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

When best-selling author, 29-year-old Hayley Stevens, walked in on her husband, Paul, and her best friend in bed together, she knew her life would never be the same again. One year later, Hayley stowed her last bag in her much-loved Audi Coupe and said good-bye to the city. She was excited to be heading west to Lochway, a small colonial village sitting on the beautiful Macdonald River. Wanting peace and quiet, Hayley had impulsively bought a cosy sandstone cottage there surrounded by lush rose gardens, with a small overseer's cottage - ideal for a writer's retreat.

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.

Harley, a man of Nyoongar ancestry, finds himself at a difficult point in the history of his country, family and self. As the apparently successful outcome of his white grandfather's enthusiastic attempts to isolate and breed the ‘first white man born', he wants to be a failure. But would such failure mean his Nyoongar ancestors could label him a success? And how can the attempted genocide represented by his family history be told?

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.

Three scary monsters – racism, misogyny and ageism – roam through this mesmerising audiobook. This audiobook can be listened to in two different ways – either Lyle or Lili can be heard first. Lyle works for a sinister government department in near-future Australia. An Asian migrant, he fears repatriation. Lili’s family migrated to Australia from Asia when she was a teenager. Now, in the 1980s, she’s teaching in the south of France. She makes friends, observes the treatment handed out to North African immigrants and is creeped out by her downstairs neighbour.

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?

In the spring of 1949, Stella O'Riain flees her home - a sheep property on the barren edge of the Strzelecki Desert. She leaves behind the graves of her husband Joe and her baby daughter. With no money and limited options, Stella accepts her brother-in-law Harry's offer to live at the O'Riain cane farm in the Richmond Valley. There she hopes to get answers to the questions that plague her about her marriage. However Harry refuses to discuss Joe or the family's secrets, even forbidding her to speak to the owner of the neighbouring property.

Tommy is in love with Lani. Lani is going out with Paul. Paul is having an affair with Julia, and Julia has a crush on Chris. Life is intoxicating when you're about to turn 18 and finish school. But something goes terribly wrong for this group of friends. One day they have the world at their feet. The next, they are all divided, destined to carry their own versions of guilt into adulthood....

In the late 1970s, in the forgotten outer suburbs, a girl has her hands in the engine of a Holden. A sinister new man has joined the family. He works as a mechanic and operates an unlicensed repair shop at the back of their block. The family is under threat. The girl reads the Holden workshop manual for guidance. She resists the man with silence, then with sabotage. She fights him at the place where she believes his heart lives - in the engine of the car.

When Malika, a young orphan in rural Pakistan, is savagely attacked, her face is left disfigured and her self-esteem destroyed. Haunted by the assault, she hides from the world, finding solace in her mathematical theories. A few years later, her intellectual brilliance is discovered and she leaves conflict-stricken Pakistan for a better education in Melbourne, where she finds herself placed with Kate - a successful plastic surgeon facing emotional insecurities of her own.

Chris Flood – a married father of two with plummeting self-esteem and questionable guitar skills – suddenly finds himself in the depths of polyamory after years of a near-sexless marriage. His wife, Sarah – a lover of the arts, avid quoter of Rumi, and always oozing confidence – wants to rediscover her sexuality after years of deadening domesticity. Their new life of polyamory features late nights, love affairs and rotating childcare duties. While Sarah enjoys flings with handsome men, Chris, much to his astonishment, falls for a polydactylous actor and musician, Biddy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Six strangers from across the world converge on the tropical island of Bali to attend a course designed to help them face their fears.

Friendships and romance blossom as the participants are put through a series of challenges designed to test, but fun in the sun suddenly transforms into something far more serious when the unthinkable happens.... Shocking, powerful and utterly gripping, Fearless takes you to the edge and makes you look down.

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.

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.

The Mothers' Group tells the story of six very different women who agree to regularly meet soon after the births of their babies. Each woman strives in her own way to become the mother she wants to be and finds herself becoming increasingly reliant on the friendship and support of the members of the mothers' group. Until one day an unthinkably shocking event changes everything, testing their bonds and revealing closely held secrets that threaten to shatter their lives.