Penguin Books Australia

It is 1919. The Great War has ended, but the Spanish flu epidemic is raging across Australia. Schools are closed, state borders are guarded by armed men, and train travel is severely restricted. There are rumours it is the end of the world.

  A penetrating study of ordinary people resisting the Nazi occupation—and, true to its title, a dark comedy of wartime manners— Comedy in a Minor Key tells the story of Wim and Marie, a Dutch couple who first hide a Jew they know as Nico, then must dispose of his body when he dies of pneumonia. This novella, first published in 1947 and now translated into English for the first time...

London, 1857: after surviving an encounter with an escaped tiger on the streets of Bermondsey, nine-year-old Jaffy stumbles into a job for its owner, the wild animal collector, Mr Jamrach.

Commissioned by Jamrach to find and collect a sea dragon, Jaf soon joins a ship bound for the South Seas, and so begins a wonder-filled voyage of discovery.

But when things start to go awry, Jaf's journey becomes...

What would make a soldier betray his country?

In the battle-smoke and chaos of Gallipoli, a young New Zealand soldier helps a Turkish doctor fighting to save a boy's life. Then a shell bursts nearby; the blast that should have killed them both consigns them instead to the same military hospital.

London, 1857: after surviving an encounter with an escaped tiger on the streets of Bermondsey, nine-year-old Jaffy stumbles into a job for its owner, the wild animal collector, Mr Jamrach.

Commissioned by Jamrach to find and collect a sea dragon, Jaf soon joins a ship bound for the South Seas, and so begins a wonder-filled voyage of discovery.

But when things start to go awry, Jaf's journey becomes...

Jan Karski, a young Polish diplomat turned cavalry officer, joined the Polish underground movement after escaping from a Soviet detention camp in 1939. He served as a courier for the underground, ferrying messages between occupied Poland and the exiled Polish leaders, before he was captured and brutally tortured by the Gestapo. 

In 1787 Lieutenant Thomas Rooke sets sail from Portsmouth with the First Fleet and its cargo of convicts, destined for New South Wales. As a young officer and a man of science, the shy and quiet Rooke is full of anticipation about the natural wonders he might discover in this strange land on the other side of the world.

From the bestselling author of Prague comes a witty, inventive, brilliantly constructed novel about an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal king.

This darkly comic labyrinth of a story opens on the desert plains of Egypt in 1922, then winds its way from the slums of Australia to the ballrooms of Boston, by way of Oxford, the battlefields of the First World War, and a royal court...

"Where are we going, where are they taking us?" The Second World War is about to start, but life for a young boy in a small town in Albania is still a game.

The hills are full of hard-case characters who are out there simply being themselves.  The mountains have a habit of bringing out the best in people, despite the hardships of rain, hail and snow that are often thrown in.  In fact, it's only after a bit of adversity comes your way that a person's true character come to the force.  Those with a love for the hills take these things on the...

1066 - SENLAC RIDGE, ENGLAND.  WILLIAM THE BASTARD, DUKE OF NORMANDY DEFEATS HAROLD GODWINSON, KING HAROLD II OF ENGLAND IN WHAT WILL BECOME KNOWN AS THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS.

The battle is hard fought and bloody; thousands of lives are spent, including that of King Harold.  But England will not be conquered easily - the Anglo-Saxons will not submit meekly to Norman rule.

AD262 - the imperium is in turmoil after the struggle for the throne. Furthermore, Ephesus, Asia's metropolis, lies in ruins, shattered by a mighty earthquake. Its citizens live in fear as the mob overwhelms the city, baying for blood to avenge the gods who have punished them.

Yet an even greater threat to the Empire advances from the North. The barbaric Goth tribes sail towards Ephesus, determined...

The Roman Empire is in crisis, with threats coming from all directions. Ballista, Warrior of Rome, must once again embark on an epic journey - one with a secret mission.

Turmoil reigns across the entirety of the imperium . But the most worrying source of danger comes from the savage barbarian tribes, whose raids have become increasingly commonplace. Ballista undertakes his most treacherous journey...

Lauren Willig's Pink Carnation novels are 'great fun' ( The Boston Globe ) and ' grandly entertaining' ( Publishers Weekly ). Now she whisks readers away to nineteenth-century India – home to romance, intrigue, and a spy know only as the Marigold . . .

May 1940. Fleeing a glamorous Manhattan life built on lies, Claire Harris arrives in Paris with a romantic vision of starting anew. But she didn't anticipate the sight of Nazi soldiers marching under the Arc de Triomphe. Her plans smashed by the German occupation, the once- privileged socialite's only option is to take a job in a flower shop under the tutelage of a sophisticated Parisian florist.

1072 England is firmly under the heel of its new Norman rulers. The few survivors of the English resistance look to Edgar the Atheling, the rightful heir to the English throne, to overthrow William the Conqueror. Years of intrigue and vicious civil war follow: brother against brother, family against family, friend against friend.

1793, the eve of the Napoleonic Wars, and Midshipman Horatio Hornblower receives his first command . . .
 
As a seventeen-year-old with a touch of sea sickness, young Horatio Hornblower hardly cuts a dash in His Majesty's navy. Yet from the moment he is ordered to board a French merchant ship in the Bay of Biscay and take command of crew and cargo, he proves his seafaring mettle on the waves...