The history of one of Australia's oldest girls' schools, published for their 150th anniversary. Some nuns hid behind convent walls, but not the Good Sams. In 1873, Mother de Sales Maloney started teaching at the small timber hut by St Xavier's Church on South Beach. To start with, the sisters had some trouble taming the barefoot colonial girls of Wollongong, but in a decade, St Mary Star of the Sea girls were regularly passing the annual university entrance exams. Over the decades the school grew and added buildings, the curriculum expanded, and skirt hems rose and fell. Through world wars, strikes and depressions, St Mary's encouraged young women to challenge social constraints of their time, while championing compassion and social justice. The magnificent frangipani that adorned the entrance to the College has toppled over, and the last of the nuns has retired. The Benedictine spirit lives on in a school community that changes with the times, nurturing girls of all backgrounds and helping them grow into women of faith and integrity. This is the story of one of the finest and oldest schools in Australia.

A Best Book of 2020: Open Letters Review "Andrews’s writing is transportingly voluptuous, conjuring tastes and smells and sounds like her literary godmother, Edna O’Brien . . . What makes her novel sing is its universal themes: how a young woman tries to make sense of her world, and how she grows up." –Penelope Green, The New York Times Book Review This “luminous” (TheObserver) feminist coming-of-age novel captures in sensuous, blistering prose the richness and imperfection of the bond between a daughter and her mother It begins with our bodies . . . Safe together in the violet dark and yet already there are spaces beginning to open between us. From that first immaculate, fluid connection, through the ups and downs of a working-class childhood in northern England, the one constant in Lucy’s life has been her mother: comforting and mysterious, ferociously loving, tirelessly devoted, as much a part of Lucy as her own skin. Her mother's lessons in womanhood shape Lucy’s appreciation for desire, her sense of duty as a caretaker, her hunger for a better, perhaps reckless life. At university in glamorous London, Lucy’s background sets her apart. And then she is finished, graduated, adrift. She escapes to a tiny house in Donegal left empty by her grandfather, a place where her mother once found happiness. There she will take a lover, live inside art and the past, and track back through her memories and her mother’s stories to make sense of her place in the world. In “a stunning new voice in British literary fiction” (The Independent) that lays bare our raw, dark selves, Jessica Andrews’s debut honors the richness and imperfection of the bond between a daughter and her mother. Intricately woven in lyrical vignettes, Saltwater is a novel of becoming-- a woman, an artist-- and of finding a way forward by looking back.

Let poetry help you examine the depths of your wounds. Let it remind you that no matter how deep it goes, you will be able to heal it because you have been able to heal every single wound inflicted on your heart and soul before. Let these words show you that you will be able to find the light at the end of the wound because you have always found your way before.

The summer James lost his heart to Alice, Alice lost her heart to the sea. The confident and charming daughter of the town's most accomplished whaling captain, Alice changes James's life the moment she teaches him how to sail. But when her father needs to fill a spot on his ship, it's James who is offered the position, and the day he returns from his expedition, he discovers Alice has disappeared. In this companion novella to Salt & Storm and Drift & Dagger, James must search the world for his heart's desire, a journey that takes him from the strange and mysterious world of the infamous Roe witch to the deepest and most dangerous reaches of the ocean itself.

An honest look at the messiness of life when you are forced to live the life you didn't imagine. Salt Water and Honey is a story about pregnancy loss and childlessness that doesn't end with a baby. It's told from the messy middle, allowing space for the tension between faith and loss to remain rather than trying to neaten it up with solutions and reasons. Lizzie has experienced the pain of multiple miscarriages and writes honestly about her struggle and fight to find God in her suffering. She is honest about the low points and the pain, but she also shares her journey as she comes to understand that her true identity is not defined by motherhood but by being a child of God. Lizzie's story provides a safe space to remind people that they're not alone, it's okay to grieve and their story matters. Covering many universal truths such as unanswered prayer, grief, disappointment, vulnerability and faith in crisis this book is actually for anyone who has lost their dream and is struggling to understand that their story still has meaning and purpose even when life looks nothing like they hoped it would.

A sweeping historical romance about a witch who foresees her own murder--and the one boy who can help change her future. Sixteen-year-old Avery Roe wants only to take her rightful place as the witch of Prince Island, making the charms that keep the island's whalers safe at sea, but her mother has forced her into a magic-free world of proper manners and respectability. When Avery dreams she's to be murdered, she knows time is running out to unlock her magic and save herself. Avery finds an unexpected ally in a tattooed harpoon boy named Tane--a sailor with magic of his own, who moves Avery in ways she never expected. Becoming a witch might stop her murder and save her island from ruin, but Avery discovers her magic requires a sacrifice she never prepared for.