Beautiful Ava Selwyn is starting to take her life back into her own hands when Juan-Varo de Montalvo arrives at Kooraki cattle station. The dark-eyed Argentinian unsettles the usually composed Ava. Varo can see the wariness in Ava's eyes, and something in him cries out to protect her, but life on the other side of the world will soon call him back. Varo has the power to make Ava whole once more—if only she'll let him in…

Includes a reader-favorite bonus story inside: Cattle rancher, secret son / by Margaret Way.

An exploration of the fast food industry in the United States, from its roots to its long-term consequences.

The Place: North Queensland, Australia. A land of fierce contrasts, of astonishing beauty--and fatal dangers. A land of secrets... The Man: Chase Banfield. A true Australian aristocrat--the master of Three Moons, a historic cattle station. The Woman: Rosie Summers. A reporter known for her fearlessness--and her stunning looks. What brings Chase and Rosie together is a search for Egyptian artifacts. There's reputed to be two-thousand-year-old evidence of an ancient Egyptian presence on Banfield land, and despite his reservations, Chase agrees to an expedition. What keeps him and Rosie together, though, is something very different....

"You know, father, sorrow can turn to water and spill from your eyes, or it can sharpen your tongue into a sword, or it can become a time bomb that, one day, will explode and destroy you" Earth and Ashes is the spare, powerful story of an Afghan man, Dastaguir, trying desperately to reach his son Murad, who has left his village to earn a living working at a mine. In the meantime the village has been bombed by the Russian army, and Dastaguir, with his newly-deaf grandson Yassin in tow, must reach Murad to tell him of the carnage. The old man is beset on all sides by sorrow, that of his grandson, who cannot understand, that of his son, who does not yet know, and his own, made even crueler by the message he must deliver. Atiq Rahimi, whose reputation for writing war stories of immense drama and intimacy began with this, his first novel, has managed to condense centuries of Afghan history into a short tale of three very different generations. But he has also created a universal story about fathers and sons, and the terrible strain inflicted on those bonds of family during the unpredictable carnage of war.

In 1895, George Whitehouse arrived at the east African post of Mombasa to perform an engineering miracle: the building of the Mombasa-Nairobi-Lake Victoria Railway – a 600-mile route that was largely unmapped and barely explored. Behind Mombasa lay a scorched, waterless desert. Beyond, a horizonless scrub country climbed toward a jagged volcanic region bisected by the Great Rift Valley. A hundred miles of sponge-like quagmire marked the railway's last lap. The entire right of way bristled with hostile tribes, teemed with lions and breathed malaria. What was the purpose of this 'giant folly' and whom would it benefit? Was it to exploit the rumoured wealth of little-known central African kingdoms? Was it to destroy the slave trade? To encourage commerce and settlement? THE LUNATIC EXPRESS explores the building of this great railway in an earlier Africa of slave and ivory empires, of tribal monarchs and the vast lands that they ruled. Above all, it is the story of the white intruders whose combination of avarice, honour and tenacious courage made them a breed apart.