Martin Kern has a special sensitivity to fonts, a skill that he uses to solve typographical crimes. When a local printer is found dead in his workshop, his body in the shape of an X, Martin and his co-investigator, journalist Lucy Tan, are drawn into a mystery that is stranger than anything they have encountered before. Someone is leaving typographical clues at the scenes of a series of murders. All the trails lead back to Pieter van Floogstraten, a Dutch design genius who disappeared without trace in the 1970s, and who has since been engaged in a mystical scheme to create the world’s most perfect font, which is concealed in locations around the globe. But is he really the killer, and how are the crimes connected to his secret font? In solving the mystery, Martin and Lucy may have to expose Martin’s hero as a psychopath. The main plot of the novel unfolds in Melbourne, while interleaved chapters set variously in a Tibetan monastery, on the plains of Peru, in London, Naples and Amsterdam, gradually reveal the story of Floogstraten in flashback. Other characters include a noir-style private font investigator, a typographical monk from the Renaissance, a Dutch prog rock group named I Am A Dolphin, and a collective of Italian typo-terrorists. This novel takes the reader into the arcane world of typographers and their typefaces, of symbols, swashes and glyphs, where the difference between a serif and sans serif could mean life and death.

Dignity in a Teacup' chronicles the five years Christine Cummins spent working as a torture and trauma counsellor with asylum seekers detained on Christmas Island, Australia’s remote Indian Ocean outpost. It provides a first-hand account of Australian immigration detention during a period of dramatic change and controversy. With exclusive access to the stories shared by hundreds of asylum seekers, Christine describes the reasons people were forced to flee their homelands. These true stories are compelling and reveal the lives of ordinary people seeking a safe new life. It’s an inspiring, intimate memoir about resilience and the tenacity of love. This book fills the gap in our understanding of people pursuing protection in a conflict-ridden world.

War and its aftermath change the lives of everyone they touch. In 1946 the Japanese War Crime Trials begin in Tokyo, where General MacArthur is initiating his grand strategy for converting Japan to a democracy and a bastion against Asian communism. Bill Liston, an Australian law lecturer conscripted to assist in the prosecutions, is embroiled in the dubious legal manoeuverings and questionable summary justice. His fiancée Irene White remains in Brisbane. Both are brought into contact with survivors of the war years – an exotic Dutch commando, a martinet Land Army Officer, teenage prisoners of war rescued from the sinking of HMAS Perth, military and legal careerists, and shattered Japanese civilians. Amongst all of this, Bill and Irene struggle to resolve their relationship and their future.

Only six escapees survived the Sandakan death marches of 1945 in North Borneo, the worst atrocity ever inflicted on Australian soldiers. 1787 Australian and 641 British POWs perished. Previous descriptions of the numerous violent acts have yielded little understanding of a situation where the real struggle was to keep one’s humanity when so many were losing theirs, whether Allied POWs, local residents of Borneo, Javanese slave labourers, or Japanese soldiers. Understanding this extraordinary story is aided by reference to a wide range of sources in different countries and disciplines, and by examining the perspectives of all players in this terrible game of survival.An unusual and extreme POW story, the Sandakan tragedy had four stages: active resistance in 1942-3, stubborn endurance in 1943–4, the collapse of civilized existence in 1945 and, finally, the postwar decades of torment for the six damaged survivors, the gradual assimilation of the story, the healing of the damage and the commemoration of the tragedy by the families and communities involved.

This is about the ‘old old’, not the physically lively sixty- and seventy-year-olds, but octogenarians having a voice. The eighties are when it all begins to crumble. This book gives the young and middle-aged insights into the world of the elderly. It deals with frailty, loss, loneliness and death, but it is far from being a gloomy book: Hansen is a literary man and he uses extracts from novels and poems to help in exploring growing old. He balances lightness and seriousness and this book will have an acute relevance for its older readers.

On Bondi Beach tells the story of a day in Bondi by allowing residents and visitors to tell their stories. The beach changes as the day passes. Different people arrive and leave, and as their lives and stories intersect, those being talked about become those who are talking. This is a book about living in a particular place, but it is also about contemporary Australia, flourishing in transience and diversity.

New Zealand, with close ties to Britain, was heavily involved in the war against Nazi Germany on the battle lines in Greece, Crete, the Middle East, North Africa and Italy. The experience was eye-opening for the new emerging nation, and a lasting bond between New Zealand and Greece was formed. Greece was a poor country in turmoil and pain during the 1940s. A military dictatorship was followed by invasion and terrifying occupation by Germany and its allies, starvation, civil war, political unrest and mutiny in its free military armed forces. New Zealand entered this arena and found a bond with a people that it still celebrates to this day. Absent is the complex, divisive and sometimes violent and surreal relationship between the two countries and the inescapable influence of Britain. Their story stretches from the mountains and open country of Greece and Crete to Middle East deserts, autumn-swept plains of Italy, and the blood-splattered streets of post-liberated Athens. Ironically New Zealand has forgotten the unpalatable but also sacrificed something that would have enhanced its own national storytelling about the war.

In the late sixties when the Beatles are top of the charts and Twiggy is hitting the catwalk, Gill embarks on a life-changing journey to Hong Kong. Mao’s revolution is at its height. Vietnam has become America’s longest war with no end in sight. But it’s at an ad agency under insane direction where Gill finds her battles and learns to stand her ground. In this spirited memoir, where Mad Men meets Han Suyin’s A Many-Splendoured Thing, Gill recreates a Hong Kong of the imagination. Attractive and naïve, wined and dined by Hong Kong’s elite, she gravitates towards camaraderie outside the world of advertising and money, and adventure follows. A weekend sail goes awry when a yacht with her on board strays into the waters of Communist China. A full-scale sea and air search mounted from Hong Kong can find no trace. Yet Gill is very much alive. With her friends, she is reciting from Mao’s Little Red Book with no idea what fate awaits her or how long she will be held. The Hong Kong Letters is part memoir, part travelogue. Gill introduces us to characters that fiction couldn’t have invented any better and transports the reader to another time and place, a reminder that anyone can fit the experiences of a lifetime into two short years.

In an extraordinary move, in 1797, the British government pressed a small group of French and German prisoners of war into the New South Wales Corps, gave them firearms and placed them as guards on a ship carrying sixty-six convict women and two convict men to New South Wales. The result was a mutiny some months into the voyage in which the captain of the Lady Shore was killed and the fates of all of those on board were tied together when the ship was taken to South America. The true story of what happened to those on board is told here in detail for the first time, in part through the eyes of sailor George Drinkald whose fascinating and articulate first-hand testimony has recently emerged.

The European settlement of the ‘Great Southern Land’, today’s Australia, is a story of first contact between European and Indigenous peoples, colonisation, disease and famine, misunderstandings and arrogant mindedness, tragedy and resilience. What really happened after the First Fleet arrived after sailing across the world to a land Europeans had barely touched upon and knew very little about? ‘Quiet Invasion’ is the true history of today’s Sydney’s first four years. Tim Ailwood explodes the myths about the first years of the convict settlement on the shores of Sydney Cove. Week by week, month by month, a detailed story of invader and invaded unfolds as the town of Sydney is hacked out of the place once called Warrane. The book follows the men and women who eked out their lives on the shores of Sydney Cove with a host of historical figures: Arthur Phillip, Bennelong, Watkin Tench, Barangaroo, William Dawes, Patyegarang, David Collins, Colbee, John Macarthur, Daringa, Henry Lidgbird Ball, Pemulwuy, William Bradley, to name just a few.