Modern Fiction

From number one bestseller and author of the Clifton Chronicles, Jeffrey Archer, Hidden in Plain Sight is the extraordinary second novel featuring William Warwick.

The bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, Trent Dalton, returns with All Our Shimmering Skies - a glorious novel destined to become another Australian classic. Darwin, 1942, and as Japanese bombs rain overhead, motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger's daughter, turns once ...again to the sky for guidance. She carries a stone heart inside a duffel bag next to the map that leads to Longcoat Bob, the deep country sorcerer who put a curse on her family. By her side are the most unlikely travelling companions: a razor-tongued actress named Greta and a fallen Japanese fighter pilot named Yukio. 'Run, Molly, run,' says the daytime sky. Run to the vine forests. Run to northern Australia's wild and magical monsoon lands. Run to friendship. Run to love. Run. Because the graverobber's coming, Molly, and the night-time sky is coming with him. So run, Molly, run. All Our Shimmering Skies is a story about gifts that fall from the sky, curses we dig from the earth and the secrets we bury inside ourselves. It is an odyssey of true love and grave danger; of the darkness and the light; of bones and blue skies. A buoyant, beautiful and magical novel abrim with warmth, wit and wonder, a love letter to Australia and the art of looking up.
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This is what I want to do. I want to go home. I want you to come with me. 'I want to go from here...' Finger on Cape Reinga. '..to here.' Finger at the bottom of Stewart Island, right at the bottom of the map. It's been years since Alex was in New Zealand, and years since he spen...t any one-on-one time with his twin sister, Amy. When they lose their parents in a shock accident it seems like the perfect time to reconnect as siblings. To reconnect with this country they call 'home'. As they journey the length of State Highway One, they will scratch at wounds that have never healed - and Alex will be forced to reckon with what coming home really means.
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Dawn Edelstein knows everything there is to know about dying. As a death doula, she specialises in helping her clients make peace with the end of their lives. But as she's flying home from her latest case, her plane plummets from the sky, and she is forced to confront her own mor...tality for the first time. Instead of seeing her brilliant quantum physicist husband Brian and their beautiful daughter flash before her eyes in what she assumes are her last moments, only one face comes to mind: Wyatt Neville. Miraculously surviving the crash, Dawn is compensated with a plane ticket to any place of her choosing. Suddenly, she sees two options before her: return to Boston, her family, and the life she knows, or journey back to an Egyptian archaeological site she left over a decade earlier, reconnect with Wyatt and their unresolved history, and finally finish her magnum opus on The Book of Two Ways - the first known map of the afterlife - that she was forced to abandon. As the story unfolds, Dawn's two possible fates are unspooled side by side, as are the secrets and doubts long buried alongside them. While attempting to reconcile with the path she chooses for her life, Dawn must confront the questions she's never truly answered: What does a life well-lived look like? When we leave this earth, what do we leave behind of ourselves? And who would you be, if you hadn't turned out to be the person you are right now?
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'Make these little vines count. Love them as I love you.' In the summer of 1914, vigneron Jerome Mea heads off to war, certain he'll be home by Christmas. His new bride Sophie Delancre, a fifth generation champenoise, is determined to ensure the forthcoming vintages will be testa...ment to their love and the power of the people of pernay, especially its strong women who have elevated champagne to favourite beverage of the rich and royal worldwide. But as the years drag on, authorities advise that Jerome is missing, considered dead. When poison gas is first used in Belgium by the Germans, British chemist Charles Nash jumps to enlist, refusing to be part of the scientific team that retaliates. A brilliant marksman, Charlie is seen by his men as a hero, but soon comes to feel that he'd rather die himself than take another life. When he is injured, he is brought to the champagne cellars in Reims, where Sophie has set up an underground hospital, and later to her mansion house in pernay, now a retreat for the wounded. As Sophie struggles with strong feelings for her patient, she also battles to procure the sugar she needs for her 1918 vintage and attracts sinister advances from her brother-in-law. However, nothing can prepare her for the ultimate battle of the heart, when Jerome's bloodstained jacket and identification papers are found in Belgium, and her hopes of ever seeing her husband alive again are reignited. From the killing fields of Ypres to the sun-kissed vineyards of southern France, The Champagne War is a heart-stopping adventure about the true power of love and hope to light the way during war.
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