Book picks similar to
Heart of the Dreaming by Di Morrissey


romance
di-morrissey
australian
australian-authors

Family Secrets


Liz Byrski - 2014
    Gerald's dominating personality has loomed large over his wife, Connie, their children, Andrew and Kerry, and his sister Flora, for decades.Connie, whose own dreams were dispensed with upon marriage, is now determined to renew her long friendship with Gerald's estranged sister, Flora. She travels to France where she finds Flora struggling to make peace with the past and searching for a place to call home. Meanwhile Andrew's marriage is crumbling, and Kerry is trapped in stasis by unfinished business with her father.As the family adjusts to life after Gerald, they could not be more splintered. But there are surprises in store and secrets to unravel. And once the loss has been absorbed, is it possible that they could all find a way to start afresh with forgiveness, understanding and possibility?

The Other Woman


Jane Green - 2004
    Dan and Linda talk on the phone every day. Twice a day. As Dan and Ellie’s intimate civil wedding ceremony gets transformed into a black-tie affair, Ellie begins to wonder if it’s possible to marry the man without marrying his mother. As troubles mount, Ellie turns to her friends—glamorous Lisa, who always looks like she’s just stepped off a runway, and wonderfully frazzled Trish—and tries to rediscover the independence she once had, and the man she still loves. But it seems that having a child and saving a marriage means growing up in ways she’d never imagined . . .A warm, witty, and wise look at mothers-in-law and what they teach us about ourselves, The Other Woman is sure to please Jane Green’s growing legion of fans.

The Ladies of Missalonghi


Colleen McCullough - 1987
    Neither as pretty as cousin Alicia nor as domineering as mother Drusilla, she seems doomed to a quiet life of near poverty at Missalonghi, her family's pitifully small homestead in Australia's Blue Mountains. But it's a brand new century--the twentieth--a time for new thoughts and bold new actions. And Missy Wright is about to set every self-righteous tongue in the town of Byron wagging. Because she has just set her sights on a mysterious, mistrusted, and unsuspecting stranger... who just might be Prince Charming in disguise.

After the Fire, a Still Small Voice


Evie Wyld - 2009
    After the departure of the woman he loves, Frank drives out to a shack by the ocean that he had last visited as a teenager. There, among the sugarcane and sand dunes, he struggles to rebuild his life. Forty years earlier, Leon is growing up in Sydney, turning out treacle tarts at his parents' bakery and flirting with one of the local girls. But when he's drafted to serve in Vietnam, he finds himself suddenly confronting the same experiences that haunt his war-veteran father. As these two stories weave around each other - each narrated in a voice as tender as it is fierce - we learn what binds Frank and Leon together, and what may end up keeping them apart.

The Girl In Times Square


Paullina Simons - 2004
    Lily's life is turned upside down with the disappearance of her flat mate, incredible revelations about her family and a personal discovery, all of which will affect her forever. What if everything you believed about your life was a lie? Meet Lily Quinn. She is broke, struggling to finish college, pay her rent, find love. Adrift in bustling New York City, the most interesting things in Lily's life happen to the people around her. But Lily loves her aimless life until her best friend and roommate Amy disappears. That's when Spencer Patrick O'Malley, a cynical, past his prime NYPD detective with demons of his own, enters Lily's world. And a sudden financial windfall which should bring Lily joy instead becomes an ominous portent of the dark forces gathering around her. But fate isn't finished with Lily. She finds herself fighting for her life as Spencer's search for the missing Amy intensifies, leading Lily to question everything she knew about her friend and family. Startling revelations about the people she loves force her to confront truths that will leave her changed forever. From a master storyteller comes a new heart-wrenching, magnificent and un-putdownable novel. This is the odyssey of two young women, Lily and Amy, roommates and friends on the verge of the rest of their lives.

Between You & Me


Susan Wiggs - 2018
    When disaster strikes, Caleb is thrust into an urban environment of high-tech medicine and the relentless rush of modern life.Dr. Reese Powell is poised to join the medical dynasty of her wealthy, successful parents. Bold, assertive, and quick-thinking, she lives for the addictive rush of saving lives. When a shocking accident brings Caleb Stoltz into her life, Reese is forced to deal with a situation that challenges everything she thinks she knows—and ultimately emboldens her to question her most powerful beliefs.Then one impulsive act brings about a clash of cultures in a tug-of-war that plays out in a courtroom, challenging the very nature of justice and reverberating through generations, straining the fragile threads of faith and family.Deeply moving and unforgettable, Between You and Me is an emotionally complex story of love and loss, family and friendship, and the arduous road to discovering the heart’s true path.

Salt Creek


Lucy Treloar - 2015
    Failed entrepreneur Stanton Finch moves his family from Adelaide to the remote Coorong area of Southern Australia, in pursuit of his dream to become a farmer.Housed in a driftwood cabin, they try to make the best of their situation. The children roam the beautiful landscape of Salt Creek; visitors are rare but warmly welcomed; a local Indigenous boy becomes almost part of the family. Yet there are daily hardships, and tensions with the Ngarrindjeri people they have displaced; disaster never seems far away.With Mrs Finch struggling to cope, Hester, their perceptive eldest daughter, willingly takes on more responsibility. But as Hester’s sense of duty grows, so does a yearning to escape Salt Creek and make a new life of her own …Lucy Treloar was born in Malaysia and educated in Melbourne, England, and Sweden. Awards for her writing include the 2014 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Salt Creek is her first novel.

The Place on Dalhousie


Melina Marchetta - 2019
    Two years later, Rosie returns to the house and living there is Martha, whom Seb Gennaro married less than a year after the death of Rosie’s mother. Martha is struggling to fulfil Seb’s dream, while Rosie is coming to terms with new responsibilities. And so begins a stand-off between two women who refuse to move out of the home they both lay claim to.As the battle lines are drawn, Jimmy Hailler re-enters Rosie’s life. Having always watched other families from the perimeters, he’s now grappling, heartbreakingly, with forming one of his own . . .An unforgettable story about losing love and finding love; about the interconnectedness of lives and the true nature of belonging, from one of our most acclaimed writers.

The Drowner


Robert Drewe - 1996
    From this innocent collision of flesh begins a passion that takes them from the Wiltshire Downs to the most elemental choices of life and death in the Australian desert. Their intense romance is but part of the daring story that unfolds. Mingling history, myth and technology with a modern cinematic and poetic imagination, Robert Drewe presents a fable of European ambitions in an alien landscape, and a magnificently sustained metaphor of water as the life-and-death force.

Sweet and Deadly


Charlaine Harris - 2007
    So she stayed, taking a job at the local paper, to try to both convince the sheriff that she was right-and maybe convince herself she was wrong. After all, her father had been the town doctor, loved (she always thought) by all. To think he was killed was to think that one of her friends or neighbors has harbored some deep resentment toward him. Then she finds the dead body of the women who had been her father's nurse for many years. Obviously murdered. Now Catherine knows that she was not wrong about her parent's death. Someone in Lowfield has a terrible secret, a secret worth killing for. Not once, not twice, but -- when another body is found -- three times. And the killer won't hesitate to add more victims to the list, as Catherine gets closer and closer to the truth.

Playing The Odds


Nora Roberts - 1985
    Serena MacGregor's father left nothing to chance when he sent Justin Blade -- part Comanche and all gambler -- on a Caribbean cruise. His daughter was evading her responsibility to produce grandchildren by working as a blackjack dealer on the CELEBRATION. Odds were they'd meet.Serena's father had his hopes riding on what would happen when they did. Win, lose or draw, they were meant for each other, proving indisputably in this case that lucky in cards did not mean unlucky in love.

The Broken Shore


Peter Temple - 2005
    He lives a quiet life with his two dogs in the tumbledown wreck his family home has become. It's a peaceful existence - ideal for the rehabilitating man. But his recovery is rudely interrupted by a brutal attack on Charles Bourgoyne, a prominent member of the local community. Suspicion falls on three young men from the local Aboriginal community. But Cashin's not so sure and as the case unfolds amid simmering corruption and prejudice, he finds himself holding on to something that it might be better to let go.

The Fine Colour of Rust


P.A. O'Reilly - 2012
    She never imagined she’d have to campaign to save the local primary school. She certainly had no idea her best friend would turn out to be the crusty old junk man. All in all, she’s starting to wonder if she took a wrong turn somewhere. If only she could drop the kids at the orphanage and start over . . . But now, thanks to her protest letters, the education minister is coming to Gunapan, and she has to convince him to change his mind about the school closure. And as if facing down the government isn’t enough, it soon becomes clear that the school isn’t the only local spot in trouble. In the drought-stricken bushland on the outskirts of town, a luxury resort development is about to siphon off a newly discovered springwater supply. No one seems to know anything, no one seems to care.With a dream lover on a Harley unlikely to appear to save the day, Loretta needs to stir the citizens of Gunapan to action. She may be short of money, influence, and a fully functioning car, but she has good friends. Together they can organize chocolate drives, supermarket sausage sizzles, a tour of the local slaughterhouse—whatever it takes to hold on to the scrap of world that is home.

Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!


Fannie Flagg - 1998
    Many inhabit small-town or suburban America. But this time, her heroine is urban: a brainy, beautiful, and ambitious rising star of 1970s television. Dena Nordstrom, pride of the network, is a woman whose future is full of promise, her present rich with complications, and her past marked by mystery.

The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart


Holly Ringland - 2018
    She is taken in by her estranged grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak. But Alice also learns that there are secrets within secrets about her past. Under the watchful eye of June and The Flowers, women who run the farm, Alice grows up. But an unexpected betrayal sends her reeling, and she flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. Alice thinks she has found solace, until she falls in love with Dylan, a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart is a story about stories: those we inherit, those we select to define us, and those we decide to hide. It is a novel about the secrets we keep and how they haunt us, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. Spanning twenty years, set between the lush sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, Alice must go on a journey to discover that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.