Showing results by narrator "Abbe Holmes" in All Categories

It all began when they started running away … Life for Winona Dalloway is not as it should be. Her husband is no longer her husband, her children are not at home with her, and the city in which she lives is besieged by fires. Black ash falls as snow, songbirds screech like dinosaurs, and the...

Rose is in her eighties and has dementia, but she's not done with life just yet. Alternately sharp as a tack and spectacularly forgetful, she spends her days roaming the corridors of the aged-care facility, ruminating on the staff and residents and enduring visits from her emotionally distant...

From the bestselling author of The House of Now and Then comes a vividly portrayed story that reveals the darkness of greed and desire where people will stop at nothing to get what they want. No matter the cost ... After a brutal attack and the breakdown of her marriage, life has taught former...

Meet Willa Waters, aged 8 . . . 33 . . . and 93. 1965. eight-year-old Willa receives a mysterious box containing a jar of water and the instruction: ‘One ocean: plant in the backyard.’ So she does - and somehow creates a time-slip that allows her to visit her future selves. 1990. Willa is...

'Deftly embroidered, the narrative is perfumed, with plants and flowers, signifiers of life, of love...a vivid and sometimes harrowing tale of yearning' - The Weekend Australian 'accomplished and devastating' - The Saturday Paper 'From the outset, the novel captures the attention of the eye and...

A black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman’s struggle to be free. When Winona Dalloway begins her day — in the peaceful early hours before her children, that ‘tiny tornado of little hands and feet’, wake up — she doesn’t know that by the end of it, everything in her world will...

Robyn Ayres works as the camp caretaker on Finch Island, a former leper colony off the coast of Queensland. Her current clients are a group of ex-military men who run a tough-love program for troubled teens. The latest crop looks like the usual mix of bad boys and sad boys. Then Robyn takes a second look at a kid called Darren. Last time she saw him his name was Aaron, and Robyn was his primary school teacher. And she was somehow at the centre of a vicious small-town custody battle involving his terrifying grandmother.

Sometimes you need to delve into the past, to make sense of the present. Alice had not expected to spend most of the twenty-first century writing about Leonard Woolf. When she stood on Morell Bridge watching fireworks explode from the rooftops of Melbourne at the start of a new millennium, she...

For fans of Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things, The Dictionary of Lost Words, The Natural History of Love is based upon the true story of 19th century French explorer, naturalist and diplomat the Count de Castelnau and his lover Madame Fonceca; sweeping historical narrative set in...

Pip never wants to be at home nowadays. There’s no laughter anymore, and her mum isn’t happy. She spends most of her time alone, daydreaming and digging for treasure by the dirty creek. But one night, Pip finds something incredible - a dragon. Tiny, possibly dying, but definitely a dragon. She quickly realises that dragons don’t come with instructions - what do you feed a dragon? Where could it have come from? And how can Pip cope with the enormous changes this creature will bring into her life?

Glen Walsh and Steven Alward were childhood friends in their tight-knit working-class community in Shortland, on the outskirts of Newcastle, New South Wales. Both proud altar boys at the local Catholic church, they went on to attend the city's Catholic boys' highs schools: Glen to Marist Brothers and Steven to St Pius X. Both did well: Steven became a journalist, Glen a priest. But when Glen discovered another priest was sexually abusing boys, he reported the offending to police, breaking Canon Law and his vows to the Catholic 'brotherhood' in the process.

Out of the Silence is the stunning tale of three women from very different worlds: Maggie Heffernan, a spirited working-class country girl, Elizabeth Hamilton, whose own disappointment in love has served only to strengthen her humanity and the remarkable Vida Goldstein, the suffragist who was to become the first woman to stand for Parliament. When Maggie's life descends into darkness after a terrible betrayal, the three women's lives collide.

Lenny Spinx is the sister of a giant. Her little brother, Davey, has a rare form of gigantism that puzzles his doctors and astounds his friends, neighbours and teachers. Together, Lenny and Davey escape to a more wondrous reality by obsessing over the entries in their monthly instalment of Burrell’s Build-It-at-Home Encyclopedia set. They lose themselves in passages about abominable snowmen, jellyfish, peregrine falcons and quicksand. Lenny vows to become a beetle expert, while Davey decides he will run away to Canada and build a log cabin.

Kitty Hawke, the last inhabitant of a dying island sinking into the wind-lashed Chesapeake Bay, has resigned herself to annihilation...until one night her granddaughter rows ashore in the midst of a storm, desperate, begging for sanctuary. For years, Kitty has kept to herself - with only the company of her wolfdog, Girl - unconcerned by the world outside, or perhaps avoiding its worst excesses. But blood cannot be turned away in times like these.

Following the tragic early death of her sister, Maddie, Kitty is forced into a hasty marriage of convenience to Maddie’s husband, Ted. She has also just lost the only man she has ever loved. Can she make a new life from the ashes of all she has lost? Kitty’s sons, Edward and James, are as different as they could be. Edward, the eldest, finds only unhappiness in love and escapes to war to forget the past, while James’ enduring love for his childhood sweetheart stops him from embracing the future.

Underbelly meets Molly's Game - the true crime investigation that rewrote the story of Melbourne's infamous gangland war and triggered a royal commission. Melbourne's gangland war was an era dominated by murders, stings, hits, drug busts, corruption and greed - inspiring bestselling books and...

In this groundbreaking and deeply soulful audiobook, author and spiritual teacher Shavita Kotak reawakens the forgotten truth of menopause as a sacred rite of passage, a time when the body, spirit, and consciousness converge to birth the wise woman within.

A black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman’s struggle to be free. When Winona Dalloway begins her day — in the peaceful early hours before her children, that ‘tiny tornado of little hands and feet’, wake up — she doesn’t know that by the end of it, everything in her world will...

A continuation of the acclaimed novel Thunderhead, Fireweather follows Winona Dalloway as she struggles to come to terms with the unrecognizable world around her. It all began when they started running away . . . Life for Winona Dalloway is not as it should be. Her husband is no longer her...

Three women from very different backgrounds, bound by friendship, separated by destiny It was impossible, but in full view of the church, the Governor and wedding guests ... The bride had vanished. Some girls are born to be loved, some are born to be useful. Some girls are born to be bad...