AustLit

'To the disgrace of his family, an illustrious London shipping merchant has taken his own life. But his niece Rhia Mahoney believes her uncle has been murdered to conceal the secrets of his trading partners. And as she begins to investigate his death, her fears are realized when she is arrested for a crime she didn't commit.

'Convict Michael Kelly's sentence is almost ended, but his plans are interrupted when a woman he has known since childhood, Rhia Mahoney, arrives in Sydney harbour aboard a prison hulk. And Michael cannot allow the men who falsely imprisoned him to condemn this young woman to the same fate...'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Françoise, an Australian photographer, travels to Bhopal in India, where 20 years earlier a gas leak killed thousands. There she meets Naga, a Tibetan refugee whose family died in the disaster, and Arkay, a Scottish traveler battling addiction, who has found solace in Buddhism. As a testament to their time together Françoise assembles photographs from their lives into an album, the Red Book. The photographs tell their stories of love, struggle and transformation—pointing to the people they have been and who they will become. The three narrators' beautifully realized voices show how lives entwine and split apart, and the story captures the irresistible lure of India for outsiders, the promise of its spirituality, and its layered history.' (Publication summary)

'His father dead by fire and his mother plagued by demons of her own, William is cast upon the charity of his unknown uncle - an embittered old man encamped in the ruins of a once great station homestead, Kuran House. It's a baffling and sinister new world for the boy, a place of decay and secret histories. His uncle is obsessed by a long life of decline and by a dark quest for revival, his mother is desperate for a wealth and security she has never known, and all their hopes it seems come to rest upon William's young shoulders. But as the past and present of Kuran Station unravel and merge together, the price of that inheritance may prove to be the downfall of them all. The White Earth is a haunting, disturbing and cautionary tale.' (publisher's website)

'"I, Jeronimus, am a man of phials, a measurer of powders on bronze scales, a potion brewer, an opium and arsenic merchant. The primped and perfumed Amsterdam burghers came to me in droves requiring cures for fevers, love balms, the miscarriage of a bastard child, and, of course, poisons. Ah, poisons."

So speaks Jeronimus Cornelisz, a thirty-year-old apothecary who transforms before our eyes into a murderous madman.

'The Company is a novel based on the 1629 voyage of the Dutch East India Company flagship Batavia, bound for the colonies with a cargo of untold riches. Among the passengers is Cornelisz, a man ousted from polite society by sordid rumors of necromancy. Corrupt to the very marrow of his soul, Cornelisz considers himself God's equal, the rightful heir to gold, silver – even another man's wife. So twisted is he by lust and greed that he incites a mutiny, running the ship aground on a reef.

'All is lost – the ship is wrecked, its passengers dying, the treasure trashed at the bottom of the sea. "The apothecary will heal us," the survivors pray, believing themselves lucky to be alive. In the name of benevolence, Cornelisz seizes command of their island refuge. The brave castaways stir with hope – until the killing begins. For forty frenzied days, Cornelisz decides who shall live and who shall die, leaving his victims with just one wish – that they had gone down with the ship.

'Soaked with the blood of the innocent and the wicked, The Company plunges, with the weight of history, deep into the heart of darkness.'