his cruelty, his need to control.

'Set in the leafy northern suburbs of Sydney during the 1940s, The Watch Tower is a novel of relentless and acute psychological power.' (Publication summary)

'When Lucy's husband of eighteen years runs out on her, she'll do anything to win him back. Including climbing out of her bedroom window at one in the morning wearing her daughter's mini skirt.

'Jasper has left Lucy for her best friend, the chic and thin interior decorator Renee. To make matters worse, her teenage daughter Tally, blames her Mum. "Dad left because you've let yourself go, you're overweight and you nagged him. No wonder he buggered off."

'While Tally is busy trying to find a loophole in her birth certificate so she can put herself up for adoption, Lucy tries to accept that a child is for life and not just for Christmas. Although a signed-up member of Underachievers Anonymous, in Lucy's quest to win back her husband she learns to be a surf life saver, loses weight and gets a job. She also falls in lust, finding herself torn between an older and a much younger man.But it's not until Lucy makes the Freudian discovery that her toy boy is also dating her daughter - and that he's been paid to do so by her conniving ex as ammunition for a custody battle, that she finally learns to stand on her own two stilettos.' (Publisher's blurb)

'A story of homecoming, this absorbing novel opens with a young, city-based lawyer setting out on her first visit to ancestral country. Candice arrives at "the place where the rivers meet", the camp of the Eualeyai where in 1918 her grandmother Garibooli was abducted. As Garibooli takes up the story of Candice's Aboriginal family, the twentieth century falls away.

Garibooli, renamed Elizabeth, is sent to work as a housemaid, but marriage soon offers escape from the terror of the master's night-time visits. Her displacement carries into the lives of her seven children - their stories witness to the impact of orphanage life and the consequences of having a dark skin in post-war Australia. Vividly rekindled, the lives of her family point the direction home for Candice.

Home is a ... novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge past and present.' (Source: Publisher's blurb)

"When JB and his flatmates took in the new guy, they had their doubts. The Celine Dion albums, the fluffy hordes of stuffed animals and the plastic-covered floral-pattern love seat should have set their threat detectors singing. But nobody was paying attention.

Within days their house had become a swirling maelstrom of death metal junkies and Drug War narcs, stolen goods and hired goons, Tasmanian Babes, karate dykes, evil yuppies, dopey greens and the Sandmen of the Terror Data.

Now the flatmates have one week to sober up, find two thousand dollars and catch the runaway new guy before Pauline Hanson, the federal government, cops, crims, their landlord and some very angry lesbians tear their house down and stomp them to jelly.

Can a bunch of hapless losers hope to defeat such an unholy alliance?" Source: Book Description.

'The thrilling international bestseller from Australia's favourite novelist author of the Scarecrow series and the Jack West Jr series with new novel The Three Secret Cities out now.

'Deep in the jungle of Peru, the hunt for a legendary Incan idol is under way - an idol that in the present day could be used as the basis for a terrifying new weapon.

'Guiding a US Army team is Professor William Race, a young linguist who must translate an ancient manuscript which contains the location of the idol.

'What they find is an ominous stone temple, sealed tight. They open it - and soon discover that some doors are meant to remain unopened...

'Fans of Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton will love Matthew Reilly.' (Publication summary)

'Upon a remote Pacific island, deserted and bombed, a nun and a soldier, derelicts of the war, live an uneasy primitive life. Realising that there is little chance of rescue, this incongruous pair face up to the exigencies of their position; Allison, a man of little or no religious belief, gradually losing the awe with which he has been invested by Sister Angela's sacred habit and by the transcendent faith which for a time obscures her feminine desirability.

At first living is reasonably simple: but the landing of a Japanese garrison obliges them to take to fox-holes, from which emerging only at night they subsist on roots and fish. This powerful first novel tells a moving, realistic story with sympathy and insight and advances logically to a dramatic conclusion.' (Publisher's blurb on front cover).

'Superbly evoking life in Sydney and London in the 1930s, For Love Alone is the story of the intelligent and determined Teresa Hawkins, who believes in passionate love and yearns to experience it. She focuses her energy on Jonathan Crow, an unlikeable and arrogant man whom she follows to London after four long years of working in a factory and living at home with her loveless family. Reunited with Crow in London, she begins to realise that perhaps he is not as worthy of her affections as originally thought and abandons her idealised vision of love for something quite different.' (From Melbourne University Publishing's website, new ed., 2011)