Old bones – ‘mossed and soft’ – are discovered in the wilderness near Queenstown. Forensic scientist Antonia Kovacs arrives from Hobart to investigate them, also to see her father, retired policeman, Dicky Nolan. Tom Pilar inherits a house from Slavko Cicak, a man he can barely remember who was a friend of his late father, Ivan. The unresolved hit-and-run death of a child in 1959 is what links them all. From the ravages of war in Eastern Europe to the 1950s and beyond, these are characters who have been shaped by stark environments. Many are refugees from the Fascist or Communist regimes in Yu ..read more

The frozen body of a man is captive in the ice of Maine’s Kennebec River. Once he is cut free and laid out in the Hallowell village tavern, Martha Ballard, a well-respected midwife, is called upon to examine him. It is murder, she announces, and many in the village are relieved to know that Joshua Burgess is dead. He is an accused rapist – accused along with Joseph North, the village judge. But this is 1789, and it is the accuser, Rebecca Foster, who suffers the consequences. Beginning with the winter freezing of the Kennebec River and ending with the spring thaw in 1790, The Frozen River is i ..read more

Iris by Miles Franklin short-listee and multiform artist, Fiona Kelly McGregor, trails the journey of eponymous protagonist, Iris Mary Webber (née Shingles). Iris is a frank and gutsy country girl from Glen Innes, who arrives in Sydney in spring 1932 to a city in the throes of the Great Depression. Her incredible conviction, street-smarts, loyalty, and stubbornness are revealed as she navigates an itinerant life in a web of razor gangs, female brothel owners, and male protectors. The novel begins with Iris leaving her husband and Hay Women’s Prison for the winding back streets of Sydney city ..read more

London, 1895. Twenty-six-year-old Timothy Badger was a street urchin of twelve when Sherlock Holmes began using him as his spy. The Baker Street Irregulars find clues Holmes and his Dr. Watson need because, to the everyday person, they are an invisible nuisance. For the last five years, Tim and his talented Black friend, Benjamin Watson, have been scraping by, detecting for Holmes whenever summoned. Now, however, Holmes trusts them to solve a case entirely on their own: the murder of Horace Quinn in his own home during a séance. Only five people are in the room when the lights go out: Quinn, t ..read more

A girl called Red writes a memoir. It begins in 1730 with her hard, nomadic life as the child of a gypsy fortune teller. She learns to read people’s futures with ordinary playing cards, using her father’s system of cartomancy called the Square of Sevens. When he dies, she becomes the ward of an antiquarian, who now possesses not only the secret to this ancient method of divination, but also – she later discovers – possesses hidden papers which hold the only clues to who her mother was. Determined to discover this truth, Red deploys her fortune telling abilities to penetrate London’s high socie ..read more

Kantika means “song” in Ladino, the language spoken by the richly drawn characters of this sweeping novel. Ladino is to Spanish as Yiddish is to German. And Ladino (or “Latin”) is a Judaeo-Old Spanish language dating from the expulsion of Sephardic Jews from Spain, over 500 years ago. From Spain they traveled mainly to eastern Mediterranean countries like Turkey, where this family-centered story begins in 1907, set in Constantinople (as it was then). In the 20th century, more travel awaits them. Unmoored by poverty and threatening world events, the Cohen family takes refuge first in Barcelona ..read more

Candy Gourlay returns to the history of the Bontok, an Igorot people in the Philippines, whose lives she previously wrote about in her 2018 novel Bone Talk. This is a companion novel rather than a sequel and describes how some Igorot people were taken to America in 1904 to be put on display at the World’s Fair in St Louis. The story is seen through the eyes of Luki, a fiercely independent young woman who desires to see and learn more of the world outside her own community. She tells her tale as though she is relating it to her recently deceased mother. It begins in the Philippines and shows ho ..read more

In 1793, when Benjamin Honey, a former slave, and his wife Patience, an Irish immigrant, arrived at an abandoned Penobscot island off the coast of Maine, it was to escape intolerance and cultivate his dream of an apple orchard – an Eden of his own. Through the decades, his mixed-race descendants became more isolated, only allowing the few to join the community who would work together for survival and protect their peaceful existence. Harding takes time to lay down the foundation of his story, but the flow picks up when the narrative refocuses on 1911 and the primary storyline of Benjamin’s gre ..read more

This is a stunning historical novel set in the 4th century. Julia, the daughter of the ruler of the provincial town of Virunum, worships the Roman gods at a time when Christianity has become the official religion of the Empire. She considers herself divorced, under Roman law, from her Christian husband, the bishop’s nephew, but since the Christians of the time considered marriage indissoluble, she is not entirely divorced. When Julia falls in love with Lucius Apulius, a Roman soldier who believes in the old gods, her father banishes him to Rome. Julia, accompanied by two servants, the painter ..read more

Readers of Little Women are well aware that Louisa May Alcott based the beloved characters of that classic novel on her own family. Sarah Miller has drawn on Alcott’s mother Abigail’s memoirs to create an enthralling alternate version of the fictional March family. The events of Marmee dovetail exactly with those of Little Women, but are delivered in the form of Margaret March’s diaries, which capture the voice of a fiercely intelligent, passionate woman of the mid-19th century, as she experiences her and her daughters’ familiar joys and sorrows during and just after the American Civil War. It ..read more