This dazzling debut novel brings the spirit of Catherine Dickens--the cast-off wife of Charles Dickens--to life in the form of Dorothea “Dodo” Gibson, a woman who is doomed to live in the shadow of her husband, Alfred, the most celebrated author in the Victorian world. Girl in a Blue Dress opens on the day of Alfred’s funeral. Dorothea is not among the throngs in attendance when The One and Only is laid to rest. Her mourning must take place within the walls of her modest apartment, a parting gift from Alfred as he ushered her out of their shared home and his life more than a decade earlier. Even her own children, save her outspoken daughter Kitty, are not there to offer her comfort--they were poisoned against her when Alfred publicly declared her an unfit wife and mother. Though she refuses to don the proper mourning attire, Dodo cannot bring herself to demonize her late husband, something that comes all too easily to Kitty. Instead, she reflects on their time together: their clandestine and passionate courtship, when he was a force of nature and she a willing follower; and the salad days of their marriage, before too many children sapped her vitality and his interest. She uncovers the frighteningly hypnotic power of the celebrity author she married. Now liberated from his hold on her, Dodo finds the courage to face her adult children, the sister who betrayed her, and the charming actress who claimed her husband’s love and left her heart aching. A sweeping tale of love and loss that was long-listed for both the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize, Girl in a Blue Dress is both an intimate peek at the woman who was behind one of literature’s most esteemed men and a fascinating rumination on marriage that will resonate across centuries.

When a Chinese peasant girl is chosen as a concubine to Li Hung, she quickly learns the reality is far from honourable. She is sent away, but rescued from her Junk by a Royal Marine Second Lieutenant. When the young officer becomes involved in the Taiping Rebellion, their blossoming relationship looks doomed.

Private detective Easy Rawlins looks for a gangster's girlfriend in 1940s L.A.

“Very funny . . . A pitch-perfect account of how it feels to be part of as culture that’s better at showing you what to wear than what to believe in . . . a real original.”—New York Magazine A gorgeous girl recalls her coming of age in her tiny, picturesque English village at the turn of the last century. After she opts out of a rural beauty pageant, her life—and its telling—begins to unravel. And it unravels into a multitude of extremely amusing, searingly beautiful strands that eventually lead her, and a troubled young man who befriends her, through the wall upholstered hellholes of modern Manhattan toward a heartrending and hugely satisfying climax that will almost literally blow your socks off. “Fun, full-throttle stuff, which rather miraculously dresses down the pernicious personal-history trend while remaining both giggly and moving in its own terms.”—Entertainment Weekly

Within my life's present unified theory of being, splendor divests itself of its own integrity, splitting to belong to everything that notices it, each part as effective as the whole splendid thing. It belongs to whatever wants it and is inexhaustible even as someone lays dying, even as someone else cries thinking there is none, their tears becoming prisms. . . With these words, the acclaimed poet Thylias Moss proclaims a hymn to the power of light over darkness, both in her own life, and in the wider world. In this, her first prose work, the author of six books of poetry and winner of the most distinguished honors--including a MacArthur Fellowship Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship and a Writing Award--delivers a brilliant, passionate, and utterly moving memoir. It is the story of the only child of a maid and factory worker who moved to Ohio from the segregated South of the fifties. Raised with much love, she flourished until the age of five, when disaster struck, in the form of a girl in sky-blue dress. Her childhood was shattered by this girl, her babysitter, who took pleasure from infliction pain, and whose reign of terror, even after its abrupt end, would send poisonous tendril further into her life. Yet ultimately, Tale of a Sky-Blue Dress is about how a young woman retrieved her life from the grasp of darkness. It is about refusing to accept tyranny. It is about feasting on splendor. How can there not be pain in a world spinning madly, in the lovely calculable chaos. . .? asks Thylias. But, she says, I am saying that joy is too necessary to abandon.

Fifteen-year-old Jenna Moores is struggling with her father's recent death. Not long after his passing, a ghost from her childhood returns. When she was young, Jenna's father convinced her that the ghost was just her imagination and that he would always protect her. But now he's gone, the ghost is back, and Jenna knows she's not imagining it. As the entity grows stronger, its threats move from alienating Jenna from her friends and family to killing her. Alone and afraid, she must find and destroy the link that holds the spirit to this world...before Jenna, too, becomes a ghost.

When her parents go on vacation in Scotland, bookworm Jane Reid is sent to visit her aunt and uncle Hildreth. But she arrives to find that she and her father have switched suitcases, and she is stranded with no books Her aunt and uncle are nice enough, but the only book in their house is the telephone directory. And their town has no bookstore or library. But on her first night at the Hildreths', Jane discovers a small book with a faded cover on her nightstand. In the morning, it is gone. The next night, another book appears. Jane seems to have a mysterious friend who knows just what she needs. . .

Stranded in England without money or a ticket home, Mercy Starling takes a job working for a medieval reenactment company. After all, who wouldn’t want to pretend to live in the past, wield swords and longbows, and dress up in armor? And the best part of her summer job is Bestwood Hall…or rather, its intriguing new owner. Painfully shy Alden Ainslie is overwhelmed by the medieval reenactors who invade the Tudor house he’s renovating, but he’s drawn to the bubbly Mercy. And he valiantly joins in the fun, dodging not jsut arrows, lances, and the odd sword thrust, but also some pretty suspicious–and potentially deadly — attacks on himself. Someone wants him to give up on the house. But Alden is desperate to prove himself–and win the heart of his lady fair…

Libby Hathorn has asked some of Australia's finest writers for their response to the painting by internationally acclaimed artist Brian Dunlop. First love, joy and disappointment, secrets, violence and the vagaries of fate are interwoven in these stories that remind us things are not always as they appear. Full of pathos, insight and wry humour, The Blue Dress is a stunning display of the possibilities of imagination. The contributing writers include Brian Caswell, Gary Crew, Libby Gleeson, Sophie Masson, Jenny Pausacker and Nadia Wheatley. 'These stories offer the reader different ways to define and access our common experience and in doing so the writers reflect with considerable insight on what it is to be on the threshold of childhood in an adult world.' Libby Hathorn