Showing results by narrator "Heather Bolton Bolton" in All Categories

Owls Do Cry is Janet Frame's first novel. She describes her idea behind it in the second volume of her autobiography: 'Pictures of great treasure in the midst of sadness and waste haunted me and I began to think, in fiction, of a childhood, home life, hospital life, using people known to me as a base for main characters, and inventing minor characters.'

Towards Another Summer is a meditation on the themes of exile and return, homesickness and not knowing where home really is. It is suffused with beauty and tenderness and shot through with self-deprecating humour and frailty. Grace, the protagonist, is taking a break from writing a long novel and seems to be losing her grip on daily life in London. She feels more and more like a migratory bird as the pull of her native New Zealand makes life in England seem transitory.

Set in an unnamed NZ city in 1953, Fire tells the story of four working class friends, all employed at Dawsons, one of the country's most glamorous and sophisticated department stores. An historical romance based on the Ballantynes Department Store Fire in 1947 that killed 41 people, most of...

When Bob Chappell disappeared from his yacht, moored in the Derwent Estuary near the Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania's marina, on the night of 26 January 2009, he left behind his pipe and tobacco - something that his partner of 18 years, Sue Neill-Fraser, knew he would never willingly do. What she didn't know was that despite no body, no weapon, no cause of death and no witnesses, she would soon become the only suspect in Chappell’s disappearance.

When Heather Delaney is injured in a shocking act of violence, her life is thrown off course. Struggling to return to work, she is haunted by the incident. Was it random or personal? Will they try again? And Heather is not the only one who is rocked by the attack. Her brother, Adam, and his second wife, Jill, already juggling the demands of work and pre-teen children find their marriage is straining at the seams. Adam disappears into his music while Jill attempts to keep all the balls in the air.

A superbly written novel offering an intriguing interpretation of one of the world's greatest aviators, the glamorous and mysterious Jean Batten. Jean Batten became an international icon in the 1930s. A brave, beautiful woman, she made a number of heroic solo flights across the world. The newspapers couldn't get enough of her, yet she suddenly slipped out of view, disappearing to the Caribbean with her mother and dying in obscurity in Majorca, buried in a pauper's grave.

From New York Times best-selling author Helen Brown comes a funny and moving account of her life-changing month as a foster mother - to a homeless cat named Bono. After a brush with cancer, Helen Brown, happily married for 22 years and with three grown children, took stock of her comfortable suburban life and found it wanting. Seizing the day, she headed to New York, the city that never sleeps, where she was talked into fostering Bono, a rescue cat in need of a forever home.

In the spirit of The Daughters of Mars, Tom Keneally's new novel brilliantly explores the intimacies of ordinary lives being played out against momentous world events. In Gawell, New South Wales, a prisoner-of-war camp to house European, Korean and Japanese captives is built close to a farming community. Alice is a young woman living a dull life with her father-in-law on his farm while her new husband first fights, then is taken prisoner, in Greece.

It is 1905 and brothers Yung and Shun eke out a living as green grocers near Wellington's bustling Chinatown. The pair work to support their families back in China, but know they must adapt if they are to survive and prosper in their adopted home. Nearby, Katherine McKechnie struggles to raise her rebellious son and daughter following the death of her husband Donald. A strident right-wing newspaperman, Donald terrorised his family, though was idolised by his son. Chancing upon Yung's grocery store one day, Katherine is touched by his unexpected generosity. In time, a clandestine relationship develops....

“If the legendary Schindler’s List was not enough to showcase Thomas Keneally’s literary mastery, then [this novel] surely will” (New York Daily News) as the Booker Prize-winning author reimagines from all sides the drastic true events of the night more than one thousand Japanese POWs...

Fiona Kidman's early stories about New Zealand women's experiences scandalised with their vivid depictions of the heartbreaks and joys of desire, illicit liaisons and unconventional love. Her writing made her a feminist icon in the early 1980s and she has since continued to tell the realities of women's lives, her stories resonating with fans over the years and across the world. To mark her 80th birthday, this volume brings together a variety of her previously published stories as well as several that are new or previously uncollected; all moving, insightful and written with love.

On the edge of a small town in New South Wales, far from the battlefields of the Second World War, lies a prisoner-of-war camp housing Italian, Korean and Japanese soldiers. For their guards and the locals, many with loved ones away fighting, captive or dead, it is hard to know how to treat them...

As she watches her brother losing the battle with his memories, Rowan wonders how long she can keep her own past at bay. The old family home in Access Road, where Lionel, Roly and Rowan grew up, is crumbling away - but after more than fifty years Lionel and Roly are back. Rowan too, otherwise safe in her 'upper crusty' suburb, is drawn more and more strongly 'out west'. The past is dangerously alive.