Sonya Hartnett

As he is dying, a twenty-year-old man known as Gabriel recounts his troubled childhood and his strange relationship with a dangerous counterpart named Finnigan.

"Cecily and Jeremy have been sent to live with their Uncle Peregrine in the English countryside, safe from the war, along with a young refugee named May. But when Cecily and May find two mysterious boys hiding in the ruins of a nearby castle, an extraordinary adventure begins. "--publishers web site.

Rex and Tabby Jenson and their sons, Colt and Bastian, arrive in Freya Kiley's Australian neighborhood with little fanfare, but their presence sends fissures throughout their modest community.

While the residents of his town concern themselves with the disappearance of three children, a lonely, rejected nine-year-old boy worries that he may inherit his mother's insanity.

Maddy, an elderly woman, returns home to find a strange boy waiting for her, and she tells him the story about when she fell in love with a man named Feather, who put aside his old existence to live with her in a cottage and conceived a child with her--who was never to be born--and left, which caused Maddy to follow him across the sea.