Van Diemen's Land, 1839. A young woman of means arrives in Hobart, with a young boy in her care. Leasing an old cottage next to an abandoned vineyard, Caroline Douglas must navigate an insular colony of exiles and opportunists to create a new life on this island of extreme seasons and wild beauty. But Caroline is carrying a secret of such magnitude it has led her to cross the world, and it will take all she is made of to bring it into the light.

Soaring from the champagne vineyards of revolutionary France to London and early colonial Australia, A Great Act of Love is a spellbinding novel of legacy, passion and reinvention. At its heart is a family with champagne in their blood and a fearless daughter determined to rewrite fate.

Inspired by true events, A Great Act of Love is an immensely beautiful and heartrending saga of a father and daughter, and the enduring power of familial love.

In a crisis, take a stand ... A coming of age story, set against the Dismissal of the government in 1975 as battle lines are drawn, democracy is on the edge, and all of it is far too close to home.

When another national crisis puts Juliet’s family beach trip on hold, Juliet is disappointed, but not surprised. When your dad has a key job in the federal government, even faraway crises hit close to home, and change is the only constant. It’s 1975 and Juliet has a lot to look forward to. It's the last year of primary school, wrongs are being set right, and there’s new attitudes, new opportunities ... as well as new friends. But as Juliet gets to know more about the people around her and the times that shape her, there are plenty of surprises still in store.

But politics is casting a long shadow over the country, and it seems nothing can save Juliet, her family, and her friendships, from the biggest crisis of all.

Forget what you know about Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen with a fantastic hairstyle. That's only part of the story. Before she was a ruler, Cleopatra was a girl with a fierce ambition: to become pharaoh.

When twelve-year-old Cleopatra and her father, Pharaoh Ptolemy XII, flee to ancient Rome in 59 BCE after Cleopatra's sister seizes the throne, they are in serious trouble. It's up to Cleopatra to raise enough gold to hire an army, gain the support of powerful allies, and take back her country's land.

Three years later she had become the most famous pharaoh in history.

This is the story of how that year in ancient Rome might have changed Cleopatra's life, with daring escapes, crocodiles, pirates, shipwreck and encountering the intrepid Captain Fileas and Myra, the slave determined to be free.

From one of Australia's best-loved authors comes the first title in an exciting new series that explores the Ancient World.

When Pa buys a stake in a gold mine at Hill End, Alfie knows his life is about to change. A golden future is just within reach, and fortune favours the bold ... but in Hill End, fortunes are lost as fast as they are made.

It’s 1872 and Alfie Wilson’s pa has sold the farm. He’s moving the family to Hill End to make their fortune and secure their Golden Future. Pa has gold fever – and so has Alfie – and they are convinced that it won’t be long before they'll be the Wealthy Wilsons.

Not everything is golden in this mining town though. Alfie soon discovers that life in Hill End is hard and, at times, dangerous. But fortune favours the bold, and Alfie is determined he and his pa will overcome the many hardships and risks to strike it rich.

But are there things in life more precious than gold?

1851, LONDON

Six months have passed since the grand opening of the Great Exhibition -- and Albertine and her family couldn't be happier.

But the season of good fortune ends abruptly when a Royal Jewel goes missing and Albertine's friend, dearest Blot, is accused of its theft. Determined to prove Blot's innocence, Papa launches an investigation. Yet despite his best efforts, the true thief cannot be found.

With time running short before Blot is imprisoned, Albertine hatches a plan. She will enlist the help of the grown-up with the sharpest eyes she knows: her ghost-governess, Nanny Tobbins.

Residing in the graveyard has, however, turned Nanny quite odd and managing her is rather difficult.

Sydney, October 1942. A wartime city dimmed by brownouts, flush with American cash, rotten with corruption.

For nightclub manager Ray Sayles, a fateful encounter in the Domain turns him into a police target. He's plunged into a system where the rich are untouchable but the marginalised - like notorious queer sly-grogger Iris Webber - are relentlessly targeted, and bent coppers hunt ordinary men whose only crime is desire.

Based on a shocking real-life scandal, The Trap is a blistering, standalone companion to the best-selling Iris. By turns tender and excoriating, it exhumes the hidden history of a city in which the law is a weapon wielded against those deemed deviant - and the most unforgivable vice is the truth.

A wonderfully atmospheric and compelling historic novel set in Scotland in 1695, from the author of All The Bees In The Hollows. Based on the selkie myths of the time, this is the story of Malie, a young woman struggling with grief, oppression, her relationship with nature and her own inherent wildness within during Europe's 'little ice age'.

Malie grew up hearing tales of selkies: shape-shifting women who shed their seal skins to seduce fishermen on the Orkney shores. That's the story of how her parents met, and it must be true because one day her mother slipped into the sea and was never seen again. 

Raised by her father, Malie has always done what she's been told, and now she's married and expecting her first baby. Life on land is predictable and safe, and her future is all mapped out for her. But, just like the seals in the sea, there's a wildness in Malie's soul – one that cannot be tamed and deeply yearns for the sea. 

Dealing with themes of motherhood, grief, violence and female oppression, The Woman in the Seal Skin is a wonderfully haunting and atmospheric tale of a woman living in a cloistered community on a wild Scottish island, who one day meets her wildness within.

A Flame in the Dark tells the remarkable true story of Nancy Wake – a fearless woman whose courage burned brightly in the shadows of World War II. Born in New Zealand and raised in Australia, Nancy defied expectations by working as a journalist in Europe as tensions mounted before the war. When conflict broke out, she chose an even more dangerous path.

Trained as a secret agent and parachuted behind enemy lines, Nancy became a key leader in the French Resistance. Nicknamed the “White Mouse” for her ability to evade the Gestapo, she organised and inspired resistance fighters, helping them strike powerful blows against the Nazi regime. Resourceful, daring, and determined, Nancy repeatedly outwitted her enemies – and, unlike many of her comrades, survived to share her story.

A powerful account of bravery, resilience, and survival, A Flame in the Dark shines a light on one of history’s most inspiring women.

Finally, these men will get what they deserve. We will make sure of it. Together.

Seoul, present day: Antiques dealer Alys is offered a vast sum of money to transport one of three highly coveted Anatomical Venuses to London, with one key condition - she must destroy it when she reaches the city.

London, 1769: After a chance meeting at the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, young and inexperienced Eleanor is promised a life of luxury by the beautiful and charismatic Elizabeth and her protégé, Emily. All she must do is allow Elizabeth complete control of her destiny.

1704: Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk has been abandoned by his own shipmates on a remote, uninhabited island. With little hope of rescue, and wild goats and cats as his only companions, he is forced to confront not only the urgent challenges of survival, but also the troubled, unsavoury past that has brought him here. What kind of man is deliberately stranded by his crew, to face near-certain death?

On the island, he must use his grit, tenacity and ingenuity to survive. As his isolation deepens, Selkirk's experience takes an extraordinary and often blackly comic turn, for the island's consolations prove as unexpected as its trials. The longer he is stranded, the more Selkirk wonders if he will ever escape the island, and in what ways he will be changed if he does.

A tale of adventure and endurance, isolation and friendship, despair and hope, this gripping, singular novel asks who we are – and who we become – when everything else is stripped away.

In Cast Away, award-winning author Francesca de Tores boldly reimagines the real-life story of Alexander Selkirk, the inspiration for the classic novel Robinson Crusoe. The world knows Crusoe's story – yet what unfolds on Selkirk's island is stranger by far . . .

Two worlds, two women, one story . . .

In 1793, eighteen-year-old Catherine is sentenced to transportation on the Tempest, a convict ship bound for New South Wales. Trapped below deck with scores of women, she endures storms, brutality and loss, while dreaming of freedom on the shores of a country far from home.

A century later in Aotearoa, Māori matriarch Keita stands amid the ruins of her whānau and the encroaching world of settlers, whalers and empire. Disturbed by the long reach of colonial change, Keita begins to unravel her own story.

Spanning seas and generations, The Other Catherine is a luminous tale of survival, whakapapa and female friendship, for readers of Jenny Pattrick and Tina Makereti.

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.

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.

Reggie was still missing after five days, and Gladys Harris was saying things about him that quivered in my mind, which now, four years later, I see as being that opening sentence leading me to this burden of what happened to Reggie Kingsley.

In the harbour city of New Plymouth in the 1960s there’s a fizz of seedy sexuality beneath a veneer of respectability. Godfrey’s world is the Balmoral Hotel his parents own, where visiting sailors drink and local fringe-dwellers congregate.

When Reggie, the openly gay barman, goes missing Godfrey senses something sinister. There’s a prevailing attitude of inevitability. Godfrey doesn’t get it, but he’s hungry to understand. Guided by his daytime-television and pulp-fiction detective heroes and a very active imagination, he attempts to solve the mystery—in the process stumbling into his own sexual adventures and discovering a new-found power in a perplexing adult world.

The Birds Began to Sing delves into a world of shadows, nods and unspoken understandings with a warmth and humour that make this novel a delight.

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.