Showing results by publisher "Bolinda audio" in Biographies & Memoirs

A son's homage to his father. John Birmingham's father died. And his life fell apart. The next six months were spent grinding through the dark forests of depression until he finally emerged out of the darkness onto sunlit upland. A unique yet universal story, On Father reaches out to everyone who has experienced and survived deep grief.

A moving, tender and compelling story about a life lived on the edges of society, of poverty, of certainty, of love. Filled with beautifully realised descriptions of life seen through a child's eyes - a child who gradually comes to realise her adored parents are all too tragically flawed and broken - Velocity packs the emotional impact of Angela's Ashes with the surreal humour and razor-sharp observations of Running with Scissors.

In the third Quarterly Essay of 2004, Margaret Simons takes a long hard look at Mark Latham, the self-proclaimed "club buster" and the man who would be prime minister. Few doubt Latham's intelligence and ambition, but what will this amount to in government? Simons argues that if Labor is elected, it will not be "business as usual". Rather we can expect a reformist government in the spirit - if not the letter - of Latham's political tutor, Gough Whitlam. It is also likely to be a government that has little time for the totemic issues of the Labor elites.

On New Year’s Day 2012, Amy-Jane Beer’s beloved friend Kate set out with a group of others to kayak the River Rawthey in Cumbria. Kate never came home, and her death left her devoted family and friends bereft and unmoored. Returning to visit the Rawthey years later, Amy realises how much she misses the connection to the natural world she always felt when on or close to rivers, and so begins a new phase of exploration.

Britain's 20th century seen through the prism of one extraordinary family. Taking the listener on a journey from the dying embers of Edwardian England, through the trauma of two world wars, the hedonism of 1980s London and ‘Cool Britannia’ in the 1990s right up to the present day, One Hundred Summers is a portrait of a century as it was experienced by one extraordinary family.

Gigorou (jig-goo-roo) means ‘beauty’ or ‘beautiful’ in Jirrbal, the language of Sasha Kutabah Sarago’s grandmother. Growing up, Sarago didn’t feel gigorou. At a young age, she was told, ‘You’re too pretty to be Aboriginal’. Since then, she’s been on a journey to reconcile her conflict with beauty. In this intimately fierce, funny and reflective audiobook, Sarago retraces her footsteps as a beauty assistant, model and magazine editor to find the answers she’s searching for.

In 1970, Lynda was 18, unmarried and pregnant when she was forced to give her baby up for adoption. She was sent by a doctor to a Catholic girls’ home for unmarried mothers, and told she’d have no hope of keeping her child because she was Aboriginal. After 26 years, Lynda was finally able to make contact with her lost son – but the much wished for reunion didn’t go well. When she looked into the adoption records, she found a web of lies – lies about her family, the baby’s father, her ‘consent’ for the adoption – and her Indigenous heritage had been completely erased.

With her new memoir Insomnia, Marina Benjamin has produced an unsettling account of an unsettling condition that treats our inability to sleep not as a disorder but as an existential experience that can electrify our understanding of ourselves and of creativity and love. Insomnia is a bravura piece of writing. At once philosophical and poetical, the book ranges widely over history and culture, literature and art, exploring a threshold experience that is intimately involved with trespass and contamination: the illicit importing of day into night.

How does it feel when your partner dies? How do you keep going, even when it all seems pointless? How can you cope with the emptiness that is still there even years afterwards? Ten women talk about their experiences of losing their husbands; how they coped with grief and how they have rebuilt their lives. One woman was left to run a farm with very little experience, another lost her husband when she was 30 and had young children to care for, another was widowed after years of coping with a poor relationship.

In this engaging and erudite essay, critically acclaimed writer Julian Barnes explores what is involved when we change our minds: about words, about politics, about books; about memories, age and time.

In 2018, on his way to a family holiday in Cairo, Australian-Egyptian citizen Hazem Hamouda disappears without warning, going missing somewhere between landing and customs. His eldest daughter, Lamisse, has recently moved to Egypt armed with a scholarship to the American University of Cairo, and overnight her world is turned upside down. With little Arabic and even less legal knowledge, she finds out her father has been arbitrarily arrested.

Even though we’d grown up in vastly different cultures and countries, we’d both known poverty, domestic violence and the expectation that neither one of us would ever amount to anything. That was probably what united us more than anything: our shared defiance of that prediction. She tap-danced on street corners for people’s small change. He was an out-of-work university teacher, poet and Vietnam vet. She was white and from Australia. He was black and from the Deep South. They met at Mardi Gras, New Orleans, in 1985. She was 22. He was nearly 40. They fell in love.

As a psychiatrist, Brendan Kelly is used to extolling the benefits of a daily meditation practice, but following his own advice is a different story. Finding the time to sit quietly every day isn’t easy when you’re already trying to juggle a stressful job, a busy family life, a cinema addiction, a cake habit, a high-maintenance cat and low-level feelings of guilt over an unused gym membership. But this is the year he is going to do it.

A detailed account of Gaga's rise to fame, from her early life when she was known as Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta, through to her current super-stardom.

Insightful and revealing, this book is the first to tell the Richard Pratt story in full. From humble Polish-Jewish immigrant beginnings, Pratt became one of Australia's business success stories. He was a paradoxical man: said to be a devoted husband, yet he had a mistress and an illegitimate daughter; Australia's most generous philanthropist, yet he admitted to price fixing; and a great supporter of the cultural arts, yet saviour of the Carlton Football Club.

In the 1890s, when a woman's role was seen as marrying well and raising a family, Daisy Bates reinvented herself from humble governess to heiress-traveller and 'woman of science'. She would become one of the best-known and most controversial ethnologists in history, and one of the first people to put Aboriginal culture on the map.

Shannon Garner met and married the man of her dreams, had two gorgeous children and lived an idyllic life on the New South Wales coast. So why did she decide one day to pursue altruistic surrogacy? And what made her choose a gay male couple from Sydney? Labour of Love is Shannon’s honest and engaging story - a roller coaster of emotion set against the backdrop of a highly regulated ‘industry’.

How to Come Alive Again is a funny, honest, broken audiobook written by an author who could be described as the same. It is a combination of self-help audiobook, memoir and polemical lifestyle guide. It lays out the basics for mending your life, accepting yourself, changing what doesn’t work, killing the worst of it and learning to live through depression. It’s an audiobook about what to do when you’re an anxious, depressed, spaghetti-brained mess in a society that still prefers us to act normal and never talk about our mental health.

When Nikki Stern left suburban Melbourne for Europe in the early 1980s, little did she know that her life was about to change dramatically. Adopted into a well-connected family and educated at an exclusive school, she fell instantly and hopelessly in love with a charming and charismatic cartoonist in Amsterdam. Paul and Nikki embarked on a passionate love affair, enjoying the hedonistic days of the '80s before eloping and returning to Australia.

Rod Halsted is the classic irrepressible Aussie larrikin. As soon as he could leave school, he headed straight to Kalgoorlie for adventure. Rod drank with Bob Hawke, did business with drug tsars, was rescued from the nick by Charles Waterstreet, hung with one of the Great Train Robbers, and wrote off endless cars. He has long since abandoned the drugs and conquered his alcohol addiction. This is his laugh-out-loud story.