A weekly podcast talking books with the Australian women who create them
On a sweltering day in a cliff-top beach shack, Jack & Lou Bright grow suspicious about the behaviour of their charismatic, unpredictable father, Charlie. A girl they know has disappeared, and as the day unfolds, Jack’s eruptions of panic, Lou’s sultry rebellions and their little sister Phoebe’s attention-seeking push the family towards revelation.
A post-Second World War story of strong female ties and family, secrets and lies, set in the multicultural Australia of the fifties.
The war is over, but her fight for a new life in Australia is about to begin…
Australia 1945.
Until now Kate Dowd has led a sheltered life on Amiens, her family’s sprawling sheep station in northern New South Wales. The horrors of war have for the most part left her untouched. But with her father succumbing to wounds he’s borne since the Great War, the management of the farm is increasingly falling on Kate’s shoulders
You wake up alone after an emergency caesarean, desperate to see your child. And when you are shown the small infant in the nursery, a terrible thought takes root: THIS BABY IS NOT YOUR BABY
One moment can change your life. When Gracie Ashcroft wakes after a crash with severe amnesia, she must choose whether to live a life through other people’s memories or to start a new life all her own.
How much will a young Parisian seamstress sacrifice to make her mark in the male-dominated world of 1940s New York fashion? Crossing generations, society’s boundaries and international turmoil, THE PARIS SEAMSTRESS is the beguiling, transporting story of the special relationship between a grandmother and her granddaughter as they attempt to heal the heartache of the past.
Jenna’s just a teenager who wants to fit in.
The popularity that she wanted though, quickly turns into infamy when two “well-meaning” friends spark a controversy that alters her life forever.
What happens when the popular kids are responsible for one of the most painful and humiliating events in your life?
Psychiatrist Natalie King is the expert witness in a vicious child custody battle, and the stakes are high. Getting it wrong means handing a child over to an abuser—or depriving that child of the only father she knows.
The most enchanting debut novel of 2018, this is an irresistible, deeply moving and romantic story of a young girl, daughter of an abusive father, who has to learn the hard way that she can break the patterns of the past, live on her own terms and find her own strength.
It’s been twenty years since Cormac Reilly discovered the body of Hilaria Blake in her crumbling Georgian home. But he’s never forgotten the two children she left behind…
The safest suburbs often hold the deepest secrets. such is the case for Essie, a mother of two. In a moment of maternal despair she once made a terrible mistake, one she will always regret. Essie has since recovered, but she fears what may still lurk inside her.
Sarah and Hannah are on a cruise from San Diego, California to Sydney Australia. Sarah Hannah’s grandmother , is returning to the country of her birth, a place she hasn’t seen since boarding the USS Mariposa in 1945. She, along with countless other war brides, sailed across the Pacific to join the american Servicemen they’d married during World War II.
Is inheritance a privilege or a right? Award winning Australian author Fiona Lowe returns with a gripping family saga, set against the backdrop of Victoria’s
1932, Ernie and Lily Hass, and their daughter, Girlie, have lost almost everything in the Depression; all they have keeping their small family together are their secrets. Abandoning their failing wheat farm and small-town gossip, they make a new start on the west coast of Australia where they begin to build a summer guesthouse. But forming new alliances with the locals isn’t easy.
From inside her Toorak mansion, Margaret, matriarch, widow of Edmund Rice O’Day of O’Day Funerals, secretly surveys her family in the garden. Everyone, including Margaret herself, is oblivious to the secrets that threaten to be uncovered by a visiting American relative who is determined to excavate the O’Day’s family history. How far will Margaret go in order to bury the truth?
From the creator of ‘Offspring’ and author of Useful, a gripping, wry and tender novel about how holding on too tightly can cost us what we love.
For Maddy, life is all about routine. It has to be, to keep her autistic sister happy and healthy. With just Maddy and her mother as Bee’s full time carers, there’s no time in Maddy’s life for complications like friends, let alone a boyfriend.
Set in rural Tasmania from the 1920s to the 1990s, The Sisters’ Song traces the lives of two very different sisters. One for whom giving and loving are her most natural qualities and the other who cannot forgive and forget.
A beautiful novel about two women – a generation apart – thrown together by circumstance, who slowly come to love and understand one another.
Stella and her mother-in-law Margie are two very different women. Stella is kind, compassionate and just a little chaotic. Margie is prickly, demanding and a stickler for convention. Stella has exciting dreams for the future. Margie has only bitter memories of the past.
Over a decade ago, Australian-born Catherine embarked on the ambitious project to only speak French to her son despite this not being her first language. In the wonderful way that one challenge often inspires another, Catherine and her husband then decided that living in France would bring some authenticity to this social experiment.
The Hope Fault is a celebration of the everyday complexities of family: aunties and steps and exes, and a baby in need of a name; parents and partners who are missing, and the people who replace them.It’s about the faultlines that run under the surface, and it’s about uncertainty — the unsettling notion that the earth might shift, literally or metaphorically, at any moment. It’s a contemporary novel that plays with time and with ways of telling stories. It finds poetry and beauty in science, and pattern and magic in landscape.
Beth had known there were secrets folded inside Theo. But she didn’t know they were secrets about her. And what do you do when everything you thought you knew about yourself is based on a lie?
A year ago, a devastating bushfire ripped Annie’s world apart – killing her grandmother, traumatising her young daughter and leaving her mother’s home in the mountains half destroyed. Annie fled back to the city, but the mountain continues to haunt her. Now, drawn by a call for help from her uncle, she’s going back to the place she loves most in the world, to try to heal herself, her marriage, her daughter and her mother.
A heart-wrenching, tender and lovely novel about loss, grief and regeneration, Ache is not only a story of how we can be broken, but how we can put ourselves back together.
A brilliant, haunting novel about a child navigating an often dark and uncaring world of male power and violence, in which grown-ups can’t be trusted and comfort can only be found in nature. A compassionate and claustrophobic vision of a child in danger and a society in trouble celebrates above all the indomitable nature of the human spirit.
A gripping, atmospheric novel from the acclaimed author of What Came Before that asks: how much should you do to help a stranger’s child?
He hated the word ‘retirement’, but not as much as he hated the word ‘village’, as if ageing made you a peasant or a fool. Herein lives the village idiot.
A moment of distraction, an unlocked car, a missing baby, how on earth could this happen? In a single day, a simple mistake will have
If you loved THE GUERNSEY LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY, THE LITTLE COFFEE SHOP OF KABUL and THE THORN BIRDS you will devour this story of five different women united by one need: to overcome the vast distances of Australia’s Top End with friendship, tears, laughter, books and love.
A compelling memoir of family secrets, murder, sexual assault and domestic violence is also the gripping story of Renee’s constant struggle to accept the truth and her true identity, and, ultimately, to forge a life on her own terms.
‘To the Sea’ is Australian author Christine Dibley’s debut crime novel. Set in Tasmania and Ireland it is lyrical, evocative and deeply engrossing.
