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

Feeling alienated from wider society, Sara, Abida and Naeem gravitate towards their university's Muslim Students' Association. Within its austere confines, Sara watches Naeem. Over time, the pair commence a furtive relationship outside of the gaze of their families and peers. But Naeem is especially burdened by the widening gap between his public façade and their clandestine forays. As the MSA elections approach, Abida seeks to win the presidency at all costs, threatening her longstanding friendship with Sara and risking her reputation.?

Hannah Bird has just arrived in Thailand. Disoriented and out of her depth, she meets Deven, a fierce and gutsy Australian expat who sweeps her into thrilling adventures rescuing elephants. As they head deeper and deeper into the fraught world of elephant tourism, their lives become tangled in ways Hannah never imagined. But how far will they go to save a life? Hannah is about to make a critical decision from which there will be no turning back, with shattering consequences.

Felix Carrington helps run the family's wedding venue business as the in-house wedding photographer for Carrington Farm. His personal passion? Taking unexpected shots of his local environment. And it's through an unlikely and close friendship with 84-year-old Winnifred Knightly that Felix is able to access one of his favourite places to photograph, the faded grandeur of Peppercorn House and its overgrown gardens.

Bridget and Simone aren't friends. But their daughters are in the same dance troupe, so they're flying to Los Angeles for the girls to perform at Disneyland. Simone's daughter Zahra is indisputably a leader in the group, but Bridget's daughter Becky is a talent on the rise. Simone and her husband are accustomed to business class, but Bridget is less comfortable there. Both lonely women are surprised to find something in common, until Bridget discovers images of Zahra and other dancers that shock her. Are they exploitative or art?

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.

Mary Anne is haunted by the death of her sister and worn down by depression. She's not a good wife and she's not a good mother. Then, one morning, she wakes to find her life completely unfamiliar to her, and she leaves her family to become a country singer. Vivian vows to be nothing like her mother, Mary Anne. Wounded by her mother's lack of love and emancipated by her lack of attention, adolescent Vivian looks for knowledge in dark places: news reports about child murderers, fashion magazines, boys' bedrooms, and small acts of violence.

Family. It means everything to Sheridan. Her brother Lachy is finally home in Australia and she's excited about Easter with both of their families. But when a traumatic incident tears the families apart, she blames him. Lachy knows he's not coping right now but his sister doesn't have the full story. And nor does he. There are some gaps in his memory. How is he connected to a DNA request, a missing woman, and a hit and run? To untangle the truth, he must decide who he can trust. His friends? His family? Himself?

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.

Pasha Ivanov is a child of the Freeze, born in Moscow during Brezhnev's repressive rule. Night after night his parents and their friends gather to preserve the memory of terrifying Stalinist violence and to expose the continued harassment of dissidents. When Gorbachev promises glasnost, openness, 24-year-old Pasha longs to create art and to carry on the work of those who came before him. His search to find meaning leads him to assemble a fractured story of Russia's traumatic past.

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.

Five years ago, Kate's partner, Max, abandoned her for his pregnant lover. The affair has long since crumbled, but Kate has become fixated with Vee, her ‘replacement'. In a bid to find out what compelled Max to leave, she moves to Bridgewell, where Vee is now raising her four-year-old daughter, Iona. Warm and trusting, Vee is juggling work, single parenthood and a controlling ex-partner, Max, with whom she is still secretly sexually involved. When Vee meets charismatic artist, Tom, she is hopeful of establishing her first meaningful attachment since Max. But Kate has her own plans.

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.

Camille is a nurse specialising in supporting families through the difficult decision to donate the organs of their dying loved ones. Camille's mother is a gifted but uncompromising transplant surgeon determined to make it in a man's world until her own life falls apart. And Camille herself is a mother to Addie–five years old, critically ill and in desperate need of the very organs her mother and grandmother work with.

Fleeing Melbourne for a village in the Yorkshire Dales had felt right. Sanctuary, I'd thought. But nowhere is as straightforward as it first appears. When Giselle flees to the north Yorkshire village of Hollydale, she doesn't give much thought to what she might find there. She's more concerned with what she's leaving behind–a toxic marriage, the loss of her beloved sister, Lina, and the cloud of suspicion over the circumstances of Lina's death.

Helen and John are too preoccupied with making a mess of their marriage to notice the quiet ways in which their daughters are suffering. Junie grows up brittle and defensive, Anna difficult and rebellious. When 15-year-old Anna fails to come home one night, her mother's not too worried; Anna's taken off before but always returned. Helen waits three days to report her disappearance. But this time Anna doesn't come back....

Lily works as a cleaner. She moves through houses in inner-city Melbourne, unseen, scrubbing away the daily residue of other people’s privilege. Her partner Janks works the line in a local food factory. With every pay cheque, they inch further away from their former world of poverty and addiction. Lily and Janks are determined that their daughter Jewelee will have a different life. She’ll have a career, not a dead-end job. She’ll have savings, not debt. But precarious lives are easily upended.

A captivating literary journey that delves into the intertwined lives of a town, its people, and a region shaped by revolution and war.

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.

Thirteen-year-old Audrey is a talented young football player. But does she want to play for Australia or does she just want to please her father, Ben, whose own thwarted sporting career looms large in his ambitions for his daughter? Audrey's mother, Jonica, doesn't know whether to be more concerned about her anxious daughter, her overbearing husband, or the only other girl on the team, Katerina, who is causing trouble on and off the field.

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.