Showing results by narrator "Tai Hara" in All Categories

It was supposed to be fun. A relaxing trip to a remote mountain retreat where there’s no phone reception. Three couples, friends since high school, are looking forward to a weekend of drinking, reminiscing and flirting. When someone suggests swapping partners, it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. The lights will be switched off, for privacy. It’s not really cheating if you don’t know who you were with, right? But when the lights come back on, one of the men is dead. No-one can agree who was in which bedroom with whom.

It was four o'clock in the morning. A young woman pushed through the hospital doors. Staff would later say they thought the woman was a new mother, returning to her child - and in a way, she was. She walked into the nursery, where a baby girl lay sleeping. The infant didn't wake when the woman placed her gently in the shopping bag she had brought with her. There is CCTV footage of what happened next, and most Australians would have seen it, either on the internet or the news.

Caroline Overington's stunning fiction debut is a multi-voiced novel centred around a child's death and its terrible repercussions. In 1982 Victorian police were called to a home on a housing estate an hour west of Melbourne. There, they found a five-year-old boy lying still and silent on the carpet. There were no obvious signs of trauma, but the child, Jacob, died the next day. The story made the headlines, and hundreds attended the funeral. Few people were surprised when the boy's mother and her boyfriend went to prison for the crime.

Polly Fletcher loves marrying off her friends. Which is kind of weird, considering she has no intention of ever walking down the aisle herself. Social worker by day, sex siren by night, Polly relies on exactly three things to get her through life: her Tinder app, her Jimmy Choo shoes and a packet of condoms in her clutch. So when she meets a sexy, silver-eyed stranger at a friend’s wedding, all she’s after is a wild night between the sheets.