"What started as a small breeze blew up and up and up until a whirlwind had wrapped itself around her. Sonny and Spike, caught in the tailwinds, looked away to protect their eyes from the flying dust. When the wind had passed and they looked back, Millie was gone."

Have you ever gotten lost in a book? Entranced into the world of a mysterious old story, Millie, a Warlpiri teenager, is sucked up by a willy willy and transported to Alice Springs in 1924. Here she meets a crew of oddly familiar young people, Sonny, Beryl and Spike. As the group continue to find each other in time, they realise the Alice Springs of the past and the future are not as different as they seem...

Desert Tracks is a time travelling novel about young people in central Australia, the historical legacy of racist policies and the relationship between history and the present.

When Nanny Tobbins fell off a horse and broke her neck, the grown-ups told nine-year-old Albertine she'd never see her beloved governess again. But it simply isn't true. For every night, when the clock strikes twelve, Nanny returns to the nursery.

Yet in her new ghostly state, Nanny Tobbins quickly causes chaos in the household -- and the timing couldn't be more inconvenient. Albertine's stepmother is struggling to settle in, and Papa is much occupied working with Prince Albert on the Great Exhibition.

To make matters worse, the grown-ups don't believe in ghosts at all, leaving Albertine to take the blame for Nanny's unruly antics.

How will Albertine restore peace to her home before the unthinkable occurs?

The biggest children's book of the year! The Midwatch is the long-awaited new middle-grade novel from internationally bestselling author–illustrator Judith Rossell, creator of the multi-award-winning novel Withering-by-Sea.

‘The city was stuffed full of wickedness, everyone knew that …’

Banished to the Midwatch Institute for Orphans, Runaways and Unwanted Girls, Maggie Fishbone is sure she’s in for a life of drudgery. But she quickly discovers there’s more to the Midwatch than meets the eye …

The city shimmers with jewels and secrets, and soon Maggie is thrust into an adventure that takes her deep underground, high above the clouds and face to face with danger itself.

Turn the page and prepare to be drawn into a lavishly illustrated world, brimming with mystery, unlikely heroines and an adventure as big as the sky.

It's 1866 and Hester Hitchins' father is missing at sea.

Determined to find him, eleven-year-old Hester wins a place at Addington's Nautical Navigation Academy, where she will learn to navigate by the stars. But the academy is just for boys, and what's more, no one seems to be in charge.

Bumbling schoolmaster Captain Slingsby doesn't know anything about navigation. Lord Addington is obsessed with building the world's biggest telescope and Lady Addington believes that falling stars are the souls of the dead.

With the help of a lodestone, her new friends Pru and Nelson, and a dazzling meteor storm, can Hester set things right - and find her own place in the universe?

A compelling historical fiction adventure, set during the Australian gold rush when daring, dangerous and bold bushrangers were both feared, and legendary. Award-winning author, Sophie Masson asks what makes a hero, or a villain?

Lily and her parents are travelling performers are delayed in Canowindra, just as famous bushranger Ben Hall and his gang - who has pulled off the biggest gold robbery ever - arrive. The gang hold everyone in town hostage– but instead of threats, hold a strange, giant three day party, and Lily is in enthralled. She writes a secret play 'Bold Ben Hall' and dreams of sending it to a famous theatre company in Sydney or Melbourne…

Meanwhile, in Forbes, stable boy Sam works for Sir Frederick Pottinger, Ben Hall’s nemesis. Sam who dreams of helping Sir Fred to catch Ben Hall…

When Lily and Sam meet, the two are soon at loggerheads about their heroes determined to prove the other wrong...and to try any means to do so!

A gripping and unusual adventure, set against a background of the hectic, action-packed atmosphere of the booming Gold Rush towns. It also asks important questions: what is a hero, what is a villain? And how do we separate fact from fiction?

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.

Thirteen-year-old Ava lives in Darwin with her family and their homing pigeons, of which Essie is Ava’s favourite. A Japanese family live next door and their son, Kazuo, is Ava’s best and only real friend. Her father is serving overseas.

While Essie is taking her first flight, Ava overhears an argument between her mother, and her brother Fred, who has lied about his age to join the militia. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he trains in Darwin and later helps set up a pigeon service in Townsville. When most civilians are sent to safety down south, Ava remains in Darwin because her mother (who works in the post office) is essential to the war effort.

Later that day, military police take Kazuo and his family away in a truck to a holding camp—much to Ava’s distress—along with many other Japanese people who call Australia home.

On February 19, 1942, Darwin is bombed, and Ava and her mother are evacuated in a cattle train with the remaining women and children. After a very difficult journey, they arrive, exhausted, at her grandparent’s home in Lake Boga, where they discover the extent of the damage to Darwin is being concealed from the population. Even those who were actually there know only part of the truth.

Desperate to do something to contribute to the war effort, Ava’s mother joins the WAAAF and begins work at the secret Catalina Flying Boat Base.

In the meantime, the authorities decide to transfer Kazuo to the men’s camp, separating him from his parents and siblings.

Living by rules and rituals has always been how Ava has felt safe, but when Kazuo escapes, she is faced with the hardest decision of all—whether to report a ‘potentially dangerous’ escapee to the authorities, or to protect a beloved friend …

When a boy called Keith pops up from nowhere in Letty's bedroom and accuses her of invading his room, Letty is astonished - but things get even stranger when she realises she is caught up in an incredible adventure, able to slip back and forth in time!

Keith lives in the world of 1969, and Letty joins in the thrill and excitement of the first astronauts about to land on the moon.

But when she discovers her trips to the past are changing history, she starts to worry. What if something she says or does causes a disaster - or even messes up the moon landing?

Love and loss. Sisterhood and betrayal. Little Flower and Linjing's fates are bound together.

As a child, Little Flower is sold to Linjing's wealthy family to become a muizai. In a fit of childish jealousy over her new handmaiden's ladylike bound feet and talent for embroidery, Linjing ensures Little Flower can never leave her to ascend in society.

Despite their starkly different places in the Fong household, over the years the two girls must work together to secure both their futures through Linjing's marriage. As the two grow up, they are by turns bitter rivals and tentative friends.

Until scandal strikes the family, and Linjing and Little Flower's lives are unexpectedly thrown into chaos. Linjing's fall from grace could be an opportunity for Little Flower - but will their intertwined fates lead to triumph, or tragedy for them both?

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.

An epic and emotional story of three spirited women - a mother, her daughter, their maid - during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong

1941. The wealthy Tang family has settled in Hong Kong after fleeing Shanghai. As the First Wife of the family, Mingzhu leads a glamorous but lonely existence - mothering the son of her husband's concubine, overseeing her daughter Qiang's education, and directing their household of servants, including her long-time confidante, Biyu.

When the Japanese invade the island, the three women's paths wildly diverge. Mingzhu's affinity for languages spares her physical labour but she's coerced into serving an enemy captain. Qiang and Biyu suffer brutal factory work and food rations until an encounter with the East River Column Resistance fighters separates them. As war rages around them, each woman holds onto the hope that the others are alive. Can they fight for their freedom and still find their way back to each other?

Fans of Lisa See, Kristin Hannah and Anthony Doerr, storytellers who blend historical accuracy with personal narrative, will love this book. Through years of impeccable research, Australian-Chinese novelist Emma Pei Yin breathes new life into real events. At once monumental and intimate, heartbreaking and hopeful, When Sleeping Women Wake is an exquisitely written novel about the unbreakable bonds that unite women.

Born into poverty in pre-war London, and growing up fast during the Blitz, Betty grabs the chance at a bigger life by migrating to Australia. On board the SS Asturias she meets three people who will influence the course of her life—Pearl, a good-hearted party girl; Athena, a Greek woman on her way to marry a man she has never met; and Leo, a German Jew who lost his family in the war.

In Sydney, Betty is making ends meet as a waitress at the famous Trocadero dance hall when she stumbles into a rushed courtship with Donald, a wealthy businessman, and dedicates herself to being the ideal 1950s suburban housewife. But life has other plans for Betty, and soon she must find a way to do more than survive.

Set against a century of world events and social upheavals, Betty takes us to the frontlines of the anti-war protests and the women's liberation movement of the 1970s, to the AIDS crisis during the 1980s, to Mexico and eventually becomes a TV screenwriter. Even in her nineties, Betty is still passionately engaged with the world, still surprising us.

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.

Even the worst person has a best friend.

A chilling black comedy, The First Friend imagines a gangster mob in charge of a global superpower.

The Soviet Union 1938: Lavrentiy Beria, 'The Boss' of the Georgian republic, nervously prepares a Black Sea resort for a visit from 'The Boss of Bosses', his fellow Georgian Josef Stalin. Under escalating pressure from enemies and allies alike, Beria slowly but surely descends into murderous paranoia.

By his side is Vasil Murtov, Beria's closest friend since childhood. But to be a witness is dangerous; Murtov must protect his family and play his own game of survival while remaining outwardly loyal to an increasingly unstable Beria. The tension ramps up as Stalin's visit and the inevitable bloodbath approaches. Is Murtov playing Beria, or is he being played?

The First Friend is a novel in a time of autocrats, where reality is a fiction created by those who rule. Reflecting on Putin's Russia, Trump's America, Xi's China and Murdoch's planet Earth, it is at once a satire and a thriller, a survivor's tale in which a father has to walk a tightrope every day to save his family from a monster and a monstrous society. Where safety lies in following official fictions, is a truthful life the ultimate risk?

Bees choose their masters. Bees don't sting good people.

Marytè is a devoted beekeeper. She lives by the old rules: work with fellow beekeepers, be a good Christian and a good harvest will follow. These rules help her cope with her grief when she inherits her husband's tree hollows. But as harsh conditions and tax increases threaten the harvest, Marytè begins to question her faith, her community and her own sanity.

There is little help to be had from her eldest daughter. Austėja is no worker bee. She takes risks, speaks her mind and dreams of escaping their isolated community. As her mother works, she finds refuge in the ancient forest and the old beliefs instilled in her by her defiant grandmother.

When Austėja discovers the mutilated body of the Hollow Watcher and uncovers a honeycomb of lies and betrayal, she is intent on finding the truth and protecting her family. Will mother and daughter overcome their differences, learn the truth behind the murder and complete the honey harvest?

In 1929, young Jack travels with his parents to Henry Ford's rubber-tree plantation in the Brazilian Amazon. In this lushly beautiful but dangerous place, he loses his much-loved mother to a horrific accident. This has terrible repercussions for his family, and Jack is eventually forced into the jungle to search for his absent father.

Seven decades later, living in the heart of Michigan's rust belt on the cusp of a new millennium, Jack faces the challenges of old age, including the gradual loss of his wife of fifty years, whose memory is disappearing even as Jack's own memories insistently resurface to invade and colonise his present.

Everything Lost, Everything Found, from master storyteller Matthew Hooton, is haunting, tender and poignant, a rich and emotional novel about loss, grief and memory, and how the past never truly leaves us.

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.