Showing results by publisher "Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd" in Family Life

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.

Bridie Farrell and Shaun Broderick come from opposite sides of the tracks. Bridie's family are perennial strugglers whilst the Brodericks are the wealthy owners of Jinjulu - one of the most prestigious properties in the district. Bridie has always longed to leave the small town she grew up in, but family responsibilities have kept her anchored there. Meanwhile, Shaun's dream of taking over the management of Jinjulu is dashed by his dictatorial father. who tries to rule Shaun's life both on and off the farm.

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.

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.

Meg's life is woven into the fabric of St. Stephens. It's a tapestry made of two precious children, a hidden truth, and a husband whose ideas of a perfect wife do not match her own. When Meg puts her foot down on a third kid, gets a job, and is empowered by the same book group that was meant to keep her in her place, her marriage begins to disintegrate. Set in a tiny Mormon community, this is a novel about resilience and courage – the fierceness of mother-love and the power that comes with never forgetting who you really are.

After weeks of grieving, a woman books a plane ticket bound for an old villa in the mountains of Abruzzo. Invited to stay with her friends Giulia and Fab—in the weeks before they marry in a village orchard—she lives for a summer in the house's Birthing Room, where generations of women once had their babies. More often, though, she lives in her head: in the past, trying to make sense of her grief and wondering how to go on, or if she can.

Schoolteacher Natalie has always been a city girl. When Nat takes up a posting at a tiny school in remote Western Australia, it proves quite the culture shock. But soon Natalie is welcomed by the inquisitive locals - particularly young student Billy and his intriguing single father, Drew. As Nat's school comes under threat of closure and Billy's estranged mother turns up out of the blue, Nat finds herself fighting for the township and battling with her heart.

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.

The Carrington family owns the only pub in the small country town of Kangaroo Ridge. It’s been eight years since the five siblings became orphans and since twins Sebastian and Tamara stepped up to look after their younger brothers and sister with the help of their aunt, Maddie. Seb and Tam gave up their teenage years to make sure the family stayed together, but that’s been hard and they’ve grown apart. Seb is silent and stoic; Tam, on the other hand, wants to kick over the traces and catch up on the life she missed out on.

When Winona Dalloway begins her day—in the peaceful early hours before her children, that ‘tiny tornado of little hands and feet', wake up—she doesn't know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed. On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices—a mind both wild and precise. And meanwhile, a storm is brewing …

Rose is in her eighties and has dementia, but she's not done with life just yet. Alternately sharp as a tack and spectacularly forgetful, she spends her days roaming the corridors of the aged-care facility, ruminating on the staff and residents and enduring visits from her emotionally distant children and grand-daughters. But when her friend is found dead—after an apparent fall from a window, Rose embarks on an eccentric and deeply personal investigation to discover the truth and—exposes all manner of secrets, even some from her own past.

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.

Since adolescence, 58-year-old Beth has lived her life with blinkers on, repressing the memory of a teenage trauma. Her mother, Marian, took control of that situation, and of all else in their family life—and as much as she could in the small town of Miner's Ridge as well. Now Marian is dead, and Beth, unemployed and in the middle of a humiliating divorce, is living with her gentle-hearted father in the family home. Beth feels obliged to take over her mother's involvement in the local town hall committee.

1944. Emily Dean is sent to stay with relatives in rural Victoria. With grandmother determined to keep up standards despite the effects of the war; Della, the Bible-quoting cook, and her young and fearless aunt Lydia, who refuses to befriend her, Emily just wants to go home. But things start looking up when she encounters Claudio, the Italian prisoner of war employed as a farm labourer. And then Lydia’s brother, William, unexpectedly returns from the war. Wounded and bitter, he’s rude, traumatised and mostly drunk, yet a passion for literature soon draws them together.

Meg and Nina are two sisters living very different lives. Meg is super organised and possibly OCD; Nina is so depressed she is living like a homeless person in her own flat and feels as though she has lost control of her life. As a result, she has become estranged from her family. But when Meg's repeated attempts to make contact with her eventually succeed, Nina can't refuse her request to head north with her and their younger sister Amber, whose drug addictions have torn the family apart.

For the first time in her seventy-nine years, Evie McCarthy is plagued by the smell of roses. Death is coming for her. Clear as day. She's lucky she has the gift of second sight. It's served her well as Ballyhay's matchmaker, and now she's being forewarned. She just wants enough time to help her daughter and granddaughters realise the important things in life. Her big-hearted granddaughter Rosie is in love again. Rosie's married sister, Molly, with two small boys, is sleep-deprived, exhausted and wondering what happened to her life. Motherhood isn't supposed to be like this, is it?

With two bright children, a beautiful home and a husband she's always depended on, Lilian Hogarth considers herself blessed. Until, on her son Jamie's final day of high school, he fails to come home. Hospitalised by a coward's punch, Jamie has been the victim of a muck-up day celebration that went too far. Lilian's support is unflinching, even as her world begins to crumble.

As conflict plays out across an unnamed region, its inhabitants deal with the fallout. Families are torn apart and brought together. A divide grows between those on either side of the war, compromises are struck as the toll of violence impacts near and far. We learn about those who are left behind and those who choose to leave in a great scattering. As the stories of those affected play out they weave together to show the whole of a society in the most extreme of circumstances. Even after the last shot is fired, their world will never recover.

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?

An estranged father. An abused and abusive mother. An army of relatives. A tapestry of violence, woven across generations and geographies, from Turkey to Lebanon to Western Sydney. This is the legacy left to Jamal Smith, a young queer Muslim trying to escape a past in which memory and rumour trace ugly shapes in the dark. When every thread in life constricts instead of connects, how do you find a way to breathe? Torn between faith and fear, gossip and gospel, family and friendship, Jamal must find and test the limits of love.