On 19 July 2013, a riot occurred at the Nauru Regional Processing Centre. Fires destroyed most of the centre, causing more than $60 million in damage. Nauru burning is the story behind the fires, and of the aftermath.

Spring, 1992. Jevrem Andric is eleven years old and war is erupting in Sarajevo. As the shelling worsens, Jevrem's journalist father and teenaged brother join the Bosnian army. Jevrem, his sisters, his concert pianist mother and beloved grandmother move into the basement. Spring, 1997. Refugee life in Toronto is bleak, and 16-year-old Jevrem and his gang of Yugoslav friends are on a rampage: drinking, smoking weed, popping pills, breaking into houses. Survival means relying on your cunning in an indifferent world. Besides, they relish the adrenaline rush; it reminds them of home. Spring, 1998. After a year in remand, Jevrem has another three in juvenile detention ahead of him, once again trapped in cramped spaces. The only way to save his soul is to escape, and so he does. He hitches rides and as he makes his way west across America toward Los Angeles and his estranged uncle, he feels that it's a chance to leave the repeating patterns of the past behind.

Sonny Mitchell and his friends are blue collar boys who are bursting out of the restraints of tame suburban life. They yearn for action, fast cars, and something more. A bond forms between members of his club as they progress from bicycles to hot rods, and take on experiences of white-knuckle street racing, beer guzzling...and girls. But as these kids approach adulthood, a dark edge jeopardizes lives as some take these new exhilarations too far. It will be up to Sonny to stop a tragedy that could destroy the girl he loves and alter the course of his life forever.

Born in inner-Sydney to an alcoholic mother and an absent father, Carl Beauchamp and his brother Neville ran wild until they were taken into care. That care turned out to be a nightmare, with the boys placed in separate boys' homes, and in Carl's case in the hands of sexual predators. The boys survived, but Carl kept the horrors he had endured secret, even from his brother, for decades. When Carl found the strength to speak out, he discovered the tragic aftermath of life in the Christian Charlton Boys' Home for many of his fellow inmates. Despite the adversity and the pain, Carl's story is overwhelmingly optimistic and heartwarming. It contains recollections of 1940s and '50s Sydney that will intrigue anyone who loves Newtown, Glebe and surrounding suburbs, and is told in his own authentic voice.

Fostered and adopted children can present major challenges resulting from unresolved attachment issues and early traumatic experiences. In this much-needed book, the contributors provide a variety of complementary perspectives on the needs of these children and their families, focusing on ways of integrating attachment theory and developmental psychology into effective practice. Examining multiple aspects of work with children who are unable to live with their birth families, the book includes contributions on the assessment, preparation and support needs of children and families, attachment and the neurobiological effects of trauma, effective management of contact with birth families and developmental challenges in school settings. The use of creative arts therapies, alongside developmental reparenting strategies as part of a long-term attachment therapy `package', are explored in some detail. A fictionalised family, used as a working example throughout Part 2, brings practical interventions to life: illustrating the Family Futures' inclusive approach, where adoptive and foster parents become pivotal members of the therapeutic team. In addition, contributions from real-life user families illustrate some of the challenges they face and demonstrate how the developmental attachment-based approach has worked for them. Bringing together a rich and innovative selection of ideas for adoption and fostering practice across the disciplines, this book will be a valuable resource for all involved in supporting substitute families.

Celebrated TV critic John Doyle has penned an Irish memoir that gives a portrait of a boy and his country transformed by television. Funny, insightful, and engaging, A Great Feast of Light begins in the small town of Nenagh, where young John's father purchased the family's first television in 1962, and ends in 1979 with the Pope's historic visit to the Emerald Isle, the appearance of "Dallas" on Irish TV, and twenty-two-year-old John's escape to North America. By day, John was schooled by the Christian brothers in the valor of Irish rebel heroes and the saintliness of Catholic martyrs. But in the evenings, television conveyed more subversive messages: American westerns, "I Love Lucy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Laugh-In, The Muppet Show, Starsky and Hutch, and Monty Python suggested ways of life that were exciting and free. News coverage of American civil rights and women's rights protests, Irish street riots, bombings, and Bloody Sunday clashed with Catholic conservatism. While the "global village" was yanking Ireland out of its past, one intelligent and sardonic boy was taking notes. His story, at once a charming coming-of-age tale and a compelling social history, is a welcome addition to the literature of Ireland.

The story is about Inez, a Hungarian girl who takes on a job as an au pair in London right after finishing college. She finds an advert in a newspaper and meets with the mother, who lives with her French husband and two boys (eight and five) in London. The girls journey begins in the south of France. She suddenly finds herself in the French Riviera in a beautiful house, with two boys whom she will have to take care of. They spend the summer holiday in France getting to know each other and the extended family. In September, the family moves back to Chiswick, London. Everybody starts to go after their duties, and Inezs daily routine takes shape too. It isnt exactly what she was looking for, and she doesnt really get along with the mother, but at least she finds friends at the English school. The mother gets pregnant, and then it turns out that the whole family has to pack up and move to Colorado. The transition period turns out to be horrific. The situation gets a little out of hand, especially after the new baby arrives. Inezs year of duty ends in the summer after one last job she has to do for the family: accompany the boys as they fly back to Budapest.

Fantasy meets crime caper in the first book of a landmark, enduringly popular epic series about a roguish group of conmen, which George R. R. Martin has called “fresh, original, and engrossing . . . gorgeously realized.” An orphan’s life is harsh—and often short—in the mysterious island city of Camorr. But young Locke Lamora dodges relentless danger, becoming a thief under the tutelage of a gifted con artist. As leader of the band of light-fingered brothers known as the Gentlemen Bastards, Locke is soon infamous, fooling even the underworld’s most feared ruler. But in the shadows lurks someone still more ambitious and deadly. Faced with a bloody coup that threatens to destroy everyone and everything that holds meaning in his mercenary life, Locke vows to beat the enemy at his own brutal game—or die trying.

A powerful novel of a teenager who fights in the First World War, hoping to redeem himself after the death of his brother. Feeling responsible for the accidental death of his recently conscripted brother, fifteen-year-old Thomas Elkin takes on the identity of his dead sibling—and enters into the fray of the conflict. His burning ambition is to die a glorious death in his brother’s name. Believing that in fully submitting to the reality of war he is atoning for his sins, he faces all the attendant horrors with a steel will and a poignant resignation. As the Great War rages, both personal conflict and global conflict raise questions of morality and mortality, guilt and faith—as this moving novel touches upon the existential crises faced on the battlefield by the men who fought.

"Searing . . . explores how identity forms love, and love, identity. Written in engrossing, intimate prose, it makes us rethink how blood’s deep connections relate to the attachments of proximity."—Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree In the early 1980s, Mary Hall is a little girl growing up in poverty in Camden, New Jersey, with her older brother Jacob and parents who, in her words, were "great at making babies, but not so great at holding on to them." After her father leaves the family, she is raised among a commune of mothers in a low-income housing complex. Then, no longer able to care for the only daughter she has left at home, Mary's mother sends Mary away to Oklahoma to live with her maternal grandparents, who have also been raising her younger sister, Rebecca. When Mary is legally adopted by her grandparents, the result is a family story like no other. Because Mary was adopted by her grandparents, Mary’s mother, Peggy, is legally her sister, while her brother, Jacob, is legally her nephew. Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she’s sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she left behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each subsequent reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again. Moving, haunting, and at times wickedly funny, Bastards is about finding one's family and oneself.