MARCH 2018 The Passengers Eleanor Limprecht A luminous novel about love by an acclaimed rising star of Australian literature. Description A war bride and her granddaughter are on a cruise from San Diego, California to Sydney, Australia. The grandmother, Sarah, was born in Australia and has not returned since she left in 1946, after she married an American serviceman during World War II and travelled to the US after the war on the 'Bride Ship' the USS Mariposa to start life with her new husband. During the journey back to the country of her birth, Sarah tells her granddaughter Hannah the story of her life. Hannah - who is the same age Sarah was when she made her first journey - listens avidly, seeing her grandmother for the first time as a woman and a person with a past. Her grandmother gives Hannah new perspective on the stories she has always told herself: that she will never be content with the way she looks, that the desire she feels is ugly and that she doesn't deserve happiness. It is when they arrive at their destination that Hannah realises the immensity of Sarah's life and what she has given up. The Passengers is a luminous novel about love: the journeys we undertake in its name, the sacrifices we make and the heartache we sometimes suffer. It is about how we most long for what have left behind. And it is about the past - how close it can still feel - even after long passages of time and when so much has changed. About the Author Eleanor was born and raised in the US, Germany and Pakistan but now lives in Sydney, Australia. Eleanor's previous novels, What Was Left and Long Bay were both published by Sleepers Publishing to critical acclaim. Price: $29.99 (NZ$32.99) ISBN: 9781760631338 Format: Paperback - C format Dimensions: 234x153mm Extent: 250 pages Main Category: FC Sub Category: Illustrations: Previous Titles: Author now living: Allen & Unwin MARCH 2018 The Passengers 12 copy pack Includes 12 copies of The Passengers plus one free reading copy. Description About the Author Price: $359.88 (NZ$395.88) ISBN: 9324551061800 Format: Dimensions: mm Extent: 0 pages Main Category: Sub Category: Illustrations: Previous Titles: Author now living: Allen & Unwin MARCH 2018 The Opal Dragonfly Julian Leatherdale A daughter sacrifices her reputation, two men bid for the love of a woman, freedom is found in the heart of a dust storm, a father's legacy reveals past crimes. Inspired by the glamour and beauty of Elizabeth Bay House and the other grand villas of Woolloomooloo Hill in the 1850s, The Opal Dragonfly tells the story of Isobel McLeod, a young woman born into wealth and privilege and yet destined to be cast out of both. Description ""Miss Isobel Clara Macleod, youngest of the seven children of Major Sir Angus Hutton Macleod, Surveyor-General of the colony of New South Wales, had the singular misfortune to know that at seven o'clock that morning her father was going to die."" September, 1851. Sydney, city of secrets and gossip. Seventeen-year-old Isobel Macleod is determined to save her father because she loves him. But when she dares to trespass in a forbidden male world, she will be plunged into social disgrace. A wave of ill fortune threatens to swallow up her family and their stately home, Rosemount Hall, 'the finest house in the colony' on the foreshores of Sydney Harbour. Is Isobel to blame for her family's fate or does the cause lie further in the past? When Isobel was four, Major Macleod returned from an expedition with two 'souvenirs': an Aboriginal girl who became her friend and two opals fashioned into a dragonfly brooch for her mother. When Isobel inherits this 'unlucky' heirloom, she wonders if the terrible dreams it summons are a curse or a gift. Now Isobel's hopes for her future depend on a charming bohemian who encourages her hidden passion to become an artist. Will she now be permanently exiled from her family home? Or will she be transformed into a new self like a magnificent dragonfly emerging into the sunlight? Price: $29.99 (NZ$32.99) A daughter sacrifices her reputation, two men bid for the love of a woman, freedom is found in the heart of a dust storm, a ISBN: 9781760293079 father's legacy reveals past crimes. Format: Paperback - C format Dimensions: 234x153mm Extent: 592 pages Inspired by Elizabeth Bay House and the other grand villas of Sydney's Woolloomooloo Hill, The Opal Dragonfly tells the Main Category: F Fiction bittersweet story of an ambitious family's fall from grace and a brave young woman's struggle to find her true self. Sub Category: F Fiction Illustrations: Previous Titles: About the Author Author now living: Julian Leatherdale's first love was theatre. On graduation, he wrote lyrics for four comedy cabarets and a two-act musical. In 2017, he wrote the short play A Life in Ten Meals for the theatre project Breaking Bread. He discovered a passion for popular history as a staff writer, researcher and photo editor for Time-Life's Australians At War series. He later researched and co-wrote two Film Australia-ABC documentaries Return to Sandakan and The Forgotten Force and was an image Allen & Unwin MARCH 2018 Opal Dragonfly 8 copy pack Includes eight copies of The Opal Dragonfly plus one free reading copy. Description About the Author Price: $239.92 (NZ$263.92) ISBN: 9324551061787 Format: Dimensions: mm Extent: 0 pages Main Category: Sub Category: Illustrations: Previous Titles: Author now living: Allen & Unwin MARCH 2018 The Break Katherena Vermette A stunning and multiple prize-winning first novel by a First Nations Canadian writer who is being acclaimed around the world. Description Stella, a young Metis mother, lives with her family by the Break, an isolated strip of land on the edge of their small Canadian town. Glancing out of her window one winter's evening Stella spots someone in trouble; horrified, she calls the police. But when they arrive, no one is there, scuff marks in the compacted snow the only sign anything may have happened. What follows is a heartbreaking and powerful tale of a community in crisis as the people connected to the victim, a young girl on the edge of a precipice, begin to lay bare their stories leading up to that fateful night. Lou is a social worker grappling with the end of a relationship. Cheryl, an artist, mourns the premature death of her sister. Phoenix, a homeless teenager, is released from a youth detention centre with no one to turn to. Officer Scott is a Metis policeman caught between two worlds. A powerful family saga, Katherena Vermette's urgent, acclaimed and multi-award-winning novel shines a light on the fear every woman carries within her?fear of male power and violence?and on the love and empathy shared by all women. 'I loved this - very tough and real.' Margaret Atwood 'Katherena Vermette is a tremendously gifted writer, a dazzling talent . The lives of the girls and women in The Break are not easy, but their voices are complex, urgent and unsparing. Vermette lays bare what it means to survive, not only once, but multiple times, against the forces of private and national histories.' Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing 'Vermette is a staggering talent. Reading The Break is like a revelation; stunning, heartbreaking and glorious. From her exquisitely rendered characters to her fully realized world and the ratcheting tension, I couldn't put it down. Absolutely Price: $29.99 (NZ$32.99) ISBN: 9781760632274 riveting.' Eden Robinson, author of Monkey Beach Format: Paperback - C format Dimensions: 234x153mm About the Author Extent: 368 pages Main Category: F Fiction KATHERENA VERMETTE is a Metis writer from Treaty One territory, the heart of the Metis nation, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Sub Category: Canada. Her first book, <i>North End Love Songs</i> (The Muses Company) won the Governor General's Literary Award Illustrations: for Poetry. Her National Film Board short documentary,<i> this river</i>, won the Coup de Coeur at the Montreal First Previous Titles: Author now living: Peoples Festival and the 2017 Canadian Screen Award for Best Short. <i>The Break</i>, her first novel, was bestseller in Canada and won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, and the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award. <i>The Break</i> was also shortlisted for a Governor General's Literary Award, the Rogers Writers'Allen Trust & FictionUnwin MARCH 2018 The Break 8 copy pack Includes 8 copies of The Break. Description About the Author Price: $239.92 (NZ$263.92) ISBN: 9324551061794 Format: Dimensions: mm Extent: 0 pages Main Category: Sub Category: Illustrations: Previous Titles: Author now living: Allen & Unwin MARCH 2018 The Midsummer Garden Kirsty Manning From medieval France to contemporary Tasmania, two remarkable women discover their strengths, passions and loves. Description Travelling between lush gardens in France, windswept coastlines of Tasmania, to Tuscan hillsides and beyond, The Midsummer Garden lures the reader on an unforgettable culinary and botanical journey. 1487 Artemisia is young to be in charge of the kitchens at Chateau de Boschaud but, having been taught the herbalists' lore, her knowledge of how food can delight the senses is unsurpassed. All of her concentration and flair is needed as she oversees the final preparations for the sumptuous wedding feast of Lord Boschaud and his bride while concealing her own secret dream. For after the celebrations are over, she dares to believe that her future lies outside the chateau.