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

Lucy Crighton has moved back in with her gregarious parents - forced to deal with her mum's obsession with Cher, her father's unsolicited advice and her empty bank account. Luckily, she has her crazy best friend to cushion reality with wild nights at the local hotel and escapades in Japanese mud-baths.... Then there's the next-door neighbour's dashing son, who she has absolutely no interest in...well, maybe just a little.

Paris, 2020. A writer is confined to her hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cezanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavor, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. But Hortense, always subject to the gaze of others, is increasingly intrigued by the woman before her. Who is she and what event hides in her past?

Marytè is a devoted beekeeper. She lives by the old rules: work with fellow beekeepers, be a good Christian and a good harvest will follow. These rules help her cope with her grief when she inherits her husband's tree hollows. But as harsh conditions and tax increases threaten the harvest, Marytè begins to question her faith, her community and her own sanity.

Shanghai in 1935 is a 20th-century Babylon, an expatriate playground where fortunes are made and lost, where East and West collide, and the stakes include life itself. Into this, Rowland Sinclair arrives from Sydney to represent his brother at international wool negotiations. Rowland is under strict instructions to commit to nothing...but a brutal murder makes that impossible. As suspicion falls on him, Rowland enters a desperate bid to find answers in a city as glitzy as it is dangerous, where tai-pans and tycoons rule, and politics and vice are entwined with commerce.

For nearly 14 years, Rowland has tried to forget, but now the past has returned. A newly discovered gun casts light on a family secret long kept...a murder the Sinclairs would prefer stayed unsolved. As old wounds tear open, the dogged loyalty of Rowland’s inappropriate companions is all that stands between him and the consequences of a brutal murder...one he simply failed to mention.

For most of his 76 years, Bill Smith preferred solitude over socialising, horses over people and confidentiality over confidantes. As a jockey, he was known for always turning up already fully kitted out in his silks. But now, in his advancing years, a fall lands him in full-time care and it becomes impossible to maintain his privacy. Nurse Maureen Bannon resents having to look after ‘the geries', especially grumpy old buggers like Mr Smith, but when she discovers Bill's secret an unlikely alliance is formed. Bill was assigned female at birth.

Shortly before the Japanese invade, the van Hoorn family throws their famous Sinterklaas party at their tea plantation in West Java. One of their guests, Mattijs, a Dutch pilot, hopes to forge a future in the Dutch East Indies, possibly with the family's daughter Anna, but she is torn between her dreams of Holland and her desire to belong. Meanwhile the housekeeper, Diah, keenly observes the goings-on around the plantation, wondering how much to tell her freedom-fighter brother.

In 1960, when the legendary icebreaker Magga Dan set sail for Antarctica, it contained a secret. Hiding on board was Nel Law, wife of expedition leader Phillip Law. She would make history by becoming the first Australian woman to set foot on the icy continent, but it was her art that would change everything. Though a talented artist, Nel has always been defined by her role as ‘the explorer's wife', but in the clear expanse of the Southern Ocean, her true self is finally allowed to emerge. Despite misogyny from the all-male crew and resentment from her husband, Nel's art begins to flourish.

On a critical mission to Afghanistan to investigate the opium trade, Rex Dalton stumbles across spine-chilling deceit and corruption that snakes through the highest echelons of power in Afghanistan, America, and Europe. When urgent requests to his superiors to eradicate the drug empire fall on deaf ears, Dalton, with his military dog, Digger, at his side, takes matters into his own hands, stirring up a hornet's nest so deadly that even he, one of the world’s most lethal assassins, might not survive.

Flying high after a best-selling book and a movie Oscar, Jonno Bligh is brought low by a cocaine habit and writer's block. He flees to the Indian Ocean on his beloved yacht, The Scoop Jon B, as the pressure to deliver his next blockbuster mounts. But a storm cripples the boat, and he takes refuge on a remote island. Unknown to him, the island is used by murderous gangster BangBang Budiman to hide the spoils of his maritime heists. Jonno watches in horror as BangBang’s men brutalize two women before leaving them to die.

On the cusp of summer, 1986, Rowan Brockman's mother asks if he can come home to Septimus in the Western Australian Wheatbelt to help with the harvest. Rowan's brother Albert, the natural heir to the farm, has died, and Rowan's dad's health is failing. Although he longs to, there is no way that Rowan can refuse his mother's request as she prepares the farm for sale.

Melbourne, 1868. When dazzling theatre star Marie St Denis dies in the arms of her best friend, fellow actress Lola Sanchez, everyone believes it was suicide by laudanum overdose. Everyone except Lola. On the brink of stardom herself, she risks everything by embarking on a quest to find Marie's killer. When journalist Magnus Scott, writing as 'the Walking Gentleman', publishes a compassionate obituary about her friend, Lola decides to seek his help.

It's 1930, and the Great Depression is taking hold. In Melbourne, thirteen-year-old Morris Turner, a little anxious by nature, feels more at home gazing at the stars than spending time with his detached father Jude, a detective, and older sister, Lottie. When a young woman is murdered in Jude's home town of Gemini, he is assigned to solve the case. With fear and polio rising in the city, Jude reluctantly takes Morris and Lottie to the small town he left long ago. At the family farm in Gemini, Morris is drawn into a community reeling from a murder and a financial crash.

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.

It's 1933, and Eric Campbell, the man who would be Australia's Fuehrer, is on a fascist tour of the continent seeking allegiances. Yet the Australian way of life is not undefended. The clandestine armies of the Establishment have mobilised to undermine Campbell's ambitions. But when the Establishment's man in Munich is killed, desperate measures are necessary. Rowland Sinclair must travel to Germany to defend Australian democracy from the relentless march of Fascism.

When Paula finds her husband's shameful secrets on his mobile phone, and Facebook puts her teenage daughter at the centre of a high-school scandal, she does the only thing that makes sense to her: she runs away from it all. Taking her kids and elderly father, she heads off on a road trip across Australia with one rule: no technology allowed. It's time to get back to basics, reclaim her life and learn how to be a family again.

Harley, a man of Nyoongar ancestry, finds himself at a difficult point in the history of his country, family and self. As the apparently successful outcome of his white grandfather's enthusiastic attempts to isolate and breed the ‘first white man born', he wants to be a failure. But would such failure mean his Nyoongar ancestors could label him a success? And how can the attempted genocide represented by his family history be told?

A year after her husband Leo's death, widow Daisy invites her three adult children to join her for a holiday in beautiful Venice. It will be wonderful, having them under one roof again in their father's birthplace. But is it possible to recapture the past? Her son Marc's marriage is in jeopardy, but for his mother's sake he convinces his wife to keep up appearances. Anna is trying to hide the truth about the dismal state of her London acting career; and Ellie, enjoying a gap year and uncertain about her future choices, wants to avoid family pressure to conform.

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.

The Mothers' Group tells the story of six very different women who agree to regularly meet soon after the births of their babies. Each woman strives in her own way to become the mother she wants to be and finds herself becoming increasingly reliant on the friendship and support of the members of the mothers' group. Until one day an unthinkably shocking event changes everything, testing their bonds and revealing closely held secrets that threaten to shatter their lives.