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In the information age, very few things are secret. Everyone from ASIO to the Freemasons has a website. So when The Sun-Herald publishes a list of Sydney's secret beaches, we cannot be accused of spilling the beans. All this information is available in streams of entries online, in guidebooks such as Andrew Short's Beaches Of The New South Wales Coast, and Tourism NSW even has a summer campaign promoting its favourite secret beaches. Secret Sydney beaches: A plethora of sandy hideaways tucked into hard to reach spots

Debut: Playing Robinson Crusoe and Jozef Imrich
Tiffany Baker's THE LITTLE GIANT OF ABERDEEN COUNTY, pitched as Wally Lamb meets Elizabeth McCracken, about a girl who grows physically and emotionally beyond her small town's wildest expectations, to Caryn Karmatz Rudy at Warner, in a pre-empt, by Daniel Lazar at Writers House (world).

Iowa Writer's Workshop graduate Alan Drew's book about a family whose lives are thrown into chaos when the 1999 Istanbul earthquake destroys the family's home and way of life, to Kate Medina at Random House, by Dorian Karchmar at the William Morris Agency.

Fifty-one-year old debut fiction writer Donald Ray Pollock's KNOCKEMSTIFF, a dark and wry work of grotesque southern gothic, based on the town of the same name in rural southern Ohio where the author was born and raised, with a violent and unsavory cast of characters hurtling from one life disaster to another -- from the father who pumps his son full of steroids in order to vicariously relive his glory days as a perpetually second-place bodybuilder, to the outback psychotic who gets unceremoniously mixed up with two teenaged siblings committing incest in a dynamite hole, to Gerald Howard at Doubleday, at auction, by Richard Pine of Inkwell Management.

Joe Dunthorne's SUBMARINE, narrated by a fourteen-year-old boy growing up in Swansea, on the south coast of Wales, to Bruce Tracy at Random House, along with Dan Menaker, at auction, in a two-book deal, by Georgia Garrett at AP Watt (US). UK rights to Simon Prosser of Hamish Hamilton.

Sandy Novack's debut novel PRECIOUS, set in 1978 during a summer when a young girl disappears from a small town in Pennsylvania, and the story collection LOVE & OTHER DISASTERS, to Jennifer Hershey at Random House, by Denise Shannon at Denise Shannon Literary Agency (world).
The True Story of the Iron Curtain Crossing: A collection of stories about how one escape can make a difference in the world
Second Life: A surprisingly upbeat, inspirational tale of escape

Elsewhere in silly news, at the start of the lawsuit between billionaire movie producer Philip Anschutz and novelist Clive Cussler, Anschutz's attorneys are now claiming the failure of film version of SAHARA had nothing to do with it being a bad movie--it's because the sales numbers for Cussler's books were exaggerated.