Showing results by publisher "Wavesound from W. F. Howes Ltd" in World Literature

In 1940, as the Nazis sweep toward Lithuania, Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara defies his own government and secretly issues thousands of visas to Jewish refugees desperate to flee. After the war, Sugihara is dismissed and disappears into obscurity. Three decades later, in Australia, Rachael Margolin, her father and her grandmother live disconnected from one another and haunted by unspoken tragedies. When Rachel announces her engagement to a Greek Orthodox man, it detonates a long-held secret.

In Robbie Arnott’s widely acclaimed and much-loved first novel, a young man named Levi McAllister decides to build a coffin for his sister, Charlotte - who promptly runs for her life. A water rat swims upriver in quest of the cloud god. A fisherman hunts for tuna in partnership with a seal. And a father takes form from fire. The answers to these riddles are to be found in this tale of grief and love and the bonds of family, tracing a journey across the southern island.

Big Time is set in a not-too-distant future Australia, where the eastern states have become the world's newest autocracy—a place where pop music is propaganda, science is the enemy, nationalism trumps all, and moral indecency is punishable by indefinite detention. The novel opens as Julian Ferryman, bass player for the Acceptables, returns to Melbourne after a year overseas. He reconnects with his band as they prepare to record and tour their second album, and is given his first taste of a new designer drug, F, a powerful synthetic hallucinogen that gives users a glimpse of their own future.

Dubbed the Housemate Homicide, it's a mystery that has baffled Australians for almost a decade. Melbourne-based journalist Olive Groves worked on the story as a junior reporter and became obsessed by the case. Now, nine years later, the missing housemate turns up dead on a remote property. Olive is once again assigned to the story; this time reluctantly paired with precocious millennial podcaster Cooper Ng. As Oli and Cooper unearth new facts about the three housemates, a dark web of secrets is uncovered.

Three women give birth in different countries and different decades. In the near future, they become neighbors in a coastal town in Aotearoa New Zealand. Single parent Keri has her hands full with four-year-old tearaway Walty and teen Wairere, a strange and gifted child, who always picks up on stuff that isn't hers to worry about. They live next door to Janet, a white woman with an opinion about everything, and new arrival Sera, whose family are refugees from ecological devastation in Europe.

Meredith established the Copeton Crochet Collective (no knitters please) because it would be like having friends, only with her in charge, and because there would be no men. It comes as a nasty shock, then, when Luke, the handsome grandson of no-nonsense Edith, decides to stay and learn to crochet.

From the acclaimed author of the Miles Franklin long-listed Madukka: The River Serpent (UWA) and the Barbara Jefferis Award shortlisted Benevolence, Compassion continues Julie Janson's emotional and intense literary exploration of the complex and dangerous lives of Aboriginal women during the 1800s in colonial New South Wales, which she began in Benevolence as a counter narrative to colonial history in Australian literature.

Tom Hope doesn’t think he’s much of a farmer, but he’s doing his best. He can’t have been much of a husband to Trudy, either, judging by her sudden departure. It’s only when she returns, pregnant to someone else, that he discovers his surprising talent as a father. So when Trudy finds Jesus and takes little Peter away with her to join the holy rollers, Tom’s heart breaks all over again. Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic small-town bookseller: the second Jew, and the most vivid person, Tom has ever met. He dares to believe they could make each other happy.

Eve Sylvester is young and broke and needs a job fast. After years of foster homes, backpacking and a sailing trip across the Pacific Ocean, she has lost contact with friends and family. She is alone, desperate—and pregnant. Then she meets Julia and Christopher Hygate, a charming and glamorous couple, who seem to have the perfect life: loads of money and a breathtakingly beautiful mansion on a remote Tasmanian island. They make her a lucrative offer. Eve can move into their empty summerhouse and take up a very easy job.

Sabine returned carrying a bag containing an effortless pair of Christian Wijnants fringed trousers and Ann Demeulemeeter Crinkle Nero boots. The sales assistant had agreed that the combination made Sabine looks exactly like an artist. Sabine is having a moment. Her new exhibition is opening soon and, as her gallerist says, 'hell is an artist three days before their exhibition opens'. But it's not only this coming milestone that is causing Sabine to melt down. She is being stalked. As exhibition day draws closer, so too does the man who has been watching her.

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.

Dark as Last Night confirms, once again, that Tony Birch is a master of the short story. These exceptional stories capture the importance of human connection at pivotal moments in our lives, whether those occur because of the loss of a loved one or the uncertainties of childhood. In this collection, we witness a young girl struggling to protect her mother from her father’s violence, two teenagers clumsily getting to know one another by way of a shared love of music, and a man mourning the death of his younger brother, while beset by memories and regrets from their past.

Paris, 2020. A writer is confined to her hotel room during the early days of the pandemic, struggling to finish a novel about Hortense Cezanne, wife and sometime muse of the famous painter. Dead for more than a century, Hortense has been reawakened by this creative endeavor, and now shadows the writer through the locked-down city. But Hortense, always subject to the gaze of others, is increasingly intrigued by the woman before her. Who is she and what event hides in her past?

In the mid-1950s, a small group of Finnish migrants set up camp on Little Rat, a tiny island in an archipelago off the coast of Western Australia. The crayfishing industry is in its infancy, and the islands, haunted though they are by past shipwrecks, possess an indefinable allure. Drawn here by tragedy, Onni Saari is soon hooked by the stark beauty of the landscape and the slivers of jutting coral onto which the crayfishers build their precarious huts. Could these reefs, teeming with the elusive and lucrative cray, hold the key to a good life?

When Winona Dalloway begins her day—in the peaceful early hours before her children, that ‘tiny tornado of little hands and feet', wake up—she doesn't know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed. On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices—a mind both wild and precise. And meanwhile, a storm is brewing …

Learning to kick a football in a suburban schoolyard. Finding your feet as a young black dancer. Discovering your grandfather’s poetry. Meeting Nelson Mandela at your local church. Facing racism from those who should protect you. Dreading a visit to the hairdresser. House-hopping across the suburbs. Being too black. Not being black enough. Singing to find your soul, and then losing yourself. Welcome to African Australia. Compiled by award-winning author Maxine Beneba Clarke, with curatorial assistance from writers Ahmed Yussuf and Magan Maga.

The remarkable stories in Born Into This are eye-opening, razor-sharp and entertaining, often all at once. From an Aboriginal ranger trying to instil some pride in wayward urban teens on the harsh islands off the coast of Tasmania, to those scraping by on the margins of White society railroaded into complex and compromised decisions, Adam Thompson presents a powerful indictment of colonialism and racism.

When a tragic bushfire puts two kids in hospital, Indigenous teenager Andrew knows the police will come after him first. But Andrew almost wants to be caught, because at least it might make his dad come and rescue him from suburban Brisbane and his neglectful mother. Growing up in small-town Tasmania, Andrew struggled at home, at school, at everything. The only thing that distracted or excited him was starting little fires. Flames boosted his morale and purified his thoughts, and they were the only thing in his life he could control.

A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship ploughs through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men. With her trademark humor, energy, and flair, McKay offers glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans embrace their animal selves and animals talk like humans.

An estranged father. An abused and abusive mother. An army of relatives. A tapestry of violence, woven across generations and geographies, from Turkey to Lebanon to Western Sydney. This is the legacy left to Jamal Smith, a young queer Muslim trying to escape a past in which memory and rumour trace ugly shapes in the dark. When every thread in life constricts instead of connects, how do you find a way to breathe? Torn between faith and fear, gossip and gospel, family and friendship, Jamal must find and test the limits of love.