Shara Wilson peeked through her dorm window curtains across the schoolyard. Soft rain fell, grey and drizzly, onto the asphalt, blurring the light and muting the usual morning bird calls. In a nearby building, plates clattered and cutlery jangled as kitchen staff prepared breakfast. A vacuum cleaner hummed down the hallway.
She glanced at her laptop, sitting among a mess of text-books, notepads and pens on the tiny desk next to her bed. No one had warned her how much homework Canningdale College dished out. It was all she ever seemed to do. One more sleep, though, and her parents would be here to pick her up. Shara would be taking Rocko, her big brown quarter horse, home for three weeks of riding and hanging out by the Coachwood River with her friends.
Shara grabbed a popper juice and some biscuits from her drawer and took her laptop from the desk. She flipped it open and sat cross-legged on the bed watching it come to life. Back home in Coachwood Crossing, she knew her bestie would be doing the same. She logged in to chat and within seconds there was a pop-up message from Jess.
—Sharsy, check out this link! There’s going to be a WILD HORSE RACE at the Coachwood Crossing Show. They’re using real brumbies! Can you believe it?—
Shara groaned. Jess would be in a huge tizz about this. She and her boyfriend Luke had been crazy about brumbies ever since Luke brought a herd of them back from Mount Isa last summer. Shara got comfy on the bed and clicked the link.
It took her to the program for the Coachwood Crossing Show, which started the next weekend and ran for three days. She scanned the list of events – it looked more like a rodeo this year, with campdrafting, calf roping, bronc riding and barrel racing. Then she spotted the wild horse race billed as ‘Lunchtime Entertainment’.
—This exciting event will use real mountain brumbies, wild and untamed!—
Shara screwed up her face. Roping down wild horses and traumatising them just for the fun of it: how wild and exciting. Not.
The blurb:
Shara heard her father’s four-wheel drive back up to the horse float, and moments later the sounds of hooves up a tailgate. She rushed to the window and saw Rocko’s big brown rump move into the float next to Goldie’s.
‘Dad! Dad! No!’ She threw herself down the back steps, sobbing. ‘I’m sorry!’
When Shara and her friends decide to protest against a wild horse race, it sounds fun, even heroic, but they don’t plan on the tangle of heartbreak that follows. The police are on her doorstep, her friend Corey is in hospital and both her beloved horses have been taken from her. Shara will need the whole town on her side before she can put things right.
Ages 11-14
The first and most important woman in my life was my mother. As it should be, in an ideal world.
When I was born, my world must have seemed, to those who observed it, pretty close to ideal. My father was a well-known actor; my mother, Julia Squire, a costume designer whose career was taking off. For myself and my younger sister, born two and a half years later, life was a beautiful flat in Belgravia, a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace, nannies and au pairs, walks to St James’s Park to feed the ducks and smocked dresses made by the Queen’s own dressmakers.
Even now, so many years after my mother died, when I think of those early days I can still smell her perfume on the air as she bent to kiss me goodnight, dressed in some beautiful off-the-shoulder gown she had designed, her pearl-covered bag in her hand, her hair swept up and her nails immaculately painted. Dad would be in the background, tall, handsome, his dinner suit gleaming black, already by then a somewhat scary presence in my life—not like my mother, warm and soft and comforting.
To be honest, I think she was a bit soft as a mother. I remember once when I was small, five or six I think, I had been behaving badly—badly enough for me to know it as well. Mum, who absolutely never punished me, got cross with me and hit me on the hand with a wooden spoon. I remember looking at my hand in astonishment, but at the same time feeling that it was fair enough, when my mother burst into tears, knelt on the floor beside me, covered me with kisses and apologised to me! Hmmm, this is interesting! I thought, putting the knowledge somewhere into a ‘mustn’t forget’ file.
The blurb:
Candida Baker grew up in a colourful family, with an actor father and costume designer mother. Her parents’ complex, and at times chaotic, lives made for a challenging environment, and from an early age Candida understood the importance of friends, finding comfort and support from many close friendships with women and from ongoing loving relationships with all her sisters.
In The Wisdom of Women, Candida celebrates all the wisdom and nurturing supportive female friends, family, mentors, and even strangers, can bring to our lives. With great deftness she weaves the tapestry of her life around the experiences of other women, who freely share their stories of kindness, laughter, betrayal and loss.
When I was ten years old I was among a group of children put up for auction every Sunday.
We weren’t sold: we were asked to file across a stage in the hopes of finding a taker. Our own parents, finally back from war, could have been in the audience, or perhaps a couple who wanted to adopt us.
Every Sunday I stepped on to the boards, hoping I would be recognized or, failing that, chosen.
Every Sunday, in that covered courtyard at the Villa Jaune, I had ten paces in which to show myself, ten paces in which to secure a family, ten paces to stop being an orphan. The first few steps were no trouble, I was propelled on to that stage by my impatience, but I flagged halfway across, and my calves laboured painfully to cover the last metre. The far end was like the edge of a diving board, with only emptiness beyond. An abyss of silence. Somewhere in those rows of heads, those hats and partings and chignons, a voice was meant to cry ‘My son!’ or ‘He’s the one! He’s the one I want! I’ll adopt him!’ Clenching my toes and straining my whole body in anticipation of this cry which would save me from abandonment, I double-checked that I looked my best.
I had been up since dawn, leaping from the dormitory to the cold basins where I scoured my skin with a bar of rock-hard green soap that was slow to soften and miserly with its lather. I had already straightened my hair a dozen times to ensure it did as it was told. My Sunday-best blue suit was now too narrow at the shoulders and too short in the arm and the leg so I huddled inside the rough fabric to disguise the fact that I had grown.
We found it hard to tell whether the waiting beforehand was a pleasure or torture; preparing ourselves to make a leap without knowing what sort of landing lay ahead. Maybe we would die a death? Maybe we would be cheered?
Of course, my shoes didn’t help.
The blurb:
It is 1942 and the Jews are being deported from Belgium. Separated from his parents, seven-year-old Joseph must go into hiding. He is taken in the dead of night to an orphanage, the Village Jaune, where the benign and enigmatic Frather Pons presides over the motley assortment of children. With the ever-present threat of the Gestapo growing closer, Joseph learns that the secret of survival is to conceal his Jewish heritage. Soon Joseph also discovers that Father Pons has a secret of his own: he is risking his life not only for the boys in his care, but for the Jewish faith itself.
Sensitive, funny and deeply humane, Noah’s Child is a simple fable that reveals the complexities of faith, bravery and the human condition.
‘THOMASINA?’
Tommy ignored the voice calling her. ‘Go, Sir Benedict!’ she whispered.
‘Thomasina!’
Tommy knew it would be Mrs Moon, the cook, angry because she wasn’t standing at the long table peeling mountains of potatoes with the other kitchen girls. Instead, Tommy was standing at the kitchen doorway, watching the knights practising in the great courtyard.
Clank, clank. The courtyard rang with the sound of sword against armour.
Sir Benedict and another knight, Sir Hugh, were teaching the squires how to fight.
‘Now I thrust,’ Sir Benedict called. He lunged forward with his sword.
Sir Hugh then drove his sword at Sir Benedict.
‘Now I parry,’ Sir Benedict explained, as he blocked the blow with his own sword.
The squires, who were boys training to be knights, copied Sir Benedict’s moves with their wooden practice swords. So did Tommy, with the small paring knife she was meant to be using on the potatoes.
‘Hooray!’ Tommy cheered softly as Sir Benedict, Flamant Castle’s bravest knight, raised his sword to signal the end of practice. The sun glinted off the steel blade, and for a moment Tommy imagined that she was the one holding her sword aloft. That she was the castle’s most daring knight, its most skilled sword fighter.
‘Ouch!’ Tommy cried, as a hand grasped her ear and twisted it hard.
‘So there you are, Thomasina,’ Mrs Moon scolded. ‘I should have known you’d be watching the knights again. You’re meant to be peeling potatoes, not dreaming in doorways.’
The blurb:
Tommy, a kitchen girl at Flamant Castle, dreams of becoming a knight - and when she is made the Keeper of the Blades, caring for all the swords in the castle armoury, it seems like her dream might come true. But then Sir Walter’s most valuable sword goes missing from the sword room. Will Tommy be able to find it before she is sent back to the kitchen in disgrace?
Introducing a feisty new character for girls (and their parents and teachers) who love adventure and want an alternative to ‘pink’ books. Created by Frances Watts, a CBCA Award Winner and author of the huge bestseller Kisses for Daddy.
Ages 7-9
Introduction
In setting out to write this book, I was told very early on by quite a few people that I would struggle to find women who had willingly taken on the challenge of managing an Australian farm. No woman would be foolish enough to attempt it on their own unless they were forced by circumstance, and I would certainly have a hard time finding women running farms on a commercial, full-time scale if there were able-bodied men in their lives who could take over for them or, at least, share the endeavour equally. What surprised me most is that the people saying this were other rural women.
Having spent most of my working life to date telling the stories of regional Australia in one form or another, I knew it simply wasn’t true. In fact, after just a few weeks of very basic research, I had a list of more than 40 potential candidates and I had barely scratched the surface. The greatest challenge was not finding women to write about, but choosing which stories to tell.
In deciding who to write about, I was influenced by my own background as the daughter of dairy farmers from a small farm in a closely settled area of South Australia. Writers, artists and filmmakers have long been fascinated with the outback and the more remote parts of our wide brown land, but there is much more to the Australia that sprawls beyond our urban boundaries. I wanted to share the experiences of women living in some of these places too, as well as their families and communities, and to capture something of their daily lives, personal struggles and extraordinary achievements.
While tragedy and unhappy circumstances may have played a role in some of them becoming farmers in their own right, it is by no means the only reason they are doing what they do. All these women share two things in common—they have made active choices to be farmers, and they love the land. Some are single, some are not, some have children and some do not. Some come from generations of farmers and grew up on the land. Some were actively discouraged by their parents from considering becoming farmers despite the fact it has been their hearts’ desires since they were children, not because they were girls but because it can be a tough and unforgiving way for anyone to make a living.
Spending time with these women emphasised the physical challenges that all farmers face. Farms can be dangerous work environments given they usually involve operating machinery and handling livestock, and some of them have experienced life-threatening injuries. While the nature of the work is physical there is more than one way to get the job done, as these women also demonstrate. Because they cannot rely on brute strength, they have found alternative approaches and clever little tricks that enable them to tackle many tasks on their own, whether it be handling a recalcitrant bull, hoisting a sheep onto the back of a ute, or working out the best way to move a stack of fence posts or a 30-kilogram bag of stock lick.
As someone who has observed more than a few farmers at work, I was also struck by their approach to working with others. Before they leapt into the task, they talked about it first to anyone helping out so that everyone was clear on what needed to be done and what was expected of each individual. Believe me this is far from common, as the number of seminar sessions run for farmers on communication skills and managing employees tends to testify. And it struck me that all of them are great networkers, quick to identify people who can provide advice and support when needed, and never ashamed to ask for it or accept it.
The blurb:
Making your living from the land in Australia is not for the faint-hearted. Isolation, hard physical work, long hours and the vagaries of drought, floods and fire make it a challenging environment for any farmer. But how do you cope when you are a woman in what is traditionally a man’s world?
Women of the Land brings together the heart-warming stories of eight rural women spread across Australia who run their own farms, capturing their ways of life, their personal struggles and their remarkable achievements.
Often juggling the demands of raising a family, they have overcome tragedy, personal fears, physical exhaustion and more than a little scepticism to build vibrant futures that sustain them and their families.
Despite their diverse backgrounds, they all share several things in common - genuine humility, a passion for farming, and a deep, spiritual connection to the land which sustains them.
This is the inspiring story of eight rural women and their remarkable everyday lives.
Prologue
The streetlight threw a pale circle of light onto the road, but beyond its edge the night was dark. Sandy shrank deeper into the shadows to avoid the men chasing him.
He could hear their feet, pounding against the pavement, their panting breaths and urgent shouts.
‘This way, I saw him go this way!’
‘No! He ducked down the side street!’
A thorn was pushing into his thigh but he didn’t dare shift position in case the movement alerted his pursuers to his hiding spot. He smiled as he thought he heard their footsteps start to fade. He knew the area better than anyone.
Six years on the streets had made him shrewd. At sixteen, he knew where the warmest doorways were, where he could get clothes from and the soup kitchens that would feed him without asking questions. He knew to trust no one.
The pain in his thigh worsened and he felt the thorn pierce his skin. Blood seeped through his flimsy tracksuit pants.
‘I trusted you! How could you do that?’ The words from years ago echoed from somewhere deep inside him. Confused, Sandy shook his head. Where had that come from? He couldn’t allow those thoughts in.
He wouldn’t allow them in.
But despite his determination, still they kept coming, softly at first, then louder and louder. Recollections as clear as yesterday forced their way back, making him forget the worrying foot-falls, as he absent-mindedly ran his fingers over the scar on his forehead. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to stop the words.
Suddenly a hand firmly grasped his shoulder and yanked him out of the bush.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ a voice from the past said.
As Sandy looked into the face of his captor, the memories weren’t memories anymore. They were real.
‘Uncle Jimmy,’ he said without thinking. The walls he had built while living on the street crumbled. He was an eight-year-old boy again in the arms of someone he loved. ‘Uncle Jimmy.’ The words came out as a sob.
‘Come on, lad; let’s get you outta here, hey? We’ve got a business to run. Together.’
The blurb:
Anna and Matt Butler were childhood sweethearts with a dream of owning their own land, a dream they achieved through hard work and determination.
But as the seasons conspire against them and Matt is involved in a terrible accident, the couple face financial ruin and the loss of their farm.
As they fight for everything they hold dear, they suddenly find themselves caught up in events much bigger and more dangerous than they could ever have imagined.
Purple Roads is a story about maintaining faith in yourself, staying true to your ideals and, most of all, the belief that some things are worth fighting for.
The Atlantic asks ‘Has Kindle Killed the Book Cover?’
Short answer? Not really. It is changing them, though.
Whisker’s Tip
I never thought we’d end up with a cat crazy enough to want to go for walks. But felines change people. I should know that.
As evening shadows crawl across the kitchen, Jonah’s footsteps drum down the hall. He appears in front of me, his red harness snared between his teeth.
‘Not now,’ I say, peeling a carrot. ‘Dinner’s only half an hour away.’
His eyes widen to become a pair of lakes. He sits neatly in front of me, snakes his tail over his front feet and examines my face. What do cats see when they look at people? They must be appalled by our lack of fur.
After a moment’s reflection, Jonah, still carrying the harness, stands up and pads toward me. He balances on his back feet and stretches his impossibly long body against mine. Pat-ting my abdomen with his front paw, he flattens his ears and puts his head to one side. Lowering himself to ground level again, he drops the harness at my feet and emits a baleful meow.
Irresistible.
Crouching, I clip the harness around his soft, athletic body. The cat arches his back in anticipation. His purrs reverberate off the cupboards.
‘Cruel, too cruel!’ I hear Mum’s voice saying. ‘Cats are wild animals. What are you doing to this poor creature?’
It’s strange how Mum stays inside my head, even years after she’s gone. I wonder if it’ll be the same for my daughters and they’ll hear me wheedling and encouraging them when they’re in rocking chairs.
In an ideal world, Jonah would be free to roam the neighbourhood. But times have changed. We live in cities. Roads are plagued with cars.
A normal cat would hate going out in a harness. Three years with Jonah have taught me he’s anything but ordinary. Apart from the fact he’s learnt to love his harness, his obsession with gloves, florist ribbon and women’s evening wear is beyond the realms of feline sanity.
The blurb:
Some say your previous cat chooses their successor. If so, what in cat heaven’s name was Helen Brown’s beloved Cleo thinking when she sent a crazy kitten like Jonah?
When Cleo died, Helen Brown swore she’d never get another kitten. But after she was diagnosed with breast cancer an unscheduled visit to a pet shop resulted in the explosive arrival of a feisty kitten called Jonah. Like Cleo, Jonah possessed great energy and charm. But unlike Cleo, he often morphed into a highly strung and capricious escape artist. Still, as Helen recovered from a mastectomy, he also proved to be a healer in his own right.
While struggling to deal with her own mortality, Helen helped arrange her son Rob’s wedding, completed her international best seller, Cleo, and was confronted with her eldest daughter Lydia’s determination to abandon university studies to embark on a spiritual life. Lydia’s desire to become a Buddhist nun in war-torn Sri Lanka was matched only by Jonah’s yearning to be an outdoor cat in a decidedly indoor-cat neighbourhood…
After Cleo is a warm, wise and often funny account of the highs and lows of mother-daughter relationships, the impact of a potentially life-threatening illness, and an often kooky - some might say deranged - cat called Jonah.
The UK cover:
The German cover:
Helen’s previous bestseller:
A Note from Greg Gaines, Author of this book
I have no idea how to write this stupid book.
Can I just be honest with you for one second? This is the literal truth. When I first started writing this book, I tried to start it with the sentence “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” I genuinely thought that I could start this book that way. I just figured, it’s a classic book-starting sentence. But then I couldn’t even figure out how you were supposed to follow that up.
I stared at the computer for an hour and it was all I could do not to have a colossal freak-out. In desperation, I tried messing with the punctuation and italicization, like:
It was the best of times? And it was the worst of times?!!
What the hell does that even mean? Why would you even think to do that? You wouldn’t, unless you had a fungus eating your brain, which I guess I probably have.
The point is, I have no idea what I’m doing with this book.
And the reason for that is, I’m not a writer. I’m a filmmaker. So now you’re probably asking yourself:
1. Why is this guy writing a book and not making a film?
2. Does it have to do with the brain-fungus thing?
Answer Key
1. I’m writing a book instead of making a film because I have retired from filmmaking forever. Specifically, I retired after making the Worst Film Ever Made. Usually the goal is to retire after making the best possible thing you can make—or, even better, die—but I did the opposite. A brief outline of my career would look like this:
i. Many Bad Films
ii. A Mediocre Film
iii. Some OK Films
iv. A Decent Film
v. Two or Three Good Films
vi. A Bunch of Pretty Great Films
vii. The Worst Film Ever Made
Fin.
How bad was that film? It killed someone, that’s how bad it was. It caused an actual death. You’ll see.
2. Let’s just say that it would explain a lot of things if there were a fungus eating my brain. Although that fungus would have to have been eating my brain for basically my entire life. At this point it’s possible that the fungus has gotten bored and left, or died from malnutrition or something.
The blurb:
Greg Gaines is the last master of high school espionage, able to disappear at will into any social environment. He has only one friend, Earl, and together they spend their time making movies, their own incomprehensible versions of Coppola and Herzog cult classics.
Until Greg’s mother forces him to rekindle his childhood friendship with Rachel.
Rachel has been diagnosed with leukemia - cue extreme adolescent awkwardness - but a parental mandate has been issued and must be obeyed. When Rachel stops treatment, Greg and Earl decide the thing to do is to make a film for her, which turns into the Worst Film Ever Made and becomes a turning point in each of their lives.
And all at once Greg must abandon invisibility and stand in the spotlight.
‘A stonking read, wonderfully rude, filled with enough wit, verve and audacity to power at least twenty novels.’ Phillip Gwynne, author of Deadly Unna? and Swerve
At first light on a late summer morning, a man in a hooded sweatshirt moved softly and slowly along an ordinary-looking street in south London. He was doing something, though a bystander would have been hard put to guess what. Sometimes he crept closer to houses, sometimes he backed further away. Sometimes he looked down, sometimes he looked up. At close range, that bystander would have been able to tell that the young man was carrying a small high definition video camera—except there was no bystander, so there was no-one to notice. Apart from the young man, the street was empty. Even the earliest risers weren’t up yet, and it wasn’t a day for milk delivery or rubbish collection. Maybe he knew that, and the fact that he was filming the houses then was no coincidence.
The name of the place where he was filming was Pepys Road. It didn’t look unusual for a street in this part of town. Most of its houses were the same age. They were built by a property developer in the late 19th century, during the boom that followed the abolition of the tax on brick. The developer hired a Cornish architect and Irish builders and the houses were built over a period of about eighteen months. They were three storeys high, and no two were identical, because the architect and his workmen created tiny variations in them, to do with the shape of the windows, or the chimneys, or the detailing of the brickwork. In the words of a guidebook to local architecture: ‘Once this is noticed, it is pleasing to look at the buildings and detect the small differences.’ Four of the houses in the street were double-fronted, with twice as much space as the others; because space was at such a premium, they were worth about three times as much as the single-fronted properties. The young man seemed to take a special interest in filming these bigger, more expensive houses.
The properties in Pepys Road were built for a specific market: the idea was that they would appeal to lower-middle class families willing to live in an unfashionable part of town in return for the chance to own a terraced house—a house large enough to have room for servants. For the first years that was mainly who lived in them: not solicitors or barristers or doctors, but the people who worked or clerked for them; the respectable, aspirational no-longer-poor. Over the next decades, the demographics of the street wobbled up and down in age, up and down in class, as it became more or less popular with upwardly mobile young families, and as the area did well or less well. The area was bombed in the second world war, but Pepys Road was unaffected until a V2 rocket hit in 1944 and destroyed two houses in the middle of the street. The gap stayed there for years, like a pair of missing front teeth, until a new property with balconies and French widows, looking very strange amid the Victorian architecture, was built there in the fifties. During that decade, four houses in the street were lived in by families recently arrived from the Caribbean; the fathers all worked for London Transport. In 1960 a small irregularly-shaped patch of grass at one end of Pepys Road, vacant since the previous structure was destroyed by German bombs, was concreted over and a two-up-two down corner shop was built there.
The blurb:
Pepys Road: an ordinary street in the Capital. Each house has seen its fair share of first steps and last breaths, and plenty of laughter in between. Today, through each letterbox along this ordinary street drops a card with a simple message: We Want What You Have.
At forty, Roger Yount is blessed with an expensively groomed wife, two small sons and a powerful job in the City. An annual bonus of a million might seem excessive, but with second homes and nannies to maintain, he’s not sure he can get by without it. Elsewhere in the Capital, Zbigniew has come from Warsaw to indulge the super-rich in their interior decoration whims. Freddy Kano, teenage football sensation, has left a two-room shack in Senegal to follow his dream. Traffic warden Quentina has exchanged the violence of the police in Zimbabwe for the violence of the enraged middle classes. For them all, this city offers the chance of a different kind of life.
Epic in scope yet intimate, capturing the ordinary dramas of very different lives, this is a novel of love and suspicion, of financial collapse and terrorist threat, of property values going up and fortunes going down, and of a city at a moment of extraordinary tension.
Watch an interview with John Lanchester
‘Lanchester’s ambitious, engaging novel will nonetheless move and amuse readers far beyond the M25. This year’s Man Booker winner? I wouldn’t bet against it.’ - read the rest of Alex Preston’s review at We Love This Book