2023 Read Widely: Australia & Oceania

"Birnam Wood is on the move . . . A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand's South Island, cutting o the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at...

Presents the life of the Australian speech therapist who helped the English king, George VI, overcome a lifelong speech disorder and become an eloquent leader of his people during the difficult days of World War II.

In the tradition of Marley & Me, "Cleo" is the story of an impish black kitten who teaches a grieving family to love and laugh again after the tragic loss of a child. "'We're just going to look.' Helen Brown had no intention of adopting a pet when she brought her sons, Sam and Rob, to visit a friend's new kittens. But the runt of the litter was irresistible, with her overlarge ears and dainty chin. When Cleo was delivered weeks later, she had no...

The story of Mary Poppins, the quintessentially English and utterly magical children's nanny, is remarkable enough. She was instantly hailed as a classic, then became a household name when Julie Andrews stepped into the role in Disney's hugely successful film. Now she is a Broadway sensation all over again. But the story of Mary Poppins's creator, as this first biography reveals, is just as unexpected and remarkable. Australian journalist Pamela Lyndon...

"In Hayley Scrivenor's Dirt Creek, a small-town debut mystery described as The Dry meets Everything I Never Told You, a girl goes missing and a community falls apart and comes together. When twelve-year-old Esther disappears on the way home from school in a small town in rural Australia, the community is thrown into a maelstrom of suspicion and grief. As Detective Sergeant Sarah Michaels arrives in town during the hottest spring in decades and begins...

"Six minutes in the wrong place at the wrong time--that's all it took to ruin Sydney detective Ted Conkaffey's life. Accused but not convicted of a brutal abduction, Ted is now a free man--and public enemy number one. Maintaining his innocence, he flees north to keep a low profile amidst the steamy, croc-infested wetlands of Crimson Lake. There, Ted's lawyer introduces him to eccentric private investigator Amanda Pharrell, herself a convicted murderer....

It is 1885, and a crippling drought threatens to ruin the McBride family. Their land is parched, their cattle starving. When the rain finally comes, it is a miracle that renews their hope for survival. But returning home from an afternoon swimming at a remote waterhole filled by the downpour, fourteen-year-old Tommy and sixteen-year-old Billy meet with a shocking tragedy.

Set in Melbourne following a catastrophic war in the northern hemisphere, Nevil Shute's classic is the story of a handful of survivors in the terrifying aftermath of nuclear apocalypse. First published in 1957-and famously adapted for the screen soon after by Stanley Kramer, in a film starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner-On the Beach is the perhaps the greatest work of popular fiction about the end of the world.

"After moving from a small country town to Seattle, Heather Baxter marries Tom, a widowed doctor with a young son and teenage daughter. A working vacation overseas seems like the perfect way to bring the new family together, but once they're deep in the Australian outback, the jet-lagged and exhausted kids are so over their new mom. When they discover remote Dutch Island, off-limits to outside visitors, the family talks their way onto the ferry, taking...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of Me Before You and One Plus One, in an earlier work available in the U.S. for the first time, a post-WWII story of the war brides who crossed the seas by the thousands to face their unknown futures. 1946. World War II has ended and all over the world, young women are beginning to fulfill the promises made to the men they wed in wartime. In Sydney, Australia, four women join 650 other war brides on an extraordinary...