Books Archive

Dream Count

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

April 24, 2024

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until — betrayed and brokenhearted — she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America – but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve.

In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves in order to love, and to be loved? A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, on daughters and mothers, on our interconnected world, Dream Count pulses with emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart, in language that soars with beauty and power. It confirms Adichie’s status as one of the most exciting and dynamic writers on the literary landscape.

A Bird in Winter (April 2024)

By Louise Doughty

April 24, 2024

One minute, she’s in a meeting in her office in Birmingham- the next, she’s walking out on her job, her home, her life. It’s a day she thought might come, and one she’s prepared for – but nothing could have prepared her for what happen next. As she flees north using multiple disguises, Bird has to work out who exactly is on her trail, and who- if anyone- she can trust.

Like many people, Bird has fantasised about escape for a long time, but now it’s actually happening if her greatest fear that she will be hunted down, or that she will never be found?

Wavewalker (April 2024)

By Suzanne Heywood

April 24, 2024

Aged just seven, Suzanne Heywood set sail with her parents and brother on a three-year voyage around the world.  What followed turned into a decade-long way of life, through storms, shipwrecks, reefs and isolation, with little formal schooling. No one else knew where they were most of the time and no state showed any interest in what was happening to the children.

Suzanne fought her parents, longing to return to England and to education and stability. This memoir covers her astonishing upbringing, a survival story of a child deprived of safety, friendships, schooling

and occasionally drinking water. . . At seventeen Suzanne earned an interview at Oxford University and returned to the UK.

Landed (April 2024)

By Sue McCauley

April 24, 2024

It’s the late 1980’s, in Timaru, and Brewer Howland has killed himself.  His wife, Briar, is left stranded in a rapidly changing world.  The future she took for granted has been obliterated and she must invent a new one.  But how does a sixty-something widow go about creating a future for herself in a world she struggles to comprehend?

The government has taken a sharp turn into unfamiliar territory, and everything seems to be rapidly changing; values, language, telephones, families, race relations, gadgets.  Amid this tsunami of ‘progress’ Briar must decide how and where to live out her life. If her children and grandchildren had turned out to be lovingly bonded family cluster she’d hoped to raise, they might have been future enough.  But her children are scattered and disputatious. . . .

Everyone on this Train is a Suspect (April 2024)

By Benjamin Stevenson

April 24, 2024

When the Australian Mystery Writers’ Society invited me to their crime-writing festival aboard the Ghan, the famous train between Darwin and Adelaide, I was hoping for some inspiration for my second book.  Fiction, this time: I needed a break from real people killing each other.  Obviously, that didn’t pan out.

The program is a who’s who of crime-writing royalty:

The debut writer [me!]

The forensic science writer

The blockbuster writer

The legal thriller writer

The literary writer

The psychological suspense writer

But when one of us is murdered, six authors quickly turn into five detectives.  Together, we should know how to solve a crime.

Or commit one.