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The Harsh Cry of the Heron is the dazzling continuation of the Tales of the Otori, an unforgettable epic with a vast emotional landscape, a classic work that crosses genres, genders and generations.‘Their realm is held in balance by their union ... Break that union and the Three Countries will fall apart.’Otori Takeo and Kaede have ruled the Three Countries peacefully for over 16 years, following the events laid out in the epic Tales of the Otori.

Douglas Mawson, born in 1882 and knighted in 1914, was Australia’s greatest Antarctic explorer. On 2 December 1911, he led an expedition from Hobart to explore the virgin frozen coastline below, 2000 miles of which had never felt the tread of a human foot. After setting up Main Base at Cape Denision and Western Base on Queen Mary Land, he headed east on an extraordinary sledging trek with his companions, Belgrave Ninnis and Dr Xavier Mertz. After tragedy struck, Mawson found himself all alone, 160 miles from safety, with next to no food.

A biography of unprecedented expedition under sail, from Australia's master of maritime history. The role of the sailor through history should never be underestimated. Over centuries battles were won and new lands discovered and settled by their skills and nerve. Rob Mundle is back on the ocean to tell one of the great stories of an expedition under sail: the extraordinary eight-month, 17,000-nautical mile voyage of the First Fleet.

Simon Nye's TV series, The Durrells, is based loosely on Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy and in particular his much-loved best seller, My Family and Other Animals. These books in turn are based somewhat loosely on actual events. The real-life Durrells went to Corfu at the urging of Lawrence Durrell, who was already living on the island with his wife, Nancy Myers. Their intent was to keep the family together as his mother, Louisa, was drinking heavily and recovering from a breakdown.

For many, the colonial story of Australia starts with Captain Cook's discovery of the east coast in 1770, but it was some 164 years before his historic voyage that European mariners began their romance with the immensity of the Australian continent. Between 1606 and 1688, while the British had their hands full with the Gunpowder Plot and the English Civil War, it was highly skilled Dutch seafarers who discovered and mapped the majority of the vast, unknown waters and land masses in the Indian and Southern Oceans.

Never before has a member of the Packer family co-operated with a writer to tell their story. In his biography The Price of Fortune, one of the nation's richest and most psychoanalyzed men opens up in an attempt to make sense of his roller-coaster life and to tell the human story of being James Douglas Packer. Of how his wealth, charm and intellect took him to such exciting places. Yet how sometimes trusting the wrong people and his own rash actions cost him - and how he is now working on getting it all back.

This is the true story of how one moment in time, by the thinnest thread of a chance, changed the course of a small boy's life in ways that are beyond description. One day he would dance with some of the greatest ballet companies of the world. One day he would be a friend to a president and first lady, movie stars, and the most influential people in America. One day he would become a star: Mao's last dancer, and the darling of the West.

In the 1840s, a ship's boy, cast ashore in northern Australia, is taken in by Aborigines. Sixteen years later he steps out of the bush and inadvertently confronts the new white settlers with their unspoken terrors. A searing and magnificent picture of Australia at the time of its foundation, focusing on the hostility between early British settlers and native Aboriginals, Remembering Bablyon tells the tragic and compelling story of a boy caught between both worlds - the civilised and the primitive.

Ned Kelly the man - warts and all - the most vivid portrait yet of Australia's immortal outlaw! Author, Ian Jones, acknowledged Kelly authority, shares with us the results of a lifetime's research. For the first time, Ned Kelly truly emerges as a man - a man who hated conflict yet never escaped it. A private man incapable of being ordinary and unnoticed. A man who was seen, even in his own lifetime, as what he represented rather than what he was.

On the afternoon of 8 April 1802, in the remote southern ocean, two explorers had a remarkable chance encounter. Englishman Matthew Flinders and Frenchman Nicolas Baudin had been sent by their governments on the same quest: to explore the uncharted coast of the great south land and find out whether the west and east coasts, four thousand kilometres apart, were part of the same island. And so began the race to compile the definitive map of Australia.

For three different people brought together by their love for birds, life on the Queensland coast in 1914 is the timeless and idyllic world of sandpipers, ibises and kingfishers. In another hemisphere civilisation rushes headlong into a brutal conflict. Life there is lived from moment to moment. Inevitably, the two young men - sanctuary owner and employee - are drawn to the war, and into the mud and horror of the trenches of Armentieres. Alone on the beach, their friend Imogen, the middle-aged wildlife photographer, must acknowledge for all three of them that the past cannot be held.

In the first century AD, Publius Ovidius Naso, the most urbane and irreverent poet of imperial Rome, was banished to a remote village on the edge of the Black Sea. From these sparse facts, one of our most distinguished novelists has fashioned an audacious and supremely moving work of fiction. Marooned on the edge of the known world, exiled from his native tongue, Ovid depends on the kindness of barbarians who impate their dead and converse with the spirit world. But then he becomes the guardian of a still more savage creature, a feral child who has grown up among deer.

Reflecting on time, religion, painting, dancing and even grandchildren, Dessaix takes us on an enlivening journey across the landscape of growing older. Riffing on writers and thinkers from Plato to Eva Hoffman, he homes in on the crucial importance of a rich inner life.

Bryce Courtenay was one of Australia's highest-selling and most-loved authors as well as a larger-than-life character. From his first book, The Power of One, he captivated readers. With his third, the non-fiction title April Fool's Day, he captured their hearts. Many of his fans would have thought they knew him, and they did - they knew the version of him that he wanted to present to the world. Bryce's son Adam also knew that version. And he knew the Bryce the rest of the world only glimpsed, or never saw at all.

From sailor to legend - the story of Captain James Cook, one of the greatest maritime explorers of all time. Rob Mundle introduces us to an unlikely sailor in a teenage Cook, who through the combination of hard-won skills as a seafarer, the talents of a self-taught navigator and surveyor, and an exceptional ability to lead and care for his men, climbed the ranks of the Royal Navy to achieve legendary status among all who sailed and mapped the world.

Heaven's Net is Wide is the first and last tale that both closes the circle and introduces readers to the strange and beautiful world of the Otori. It is an epic historical fantasy of revenge and betrayal, honour and loyalty, beauty and passion and the overwhelming power of love, set in a mystical, medieval Japan, which will enthral readers the world over.

One day, not so very many years ago, a small peasant boy was chosen to study ballet at the Beijing Dance Academy. His mother urged him to take this chance of a lifetime. But Li was only eleven years old and he was scared and lonely, pushed away from all that he had ever known and loved. He hated the strict training routines and the strange place he had been brought to. All he wanted to do was go home - to his mother, father, and six brothers, to his own small village. But soon Li realised that his mother was right. He had the chance to do something special with his life - and he never turned back.

Books 1 and 2 in The Tale of Shikanoko series. The first instalment in a magnificent epic by the creator of the global phenomenon the Tales of the Otori, Lian Hearn, whose books have sold over four million copies worldwide. An ambitious warlord leaves his nephew for dead and seizes his lands. A stubborn father forces his younger son to surrender his wife to his older brother. A mysterious woman seeks five fathers for her children. A powerful priest meddles in the succession to the Lotus Throne.

Not all murder victims are mourned, but the perpetrator must always be punished.... For Robert Church, superintendent of the Parramatta Female Factory, the most enjoyable part of his job is access to young convict women. Inmate Grace O'Leary has made it her mission to protect the women from his nocturnal visits, and when Church is murdered with an awl thrust through his right eye, she becomes the chief suspect.

Four years ago Eliza Dacey was brutally murdered. Within hours, her killer was caught. Wasn’t he? So reads the opening titles of Jack Quick’s new true-crime documentary. A skilled producer, Jack knows that the bigger the conspiracy, the higher the ratings. Curtis Wade, convicted of Eliza’s murder on circumstantial evidence and victim of a biased police force, is the perfect subject. Millions of viewers agree. Just before the finale, Jack uncovers a minor detail that may prove Curtis guilty after all. Convinced it will ruin his show, Jack disposes of the evidence and delivers the finale unedited: proposing that Curtis is innocent.