The Names of a Hare by Bernice Barry
Cornwall, 1628. A young girl guards a dangerous secret: she can leave her body and fly. Steeped in herbal lore and forbidden spells, the girl becomes a woman, while across the land whispers of witchcraft turn deadly. When witchfinder Matthew Hopkins sets out to hunt her down, their meeting will change the course of history. In a world that fears what it cannot explain, a story shared is the most potent magic of all.
Henry Goes Bush by Wayne Marshall
The price of genius is one hell of a hangover.
In 1892, New South Wales' most promising writer and least promising teetotaller, Henry Lawson, is banished to Bourke to 'find the real bush'. The goal: sober up, gather fresh material, and stop being such a disappointment. But what Australia's favourite literary son discovers in the river town is less a glorious national frontier than a collective nervous breakdown.
History records this as the trip that defined his career. Wayne Marshall records it as a surrealist action movie where Lawson must outrun his own myth and a gunslinger known as The Rider, aka Banjo - a poet significantly better at being a legend than Henry is.
Henry Goes Bush confronts the madness that lies behind our colonial dreaming - a moment where history is a hallucination and 'the bush' a phantasmagoric theme park. A reality in which The Bulletin's famed poetry wars are an actual shootout on the banks of the Darling River.
It turns out finding 'the real Australia' is easy; the hard part is surviving the encounter.
A Flash in the Dust by Meg Caddy
1899, Fremantle Asylum, Western Australia. For three years now, Gilberta Brady has kept quiet and stayed out of trouble, hoping to soon be released. But when Norah Devaney screams into the ward with revenge in her heart and a story no-one believes, Brady’s carefully guarded peace is shattered.
On the run and out of options, they collide with Malkar and Kedalak, Nyungar brothers on their own journey home. They form an unlikely gang of bushrangers and embark on a dangerous mission: track down the man who killed Norah’s mum.
But the Whistling Man is hunting them too.
The Year We Escaped by Suzanne Leal
With war on their doorstep, German classmates Klara and Rachel, and French brothers Lucien and Paul, are forced to leave their homes. They are taken to Gurs, a French detention camp in the south-west of France. It's a crowded place, with little comfort and even less food.
When Klara and Rachel are promised safe refuge in a remote French village, Lucien and Paul are anxious to join them — and will risk their own lives to get there.
Filled with adventure, danger and intrigue, this is the story of four unlikely friends desperate to escape from a war that keeps coming closer.
I am Nannertgarrook by Tasma Walton
Based on the true story of Tasma Walton’s ancestor, a powerful, heart-wrenching novel about maternal love that endures against pitiless odds. Kidnapped by sealers and enslaved far from her homeland, Nannertgarrook has a spirit that refuses to bow …
From her idyllic life in sea country in Nerrm (Port Phillip Bay, Victoria), Nannertgarrook is abducted and taken to a slave market, leaving behind a husband, daughter and son. Pregnant when seized, she soon gives birth to another son, whom she raises with the children of her fellow captives.
Nannertgarrook is separated not only from her Boonwurrung family, but from her birthright – the ceremonies she once was so joyously part of, the majestic whales who are her totem, the land and sky and sea country and its creatures. All these things she loves as deeply as she does her blood kin.
But now, as her reality becomes profoundly different, she must keep that family and her old life alive in her mind. Their rich, pulsating elements sing to us through her beautiful voice, even while Nannertgarrook herself is subjected to the worst of humanity. This sweeping novel asks us to consider who, in colonial history, were the real savages, and what it truly means to be civilised.
Rapture by Emily Maguire
The motherless child of an English priest living in ninth-century Mainz, Agnes is a wild and brilliant girl with a deep, visceral love of God. At eighteen, to avoid a future as a wife or nun, Agnes enlists the help of a lovesick Benedictine monk to disguise herself as a man and devote her life to the study she is denied as a woman.
So begins the life of John the Englishman: a matchless scholar and scribe of the revered Fulda monastery, then a charismatic heretic in an Athens commune and, by her middle years, a celebrated teacher in Rome. There, Agnes (as John) dazzles the Church hierarchy with her knowledge and wisdom and finds herself at the heart of political intrigue in a city where gossip is a powerful—and deadly—currency.
And when the only person who knows her identity arrives in Rome, she will risk everything to once again feel what it is to be known—and loved.
Dusk by Robbie Arnott
In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds. Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there's far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they're forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.
