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

Mai and Hikaru went to school together in the city of Nagoya, until Hikaru disappeared when they were 18. It is not until 10 years later, when Mai runs into Hikaru's mother, Hiromi Sato, that she learns Hikaru has become a hikikomori, a recluse unable to leave his bedroom for years. In secret, Hiromi Sato hires Mai as a 'rental sister', to write letters to Hikaru and encourage him to leave his room.

Twenty-six-year-old Nicole Najim is struggling to find herself after a painful breakup, just when she thought she was going to settle down. Working a dead-end job in the family car dealership and at a loose end, she picks up her camera and returns to the melting pot of Sydney’s West to rediscover her roots. When she catches up with childhood friend, Danny, who makes his living in a shadowy underworld, their relationship intensifies just as the law starts to close in.

How can we know the truth of our own lives? This question troubles Matilda, as she looks back on her time with her foster brother, Sem. Matilda remembers long hours at the swimming pool. Celeste, a girl who lived downstairs. Sem disappearing for hours, then days. Her father yelling in the driveway. A car coming to take Sem away. Five years later, Sem is now a memory she has locked away. Until, at a party, she reconnects with Celeste and then Sem and the three of them move to Eden. As the summer drags on, Sem starts disappearing again.

Meet Dorcas, a spirited 12-year-old struggling to contain her irrepressible humour and naughty streak in a family of Christadelphians in 1960s Adelaide. She is her mother's least favourite child and always at the bottom of the order on the family's string of beads that she and her younger siblings Ruthy and Caleb reorder according to their mother's ever-changing moods.

A family favours their son over their daughter. Shan attends university before making his fortune in Australia, while Yannie must find menial employment and care for her ageing parents. After her mother’s death, Yannie travels to Sydney to become enmeshed in her psychopathic brother’s new life, which she seeks to undermine from within.... This is a novel that rages against capitalism, hetero-supremacy, mothers, fathers, families - the whole damn thing.

This could be any small town. It aches under the heat of summer. It flourishes in the cooler months. Everyone knows everyone. Their families, histories and stories are interwoven and well-known by one and all. Or at least, they think they are. But no one sees anything quite the same way. Perceptions differ, truths are elusive, judgements have outcomes and everything is connected. For better or for worse.

Thirteen-year-old Audrey is a talented young football player. But does she want to play for Australia or does she just want to please her father, Ben, whose own thwarted sporting career looms large in his ambitions for his daughter? Audrey's mother, Jonica, doesn't know whether to be more concerned about her anxious daughter, her overbearing husband, or the only other girl on the team, Katerina, who is causing trouble on and off the field.

Every couple has a story. How they met, how they fell in love–their ups, their downs. What made them want to be in each other's arms day and night. The struggle of family expectations. The need to please each other, the desire to go their separate ways. It is about the private universe between two people as they try to hold to each other despite the barriers of geography, culture and class. Every couple has a beginning, a middle, and maybe an end.

Astronomer Lucy Rutherford is celebrating the refurbishment of the 100-year-old telescope in the Yarra Valley town of Bowness, Victoria. Her husband, Justin, is running for parliament, on a platform of responsibility and progress. But Lucy isn't interested in being a politician's wife. She plans to leave him once he's won the election. Her biggest concern is how her eleven-year-old daughter, Gabby, will take the news. Or does Gabby already know?

Delphi Hoffman, a wildchild living in London, is finally getting her life together with a new love affair and the offer of a coveted job—until she receives the phone call she hoped would never arrive. Her mother Vivian’s terminal illness has reached its tipping point and she summons Delphi to Australia to help her euthanise. Unable to deny her mother’s suffering, or her promise to her of a good death, Delphi reluctantly returns to her mother for the last time.

Odessa Odin has it all—a successful career, an adoring husband and a close circle of friends to whom she is fiercely loyal. On the surface they're living a glittering London life of wealth and cosseted privilege, but underneath this veneer lies painful truths of betrayal, neglect and unfulfilled ambitions. It's a tightrope of holding themselves and their marriages together as their men transgress the promises they made at the alta. For the women, there's just too much to lose. When Odessa discovers her husband is having an affair, her carefully constructed life falls away.

Australian soldier Toohey returns from Baghdad in 2003 with shrapnel in his neck, crippled by PTSD and white-knuckling life. In the Iraq of a decade earlier, aspiring pianist Nasim falls from favour with Saddam Hussein and his psychopathic son Uday, triggering a perilous search for safety. In Melbourne as the millennium turns, Robbie, faced with her father’s dementia and the family silences that may never find voice, tests boundaries. And in the present day, Gerry seeks to escape his father Toohey’s tyranny and heal its wounds.

Europe, 1940s: Imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, Spanish fighter and photographer Mateo Baca is ordered to process images of the camp and inmates for a handful of photo books being made for presentation to top Nazi figures. Just five books in total, or so the officials think. Mateo manages to make a secret sixth book and, with the help of a local woman, Lena Lang, it remains hidden until the end of the war.

In 1917, while the world is at war, Alma falls pregnant, and her daughter, Molly, is born in secret. In 1952, Anna enters a Salvation Army home for unmarried mothers, determined to keep her baby. In 1975, Cathy is living with David, determined not to get married, but when she falls pregnant a new chapter is added to this family story. Interweaving the intimate lives of three generations of Australian women, this is a tale about secrets, motherhood, adoption and the untold stories that shape us.

Anna, 62, is the victim of a terrorist attack in which eleven others were murdered. Nat, 35, is an Army veteran who fought in Afghanistan. They have so little in common. And so much. A friendship stirs between them, tentative and unlikely, its foundation the violence they have seen and the memories that stalk them. Together, they begin to search for a way back home. But when Nat's wife falls unexpectedly pregnant, terrible ghosts from his wartime past rise up and much more than a friendship is at stake.

On the morning of her wedding, 24-year-old Beth Shaw drives down the peninsula to the Portsea Hotel. She is uneasy and confused because she has just learnt something devastating about her fiancé, Jordan, that completely changes her view of him. As Beth’s old schoolmates and her relatives arrive for the big day at the bayside idyll, Beth contemplates her childhood in suburbia. She worshipped the school relay runners, one of whom was Jordan’s high school sweetheart. Painful memories of earlier disloyalties and betrayals resurface.

Evie Shine is adrift. After two decades of marriage, her husband has left her. Possibly for another woman. He isn’t saying. That Evie has spent her career dissecting relationships and mending broken hearts doesn’t help at all—it just makes everything worse. How did she not see this coming? And what’s she meant to do now? Her own worst client, Evie ignores all useful advice and chooses platitudes, wine and hangovers over the prospect of moving on. But soon she realises that the beauty of having the rug ripped from under you is getting to see exactly what’s underneath.

When Paula finds her husband's shameful secrets on his mobile phone, and Facebook puts her teenage daughter at the centre of a high-school scandal, she does the only thing that makes sense to her: she runs away from it all. Taking her kids and elderly father, she heads off on a road trip across Australia with one rule: no technology allowed. It's time to get back to basics, reclaim her life and learn how to be a family again.

On the cusp of summer, 1986, Rowan Brockman's mother asks if he can come home to Septimus in the Western Australian Wheatbelt to help with the harvest. Rowan's brother Albert, the natural heir to the farm, has died, and Rowan's dad's health is failing. Although he longs to, there is no way that Rowan can refuse his mother's request as she prepares the farm for sale.

Estranged sistes—Eva and Elisabeta Novak—have not spoken since Eva’s young daughter, Gracie, was killed in a road accident. More than a decade later, and long after Eva has moved overseas, Elizabeta calls, insisting that Eva return home. But when Eva arrives at her sister’s house, she discovers that Elizabeta is dead. Eva finds that she has been appointed the executor of Elizabeta’s estate, and as she undertakes the monumental task of clearing out the house, she comes to know her sister again through the objects and documents that she encounters.