Australia Adventure

Lights, camera, action! Yeehaw!

In the lonely expanse of Northern Australia lies the second biggest national park in the world. It is a place where fire transforms landscapes, floods drown flatlands, and ancient writing haunts cliffs. In this tropical wilderness, ancient fish spit water at passing insects, unnamed waterfalls tumble into vast gorges, and giant crocodiles rule the dark rivers. This is Kakadu National Park - Australia’s natural and cultural treasure.

Uluru is the indigenous Australian name for an enormous rock formation found in central Australia. Made from sandstone, Uluru is a rock monolith or an ‘island mountain’, a formation that geologists refer to as a monadnock. It stands 318 m (986 ft) high and has a circumference of 8 km (5 miles). It is located 335 km (208 mi) south west of the nearest rural centre, the large town of Alice Springs.

Ed Stafford - adventurer extraordinaire and Guinness World Record holder for walking the length of the Amazon River - likes a challenge. Casting about for an adventure that would top the extraordinary feat he recounts in Walking the Amazon, Stafford decides to maroon himself on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific. His mission: to survive for 60 days equipped with nothing - no food, water, or even clothing - except the video cameras he would use to document his time.

Seventeen-year-old Chan's ancestors left a dying Earth hundreds of years ago, in search of a new home. They never found one. This is a hell where no one can hide. The only life that Chan's ever known is one of violence, of fighting. Of trying to survive. This is a ship of death, of murderers and cults and gangs. But there might be a way to escape. In order to find it, Chan must head way down into the darkness - a place of buried secrets, long-forgotten lies, and the abandoned bodies of the dead.

Australia's largest state takes up nearly a third of the continent, filling some 2,525,250 square kilometers with a diverse mix of extreme and wonderful landscapes. The balmy seaside capital of Perth and its thriving southern suburb of Fremantle, where 1.4 of the state's 1.8 million residents live, are spread along Australia's southwest edge, just north of the Cape Naturaliste hook.

In October 1863, Ian Steele, having taken on the identity of Captain Samuel Forbes, is fighting the Pashtun on the north-west frontier in India. Half a world away, the real Samuel Forbes is a lieutenant in the third New York Volunteers and is facing the Confederates at the Battle of Mission Ridge in Tennessee. Neither is aware their lives will change beyond recognition in the year to come. In London, Ella, the love of Ian's life, is unhappily married to Count Nikolai Kasatkin.

From Curio Bay to Golden Bay, in Down South writer Bruce Ansley sets off on a vast expedition across the South Island, Te Waipounamu, visiting the places and people who hold clues to the south's famous character. Not so very long ago, the South Island had most of New Zealand's people and just about all of the money. Gold miners found fortunes in the hills and rivers, sheep barons straddled mountains, valleys and plains. Wealthy southerners ruled the government. Where now lies the South Island's golden fleece? And what is its future?

Alice-Miranda and her friends are off to the Australian Outback! They’re going to help an old family friend who’s found himself short staffed during cattle mustering season. The landscape is like nothing else - wide open and dusty red as far as the eye can see. It’s also full of quirky characters, like eccentric opal miner Sprocket McGinty and the enigmatic Taipan Dan.

On the banks of the Nile, a hero will rise. Across the lush plains of Egypt, Taita, a freed eunuch slave, wears his authority lightly. Not only is he the close advisor to the Pharaoh, but he is guardian to Pharaoh Tamose's two teenage sisters, the young beauties Tehuti and Bekatha. But the kingdom is not at peace. They have been fighting Southern Egypt's constant and historic enemy, the Hyksos people in the north, since time began. To finally crush them, Pharaoh must turn to his most trusted friend.

Australia has been invaded. While the outnumbered Australian Defence Force fights on the ground, in the air, and at sea, this quickly becomes a war involving ordinary people. Ben, an IT consultant, has never fought a day in his life. Will he survive? Grant, a security guard at Sydney's International Airport, finds himself captured and living in the filth and squalor of one of the concentration camps dotted around Australia. Knowing death awaits him if he stays, he plans a daring escape.

When last we encountered Gabriel Allon in Portrait of a Spy, he was pitted in a blood-soaked duel with a deadly network of jihadist terrorists. Now, exposed and war-weary, he has returned to his beloved Rome to restore a Caravaggio masterpiece for the Vatican. But early one morning Gabriel is summoned by his friend and occasional ally Monsignor Luigi Donati, the all-powerful private secretary to the Pope. The broken body of a beautiful woman lies beneath Michelangelo's magnificent dome. Donati calls upon Gabriel to pursue the truth—was it suicide, or something more sinister?

Author Deb Hunt sets out to discover what makes our Australian farming families tick. Travelling to properties across the country - from a vast, dusty cattle run in outback Queensland to the wheat belt of Western Australia and dairy farms in Tasmania - and introducing us to eight different families who survive and thrive on the land, these stories provide a window into a way of life that defines the Australian spirit at its best.

Deep in the middle of the Nevada desert, the Xymos Corporation has built a state-of-the-art fabrication plant, surrounded by miles and miles of nothing but cactus and coyote. Eight people are trapped inside because outside, waiting for them, looking for them, is a self-replicating, fast-evolving swarm made up of predatory molecules that they themselves created. On a singular level, the molecules are seemingly harmless, but massed together, they form an intelligent organism that is anything but benign. They must find a way to stop this creature before it gets inside.

When Quil Medway gets on the train, she thinks she knows where and howher journey will end. At camp. With another school holiday spent surrounded by people, but feeling alone. Quil doesn't know how wrong she is. She doesn't know anything about the shop at Hoopers Bend. Or a bitter, prickly woman called Bailey Or a little black and white dog who at this very moment is chewing through a rope so he'll be free to answer a call that only he can hear. She doesn't know about the magic. But it won't be long now....

In an isolated village in the mountains of Andalusia, a mysterious Frenchwoman begins work on a dangerous memoir. It is the story of a man she once loved in the Beirut of old, and a child taken from her in treason's name. The woman is the keeper of the Kremlin's most closely guarded secret. Long ago, the KGB inserted a mole into the heart of the West - a mole who stands on the doorstep of ultimate power. Only one man can unravel the conspiracy: Gabriel Allon, the legendary art restorer and assassin who serves as the chief of Israel's vaunted secret intelligence service.

Andy and Terry have built their biggest and most astonishing treehouse yet! It has everything they - and you - could wish for, including an electric pony stable, a Santa Land, a NOISY level, a kangaroo-riding range, a WHATEVER-WEATHER-YOU-WANT dome, a 100% edible gingerbread house and a hall of funhouse mirrors. But Anti-Andy, Terrible-Terry and Junkyard-Jill, their doppelgangers, are trapped in one of the mirrors - and they want out.

Meixing Lim and her family have arrived at the New House in the New Land. Everything is vast and unknown to Meixing – including the house she names Big Scary. She is embarrassed by her second-hand shoes, has trouble understanding the language at school, and is finding it hard to make friends. Meixing’s only solace is a glasshouse in the garden, which inexplicably holds the sun and the moon and the secrets of her memory and imagination.

In the summer of 1914, vigneron Jerome Méa heads off to war, certain he'll be home by Christmas. His new bride Sophie, a fifth-generation champenoise, is determined to ensure the forthcoming vintages will be testament to their love and the power of the people of Épernay, especially its strong women. But as the years drag on, authorities advise that Jerome is missing, considered dead. When poison gas is first used in Belgium by the Germans, British chemist Charles Nash jumps to enlist.

Hey, you - yes, you! Remember when we found that really deep hole and you jumped in and I had to jump in to rescue you and at the bottom of the hole we found the cave of the legendary Peanut Butter Beast? That was one of our deepest - and most dangerous - adventures ever! What? You don't remember? Well, have I got a story for you! Let me remind you how it all went down ... and down ... and down ... and down.