Showing results by narrator "Zoe Carides" in All Categories

Six strangers from across the world converge on the tropical island of Bali to attend a course designed to help them face their fears.

Friendships and romance blossom as the participants are put through a series of challenges designed to test, but fun in the sun suddenly transforms into something far more serious when the unthinkable happens.... Shocking, powerful and utterly gripping, Fearless takes you to the edge and makes you look down.

1944. Emily Dean is sent to stay with relatives in rural Victoria. With grandmother determined to keep up standards despite the effects of the war; Della, the Bible-quoting cook, and her young and fearless aunt Lydia, who refuses to befriend her, Emily just wants to go home. But things start looking up when she encounters Claudio, the Italian prisoner of war employed as a farm labourer. And then Lydia’s brother, William, unexpectedly returns from the war. Wounded and bitter, he’s rude, traumatised and mostly drunk, yet a passion for literature soon draws them together.

France, 1673. Desperate to save herself and her only surviving son from an outbreak of plague, the widow Charlotte Picot flees her village. But her son is kidnapped by slavers, and she fears the boy has been taken to Paris, the terrible City of Crows. And so she resorts to witchcraft and summons assistance in the shape of a malevolent man. Meanwhile, a notorious criminal, Lesage, is unexpectedly released from the prison galleys where he has served a brutal sentence for sacrilege....

Set in southern Tasmania, the linked stories in Smokehouse bring into focus a small community and capture those moments when life turns and one person becomes another. As we get to know these characters—a mother whose fresh start leads to a fractured future, a stonemason seeking connection, a woman grieving her adopted mother, a couple torn apart by their daughter's drug addiction—we learn how their lives intersect, in various ways, across time and place.

As a terrible pandemic rages through the country, a young girl, Teo, leaves her small village and sets off into the forest, in search of a cure for her sister who is infected with the pox. Her father Merdocai has surrendered himself to the evil Marquis to be experimented upon for the Greater Good; and with her mother long-dead, all Teo has to keep her going is the love of her sister, her father and her friend Rodrigo, a stuttering poet. As Teo ventures deeper into the forest, she encounters creatures and teachers who hold the answers to all the questions she has about who she is.

Wellington, 1885: Tally Ho doesn't need to go to school because she is going to be a fisherman or cart driver or butcher boy like Harry Crawford. Taking her hero's advice, she runs away. Sydney, 1917: A burned woman is discovered on the banks of the Lane Cove River. Nobody knows who she was until the police find out a boy's mother went missing that very same weekend, and his stepfather, Harry Crawford, is not who he seems to be.

The Life of Houses explores, with a poet's eye for detail, the hidden tensions in one of Australia's establishment families. These tensions come to the surface during a week in summer when Kit's recently divorced mother sends her away to stay with her estranged grandparents, and her unmarried aunt who cares for them, in their old and decaying house by the sea.