Showing titles in Family Life

A woman's bungled act of kindness sparks a chain of events that reverberates through the generations uncovering secrets, lies and the biggest scientific controversy of the nineteenth century, the classification of the platypus. Two women, a century apart, are drawn into a mystery surrounding the...

Brought to you by Penguin. A novel from Eve Chase, author of The Glass House and The Birdcage. A glittering family. A Notting Hill house. Step into their secrets . . . Notting Hill, London. Lou Parker's famous mother walks out of their pink front door and doesn't return home by midnight, or the...

Escape to Italy with this sumptuous story of secrets and friendships under Mediterranean skies. A recipe for life should be a simple thing: love and happiness, family, friends and a little food. But life is rarely straightforward.... Alice wants to make the most of life - after all, she knows how fragile it can be - and knows she never feels more alive than when she's cooking. Babetta has spent a lifetime tending the garden of her tiny house on the Italian coast, supplying food to feed a family now grown and gone.

What happens when the one that got away comes back? Find out in this sparkling debut from Mhairi McFarlane. Rachel and Ben. Ben and Rachel. It was them against the world. Until it all fell apart. It’s been a decade since they last spoke, but when Rachel bumps into Ben one rainy day, the years melt away. They’d been partners in crime and the best of friends. But life has moved on: Ben is married. Rachel is not. Yet in that split second, Rachel feels the old friendship return. And along with it, the broken heart she’s never been able to mend.

A portrait of a vanishing world, and a love story for the ages - from the award-winning author of Lucky's. In the fading glow of Australia's print journalism era, The National is more than a newspaper: it's an institution, and the only place that George Desoulis has ever felt at home. A...

Alice Hamilton loved being a mature-age student, but now she's finished her university degree she needs to find herself a career. But the job market is tough, and it doesn't help that her partner, David, keeps reminding her about their sizable mortgage. When she's offered a role in a major real estate agency, she jumps at the opportunity. David is excited by her prospects in the thriving Melbourne housing market, and Alice is pleased that she'll be utilising her exceptional people skills. But Alice quickly realises all is not as it seems.

Ruby has always been the generous mediator among her friends, family and colleagues, which is why they have all turned up to celebrate her 50th birthday. But after a few too many glasses of champers, Ruby's speech doesn't exactly go to plan. Instead of delivering the witty and warm words her guests are expecting, Ruby takes her moment in the spotlight to reveal what she really thinks of every one of them. She also accuses her husband, Harry, of having an affair, and reads to the audience the evidence she found on his phone that very morning.

Florence Day is a ghost-writer with one big problem. She’s supposed to be penning swoon-worthy novels for a famous romance author but, after a bad break-up, Florence no longer believes in love. And when her strict (but undeniably hot) new editor, Benji Andor, won’t give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. Although when tragedy strikes and Florence has to head home, the last thing she expects to see is a ghost at her front door.

From Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail, a newly collected audiobook of his darkest stories, read by Juliet Stevenson, Cillian Murphy, Adrian Scarborough, Tamsin Greig, Stephanie Beacham and Andrew Scott. 'There is a pleasure sure in being mad, which none but madmen know.' Our greatest fear is of losing control - of our lives, but, most of all, of ourselves. In these 10 unsettling tales of unexpected madness master storyteller Roald Dahl explores what happens when we let go our sanity.

Diana McIntyre and her four boys have had a tough eighteen months but, with the love and support of her family, she believes their lives are finally back on track. Diana’s dream of starting a flower farm has been the perfect diversion, with an elderly dahlia expert showing her the ropes. She won’t have to do this alone. Locum pharmacist and single dad Ned Gardiner hasn’t called Victoria home for years. However, his father’s death forces Ned to return to the family farm, a place that holds few happy memories for him.

Every marriage has secrets. Everyone has flaws. Your wife isn't perfect - you know that - but then again nor are you. But now a serial killer is on the loose in your small town, preying on young women. Fear is driving your well-behaved young daughter off the rails, and you find yourself in bed late at night, looking at the woman who lies asleep beside you. Because you thought you knew the worst about her. The truth is you know nothing at all.

For Alice and Hanna, saint and sinner, growing up is a trial. There is their mother, who takes a divide-and-conquer approach to child-rearing, and their father, who takes an absent one. There is their older brother, Michael, whose disapproval is a force to be reckoned with. There is the catastrophe that is never spoken of but has shaped everything. As adults, Alice and Hanna must deal with disappointments in work and in love, as well as increasingly complicated family tensions and lives that look dismayingly dissimilar to what they'd intended.

On Christmas Eve, 1968, Cathy McLean receives a surprise visit from the lost love of her life and is forced to choose between the one that got away and the one that stayed. On Christmas Eve, 1993, Cathy’s daughter Helena is overjoyed to hear that her boyfriend is about to propose, until a devastating encounter threatens to bring her heartbreak instead of diamonds. On Christmas Eve 2023, a shocking discovery rocks Eve Quinn’s world. The only gift Eve wants this year is the truth. But will it take a Christmas miracle to unravel generations of secrets?

When the Bruny bridge is bombed, UN troubleshooter Astrid Coleman agrees to return home to help her brother before an upcoming election. But this is no simple task. Her brother and sister are on either side of politics, the community is full of conspiracy theories, her mother is fading and her father is quoting Shakespeare. Only on Bruny does the world seem sane. Until Astrid discovers how far the government is willing to go.

As if my mum breaking her hip and being rushed to hospital isn’t shocking enough for one day, now in her post-operative delirium, she’s just told me I’m not her daughter. That she has never been able to have children. The nurse reassures me that people are often confused after a trauma. But I know this woman so well and I can tell there’s a grain of truth in what she says. Which begs the questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? When I dig into the truth, I suddenly stir up a hornet’s nest of secrets, lies – and possibly a crime so unfathomable – that stretches back decades.

The six D’Aplièse sisters have each been on their own incredible journey to discover their heritage, but they still have one question left unanswered: who and where is the seventh sister? They only have one clue - an image of a star-shaped emerald ring. The search to find the missing sister will take them across the globe - from New Zealand to Canada, England, France and Ireland - uniting them all in their mission to complete their family at last.

Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her children and manage the family apple orchard; the other followed a dream and traveled the world to become a famous photojournalist. But when their beloved father falls ill, Meredith and Nina find themselves together again, standing alongside their cold, disapproving mother, Anya, who even now, offers no comfort to her daughters.

Is a fake boyfriend really just for Christmas? One fake romance. One magical Christmas. One chance to fall in love. Laura was all set for a quiet solo Christmas – just her, a bottle of wine, and flat-sitting for a stranger. But when the stranger’s parents mistake her for his mystery...

The view is a killer ... Darkly compelling and twisty psychological drama from a talented new Australian author. Perfect for readers who love Sally Hepworth, Pip Drysdale and Adele Parks. Will one mother's lie cost another woman her life? Sleep deprived, struggling and at breaking point...

It is 1911, and Jean is about to join the mass strike at the Singer factory. For her, nothing will be the same again. Decades later, Connie sews coded moments of her life into a notebook, as her mother did before her. More than 100 years after his grandmother's sewing machine was made, Fred unpicks the secrets of four generations, one stitch at a time.