Showing results by narrator "Taylor Owynns" in All Categories

From Australia's master storyteller comes an endearing and engaging novella about a journey as unexpected, painful, intriguing and character-filled as life itself. A cruise was the promise. To cruise away from their troubles. To cruise towards the place where they first met, on the banks of the Thames. A cruise to dwell in their memories together and plan their next chapter. Paddy and Jenny Davern have had a long and happy marriage together in Sydney. Together they embark on a cruise to London, for the last leisurely journey in each other's company.

Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Ester is yearning to fall in love again. Meanwhile, her ex-husband's past decisions are catching up with him, her sister is struggling through her own directionless life and her mother is about to make a choice that will profoundly affect them all.

To give them hope she must tell their story. It's 1946. The war is over, and Juliet Ashton has writer's block. But when she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams of Guernsey - a total stranger living halfway across the Channel, who has come across her name written in a secondhand book - she enters into a correspondence with him, and in time with all the members of the extraordinary Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

A compelling feel-good novel featuring a proud and gutsy heroine, for anyone who believes in the resilience of the human spirit. A RESILIENT SPIRIT Dolly Jamieson is not homeless, she's merely between permanent abodes. The 78-year-old spends her days keeping warm at the local library, where she...

Part memoir, part transformational self-help book, Lovelands is a chronicle of Dr Debra Campbell's journey through the rocky terrain of her personal relationships. She offers help to listeners so they can locate, identify and circumnavigate their fault lines. She examines family relationships and their impact on self-esteem and intimacy as well as the reasons for our relationship choices and dysfunctional patterns.

Former social worker Elle Castillo is the host of a popular true-crime podcast that tackles cold cases of missing children in her hometown. After four seasons of successful investigations, Elle decides to tackle her white whale: the Countdown Killer, or TCK. Twenty years ago, TCK established a pattern of taking and ritualistically murdering girls, each a year younger than the last. No one’s ever known why - why he stopped abruptly with his 11-year-old victim, or why he followed the ritual at all.

A young Anne flees Wattle Island in 1950, heartbroken and desperate to make her own way in the world. As she begins to forge a life for herself in the city, a forbidden love returns, and she is faced with a choice that could destroy all she has built. When disaster changes her life forever, starting the Wattle Island Book Club is the only thing that offers her solace.

This is the first biography of Greer for two decades, drawing on unprecedented access to her extensive personal archive, opened at Melbourne University in 2016. Kleinhenz has interrogated Greer's personal and professional files, spoken to people who have known her from her school days onwards, and read every word written by and about her. Beginning with Greer’s troubled early life in 1940s Melbourne, it traces her career, relationships with men and women, her travels and her home life and examines Greer’s work and ideas from The Female Eunuch to the #MeToo movement.

Barbara McClymont walks the cane fields searching for Janet, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who has been missing for weeks. The police have no leads. The people of Quala are divided by dread and distrust. But the sugar crush is underway and the cane must be burned. Meanwhile, children dream of a malevolent presence, a schoolteacher yearns to escape, and history keeps returning to remind Quala that the past is always present.

From the Winner of the 2016 Stella Prize for The Natural Way of Things. Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. Can they survive together without her? They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur, Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual, and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they've remained close all these years, the grieving women gather for Christmas at Sylvie's old beach house.

Elderly and in poor health, Mary fulfils her wish to herself to live out her last days on Bruny Island with only her regrets and memories for company. A long time ago, her late husband was the lighthouse keeper on Bruny, and she'd raised a family on the wild windswept island, until terrible circumstances forced them back to civilisation. The long-buried secret that has haunted her for decades now threatens to break free, and she is hoping to banish it once and for all before her time is up.

It is the winter of 1985. Hope Farm sticks out of the ragged landscape like a decaying tooth, its weatherboard walls sagging into the undergrowth. Silver's mother, Ishtar, has fallen for the charismatic Miller, and the three of them have moved to the rural hippie commune to make a new start. But here, at just 13, she is thrust into an unrelenting adult world, and the walls begin to come tumbling down, with deadly consequences.

World leaders are being assassinated by toxic gas. An obscure group of Chinese terrorists claims responsibility, but are the Ten Brothers - a secret circle of China's political, military and business elite - using terrorists as a cover to justify the assassination of China's President and the overthrow of Beijing? Once again, ex-CIA operative Tori Swyft finds herself embroiled in the middle of an explosive conspiracy. Can she survive long enough to thwart the Ten Brothers?

On beautiful Fraser Island in 1882, the population of the Badtjala people is in sharp decline following a run of brutal massacres. When German man Louis Müller offers to sail 18-year-old Bonny to Europe, along with 22-year-old Jurano and his 15-year-old niece, Donordera, the proud and headstrong Bonny agrees. Accompanied by Müller’s bright and grieving daughter, Hilda, the group begins their journey to perform in Hamburg, Berlin, Paris and eventually London in the hope of seeking help from the Queen of England.

'I can vividly remember the last steps of the last ballet, walking off the stage led by a mother and knowing the decision I had to make. That was my last dance.' Mary Li (ne� McKendry) is an international ballet star and a mother like no other. She became a household name when her husband Li...

A year after her husband Leo's death, widow Daisy invites her three adult children to join her for a holiday in beautiful Venice. It will be wonderful, having them under one roof again in their father's birthplace. But is it possible to recapture the past? Her son Marc's marriage is in jeopardy, but for his mother's sake he convinces his wife to keep up appearances. Anna is trying to hide the truth about the dismal state of her London acting career; and Ellie, enjoying a gap year and uncertain about her future choices, wants to avoid family pressure to conform.

Spanning three generations, The Long Goodbye takes us deep into the lives of an Australian family as they survive record-breaking floods, outlast epic droughts and face the unforgiving realities of life on the land. Told with astounding lyricism, warmth and humour, this is a deeply moving memoir about the unbreakable bonds of marriage, love and family. And it poses the most heartbreaking moral dilemma of all: when a loved one is suffering, is euthanasia the answer?

When Maggie, Fran and Rose met in their youth, they had dreams and ambitions. Forty years later, the three friends are turning 60, all of them restless and disenchanted with their lives. In an attempt to recapture the sense of freedom and purpose they once possessed, they decide to retrace the steps of their 1978 backpacking trip through Europe. What could possibly go wrong? As they set off on their trip, it will prove to be an odyssey that will test their friendship, challenge their beliefs and redefine the third age of their lives.

Meet Daphne Buckley, a psychiatrist in search of a great love. He hasn't turned up yet. But surely he will. He could be any one of the respondents to her old-fashioned 'looking for love' classified. He could be one of the men her overbearing mother tries to set her up with, or even someone she already knows. It doesn't matter. Daphne is determined and brainy and prepared to bend all the rules. With old school friend Celeste by her side and her mother's grooming tips for unkempt leg hair, love is likely just around the corner.

Alison is an actress who no longer acts, Patrick a musician past his prime. The eccentric couple live an isolated, debauched existence in an old manor house in Scotland, a few miles outside their village. That is, until Patrick's teenage daughter, Neve, flees Australia to spend a year abroad with her doting, if unreliable, father, and Alison, the stepmother she barely knows. On the weekend of Neve's eighteenth birthday, her father insists on a celebratory feast to mark her coming of age. Despite Neve's objections, her mother Shannon arrives in Scotland to join the celebrations.