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

Van Diemen's Land, 1826. Bridget Crack, a desperate convict, flees the cruelty of her master into the impenetrable Tasmanian wilderness. Saved from certain death by Matt Sheedy and his fellow bushrangers, her precarious existence among the volatile and murderous men is a different kind of hell. Hunted by soldiers, at the mercy of killers, and surrounded by roaring river and towering columns of rock, what will she have to do to survive?

A small garrison of Australian soldiers is left to defend a town and its people against the might of the Japanese forces. This is a story of those who were left behind and those who waited for them to return.

It’s the summer of 1968, and Evelyn Lynden is a woman at war with herself. Minister’s daughter. Atheist. Independent woman. Frustrated wife. Bitch with a bleeding heart. Following her conscientious-objector husband, Lenny, to the rural Eden of Evergreen Valley, California, Evelyn wants to be happy with their new life. Yet she finds herself disillusioned with Lenny’s passive ways - and anxious for a saviour. Enter the Reverend Jim Jones, the dynamic leader of a revolutionary new church....

Duy, Phong, Minh, and Edmond have been best friends since childhood. Now, as young men running their families' formidable businesses, they make up Saigon's most powerful group of friends in 1928 Vietnam's elite society. Until one of them is murdered. In a lavish mansion on a hill in Dalat, all four men have gathered for an evening of indulgence, but one of them won't survive the night.

Tishtar runs a small legal practice in Melbourne where he has a new client, Habiba, who seeks to bring her orphan nieces to Australia from war-torn Somalia. He is also a migrant, having left the civil unrest in Iran to find a new life in a new country. As Tishtar becomes consumed with Habiba's tales of war-torn Somalia, his own childhood memories return and he reflects on the time he spent at his grandmother's house to escape the atrocities that unravelled post the Islamic Revolution.

Shortly before the Japanese invade, the van Hoorn family throws their famous Sinterklaas party at their tea plantation in West Java. One of their guests, Mattijs, a Dutch pilot, hopes to forge a future in the Dutch East Indies, possibly with the family's daughter Anna, but she is torn between her dreams of Holland and her desire to belong. Meanwhile the housekeeper, Diah, keenly observes the goings-on around the plantation, wondering how much to tell her freedom-fighter brother.

For most of his 76 years, Bill Smith preferred solitude over socialising, horses over people and confidentiality over confidantes. As a jockey, he was known for always turning up already fully kitted out in his silks. But now, in his advancing years, a fall lands him in full-time care and it becomes impossible to maintain his privacy. Nurse Maureen Bannon resents having to look after ‘the geries', especially grumpy old buggers like Mr Smith, but when she discovers Bill's secret an unlikely alliance is formed. Bill was assigned female at birth.

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.

Wellington, 1885: Tally Ho doesn't need to go to school because she is going to be a fisherman or cart driver or butcher boy like Harry Crawford. Taking her hero's advice, she runs away. Sydney, 1917: A burned woman is discovered on the banks of the Lane Cove River. Nobody knows who she was until the police find out a boy's mother went missing that very same weekend, and his stepfather, Harry Crawford, is not who he seems to be.

London, 1991: Alex Johns, trainee art intern at the Courtauld, believes a hidden secret lies within Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas—one of the most written about paintings of all time. Her own mother died in mysterious circumstances while trying to uncover its secrets and Alex is troubled by memories of her own encounter as a child with the girl in the painting—the Infanta Margarita—who continues to haunt her. Alex must take up her mother's work and find evidence to uncover the truths within the canvas

Europe, 1940s: Imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, Spanish fighter and photographer Mateo Baca is ordered to process images of the camp and inmates for a handful of photo books being made for presentation to top Nazi figures. Just five books in total, or so the officials think. Mateo manages to make a secret sixth book and, with the help of a local woman, Lena Lang, it remains hidden until the end of the war.

Feeling alienated from wider society, Sara, Abida and Naeem gravitate towards their university's Muslim Students' Association. Within its austere confines, Sara watches Naeem. Over time, the pair commence a furtive relationship outside of the gaze of their families and peers. But Naeem is especially burdened by the widening gap between his public façade and their clandestine forays. As the MSA elections approach, Abida seeks to win the presidency at all costs, threatening her longstanding friendship with Sara and risking her reputation.?

In 1917, while the world is at war, Alma falls pregnant, and her daughter, Molly, is born in secret. In 1952, Anna enters a Salvation Army home for unmarried mothers, determined to keep her baby. In 1975, Cathy is living with David, determined not to get married, but when she falls pregnant a new chapter is added to this family story. Interweaving the intimate lives of three generations of Australian women, this is a tale about secrets, motherhood, adoption and the untold stories that shape us.

On a night of raging winds and rain, Captain Cook's Endeavour lies splintered on a coral reef off the coast of Far North Australia. A small disparate band of survivors, fracturing already, huddle on the shore of this strange land - their pitiful salvage offers scant protection from the dangers of the unknown creatures and natives that live here. Watching these mysterious white beings, the Guugu Yimidhirr people cannot decide if they are ancestor spirits to be welcomed - or hostile spirits to be speared. One headstrong young boy, Garrgiil, determines to do more than watch.

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?

July, 1945. The war in Europe is finally over. But Auguste Duchene, who survived occupied Paris at great personal cost, cannot escape his past. He finds himself helping the Allies to pursue a Gestapo war criminal through the ravaged and dangerous streets of Berlin. Duchene soon learns, however, that, although one global conflict may have ended, another is beginning, and he is in a deadly race against the Russians as they hunt the same man. And, once again, at the heart of all he does, are his extraordinary wife Sabine and his beloved daughter Marienne.

In the summer of 1912, a workman's pickaxe strikes through the basement floor of an old tenement house in Cheapside, London, uncovering a cache of unimaginably valuable treasure that quickly disappears again. Present day. When respected jewellery historian Kate Kirby receives a call about the Cheapside jewels, she knows she's on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. As Kate peels back the layers of London's stories of plague, fire and political turmoil, she is forced to explore long-buried family secrets.

Paris, 1938. The last sigh of summer before the war. As Australian journalist Charlotte ‘Charlie' James alights at the Gare du Nord, ready to start her role as correspondent for The Times, Paris is in turmoil as talk of war becomes increasingly strident. Charlie is chasing her first big scoop, needing to prove to her boss that she can do this job as well as, if not better than, her male counterparts. And the best way to forge the necessary contacts quickly is to make the well-connected expats, Lord and Lady Ashworth, her business.

Austria, 1936. Esther 'Tess' Simpson works for a British organisation that rescues academics from the cruel Fascist and anti-Semitic regimes taking hold in Europe. During a dangerous trip to Vienna to help bring aid to Europe's threatened Jewish scholars, Esther meets Harry Singer, a young Jewish academic and musician. Tess works tirelessly to rescue at-risk academics and scientists from across Europe, trying to find positions for them in Britain and America.

Sydney, 1930: In a well-heeled corner of Paddington, just a short distance from the razor gangs of Darlinghurst and Kings Cross, sits Maison des Fleurs, an upscale brothel run by the indomitable Madame. The star of Maison des Fleurs is Violet Kelly—beautiful, clever and determined to make something of herself in a world that has already taken so much. When a former associate of Madame's emerges to claim a long-owed favour involving a kidnapped girl and an ancient curse, Violet is drawn into a dangerous game of cat and mouse.