Showing results by publisher "Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd" in Coming of Age

Ned West dreams of sailing across the river on a boat of his very own. To Ned, a boat means freedom – the fresh open water, squid-rich reefs, fires on private beaches – a far cry from life on Limberlost, the family farm, where his father worries and grieves for Ned's older brothers. They're away fighting in a ruthless and distant war, becoming men on the battlefield, while Ned – too young to enlist – roams the land in search of rabbits to shoot, selling their pelts to fund his secret boat ambitions.

As the long summer holiday stretches ahead, with her older sister more interested in boys, her mother disappearing on long walks and her father, beer in hand, watching the cricket, the youngest in the family often finds herself alone. At the beach, she meets Kahu, a boy who tells her a tragic story. A couple of years ago, a little girl went missing, presumed drowned. But no one ever found her body. Suddenly, the summer has purpose—they will find the missing girl and become local heroes.

Charlie Knight's life was supposed to be spectacular. Instead, he's in his late thirties, and still playing tennis against the same people every Friday night. Still jogging the same streets every morning. Still treating the same patients every day—fixing the high blood pressure and arthritic knees of folks who've known him since he was a kid. But Charlie has a secret plan to escape. A plan to live the life he was destined to, even if the woman he was meant to do it with has left him behind.

Giacomo Brolo, aka Jack, is a mess. He works piecemeal construction gigs in remote WA, drinks himself to oblivion and is estranged from his family and friends. He's consumed by a self-loathing all too common for closeted men who have grown up in a world of hate and shame. But then Jack returns to his regional hometown of Geraldton for a family wedding. He hasn't been back since he fled at the age of eighteen, and his past soon catches up with him.

As a prospective barrister, Zaid Saban is on the cusp of achieving everything he has dreamed of. His social and professional world is far removed from his schoolyard days in the suburbs of western Sydney, even more far removed from the traumatic events of his final year of school in which best friend, Hass, was arrested for murder. Zaid thinks he has put all this behind him. But when Hass’s sister, Amira, finds him and asks him to read her brother’s diary, Zaid is pulled back to the very world he had left behind. Is it possible that Hass was innocent?

In the aftermath of their mother's death, the Tetley siblings' lives are falling apart. Left to fend for themselves as their family farm goes to ruins, Rose sets out to escape the grief and mess of home. When she meets Noongar Elders Patsy and Herbert, she finds herself drawn into a home where she has the chance to discover the strength of community, and to heal a wound her family has carried for a generation.

Hera Stephen is clawing through her mid-twenties, working as an underpaid comment moderator in an overly air-conditioned newsroom by day and kicking around Sydney with her two best friends by night. Instead of money or stability, she has so far accrued one ex-girlfriend, several hundred hangovers, and a dog-eared novel collection.

It's 1965 and Joe Cluny is living in a working-class suburb with his mom, Marion, and sister, Ruby, spending his days trying to avoid trouble with the nuns at the local Catholic primary school. One evening his Aunty Oona appears on the doorstep, distressed and needing somewhere to stay. As his mom and aunty work out what to do, Joe comes to understand the secrets that the women in his family carry, including on their bodies. Yet their pleas for assistance are met with silence and complicity from all sides. Who will help Joe's family at their time of need?

A deeply funny novel about chasing your dreams and losing your ambition, Very Impressive for Your Age explores the mid-twenties crisis that occurs when you learn that who you always wanted to be when you grew up isn't quite what you imagined.

Jaxie dreads going home. His mum’s dead. The old man bashes him without mercy, and he wishes he was an orphan. And then, in one terrible moment, his life is stripped to little more than what he can carry and how he can keep himself alive. There’s just one person left in the world who understands him and what he still dares to hope for. But to reach her he’ll have to cross the vast saltlands on a trek that only a dreamer or a fugitive would attempt.

Alex and Leah meet at medical school and form an immediate and intense connection. Over the course of four years as they are caught in the push-pull of love and betrayal, longing and reunion, neither can quite give up the other, even as they question whether they are good for each other. Twenty years later, when Alex and Leah encounter each other again, will they make the right choice?

Meet Daniel Nour: Egyptian and Australian; loud and painfully awkward; conservative and very confused (especially about other boys). He's never quite pulled off normal, but 'not-normal' is where the best stories are. Now he's made his peace with that and is ready to share his wisdom. Told as a series of snapshots from Daniel's life–from 'How to Be Born' to 'How to Die' and everything in between–this is a sharply funny tale of culture, family and trying, but not always managing, to come of age.

On an ordinary night in an ordinary year, Tommy Llewellyn's doting parents wake in a home without toys and nappies, without photos of their baby scattered about, and without any idea that the small child asleep in his crib is theirs. That's because Tommy is a boy destined to never be remembered. On the same day every year, everyone around him forgets he exists, and he grows up enduring his own universal Reset. That is until something extraordinary happens: Tommy Llewellyn falls in love. Determined to finally carve out a life for himself, Tommy sets out on a mission to finally trick the Reset.

86, and ‘beautiful, radical ideas’ are in the air. A young woman arrives in Melbourne to research the novels of Virginia Woolf. In bohemian St Kilda she meets artists, activists, students—and Kit. He claims to be in a "deconstructed" relationship, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, her work on the Woolfmother falls into disarray.

All Ellie Robertson has wanted to be since childhood is a painter: after all, that’s the easiest way to speak without actually having to say anything. But now she’s turning thirty, has had a major career win, and is only just realising that she might have let some minor things slide. Like, for instance, working out how to love another human being. So Ellie decides to do what any normal person would do: paint a portrait of each of her exes, from the childhood crush to the woman she may or may not still be madly in love with.

Michaela and Eve are two bright, bold women who befriend each other their first year at a residential college at university, where they live in adjacent rooms. They could not be more different: one, assured and popular - the other, uncertain and eager to please. But something happens one night in O-week - a drunken encounter, a foggy memory that will force them to confront the realities of consent and wrestle with the dynamics of power.

Twenty-one-year-old Olivia hears the world in colour, but her life is mottled grey. Estranged from her parents, and living with her grandfather who is drowning in sadness, Oli faces the reality of life beyond university alone. When she wakes on a boat with no recollection of how she got there, she accepts the help of two strangers who change the course of her future forever. With Mac and Maggie, Oli learns to navigate a life upon open ocean and the world flowers into colours she's never seen before.

It was a straightforward request. Take her gran home to her beloved Scotland. In the space of a few days, Elle loses her job and her home and faces moving back in with her parents - where she knows she'll hear a lot about how she is wasting her life, unlike her three siblings. Then Gran's will is read and everything changes.

After fleeing to Melbourne in the wake of a breakup, all Ana has to show for herself is an unfulfilling job at an overly enthusiastic tech start-up and one particularly questionable dating app experience. Then she meets Evan. Charming, kind and financially responsible, Evan is a complete aberration from her usual type, and Ana feels like she has finally awoken from a long dating nightmare. As much as she tries to let their burgeoning relationship unfold IRL, Ana just can't resist the urge to find Evan online.

Audrey Sweetman wakes up one morning next to her husband, excited for the promotion she's been working towards for years. But by nightfall, everything in her life has been upended. She escapes to the seaside village of Whitehaven Bay, but her plan to hide is derailed by her meddlesome new neighbours. The Coffin Cheaters bikie gang. A cranky pensioner with a habit of naked swimming. Shez, the dubious 'CEO' of the holiday flats. A mouthy teen who's nothing but trouble. And a handsome yet elusive retiree, Dr Flood.