Showing results by publisher "Bolinda audio" in Biographical Fiction

Melbourne, 1927. The summer flowers smell like Christmas the night Zara Dickins meets Harry Holt. Zara is wearing a dress she has designed and made herself. White organdie over a short black slip, with black embroidery and a crimson taffeta sash. It is party season and the university crowd are celebrating end-of-year exams. Zara loves dancing with the boys and flirting with them, but it's a game to her. Nothing serious. Until Harry. He plans to be a politician once he finishes law. She, a fashion designer, if she can find a way to break out of the secretarial pool.

She is a young maid in a stately home; he is a dashing British army officer trapped in an unhappy marriage. The pair strike up a close friendship and, just as he's departing for war, they surrender to their passion. Years later, he returns triumphant from defeating Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, to reunite not only with his wife and their two sons, but with the maid Mary Ann and their illegitimate daughter Elizabeth.

Mary Bligh is no shrinking violet. After an horrific six-month sea voyage from Britain, she proves to be as strong-willed as her father, the bloody-minded, newly appointed Governor William Bligh. The pair immediately scandalise Sydney with their personalities, his politics and her pantaloons. And when 300 armed soldiers of the Rum Rebellion march on Government House to depose him, the Governor is nowhere to be seen as Mary stands defiantly at the gates, fighting them back with just her parasol.

A woman approaching the ‘invisible years’ of middle age abandons her failing writing career to retrain as a chiropodist in the East Berlin suburb of Marzahn, once the GDR’s largest prefabricated housing estate. From her intimate vantage point at the foot of the clinic chair, she observes her clients and co-workers, listening to their stories with empathy and curiosity. Part memoir, part collective history, Katja Oskamp’s love letter to the inhabitants of Marzahn is a tender reflection on life’s progression and our ability to forge connections in the unlikeliest of places.

Can’t I Go Instead follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early 20th-century. When the daughter’s suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her father’s Japanese employees and shipped off to the United States. At the same time, her maidservant is sent in her mistress’s place to be a comfort woman to the Japanese Imperial army. Years of hardship, survival and even happiness follow.

1816. Mary, 18 years old, is staying in a villa on Lake Geneva with her lover Percy Shelley. She is tormented by his infidelities, haunted by the loss of her baby daughter. Then one evening with friends, as storms rage outside and laudanum stirs their imaginations, Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story, and something fierce and wild awakens in Mary. Memories surface of the long, strange summer she once spent with a family in Scotland, where she found herself falling in love with the enigmatic Isabella Baxter. She learned tales of mythical beasts, witches and spirits.

Britain, 1961. A beautiful blonde baby is born to Viscount Althorp, heir to the Spencer earldom. But Diana grows up amid the fallout of her parents’ messy divorce. She struggles at school. Her refuge throughout is romantic novels. She dreams of falling in love and being rescued by a handsome prince. In royal circles, there is concern about the Prince of Wales. Charles is nearing 30, and the right girl needs to be found fast. She must be young, aristocratic and completely free of past liaisons. Pure and innocent.

There was a Breaker Morant - he was executed at Pietersburg on 27 February 1902. His crime? Wilful murder of civilians. Yet to this day his guilt remains in doubt. Kit Denton's novel, The Breaker, does more than recount the facts and mystery surrounding Morant's death sentence. Full of action and set in three continents, it covers the entire range of the Breaker's activities. We see him as a champion horseman, a likeable larrikin, a popular balladist. We see him in love and in war. Then we see him face the firing squad that will end his life. Was he a cold-blooded killer or a scapegoat?

In turn of the century England, the Jolivet family leads a charmed existence. Daughter of a wealthy vineyard owner and a French pianist, vivacious Marguerite, the eldest of three, loves spinning stories and entertaining her family's well-connected friends. Marguerite, taking the stage name Rita, quickly draws the attention of legendary theatre producer Charles Frohman. From the West End to Broadway, and then in the new medium of silent film, her star burns brighter with every role. But soon, war is raging across Europe. Rita receives word from Inez that their brother is about to enlist.

In Melbourne a one-time research student with interests in philosophy and psychology is diagnosed with her third episode of psychosis. Based on real-life events, translated from Bengali by the award-winning Indian translator Arunava Sinha, Hospital is an extraordinary story that portrays the experience of psychosis and its treatments in an unflinching and understated way, while struggling more broadly with the definition of sanity in our society.

When Johno comes out of prison, he resolves never to go back again. But his new life is not easy, especially as he soon finds himself in sole charge of his strange young son, Danny. Danny isn't the kind of son he would have chosen, but, in caring for the boy, Johno finds new meaning and new direction. But what do you do when the world you've so carefully built comes crashing down? Can you ever escape your past?