Showing results by publisher "Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd" in Psychological

What if they hadn't gone? That's the question Clementine can't stop asking herself. It was just a backyard barbeque. They didn't know their hosts that well. They were friends of friends. They could so easily have said no. But she and her husband, Sam, said yes, and now they can never change what they did and didn't do that beautiful winter's day. Six responsible adults. Three cute kids. One yapping dog. It's a normal weekend in the suburbs. What could possibly go wrong?

For fans of Gillian Flynn, Laura Lippman, and Paula Hawkins comes Holly Seddon's arresting fiction debut: an engrossing thriller full of page-turning twists and turns, richly imagined characters, and gripping psychological suspense. Some secrets never die. They're just locked away. Alex Dale is lost. Destructive habits have cost her a marriage and a journalism career. All she has left is her routine: a morning run until her body aches, then a few hours of forgettable work before the past grabs hold and drags her down.

Pools of blood, scenes of carnage, signs of agonising death - who deals with the aftermath of violence once the bodies have been taken away? Judith Kepler has seen it all. She is a crime-scene specialist. She turns crime scenes back into habitable spaces. She is a cleaner. It is at the home of a woman who has been brutally murdered that she is suddenly confronted with her own past. The murder victim knew Judith's secret: as a child Judith was sent to an orphanage under mysterious circumstances - parentage unknown.

The 10-day retreat at boutique health-and-wellness resort Tranquillum House promises healing and transformation. Nine stressed city dwellers are keen to drop their literal and mental baggage and absorb the blissful meditative ambiance while enjoying their hot stone massages. They are all on a path to a better way of living. Or at least a better waistline.... Watching over them is the resort's director, a woman on a mission to reinvigorate these bodies and minds. But to what lengths will she go to achieve her goal? These nine perfect strangers have no idea what's about to hit them.

Finally, Cath has met someone: a man she loves, Robin, and who adores her in return. And after years of managing fine on her own, running a successful business, raising her son and caring for her elderly mother, she feels she deserves some happiness. She expected everyone to be delighted for her. But her friends and family are suspicious of Robin. And Rebecca, a desperate single mother whom Cath has hired as a live-in housekeeper, doesn’t trust him either.

An Australian literary hoax lies at the core of My Life as a Fake, Peter Carey's captivating contemplation of the art world. In steamy, fetid Kuala Lumpur in 1972, Sarah Wode-Douglass, editor of a London poetry journal, meets the mysterious Christopher Chubb. An Australian literary hoaxer, Chubb is carting around a manuscript likely filled with deceit. In this dubious work Sarah recognises a real genius. But whose genius? She is drawn into a fantastic story of imposture, murder, kidnapping and exile, which couldn't be true unless its teller were mad. Or perhaps haunted.

When Alex Morris loses her fiancé in dreadful circumstances, she moves from London to Edinburgh to make a break with the past. Alex accepts a job at a special school, commonly referred to as ‘The Unit’ - it takes on the students expelled from other schools in the city. These are troubled, difficult young people and Alex is an inexperienced teacher, terrified of what she’s taken on. There is one class - a group of five teenagers - who are particularly intimidating.

When Sarah Haywood rescues a young girl in trouble, she expects nothing in return. But her instinctive act of bravery puts her in the debt of a powerful and dangerous man, and he has other ideas. He lives by his own brutal code, and all debts must be repaid - in the only way he knows how. He offers Sarah a way to solve an impossible situation with her intolerable boss.

In 19th-century China, when wives and daughters were foot-bound and lived in almost total seclusion, the women in one remote Hunan county developed their own secret code for communication: nu shu (“women’s writing”). With the arrival of a silk fan on which Snow Flower has composed for Lily a poem of introduction in nu shu, their friendship is sealed. As the years pass, through famine and rebellion, they reflect upon their arranged marriages, loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood.

Gripping and packed with twists and turns, this stunning thriller will make you question whether we can ever really trust the ones we love.... What if your whole life was based on lies? When Joe Lynch stumbles across his wife driving into a hotel car park while she's supposed to be at work, he's intrigued enough to follow her in. And when he witnesses her in an angry altercation with family friend Ben, he knows he ought to intervene.

London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything. Even her own character.

You went to bed at home, just like every other night. You woke up in the back of a taxi, over 250 miles away. You have no idea how you got there and no memory of the last 10 hours. You have no phone, no money, just a suicide note in your coat pocket, in your own writing. You know you weren't planning to kill yourself. Your family and friends think you are lying. Someone knows exactly what happened to you. But they're not telling....

What if your worst enemy discovered your darkest secret? At 2:00 a.m. on the morning of her 40th birthday, Sophie wakes in the darkness of her bedroom and finds a stranger watching her from the foot of the bed. The intruder hands Sophie a letter and issues an ultimatum: the message is to be opened at her forthcoming party, in front of family and friends, at exactly 8:00 p.m.

A juicy, powerful listen featuring twin sisters who have drifted apart and the shocking family secrets that bind them.... Robin and Sarah weren't the closest of twins. They weren't even that similar. But they loved each other dearly. Until, in the cruellest of domestic twists, they were taken from one another. Now in her early 30s, Robin lives alone. Agoraphobic and suffering from panic attacks, she spends her days pacing the rooms of her house. The rest of the time she watches - watches the street, the houses, the neighbours.

Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love - Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends. Helen Garner’s gritty, lyrical first novel divided the critics on its publication in 1977. Today, Monkey Grip is regarded as a masterpiece - the novel that shines a light on a time and a place and a way of living never before presented in Australian literature: communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs and sex.

Raine sometimes complains that nothing exciting is ever gonna happen in Grace, Alabama, again. Daddy told her careful what you wish for. Everyone loves Summer Ryan. A model student and musical prodigy, she's a ray of light in the struggling small town of Grace - especially compared to her troubled sister, Raine. Then Summer goes missing. Grace is already simmering, and with this new tragedy the police have their hands full keeping the peace.

At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the incident. In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the 21st century.

Halina Shore is a Polish born forensic dentist living in Australia. When she travels to Poland to take part in the investigation of a war crime, she finds herself at the center of a bitter struggle in a community that has been divided by a grim legacy. As the investigation proceeds, her professional assignment becomes a confronting personal odyssey as the truth about her own past begins to emerge.

A vanished child, a family in turmoil and a fateful phone call that brings the torments of the past into the harrowing present.... 'I think my real name is Samantha. I think I'm your daughter.' When Caroline Shipley's two-year-old daughter disappeared, her whole world came crashing down. Now, 15 years later, Caroline receives a phone call that could change everything. But could this stranger really be her daughter? And what happened all those years ago to make her vanish without a trace?

A nail-biting, breath-taking story about the disappearances of two young women - a decade apart - told in reverse. It's been 10 years since Nicolette Farrell left her rural hometown after her best friend, Corinne, disappeared without trace. Then a letter from her father arrives - 'I need to talk to you. That girl. I saw that girl.' Has her father's dementia worsened, or has he really seen Corinne? Returning home, Nicolette must finally face what happened on that terrible night all those years ago.