Showing titles in Women

Amani Haydar suffered the unimaginable when she lost her mother in a brutal act of domestic violence perpetrated by her father. Five months pregnant at the time, her own perception of how she wanted to mother (and how she had been mothered) was shaped by this devastating murder. After her mother's death, Amani began reassessing everything she knew of her parents' relationship. They had been unhappy for so long - should she have known that it would end like this?

For some, turning another decade older is a milestone they’d rather not mark. But when Katie Piper turned forty, it was only cause for celebration. With an acid attack causing her to stare death in the face at age twenty-four, Katie’s approach to ageing was changed irrevocably. In a world where women have too often been made to feel irrelevant or invisible for going through the natural ageing process, she now sees each passing day as life’s greatest gift – but you don’t need to go through trauma to give your views on ageing a much-needed overhaul.

Sex workers in 19th-century Melbourne were judged morally corrupt by the respectable world around them. But theirs was a thriving trade, with links to the police and political leaders of the day, and the leading brothels were usually managed by women. While today a popular bar and a city lane are famously named after Madame Brussels, the identities of the other ‘flash madams’, the ‘dressed girls’ who worked for them and the hundreds of women who solicited on the streets of the Little Lon district of Melbourne are not remembered.

Virginal, chaste, humble, patiently waiting for rescue by brave knights and handsome princes: this idealized—and largely mythical—notion of the medieval noblewoman still lingers. Yet the reality was very different, as Kelcey Wilson-Lee shows in this vibrant account of the five daughters of Edward I, often known as Longshanks. The lives of these sisters—Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary, and Elizabeth—ran the gamut of experiences open to royal women in the Middle Ages.

In the early 2000s, after years of hard work and determination to breakthrough as an actor, Bethany Joy Lenz was finally cast as one of the leads on the hit drama One Tree Hill. Her career was about to take off, but her personal life was slowly beginning to unravel. What none of the show's millions of fans knew, hidden even from her costars, was her secret double life in a cult.

Her role as Alexis Carrington Colby in Dynasty brought her to peak stardom, a role which might have been created for the tempestuous, strong-willed, and passionate woman that she is. As might be expected, in this memoir, she tells the truth; from her romantic adventures - sometimes desirable, sometimes disastrous - with some of the most famous and interesting men in the world, to the inside story of her fascinating and erratic acting career. Joan Collins candidly divulges her past imperfect in a book that is, like herself, outspoken, witty, daring, and full of life.

The morning after Courtney Gustafson moved into an old house in the Poets Square neighbourhood of Tucson, Arizona, she noticed tiny pawprints all over her driveway. They were the first evidence of a colony of feral cats who would, in time, become part of her family, expand her world spectacularly, and help pierce a personal darkness she’d wrestled with for much of her life. Poets Square is a love letter to community in a broken society, told through the cats Courtney meets in dark alleys, neglected homes and her own driveway; cats she cherishes and must sometimes let go.

Growing up in the Canadian Rockies, the mountains have always been home for Jenny Tough. Travelling the world, she's always discovered commonalities with mountains—and mountain people. Her major project is to run solo and unsupported across a mountain range on every continent where indigenous mountain people live isolated from the outside, urban world. Running solo and unsupported comes with obvious logistical as well as physical challenges, but running is also a common language.

In this memoir–a mix of poetry, prose, and storytelling–Leena Magdi describes a mind altered by grief. Exploring the sudden loss of her brother and the war in Sudan, readers dive headfirst into Leena’s world.

This true-life memoir is a behind-the-headlines story that sounds more like a novel in an exotic locale. Through the eyes of the unwitting wife of a psychopath, Ross takes us on her journey, from their initial meeting to the fateful day of her husband's arrest. We follow along as the truth unfolds through her self-launched investigations and her arduous struggles to accept unspeakable realities. Left in the aftermath of destruction, it is also an intimate personal account of her long and hard road to heal physically, mentally, and emotionally, to overcome her past and move on.

Some losses don’t just break you—they take you apart, piece by piece, until you are no longer the person you once were. On July 7, 2005, Azuma Wundowa’s life crumbled when her mother boarded a bus in London and never came home. That summer, at sixteen, Azuma was gleefully waiting for concert tickets to arrive and enjoying life as it was. But then her mother went missing amidst one of the most devastating tragedies in London—the 7/7 bombings.

Meine Mutter war Alkoholikerin. Meine Kindheit? Keine einfache! Vor Jahren schwör ich mir, den Kontakt zu meiner Mutter abzubrechen. Als sie jedoch schwer erkrankte und Hilfe brauchte, reichte ich ihr meine Hand. Nichtwissend, dass die härtesten Tage, Wochen und Monate meines Lebens sein sollten.

Guided by a rich concoction of Buddhist insight and horse sense, the unlikely support of a meditation group in a nearby Federal prison, and the friendship of a woman born on the ranch in the 1930’s, Victress began a journey that shattered old defenses and loosened the grip of the lifelong fears that bound her.

"I am not moving to Iraq to teach." But the recession came hard for Gretchen Berg. Tens of thousands of dollars in debt, her only option was to uproot her life and move to the Middle East for work. She was prepared to make some good money, pay off some bad debt, take some photos of camels, and suffer through expected misogyny typical of the Middle East. She was unprepared for the drama and chaos that erupted within the well-intended, burgeoning university program, and the comical carnival of personalities she’d encounter, along with unexpected misogyny coming from inside the building.

Sara Fay Egan has never lived a “by-the-book” kind of life. From orchestrating high-profile events to grappling with her daughter's life-threatening illness, she’s faced more twists and turns than most. In The Through Line, Sara Fay shares her deeply personal journey, blending raw emotion with the practical know-how she’s gained from years of balancing a successful career with family responsibilities.

In the aftermath of loss, a mother and her young son cross the ocean to a remote strip of land on the North Atlantic. Through art, philosophy, poetry, geology and Minecraft, Coutts starts to imagine new ways of being and a new existence for her small family. With the precision and clarity of the camera, Coutts combines the real with the fictional, interweaving folk song, maps and island lore to present a devastating and fierce reflection on intimacy and separation, parenthood, photography and the fragility and strangeness of our environment.

At the bottom of her barrel, Bethany begins to look around, only to find darkness. In the darkness she makes connections to inherited family patterns and demons from the past. Listening to Finding My Way is like watching a boat being tossed by torrid seas. Will Bethany settle for status quo or keep pursuing greater depths into the unknown? As Bethany attempts several healing modalities, she is ultimately pointed back to the cross of Jesus. This is not your average story of self-discovery, or even religion. This is a journey of the soul.

Es un ejercicio de honestidad conmigo misma. Un volver la vista atrás para contemplar todo cuanto me ha sucedido. Al mirarme al espejo, puedo decir: he vivido. He superado los obstáculos que han aparecido en mi camino. Aún sigo superando otros muchos. He sido capaz de reinventarme muchas veces, de tirar para adelante. Soy positiva por naturaleza, y el mensaje que quiero transmitir es que casi todo merece la pena.

Caterina II di Russia, nata principessa Sofia di Anhalt-Zerbst e andata in sposa a soli sedici anni all'erede al trono degli zar, è una delle più straordinarie e controverse figure femminili della storia europea. Con grande precisione storica e brillante stile narrativo, questa biografia ne delinea la forte personalità: una donna intelligente, amica e sostenitrice degli illuministi, caparbia e coraggiosa, che riuscì a imporsi in un mondo straniero e ostile superando i pregiudizi dei suoi contemporanei.

Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited audiences into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. With their frankness, humour and steel-sharp wit, these accounts of everyday happenings provide an intimate insight into the life of one of Australia’s greatest writers.