Modern Literature

//Modern Literature
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  • It's the summer of 1971, not far from the stone-fruit capital of New South Wales, where Mr Wigg lives on what is left of his family farm. Mrs Wigg has been gone a few years now and he thinks about her every day. He misses his daughter, too, and wonders when he'll see her again. He spends his time working in the orchard, cooking and preserving his produce and, when it's on, watching the cricket. It's a full life. Things are changing though, with Australia and England playing a one-day match, and his new neighbours planting grapes for wine. His son is on at him to move into town but Mr Wigg has his fruit trees and his chooks to look after. His grandchildren visit often: to cook, eat and hear his stories. And there's a special project he has to finish ...It's a lot of work for an old man with shaking hands, but he'll give it a go, as he always has.
  • This saga travels across oceans and continents to Iceland, Greenland and North America during the time in history when Anglo-Saxons battled Vikings and the Norsemen discovered America. The marked contrasts between powerful royalty, landless peasants, Viking warriors and noble knights are expertly brought to life in this gripping tale of the French prince, Rumon. Shipwrecked off the Cornish coast on his quest to find King Arthur's legendary Avalon, Rumon meets a lonely girl named Merewyn and their lives soon become intertwined. Rumon brings Merewyn to England, but once there he is so dazzled by Queen Alfrida's beauty that it makes him a virtual prisoner to her will.  Anya Seton  proves her mastery of historical detail and ability to craft a compelling tale that includes real and colorful personalities such as St. Dunstan and Eric the Red.
  • Book II  of The Civil War trilogy. July 1863. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia is invading the North. General Robert E. Lee has made this daring and massive move with seventy thousand men in a determined effort to draw out the Union Army of the Potomac and mortally wound it. His right hand is General James Longstreet, a brooding man who is loyal to Lee but stubbornly argues against his plan. Opposing them is an unknown General George Meade, who has taken command of the Army only two days before what will be perhaps the crucial battle of the Civil War. In four bloody and courageous days,two armies fight for two conflicting dreams. One dreams of freedom, the other of a way of life. More than rifles and bullets are carried into battle. The soldiers carry memories. Promises. Love. And more than men fall on those Pennsylvania fields. Bright futures, untested innocence, and pristine beauty are also the casualties of war.
  • Book III of The Civil War trilogy. Gettysburg is past and the war advances to its third brutal year. On the Union side, the gulf between the politicians in Washington and the generals in the field yawns ever wider. Never has the cumbersome Union Army so desperately needed a decisive, hard-nosed leader. It is at this critical moment that Lincoln places Ulysses S. Grant in command - and turns the tide of war. For Robert E. Lee, Gettysburg was an unspeakable disaster - compounded by the shattering loss of the fiery Stonewall Jackson two months before. Lee knows better than anyone that the South cannot survive a war of attrition. But with the total devotion of his generals - Longstreet, Hill, Stuart - and his unswerving faith in God, Lee is determined to fight to the bitter end. Here too is Joshua Chamberlain, the college professor who emerged as the Union hero of Gettysburg - and who will rise to become one of the greatest figures of the Civil War.
  • The wind is whispering in Woody Creek...Change is in the air...It's 1958 and Woody Creek is being dragged kicking and screaming into the swinging sixties. Jenny's daughters, Cara and Georgie, are now young women. They have inherited their mother's hands, but that is where their similarity ends. Raised separately, they have never met. A mistake from Cara's teenage years looms over her future, but she believes emphatically in the white wedding and happily ever after myth. Georgie has seen enough of marriage and motherhood. She plans to live her life as her grandmother did, independent of a man. But life for the Morrison girls has never been easy, and once the sisters are in each other's lives, long-buried secrets are bound to be unearthed, the dramatic consequences of which no-one could have predicted...Described as ‘...very Australian, very real, very country small town and very well written.’
  •   Woodlea Book 2. After losing a patient, Dr Fliss Knight returns to small town Woodlea and buys a rundown farm, her confidence and city career in tatters. She intends to live a solitary life and hopes that the slow country pace will help her heal. Pickup rider Hewitt Sinclair is no stranger to how hairy things can get in a rodeo arena. But when he can’t save the life of his twin brother, he hangs up his spurs. Determined to provide for his brother’s widow and young family, he gives himself no time to grieve. But when a motorbike accident proves he needs to also look out for himself, he accepts an old friend’s invitation to stay at an isolated property while his body heals. When Fliss meets the cowboy living in the bluestone stables across the garden, all her hopes for a quiet and peaceful life fade. Despite his reserve, Hewitt is impossible to ignore. As they work together to care for an abandoned dog and her puppies they find themselves drawn to each other. But as a family secret threatens every truth Fliss has ever known, and the heavy spring rain continues to fall, both Fliss and Hewitt must each face their deepest fears.
  • When young Jinnie Howlett’s widowed father, a tinker man, died a pauper, she was indeed fortunate to already be the inmate of a northern workhouse, for with no other relatives, she might have ended up on the streets – a fate for girls her age that was all too common in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Close to her fifteenth birthday and after years of drudgery and toil, she is at last offered a position as a maid of all work with the Shalemans at Tollet’s Ridge Farm, a bleak isolated place near the Cumbrian border. Rose, the invalid wife of Pug Shaleman and mother to Bruce and Hal demanded all her time. But Bruce realises there’s more to this seemingly vulnerable girl than the rest of the family realises, and he becomes her defender against the brutish harassment of Pug and Hal. It is onlyj when she accidentally makes the acquaintance of Richard Baxton-Powell, who owed his life to Bruce, that Jinnie realises how different and tempting life was beyond the farm – and it is only later she understands that her growing confidence and maturity owed more to her life with the Shalemans than to any other outside influence.

  • Spanning three generations, Capricornia tells the story of Australia's north. It is a story of whites and Aborigines and Asians, of chance relationships that can form bonds for life, of dispossession, murder and betrayal. In 1904 the brothers Oscar and Mark Shillingsworth, clad in serge suits and bowler hats, arrive in Port Zodiac on the coast of Capricornia. they are clerks who have come from the south to join the Capricornian Government Service. Oscar prospers, and takes to his new life as a gentleman. Mark, however, is restless, and takes up with old Ned Krater, a trepang fisherman, who tells him tales of the sea and the islands, introduces him to drink, and boasts of his conquests of Aboriginal women - or 'Black Velvet', as they are called. But it is Mark's son, Norman, whose struggles to find a place in the world embody the complexities of Capricornia itself. The inspiration behind Baz Luhrmann’s film Australia.
  • Growing up in an isolated cottage in the hills of Cumberland, Tom knows the bitter cold of shooting expeditions with his grandfather and long evenings spent with his father and mother. But taken away from the hills to live in the small town of Thornton, Tom experiences a tumult of conflicting emotions which he must master before he can come to terms with his identity.