Showing titles in Contemporary Fiction

Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, 16-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles to regain her sanity, the listener is inexorably drawn into her private suffering.

Captain Jack Aubrey sails away from the hated Australian prison colonies in his favourite vessel the Surprise, pondering on middle age and sexual frustration. He soon becomes aware that he is out of touch with the mood of his ship: to his astonishment he finds that in spite of a lifetime's experience he does not know what the foremost hands or even his own officers are thinking.

Edwina Dawling is the golden girl of Australian television. The former pop singer is now the country's most popular actress, an international star thanks to the hit TV soap The Glitter Game. But behind the seductive glamour of television is a cutthroat world where careers are made or destroyed with a word in the right ear...or a night in the right bed. Where success breeds envy and corruption, concealed in the flashing smiles at every premier event, every party.

Loyal country girl Libby Levine lives a golden life with her financier husband Carl and their two children. When Carl is jailed for financial fraud, Libby feels agonizingly complicit for hosting the final investor pitch in their home. She's also horrified to discover that her brother lost money as well - and with it his last chance at IVF. Matters go from atrocious to worse when her family's possessions and home are repossessed, Libby is sacked and Harrison's priceless violin is wrecked. They have no other option but to move to the rural goat farm where Libby was raised and start again.

Casey Han's years at Princeton have given her a refined diction, an enviable golf handicap, a popular white boyfriend and a degree in economics. But no job, and a number of bad habits. As Casey, the daughter of working-class Korean immigrants, navigates an uneven course of small triumphs and spectacular failures, a clash of values, ideals and ambitions plays out against the colourful backdrop of New York society.

In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous. Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.

Luke and Anna, 30-something and restless, decide on a sea change. Worn down by city life and wounded by a loss neither can talk about, they flee to a sleepy village by the coast. There, surrounded by nature, they begin to feel rejuvenated. But when bushfire threatens their new home, they must confront what they have tried to put behind them. Vertigo is a fable of love and awakening by one of Australia's finest writers, about the unexpected way emotions can return and life can change.

The rhythms of this novel are the rhythms of the land. A Place on Earth resonates with variations played on themes of change; looping transitions from war into peace, winter into spring, browning flood destruction into greening fields, absence into presence, lost into found.

Okay, so it looks like the Kelly Club is finally closing down - it had to happen sooner or later. And it isn’t as if Les Norton will starve. He has money snookered away, he owns his house, and his blue-chip investment - a block of flats in Randwick - must be worth a fortune by now. Except that the place is falling down, the council is reclaiming the land, there’s been a murder in Flat 5, and the tenants are the biggest bunch of misfits since the Manson family.

Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends who come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village’s all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook’s mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility but also danger. Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook’s differences are impossible to ignore.

August, 1943. In the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will change his life forever. This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.

「あの、ランチが終わったら、ちょっと話を聞いてもらってもいいですか？」おいしくて新鮮な野菜たっぷりの料理が評判の菜の花食堂は、"地元の逸品"に選ばれた瓶詰や予約制のディナーも評判の人気店。オーナーの靖子先生は今日もおいしい料理を作りながら、誰かが抱えた秘密を見抜いて心配ごとでいっぱい

おいしい料理×日常の謎！シリーズ12万部突破!やさしくてほろ苦い日常ミステリー　待望の第６巻!「じゃあ、靖子先生に相談してみたら、どうでしょう？」季節の野菜を活かしたランチと予約制ディナーが人気の菜の花食堂のオーナー・靖子先生は、おいしい料理を作るだけ

「これはもう、推理するまでもないわね」おいしいランチと予約制のおまかせディナーが評判の菜の花食堂のオーナー・靖子先生は、洞察力が鋭くて謎解きが得意。食堂や料理教室で起こる小さな事件を解決してくれるだけじゃなく、そっと悩みを掬い上げて静かに背中を押してくれる――妻が夫のダイエッ

「靖子先生、そういう謎を解くのが得意なんです。いつも、ちょっとしたヒントから真実を見つけてくれるんです」手を掛けたランチが評判の菜の花食堂を営む靖子先生はいつも、とびきりの料理と謎の答えと、明日へと進むためのヒントを手渡してくれる──。好き嫌いがないはずの恋人

世間を震撼させた白昼のテロ事件から17年。名を変え他人になりすまし、“無実”の彼女はなぜ逃げ続けたのか？　1995年３月某日。渋谷駅で毒ガス散布事件が発生。実行犯として指名手配されたのは宗教団体「光の心教団」の幹部男性と、何も知らずに同行させられた23歳の信者岡本啓美

「このあたりでは評判らしいですよ。ちょっとしたヒントから真実を見抜く、日本のミス・マープルだって」グルメサイトには載っていない、だけどとっても美味しいと評判の菜の花食堂の料理教室で靖子先生が教えてくれるのは、ささやかな謎と悩みの答え、そしてやっぱり美味しいレシピ。いつも駐車場に停まっ

「自分が食べるためにこそ、おいしいものを作らなきゃ」　菜の花食堂の料理教室は今日も大盛況。オーナーの靖子先生が優希たちに教えてくれるのは、美味しい料理のレシピだけじゃなく、ささやかな謎の答えと傷ついた体と心の癒し方……？　イケメンの彼が料理上手の恋人に突然別れを告げたのはなぜ？

Ricordare un tempo che è stato e non tornerà è un esercizio pericoloso. Cantare la fine di un mondo porta con sé il rischio di cedere alla nostalgia. Ma non è il rimpianto a guidare il racconto di Mauro Corona, bensì il bisogno di farsi testimone di un passato che i ricordi vanno a stanare di continuo. Come nella sua infanzia ertana era il susseguirsi dei mesi e delle stagioni a dettare i ritmi della vita, anche in questo scritto è il calendario a scandire la memoria, in un moto circolare lungo un anno che, dalla neve di gennaio, a quel bianco ritorna, per iniziare un nuovo ciclo.

Lucy, staying in a beautiful home overlooking Venice Beach, can find no peace from her misery - not in therapy, not in Tinder hookups, not in her sister's dog's unquestioning devotion, not in ruminating on the ancient Greeks. Yet everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer one night while sitting alone on the beach rocks....