Showing results by narrator "Deidre Rubenstein" in All Categories

Joice Loch was an extraordinary Australian. She had the inspired courage that saved many hundreds of Jews and Poles in World War II, the compassion that made her a self-trained doctor to tens of thousands of refugees, the incredible grit that took her close to death in several theatres of war and the dedication to truth and justice that shone forth in her own books and a lifetime of astonishing heroism.

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.

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.

The wind is whispering in Woody Creek. Change is in the air. It's 1958 and Woody Creek is being dragged kicking and screaming into the swinging '60s. Jenny's daughters, Cara and Georgie, are now young women. They have inherited their mother's hands, but that is where their similarity ends. Raised separately, they have never met. A mistake from Cara's teenage years looms over her future, but she believes emphatically in the white-wedding and happily-ever-after myth. Georgie has seen enough of marriage and motherhood. She plans to live her life as her grandmother did, independent of a man.

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.

As a teenage orphan in England in 1791, Mary Reibey was sentenced to death for stealing a horse. When police cornered her, she was dressed as a boy, and she maintained that disguise until she was unmasked at her trial. Due to her 'tender age', Reibey was spared the hangman's noose and sentenced to seven years' transportation to the colony of New South Wales. With the odds stacked against her, Reibey went on to become Australia's first female business tycoon and the richest woman in the colony, founding the Bank of New South Wales, now one of the nation's biggest financial institutions.

Clever, charming dressmaker Ketty Clift is embarking on her final cruise from Sydney before she must make serious changes in her life. Her mission is to transform the lives of those who join her at her dining table every evening. But this trip is different. As the glamour and indulgence of the cruise takes hold, and the ship sails further away from Sydney towards the Pacific Islands, it becomes clear her fellow travellers - a troubled family, a grieving widower and an angry divorcee determined to wreak revenge on her ex - are going to be harder work than usual.

During the darkest days of the Cold War, in the remote wilderness of a South Australian desert, the future of an infant nation is being decided ... without its people's knowledge. A British airbase in the middle of nowhere; an atomic weapons testing ground; an army of raw youth led by powerful, ambitious men - a cocktail for disaster. Such is Maralinga in the spring of 1956.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While we know much about the iconic outlaw Ned Kelly, his mother Ellen Kelly has been largely overlooked by Australian writers and historians...until now. By best-selling biographer Grantlee Kieza, Mrs Kelly is the astonishing story of one of Australia's most notorious women and her wild family, but it's also the story of the making of Australia, from struggling colony and backwater to modern nation.

The story of eight courageous women who had the courage and strength for which the Anzacs are renowned and the compassion and tenderness that only a woman can bring. One brave nursing sister, Hilda Samsing, became a whistle blower. Nursing aboard the hospital ship Gascon, outraged by the bungled evacuation of wounded Anzacs which was censored out of the press, she let her diary be shown in high places, which raised questions in the House of Commons.

Bittersweet follows the lives of four sisters - two pairs of twins. Edda, Grace, Kitty, and Tufts are about to become the first batch of nurses to be professionally trained in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. For Edda, it is the closest she can come to her dream of being a doctor. For Grace, the hospital is a terrifying place of sickness and mess, while Tufts discovers her hidden talents. For Kitty, it is a way to escape the suffocating love of her mother, who can see nothing beyond Kitty's astonishing beauty.

Elizabeth Hunter, an ex-socialite in her 80s, has a mystical experience during a summer storm in Sydney which transforms all her relationships: her existence becomes charged with a meaning which communicates itself to those around her. From this simple scenario Patrick White unfurls a monumental exploration of the tides of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, impotence and longing that fester within family relationships.

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.

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.