Showing results by narrator "Edwina Wren" in All Categories

The narrow stairway inside the mountain led to a door that opened into a huge marble plateau. Upon this stood a stone circle of nine of the largest hunks of polished crystal Tory had ever seen. A turbulent cloud erupted overhead, its core alive with electromagnetic activity. For 20 years the kingdoms of Prydyn, Dumnonia and Dalriada have prospered in peace under the guidance of their High King, Maelgwn of Gwynedd, and his good Queen, Tory.

Late one evening, en route to visit a relative, an accident leaves Tory - the attractive, twenty-something daughter of a prominent history professor – stranded near a ring of stones in Britain. Tory resolves to spend the night at the stone circle and seek help in the morning... But across the vortex of time and space, she is taken back to the Dark Age.

The extraordinary and best-selling journeys of one woman throughout time... An enormous vortex spiralled above the Earth, out beyond the orbit of the moon. Its centre was expanding to form a huge glowing corridor through the fabric of space. This brilliant mass shot forth thousands of glowing balls of light that proceeded to descend toward our planet.

The once impoverished medical student Agnes Glock is now the fabulously wealthy Mrs Mulberry. Her estate in the mountains is magnificent, a haven for those too ravaged by the Great War to cope with the society that first condemned them to battle and which now shuns them. The War has, however, stolen Agnes's chance to graduate as a doctor, as well as the fiance she adored.

The soldiers called her the Angel of Waterloo...Henrietta Bartlett, the esteemed surgeon's daughter who was born on a battlefield, lost her mother on a battlefield, and was widowed on the battlefield, where she worked alongside her father on that fateful day in June 1815. But after the carnage of war, Hen dreams of peace, and her own home, and a society that would allow a woman to practice medicine. The new and faraway colony of New South Wales seems a paradise, where even convicts have a chance of a good life.

The year is 1942 and the world is at war. Nancy Clancy left school at 14 to spend a year droving, just like her grandfather Clancy of the Overflow. Now 16, Nancy's family has sent her to Malaya to bring home her sister-in-law Moira and baby nephew Gavin. Yet despite the threat of Japanese invasion, Moira resists, wanting to stay near her husband Ben. But not even Nancy of the Overflow can stop the fall of Singapore and the capture of so many Australian troops. When their ship is bombed, Nancy, Moira and Gavin are reported missing. 

In 1996, Hanna Heath, a rare-book expert, is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, which has been rescued during the Bosnian war. Priceless and beautiful, the book is one of the earliest Jewish volumes ever to be illuminated with images. When Hanna discovers a series of artifacts in its ancient binding, she begins to unlock the book's mysteries. The reader is ushered into an exquisitely detailed past, tracing the book's journey from its salvation back to its creation.

In 1894, 12-year-old Matilda flees the city slums to find her unknown father and his farm. But drought grips the land, and the shearers are on strike. Her father has turned swaggie, and he's wanted by the troopers. In front of his terrified daughter, he makes a stand against them, defiant to the last. "You'll never catch me alive," said he....

Paris 1946: Sabine Brouillette is a war crimes investigator with the French secret service. She lost her family, including her young son, when her Resistance circuit was betrayed near the end of the war. New evidence comes to light that the traitor was a British double agent who went by the code name 'The Black Fox'. Now her quest for revenge has a single focus: find the Black Fox and kill him. 

Blue Laurence has escaped the prison of her aunt's mansion to join the Magnifico Family Circus, a travelling troupe that brings glamour and laughter to country towns gripped by the Depression. Blue hides her crippled legs and scars behind the sparkle of a mermaid's costume; but she's not the only member of the circus hiding a dark secret. The unquenchable Madame Zlosky creates as well as foresees futures. The bearded lady is a young man with laughing eyes. A headless skeleton dangles in the House of Horrors. And somewhere a murderer is waiting...to strike again. 

Far North Queensland, 1993: at 74, former cane farmer Grace Maud is feeling her age, and her isolation, and thinks the best of life may be behind her. Elsewhere in town, high school teacher Patricia has given up on her dreams of travel and adventure and has moved back home to look after her ageing parents, while cafe owner Dorothy is struggling to accept that she may never have the baby she and her husband so desperately want. Each woman has an unspoken need: reconnection. And that's how they find themselves at Orange Blossom House, surrounded by perfumed rainforest. 

England, 1918. Armistice Day should bring peace into Leonora's life. Rather than secretly making cosmetics in her father's chemist shop to sell to army nurses such as Joan, her adventurous Australian friend, Leo hopes to now display her wares openly. Instead, Spanish flu arrives in the village, claiming her father's life. Determined to start over, she boards a ship to New York City. On the way she meets debonair department store heir Everett Forsyth....

Hannah Tigone, bestselling Australian crime author, is crafting a new novel that begins in the Boston Public Library: four strangers; Winifred, Cain, Marigold and Whit are sitting at the same table when a bloodcurdling scream breaks the silence. A woman has been murdered. They are all suspects, and, as it turns out, each character has their own secrets and motivations—and one of them is a murderer.

This ambitious, electrifying work traces the harrowing journey of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in 15th-century Spain. When it falls to Hanna Heath, an Australian rare-book expert, to conserve this priceless work, the series of tiny artifacts she discovers in its ancient binding—an insect wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair—only begin to unlock its deep mysteries.

The second book in this brilliant series from best-selling author of The Ancient Future, Traci Harding. Throughout the Universe, the secret of life is pursued to the death.... Taren Lenox and Lucian Gervaise land on a utopian planet of immortal psychics. It shares an orbit with their lost planet, Maladaan - inhabited by a race that cannot abide psychism. Their saviours believe Taren and Lucian to be incarnations of their great ancestors, come to help them remove the alien planet from their star system.

There have been fires before, but not like this. In 1978, as the hot wind howls and the grass dries, all who live at Gibber's Creek know their land can burn. But when you love your land, you fight for it. For Jed Kelly, an even more menacing danger looms: a man from her past determined to destroy her. Finding herself alone, trapped and desperate to save her unborn child, Jed's only choice is to flee—into the flames.

From master storyteller Bryce Courtenay comes a colorful, lusty story set in the 13th century, an epic tale of a Europe torn by religious intolerance. The story centers around Sylvia Honeyeater, who sings like an angel and can literally charm the birds from the trees. The narrative also features the Pied Piper of Hamelin, Francis of Assisi, the Muslim Sultan and his harem, and the fervor that becomes the Children's Crusade and then, later, the Crusades.

Ten years in Maladaan's past, Taren Lennox seizes the opportunity to secure personal financing for the AMIE Project and base the building on Frujia - away from Maladaan and its Secret Service. But when the MSS develop a weapon, from a patent of one of Taren's inventions that counts light - photon by photon - she begins to doubt her ability to keep her ever-growing psychic army a secret. For this new photon-camera can identify a psychic from the more inept by the unmistakable brilliance of their light-field. 

As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play. Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone. 

During a brush with the Sons of the Long Knives, Gwion earns the trust of Keridwen and is offered employment at her Castell in Gwynedd. There the goddess is brewing a potion of prophetic insight and secret wisdom, destined for her monstrous, shape-shifting son, Morvran. But an ill-timed accident on the final day of his task sees Gwion inherit all the potion's supernatural abilities. In a shapeshifting battle, Gwion is swallowed by Keridwen, and upon her return to human form the Goddess discovers that she is pregnant. A punishment imposed on her by Gwyn ap Nudd, Lord of the Otherworld, dooms the goddess to carry the babe in her womb for decades.