New Book Roundups

Insiders' Down Under
Secrets of the Sea is set in a fictional coastal town in Tasmania where a couple's troubled relationship is further tested when they rescue a teenage sailor during a storm. Author Nicholas Shakespeare lives part of the year in Tasmania, and that insider's knowledge imbues this novel's pages. E.O. Hoppé's Australia, edited by Graham Howe, celebrates the vast continent and its people with over 200 images—some unseen for decades—from the acclaimed modernist photographer E.O. Hoppé (1878-1972), who spent a year traveling throughout Australia in 1930. And winner of this month's best book title: Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All: A New Zealand Story. In this memoir, Christina Thompson explores the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maori of New Zealand, both historically and personally, as she describes how she came to meet, marry, and start a family with a Maori.

Not for the Timid
The high-altitude adventure anthology Near Death in the Mountains: True Stories of Disaster and Survival, edited by Cecil Kuhne, scales Everest, McKinley, and more. In Black Wave: A Family's Adventure at Sea and the Disaster That Saved Them, John and Jean Silverwood candidly share the remarkable true-life tale of their two-year voyage from the Atlantic through the Caribbean to the Pacific with their four kids aboard a 55-foot catamaran. The "disaster" of the subtitle takes place off a remote atoll in French Polynesia.