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

Delphi Hoffman, a wildchild living in London, is finally getting her life together with a new love affair and the offer of a coveted job—until she receives the phone call she hoped would never arrive. Her mother Vivian’s terminal illness has reached its tipping point and she summons Delphi to Australia to help her euthanise. Unable to deny her mother’s suffering, or her promise to her of a good death, Delphi reluctantly returns to her mother for the last time.

Odessa Odin has it all—a successful career, an adoring husband and a close circle of friends to whom she is fiercely loyal. On the surface they're living a glittering London life of wealth and cosseted privilege, but underneath this veneer lies painful truths of betrayal, neglect and unfulfilled ambitions. It's a tightrope of holding themselves and their marriages together as their men transgress the promises they made at the alta. For the women, there's just too much to lose. When Odessa discovers her husband is having an affair, her carefully constructed life falls away.

Flora's teenage crush, Mitch, is standing at the altar when his bride has a sudden change of heart. Decades earlier, in the same church, a similar story of heartbreak played out. From the rolling green hills of the Tablelands to the crowded streets of Shanghai on the eve of the Second World War, this beautiful romantic saga asks the question - do we ever get over our first love, and is it ever too late to make amends?

There is much that heavily pregnant Grace still doesn't know about her new husband King's background. So, when word comes that King's father is dying, Grace is eager to accompany him to his childhood home, Blackwater, located in a remote part of Tasmania. Things go badly from the start. The house is in terrible repair, King's dying father yells at Grace to leave and King's twin sister, Ruth, seems disturbed by Grace's presence. After his father's death, King convinces Grace they must stay and help Ruth settle the estate, but as time stretches on he grows strange and distant.

A secret band of radical environmentalists, under the name 9S have spent years secretly infiltrating industry and government, working themselves into the most trusted jobs...sleepers ready to act. As a series of global catastrophes erupt, Australian ex-CIA agent Dr. Tori Swyft, finds herself at the centre of it all. Having once been briefly recruited as a 9S member at university, she may be the world's only chance of stopping the threat before it's too late.

Van Diemen's Land, 1826. Bridget Crack, a desperate convict, flees the cruelty of her master into the impenetrable Tasmanian wilderness. Saved from certain death by Matt Sheedy and his fellow bushrangers, her precarious existence among the volatile and murderous men is a different kind of hell. Hunted by soldiers, at the mercy of killers, and surrounded by roaring river and towering columns of rock, what will she have to do to survive?

At seventeen, Maeve is naively single-minded about pursuing a life in the theatre. After a rigorous audition process, she secures a position at one of the most competitive drama schools in the country. Leaving behind the security of her childhood home in Queensland, Maeve moves to Melbourne and devotes herself to the course. The expectations of the faculty are made clear from the outset: to avoid failure, the process must be adhered to without question and, as the youngest student at the drama, Maeve knows she must gain life experience in order to support it.

Set in southern Tasmania, the linked stories in Smokehouse bring into focus a small community and capture those moments when life turns and one person becomes another. As we get to know these characters—a mother whose fresh start leads to a fractured future, a stonemason seeking connection, a woman grieving her adopted mother, a couple torn apart by their daughter's drug addiction—we learn how their lives intersect, in various ways, across time and place.

A small garrison of Australian soldiers is left to defend a town and its people against the might of the Japanese forces. This is a story of those who were left behind and those who waited for them to return.

It’s the summer of 1968, and Evelyn Lynden is a woman at war with herself. Minister’s daughter. Atheist. Independent woman. Frustrated wife. Bitch with a bleeding heart. Following her conscientious-objector husband, Lenny, to the rural Eden of Evergreen Valley, California, Evelyn wants to be happy with their new life. Yet she finds herself disillusioned with Lenny’s passive ways - and anxious for a saviour. Enter the Reverend Jim Jones, the dynamic leader of a revolutionary new church....

Eighteen-year-old Aaron is charismatic, resourceful and addicted to heroin. His mum has kicked him out of home in a last-ditch move to help him get straight, and he wanders the streets of South Melbourne, living on his wits and sleeping rough–all the while chasing drugs, dreams and love. Desperate to fund his addiction, Aaron climbs into the car of The Man, a distinguished elderly gentleman willing to pay for a certain kind of relationship.

Greta's partner, Joel, grew up with five brothers and a sister in a feisty household on an isolated NT property. But he doesn't talk about those days - not the deaths of his sister and mother, nor the origin of the scars that snake around his body. Now, many years later, he returns with Greta and their three young boys to prepare the place for sale. The boys are quick to settle in, and Joel seems preoccupied with work, but Greta has a growing sense of unease, struggling in the build-up's oppressive heat and living in the shadow of the old, burned-out family home.

After years away from his hometown of Melbourne, Luke Harris is back on track. All he wants is a normal job, his own house and a dog. But Luke is a man with a past, where life was anything but peaceful and his skills ran to the dark side. A past not easily forgotten - or forgiven. When he crosses paths with Gus Alberici—the brutal criminal he worked for as a teenager—he's dragged reluctantly back to his old life. Luke's father has vanished, along with a chunk of Gus's cash. And something is up with his new girlfriend's father ...

On a Monday afternoon as Miranda Jack waits at traffic lights, a stranger jumps into her car and points a gun at her chest. Forced to drive at high speed up the motorway, Miranda listens to the man’s frantic, paranoid rants, claiming he's being chased and that they're both now running for their lives. Two hours later, Miranda is safe but she can't simply walk away - not without knowing the truth about that terrifying drive....

Elizabeth posts a ‘room for rent’ notice in Trevor’s bookshop and is caught off-guard when Trevor answers the advertisement himself. She expected a young student, not a middle-aged bookseller whose marriage has fallen apart. But Trevor is attracted to Elizabeth’s house because of the empty shed in her backyard, the perfect space for him to revive the artistic career he abandoned years earlier. The face-blind, EH Holden-driving Elizabeth is a solitary and feisty book editor, and she accepts him, on probation.

Meet Celia Stone, the ultimate hyper-organised, journal-obsessed thirty-something with a life that is perfectly planned out and running like clockwork. From her promising writing career to her devoted partner and rigorous fitness routine, Celia has it all–and she's right on track with her early retirement plan. But when her husband suggests it's time to start a family, Celia begins to question whether a new addition might just throw off-course everything she's worked so hard to achieve.

Duy, Phong, Minh, and Edmond have been best friends since childhood. Now, as young men running their families' formidable businesses, they make up Saigon's most powerful group of friends in 1928 Vietnam's elite society. Until one of them is murdered. In a lavish mansion on a hill in Dalat, all four men have gathered for an evening of indulgence, but one of them won't survive the night.

Tishtar runs a small legal practice in Melbourne where he has a new client, Habiba, who seeks to bring her orphan nieces to Australia from war-torn Somalia. He is also a migrant, having left the civil unrest in Iran to find a new life in a new country. As Tishtar becomes consumed with Habiba's tales of war-torn Somalia, his own childhood memories return and he reflects on the time he spent at his grandmother's house to escape the atrocities that unravelled post the Islamic Revolution.

When Malika, a young orphan in rural Pakistan, is savagely attacked, her face is left disfigured and her self-esteem destroyed. Haunted by the assault, she hides from the world, finding solace in her mathematical theories. A few years later, her intellectual brilliance is discovered and she leaves conflict-stricken Pakistan for a better education in Melbourne, where she finds herself placed with Kate - a successful plastic surgeon facing emotional insecurities of her own.

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.