Showing results by publisher "Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd" in Literature & Fiction

When Alexandra returns to Australia to be with her dying grandfather, Wilhelm, and grandmother Romy, they share with her family secrets they had kept hidden for over 50 years. In 1939, two young girls meet in Shanghai, the 'Paris of the East': beautiful local Li and Viennese refugee Romy. They form a fierce friendship, but the deepening shadows of World War Two fall over the women as they slip between the city's glamorous French Concession and the desperate Shanghai Ghetto. Eventually, they are forced to go in separate ways as Romy doubts Li's loyalties.

1941, Estonia. As Stalin’s brutal Red Army crushes everything in its path, Katarina battles to protect her grandmother’s precious legacy - the weaving of gossamer lace shawls stitched with intricate patterns that tell the stories passed down through generations. Meanwhile Lydia is suffocating in her prison of privilege in Moscow. Yearning for freedom and to discover her beloved mother’s Baltic heritage, she escapes to Estonia. Soon these two young women find themselves in a fight for life, liberty and love.

Twenty-six-year-old Nicole Najim is struggling to find herself after a painful breakup, just when she thought she was going to settle down. Working a dead-end job in the family car dealership and at a loose end, she picks up her camera and returns to the melting pot of Sydney’s West to rediscover her roots. When she catches up with childhood friend, Danny, who makes his living in a shadowy underworld, their relationship intensifies just as the law starts to close in.

Queensland in 1976 churns with corruption. When Detective Ray Windsor defies it, he is exiled deep into the state's west. Royalton is a town on its knees and plagued by crimes left largely un-investigated by the local police chief, Kennedy, and his elusive boss. Mutual dislike between Kennedy and Ray gradually turns ugly as Ray and his new partner, Arshag, uncover a pattern of crimes that no one seems concerned about solving. But when two girls from local immigrant families are found dead and another disappears, Ray and Arshag are forced to take the law into their own hands.

Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Ester is yearning to fall in love again. Meanwhile, her ex-husband's past decisions are catching up with him, her sister is struggling through her own directionless life and her mother is about to make a choice that will profoundly affect them all.

Between managing a bustling beauty salon, hectic volunteer commitments and the lion's share of parenting two-year-old Claudia, Angie McIntyre barely has time to turn around. And with each passing month, she feels her relationship with fly-in, fly-out boyfriend Rob Jones slipping through her fingers. When Rob faces retrenchment and the most fabulous fixer-upper comes onto the market, Angie knows this derelict weatherboard cottage will be the perfect project to draw their little family together.

In 1999, art dealer Alex Clayton stumbles across a lost portrait of Molly Dean, an artist’s muse brutally slain in Melbourne in 1930. Alex buys the painting and sets out to uncover more details, but finds there are strange inconsistencies: Molly’s mother seemed unconcerned by her daughter’s violent death, the main suspect was never brought to trial despite compelling evidence and vital records are missing. Alex enlists the help of her close friend, art conservator John Porter, and together they sift through the clues and deceptions that swirl around the last days of Molly Dean.

Funny Ethnics catapults listeners into the sprawling city-within-a-city that is Western Sydney and the world of Sylvia Nguyen: only child of Vietnamese refugee parents, unexceptional student, exceptional self-doubter. It's a place where migrants from across the world converge, and identity is a slippery, ever-shifting beast. Jumping through snapshots of Sylvia's life—from childhood to something resembling adulthood—this novel is about square pegs and round holes, those who belong and those on the fringes.

For two young brothers, a hidden cave a short walk from the family farm seems the perfect escape from their abusive, shell-shocked father — until the older brother goes missing. Fearful of his father, nine-year-old Kip lies about what happened. It is a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life.

Bronwyn's family has always thrived in the legal profession and a position at their prestigious firm is hers by right. Only problem is, she doesn't want it. Her best friend Claudia has always dreamed of being a lawyer, but tragedy made her take over her father's vineyard instead. Each wants the other's life, so they hatch a plan to swap. But achieving their dreams isn't easy, and falling in love with the wrong men is not a good idea....

What makes Zenadth Kes/Torres Strait unique? And what is it like to be a Torres Strait Islander in contemporary Australia? Growing Up Torres Strait Islander in Australia, compiled by poet and author Samantha Faulkner, showcases the distinct identity of Torres Strait Islanders through their diverse voices and journeys.

Set in 1995 against the backdrop of Auckland's burgeoning party scene, Golden Days is the story of an intense late-teens friendship between bookish Becky and star-dusted Zoe Golden, and what happened when one terrifying night changed their lives and destroyed their friendship forever. After finding out that her husband has been cheating on her, Becky is mourning the end of her picture-perfect marriage at the bottom of a bottle. She thought she'd left that summer far behind, but the trauma of her present day brings back memories of the horrific night her brother died.

Two Australian police officers travel to San Francisco and Los Angeles in the summer of 1967 in search of a missing young man, only to find themselves fully immersed in the world of music, free love, drugs and hippie counterculture. They soon realise this isn't just any ordinary missing person investigation. A big gig is the perfect place to get away with murder, and their search becomes a thrilling journey through the seamy side of the 1960s counterculture.

Camille is a nurse specialising in supporting families through the difficult decision to donate the organs of their dying loved ones. Camille's mother is a gifted but uncompromising transplant surgeon determined to make it in a man's world until her own life falls apart. And Camille herself is a mother to Addie–five years old, critically ill and in desperate need of the very organs her mother and grandmother work with.

From the best-selling author of The Sunday Girl. When Charlie sees a man who is the spitting image of her husband, Oliver, on a dating app, her heart stops. Her first desperate instinct is to tell herself she must be mistaken - she caught only a glimpse from a distance as her friends were laughingly swiping through the men on offer. But she knows it’s no mistake. She took that photo. On their honeymoon. She just can’t let it go.

Greer O'Reilly needs to start over. Her partner of 12 years has left her, and she's moved to a blueberry orchard in the Victorian hills. When she and daughter Sophie arrive to take possession, the former owner, 81-year-old jazz lover Charlie Chandler, refuses to move out. Dying and desperate to spend his last days in his old home, the unlikely pair soon form a close bond - one that will offer the strength and inspiration Greer needs.

Barbara McClymont walks the cane fields searching for Janet, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who has been missing for weeks. The police have no leads. The people of Quala are divided by dread and distrust. But the sugar crush is underway and the cane must be burned. Meanwhile, children dream of a malevolent presence, a schoolteacher yearns to escape, and history keeps returning to remind Quala that the past is always present.

When a local father is convicted of the possession and distribution of child pornography, the tight-knit, middle-class community is quick to unravel. He is granted permanent name suppression, and soon friend turns on friend, neighbour delivers up neighbour, and hysteria rapidly engulfs them all. Who among them was capable of such moral trespass?

In self-exile on the remote island of Tasmania, Taylor Bridges is the only ranger of an isolated national park, its town slowly drowning beneath the rising waters of the new dam project. Still struggling with the guilt of losing his daughter, Claire, Taylor is a chronic sleepwalker. So, when another little girl goes missing in his park a year to the day of his own child’s unsolved disappearance, Taylor’s sense of redemption finds him wading in over his head to find her.

On a hot morning in 1991 in the regional town of Clarke, Barney Clarke (no relation) is woken by the unexpected arrival of many policemen: they are going to search his backyard for the body of a missing woman. Next door, Leonie Wallace and little Joe watch the police cars through their kitchen window. Leonie has been waiting for this day for six years. She is certain that her friend—Ginny Lawson—is buried in that backyard under a slab of suspicious concrete. But the fate of Ginny Lawson is not the only mystery in Clarke.