Showing results by narrator "Taryn Ryan" in All Categories

I never thought I would end up here. Alone, in a cold one-bedroom apartment, only seeing my precious daughter once a week. Another woman is living the life that was once mine. I wish I was still married to my ex-husband, the love of my life. I dream of tucking my five-year-old child into her ballerina bed sheets every night. I miss living in a beautiful house, the perfect family home, with a winding staircase and a sprawling garden. I’d do anything to be with my family again. To start over and prove to them that I’ve changed, that I won’t lose control like before.

In 1841, Australia's first children's book was published, the anonymous writer known only as 'a lady long resident in New South Wales'. The identity of the author was one of the most puzzling literary mysteries until 1981, when she was finally given a name: Charlotte Waring Atkinson. Today, her great-great-great-great-granddaughters Kate Forsyth and Belinda Murrell are also celebrated authors. They grew up on stories about Charlotte's life of love, grief and violence - and her struggle to assert an independent spirit.

When I begin to receive threatening messages, one thing becomes clear: Cassandra wants me out of her son’s life, and she will do anything to get what she wants. Including destroying me. But that’s okay. No matter what she does, I’m confident that Miles and I will be forever. Because I know Cassandra’s darkest secret. The one she’ll do absolutely anything to keep. I have a plan, while she has no idea who she’s dealing with. And by the time my darling mother-in-law realizes, it will be far too late for her to run…

Sydney journalist Chloe Brown is left devastated when her long-term boyfriend finally admits he never wants children. Impulsively, she takes a job on a small country newspaper in Queensland's far north to escape disappointment. But she soon realises that no place is free from trouble or heartache. The grouchy news editor, Finn Latimer, is a former foreign correspondent who has retreated after a family tragedy. Emily, the paper's elegant, 60-something owner, is battling with her husband's desertion. Meanwhile, the whole town is worried when their popular young baker disappears.

Spilling Secrets: Planet Catlabrator is awash with water and the catralabs are drowning. When Space Agent Star Girl is sent to investigate with SA Asteroid she learns that some mission buddies are more trouble than they're worth. Can she work with Asteroid to save the planet and its alien catralabs?

Riga, 1943. Cycling the streets to deliver fresh loaves, Zenta passes empty houses, curtains open, doors unlocked, their occupants forced out by Russian or German hands. Above the newly built town hall, a Nazi flag waves in the breeze. Since her brother became a soldier and her sister joined the resistance, Zenta is all her parents have left. Then one morning her sister returns. Tired, worn, with a newly rounded belly, Estere is as determined as ever to fight for their freedom.

When a young girl wakes up in the middle of the desert, she has no idea who she is. She's wearing one shoe, a silky black dress, and she's carrying a strange, heavy case. She meets Tarni, who is on a mysterious quest of her own. Together, the two girls trek across the vast and ever-changing Australian Outback in search of answers. Except both are also hiding secrets.

When Mara Gregory receives a letter from the father whom she believed to have died when she was a child, her world is turned upside down. Aaron Buchanan only discovered that he had a daughter a couple of years ago and now he's desperate to play a part in her life. In the face of her mother's opposition, Mara arranges to meet her father and his family. In a breath-taking corner of the world, amid a waterfront community on Australia's west coast, will Mara find him the disappointment that her mother promises?

In 1983, backstage at the Lyceum in London, Tracey Thorn and Lindy Morrison first met. Tracey's music career with the Marine Girls had just begun, while Lindy, drummer for The Go-Betweens, was ten years her senior. They became confidantes, comrades and best friends, a relationship cemented by activism and agitprop theatre, lesbian punk bands and rock 'n' roll love affairs. Morrison came to be a kind of mentor to Thorn, a strong female role model in a male dominated industry. They both faced a chauvinist music media wanting them to behave to type.

When Olivia Molly Rogers was crowned Miss Universe Australia, she knew exactly what she wanted to shine a light on: her struggles with disordered eating and anxiety. While many of her Instagram followers are eager for her fashion, art and insanely cute dog content, the heart of Olivia's audience is there for her refreshingly honest voice on body positivity and mental health.

Dee Nichols is a free-spirited yoga teacher, albeit a broke one. But she's not interested in money or possessions or thinking too far into the future. After surviving a terrible car accident, she's just happy to be breathing. Then Dee meets Ethan Roxburgh at a Christmas party. As the head of Roxburgh Holdings, and a regular in the social pages, he's the opposite of what Dee wants in her life. Until a job modelling yoga in a TV commercial turns Dee into an overnight celebrity.

They find her just as the sun is beginning to rise in the early morning mist. They had begun at dawn, the group of searchers keen to get going. A missing child spurred everyone on. In the end, it was a flash of color, a bright neon pink that caught her eye. They had been looking for pink. Nothing tests your faith like being a mother. The first time your children walk to school alone, their first sleepover, when they finally fly the nest. As a parent, you have to believe that everything will be ok.

"Your son is missing," they say, and life as I know it is over. "Where would he go?" the police ask. "Where would he be?" my daughter begs. My heart races as images flash in my mind. The cabin we rent every autumn, surrounded by fiery-red maple trees. Voices raised. Tears falling. A marriage falling apart. And worst of all my husband telling our child, Theo, to run. The rest is a blank in my memory. If I close my eyes I can almost see it. A betrayal that has left me alone, in tatters, grieving for what we had.

Verity Fassbinder thought no boss could be worse than her perfectionist ex-boyfriend—until she agreed to work for a fallen angel. The angel is a jealous—and violent—employer, so she's quit working for the Weyrd Council and sent her family away. The angel has tasked Verity with finding two lost treasures. That would be hard even without a vengeful Dusana Nadasy on her heels. And Inspector McIntyre won't stop calling: the bodies of Normal women who disappeared decades ago are turning up, apparently subjected to Weyrd magics.

I am cooking spaghetti, his favourite, while he plays in the garden. But when I look up, he’s gone. I call the police, my hands shaking so much that I hit the wrong digits twice. "My son is missing." When the police turn up, I’m trapped in the web of my lies. I have hidden the truth from eight-year-old Riley, my little boy who loves climbing trees and always has scraped knees. I have hidden my secret from everyone.

When first-year music student Amalia stumbles into her Oxford college bar, she has no idea that everything is about to change. Seated across from her is Alex, a velvety-voiced fellow Australian with eyes the colour of her native sky. They strike up a friendship that is immediate - its intensity both thrilling and terrifying. As the days and weeks go by, they spend more and more time together: philosophising, hypothesising, questioning everything.

In Western Australia, Sarah chuckles as she describes her final will and testament—which will throw the metaphorical cat among the family pigeons—whilst sharing a bottle of wine with her neighbour Thomas as they sit on the terrace of her luxurious waterside home. Six months later, at the age of 95, she peacefully passes on. Married and widowed three times, Sarah has had a great life as a successful businesswoman. Now she's left her Australian house to her two great-nieces—on the condition that they live in it together for a year.

Caroline twitches aside her curtains to see the new family moving in. A mother – beautifully dressed in expensive clothes – and two young children. Where is her husband, she wonders? And why are they moving in to the smallest house on the street? They really don’t seem the type. But Caroline believes it’s important to be welcoming. It’s important to know everything that’s happening on West Street.

An unexpected inheritance is most people's dream, but not so for Paula. She's happy and secure in Western Australia with her own business, a complete contrast to her rootless childhood, and has little interest in the minor stately home in Wiltshire of which she is apparently now the owner. Persuaded to at least visit the property, she travels to the UK but from the journey to what awaits her at the other end, complications personal, romantic and financial abound, which will test the adage that home is where the heart is.

The Kane family, Lorcan, Naiyana and their young son, relocate from Perth to Kallayee, an abandoned mining town in the Great Victoria Desert to start over again, free from their chequered past. The town seems like the perfect getaway: peaceful, quiet, remote. Somewhere they won’t be found. But life in Kallayee isn’t quite as straightforward as they hope. There are noises in the earth, mysterious shadows and tracks in the dust, as if the town is coming back to life. But the family can’t leave. No one can talk sense into them. And now, no one can talk to them at all.