Showing results by narrator "Maddy Withington" in All Categories

Sydney TV reporter Josephine "Josie" Larsen is approaching 30 and coming dangerously close to failing at life. Lost in a vortex of other people's career milestones, engagement parties, and baby showers, Josie is perennially single, abandoned by her globetrotting family, and invisible to her boss—except for the one time he tuned in while she was mid-panic attack on live TV. As a punishment, Josie is shipped off to cover another reporter's six-month leave at a regional bureau in Newcastle. But Josie has more waiting for her in Newcastle than yawn-inducing stories about bicycle lane protests.

1917: America's declaration of war against Germany gives Grace Winter, a keen-eyed New York Times investigative reporter, a much sought after opportunity to make her mark on the Western Front, albeit in ways she had never expected. But by 1918 the gruesome reality of trench warfare has set in, and an invisible new enemy - The Spanish Flu - is killing allied soldiers in their droves.

Lotti Coates lives in the shadow of a genius: her father, George, is a brilliant and celebrated Australian painter. When Lotti meets the outcast waif Kyla at a suburban Canberra school, two worlds are set to collide. Slowly Kyla is drawn into the orbit of the Coates family. Or is it the other way around? As Lotti and Kyla navigate their way towards adulthood, dark secrets start to unravel, with devastating consequences....

In Darkwater, being female doesn't amount to much. But Chelsea's luckier than most. She's the young lover of the town's feared leader, which she keeps telling herself is a good thing, what with food getting scarce and the wells drying up. She's secure and safe and can almost believe she's happy. But when a stranger rides into town, gun on one hip, whip on the other, Chelsea can't look away. Especially when it turns out this stranger is a woman. Nobody can say what the stranger is there for. But she brings talk of an outside perhaps no longer so chaotic, no longer something to hide away from.

It's not easy getting close to people. Amelia's meeting a lot of men but once she gets the sex she wants from them, that's it for her: she can't connect further. A terrible thing happened to Daniel last year and it's stuck inside Amelia ever since, making her stuck too. Maybe being a cosmetician at her family's mortuary business isn't the best job for a young woman. It's not helping her social life. She loves her job, but she's not great at much else. Especially emotion.

Bridget and Simone aren't friends. But their daughters are in the same dance troupe, so they're flying to Los Angeles for the girls to perform at Disneyland. Simone's daughter Zahra is indisputably a leader in the group, but Bridget's daughter Becky is a talent on the rise. Simone and her husband are accustomed to business class, but Bridget is less comfortable there. Both lonely women are surprised to find something in common, until Bridget discovers images of Zahra and other dancers that shock her. Are they exploitative or art?

‘Ella Baxter’s debut novel is drenched in sex and death . . . there’s also much love . . . An intense, viscerally affecting book, with the quotient of tenderness to violence in an equal scale.’ - Sydney Morning Herald Amelia is no stranger to sex and death. Her job in her family’s...