New South Wales, 1856: Miles McGinty and Isabel Dowling are born on the same night into different worlds. Miles is the illegitimate son of an actress in a troupe of travelling players, Isabel the rebellious daughter of a merchant banker, her home a red-brick mansion in one of Sydney's better suburbs. Both are destined to defy convention - and gravity. She rides in a balloon at the age of seven, defying the tweed-coated official who'd asked for a boy. He learns to float in mid-air with the aid of a mysterious showman and storyteller. But Miles becomes possessed by a secret ambition, the desire to build and ride in a flying machine. When his path finally crosses Isabel's, he knows he's met the only person who can share his adventurous vision.

From Tom Gilling—The New York Times Notable author of The Adventures of Miles and Isabel—comes a skillful, compulsively readable modern thriller about re-inventing one’s identity. It was just a harmless lie—to say he was driving Danny Grogan’s car when it was caught speeding down the Sydney streets on New Year’s Eve—and Danny’s father, a billionaire real estate tycoon, has promised to make it worth his while. But when former reporter Nick Carmody stands up in court to profess his guilt, it suddenly becomes clear that he doesn’t understand what he’s admitting to—until it’s too late. Nick’s “good deed” hurls him into a world of secrets, drugs, corruption, and murder. To save his life, he has no choice but to disappear and become someone else. What he doesn’t realize is that a new identity can be even more dangerous than the one left behind. As his new life in Melbourne veers out of control, Nick has to question whether chance alone is responsible, or whether more sinister forces are at work. A darkly comic page-turner, Seven Mile Beach is a haunting modern fable from a seductive novelist who never fails to thrill and surprise.

Selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year, Tom Gilling's novel opens in a crowded playhouse in 1856 Sydney, Australia, where two spectacular lives are about to start. During her scandalous turn as Hamlet, a heavily pregnant (and unmarried) actress unexpectedly goes into labor onstage, shocking the audience. Indeed, one patrician spectator — who is also with child — is so moved that she too goes into labor. The babies born that night are Miles and Isabel, two dreamers destined to defy convention — and gravity. The Adventures of Miles and Isabel is a delightful novel set in rough-and-tumble, turn-of-the-century Sydney. A best-seller in Australia, it follows the strangely converging lives of these two young daredevils. United by a dream of flight — and true love — the couple attempts to rise above the obstacles of class and physics that stand in their way.