Showing results by narrator "Rebecca Macauley" in All Categories

Taylor Markham is now a senior at the Jellicoe School, and has been made leader of the boarders. She is responsible for keeping the upper hand in the territory wars with the townies, and the cadets who camp on the edge of the school's property over summer. She has to keep her students safe and the territories enforced and to deal with Jonah Griggs - the leader of the cadets and someone she'd rather forget. B ut what she needs to do, more than anything, is unravel the mystery of her past and find her mother.

Buddhism for Mothers explores the potential to be with your children in the all-important present moment; to gain the most joy out of being with them. How can this be done calmly and with a minimum of anger, worry and negative thinking? How can mothers negotiate the changed conditions of their relationships with partners, family and even with friends? Using Buddhist practices, Sarah Napthali offers ways of coping with the day-to-day challenges of motherhood.

Welcome to my world. I'm Amal Abdel-Hakim, a 17-year-old Australian-Palestinian-Muslim still trying to come to grips with my various identity hyphens. It's hard enough being cool as a teenager when being one issue behind the latest Cosmo is enough to disqualify you from the in-group. Try wearing a veil on your head and practicing the bum's up position at lunchtime and you know you're in for a tough time at school.

Senior year is over, and Lucy has the perfect way to celebrate: tonight, she's going to find Shadow, the mysterious graffiti artist whose work appears all over the city. He's out there somewhere - spraying color, spraying birds and blue sky on the night - and Lucy knows a guy who paints like Shadow is someone she could fall for. Really fall for. Instead, Lucy's stuck at a party with Ed, the guy she's managed to avoid since the most awkward date of her life. But when Ed tells her he knows where to find Shadow, they're suddenly on an all-night search around the city.

Freya thought she could relax when Ryan's best mate Jamie got engaged to her best friend Hannah. Two couples, four friends – what could be better than that? But a day before the wedding, Freya is torn between keeping the peace or blowing it up. Hannah's perfect wedding is hours away and she's daydreaming of a honeymoon in Tahiti and starting the family she longs for when she hears the first-responder sirens. Is it a grass fire? Worse? And why aren't Ryan or Jamie answering their phones?

Alice Hunter is smarting from the raw deal life has thrown her way: suddenly single, jobless and forced to move home to her parents' tiny seaside town. And now she faces an uncomfortable truth. She wants her twin sister Libby's enviable life. Libby's closest friend Jess Dekic has been around the Hunter family for so long she might as well be blood. She's always considered herself a sister closer to Libby than Alice ever could be. 

A devastating bushfire. Three scorched marriages. An an inflammatory secret that will rock a town. When a lethal bushfire tore through Myrtle, nestled in Victoria’s breathtaking Otway Ranges, the town’s buildings - and the lives of its residents - were left as smouldering ash. For three women in particular, the fire fractured their lives and their relationships. Eighteen months later, with the flurry of national attention long past, Myrtle stands restored, shiny and new. But is the outside polish just a veneer? 

Tinahely, Ireland, 1959. Rosie Hart is content leaving her home behind to follow her new husband to Australia. But she soon discovers there is no room for her or their young son in the life he has built in vibrant Kings Cross. As their marriage crumbles, Rosie will need to fight for the golden future her son deserves...until the day her world is shattered and all hope turns to dust.

Rage Winnoway's mother has been asleep since she had a terrible accident. In a quest to find healing magic, Rage and her animal friends travel through a strange gateway to Valley, a land of mythical beasts, talking dogs and streets that change shapes.

Why are Topsy and Turvy so different? One day they learn why.

Eleven-year-old Bella has a terrible guilty secret: something she did three years ago, when her English relatives were visiting. Now, in the last week in December, they were returning to Australia and Bella fears the worst: that they are coming to confront her; that they suspected her all along.

In a small country town during one long, hot summer, the Bloom family begins to unravel. Marital secrets, new and long hidden, surface - with devastating effect. Martha is straining against the confines of her life, lost in regret for what might have been, when an old flame shows up. In turn, her husband, Mike, becomes frustrated with his increasingly distant wife. While teenagers Tilly and Ben are about to step out into the world, nine-year-old Ada is holding on to a childhood that will soon be lost to her. When Ada discovers an abandoned well beneath a rusting windmill, she is drawn to its darkness and danger. 

Will Oliver's chook ever lay an egg? He'll have to wait and see!

Jenny finds a big, egg-shaped thing down by the creek. When she takes it home, it soon hatches, and out pops a cute - but very hungry - baby dinosaur!

Mimi laid the box on the bench and opened it carefully. Inside were rows and rows of coloured pastels that shimmered in the light. She rolled them under her fingertips and her imagination began to fill with amazing pictures. When Mimi is given a box of magical pastels, she discovers that she can draw the Garden of Empress Cassia - a drawing so beautiful and real that people are transported inside it. But the pastels are ancient, mysterious, and powerful, and in the wrong hands can be very dangerous....

It has been two years since Violet Eden walked away from the city, her friends, her future and most importantly, her soulmate, Lincoln. Part angel, part human, Violet is determined to stand by the promises she made to save the one she loves.

Honolulu, Hawaii, 1941. On the evening of her 16th birthday party, Catherine McGarrie wants nothing more than for the night to be over, even though the opulence of the ballroom befits the daughter of a US Navy Rear Admiral. Then she meets Charlie, a navy officer from the other side of the tracks, a man her parents would never approve of. As rumours of war threaten their tropical paradise, Catherine and Charlie fall in love. But the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7th December 1941 changes their lives forever.

At 17 Veronica O’Shay is happier running wild on the family farm than behaving in the ladylike manner her mother requires, and she despairs both of her secret passion for her brother’s friend, Jack Murphy, and what promises to be a future of restraint and compliance. But this is 1913, and the genteel tranquillity of rural Beecroft is about to change forever as the O’Shay and Murphy families, along with their friends, the Dwyers, are caught up in the theatre of war, and their fates become intertwined.

It's December 1900, and Berylda Jones is heading home to Bathurst for Christmas. Tragically, 'home' is where she and her beloved sister Greta live in terror, under the control of their sadistic Uncle Alec. But Berylda has a plan, borne out of desperation, to free herself and Greta from Alec for good - if she can only find the courage to execute it.

From a talented emerging writer comes a brave, honest, unforgettable memoir about mental illness, which breaks the silence and shatters the taboos to give hope to all those struggling to find their way through. One day Sophie Hardcastle realised the joy she’d always known had disappeared. She was constantly tired, with no energy, no motivation and no sense of enjoyment for surfing, friends, conversations, movies, parties, family - for anything. Her hours became empty.