Showing results by narrator "Taylor Owynns" in All Categories

Barbara McClymont walks the cane fields searching for Janet, her 16-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.

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.

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.

A secret band of radical environmentalists, under the name 9S have spent years secretly infiltrating industry and government, working themselves into the most trusted jobs...sleepers ready to act. As a series of global catastrophes erupt, Australian ex-CIA agent Dr. Tori Swyft, finds herself at the centre of it all. Having once been briefly recruited as a 9S member at university, she may be the world's only chance of stopping the threat before it's too late.

Since her sister died, Meg has been on her own. She doesn’t mind, not really - not with Atticus, her African grey parrot, to keep her company - but after her house is broken into by a knife-wielding intruder, she decides it might be good to have some company after all. Andy’s father has lost his job, and his parents’ savings are barely enough to cover his tuition. If he wants to graduate, he’ll have to give up his student flat and find a homeshare.

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. Then she, along with countless other war brides, sailed across the Pacific to join the American servicemen they had married during World War II. Now Hannah is the same age Sarah was when she made her first journey and, in hearing Sarah tell the story of her life, realises the immensity of what her grandmother gave up.

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?

Grief-stricken and on the verge of a breakdown, Luda Managan and her two teenaged children try to make a home for themselves on a collection of harsh and haunted Scottish islands. Luda, a photographer, is mesmerised by the extraordinary magic of the islands but soon finds herself condemned by the local community after publishing images documenting the death of a local child. Alienated, Luda turns her attention to the records from the 17th-Century island witch-hunts and the fragmented life stories of the executed women.

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.

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.

Alice is only nine years old in 1910 when she is sent to the feared Coast Hospital Lazaret at Little Bay in Sydney, a veritable prison where more patients are admitted than will ever leave. She is told that she's visiting her mother, who disappeared one day when Alice was two years old. Once there, she learns her mother is suffering from leprosy and that Alice has the same disease.

Edwina Dawling is the golden girl of Australian television. The former pop singer is now the country's most popular actress, an international star thanks to the hit TV soap The Glitter Game. But behind the seductive glamour of television is a cutthroat world where careers are made or destroyed with a word in the right ear...or a night in the right bed. Where success breeds envy and corruption, concealed in the flashing smiles at every premier event, every party.

Poignant and uplifting, political and personal loyalties are tested in 19th-century Sydney. Colonial Sydney in the final weeks of 1899: a city striving for union and nationhood but dogged by divisions so deep they threaten to derail not just the Federation but the colony itself. There are chasms opening, too, when a clandestine note reaches the wrong hands in the well-to-do household of aspiring politician Alasdair Dunlevy and his wife, Eleanor.

Tess is feeling burnt out from her uninspiring job and her busy city lifestyle. Even her personal relationships make her feel as if she's simply drifting through life rather than living it to the full. Her godmother Luna, who leads a very simple existence in a rustic cottage in the North Queensland rainforest, is also at something of a crossroads. Keen to expand her jewellery-making business, she needs the new connections that a bustling city offers. When she suggests to Tess that the two of them might swap homes for an extended period, it seems the perfect solution.