Showing results by publisher "Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd" in Small Town & Rural

Sully McCoy has spent the last twenty years distancing himself from his father's reputation and has made a good life for himself and his daughter in Rockne Heads. Yet now Alex Kelly is back in town and somehow still turning his life upside down. He thought he'd never see her again. And Alex is making it perfectly clear that she's not here to relive old memories—she's here to end them once and for all.

In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged with a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims' families, but its impact travels even further—into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes. Highway 13 takes murder as its starting point, but it unfolds to encompass much more. Fiona McFarlane presents an unforgettable, entrancing exploration of the way stories are told and spread, and at what cost.

Bush nurse Lara McIntyre and rural journalist Toby Paxton are thrust into the limelight when an accident puts the heart of their community in jeopardy. The small country town of Bridgefield can’t manage without their general store and post office, but Lara can’t stomach the idea of out-of-town buyers revamping it with no regard for what the residents want. She’s also unsure where Toby’s allegiances lie in this fight. Loyalties are put to the test as the locals attempt to save the shop, with personal agendas, old grudges and misunderstandings threatening their best efforts.

Born and bred on the land, Jordan Windcroft is brave and independent. She's had to be. Her life revolves around running her property almost single-handedly on next to no money, and waiting out her four years of probation—a rap that she took for one of her closest friends for a crime she didn't commit. Thankfully there's an end to her problems in sight. Jordan's probation period is almost up, and if she can just make the cattle sale, there's a chance she can pull herself out of more than ten years of serious debt and keep her precious farm.

Penny McIntyre loves her life as an ambitious city professional, so when she's floored by a mystery illness and ordered back to the family farm for three months' rest and recuperation, she is horrified to find her perfect life imploding. Within days, she is forced to leave her job, her live-in boyfriend and her beloved city apartment...to return to the small country town in which she grew up. Back to her dad and three sisters, one of whom has never forgiven her for abandoning her family. And to her ex-boyfriend, Tim Patterson, who was the biggest reason she ran in the first place.

Between managing a bustling beauty salon, hectic volunteer commitments and the lion's share of parenting two-year-old Claudia, Angie McIntyre barely has time to turn around. And with each passing month, she feels her relationship with fly-in, fly-out boyfriend Rob Jones slipping through her fingers. When Rob faces retrenchment and the most fabulous fixer-upper comes onto the market, Angie knows this derelict weatherboard cottage will be the perfect project to draw their little family together.

1987: It's late summer and a time of change when a 17-year-old girl leaves the local shopping center in the sleepy town of Lowbridge and is never seen again. Her unsolved disappearance is never far from the town's memory. There's those who grew up in the shadow of her loss whose own lives were altered forever, and those who know more than they're saying. It just takes an outsider to ask the right questions.

Magpie Beach is a quiet seaside town – full of small-town prejudices and small-town cliques. Meg, Rosemary and Lily are all outsiders. Meg and Lily because they came to Magpie Beach to escape their former lives, Rosemary because her upbringing was the subject of much local gossip and upturned noses. The three women come together as friends, partly because their homes are so close together on the outskirts of town – and partly because their neighbors treat them with such suspicion. When Jessie Else goes missing – it's easy to see why this small band of outcasts are first on the list of suspect.

Years after leaving Jasper, Detective Alex Markov has been sent back under the shadow of an LAPD corruption investigation. She is convinced that the man, a family friend, was murdered opportunistically under the cover of the fire. As the smoke clears, Alex reveals a town corrupt to its core–but exposing that corruption could destroy her and the people she loves. Will she ignore the crookedness and deceit, or face the consequences of pursuing an inconvenient truth?

It was a straightforward request. Take her gran home to her beloved Scotland. In the space of a few days, Elle loses her job and her home and faces moving back in with her parents - where she knows she'll hear a lot about how she is wasting her life, unlike her three siblings. Then Gran's will is read and everything changes.

Smart and reliable, Gemma Northcote has always done what's expected of her. So it's not surprising that after uni she defers to her father's wish that she join the family business. Gemma's best friend, Jasmine, is a different personality altogether. She thrives on spontaneity, is unpredictable and has generally pursued her own path. When Gemma and Jasmine decide to spend a working holiday on a large rural property, their friends and family are surprised. Neither has any experience of country life (unless you count Jasmine's love of McLeod's Daughters) and they're not exactly farming types.

On a hot October afternoon, a girl walks barefoot out of the Wimmera desert, near the small town of Gatyekarr. She finds sanctuary with Beth, a regenerative farmer and collector of seeds, devoted to bringing her family's farm back to life. The arrival of the mysterious 'desert girl' unsettles the community and old tensions erupt. The longer the girl stays silent, the more volatile the town becomes. Who is she and what does her presence mean?

Meg's life is woven into the fabric of St. Stephens. It's a tapestry made of two precious children, a hidden truth, and a husband whose ideas of a perfect wife do not match her own. When Meg puts her foot down on a third kid, gets a job, and is empowered by the same book group that was meant to keep her in her place, her marriage begins to disintegrate. Set in a tiny Mormon community, this is a novel about resilience and courage – the fierceness of mother-love and the power that comes with never forgetting who you really are.

The Carrington family owns the only pub in the small country town of Kangaroo Ridge. It’s been eight years since the five siblings became orphans and since twins Sebastian and Tamara stepped up to look after their younger brothers and sister with the help of their aunt, Maddie. Seb and Tam gave up their teenage years to make sure the family stayed together, but that’s been hard and they’ve grown apart. Seb is silent and stoic; Tam, on the other hand, wants to kick over the traces and catch up on the life she missed out on.

Felix Carrington helps run the family's wedding venue business as the in-house wedding photographer for Carrington Farm. His personal passion? Taking unexpected shots of his local environment. And it's through an unlikely and close friendship with 84-year-old Winnifred Knightly that Felix is able to access one of his favourite places to photograph, the faded grandeur of Peppercorn House and its overgrown gardens.

Reggie Macleod had her life sorted. As a kid in a small school with only twelve students; she vowed she was going to live in the city and be something important. And she'd followed her dream. Then her world changed with one phone call from her brother. Returning to River Styx, the cattle property where she grew up on the New England Tablelands, Reggie came home to help after her parents barely survived a car accident. It was only going to be for a couple of months … that was almost three years ago.

Diana McIntyre and her four boys have had a tough eighteen months but, with the love and support of her family, she believes their lives are finally back on track. Diana’s dream of starting a flower farm has been the perfect diversion, with an elderly dahlia expert showing her the ropes. She won’t have to do this alone. Locum pharmacist and single dad Ned Gardiner hasn’t called Victoria home for years. However, his father’s death forces Ned to return to the family farm, a place that holds few happy memories for him.

Since adolescence, 58-year-old Beth has lived her life with blinkers on, repressing the memory of a teenage trauma. Her mother, Marian, took control of that situation, and of all else in their family life—and as much as she could in the small town of Miner's Ridge as well. Now Marian is dead, and Beth, unemployed and in the middle of a humiliating divorce, is living with her gentle-hearted father in the family home. Beth feels obliged to take over her mother's involvement in the local town hall committee.

After losing her family farm to an aggressive global conglomerate, ambitious farmer Georgie Henderson manages Stoney Creek, a cattle farm in the New England region of NSW, spending every waking moment plotting and saving to buy Tamban back from those corporate vultures. When an unlikely meeting with Armani-clad businessman Michael Delacourt at a rowdy B&S Ball sends them on a whirlwind romance, Georgie can't believe it's possible for life to be this good. But her world shatters when she discovers the shocking secret Michael has been trying to keep from her.

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.