A novel of hauntings, love, longing, memory and loss told with audacity and breathtaking imaginative power from one of Australia's most acclaimed writers.

Description

You have possessed me, let me go.

An iceberg is towed through the Heads to the astonishment of colonial Sydney. As it melts, the iceberg is revealed as a tomb to the perfectly preserved body of a young sailor, who died forty years before.

A man lost in grief for his wife is haunted by his memories of her. His life becomes a memorial to her, in the hope of defeating the oblivion of death.

Ice tells the story of Malcolm McEacharn, the man who brings joy to early Sydney in the form of an iceberg and who later pioneers the first successful refrigerated voyage from Australia to London. He is a brilliant businessman who will later bring electricity to Melbourne, become its Lord Mayor and be one step away from becoming Prime Minister - but he is driven by an obsession that threatens to destroy him and his world.

Ice also tells a parallel story, set in contemporary Sydney, of a young biographer who lies in a coma, and her bereft husband's desperate attempts to resurrect her by unearthing the truth about her subject McEacharn.

Both stories are redolent with longing, suffused by regret, illuminated by extraordinary imagery, hypnotic language and the spectre of suspended life in the 'mythical country of ice'. From the frozen, desolate Antarctic to bustling Victorian London, from the Yorkshire moors to colonial tropical Cairns, to Imperial Japan and to the gritty streets of modern-day Kings Cross, Ice walks the line between life and death, fact and fantasy, grief and madness. It is a book about the power of love, told with audacity and breathtaking imaginative power. It will never let you go.

About Louis Nowra

Louis Nowra is an acclaimed author, screenwriter and playwright and lives in Sydney. His books include The Misery of Beauty, The Twelfth of Never and the most recent title, Bad Dreaming, and his plays include Cosi, The Marvellous Boy and The Golden Age.

The fabulous Phryne - the 1920s most elegant and irrepressible sleuth - returns for her seventeenth adventure investigating the death of a man at St Kilda while at the same time trying to find a lost child who could inherit an old woman's fortune.

Description

'I must say Jack, I have been in some awful company before - I have dined with torturers and Apaches and strict Plymouth Brethren and politicians - but I never met such vile company as those people. Each in his or her own way, they were frightful.'

Melbourne, 1929. The year starts off for glamorous private investigator Phryne Fisher with a rather trying heat wave and more mysteries than you could prod a parasol at. Simultaneously investigating the apparent suicide death of a man on St Kilda beach and trying to find a lost, illegimate child who could be heir to a wealthy old woman's fortune, Phryne needs all her wits about her, particularly when she has to tangle with a group of thoroughly unpleasant Bright Young Things.

But Phryne Fisher is a force of nature, and takes in her elegant stride what might make others quail, including terrifying s ances, ghosts, Kif smokers, the threat of human sacrifices, dubious spirit guides and maps to buried pirate treasure ...

About Kerry Greenwood

Kerry Greenwood is the author of more than forty novels, six non-fiction works and the editor of two collections. Previous novels in the Phryne Fisher series are Cocaine Blues, Flying too High, Murder on the Ballarat Train, Death on the Victoria Dock, Blood and Circuses, The Green Mill Murder, Ruddy Gore, Urn Burial, Raisins and Almonds, Death Before Wicket, Away with the Fairies, Murder in Montparnasse, The Castlemaine Murders, Queen of the Flowers, Death by Water, Murder in the Dark and, most recently, A Question of Death: An illustrated Phryne Fisher treasury. She is also the author of the Corinna Chapman crime series, several books for young adults and the Delphic Women series. When she is not writing she is an advocate in Magistrates' Court for the Legal Aid Commission. She is not married, has no children and lives with a registered Wizard.