Showing results by narrator "Withington Maddy" in All Categories

Amelia Aurelia is approaching 30 and her closest relationships - other than her mother - are through her dating apps. She works at the family mortuary business as a cosmetic mortician with her eccentric step-father and older brother, whose throuple’s current preoccupation is with what type of snake to adopt. When Amelia’s affectionate mother passes away without warning, she is left without anchor. Fleeing the funeral, she seeks solace with her birth-father in Tasmania and stumbles into the local BDSM community.

After Ana flees to Melbourne in the wake of a breakup, all she has to show for herself is an unfulfilling job and one particularly questionable dating app experience. Then she meets Evan: the old-fashioned way, at a bar. Charming, kind, and responsible, Evan is a complete deviation from her usual type. Ana tries to let their relationship unfold IRL, but she can’t resist the urge to find him online. When she discovers that his previous girlfriend died in a hit-and-run, Ana begins to worry that she’s living in the shadow of his lost love.

Katy Sweeney is determined to find her sister. A year earlier, just three weeks into a solo vanlife trip, free-spirited Phoebe vanished without a trace on Western Australia’s remote and achingly beautiful Coral Coast. With no witnesses, no leads, and no DNA evidence, the case has gone cold. But Katy refuses to give up. Using Phoebe’s social media accounts as a map, Katy starts to retrace her steps, searching for the clues that the police have missed. Was Phoebe being followed? Who had she met along the way, and what danger did they pose?

Eighteen-year-old Brooke is the kind of friend who not only remembers everyone’s birthdays, but also organizes the group present, pays for it, and politely chases others for their share. She’s the helper, the doer, the maker-of spreadsheets. She’s the responsible one who always follows the rules—and she plans to keep it that way during her first year of college. Her student housing only has one rule: "no unnecessary drama." Which means no fights, tension, or romance between roommates. When one of them turns out to be Jesse, her high-school nemesis, Brooke is determined she can handle it.

On the Coral Coast of Western Australia, solo traveller Katy is on a mission to find her free-spirited sister, Phoebe, who disappeared along the same route a year ago. But as she drives her campervan further into the wild north, Katy realizes she's not as alone as she'd first believed. Soon she is pulled into a complicated web of secrets, lies, myths and stories that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her sister.

1917: America's declaration of war against Germany gives Grace Winter, a keen-eyed New York Times investigative reporter, a much sought after opportunity to make her mark on the Western Front, albeit in ways she had never expected. But by 1918 the gruesome reality of trench warfare has set in, and an invisible new enemy - The Spanish Flu - is killing allied soldiers in their droves.

Sydney TV reporter Josephine "Josie" Larsen is approaching 30 and coming dangerously close to failing at life. Lost in a vortex of other people's career milestones, engagement parties, and baby showers, Josie is perennially single, abandoned by her globetrotting family, and invisible to her boss—except for the one time he tuned in while she was mid-panic attack on live TV. As a punishment, Josie is shipped off to cover another reporter's six-month leave at a regional bureau in Newcastle. But Josie has more waiting for her in Newcastle than yawn-inducing stories about bicycle lane protests.

Jessie Else disappeared the summer the Lambs came to Magpie Beach. Not that the two events were connected at all, in reality; only in my own head, in my own world. They marked for me the end of a certain quiet time and the start of a more complicated living.

When Emily's beautiful cousin Aspen goes missing somewhere in the Outback, no one seems to take it seriously, not even the police. After all, Aspen has a history of drug use and a string of broken relationships to her name. But Emily knows that her disappearance is totally out of character, so she books a flight to the Northern Territory to find her. Emily's search takes her south of Darwin to every road stop and tourist trap she can find, but the only person who turns up is the last person she expected to see, her ex-husband Ben. But there is a violent killer on the loose.

Amelia is no stranger to sex and death. Her job in her family’s funeral parlour, doing make-up on the dead, might be unusual, but she’s good at it. Life and warmth comes from the men she meets online - combining with someone else’s body at night in order to become something else, at least for a while. But when a sudden loss severs her ties with someone she loves, Amelia sets off on a 72-hour mission to outrun her grief - skipping out on the funeral, running away to stay with her father in Tasmania and experimenting on the local BDSM scene.

Bridget and Simone aren't friends. But their daughters are in the same dance troupe, so they're flying to Los Angeles for the girls to perform at Disneyland. Simone's daughter Zahra is indisputably a leader in the group, but Bridget's daughter Becky is a talent on the rise.

After fleeing to Melbourne in the wake of a breakup, all Ana has to show for herself is an unfulfilling job at an overly enthusiastic tech start-up and one particularly questionable dating app experience. Then she meets Evan. Charming, kind and financially responsible, Evan is a complete aberration from her usual type, and Ana feels like she has finally awoken from a long dating nightmare. As much as she tries to let their burgeoning relationship unfold IRL, Ana just can't resist the urge to find Evan online.

A group of school-leavers: free at last, ready to party, expectations high. Leonardo, geeky, asthmatic, shy and prone to anxiety, has landed with them. Super high-achiever Kaiya is trying to forget her frustration with her drug-addicted sister as well as dealing with pressure from the popular girls. Mason is coming to terms with his secret desire for his best mate, Jared. Jared wants a week off from his relationship with Val so he can have sex with as many girls as possible. But the party takes a dangerous turn when Val is drugged and a man is later found dead on the beach.

Winter Robins is a happy enough child, growing up in the north of England, with parents who love her and the constant companion of a twin brother, but a cold wind blows through when her mother dies. Her father turns to the bottle, her grandmother struggles to cope, and she and her brother are sent to live in Western Australia with family their mother had never mentioned.

Noni Blake knows she wants more: more adventures, more joy, more romance, more orgasms, more pleasure...more everything. Now she just has to figure out how to get it. Noni didn’t expect to be starting over at the age of 36. But 18 months after the end of her long-term relationship, she decides it’s time to start living her life again. While an encounter with a sexy firefighter is a welcome entry back into the dating world, Noni soon realises she’s looking for more than just a series of brief, pleasurable encounters. She’s looking for more pleasure in, well, everything.

Claire has returned from London to the dust and familiarity of her childhood home, only to realise something is wrong with her partner, Maggie. Patrick is a lonely university student, until he meets Caitlin—but does she feel as connected as he does? Ana is happily married with three children. Then, one night, she falls in love with someone else. Based on three true stories, Heartsick by Jessie Stephens is a compelling narrative non-fiction account of the many lows and occasional surprising highs of heartbreak.

In Darkwater, being female doesn't amount to much. But Chelsea's luckier than most. She's the young lover of the town's feared leader, which she keeps telling herself is a good thing, what with food getting scarce and the wells drying up. She's secure and safe and can almost believe she's happy. But when a stranger rides into town, gun on one hip, whip on the other, Chelsea can't look away. Especially when it turns out this stranger is a woman.

Eighteen-year-old Brooke is the kind of friend who not only remembers everyone's birthdays, but also organises the group present, pays for it, and politely chases others for their share. She's the helper, the doer, the guarder-of-drinks, the minder-of-bags, the maker-of-spreadsheets. She's the responsible one who always follows the rules—and she plans to keep it that way during her first year of university. Her new share house is rules-lite. But ‘no unnecessary drama' means no fights, tension, or romance between housemates.

Lotti Coates lives in the shadow of a genius: her father, George, is a brilliant and celebrated Australian painter. When Lotti meets the outcast waif Kyla at a suburban Canberra school, two worlds are set to collide. Slowly Kyla is drawn into the orbit of the Coates family. Or is it the other way around? As Lotti and Kyla navigate their way towards adulthood, dark secrets start to unravel, with devastating consequences....

It's not easy getting close to people. Amelia's meeting a lot of men but once she gets the sex she wants from them, that's it for her: she can't connect further. A terrible thing happened to Daniel last year and it's stuck inside Amelia ever since, making her stuck too. Maybe being a cosmetician at her family's mortuary business isn't the best job for a young woman. It's not helping her social life. She loves her job, but she's not great at much else. Especially emotion.