The Voyagers by Mardi McConnochie, Viking, $29.95.

Shore leave, Sydney, 1943, and quietly determined US sailor Stead heads straight for the home of the girl he met and fell in love with during three magical days in 1938.

Back then, Marina was a sheltered girl on the verge of a career as a world-famous pianist. Five years on, she’s gone, just another disappearance amid the turmoil of World War II.

Stead’s ardent search through the dying days of World War II is interwoven with the story of Marina’s heartbreaking choices, miraculous escapes and gruelling experiences.

Beautifully written, cleverly told and alive with the ugliness and urgency of war, The Voyagers is a love story made all the more vivid by suspense.

From Sydney to London, Shanghai and Singapore, will these war-crossed lovers find each other? Has Stead’s search come too late? Or will three days of passion and five years of desperation be followed by a lifetime of love?

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Madeleineby Kate McCann, Bantam Press, $35.

She loved Harry Potter,Dr Whoand her favourite toy Cuddle Cat, and when four-year-old Madeleine McCann was abducted on Thursday, May 3, 2007, in Portugal, the whole world knew who she was.

Ever since that day, her British doctor parents Kate and Gerry have fought to find her and clear their own names from suspicion.

All royalties from this book, written by Kate four years on, go to fund further investigation following the cessation of the police search.

Be warned, this is no easy read. It tells one mother’s living nightmare and any thoughts of family culpability are banished as you read Kate’s agonising descent into a living hell.

Why did they leave their children without a babysitter on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance from their holiday apartment? “We will bitterly regret it until the end of our days.”

Critical failure to follow up on a sighting of a man carrying a child that fateful night. “I have little doubt in my mind that was Madeleine’s abductor.”

Opening a dumpster bin on a search and praying her daughter was not inside. “The thought of Madeleine’s fear and pain tears me apart. The thought of paedophiles makes me want to rip my skin off,” Kate wrote in a diary she kept.

Answering baby twins Sean and Amelie who wanted to know where big sister “Magalin” was.

Allowing Amelie to kiss her big sister goodnight on the photograph in the locket Kate wears around her neck.

Finding saviours in the kindness of strangers, enemies in inexplicable hoaxers. “There is not a single aspect of our old life that has not been altered,” writes Kate.

The pain is so explicit throughout this book, it would make it easier if there had been evidence that Kate and Gerry were both arguido (accused), with the Portuguese police announcing them as “suspects”.

And perhaps therein lies the terrible untruth of those who willingly condemned them – it would have made our pain about the little blonde angel child’s disappearance less difficult to bear.

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The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir by Alice Walker, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $35.

Hatched as a blog and raised by her agent into a book, Alice Walker’s (of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple fame) The Chicken Chronicles, is both a practical day-in-the-yard guide to caring for her “girls” — bullied Gertrude Stein, rebellious Hortensia and sensuous Glorious, to name a few of her cosseted chooks — yet also a moving voyage into the mind-set of gentle, earth-loving “Mommy” Alice, whose job on a Sunday as a little girl in the Deep South of America was to chase down dinner and wring its neck.

On her farm in San Francisco, Alice, sitting on an old green stool, warms her chilly hands under the wings of her beloved swooning babes, watches them do the “funky chicken dance” scratching for bugs with their powerful legs and delights in them recognising her voice.

Michael Jackson, the Dalai Lama and her own mother all, too, have a place on her storytelling lap, heroes to be woven into majestic realisations about maternal nurturing and Mother Nature. Quirky, but captivating.

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Never A Dull Moment by Sarah Baker, Murdoch Books, $39.99.

Do you remember the time when TVs, iPads, Facebook, Gameboys and all that jazz weren’t the only way to while away an evening?

In fact, back in those days, families and friends would come together to play games and have fun.

Take a journey back with this excellent hardback tome of parlour games for young and old.

The parlour was a Victorian construct, a formal public room where the burgeoning middle-classes would gather for that new thing — leisure time.

Parlour games offered the perfect opportunity for girls to show off their wit or accomplishments and young men to do some subtle wooing, as well a place for children to be seen and heard, and parents to connect with their offspring.

There are more than 200 games and pastimes in this book, including the intriguing Animals, in which a blindfolded player seeks out other players in the room who, once caught, become their prisoner and have to imitate an animal who needs Australia’s Got Talent?

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The Colour Of Tea by Hannah Tunnicliffe, Pan Macmillan, $32.99.

Grace’s life is unravelling. She feels lost in eclectic, buzzing Macau, where her husband Pete is managing the opening of a casino.

Devastated that her dream to have children is cut short, her marriage becomes strained and their sadness remains unsaid, causing them to drift further away from each other.

During celebrations for Chinese New Year, Grace watches the fireworks and an idea is sparked. She’ll turn her love and memories of Parisian “macarons” into the opening of her cafe, Lillian’s.

For ex-pats, drinking “real” coffee is a godsend, for others, it is tea and sympathy that bring them back.

With a much-needed focus and newly found friends, there’s now a reason for Grace to get up each morning — until Pete tells her news that will tear at her heart.

The Colour Of Tea, the author’s debut novel, is full of sensuous descriptions, the best ones, of course, of the “macarons”.

There are insightful observations of men and of the complexity of female friendships.

Grace’s introverted character will have you thinking about how you relate to the world outside and nodding in recognition at our own foibles and misgivings about love.

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Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, Random House Australia, $24.95.

My husband recommended this to me after he had read it when we were away travelling two years ago. It shattered me!

The central character makes a massive error in judgement and is literally disgraced and cast out of his place of work, and goes away to spend time with his independent daughter on her farm in South Africa.

Beautifully written, complex, haunting, morally ambiguous, desperately sad and also a great tribute to human stoicism and spirit.

I love that the central character is so flawed and, at times, unsympathetic, yet so true and understandable. It also paints an unforgettable vision of modern South Africa.

Actress Kat Stewart appears in Offspring on Network Ten.

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To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal, Little, Brown, $29.99.

Judith Whitman believes in the sort of love that “picks you up in Akron, Ohio, and sets you down in Rio de Janeiro”.

Yet after finding just that kind of love as a teenager, she ended up marrying someone else instead.

Now in her 40s, she decides to revisit the road not taken and starts a search for her lost love.

Yet can we ever recapture the intense feelings of our youth? A truly memorable and heartfelt novel, this is a wonderful read that, like Judith’s idea of love, sweeps you up and takes you to another place and time.

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