AustLit

'Hernan Cortes is sent with a handful of men to explore the new lands to the west of Cuba. His orders: go no further than the beach and report back.

'But though penniless and landless Cortes knew he was destined to be a king. All he needed was a country. He takes prisoner a young Mayan princess, Malinali. Her father was murdered by the country’s overlords, the Aztecs. What she wanted was – revenge.

'Their meeting changes the course of Mexican history.

'She becomes Cortes’ lover, devoting herself to the man she believes to be a living god. And she shows him how to achieve the impossible – but at what cost?' (Publication summary)

'When a young woman investigating a smuggling racket is murdered, her boyfriend picks up the trail. It leads him to a giant corporation, a sophisticated computer and a very sinister plan.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Upon a remote Pacific island, deserted and bombed, a nun and a soldier, derelicts of the war, live an uneasy primitive life. Realising that there is little chance of rescue, this incongruous pair face up to the exigencies of their position; Allison, a man of little or no religious belief, gradually losing the awe with which he has been invested by Sister Angela's sacred habit and by the transcendent faith which for a time obscures her feminine desirability.

At first living is reasonably simple: but the landing of a Japanese garrison obliges them to take to fox-holes, from which emerging only at night they subsist on roots and fish. This powerful first novel tells a moving, realistic story with sympathy and insight and advances logically to a dramatic conclusion.' (Publisher's blurb on front cover).