All the birds, Singing

A Miles Franklin award winner (2014), this is a story of stubborn hopes and unexpected beauty.  Jake Whyte is a hard working, hard headed young woman living alone and tending sheep on a remote British island. Her wayward dog is her only companion.  This wild, windswept island is isolated, although past emotional scars mean that's the way she wants it.

Suspense builds as her sheep go missing at night. Could it be foxes in the woods, a strange boy, or rumours of a mysterious beast? And there are demons of Jake's Australian past, intruding into the present...

CITATION: Wyld, Evie. All the birds singing. North Sydney, NSW:  Random House Australia, 2013.

 

Swift and assured and emotionally wrenching. You won’t only root for Jake, you’ll see the world, hard facts and all, more clearly through her telling.       
                                                     - The New York Times.


 

Readers feedback, a free chapter and notes about the author plus a video interview with Evie Wyld at the official publisher's  website.

Listen to the ABC radio interview with Evie Wyld.   
This title is also available in Large print, CD audiobook & kindle ebook.

 

 

The light between oceans

Set in 1918 on a remote island lighthouse off Southwest Australia. A dramatic wild setting where Tom Sherbourne has retreated to live a solitary life in the hope of erasing his emotional scars after distinguished service in World War I. While on leave he meets Isabel, they marry and she joins him at the lighthouse.  In peaceful isolation their romance blooms - but after 4 years and several heartbreaking miscarriages, their marriage is tested to the limit. Two weeks after the tragic loss of a premature baby, a dinghy drifts ashore carrying a dead man and a newborn baby in great distress. Against Tom’s protests, Isabel wants to keep the baby that she sees as a gift from God. Only years later will they understand that the choice they make will haunt them forever.

CITATION: Stedman, M.L., The light between oceans. North Sydney, NSW: Vintage Books, 2012.

The New York Times bestseller soon to be a major motion picture from Spielberg’s Dreamworks that is “irresistible…seductive…with a high concept plot that keeps you riveted from the first page.”  –O, The Oprah Magazine.

Also available in large print, audiobook & kindle ebook.
More about this book including video interview with the author and 'browse inside' feature from the Publishers website - Simon and Schuster.

Hollywood comes to Stanley, (Tasmania) starring Michael Fassbender, Rachel Weisz.

Stanley, Tasmania.     photo credit - ABC News

The secret fate of Mary Watson

Based on historical diaries, this fictional 'true story' is set in 1879 on remote Lizard Island in far north Queensland.

Fleeing her family home, 19-year-old Mary Oxnam has few prospects and no connections. Plain and penniless, she must rely on her wit and intelligence to survive. Mary soon finds work as a pianist in a Cooktown brothel. The job serves as a front for her more lucrative side career as a spy in various smuggling operations. 
Within a year she has moved to Lizard Island, locked into a marriage of convenience with a fisherman. It's a rough, isolated place, rife with hidden enemies - and unexpected temptation.

A suspenseful story of peril and intrigue, with a heady combination of wild beauty and foreboding. – HarperCollinsPublishers.


CITATION: Johnson, Judy. The secret fate of Mary Watson. Pymble, N.S.W. : HarperCollinsPublishers, 2011.

By the winner of a Victorian Premier's Literary Award, 2007 (for Jack).

Available in CD audiobook, braille & kindle ebook.

When Captain flint was still a good man

Young Cal lives with his parents on Loyalty Island. Each winter, Cal's father - a ship’s captain - sails to Alaska for 6 months to catch king crab. Cal feels the emotional gulf and tension caused by his father’s absence but knows their livelihood depends on it. He fills his head with stories of pirates on Treasure Island (where R L Stevenson created the original Captain Flint). When John Gaunt, the owner of the fleet dies suddenly, Cal wonders about the relationship his mother has had with Gaunt. His untimely death puts the fleet on the brink of collapse. Cal finds evidence that his father has resorted to desperate measures to save their way of life. Cal’s loyalty faces the ultimate test.

CITATION: Dybek, Nick. When Captain Flint was still a good man. New York : Riverhead Books, 2012.


...peopled with multidimensional characters and featuring well-drawn settings. Dybek writes well about family, about relationships and loyalty, about responsibility and community, and about all that passes from father to son. –Kirkus reviews

Read the transcript of an interview by Granta with author Nick Dybek.

Available on kindle and audiobook. 

Cloud Atlas

 

An ambitious novel presenting six different stories set in different time periods. Each story is read by the main character in the next chapter. After the sixth story, the other five stories are returned to and closed. The first begins in Chatham Islands (a remote Pacific archipelago off the coast of New Zealand) with the diary of a 19th-century notary. The second story shifts to 1931 with the letters of a penniless composer in 1931 Belgium. Then we meet a 1970s reporter who gets in the way of a nuclear energy company in California and a genetically engineered serf in a future "corpocracy" who slowly gains awareness of her plight. Finally we return to the Chatham islands, only centuries later in a post-civilisation world.

...brilliantly original fiction that reveals how disparate people connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. – Goodreads   

Citation: Mitchell, David. The cloud atlas. London : Sceptre, 2004.

Available as a CD audiobook, kindle ebook + an enhanced edition with audio and video. Adapted for film starring Tom Hanks, Halle Berry.

Watch the video interview with David Mitchell :

Bodily Harm

Rennie is a young journalist whose comfortable world falls apart when she discovers that she has breast cancer. After her operation, she returns to find policemen in her apartment, investigating the presence of an intruder, an invader who has made himself at home in her kitchen and left a length of rope on her bed. Unnerved by these events, she decides on a holiday escape. She flies to St. Antoine, a fictitious Caribbean island.

...on the tiny island of St.  Antoine she is confronted by a world where her rules for survival no longer apply.  By turns comic, satiric, relentless, and terrifying, Margaret Atwood's Bodily Harm is ultimately an exploration of the lust for power, both sexual and political, and the need for compassion that goes beyond what we ordinarily mean by love. – Random House.

CITATION: Atwood, Margaret. Bodily Harm. New York : Bantam Books, 1996. 



Available in large print, audiobook, ebook. Look inside or listen to a sample at Amazon.
Listen to Margaret Atwood interviewed by Fay Weldon about Bodily Harm. (British Library mp3).