Showing results by publisher "Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd" in World Literature

Halina Shore is a Polish born forensic dentist living in Australia. When she travels to Poland to take part in the investigation of a war crime, she finds herself at the center of a bitter struggle in a community that has been divided by a grim legacy. As the investigation proceeds, her professional assignment becomes a confronting personal odyssey as the truth about her own past begins to emerge.

Three women linked by their blood, their dreams...and their sins. From Leningrad in the '70s to America and London in the present day, Kimberley Freeman's new novel follows the lives of two sisters, Lena and Natalia, and their cousin, Sofi, as they move away from Russia and all they have known. Despite promising to always take care of each other, a pact to meet every winter is shattered as their lives change and long-held resentments begin to surface. Can that resentment turn to hatred? To murder?

A long-forgotten secret, a scandalous attraction and a place where two women's lives are changed forever. 1926: Violet Armstrong is one of the few remaining members of staff working at the grand Evergreen Spa Hotel as it closes down over winter. Only a handful of guests are left, including the heir to a rich grazing family, his sister and her suave suitor. When a snowstorm moves in, the hotel is cut off and they are all trapped. No-one could have predicted what would unfold.

Warm, insightful and poignant, Freeing Grace tells the story of David, curate of an inner-city parish, and Leila, his Nigerian-born wife. Unable to have children of their own, they're desperate for a family. When they finally hear they've been approved to adopt a baby, Grace, they can scarcely believe their good fortune. There's just one problem for which David and Leila cannot plan: Grace's birth family - the enigmatic, charismatic Harrisons.

A breath-taking debut from an author whose vision is both acerbic and tender. Seb's beautiful, beloved wife Leda has been killed by a swan. With a name like that, with a bizarre family history like hers, it isn't really surprising. Seb has a grip on her story and its aesthetics; he knows how it should go. Except that he doesn't. Sorting through her belongings after her death, he comes across a packet of unopened letters from a man whom Leda has never mentioned.

Two sisters - Miranda, the older, responsible one, always her younger sister's protector; Lucia, the headstrong, unpredictable one, whose impulses are huge and, often, life changing. When their mother dies and Lucia starts hearing voices, it is Miranda who must find a way to reach her sister. But Lucia impetuously plows ahead, marrying a bighearted older man only to leave him suddenly to have a baby with a young Latino immigrant.

"Everything is free. That's the secret. The only thing that isn't free is you. You do as you're told; you sit in your seat till they say, 'Stand.' You stay put till they say, 'Go.' Maybe that's the way you like it. It's easy. It's all there. You don't have to think about it. You don't even have to feel it. I sometimes wonder how this planet keeps on sticking to my feet. They did everything they could to pin me down: my mum, my dad, school. They put me in homes with kind guys and they put me in homes with bastards."

This selection comprises what Les Murray considers his most successfully realised poems, drawn from all his collections, up to and including Biplane Houses but not including his two verse novels.

The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologist’s estimate that he has only a year or two left, and it’s hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years; the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren’t still best friends; and Sully’s son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one). 

Australia's novels lie at the heart of the country. Books that Made Us looks at the history of Australian culture through the books we have read and the stories we have told. Capturing everyday lives and exceptional dreams, Australian novels have held up a mirror to the nation, reflecting the good and the bad. 

Western Australia, the wheatbelt. Lew McLeod has been travelling and working with Painter Hayes since he was a boy. Shearing, charcoal burning - whatever comes. Painter made him his first pair of shoes. It’s a hard and uncertain life, but it’s the only one he knows. But Lew’s a grown man now. And with this latest job, shearing for John Drysdale and his daughter Clara, everything will change. Stephen Daisley writes in lucid, rippling prose of how things work, and why.

Addy Loest is harbouring a secret - several, in fact. Dedicated overthinker, frockaholic and hard-partier, she’s been doing all she can to avoid the truth for quite some time. A working-class girl raised between the Port Kembla Steelworks and the surf of the Illawarra coast, Addy is a fish out of water at the prestigious University of Sydney. She’s also the child of German immigrants, and her broken-hearted widower dad won’t tell her anything about her family’s tragic past.

Tourmaline is an isolated Western Australian mining town - a place of heat and dust, as allegorical as it is real. Out of the desert staggers a young diviner, Michael Random, offering salvation to this parched town. The once comatose community is indeed stirred to life, by hate as much as by love, and its people find salvation in neither water nor gold.

When Catherine's secret lover dies suddenly, she has nowhere to turn to except her work. A middle-aged curator in a London museum, Catherine is given a very particular project: a box of intricate clockwork parts that appear to be the remains of a 19th century automaton - a beautifully made mechanical bird. When she discovers the diary of the man who commissioned the machine, she is partially rescued from one obsession by another: who was Henry Brandling?

I want to die. I do not want to be mad.... It is like my body is a house, and some visitor has come and attacked the person who lived there. After an Australian patrol officer commits suicide on a remote New Guinea island in 1959, five witnesses are called to a government inquiry. Each has a disturbing story to tell: strand by strand, the mystery of the officer's past is unravelled. But what of other visitants, like the unidentified flying object and the cargo cult it has inspired on the island?

Real estate developer Dharmen Shah’s offer to buy out the residents of Vishram Society - a formerly respectable, now crumbling apartment complex that abuts the infamous Dharavi slums - is more than generous. But one man stands in the way of Shah’s luxury high- rise: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher who will not leave his home in Vishram’s Tower A.

Unable to find work in his field, Joseph Ponthus enlists with a temp agency and starts to pick up casual shifts in the fish processing plants and abattoirs of Brittany. Day after day he records with infinite precision the nature of work on the production line: the noise, the weariness, the dreams stolen by the repetitive nature of exhausting rituals and physical suffering. But he finds solace in a life previously lived. Shelling prawns, he dreams of Alexandre Dumas. Pushing cattle carcasses, he recalls Apollinaire.

From one of our leading novelists and historians comes a breathtakingly vivid novel that recalls the three voyages Captain Cook made to the southern hemisphere, culminating in the last, fateful expedition on which he was brutally murdered. A. N. Wilson's powerful new novel explores the life and times of one of the greatest British explorers, Captain Cook, and the golden age of Britain's period of expansion and exploration.

Rembrandt's Mirror explores the three women of Rembrandt's life and the towering passions of the artist seen through the eyes of his last great love, Hendrickje. Hendrickje, a girl from a strict Calvinist family, leaves her provincial home to find work as a housemaid. She enters Rembrandt's flourishing workshop five years after the death of the great artist's wife, an event that continues to haunt him.

A powerful debut, harmonising Australian-born and immigrant voices, contrasting and connecting their thoughts and struggles. What if moving to a crumbling Australian coastal town meant giving up your only dream? In 1974, Nayeema reluctantly leaves Sydney's inner city to move to Burraboo, a tired coastal town, with her husband, Fawzy. In doing so, Nayeema surrenders her only dream, but once there she falls under the sway of new infatuations.