WINNER 2025 RUBERY PRIZE YOUNG ADULT NOVEL In a world that fears the future, one boy dares to seek it. Sixteen-year-old Will has been raised to distrust technology. After a cataclysm known as the Devastation, his isolated community rejected the old world—shunning electricity, machines, and the progress they once promised. But Will yearns for more. When he's cast out for questioning the rules, he sets off alone on a perilous journey to Coal City, the last place his estranged father was seen...

If you stop running, you fall.Jonah Pastern is a magician, a liar, a windwalker, a professional thief…and for six months, he was the love of police constable Ben Spenser’s life. His betrayal left Ben jailed, ruined, alone, and looking for revenge.Ben is determined to make Jonah pay. But he can’t seem to forget what they once shared, and Jonah refuses to let him. Soon Ben is entangled in Jonah’s chaotic existence all over again, and they’re running together—from the...

"A novel about the truths—some wonderful, some terrible—that children know and adults do not.” —Time Magazine“They say you cannot go home again, and that is as true as a knife . . .”A man returns to the site of his childhood home where, years before, he knew a girl named Lettie Hempstock who showed him the most marvelous, dangerous, and outrageous things, but when he gets there he learns that nothing is as he remembered.Wondrous, imaginativ...

This rattling good yarn has now been made into a major movie: Hunt For the Wilderpeople, directed and written by Taika Waititi, and starring Sam Neill and Julian Dennison. When Social Welfare threatens to put Ricky into care, the overweight Maori boy and cantankerous Uncle Hec flee into the remote and rugged Ureweras. The impassable bush serves up perilous adventures, forcing the pair of misfits to use all their skills to survive hunger, wild pigs and the vagaries...

At the age of six, Kerry McGinnis loses her mother. Her father, left with four young children to raise, gathers up his family and leaves the city to go droving. For the next fifteen years, the McGinnis clan travels the continent, droving, horse breaking and living off the land. Kerry grows up in the harsh outback, and the animals that inhabit the land are her closest friends.With the memory of her absent mother ever present, Kerry begins her difficult journey into young womanhood.

After seven years on the road with her family, Kerry McGinnis is tired of the wandering life and yearns for a proper home. When her father, the irascible but loveable Mac, buys a property in Queensland's Gulf Country, it seems like she might have found one.But not everything goes smoothly. In their struggle to make a go of things, the McGinnis family encounters fire, flood, a three-metre python, and other, human obstacles. Sian, the eldest son, is at loggerheads with his father, wh...

Set in the near future and inspired by the captivating myth of the warrior queen Califia, this brilliantly inventive novel tells the story of a small, peaceful community of women tucked away in a world gone mad.Only the elders of the Valley remember life the way it used to be…when people traveled in automobiles and bought food others had grown. When the male-to-female ratio was nearly the same. Before the bombs fell, and a deadly virus claimed the world’s men....

Far North is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.My father had an expression for a thing that turned out bad. He'd say it had gone west. But going west always sounded pretty good to me. After all, westwards is the path of the sun. And through as much history as I know of, people have moved west to settle and find freedom. But our world had gone north, truly gone north, and just how far north I was beginning to learn.Out on the f...

The golden shores of Trinity Bay might not be the paradise they dream of...Patricia Shaw's Cry of the Rain Bird is an absorbing romantic saga set in the seemingly blissful Trinity Bay, with dark twists along the way. The perfect read for fans of Fleur McDonald and Elizabeth Haran.Englishman Corby Morgan and his young wife Jessie set sail for the golden shores of Trinity Bay, dreaming of an easy life in paradise. But Providence, the...

Serafina's defeat of the Man in the Black Cloak has brought her out of the shadows and into the daylight realm of her home, Biltmore Estate. Every night she visits her mother in the forest, eager to learn the ways of the cat¬amount. But Serafina finds herself caught between her two worlds: she's too wild for Biltmore's beautifully dressed ladies and formal customs, and too human to fully join her kin.Late one night, Serafina encounters a strange and terrifying figure in the forest, ...

Discover twelve dark and twisted mysteries from USA Today bestselling author Rachel Amphlett.This page-turning collection features The Man Cave, in which Darren regains consciousness in a dank basement where escape turns out to be the least of his worries; in The Last Super Larry has a dark confession to make; and in Nowhere to Run a rookie detective encounters her first serial killer... but will she survive?“"Like a box of dark chocolates – somet...

TO LEARN TO LOVE…HE WILL HAVE TO LET GO…The illegitimate son of the wealthiest man in Cedar River, Jonah Rickard spent his life avoiding his father. Forced back home for a wedding, he’s brought face-to-face with the only woman to ever threaten his hardened heart. Connie Bedford knows what it is to be haunted by the past, betrayed by trust…scared by desire. Years ago, Jonah’s father saved her. Now only Connie and her love can save Jonah—and, maybe, his family…