Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

Kate Webster is a loveable girl who likes to play hard now and worry about the consequences later. Rocked by the death of her mother, she takes on a dare at one of Australia's wildest rural social events - a Bachelors & Spinsters ball - to 'scalp' gorgeous farm boy Nick McDonnell. It's a dare that changes everything. For just as Kate is ready to start her new life, away from her grieving father and the pressures of the family farm, she discovers she is pregnant.

The gift of heaven on earth. It will become the biggest story in the world... When the residents of a small town on Lake Michigan start receiving phone calls from the afterlife, they all become the subject of widespread attention. Is it the greatest miracle ever or a massive hoax? Sully Harding, a grief-stricken single father, is determined to find out. This is a story about the power of belief - and a page-turner that will touch your soul.

In the second novel in the Pop Larkin series, the Larkin family descends upon Brittany in France. Like fish out of water, they find that things don't quite turn out their way: The weather is less than ideal, the food is awful, and the hotel is in a bad state of repair. But things slowly improve as Pop manages to sweet-talk Mlle Dupont, Angela Snow and her sister, Iris; and Charley and Mariette celebrate their first wedding anniversary. A Breath of French Air is a delightful book full of nostalgia, fun, and frivolity.

Marnie Sellick is adrift when she lands a job at the coveted, mysterious beauty brand rytual cosmetica. The enigmatic founder and CEO, Luna Peters, takes a liking to Marnie, and as the two grow closer Marnie becomes intoxicated by the life that Luna, and rytual, can offer her. But all is not what it seems at rytual. Luna has a cult-like hold over the all-female staff, and that's not to mention what happens at their weekly Friday Night Drinks. As Marnie edges closer to the darkness at the centre of rytual's millennial pink facade, cracks begin to show.

Gossip From Thrush Green returns readers to that delightful English village, neighbour to Fairacre, for a golden summer. But this sleepy, pristine setting conceals a flurry of activity among the villagers. Rumour has it that Mr. Venables is considering retirement just as the village’s teacher is about to make an important decision. Molly Curdle prepares for a new baby. The kindly vicar, Charles Henstock, works on his sermon - quite unaware of the disaster that will overtake him.

Isabel Dalhousie thinks often of friends, sometimes of lovers, and on occasion of chocolate. As an Edinburgh philosopher, she is certain of where she stands. She can review a book called In Praise of Sin with panache and conviction, but real life is...well, perhaps a bit more challenging....

The mid-'70s: at an all-boys Catholic school in Melbourne, Timothy Conigrave falls wildly and sweetly in love with the captain of the football team. So begins a relationship that weathers disapproval, separation and ultimately death. With honesty and insight, Holding the Man explores the highs and lows of any partnership and the strength of heart both men have to find when they test positive for HIV. This is a book as refreshing and uplifting as it is moving - a funny and sad and celebratory account of growing up gay.

She watches from her terrazza as the three American women carry their luggage into the stone villa down the hill. Who are they, and what brings them to this Tuscan village so far from home? An expat herself, and with her own unfinished story, she can't help but question: will they find what they came for?

In a darkened room a young man sits telling the macabre and eerie story of his life - the story of a vampire, gifted with eternal life, cursed with an exquisite craving for human blood. Anne Rice's compulsively readable novel is arguably the most celebrated work of vampire fiction since Bram Stoker's Dracula which was published in 1897.

Long-married couple Junior and Henrietta live a quiet, solitary life on their farm, where they work at the local feed mill and raise chickens. Their lives are simple, straightforward, uncomplicated. Until the day a stranger arrives at their door with alarming news: Junior has been chosen to take an extraordinary journey, a journey across both time and distance, while Hen remains at home. Junior will be gone for years. But Hen won't be left alone.

In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous. Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.

Callie March is fascinated by human absurdity, including the habits of the upper class. So when she bribes her screen-addicted teenage son to join a local rowing club, she is thrilled to discover a whole new world of odd behaviours, irrational obsessions and riverside rooting. Thrust into a support crew and a very silly uniform, Callie has inadvertently volunteered for a season of pre-dawn parenting, endless fundraising and a whole lot of pandering to insufferable dickheads. But she also finds friendship, intrigue, lust and Harry Styles, while her son finds his first (illuminating) love.

From Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Orange Prize-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun, come 12 dazzling stories in which she turns her penetrating eye on the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Nigeria and the West. Searing and profound, suffused with beauty, sorrow and longing, this collection is a resounding confirmation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's prodigious storytelling powers.

Aged 13, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Alone and rudderless in New York, he is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. He is tormented by an unbearable longing for his mother, and down the years clings to one thing that reminds him of her: a small, strangely captivating painting that ultimately draws him into the criminal underworld.

Iris Turner, an unworldly young Englishwoman, arrives in the French Riviera to take up a secretarial role for the mysterious Hammond Brooke. Living in a small, exclusive hotel among eccentric and unpredictable aristocrats and struggling to gain her employer's trust, she soon realises that nothing is as it seems. Initiated into the mysterious world of perfume, she finds herself entangled in a web of intrigue and deception.

Former Australian Army officer Mike Williams is trying to forget a troubled past - with a carefree existence as an overland tour guide in Africa. But then one day on the road, he receives word that the South African Police have some news for him. A bloody and tragic run-in with ivory hunters in Mozambique the year before had left Mike's world in shreds. But now the authorities are on the poachers' trail and they need his help to catch them.

Tenacious English journalist Sarah Thatcher is along for the ride, and insists on becoming involved.

Fourteen years ago, Kelsey and Raf Maccioni left hospital with their newborn daughter, Ammy. Days later, Shona and Nathan James welcomed the birth of their son, Zac. The only thing the two couples have in common is the IVF clinic where their dreams came true. They are strangers to each other - for now. Fast forward to April 2024 . . . Ammy has grown into a rebellious young woman, and Zac is a kind but introverted teenager. Life may not be perfect for either family, but like everyone else they are muddling through. Until Ammy takes a DNA test for a school project.

When Australian Julie Reagan discovers a book written about wild Malaysia in the 1970s, she decides to find out more about the author – her great aunt. Why did her grandmother refuse to speak about her sister who disappeared from the family, 60 years before? What caused such a severe rift?Julie is invited to stay with her cousins who run the plantation founded by her great grandfather in Malaya a hundred years ago, and she decides to visit in the hope of finding clues to this family mystery.

It isn't often you receive a letter from the dead. When Vianne Rocher receives a letter from beyond the grave, she has no choice but to follow the wind that blows her back to Lansquenet, the village in south-west France where, eight years ago, she opened up a chocolate shop.

The Kimberley, a land that cradles Australia's ancient treasures, is sanctuary to the mysterious spirits reflected in the oldest rock art in the world. It is also home to a people whose powerful secrets could unlock the future for a modern mankind. Four people are tied up in a mystery so powerful it could change their lives forever.