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

In 1916, Rosie Marchand leaves her hometown of Albert on the Somme. A survivor of the war, she finds shelter in the home of her cousin, photographer Louis Thuillier, a shell-shocked veteran of Verdun, who with his wife Antoinette takes pictures of soldiers behind the lines. For Australian Bill Foster, the war is a faraway adventure where he is driven to go and join his brother. Bill is in love with Isabella De Luca, a passionate Queensland woman, and promises to return to her. However, Mick De Luca, Isabella's father, vows to do all he can to ensure this doesn't happen.

With its compelling portrayal of a paranoia-ridden Moscow and blockaded Berlin, The Moscow Defector sees Duchene and Sabine, torn apart by opposing ideologies, risk their lives to try to save one another. Evocative, gripping and full of twists, this taut thriller asks if lovers can reunite against an all-powerful regime.

Paris, 1810. Haunted by the French Revolution, Marie Tussaud has locked herself away in her shop with the death masks she was forced to make to avoid the guillotine. Philidor, a famous magician, offers her the chance to accompany him to London to assist in creating a wax automaton that will bring them both money and success. Following a disastrous performance on their opening night in which the wax on their prized spectacle melts, the eccentric duke, William Cavendish, invites them to his rambling estate, Welbeck.

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.

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.

On beautiful Fraser Island in 1882, the population of the Badtjala people is in sharp decline following a run of brutal massacres. When German man Louis Müller offers to sail 18-year-old Bonny to Europe, along with 22-year-old Jurano and his 15-year-old niece, Donordera, the proud and headstrong Bonny agrees. Accompanied by Müller’s bright and grieving daughter, Hilda, the group begins their journey to perform in Hamburg, Berlin, Paris and eventually London in the hope of seeking help from the Queen of England.

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?

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.

It's 1930, and the Great Depression is taking hold. In Melbourne, thirteen-year-old Morris Turner, a little anxious by nature, feels more at home gazing at the stars than spending time with his detached father Jude, a detective, and older sister, Lottie. When a young woman is murdered in Jude's home town of Gemini, he is assigned to solve the case. With fear and polio rising in the city, Jude reluctantly takes Morris and Lottie to the small town he left long ago. At the family farm in Gemini, Morris is drawn into a community reeling from a murder and a financial crash.

Will Power has returned from the Northern Territory shaken, stirred and generally discombobulated. It is late 1942, and, demeaningly enough, he finds himself playing a pantomime dame. If only this was his only worry.... As his great hero, Shakespeare, once noted, 'When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions'. Can Will finally overcome his tendency to be the living embodiment of Murphy's law?

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.

On a frozen January evening in 1944, Nancy Levin and her three-year-old daughter, Emily, flee their East London home as an air raid siren sounds. Not far away, Diana Meadows and her own three-year-old daughter, Abigail, are lost in the blackout as the air raid begins. They hurry to the safety of the underground tube station, but in wartime people will do anything to survive - even at the expense of others.

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....

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.

Poignant and uplifting, political and personal loyalties are tested in 19th-century Sydney. Colonial Sydney in the final weeks of 1899: a city striving for union and nationhood but dogged by divisions so deep they threaten to derail not just the Federation but the colony itself. There are chasms opening, too, when a clandestine note reaches the wrong hands in the well-to-do household of aspiring politician Alasdair Dunlevy and his wife, Eleanor.

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.

It’s a mystery that has passed into fashion legend: the perfect evening gown that was to be created by couture star Elisabeth Fontaine before her tragic death in 1930. Its design, a closely guarded secret, has never been found. So when vintage fashion dealer Isabelle Bernard comes across an enigmatic letter from Fontaine mentioning the ‘evening sketches’, she’s very excited. Hot on the trail, she heads to Paris to investigate, fetching up on the doorstep of couture apprentice Romy Valence.