Showing results by publisher "Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd" in Genre Fiction

Wry, moving, beautifully observed and politically astute, this latest audiobook from one of New Zealand's finest chroniclers pinpoints universal truths through very NZ lives. Life isn't always like it appears in the movies. In 1952 Irene Sandle takes her young daughter to Motueka. Irene was widowed during the war and is seeking a new start and employment in the tobacco fields. There, she finds the reality of her life far removed from the glamour of the screen.

This is Australia: an unnamed dead-end town in the heart of the outback. A young writer arrives in New South Wales to research local settlements that are slowly vanishing into oblivion - but he didn't expect these ghost towns to literally disappear before his eyes. When an epidemic of mysterious holes threatens the town's existence, he is plunged into an abyss of weirdness from which he may never recover.

Ben Thomas made a mistake. A one-night stand with Natasha Peters has got her pregnant. Now Ben has two options – give up on his dream as a comedian and get a day job, or abandon his responsibility and be a total dick. Only when Tash tells the full truth does a third possibility emerge.

Jude is a 30-something sort-of musician made accidentally rich by a fortuitous business deal. Suddenly able to fund his obsession with wine and restaurants, he naturally embarks on a victory lap of Paris. While there, he is entrusted to open the Melbourne outpost of a beloved bistro and curate its perfect wine list. But is Australian wine enough? Is Jude enough? To find out, he’ll stare down rollercoaster luck, his own demons and falling for his best friend – all while leaning on his Grand Crew of wine-loving comrades.

Abigail Willard first spots her from the back of a New York cab: the spitting image of Abby herself at age 22 – right down to the silver platforms and raspberry coat she wore as a young artist with a taste for wildness. But the real Abby is now 46 and married, with a corporate job and two kids. As the girl vanishes into a rainy night, Abby is left shaken. Was this merely a hallucinatory side effect of working-mom stress? A message of sorts, sent to remind her of passions and dreams tossed aside? Or something more dangerous?

Everything in Klara’s life seems perfect. She runs a successful cosmetic clinic with her best friend Tomas, she has a beautiful house near the beach in Melbourne and she and her adoring husband, Dante, are trying for a baby. Then one day she receives a call that punctures her perfect life. Dante has had an accident. He was found unconscious in a gay sauna and now lies in a coma. What Klara discovers about her husband will disrupt everything she thought she knew about love, marriage and family.

Sarah is a smart young lawyer living in Bondi when she falls head over heels. Daniel is handsome and passionate. When Daniel introduces her to a charismatic young couple, rabbi Menachem Lev and his wife, Chani, despite herself, Sarah is drawn in by the vibrant community at the beachside synagogue. By the time the couple move to the Jamison Valley, where Menachem and Chani have established a community of believers, Sarah can’t imagine life without the joy, purpose and love she’s discovered. Four years on, youthful passion has given way to something darker.

An exploration of relationships, marriage, passion, beauty and the price of love. Zoë Howard is 17 when her brother, Russell, introduces her to Stephen Quayle. Aloof and harsh, Stephen is unlike anyone she has ever met, 'a weird, irascible character out of some dense Russian novel'. His sister, Anna, is shy and thoughtful, 'a little orphan'. Zoe and Russell, Stephen and Anna: they may come from different social worlds, but all four will spend their lives moving in and out of each other's shadow.

For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe she was abandoned, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts.

A woman washes ashore in Sicily. She has come from North Africa to find her son, taken from her when he was just days old by his father and stolen away to Berlin. With nothing but her maid’s uniform and a knife stashed in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers – some generous, some exploiting – to guide her passage north. These strangers tell of their encounters with a quiet, mysterious woman in a blue coat – each account a different view of the truth, a different truth.

"There," says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, just after her baptism, and just before going home to the husband who will kill her that evening and then shoot himself. Drew, tortured by the cryptic finality of that short utterance, feels his faith in God slipping away and is saved from despair only by a meeting with Heather Laurent, the author of wildly successful, inspirational books about angels. Heather survived a childhood that culminated in her own parents’ murder-suicide, so she identifies deeply with Alice’s daughter, Katie, offering herself as a mentor to the girl and a shoulder for Stephen....

Imagine a faraway country that was once a friend of the West becoming the enemy, its people isolated and savagely repressed by a tyrant known as Great Uncle. As one of the country's most celebrated writers and a war hero, the storyteller has a better life than most – until he is made an offer he can't refuse. He must write a great novel, telling of the suffering of his people under the enemy's cruel economic sanctions and portraying Great Uncle as their saviour.

With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention, she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people's lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity.

When Claude meets the legendary actress Sabine Montrose during the last hours of her 40th birthday in her Manhattan hotel room, inspiration strikes, and his fate is sealed. For nearly half a century, Claude Ballard has been living at the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel. A French pioneer of silent films who started out as a concession agent for the Lumiere brothers, the inventors of cinema, Claude now spends his days foraging mushrooms in the hills of Los Angeles and taking photographs of runaways and the striplings along Sunset Boulevard.

Loving mother and midwife. Emma’s family has always lived in beautiful Lyrebird Lake and she’s built a wonderful life for herself and her little daughter. Living the dream, working in midwifery...hiding from the possible destruction that hangs over her future. Gorgeous Italian man! Gianni only meant to stay briefly, but is bowled over by ethereal Emma. He has a home, responsibilities and a life and family in Italy. But everything changes when he finds out Emma is pregnant.

When a spreading fire in the mountains stops his train, Bon looks out the window and does what he’s always imagined he might—he gets off the train, and steps out of his life. In the desolate regional town of Newnes, he falls into the company of Steven and Jack Grady, two brothers, one garrulous, the other all but silent, both drawn like moths to the chaos of the coming days. When Lesley—an enigmatic fellow escapee from the city—arrives, they coalesce into a makeshift family unit, bound by a deep and strange attachment.

The Magpie Wing is set on football fields, in sharehouses, at punk gigs and in dilapidated and gentrifying pubs. Max Easton’s debut novel moves from the nineties to the present, and between the suburbs and the inner city, exploring how communities that appear worlds apart—underground music scenes, rugby league clubs, communist splinter groups—often share unexpected roots.

A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away and he becomes lost in memory and beauty. He also begins to tell us a story.

Then she lifts the Fish up from the bassinet and holds him out to me. ‘Go on, take him.’ And to the Fish she says, ‘This is your uncle.' I manage to clap my hands either side of the fish bundle. But I feel like I am holding an expensive glass. Once you’re told not to drop it, all you can think of is the glass shattering across the floor. When the baby is born in a shabby caravan at a beach campground, it’s clear he is not like other babies. But the family will try hard to protect and love and accept him. Perhaps all the more to make up for letting his troubled mother down.

Even though 16 years have passed, Billie will never recover from the murder of her daughter, Jess, and clings to her memory—and the site of her death—like a life raft. Daniel, who was a toddler when his mother was killed, can recall little of what happened but knows if he’s to have any chance of a better future he needs to move on from that defining event—if only his grandmother would let him. Meanwhile Daniel’s stepmother, Carla, also feels trapped by Jess’s legacy but has a plan that she believes will help everyone to escape from the long shadow of the past.