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

When Maggie, Fran and Rose met in their youth, they had dreams and ambitions. Forty years later, the three friends are turning 60, all of them restless and disenchanted with their lives. In an attempt to recapture the sense of freedom and purpose they once possessed, they decide to retrace the steps of their 1978 backpacking trip through Europe. What could possibly go wrong? As they set off on their trip, it will prove to be an odyssey that will test their friendship, challenge their beliefs and redefine the third age of their lives.

For Ava, heading to university in the city is her escape from a poverty-stricken upbringing in a tiny coastal town. Her mother deserted the family when she was a baby, leaving her with a chronically ill father who was able to provide love but little else. On the other side of the world, Laurie tolerates university only at the urging of her father, a celebrated professor of Marxist thought. Her mother died in childbirth, and Laurie feels boxed in by her father's expectations. She dreams of freedom, far from the Cambridge cloisters.

Jock Serong reimagines in urgent, compelling prose the ill-fated exploits of George Augustus Robinson at the settlement of Wybalenna. On the windswept point of an island at the edge of van Diemen’s Land, the Commandant huddles with a small force of white men and women. He has gathered together, under varying degrees of coercion and duress, the last of the Tasmanians, or so he believes. His purpose is to save them—from a number of things, but most pressingly from the murderous intent of the pastoral settlers on their country.

Natalie King is back. Her reluctance to live a quiet life has led to severe depression, and now it's time to retreat to the country - a borrowed house on the Great Ocean Road and a low-key research job at a provincial university. But Natalie and trouble have a mutual attraction. Unsurprisingly, Natalie finds herself drawn deep into a local mystery and even deeper into danger....

On a hot October afternoon, a girl walks barefoot out of the Wimmera desert, near the small town of Gatyekarr. She finds sanctuary with Beth, a regenerative farmer and collector of seeds, devoted to bringing her family's farm back to life. The arrival of the mysterious 'desert girl' unsettles the community and old tensions erupt. The longer the girl stays silent, the more volatile the town becomes. Who is she and what does her presence mean?

As the long summer holiday stretches ahead, with her older sister more interested in boys, her mother disappearing on long walks and her father, beer in hand, watching the cricket, the youngest in the family often finds herself alone. At the beach, she meets Kahu, a boy who tells her a tragic story. A couple of years ago, a little girl went missing, presumed drowned. But no one ever found her body. Suddenly, the summer has purpose—they will find the missing girl and become local heroes.

When Sofie comes to stay with her grandmother in Stanthorpe, she knows little of Nonna Gia's past. In the heat of that 1984 summer, the two clash over Gia's strict Italian ways and superstitions, her chilli-laden spaghetti and the evasive silence surrounding Sofie's father, who died before she was born. Then Sofie learns Gia had an arranged marriage. From there, the past begins to reveal why no-one will talk of her father.

Vanessa Rooney is a thirty-something dental hygienist who finds herself a single mum with a hole in her heart where her husband had been. Somehow, she finds the courage to fulfil her dream of writing a romance novel but soon discovers that it has been plagiarised by celebrity author Charlotte Lancaster. Vanessa sues Charlotte with the help of solicitor Dave Rendall, who's nursing some unfulfilled dreams of his own. When gun QC Marcus Stafford joins their legal team, Vanessa feels like her perfect man has stepped into her life.

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?

Gaelle has a dream job working for a fashion magazine, and a husband who loves her. Life should be perfect, but life does not always go according to plan. Feeling lost and alone, Gaelle flees to a tiny seaside town on the other side of the country. As she revisits the legacy of a strange, sometimes magical childhood in France, Gaelle finds unexpected help from a thirteen-year-old stranger.

Meg's life is woven into the fabric of St. Stephens. It's a tapestry made of two precious children, a hidden truth, and a husband whose ideas of a perfect wife do not match her own. When Meg puts her foot down on a third kid, gets a job, and is empowered by the same book group that was meant to keep her in her place, her marriage begins to disintegrate. Set in a tiny Mormon community, this is a novel about resilience and courage – the fierceness of mother-love and the power that comes with never forgetting who you really are.

When Edith and a select group of employees at Winked advertising agency are sent to Consequi, an elite three-day work retreat in the remote mountains, she sees an opportunity to impress her bosses and dodge an inevitable restructure. But this is no ordinary corporate retreat. Trapped together in the revamped convent, the threat of mass redundancy looming over them, their phones confiscated and the team-building activities becoming increasingly extreme, the 'work family's' cracks begin to widen–and Edith has a secret that threatens to make her the office outcast: the stinkbug.

On an ordinary night in an ordinary year, Tommy Llewellyn's doting parents wake in a home without toys and nappies, without photos of their baby scattered about, and without any idea that the small child asleep in his crib is theirs. That's because Tommy is a boy destined to never be remembered. On the same day every year, everyone around him forgets he exists, and he grows up enduring his own universal Reset. That is until something extraordinary happens: Tommy Llewellyn falls in love. Determined to finally carve out a life for himself, Tommy sets out on a mission to finally trick the Reset.

Ted ‘Little Boy Blue' Taylor has replaced his estranged father Ron—a disgraced former heavyweight champion on the cusp of an unexpected comeback—as the darling of Australian boxing. But after two uninspiring losses, he is failing to live up to the expectations that have always weighed so heavily upon him. Ted's battles are not isolated to his sport: a painful history of alcoholism, domestic abuse and ties to the underworld of boxing has a firm hold on the Taylor family. Generational trauma and guilt are not Ted's only inheritance.

Geraldine is born with an adventurer’s heart. Whether it is sneaking out of home in Yorkshire, escaping from boarding school in Rhodesia, or buying hormones from the local speed dealer in Weston-super-Mare, Geraldine is wide open to all the world has to offer–even if the world doesn’t know what to make of Geraldine. Arriving in Australia as an adolescent, Geraldine will use music as the key to unlock her soul. And as a woman, she will find a way to inspire others, and to be accepted for herself.

In 2016, while in the early stages of IVF, Rose is shaken by the discovery that she carries a dangerous mutation of the BrCa1 gene. She begins to ask questions about her family history, and particularly her grandmother Nellie, whose early death left a hole in their family that was never quite filled. As the certainties in Rose's life start to crumble around her, she becomes fixated on the shadowy figure of Nellie. Who really was this woman, and could her secrets reveal the way forward for the granddaughter who may share her fatal gene?

Abandoned by her mother as a toddler, only occasionally visited by her volatile father and raised solely by her tormented Pop, Justine finds sanctuary in The Choke, a place where the banks of the Murray River are so narrow they can almost touch. Although Justine doesn't know it, her father is a menacing criminal, and the world she is exposed to is one of great peril to her. She must make sense of it on her own - and when she eventually does, she knows what she has to do....

When Esther wakes with a breathing tube down her throat, she has no idea where she is or how she got there. In terrible physical condition, Esther is tended to by Grace, the only other person in the building. In the half-consciousness of her recovery, Esther is desperate to get back to her young kids and grapples with the events of her life as they come flooding back: a childhood spent between warring parents; the demise of her marriage; the struggles she faced when her children were born.

Lotti Coates lives in the shadow of a genius: her father, George, is a brilliant and celebrated Australian painter. When Lotti meets the outcast waif Kyla at a suburban Canberra school, two worlds are set to collide. Slowly Kyla is drawn into the orbit of the Coates family. Or is it the other way around? As Lotti and Kyla navigate their way towards adulthood, dark secrets start to unravel, with devastating consequences....

From the acclaimed author of The Memory Artist and The Shut Ins comes a new novel about the relationship between body and self, and how we must dive beneath the surface to really know ourselves.