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

An estranged father. An abused and abusive mother. An army of relatives. A tapestry of violence, woven across generations and geographies, from Turkey to Lebanon to Western Sydney. This is the legacy left to Jamal Smith, a young queer Muslim trying to escape a past in which memory and rumour trace ugly shapes in the dark. When every thread in life constricts instead of connects, how do you find a way to breathe? Torn between faith and fear, gossip and gospel, family and friendship, Jamal must find and test the limits of love.

Eight years ago, Sahar pursued her happily-ever-after when she married Khaled and followed him to Jordan, leaving behind her family, her friends and a thriving cake business. But married life didn’t go as planned, and, haunted by secrets, Sahar has returned home to Sydney without telling her husband. With the help of her childhood friends, Sahar hits the reset button on her life. She takes a job at a local patisserie run by Maggie, a strong but kind manager who guides Sahar in sweets and life.

Yasmin Weston is on holiday when she learns that her son Daniel has been assaulted at home in Australia, leaving him with a debilitating brain injury. She vows to hunt down her son’s attacker. Evie MacIntyre knows the Westons from school. She’s never had much time for Yasmin, and she dislikes Daniel because he bullied her son, Brody. When Evie discovers evidence that Brody was involved in the attack, she is torn but decides there is no way she will let her only son go to jail.

1699. The salons of Paris are bursting with the creative energy of fierce, independent-minded women. But outside those doors, the patriarchal forces of Louis XIV and the Catholic Church are moving to curb their freedoms. In this battle for equality, Baroness Marie Catherine D’Aulnoy invents a powerful weapon: ‘fairy tales’. When Marie Catherine’s daughter, Angelina, arrives in Paris she is swept up in the glamour and sensuality of the city, where a woman may live outside the confines of the church or marriage.

Hetty and Ness have been best friends since childhood. Hetty is captivating, while Ness is a wallflower, hopelessly in love with her. Leaving Melbourne for the first time to live abroad, they take a room in a share house of creatives in Toronto’s student quarter. Hetty disappears into bar-keeping and nightlife, while Ness drifts aimlessly. But when Ness finds Faith in the art gallery, an intense affair begins. Her life starts to make sense. And Hetty’s starts to fall apart, a mess of bad drugs and bad men. Ness may lose the person she loves more than anyone else in the world.

At times like these families should be coming together, not tearing each other apart. On her remote North Queensland cattle station, Ivy Dunmore is facing the end of her days. Increasingly frail, all she holds dear is threatened not just by crippling drought, but by jealousy and greed - and that’s from within her own family. Can Felicity, who's battling her own crisis as her 50th birthday approaches, protect her mother and reunite her family under the homestead's faded iron roof? Or will sibling rivalries erupt and long-held secrets from the past break a family in crisis?

Abigail Sorensen has spent her life trying to unwrap the events of 1990. It was the year she started receiving random chapters from a self-help book called The Guidebook in the post. It was also the year Robert, her brother, disappeared on the eve of her 16th birthday. She believes the absurdity of The Guidebook and the mystery of her brother's disappearance must be connected....

In secluded Devlins Reach, on the shores of the Hawkesbury River, three bodies are unearthed in an excavation site. When a wilderness expert, Park Ranger Taylor Bridges, is called in to assist local police, he soon discovers the town has an unsettling history - one to match Taylor's own haunted past. But the quiet location and picturesque beauty of The Reach are hiding something darker than Taylor could have anticipated. Within the town's tight-knit community of loggers, store owners and tight-lipped locals, someone is targeting the residents one by one.

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.

Someone is hiding a secret - one that could change Berry's life and alter her tragic past. As a child, Berry McCalister's family was torn apart by shocking violence. Eleven years on, she returns to the small town of Harlington, determined to confront the past and, finally, to cut all ties and sell the family farm. Complicating her desire to get out of Harlington, Berry is drawn to her childhood crush, Nate Tarant. He never knew she existed back then, but things change, and this time Nate seems to be very much aware of her presence.

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.

Daniel is a 16-year-old drug dealer and he’s going to jail. Then, suddenly, he’s not. A courtroom intervention. A long car ride to a big country house. Other 'gifted delinquents.' The elusive, devastating Rachel, and Alex, so tightly wound he seems about to shatter. So where are they? It’s not a school, despite the 'lessons’ with the headsets and changing images. It’s not a psych unit - not if the absence of medication means anything. It’s not a jail, because Daniel’s free to leave. Or that’s what they tell him.

A house perched impossibly on a cliff overlooking the stunning, iconic Bluebird Beach. Prime real estate, yet somehow not real estate at all, The Lodge is, like those who live in it, falling apart. Gordon Grimes has become the accidental keeper of this last relic of an endangered world. He lives in The Lodge with his wife, Kelly, who is trying to leave him, their son, Ben, who will do anything to save him, his goddaughter Lou who is hiding from her own troubles, and Leonie, the family matriarch who has trapped them here for their own good.

The Carrington family owns the only pub in the small country town of Kangaroo Ridge. It’s been eight years since the five siblings became orphans and since twins Sebastian and Tamara stepped up to look after their younger brothers and sister with the help of their aunt, Maddie. Seb and Tam gave up their teenage years to make sure the family stayed together, but that’s been hard and they’ve grown apart. Seb is silent and stoic; Tam, on the other hand, wants to kick over the traces and catch up on the life she missed out on.

Two years ago Freya had no boyfriend, no bank balance and was barely employed as a bad waitress. Then she got BBest, a lifestyle app that knows you better than you know yourself. It calculates your likes and dislikes, gives you best options and streamlines your life.

Now Freya has the perfect life - she's officially in love and her floristry business is thriving. But if she's so in love, why doesn't it feel exactly right? And who is that mysterious man in her grandfather's bookshop with soulful eyes that leave her unstitched?

It is the winter of 1985. Hope Farm sticks out of the ragged landscape like a decaying tooth, its weatherboard walls sagging into the undergrowth. Silver's mother, Ishtar, has fallen for the charismatic Miller, and the three of them have moved to the rural hippie commune to make a new start. But here, at just 13, she is thrust into an unrelenting adult world, and the walls begin to come tumbling down, with deadly consequences.

Poppy Abbott seems to have it all. Bright, successful and attractive, she lives in a beautiful apartment with sweeping views of Sydney. However, since the recent death of her beloved grandmother, she's been struggling to come to terms with her grief. When sorting through her grandmother’s belongings she uncovers some love letters and an old diary with the name ‘Maggie Abbott’ on the front, detailing her romance with a young soldier. Maggie’s name is unfamiliar to her, and the last pages of the diary are ripped out, leaving Poppy at a loss of how this love story ended.

Prague, 1943. Taken from her home in Prague, Hana Lederova finds herself imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto of Theresienstadt, where she is forced to endure appalling deprivation and the imminent threat of transportation to the east. When she attracts the attention of the Czech gendarme who becomes her guard, Hana reluctantly accepts his advances, hoping for the protection she so desperately needs. Sydney, 2010. Manipulated into a liaison with her married boss, Tessa knows she needs to end it, but how?

World War II is over, and Hiroshima lies in a heap of poisoned rubble when young Quaker Wesley Cunningham returns home to Almond Tree. He served as a stretcher-bearer; he’s seen his fair share of horror. Now he intends to build beautiful houses and to marry, having fallen in love with his neighbour’s daughter, Beth Hardy. Beth has other plans. An ardent socialist, she is convinced the Party and Stalin’s Soviet Union hold the answers to all the world’s evils. She doesn’t believe in marriage, and in any case, her devotion is to the cause.

Two women from opposite ends of the earth begin corresponding by chance and start sharing the intimacies of their lives. An anguished email from Pamela Robinson in Australia to her ex-husband in Paris accidentally ends up in the inbox of New York State teacher Chrisanthi Woods. Chrisanthi is sympathetic to Pamela's struggles and the women begin to tell each other the stories and secrets of their lives. Pamela, responsible for raising her three sons, must re-invent the meaning of home following her divorce, and Chrisanthi, her dreams long dampened, must find home by leaving it.