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

When East, a low-level lookout for a Los Angeles drug organisation, loses his watch house in a police raid, his boss recruits him for a very different job: a road trip - straight down the middle of white, rural America - to assassinate a judge in Wisconsin. Having no choice, East and a crew of untested boys - including his trigger-happy younger brother, Ty - leave the only home they've ever known in a nondescript blue van, with a roll of cash, a map and a gun they shouldn't have. Along the way, the country surprises East.

Once there was a widow with three sons, and their names were Black, Brown and Blue. Black was the eldest; moody and aggressive. Brown was the middle child, timid and dull. But Blue was his mother's favourite. And he was a murderer. Blueeyedboy is a brilliant: a dark and intricately plotted tale of a poisonously dysfunctional family, a blind child prodigy, and a serial murderer who is not who he seems. Told through posts on a web journal called badguysrock, this is a thriller that makes creative use of all the multiple personalities, disguise and mind games that are offered by playing out a life on the internet.

In a town of innumerable petrol stations, labyrinthine cul-de-sac streets, two competing shopping plazas and ubiquitous drive-thru franchises, where are these people likely to find the truth about their collective past - and can they do so before the town completely disappears?

Real estate developer Dharmen Shah’s offer to buy out the residents of Vishram Society - a formerly respectable, now crumbling apartment complex that abuts the infamous Dharavi slums - is more than generous. But one man stands in the way of Shah’s luxury high- rise: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher who will not leave his home in Vishram’s Tower A.

Francesca is Caro’s stepmother, and Pauly’s mother. A scientist, she can see what is going to happen. The high house was once her holiday home, now looked after by locals Grandy and Sally, she has turned it into an ark, for when the time comes. The mill powers the generator, the orchard is carefully pruned, the greenhouse has all its glass intact. Almost a family, but not quite, they plant, store seed and watch the weather carefully.

Mara’s island is one of stories and magic, but every story ends in the same way. She will finish her days on the cliff, turned to stone and gazing out at the horizon like all the islanders before her. Mara’s parents - a boxer and a ballerina - chose this enchanted place as a refuge from the turbulence of their previous lives: they wanted to bring up their children somewhere special and safe. But the island and the sea don’t care what people want, and when they claim a price from her family, Mara’s world unravels.

A woman washes ashore in Sicily. She has come from North Africa to find her son, taken from her when he was just days old by his father and stolen away to Berlin. With nothing but her maid’s uniform and a knife stashed in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers – some generous, some exploiting – to guide her passage north. These strangers tell of their encounters with a quiet, mysterious woman in a blue coat – each account a different view of the truth, a different truth.

Nathan Nelson is the average son of a genius. His father, a physicist of small renown, has prodded him toward greatness from an early age, but despite Samuel Nelson's efforts Nathan remains ordinary. Then, in the summer of 1987, everything changes. Nathan is involved in a terrible accident and falls into a coma. When he awakens, he finds that everyday life is radically different. His perceptions of sight, sound and memory have been irrevocably changed.

A man called Holland, living on a remote estate in New South Wales, planted on his land a collection of all eucalyptus trees known to man. He then set, for his beautiful and only daughter Ellen, one of those traps essential to fairy tales: only a man who could correctly name each tree in his vast collection could have her hand in marriage. On a country property a man named Holland lives with his daughter Ellen. Over the years, as she grows into a beautiful young woman, he plants hundreds of different gum trees on his land.

Maine, 1997. As the people of Fort Meadow Beach celebrate the Fourth of July, four-year-old Daisy Wright disappears and is never seen again. Maine, Present Day. Fired from her job and heartbroken, Peyton Winchester moves back home for the summer. Bored and aimless, she finds a renewed sense of purpose when an ad for a journalism course reminds her of a path not taken. Returning to life in her hometown brings back all kinds of memories—including Daisy's vanishing when she was a young girl herself.

It's 1944 when twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others.

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.

'Your husband is a landowner,' they told her. 'Food and clothing is so plentiful, it grows on trees'. 'You will be able to go to school'. Of the three lies the matchmaker told Willow before she left home as a picture bride in 1918, the third hurt the most. Never one to be deterred, Willow does all that she can to make the best of her unexpected circumstance. But it isn't long before her dreams for this new life are shattered – first by a husband who never wanted to marry her in the first place, and then by the escalation of the Korean independence movements.

Set between the USA and Australia, Believe in Me focuses on a daughter’s attempt to piece together her mother Sarah’s early life. We follow Sarah’s journey from her home in Upstate New York to Idaho, where she is sent to accompany a missionary. When Sarah falls pregnant she is despatched to relatives in Sydney to give birth at a home for unmarried mothers, where she is pressured to give up her baby, Bethany, for adoption. As Bethany learns more about her mother’s life, she comes to accept her own history and identity.

Istanbul, Turkey, 1955. Benedict Hitchens, once a world-renowned archaeologist, is now a discredited - but still rather charming - shell of his former self. Once full of optimism and adventure, his determination to prove that Achilles was an historical figure led him to his greatest love, Karina, on the island of Crete and to his greatest downfall, following the disappearance of an enigmatic stranger, Eris. He has one last chance to restore his reputation, solve the mystery of Eris and prove his Achilles theory. But it is full of risk and possibly fatal consequences....

You'd do anything for the one that got away...wouldn't you? When Billy Orr returns home to spend time with his dying sister, he bumps into his ex-girlfriend Aimi, the love of his life. He might not have seen her in 11 years, but Billy's never forgotten her. He'd do anything for her then, and he'd do anything for her now. When Aimi tells him that she wants to escape her abusive husband, Billy agrees to help her fake her own death.

1838. The Ohio River. May Bedloe is a seamstress to her cousin, the flamboyant actress Comfort Virtue. A wealthy abolitionist and notorious opportunist is quick to lure Comfort to her cause - a cause, it seems, that has no use for quiet little May. Casting out on her own for the first time, May lands a job on Hugo Cushin's wondrous Floating Theatre - a flatboat that sails the Ohio performing plays to the townsfolk along the way. Though shy at first, May quickly finds herself drawn into the eccentric troupe of characters aboard her new home.

It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly's Field, Wisconsin. Dutifully accompanying her newly unemployed husband, Ellen has brought her two children into the home of her in-laws on Vinegar Hill - a loveless house suffused with the settling dust of bitterness and routine - where calculated cruelty is a way of life preserved and perpetuated in the service of a rigid, exacting and angry God.

What if your perfect life was based on lies? I'm a lucky woman, thinks Susanna Greenfield. And why wouldn't she? Her handsome, successful husband is a loving father to their two teenage children. Her mother, Jean, is her dearest friend. Her scatty but adored younger sister, Angie, seems to have finally found some stability in her life. Susanna has a solid career as an art teacher and if, as she's recently discovered, there's a hole inside her where her creative spirit used to be - is that really such a big price to pay?

Laura Preston is a reclusive artist at odds with her older sister, Bea, as their elegant, formidable mother slowly slides into dementia. When a stranger contacts Laura claiming to be her brother who disappeared 40 years earlier when the family lived in Bangkok, Laura ignores Bea's warnings of a scam and flies to Thailand to see if it can be true. But meeting him in person leads to more questions than answers.