Books Archive

Rambling Man My Life on the Road (April 2024)

By Billy Connolly

April 24, 2024

When Billy set out from Glasgow as a young man he never looked back.

He played his banjo on boats and trains, under trees and on top of famous monuments. He danced naked in snow, wind and fire. He slept in bus stations, under bridges and on strangers’ floors.  He travelled by foot, bike, ship, plane, sleigh- even piggy- backed – to get to his next destination.

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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?

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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.

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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. . . .

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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.

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