Available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booktopia
In Australia buy at your great local independent bookstore:
Better Read Than Dead King Street, Newtown, Sydney
Mclean’s Booksellers Beaumont St, Hamilton, Newcastle
The Book Warehouse Keen St, Lismore
Perceptio Cullen St, Nimbin
Abbey’s Bookshop York St, Sydney
Berkelouw Books Park Street, Mona Vale, Sydney North Shore
Betty Loves Books Scott St, Newcastle
A family drama that spans decades and explores the unexpected twists and turns that make life worth living…
When Eva moves out to volunteer as a nurse in a Hamburg hospital during World War II and her husband Peter joins the navy, they escape a war that rages within the family home.
After Germany surrenders, as the country starts to rebuild, Eva and Peter try to fix the fissures that have appeared in their relationship by emigrating to Australia with their two daughters, hoping for a happier life.
Success follows them across the sea to their adopted homeland, but so too do traumas and memories of war-time life.
After Eva settles in Nimbin, a relaxed and alternative town with a celebrated counterculture, discoveries and life-changing surprises show her how things can change so quickly.
The First Canary is an extraordinary and epic tale of interweaving lives, self-discovery and friendship persevering despite the odds. Set in war-torn South Africa, the story follows a whole host of connected characters, from unwilling conscripts Cliff and Zeb, to Brenda, who is determined to find her birth parents, to Josh, an aspiring journalist whose dreams are threatened by a terrifying diagnosis.
“Family ties and bonds of brotherhood that span across decades lie at the heart of this story, and it is impossible not to become immersed in the lives of the characters and the events that play out”.
Not long after the release of Nelson Mandela and the birth of the new South Africa, aging father Tom Lembruite moves to the small, conservative town of Fynberg, with his new wife, 40 years his junior. His purchase of the town’s only restaurant and investment in a nearby farm nestling in the foothills of the Drakensberg, sets in motion a chain of events that changes the lives of his children forever.
Three of the siblings have joined Tom in Fynberg and come face to face with the challenges and opportunities of this now free land. His son Dirk may have got more than he wished for whilst paternal twin sisters, Pat and Lerryn, find themselves on equal footing for the first time, since their early adolescence.