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

Helen Lally is 22, the stunning daughter of an impoverished artist whose fame and fortune will soon be made. Woe to her for catching the eye of Clifford Wexford, a 35-year-old art dealer, rapaciously ambitious, eminently eligible and careless of all lives but his own. In the space of nine months in the ever-so-swinging '60s, Helen and Clifford meet, fall instantly in love, marry and produce the enchanting Nell. But there the want changes hands, as it will, time and again, in the course of this seductively high-spirited move.

Bavaria, 1776. When Albrecht Durer the Much Much Younger's Frog Prints go missing, he knows exactly where to turn for help. Gretel (yes, that Gretel), now 35 and still living with her gluttonous brother, Hans, is the country's most famous private investigator, and she leaps at the opportunity to travel to cosmopolitan Nuremberg to take on the case. But amid the hubbub of the city's annual sausage festival, Gretel struggles to find any clues that point toward the elusive thief.

In a small country town during one long, hot summer, the Bloom family begins to unravel. Marital secrets, new and long hidden, surface - with devastating effect. Martha is straining against the confines of her life, lost in regret for what might have been, when an old flame shows up. In turn, her husband, Mike, becomes frustrated with his increasingly distant wife. While teenagers Tilly and Ben are about to step out into the world, nine-year-old Ada is holding on to a childhood that will soon be lost to her. When Ada discovers an abandoned well beneath a rusting windmill, she is drawn to its darkness and danger.

It is said that a picture may be worth a thousand words, but an old photograph can inspire many more. In this beguiling book, Alexander McCall Smith casts his eye over five chanced-upon photographs from the era of black-and-white photography and imagines the stories behind them. Who were those people, what were their stories, why were they smiling, what made them sad? What emerges are surprising and poignant tales of love and friendship in a variety of settings.

A tender, impassioned and unforgettable story of a father's love and a daughter's ambition in the wake of devastating tragedy. It all starts with the death of Martijn van Vliet's wife. His grief-stricken young daughter, Lea, cuts herself off from the world, lost in the darkness of grief. Then she hears the unfamiliar sound of a violin playing in the hall of a train station, and she is brought back to life. Transfixed by a busker playing Bach, Lea emerges from her mourning, vowing to learn the instrument.

More than a year ago, mild-mannered Jason Getty killed a man he wished he’d never met. Then he planted the problem a little too close to home. But just as he’s learning to live with the undeniable reality of what he’s done, police unearth two bodies on his property - neither of which is the one Jason buried. Jason races to stay ahead of the consequences of his crime, and while chaos reigns on his lawn, his sanity unravels, snagged on the agendas of a colorful cast of strangers.

At the International Conference Centre in Geneva, Hannah Rossier, formerly Annie Price, comes face to face with Neville Weir, someone from her childhood who she never expected, or wanted, to meet again. As Neville’s reasons for attending the conference become clear, the dark waters of Hannah’s past start to rise. Hannah is a psychotherapist, with a specialist interest in memory and how connections are made between past and present. She has reinvented herself successfully, moving from a small northern town in England to Lucerne, Switzerland, with her husband, Thibaut.

Everything in Klara’s life seems perfect. She runs a successful cosmetic clinic with her best friend Tomas, she has a beautiful house near the beach in Melbourne and she and her adoring husband, Dante, are trying for a baby. Then one day she receives a call that punctures her perfect life. Dante has had an accident. He was found unconscious in a gay sauna and now lies in a coma. What Klara discovers about her husband will disrupt everything she thought she knew about love, marriage and family.

Opening like an early Tom Waits barstool-tale, The Motel Life tells the story of two brothers, Frank and Jerry Lee. Taking to the road in an attempt to escape the hit-and-run accident caused by Jerry Lee, the novel goes back to tell the story of their unhappy lives. With intense feeling and compassion, Vlautin explores the frustrations and failed dreams of the two brothers - one a natural storyteller, the other an artist - and renders perfectly the sense of entrapment they feel.

A psychological mystery filled with droll humour, brilliant language and unforgettable characters. Twenty-five-year-old Clemency James has moved from Sydney to a chilly bedsit on the other side of the world. During the day she studies for the bar by correspondence; in the evenings she gives French lessons to earn a meagre wage. When she meets Christian, a charismatic would-be actor, she can see he's trouble - not least because he's involved with an older woman who has children.

A powerful debut, harmonising Australian-born and immigrant voices, contrasting and connecting their thoughts and struggles. What if moving to a crumbling Australian coastal town meant giving up your only dream? In 1974, Nayeema reluctantly leaves Sydney's inner city to move to Burraboo, a tired coastal town, with her husband, Fawzy. In doing so, Nayeema surrenders her only dream, but once there she falls under the sway of new infatuations.

A contemporary thriller of rebellion and surrender, love and war. It is the present day. The foggy northern city of Port Angelsund is under occupation by the soldiers of Garrison. Sylvie is a young woman just trying to survive. When she is singled out for punishment at a Garrison checkpoint, a young lieutenant rescues her from torture. Though she knows the terrible risks of collaboration, she cannot stop herself from falling in love.

'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.

Across the room, through the fog of tobacco smoke, Betty notices him. His teacup is empty, his eyes are low and he doesn't speak. She wants him to notice her. She wants to impress. Fifteen-year-old Betty Broadbent helps her erratic and beautiful mother run the Hotel Eden, a boardinghouse now besieged by reporters, keen for juicy gossip and eye-catching headlines. They are there because the Cornish seaside town has recently witnessed a string of murders, young girls stabbed to death.

Fever at Dawn is a love story for the ages. Based on the letters of the author's parents, it's a sad and joyous tale that will stay with you long after its happy ending. In July 1945, Miklós, a Hungarian survivor of Belsen, arrives in a refugee camp in Sweden. He is skin and bone, and has no teeth. The doctor says he has only months to live. But Miklós has other plans.

In this enthralling and thought-provoking novel of Middle Eastern intrigue, Charlie, a brilliant and beautiful young actress, is lured into 'the theatre of the real' by an Israeli intelligence officer. Forced to play her ultimate role, she is plunged into a deceptive and delicate trap set to ensnare an elusive Palestinian terrorist.

A corporate lawyer from the house of Single & Single is shot dead in cold blood on a Turkish hillside for crimes that he does not understand. A children’s entertainer in Devon is hauled to his local bank late at night to explain a monumental influx of cash. A Russian freighter is arrested in the Black Sea. A celebrated London financier has disappeared into thin air. A British customs officer is on a trail of corruption and murder.

Absolute Friends is a superbly paced novel spanning 56 years, a theatrical masterstroke of tragi-comic writing and a savage fable of our times, almost of our hours. The friends of the title are Ted Mundy, British soldier’s son born 1947 in a new independent Pakistan, and Sasha, refugee son of an East German Lutheran pastor and his wife, who have sought sanctuary in the West.

It begins as a simple dream. An idealistic environmental scientist moves his wife and young son off the grid, to a stretch of river-bottom farmland in the Mississippi hills, hoping to position himself at the forefront of a revolution in agriculture. Within a year he is ruined. When a corpse appears on his family's property, the farmer is convinced he's being set up.

Set in North Africa and Sicily at the end of World War II, In the Wolf’s Mouth follows the Allies’ botched “liberation” attempts as they chased the Nazis north toward the Italian mainland. Focusing on the experiences of two young soldiers - Will Walker, an English field security officer, ambitious to master and shape events; and Ray Marfione, a wide-eyed Italian American infantryman - the novel contains some of the best battle writing of the past fifty years