Showing results by publisher "Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd" in Literary Fiction

Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Ester is yearning to fall in love again. Meanwhile, her ex-husband's past decisions are catching up with him, her sister is struggling through her own directionless life and her mother is about to make a choice that will profoundly affect them all.

During a hot Melbourne summer, Jovan's cleaning work at a bayside hospital is disrupted by acts of graffiti and violence. For Jovan, the mysterious words that must be cleaned away dislodge memories of the past.... Intensely human, yet majestic in its moral vision, Black Rock White City is an essential story of Australia's suburbs now, of displacement, immediate threat and the unexpected responses of two refugees as they try to reclaim their dreams.

Every 179 days Robbie forgets everything. He knows this because last time it happened, he wrote himself a letter explaining it. The disorientation. The fear. The bizarre circumstances imposed by the rare neurological condition he lives with. To survive the forgetting - to cope with his recurring loss of identity - Robbie leads a solitary, regimented life. Lives alone. Speaks to no one if he can avoid it. Works to complete a strange herculean task set for him by his former self. And then, with 12 days left before his next forgetting, Julie invades his life.

Seventeen-year-old Georgia has a secret - one that is isolating her from everyone she loves. She's desperate to tell her best friend, but Sophia is ignoring her, and she doesn't know why. Before she can find out, Sophia is left fighting for her life after a hit-and-run, with Georgia a traumatised witness. Georgia's secret is about to go viral, but can her family rise above the lies they've told and fight for what matters most of all?

Gabriel Fox, the young son of an old English house, arrives in a land both ancient and new. Drawn by the promise of his heart’s desire, and compelled to distance himself from pain at home, Gabriel begins his quest into Van Diemen’s Land. His guide, a cannibal who is not all he seems, leads him north where Gabriel might free himself of his distracting burden and seek the woman he must find. As Gabriel traverses this wild country, he uncovers new truths buried within his own memory.

It's not easy getting close to people. Amelia's meeting a lot of men but once she gets the sex she wants from them, that's it for her: she can't connect further. A terrible thing happened to Daniel last year and it's stuck inside Amelia ever since, making her stuck too. Maybe being a cosmetician at her family's mortuary business isn't the best job for a young woman. It's not helping her social life. She loves her job, but she's not great at much else. Especially emotion.

France, 1673. Desperate to save herself and her only surviving son from an outbreak of plague, the widow Charlotte Picot flees her village. But her son is kidnapped by slavers, and she fears the boy has been taken to Paris, the terrible City of Crows. And so she resorts to witchcraft and summons assistance in the shape of a malevolent man. Meanwhile, a notorious criminal, Lesage, is unexpectedly released from the prison galleys where he has served a brutal sentence for sacrilege....

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.

Two women from opposite ends of the earth begin corresponding by chance and start sharing the intimacies of their lives. An anguished email from Pamela Robinson in Australia to her ex-husband in Paris accidentally ends up in the inbox of New York State teacher Chrisanthi Woods. Chrisanthi is sympathetic to Pamela's struggles and the women begin to tell each other the stories and secrets of their lives. Pamela, responsible for raising her three sons, must re-invent the meaning of home following her divorce, and Chrisanthi, her dreams long dampened, must find home by leaving it.

A mother cuts her daughter's hair because her own hair starts falling out. A woman leaves her boyfriend because he reminds her of a corpse, another undergoes brain surgery to try and live more comfortably in higher temperatures. A widow physically transforms into her husband so that she does not have to grieve. In She Is Haunted, these renditions of the author search for recognition and connection, and more than anything else, small moments of empathy.

Rin Braden is almost ready to give up on life after the heartbreaking death of her lover Yamaan and the everyday dread of working for her mother's corrupt private prison company. But through a miracle Yamaan has survived. Yamaan turns up in an immigration detention facility in Australia, trading his labour for a supposedly safe place to live. This is no ordinary facility, it's Eaglehawk MTC, a manufactory built by her mother's company to exploit the flood of environmental refugees.

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.

In 1890, artist Edward Burne-Jones finished a monumental series of paintings inspired by Sleeping Beauty. Told through the eyes of the five women in his life - wives, daughters and mistresses of famous artists - this is the astonishing story behind that famous painting - a story of love, obsession, scandal and betrayal.

In the fall of 2011, a heartbroken young man flees Australia for the USA. Landing in the excessive, uncanny-familiar glamour and plenitude of New York City, Will makes a vow to say yes to everything that comes his way. By fate or random chance, Will's journey takes him deep into the American heartland where he meets Wayne Gage, a fast-living, troubled Vietnam veteran, would-be spirit guide and collector of exotic animals. These two men in crisis form an unlikely friendship, but Will has no idea just how close to the edge Wayne truly is.

It is the winter of 1985. Hope Farm sticks out of the ragged landscape like a decaying tooth, its weatherboard walls sagging into the undergrowth. Silver's mother, Ishtar, has fallen for the charismatic Miller, and the three of them have moved to the rural hippie commune to make a new start. But here, at just 13, she is thrust into an unrelenting adult world, and the walls begin to come tumbling down, with deadly consequences.

Gwen Hill adores Green Valley Avenue. So when the house next door is sold, Gwen wonders how the new family will settle into this cosy community. More than a new home, it's a clean slate for Frankie, who has moved her brood in a bid to save her marriage. To maintain privacy and corral her children, Frankie proposes a fence between the properties, destroying Gwen's picture-perfect front yard. To Gwen, this is an act of war.

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.

Hetty and Ness have been best friends since childhood. Hetty is captivating, while Ness is a wallflower, hopelessly in love with her. Leaving Melbourne for the first time to live abroad, they take a room in a share house of creatives in Toronto’s student quarter. Hetty disappears into bar-keeping and nightlife, while Ness drifts aimlessly. But when Ness finds Faith in the art gallery, an intense affair begins. Her life starts to make sense. And Hetty’s starts to fall apart, a mess of bad drugs and bad men. Ness may lose the person she loves more than anyone else in the world.

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.

Sarah and Hannah are on a cruise from San Diego, California, to Sydney, Australia. Sarah, Hannah's grandmother, is returning to the country of her birth, a place she hasn't seen since boarding the USS Mariposa in 1945. Then she, along with countless other war brides, sailed across the Pacific to join the American servicemen they had married during World War II. Now Hannah is the same age Sarah was when she made her first journey and, in hearing Sarah tell the story of her life, realises the immensity of what her grandmother gave up.