Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists: Books Set in Australia/Oceania

In September 1953, 22-year-old Rupert Murdoch landed in Adelaide, South Australia. Fresh from Oxford with a radical reputation, the young and brash son of Sir Keith Murdoch had arrived to fulfill his father's dying wish: for Rupert to live a 'useful altruistic and full life' in the media. For decades, Sir Keith had been a giant of the Australian press, but his final years were spent bitterly fending off rivals and would-be successors. When the dust settled on his father's estate, Rupert was left with the Adelaide-based News Ltd and its afternoon paper The News -- a minor player in a small, parochial city. But even this inheritance was soon under siege, as the left-wing 'Boy Publisher' stared down his father's old colleagues at the city's paper of record, The Advertiser, and a conservative establishment kept in power by a decades-old gerrymander.
(Description from catalog)

In 1951 in Sydney, Australia, a fourteen-year-old boy named James Harrison was near death when he received a transfusion of blood that saved his life. A few years later, and half a world away, a shy young doctor at Columbia University realized he was more comfortable in the lab than in the examination room. Neither could have imagined how their paths would cross, or how they would change the world. (Description from NoveList.)

Documents the adoption of three unruly rescue dogs that transform the Zusak family's life, revealing the chaos, love, and unexpected lessons while exploring the deeper connections between humans and animals.
(Description from NoveList)

When a catastrophic wildfire suddenly rips through a woman's hometown, she thinks she is lucky to have survived...until she finds a dead woman in her driveway, clutching a piece of paper with her name on it. (Description from catalog)

A woman is desperate to discover what happened to her sister on her solo road trip through the Australian outback.
(Description from NoveList)

In the aftermath of crushing grief, sole parent Kate Whittaker must learn to live and love again. When Kate and her boss, Hugh, become stranded in a sleepy hamlet north of Byron Bay, she finally has a chance to process all that she's been through and all that the future might hold.
(Description from NoveList)

Lucy awakens from a dream to find her hands around her ex-lover's throat. Horrified, she flees to her older sister's house on the Australian coast, hoping she can help explain the strangely vivid nightmare that preceded the attack-but Jess is nowhere to be found. As Lucy awaits her return, the rumors surrounding Jess's strange small town start to emerge.
(Description from NoveList)

It's not just secrets buried at Wild Meadows. For as long as they can remember, Jessica, Norah and Alicia have been told how lucky they are. Rescued from family tragedies and raised by a loving foster mother on an idyllic farming estate, they were given an elusive second chance of a happy family life. But their childhood wasnt the fairy tale everyone thinks it was. And when a body is discovered under the home they grew up in, the foster sisters find themselves thrust into the spotlight as key witnesses. Or are they prime suspects?--Description by NoveList

Leaving London behind, Margery Benson, a schoolmarm and spinster in 1950, embarks on a quest to the other side of the world in search of her childhood obsession – the golden beetle of New Caledonia – with the help of a fun-loving assistant who changes her life forever. (Description from NoveList)

Seduced by her employer's son, Evangeline, a naïve young governess in early nineteenth-century London, is discharged when her pregnancy is discovered and sent to the notorious Newgate Prison. After months in the fetid, overcrowded jail, she learns she is sentenced to "the land beyond the seas," Van Diemen's Land, a penal colony in Australia. Though uncertain of what awaits, Evangeline knows one thing: the child she carries will be born on the months-long voyage to this distant land.
(Description from catalog)

A woman stands up on a plane, and predicts when everyone will die. Everyone laughs it off until it starts to come true.
(Description from catalog)

Don Tillman, a professor of genetics, sets up a project designed to find him the perfect wife, starting with a questionnaire that has to be adjusted a little as he goes along. Then he meets Rosie, who is everything he's not looking for in a wife, but she ends up his friend as he helps her try and find her biological father. (Description from catalog)