Showing results by narrator "Deidre Rubenstein" in All Categories

An epic story of love, sacrifice and revenge swept along on the winds of war. Australian actress Samantha Lindsay is thrilled when she scores her first lead movie role in the Hollywood epic Torpedo Junction, playing a character based on World War II heroine 'Mamma Tack'. But as filming begins in Vanuatu, uncanny parallels between history and fiction emerge. Just who was the real Mamma Tack? And what mysterious forces are at play? The answers reveal not only bygone secrets but Sam's own destiny.

Jenny Morrison is bravely trying to move on with her life. Her husband missing amidst the turmoil of WWII she takes refuge with Ray King, a slightly sinister, stuttering boy who disappeared from Woody Creek as a teenager but has now reappeared. In return for regular 'wifely duties', Ray offers Jenny and her three children sanctuary at his house in Melbourne. For a time, she is happy.

It is 1944 in Budapest, and the Germans have invaded. Miklos Nagy risks his life and confronts the dreaded Adolf Eichmann in an attempt save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the death camps. But no one could have foreseen the consequences.... It is 2005 in Sydney, and Annika Barnett sets out on a journey that takes her to Budapest and Tel Aviv to discover the truth about the mysterious man who rescued her grandmother in 1944.

After many tumultuous years spent grappling with the past, Jenny Hooper might have expected her latter years to be the best of her life, and they are - until tragedy strikes. Left floundering in a house full of memories, not all of them good, Jenny knows a reckoning is in order. But it won't be easy. History is beginning to repeat itself for Jenny's adopted daughter, Trudy, who finds herself trapped in an abusive relationship. Jenny and her older daughter, Georgie, can only stand by and watch as Trudy's life implodes.

The life of 79-year-old pensioner Peggy Smart is as beige as the décor in her retirement village. Her week revolves around aqua aerobics and appointments with her doctor. Following a very minor traffic accident, things have turned frosty with her grown-up children, and she is afraid they are trying to take away her independence. Noticing her memory isn't what it used to be, Peggy is taking ever more inventive steps to cover up her dwindling faculties.

Jacques Lacan was one of the most important psychoanalysts ever to have lived. Building upon the work of Sigmund Freud, he sought to refine Freudian insights with the use of linguistics and mathematics, arguing that "the structure of unconscious is like a language." He is widely misunderstood and often unfairly dismissed as impenetrable. In this clear, wide-ranging primer, Lionel Bailly demonstrates how Lacan’s ideas are still vitally relevant to contemporary issues of mental health treatment.

At the very end of the Ladies’ Frocks Departments, past Cocktail Frocks, there was something very special, something quite, quite wonderful; but it wasn’t for everybody: that was the point. Because there, at the very end, there was a lovely arch, on which was written in curly letters Model Gowns. Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, Ladies in Black is a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The women in black are run off their feet, what with the Christmas rush and the summer sales that follow.

In the tradition of Paullina Simons comes an unforgettable story of a mother and daughter from a remarkable new writer. Beginning in a small village under Japanese occupation on the Chinese-Russian border in the final days of World War II, White Gardenia tells the story of a Russian mother and daughter separated by war.

Set in the leafy northern suburbs of Sydney during the 1940s, The Watch Tower is a novel of relentless and acute psychological power. Following their father's death, Laura and Clare are withdrawn from their elite private boarding school by their mother. As their mother slowly withdraws from them, the two are left to fend for themselves. Laura's boss, Felix, is there to help, even offering to marry Laura if she will have him. However Felix is not all that he seems, and little by little the two sisters grow complicit with his obsessions, his cruelty and his need to control.

Independent and spirited, Georgie is her mother’s daughter through and through. But after a house fire takes the life of her sister, Margot, and burns her home to the ground, Georgie is lost. She flees town with nothing but a cardboard box and the determination to be somebody, anybody, else.

Woody Creek is gearing up for its centenary celebrations - but for many of its townspeople, it's just another reminder of the old days, when life was more simple, before so-called progress, technology and a growing population roared through the town, altering everything in its wake. Not for Georgie, though. Long encumbered by responsibility for her half-sister, Margot, she's looking towards the future and more changes.

On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman - foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant - is found unconscious just off the railway tracks in the tiny logging community of Woody Creek. The town midwife, Gertrude Foote, is roused from her bed when the woman is brought to her door. Try as she might, Gertrude is unable to save her, but the baby lives.

A novel about connections in a changing world of friends, lovers, family, illness, and death, this unique narrative tells the story of Marie King - a 59-year-old divorcée from Sydney’s affluent north shore. Having devoted her rather conventional life to looking after her husband and three children, Marie is experiencing an identity crisis. Forced to sell the family home now that her children have moved out, Marie expresses herself by getting a tattoo and, consequently, forges a friendship with tattoo artist Rhys.

Edith and Frances, living with their mother on a tiny farm in the south-east of Australia, are visited by their cousin Leopold and his Armenian friend Aram. The two young men are taking the long way home after working on an archaeological dig in Iraq. It is 1937. The modern world they say, is waiting to erupt. Among the tales they tell is the story of Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk, in ancient Mesopotamia.

When Jenny Morrison fled Woody Creek for a new life in Melbourne she left behind a dysfunctional family, a town of small-minded gossips, and, most tragically, a newborn baby. Mustering all her strength, she resolved to put her past behind her, reclaim her identity, and pursue her dream of becoming a famous singer.... Yet just months later she is back - wiser and with an expensive new wardrobe - but with a second child growing in her belly.

In The Silent Inheritance, the author of the best-selling Woody Creek series brings another unforgettable cast of characters to life in a brand new story. Sarah Carter, mother of 12-year-old Marni, is raising her daughter alone in a small granny flat in suburban Melbourne. A serial killer, dubbed 'The Freeway Killer', is headline news and when Marni's classmate is abducted from the mall where Sarah and Marni shop, their city no longer feels safe.

Hetty’s family was torn apart following the German invasion of the Netherlands. Rounded up by the Nazis and then separated from their parents, Hetty and her brothers were sent to the Children’s House, within Belsen concentration camp. As one of the eldest, Hetty became the ‘Little Mother’, helping to care for not only her siblings, but the other children as well.In a direct and powerful style, Hetty recalls one of the remarkable, largely untold stories of the Holocaust – the extraordinary struggle and survival of this group of children through those terrible years.

Lori Smyth-Owen isn't your average teenager - as you'd expect from the only girl in a family of 12. Or they were a family, until their father took his own life to escape his bed-bound wife, too obese to leave her room. But for Lori and the remaining brothers, there is no escape from their volatile, mentally unstable mother. They raise themselves away from the gaze of the authorities, realising that though abandoned, they are now in charge. They can control everything, including their mother's food intake.

Pru's husband has walked out, leaving her alone to contemplate her future. She's missing not so much him, but the life they once had - picnicking on the beach with small children, laughing together, nestling up like spoons in the cutlery drawer as they sleep. Now there's just a dip on one side of the bed and no one to fill it. In a daze, Pru goes off to a friend's funeral. Usual old hymns, words of praise and a eulogy but...it doesn't sound like the friend Pru knew. And it isn't. She's gone to the wrong service.

A story of courage, unconventionality and lust for life. Vera Wasowski was just seven years old when German soldiers marched her family into the Lvov Jewish ghetto in Poland. She watched her father take his own life and her mother accede to sexual blackmail in order to ensure her and Vera’s survival. With unsparing honesty and the blackest humour, she recalls a world where the desire to survive was everything.