Showing results by publisher "Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd" in Contemporary Fiction

Three children wake up in a basement room. They have been drugged and taken from their beds in the middle of the night. Now they are alone. Where are their parents? Who can they trust? The family has been betrayed to the government and Salt Cottage, their home on a clifftop above the ocean, is no longer safe. Their mother's scientific work has put them all in danger. To protect them, she must let them go. She must put her faith in an old family friend - and in her children's own resilience and courage.

A boy can’t be a bestie, can he? Mia and Jack are great friends - they live next door to each other and they like the same things. But what happens when everyone thinks he’s her boyfriend?

Lucy Briar has arrived home in turmoil after years overseas. She's met her fiancé in London and has her life mapped out, but something is holding her back. Hoping to ground herself and find answers, Lucy settles into once familiar routines. But old tortured feelings flood Lucy's existence when her beloved father, Ron, is hospitalised and Morgan - the man who drove her away all those years ago - seeks her out. Worse, Ron implores Lucy to visit Bitterwood Estate, the crumbling historic family guesthouse now left to him.

Hetty’s family was torn apart following the German invasion of the Netherlands. Rounded up by the Nazis and then separated from their parents, Hetty and her brothers were sent to the Children’s House, within Belsen concentration camp. As one of the eldest, Hetty became the ‘Little Mother’, helping to care for not only her siblings, but the other children as well.In a direct and powerful style, Hetty recalls one of the remarkable, largely untold stories of the Holocaust – the extraordinary struggle and survival of this group of children through those terrible years.

One crumbling grand manor house, a family in decline, five generations of women and an attic full of beautiful clothes with secrets and lies hidden in their folds.... Failed fashion designer Sylvie Dearlove is coming home to England - broke, ashamed and in disgrace - only to be told her parents are finally selling their once grand, now crumbling country house, Bledesford, the ancestral home of the Dearlove family for countless generations.

Here's a comic story of modern love and life when you're 20-something, single, and male. It is the mess Jon Marshall makes of his life when it stops making sense – a comedy of fallibility and misjudgements.

In the warm alkaline waters of the public bath a headstrong young engineer accidentally collides with a beautiful actress. From this innocent collision of flesh begins a passion that takes them from the Wiltshire Downs to the most elemental choices of life and death in the Australian desert. Their intense romance is but part of the daring story that unfolds.

With their father there’s always a catch.... Colt Jenson and his younger brother, Bastian, have moved to a new, working-class suburb. The Jensons are different. Their father, Rex, showers them with gifts - toys, bikes, all that glitters most – and makes them the envy of the neighbourhood. To Freya Kiley and the other local kids, the Jensons are a family from a magazine and Rex a hero - successful, attentive, attractive, always there to lend a hand.

A sleek high-speed train glides silently through the French countryside, bearing Michael, an Australian writer, and his travelling world of memory and speculation. Melbourne, 1946, calls to him: the pressure cooker of the city during World War II has produced a small creative miracle, and at this pivotal moment the lives of his newly married parents, a group of restless artists, a proud old woman with a tent for a home, a journalist, a gallery owner, a farmer and a factory developer irrevocably intersect.

When Celia Inverarity, aged 17, is found brutally murdered in a secluded West Auckland park one Sunday afternoon, Paul Prior, her English teacher and mentor, is suspected of being her murderer. Celia's death and the violence which follows send Prior back to examine the past - a past that is as secret as his father's den in the old poison shed. Eventually the murderer is exposed, but not before a family has been split apart and old wounds revealed.

On a sweltering day in a clifftop beach shack, Jack and Lou Bright grow suspicious about the behaviour of their charismatic, unpredictable father, Charlie. A girl they know has disappeared, and as the day unfolds, Jack's eruptions of panic, Lou's sultry rebellions and their little sister Phoebe's attention-seeking push the family towards revelation.

Cate Perry’s future couldn’t look brighter. She’s learning about life on the land, and has just completed her first solo flight over the vast Northern Territory cattle station she calls home. And she’s falling in love - with handsome, gentle Alf. Then a tragic freak accident changes Cate’s life forever. Grief and shame drive her to Tamworth, where she meets the talented Nat and quickly stumbles into a singing career. But fame begins to take its toll and, just when Cate least expects it, Alf steps back into her life. Will Alf and Cate face up to their feelings, or forever live with the consequences?

The irrepressible Russell "Buffy" Buffery has upped sticks from London and moved to Knockton, Powys, to a B&B inherited from an old flame. With his future spread before him, and a string of failed marriages behind him, Buffy decides it's time for a new challenge. Meanwhile: Harold's wife has run off with a younger woman leaving him alone with his as-yet-unwritten novel narrated by Mary Pickford's cat; Amy's weedy boyfriend has turned out to be not so needy after all; and Andy's partner's corset-and-suspender-clad attempts at seduction are having anything but the desired effect.

It's 1931, and Belle Bartholomew has arrived in rural Sweet Wattle Creek to claim her inheritance - a run-down grand hotel formerly owned by Martha Ambrose. Determined to solve the mystery of her birth and the reason why she was bequeathed the hotel, Belle runs into difficulties with the townsfolk and their desire to keep their secrets safe. Sixty years later Sophie Matheson is on a quest to find Belle and her family after discovering the wedding dress. The Sweet Wattle Creek centenary brings more challenges when her past catches up.

Revenge, redemption...and pastry. The witty new novel from the author of Hotel du Barry. In the winter of 1912 on the wild West Coast of Tasmania, Wolfftown's most notorious heiress and murderess, Sasha Torte, tells the tale of her own spectacular downfall. Forsaken by her parents and raised by criminals and reprobates, Sasha becomes a world-famous pastry chef at the tender age of 17. Entanglement with the disreputable Dasher brothers leads to love, but also to a dangerous addiction.

From the steps of the Sydney Opera House came international acclaim... but at a price. All young Lizzy wants to do is sing, ride the boundaries of her family's Queensland property and dream of one day performing on stage. But when a freak storm hits the area, wreaking havoc and bringing tragedy, she swears never to sing another note. Lizzy, however, has a voice as uplifting as the pure beauty of the song of the bellbirds, and others are not quite so willing to let her remarkable talent go to waste.

There are certain things that Yuri Zipit knows: that being official food taster for the leader of the Soviet Union requires him to drink too much vodka for a 12-year-old. That you do not have to be an elephantologist to see that the great leader is dying. That Marshal Bruhah has been known to eat his own children while Comrade Krushka is fit only to run a slaughterhouse and that one of them has Yuri's father somewhere here in the Dacha. That it's a crime to love your family more than you love Socialism, the Party or the Motherland.

Isabel Murrow is precariously balancing her career and her family. Hard-working and caring, worried but supportive, all Isobel wants, in a perilous world of bullies and temptations, is to keep her daughter Phoebe safe. Phoebe has just attempted suicide. She says it is Isabel's fault. Saving Phoebe Murrow is a timely tale about an age-old problem - how best to raise our children, and how far to go in keeping them from harm.

'A man's eye is accommodative, like his heart.' Samuel Browne's wife has left him suddenly after just three years of marriage. She invites him to 'go live a better life without me'. He must start again, and alone. And so it is that Sam finds himself deep in the English countryside in a cold but characterful old house, remote and encircled by hills, in the employment and company of an older, wiser man, a man as fond of mystery as he is of enlightenment.

Julia Merton is determined to go to Paris to live as an artist, and she will not let her humble origins stand in her way. In a city gone mad over its first royal visitor, she seizes an unexpected opportunity, and soon the only thing standing between Julia and her dream of independence is a disturbingly handsome rake named Edward Longfield....