Showing results by narrator "Deidre Rubenstein" in All Categories

To hesitate on the edge of life or to plunge in and risk change - this is the dilemma explored in The Living and the Dead. Patrick White's second novel is set in '30s London and portrays the complex ebb and flow of relationships within the Standish family. Mrs Standish, ageing but still beautiful, is drawn into secret liaisons, while her daughter Eden experiments openly and impulsively with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer - until dramatic events shock him into sudden self-knowledge.

Growing up in an Australian country town before World War I, Jackie Hanna and Cushie Moy are carefree and innocent in their love for each other, but Jackie is a dwarf, and his devotion to the beautiful Cushie is condemned by her parents. This is the story of their life-long odyssey, and of the triumph of a special kind of courage. In Swords and Crowns and Rings Ruth Park brilliantly captures the mood and tempo of Australian life from 1907 until 1931.

In The Silent Inheritance, the author of the best-selling Woody Creek series brings another unforgettable cast of characters to life in a brand new story. Sarah Carter, mother of 12-year-old Marni, is raising her daughter alone in a small granny flat in suburban Melbourne. A serial killer, dubbed 'The Freeway Killer', is headline news and when Marni's classmate is abducted from the mall where Sarah and Marni shop, their city no longer feels safe.

Hetty’s family was torn apart following the German invasion of the Netherlands. Rounded up by the Nazis and then separated from their parents, Hetty and her brothers were sent to the Children’s House, within Belsen concentration camp. As one of the eldest, Hetty became the ‘Little Mother’, helping to care for not only her siblings, but the other children as well.In a direct and powerful style, Hetty recalls one of the remarkable, largely untold stories of the Holocaust – the extraordinary struggle and survival of this group of children through those terrible years.

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 Following their father's death, Laura and Clare are withdrawn from their elite private boarding school by their mother.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.

For 44 years Stella Templeton has been a dutiful daughter and a good citizen living in Maidenville, population 2,800, a town where nothing happens. Until one hot summer afternoon...An ugly act has lifted the respectable skirts of Maidenville and mystery starts to surround the daughter of the local minister. Then the disappearance of a 16-year-old-boy adds to the neighbourhood's confusion. Does something sinister lurk behind the neatly trimmed hedges and white picket fences that divide this sleepy town?

For the many people who are interested in learning more about Buddhism, here is a primer on Buddhism and Buddhist practice written in a deceptively simple manner, with an engaging, gentle humor and flavor. Adrienne Howley's purpose is to demystify Buddhism, stripping away the layers of ritual and iconography that have grown up around it over the centuries, and to present the original, basic tenets and practices.

It is 1944 in Budapest, and the Germans have invaded. Miklos Nagy risks his life and confronts the dreaded Adolf Eichmann in an attempt save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the death camps. But no one could have foreseen the consequences.... It is 2005 in Sydney, and Annika Barnett sets out on a journey that takes her to Budapest and Tel Aviv to discover the truth about the mysterious man who rescued her grandmother in 1944.

Edith and Frances, living with their mother on a tiny farm in the south-east of Australia, are visited by their cousin Leopold and his Armenian friend Aram. The two young men are taking the long way home after working on an archaeological dig in Iraq. It is 1937. The modern world they say, is waiting to erupt. Among the tales they tell is the story of Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk, in ancient Mesopotamia.

Pru's husband has walked out, leaving her alone to contemplate her future. She's missing not so much him, but the life they once had - picnicking on the beach with small children, laughing together, nestling up like spoons in the cutlery drawer as they sleep. Now there's just a dip on one side of the bed and no one to fill it. In a daze, Pru goes off to a friend's funeral. Usual old hymns, words of praise and a eulogy but...it doesn't sound like the friend Pru knew. And it isn't. She's gone to the wrong service.

The seventh book in the addictive Woody Creek series from bestselling Australian author Joy Dettman. After many tumultuous years spent grappling with the past, Jenny Hooper might have expected her latter years to be the best of her life, and they are - until tragedy strikes. Left floundering in...

From the bestselling author of Mallawindy and the Woody Creek series comes a story of love and survival. Lori Smyth-Owen isn't your average teenager - as you'd expect from the only girl in a family of twelve. Or they were a family, until their father took his own life to escape his bed-bound...

With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention, she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people's lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity.

Set in Australia in the 1840s, A Fringe of Leaves combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's Land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of Australian Aboriginals, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class.

In six short stories Patrick White probes beneath the surface of events to expose a deeper, truer reality. These six short novels and stories achieve the majesty and power of the best of Patrick White’s great novels. They probe beneath the surface of events - a sexual lapse, the unaccustomed climate of a foreign country, interruptions in a cherished routine, a death, a toothache - to expose a deeper, truer reality.

The four Latimer sisters were famous throughout New South Wales for their beauty, wit and sisterly love. But then they left home to train as nurses, swapping their feather beds for the bunks of nursing accommodation. And now, as the Depression casts its shadow across Australia, they must confront their own secret desires. Will the sisters find the independence they crave? Or is life - like love - always bittersweet?

Early one Sunday, the town of Molliston wakes to the news that a young bride is dead. The year is 1929. The Great War with Germany has been fought and won, but at an immense cost to the small community. Death is too familiar here. So many sons were lost. So many daughters would never be wives; so many grandchildren would never be born. Racial hatred is like a bushfire in the belly of some. And the dead girl is found only yards from the property of old Joe Reichenberg, a German..

At the very end of the Ladies’ Frocks Departments, past Cocktail Frocks, there was something very special, something quite, quite wonderful; but it wasn’t for everybody: that was the point. Because there, at the very end, there was a lovely arch, on which was written in curly letters Model Gowns. Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, Ladies in Black is a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The women in black are run off their feet, what with the Christmas rush and the summer sales that follow.

What has gone wrong with political leadership in Australia? And are things likely to change with a change of leader or government? In this crisp and timely essay, Laura Tingle examines political leadership in general - some profiles in courage and cunning - as well as styles of leadership. She looks at Macron and Merkel, Keating and Obama.

Independent and spirited, Georgie is her mother’s daughter through and through. But after a house fire takes the life of her sister, Margot, and burns her home to the ground, Georgie is lost. She flees town with nothing but a cardboard box and the determination to be somebody, anybody, else.