Showing results by publisher "Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd" in Psychological

What if they hadn't gone? That's the question Clementine can't stop asking herself. It was just a backyard barbeque. They didn't know their hosts that well. They were friends of friends. They could so easily have said no. But she and her husband, Sam, said yes, and now they can never change what they did and didn't do that beautiful winter's day. Six responsible adults. Three cute kids. One yapping dog. It's a normal weekend in the suburbs. What could possibly go wrong?

Love, sex, death, family, friendship, betrayal, tenderness, brutality, sacrifice and revelation. This incendiary collection of stories from acclaimed writer Christos Tsiolkas, best-selling author of The Slap and Barracuda, takes you deep into worlds both strange and familiar, and introduces you to characters who will never let you go and situations that will haunt you forever.

Could 10 days at a health resort really change you forever? Nine perfect strangers are about to find out.... The 10-day retreat at boutique health-and-wellness resort Tranquillum House promises healing and transformation. Nine stressed city dwellers are keen to drop their literal and mental baggage and absorb the blissful meditative ambience while enjoying their hot stone massages. They are all on a path to a better way of living. Or at least a better waistline....

For fans of Gillian Flynn, Laura Lippman, and Paula Hawkins comes Holly Seddon's arresting fiction debut: an engrossing thriller full of page-turning twists and turns, richly imagined characters, and gripping psychological suspense. Some secrets never die. They're just locked away. Alex Dale is lost. Destructive habits have cost her a marriage and a journalism career. All she has left is her routine: a morning run until her body aches, then a few hours of forgettable work before the past grabs hold and drags her down.

In 19th-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (“women’s writing”). With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood.

Helen Garner’s gritty, lyrical first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Grip is regarded as a masterpiece - the novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs and sex.

Tom Keely's reputation is in ruins. And that's the upside. Divorced and unemployed, he's lost faith in everything precious to him. Holed up in a grim high-rise, cultivating his newfound isolation, Keely looks down at a society from which he's retired, hurt and angry. He's done fighting the good fight, and well past caring. But even in his seedy flat, ducking the neighbours, he's not safe from entanglement. All it takes is an awkward encounter in the lobby. A woman from his past, and a boy the likes of which he's never met before. 

A nail-biting, breath-taking story about the disappearances of two young women - a decade apart - told in reverse. It's been 10 years since Nicolette Farrell left her rural hometown after her best friend, Corinne, disappeared without trace. Then a letter from her father arrives - 'I need to talk to you. That girl. I saw that girl.' Has her father's dementia worsened, or has he really seen Corinne? Returning home, Nicolette must finally face what happened on that terrible night all those years ago.

Erica Marsden’s son, an artist, has been imprisoned for homicidal negligence. In a state of grief, Erica cuts off all ties to family and friends, and retreats to a quiet hamlet on the south-east coast near the prison where he is serving his sentence. There, in a rundown shack, she obsesses over creating a labyrinth by the ocean. To build it - to find a way out of her quandary - Erica will need the help of strangers. And that will require her to trust and to reckon with her past.

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the incident. In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the 21st century.

Henrietta, privileged and sheltered, expected a smoothly comfortable society life in Washington when she married Sam Pollitt, a handsome self-made biologist. Ten years later, Henny is a skinny, screaming drudge with five children, a raging wreck of a woman driven by 'hate, horror, passion or contempt'. But Sam, whose impractical idealism has brought his family to near-ruin, is unchanged: still at sea in all adult affairs, an absurd hypocritical buffoon but a genius with children, except Louie, his eldest daughter.

Behind the uneasy trees rose the hills, and beyond them again the country of the lost, huge wilderness between this last haunt of civilisation and the unpeopled sea. Exhausted and losing faith, an Anglican minister flees his mission in Australia's northwest for the vast emptiness of the outback. In the soul country of the desert, the old man searches for the islands of the Aboriginal dead, reflecting on past transgressions and on his life's work.

London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything. Even her own character.

Set in the leafy northern suburbs of Sydney during the 1940s, The Watch Tower is a novel of relentless and acute psychological power. Following their father's death, Laura and Clare are withdrawn from their elite private boarding school by their mother. As their mother slowly withdraws from them, the two are left to fend for themselves. Laura's boss, Felix, is there to help, even offering to marry Laura if she will have him. However Felix is not all that he seems, and little by little the two sisters grow complicit with his obsessions, his cruelty and his need to control.

When Sarah Haywood rescues a young girl in trouble, she expects nothing in return. But her instinctive act of bravery puts her in the debt of a powerful and dangerous man, and he has other ideas. He lives by his own brutal code, and all debts must be repaid - in the only way he knows how. He offers Sarah a way to solve an impossible situation with her intolerable boss.

In her quest to uncover the truth behind her friend's death, Mak falls headlong into a deadly game of cat and mouse, unaware she has become the obsession of a sadistic psychopath. She is driven into a corner, an evil place where she must suspect everyone and everything.

The controller stood back. 'Right,' he said. 'Spin 'em!' The man flipped the piece of wood and the coins spun up into the air above his head and dropped down on to the carpet. There was silence. Wake in Fright tells the tale of John Grant's journey into an alcoholic, sexual and spiritual nightmare. It is the original and the greatest outback horror story. Bundanyabba and its citizens will forever haunt its listeners.

A juicy, powerful listen featuring twin sisters who have drifted apart and the shocking family secrets that bind them.... Robin and Sarah weren't the closest of twins. They weren't even that similar. But they loved each other dearly. Until, in the cruellest of domestic twists, they were taken from one another. Now in her early 30s, Robin lives alone. Agoraphobic and suffering from panic attacks, she spends her days pacing the rooms of her house. The rest of the time she watches - watches the street, the houses, the neighbours.

Gripping and packed with twists and turns, this stunning thriller will make you question whether we can ever really trust the ones we love.... What if your whole life was based on lies? When Joe Lynch stumbles across his wife driving into a hotel car park while she's supposed to be at work, he's intrigued enough to follow her in. And when he witnesses her in an angry altercation with family friend Ben, he knows he ought to intervene.

Raine sometimes complains that nothing exciting is ever gonna happen in Grace, Alabama, again. Daddy told her careful what you wish for. Everyone loves Summer Ryan. A model student and musical prodigy, she's a ray of light in the struggling small town of Grace - especially compared to her troubled sister, Raine. Then Summer goes missing. Grace is already simmering, and with this new tragedy the police have their hands full keeping the peace.