Showing results by narrator "Taylor Owynns" in All Categories

Edwina Dawling is the golden girl of Australian television. The former pop singer is now the country's most popular actress, an international star thanks to the hit TV soap The Glitter Game. But behind the seductive glamour of television is a cutthroat world where careers are made or destroyed with a word in the right ear...or a night in the right bed. Where success breeds envy and corruption, concealed in the flashing smiles at every premier event, every party.

Part memoir, part transformational self-help book, Lovelands is a chronicle of Dr Debra Campbell's journey through the rocky terrain of her personal relationships. She offers help to listeners so they can locate, identify and circumnavigate their fault lines. She examines family relationships and their impact on self-esteem and intimacy as well as the reasons for our relationship choices and dysfunctional patterns.

Alison is an actress who no longer acts, Patrick a musician past his prime. The eccentric couple live an isolated, debauched existence in an old manor house in Scotland, a few miles outside their village. That is, until Patrick's teenage daughter, Neve, flees Australia to spend a year abroad with her doting, if unreliable, father, and Alison, the stepmother she barely knows. On the weekend of Neve's eighteenth birthday, her father insists on a celebratory feast to mark her coming of age. Despite Neve's objections, her mother Shannon arrives in Scotland to join the celebrations.

Barbara McClymont walks the cane fields searching for Janet, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who has been missing for weeks. The police have no leads. The people of Quala are divided by dread and distrust. But the sugar crush is underway and the cane must be burned. Meanwhile, children dream of a malevolent presence, a schoolteacher yearns to escape, and history keeps returning to remind Quala that the past is always present.

Grief-stricken and on the verge of a breakdown, Luda Managan and her two teenaged children try to make a home for themselves on a collection of harsh and haunted Scottish islands. Luda, a photographer, is mesmerised by the extraordinary magic of the islands but soon finds herself condemned by the local community after publishing images documenting the death of a local child. Alienated, Luda turns her attention to the records from the 17th-Century island witch-hunts and the fragmented life stories of the executed women.

In 1970s Melbourne, 22-year-old Italian migrant Antonello is newly married and working as a rigger on the West Gate Bridge, a gleaming monument to a modern city. When the bridge collapses one October morning, killing 35 of his workmates, his world crashes down on him. In 2009, Jo and her best friend, Ashleigh, are on the verge of finishing high school and flush with the possibilities for their future. But one terrible mistake sets Jo’s life on a radically different course.

It is the winter of 1985. Hope Farm sticks out of the ragged landscape like a decaying tooth, its weatherboard walls sagging into the undergrowth. Silver's mother, Ishtar, has fallen for the charismatic Miller, and the three of them have moved to the rural hippie commune to make a new start. But here, at just 13, she is thrust into an unrelenting adult world, and the walls begin to come tumbling down, with deadly consequences.

This is the first biography of Greer for two decades, drawing on unprecedented access to her extensive personal archive, opened at Melbourne University in 2016. Kleinhenz has interrogated Greer's personal and professional files, spoken to people who have known her from her school days onwards, and read every word written by and about her. Beginning with Greer’s troubled early life in 1940s Melbourne, it traces her career, relationships with men and women, her travels and her home life and examines Greer’s work and ideas from The Female Eunuch to the #MeToo movement.

At times like these families should be coming together, not tearing each other apart. On her remote North Queensland cattle station, Ivy Dunmore is facing the end of her days. Increasingly frail, all she holds dear is threatened not just by crippling drought, but by jealousy and greed - and that’s from within her own family. Can Felicity, who's battling her own crisis as her 50th birthday approaches, protect her mother and reunite her family under the homestead's faded iron roof? Or will sibling rivalries erupt and long-held secrets from the past break a family in crisis?

A year after her husband Leo's death, widow Daisy invites her three adult children to join her for a holiday in beautiful Venice. It will be wonderful, having them under one roof again in their father's birthplace. But is it possible to recapture the past? Her son Marc's marriage is in jeopardy, but for his mother's sake he convinces his wife to keep up appearances. Anna is trying to hide the truth about the dismal state of her London acting career; and Ellie, enjoying a gap year and uncertain about her future choices, wants to avoid family pressure to conform.

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.

Spanning three generations, The Long Goodbye takes us deep into the lives of an Australian family as they survive record-breaking floods, outlast epic droughts and face the unforgiving realities of life on the land. Told with astounding lyricism, warmth and humour, this is a deeply moving memoir about the unbreakable bonds of marriage, love and family. And it poses the most heartbreaking moral dilemma of all: when a loved one is suffering, is euthanasia the answer?

A secret band of radical environmentalists, under the name 9S have spent years secretly infiltrating industry and government, working themselves into the most trusted jobs...sleepers ready to act. As a series of global catastrophes erupt, Australian ex-CIA agent Dr. Tori Swyft, finds herself at the centre of it all. Having once been briefly recruited as a 9S member at university, she may be the world's only chance of stopping the threat before it's too late.

World leaders are being assassinated by toxic gas. An obscure group of Chinese terrorists claims responsibility, but are the Ten Brothers - a secret circle of China's political, military and business elite - using terrorists as a cover to justify the assassination of China's President and the overthrow of Beijing? Once again, ex-CIA operative Tori Swyft finds herself embroiled in the middle of an explosive conspiracy. Can she survive long enough to thwart the Ten Brothers?

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.

It's 2016. Lance Alcocke, sole heir to an iron ore fortune, 40-ish bachelor, has just lost control of his life's work. His newly opened mine, Madeleine's Monster, named after his pioneering, iron-fisted grandmother, was supposed to be a workers' paradise in the Pilbara. But the Monster can't cover its costs, and Lance's Korean financiers are trying to steal his company out from under him. They've appointed administrators to APC Minerals, and Lance's 1,200 workers have lost their jobs.