Showing results by publisher "Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd" in Women

This is a memoir of an unconventional childhood that explores what it means to be an only child. This audiobook is for all children who have ever felt like the fulcrum of a seesaw, the focus of all eyes and expectations, torn between love and fear, obedience and rebellion, duty and the longing to escape. Only is revelatory, lyrical and life affirming, for anyone who has felt the burden of trying to be a good daughter.

As the first Muslim woman in any Australian parliament, the 100th woman in the senate and the only engineer in the senate, Mehreen has a unique and crucial perspective on our country and how things are changing for the better or worse. This is the story of a Brown, migrant Muslim woman breaking into a white man's world and striving to change it without being changed. It is an honest, no-holds-barred account of what happens when reality meets perception and when you shatter long-held stereotypes and confront a system steeped in privileged hierarchies, racism and sexism.

Wendy Harmer has had an extraordinary life. From being born with a severe facial deformity, to performing as a stand-up comedian, a national television host and then going on to be the highest paid woman in the cut-throat world of Sydney FM radio ... her tale of overcoming adversity is told with her trademark frankness and celebrated wit.

At 24, life was good for Georgie Dent. After graduating with top marks she landed her dream job at a prestigious Sydney law firm and moved in with a boyfriend she adored. She had the world at her feet and no right to break. But she did. Badly. Within a year Georgie was unemployed, back living with her parents and suffering such crippling anxiety that she ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Breaking Badly is the story of a nervous breakdown in slow motion, a life that fell apart and what it took to put it back together again.

Alannah Hill, one of Australia’s most successful fashion designers, created an international fashion brand that defied trends with ornamental, sophisticated elegance, beads, bows and vintage florals. But growing up in a milk bar in Tasmania, Alannah’s childhood was one of hardship, fear and abuse. At an early age she ran away from home with eight suitcases of costumes and a fierce determination to succeed, haunted by her mother’s refrain of ‘you’ll never amount to anything, you can’t sew, nobody likes you and you’re going to end up in a shallow grave, dear!’

I landed in this place six years ago in a welter of panic, pain and instinct. I'd been in fight-or-flight mode for twelve months, wanting only to keep on flying—or fleeing. I brought almost nothing of my previous life. Grief had made me ruthless; I threw and threw. (And yes, I knew how appalled you'd have been, Pete.) My father implored me to stay with the familiar. Constants, he said, would give me scaffolding. Decades ago, when his second wife, my stepmother, died suddenly, habits were his protection and rituals his comfort—along with a packet or two of cigarettes a day.

From Lucia Osborne-Crowley comes a necessary, elegant and empathetic work exploring the intricacies of abuse, trauma and shame. Through the voices of women, trans and non-binary people around the world and her own deeply moving testimony, Lucia speaks of vulnerability and acceptance and the reclaiming of ourselves in a world that repeatedly asks us to carry the weight of the shame of the atrocities committed against us.

Dumped by her husband of twenty-five years, Jo Peck—smart, successful, and sixty—is totally floored. There's the complete bombshell of the news, the cliché of a younger woman—a much younger woman—there's the disappointment of cancelled retirement travel plans, and there's the foundation-rocking loss of her sense of identity—if she's no longer Rex's wife, who the hell is she?

At sixteen years old, Lily Arthur was caught between the women's liberation movement of the ‘swinging sixties and the draconian ideology that young women should be punished for deviating from society's 'moral codes'. For the 'crime' of being pregnant, Lily was forcibly taken from the man she planned to marry and incarcerated in the notorious Holy Cross Home for ‘wayward' girls in Wooloowin, Brisbane as a ‘prisoner' of the state. Lily spent her entire pregnancy performing unpaid labour its infamous Magdalene Laundry.

Known and loved by her many New Zealand and Australian fans as a down-to-earth broadcaster, radio host and social media sensation, Bree Tomasel is an irrepressible force of nature. But behind the banter and success, is a young woman who has battled anxiety and survived a harrowing attack on her as a young child. Funny, candid, raw—this is Bree Tomasel as you've never seen her.

People always asked her if she was ever afraid, living out in the desert alone with all those rough and scruffy men. But Minnie Berrington was not the faint-hearted type, and never had been. Being tough came naturally to her, growing up with three brothers and a family that went from riches to ruins. Only a slip of a girl, Minnie could match any man in stamina, perseverance and strength. She arrived in Coober Pedy when camels still brought in essential supplies, and water was so scarce that no-one washed. Together with the other miners, she braved the heat, the flies and the dust.

Samantha Wills started her self-titled jewellery company on the kitchen table of her share house in the eastern suburbs of Sydney when she was just 21 years old. While her rise to the global stage looked meteoric to many, Samantha has said 'It took me 12 years to become an overnight success.' Following Samantha's journey, from being named a breakout star by The New York Times to barely being able to breathe on a hotel room floor, Of Gold and Dust is so much more than a business memoir.

Hannah Diviney has always known that her experience of the world was fundamentally different from those around her. While her friends went to soccer and dance and little athletics, Hannah was going to physio and doctors' appointments. While her friends got jobs, fell in love and went clubbing, Hannah surrounded herself with the fantastical worlds she found in books. But books where people like her were nowhere to be found. Refusing to accept the narratives, or lack thereof, that she'd been given, Hannah was determined to forge her own path in a world that wasn't designed for her.

Kerstin is childless by choice and married to her job when Gianni, a charming Italian, turns her life into a champagne-colored fairy tale. Soon after their runaway wedding, Gianni is diagnosed with cancer and Kerstin becomes his dedicated carer. But when she discovers that he has been cheating on her all through their relationship, she is faced with a difficult choice: walk away, or continue to care for the man who betrayed her.

Following the year Rachael Mogan-McIntosh gave birth to her third child and shapeshifted from wild to mild, Mothering Heights is an hilarious, moving celebration of early parenthood—written by a survivor.

From the best-selling author of Sheila comes the story of a bewitching Australian socialite who fascinated the world. Enid Lindeman stood almost six feet tall, with silver hair and flashing turquoise eyes. The girl from Strathfield in Sydney stopped traffic in Manhattan, silenced gamblers in Monte Carlo and dared walk a pet cheetah on a diamond collar through Hyde Park in London. In early 20th-century society, when women were expected to be demure and obedient, the granddaughter of Hunter Valley wine pioneer Henry Lindeman waltzed through life to the beat of her own drum.

Heidi is unapologetically authentic, her memoir is filled with honesty, humour and home-truths. She will show you how she dealt with her inner mean girls that told her she wasn't skinny enough, good enough or simply that other people mattered more than she did. She will inspire you to STOP worrying what other people think and take your power back!

At the age of 20, after a traumatic sexual assault trial, Kathryn Heyman ran away from her life and became a deckhand on a fishing trawler in the Timor Sea. Coming from a family of poverty and violence, she had no real role models, no example of how to create or live a decent life, how to have hope or expectations. But she was a reader. She understood story, and the power of words to name the world. This was to become her salvation.

This is the truly remarkable life story of the notorious Ethel Livesey, a serial fraudster and confidence trickster who became a media sensation after she ran out on her society wedding in 1945 and later was arrested for obtaining goods by false pretences. With a prologue by Ethel Livesey's granddaughter, this extraordinary tale of Australia's greatest fraudster is told for the first time in rich and fascinating detail.

Sinéad has always known that there was a better version of herself lying just outside of her grasp. That if she listened to the right song or won the right (any) award or knew about whisky or followed the right Instagram psychologist or drank kombucha, ever, or enacted the correct 70-step Korean skincare regime, she would become her ‘best self’. In My Defence, I Have No Defence raises the white flag on trying to live up to impossible standards.