Showing results by narrator "Casey Withoos" in All Categories

One day a woman meets a man and falls instantly and irrevocably in love with him. It hits her like a thunderbolt, and she has to have him, has to be with him, regardless of the cost, of the pain of breaking up her existing relationship. She has never felt more in sync - or in love - with anyone in her whole life. So this is how it feels, she thinks to herself. This is what real love feels like. It's like that for him, too. What happens next will tear them apart and unleash havoc onto their worlds.

Natalie Kon-yu was nine weeks pregnant when the trembling began. Two weeks later she checked herself into a mental health unit. Though she was in crisis, the GPs, nurses and psychiatrists couldn't see beyond Natalie's precious cargo. She was made to feel that her pregnancy outweighed her mental health. This loss of agency lingered long into her early years of motherhood. In that time, she discovered that she was far from alone. In fact, her experience typifies the harsh inequalities endured by child-bearing women, as well as the devaluation of what is still perceived as ‘women's work'.

Somebody is lying. After eighteen-year-old Ellie Canning is found shivering and barely conscious on a country road, her bizarre story of kidnap and escape enthrals the nation. Who would do such a thing? And why? Local drama teacher Suzannah Wells, once a minor celebrity, is new to town. Suddenly...

What does a young footballer do to cut loose? At night, some play what they think of as pranks or games: night games with women. Sometimes these involve consensual sex, sometimes not, and often the lines are blurred. In Night Games, Anna Krien follows the rape trial of an Australian Rules footballer. She also takes a balanced and fearless look at the dark side of footy culture - the world of Sam Newman, Ricky Nixon, Matty Johns and the Croa Sharks.

Camille is a nurse specialising in supporting families through the difficult decision to donate the organs of their dying loved ones. Camille's mother is a gifted but uncompromising transplant surgeon determined to make it in a man's world until her own life falls apart. And Camille herself is a mother to Addie–five years old, critically ill and in desperate need of the very organs her mother and grandmother work with.

Felix Carrington helps run the family's wedding venue business as the in-house wedding photographer for Carrington Farm. His personal passion? Taking unexpected shots of his local environment. And it's through an unlikely and close friendship with 84-year-old Winnifred Knightly that Felix is able to access one of his favourite places to photograph, the faded grandeur of Peppercorn House and its overgrown gardens.

World War II is over, and Hiroshima lies in a heap of poisoned rubble when young Quaker Wesley Cunningham returns home to Almond Tree. He served as a stretcher-bearer; he’s seen his fair share of horror. Now he intends to build beautiful houses and to marry, having fallen in love with his neighbour’s daughter, Beth Hardy. Beth has other plans. An ardent socialist, she is convinced the Party and Stalin’s Soviet Union hold the answers to all the world’s evils. She doesn’t believe in marriage, and in any case, her devotion is to the cause.

A moving, tender and compelling story about a life lived on the edges of society, of poverty, of certainty, of love. Filled with beautifully realised descriptions of life seen through a child's eyes - a child who gradually comes to realise her adored parents are all too tragically flawed and broken - Velocity packs the emotional impact of Angela's Ashes with the surreal humour and razor-sharp observations of Running with Scissors.

From the acclaimed author of The Memory Artist and The Shut Ins comes a new novel about the relationship between body and self, and how we must dive beneath the surface to really know ourselves.

While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry.

Birdie McBride has it all: a fulfilling job, five healthy daughters and a doting husband, Ned. But then Ned dies. He leaves behind a document for Birdie—‘Things I Need You To Know'—a guide to everything from household maintenance to each daughter's emotional landscape. Reading Ned's manual, Birdie falls in love with her husband in a way she never did when he was alive. Yet the presence of his best friend, Marcello, complicates things.

Even though we’d grown up in vastly different cultures and countries, we’d both known poverty, domestic violence and the expectation that neither one of us would ever amount to anything. That was probably what united us more than anything: our shared defiance of that prediction. She tap-danced on street corners for people’s small change. He was an out-of-work university teacher, poet and Vietnam vet. She was white and from Australia. He was black and from the Deep South. They met at Mardi Gras, New Orleans, in 1985. She was 22. He was nearly 40. They fell in love.

Where Have You Been? is a gripping domestic thriller that takes the form of a classic impostor story, with a 21st-century twist. Susan and Ed Middleton are perfectly content with their lives. Two kids, two cars, a solid brick bungalow in the suburbs. There’s barely a ripple in the surface of their happy existence. But when Susan’s older sister, who vanished as a teenager, reappears to claim an inheritance, everything is set to change. Karen - now known as Carly - has had a tough time during the past 20 years: drugs, prostitution, prison.

Violet Black and Ethan Wright are both in a coma after contracting the lethal M-fever. They have never met: I couldn't speak, but I was trying so hard to communicate and then...then.... I pushed. And something, someone, pushed back. Her name is Violet. Violet, but she is sunshine-yellow, and I need to find her because I think she might be just like me. But there is a far more serious reason for Ethan to find Violet - the sinister Foundation is trying to hunt them down.

Blending the popular genre of crime fiction with the art of the short story, Crime and Other Pastimes reveals the interconnecting lives and deaths of unforgettable characters within an inner-city community. After the corpse of a newborn baby is discovered in a nearby laneway, an adopted girl being raised in a funeral home finally appreciates the sanctity of her own life. A drug dealer goes missing, and his many clients plot an outrageous plan to ensure his safe return, with comically fatal results....

Beat. Heartbeat. One, two, three. I only just became aware of the third today, just another complication in an impossible situation. The Foundation is particularly keen to get its hands on the baby. Is freedom an impossible dream?

Art dealer Alex Clayton and conservator John Porter are thrilled to be previewing the Melbourne International Museum of Art’s (MIMA) newest exhibition, until they witness a museum worker collapse and badly damage a reportedly cursed painting. Belief in the curse is strengthened when MIMA’s senior conservator, Meredith Buchanan, dies less than 24 hours later while repairing the work. But Alex and John are convinced there is a decidedly human element at work in the museum.

As a sexual offences prosecutor, Katrina Marson works for an institution that can only respond, one case at a time, to sexual violence once the damage is already done. During a decade of looking back, she kept returning to a single question: what could have been done to prevent this?

The beautiful Snowy Mountains are Kylie Harris' home. An expert, daring skier, Kylie once dreamed of instructing the rich and famous who come to the Victorian Alps each winter. But when tragedy strikes, she is forced to reassess her life. In the wilds of Papua New Guinea, Kylie, now an aid worker, is reunited with the man she believes is her soul mate. But it turns out happiness is an elusive gift. Heartbroken, Kylie is convinced she will never again love so deeply. Can she find the courage to let go of her past?

A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship ploughs through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men. With her trademark humor, energy, and flair, McKay offers glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans embrace their animal selves and animals talk like humans.