AustLit

When fourteen-year-old Allie's mother, Mae, mysteriously disappears in the dark waters of the harbor, Allie begrudgingly sets off with Julia, an aunt she barely knows, to stay at the dairy farm where her mother grew up. As the days pass and the heat of the wet season swells, Allie waits for her mother's call, certain that she will reappear. While Julia - determined to undo the damage her family has inflicted upon the land - replants the trees of the forest, Allie lurks around the cabin belonging to her mother's first love, a man who still lives deep within the valley. But when the truth about Mae's childhood and Allie's mythical father, the balloon man, begins to surface, Allie must come to grips with the lies her mother has told her and the secrets buried within the mud-rich landscape. Source: Book Jacket

'When Jack Irish, criminal lawyer turned debt collector, receives a mysterious message from an ex-client, he is too immersed in his misery over Fitzroy's latest loss to take much notice. The next thing Jack knows, the ex-client is dead and he is drawn into a dangerous investigation.' (Publication summary)

'Jack Irish has no shortage of friends. Jockeys and journos, lawyers and standover men, people in nameless occupations who aren’t in the phone book. These days, though, the only family he sees are Irish men in faded football team photographs on the pub wall. So when Des Connors, the last link to his father, calls to ask for help in the matter of a missing son, Jack is happy to lend a hand. But sometimes prodigal sons go missing for a reason.

'As Jack begins to dig, he discovers that Gary Connors was a man with something to hide. And his friends are people with darker, more deadly secrets.' (Publication summary)

'Day's mother died with her eyes wide open in 1947, near Maude, New South Wales. No doctor was called. Day watched his father drop her body into the red earth wrapped in a hessian feed sack. He was only twelve. When he rode up Muddy Gates Lane, away from there, he didn't know that he was leaving, but he was sure he wasn't coming back. Day's journey took him to America, travelling as groom for a horse called Unusual. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland he meets Callie, who wants to be the world's first woman jockey. There is no doubt in her eyes, she knows about things that Day has never seen. He is stranded by a love for Callie that takes him back to the harshness of his childhood in Australia, to the dark secrets of his family.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.