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

Alice Montgomery goes missing in 2015. Seven years later, her best friend Hannah is bouncing from job to job, city to city, forever feeling the need to outrun something, but unsure what. With the niggling need to move nipping at her heels, Hannah decides to return home–a small coastal town in Western Australia–for the first time since she left, to help her mum after surgery and confront their fractured relationship.

Reggie Macleod had her life sorted. As a kid in a small school with only twelve students; she vowed she was going to live in the city and be something important. And she'd followed her dream. Then her world changed with one phone call from her brother. Returning to River Styx, the cattle property where she grew up on the New England Tablelands, Reggie came home to help after her parents barely survived a car accident. It was only going to be for a couple of months … that was almost three years ago.

While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry.

Sarah and Hannah are on a cruise from San Diego, California, to Sydney, Australia. Sarah, Hannah's grandmother, is returning to the country of her birth, a place she hasn't seen since boarding the USS Mariposa in 1945. Then she, along with countless other war brides, sailed across the Pacific to join the American servicemen they had married during World War II. Now Hannah is the same age Sarah was when she made her first journey and, in hearing Sarah tell the story of her life, realises the immensity of what her grandmother gave up.

After many months of grief over her brother's illness and death, journalist Zara Ellison is finally ready to begin a new chapter of her life and make a commitment to her boyfriend, Senior Constable Jack Higgins. But when she's assigned to investigate the Barker arrest, Jack begins to believe that Zara is working against him.

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.

Meet the Jansen family: Since the weekend of the party–the one twenty-two year old Liv can’t remember, the one that left her covered in bruises–she’s been locked out of her bedroom by a padlock. Her parents are behaving oddly and her best friend won’t respond to her texts. Maybe she really was out of control that night. The guilt is getting to her father, Janus. He brought his family from Australia to L.A. to chase his dream of seeing his novel on the big screen, and he can’t let them down. Not again. But he’s not sure he can do what is necessary to keep this secret hidden.

John Devereaux, an SAS Warrant Officer, is seconded to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and handed a mission that will test him to his very core. The operationally deniable mission: infiltrate into Cambodia via parachute from 37,000 feet in the dead of night and assassinate two high-value targets, alone, and with dozens of enemy soldiers in his way.

In a near future all identity information is encoded in digital language. Nations know where everyone is, all the time. Not everyone agrees with this constant surveillance, and when the system is hijacked and shut down, all global borders are closed. The world is no longer connected, and there is no back-up plan to establish belonging, ownership or trade. Scarlet Friday, whose job is to correct historical record, is stranded on the wrong side of the globe.

An unexpected death finds Lizzie, Alice and Margot at various crossroads in their lives, torn between looking back and moving on. Lizzie is reeling from a decades-old discovery that changes everything she thought she knew about her friends, her family and her marriage. Alice has always been the good-time girl, as charismatic presenting the weather on television as she is working as a life model. But decades of piecemeal gigs have left her with a safety net that is rapidly unravelling.

Fire in the Head addresses a deep taboo in Australian society—the legacy of child sexual abuse and what victims must endure to bring perpetrators to justice.

A traumatised journalist is given a dream assignment—track down the mayor of a remote and mysterious town whose citizens are reported to be the happiest people on earth. Journeying into a harsh and inhospitable landscape, she overcomes many obstacles before arriving in Silver Springs, the place whose citizens live according to the ancient philosophy of Stoicism and where she has been granted three days to interview the mayor.

Beatrix is a loner. She has a love-hate relationship with her one friend, Ray, a hate-hate relationship with everyone else in her office and a genuine attachment to a stuffed canary named Horatio. She drinks alone far too much. Lately she's been finding the edge of the railway platform dangerously seductive. Her life needs to change. Then she crosses paths with an old woman who seems to be stalking her, and that's exactly what happens. Eighty-something Fred is smart, earthy, funny and not the harmless elderly lady she appears to be. She is, in fact, quite literally something else. But what?

Griffin Callahan and Olivia Dawson were inseparable. Everyone in town knew it. But when Griff went off to Ag College, Liv told him it was over and fled her family's farm to study law. Griff had never understood her reasons but eventually accepted that first loves don't last. Until now. Currently back on the farm to help her twin brother with the harvest, Liv is the same gorgeous, laughing, hazel-eyed girl he'd always loved. Yet Griff can sense a difference, an uncertainty playing beneath the surface that wasn't there before.

Sydney journalist Chloe Brown is left devastated when her long-term boyfriend finally admits he never wants children. Impulsively, she takes a job on a small country newspaper in Queensland's far north to escape disappointment. But she soon realises that no place is free from trouble or heartache. The grouchy news editor, Finn Latimer, is a former foreign correspondent who has retreated after a family tragedy. Emily, the paper's elegant, 60-something owner, is battling with her husband's desertion. Meanwhile, the whole town is worried when their popular young baker disappears.

When best-selling author, 29-year-old Hayley Stevens, walked in on her husband, Paul, and her best friend in bed together, she knew her life would never be the same again. One year later, Hayley stowed her last bag in her much-loved Audi Coupe and said good-bye to the city. She was excited to be heading west to Lochway, a small colonial village sitting on the beautiful Macdonald River. Wanting peace and quiet, Hayley had impulsively bought a cosy sandstone cottage there surrounded by lush rose gardens, with a small overseer's cottage - ideal for a writer's retreat.

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.

Two sisters are brutally separated by war in tragic circumstances. Ania is imprisoned and forced to endure the atrocities of a Nazi concentration camp. Danuta’s search for her sister leads her into the dangers of the Polish Underground. Each will do what they must to survive long enough to find each other. Their dream of being reunited is crushed in shocking circumstances. In an astonishing twist of fate, the opportunity for revenge presents itself 60 years later.

In Darkwater, being female doesn't amount to much. But Chelsea's luckier than most. She's the young lover of the town's feared leader, which she keeps telling herself is a good thing, what with food getting scarce and the wells drying up. She's secure and safe and can almost believe she's happy. But when a stranger rides into town, gun on one hip, whip on the other, Chelsea can't look away. Especially when it turns out this stranger is a woman. Nobody can say what the stranger is there for. But she brings talk of an outside perhaps no longer so chaotic, no longer something to hide away from.

Raised by her severe parents in a punitive and authoritarian church, Ellen Wells is entirely unprepared for life in the modern world. When things become intolerable at home, she escapes and, striking out on her own, makes a completely new start. Ellen lands a job as a teacher in a girls' school and gradually finds peace in that community and in her solitary life. To begin with, she is painfully shy, but when she meets Gordon, a fellow teacher, she responds with curiosity and, before long, pleasure. Three years later, a knock on the door changes everything.