Book picks similar to
Here in the After by Marion Frith


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Echoes of War


Tania Blanchard - 2021
    Another heart-rending novel inspired by a true story from the bestselling author of The Girl from Munich.  Calabria, Italy, 1936 In a remote farming village nestled in the mountains that descend into the sparkling Ionian Sea, young and spirited Giulia Tallariti longs for something more. While she loves her home and her lively family, she would much rather follow in her nonna’s footsteps and pursue her dream of becoming a healer. But as Mussolini’s focus shifts to the war in Europe, civil unrest looms. Whispers of war are at every corner and her beloved village, once safe from the fascist agenda of the North, is now in very real danger. Caught between her desire to forge her own path and her duty to her family, Giulia must draw on the passion in her heart and the strength of her conviction. Can she find a way to fulfill her dreams or will the echoes of war drown out her voice?

Hello from the Gillespies


Monica McInerney - 2014
    This year, Angela surprises herself—she tells the truth....The Gillespies are far from the perfect family that Angela has made them out to be. Her husband is coping badly with retirement. Her thirty-two-year-old twins are having career meltdowns. Her third daughter, badly in debt, can’t stop crying. And her ten-year-old son spends more time talking to his imaginary friend than to real ones.Without Angela, the family would fall apart. But when a bump on the head leaves Angela with temporary amnesia, the Gillespies pull together—and pull themselves together—in wonderfully surprising ways....

A Stolen Season


Rodney Hall - 2018
    . . veteran of the Iraq conflict who has suffered such extensive bodily trauma that he can only really survive by means of a mechanical skeleton.Marianna's has been ruined by men . . . A woman who has had to flee the country after her husband lied to the wrong people.John Philip's by too much money . . . Until he receives a surprise inheritance in the evening of his own life.Rodney Hall, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, presents the story of three people experiencing a period of life they never thought possible, and, perhaps, should never have been granted at all...PRAISE FOR RODNEY HALL"Reminiscent of both Joyce and Garcia Marquez" Washington Post"Magnificent. So good that you wish you had written it yourself" Salman Rushdie"A wondrous blend of the fabulous and the surreal" The Australian"Brilliant" David Mitchell

Blueberry


Glenna Thomson - 2017
    . .Greer O'Reilly needs to start over. Her professional success belies private sadness and domestic overload. She's torn between her career and motherhood. Her partner of twelve years has left her. And up ahead is her new home - a beautiful though neglected blueberry orchard in the hills of north-east Victoria. But when she and her six-year-old daughter Sophie arrive at the property to take possession, there's an unforeseen complication - the former owner, 81-year-old artist and jazz lover Charlie Chandler, refuses to move out. Charlie is dying and desperate to spend his last days in his old home. With Greer at the beginning of her new life, and Charlie at the end of his, the unlikely pair soon form a close bond. One that will offer the strength and inspiration Greer needs - because the next twelve months will either make or break her . . .

Prochownik's Dream


Alex Miller - 2005
    Since the death of his father, Moniek Prochownik, four years earlier, Toni has been at a creative standstill - until Marina Golding, the wife of his former teacher and mentor, Robert Schwartz, contacts him, and everything changes. Toni finds in Marina the perfect companion of his life in art and his creative energies are re-awakened.But Toni's newfound inspiration and artistic energy come at the direct expense of his relationship with his wife and daughter. The more dependent for his art he becomes on Marina, the more potentially destructive become the tensions between himself and his wife, Teresa. Toni's dilemma is how to reconcile the transgressive nature of his imaginative life with the daily life of his family, who he loves. Robert Schwartz's dying father, Theo, warns him not to confuse art with life. But by what means is he to achieve such clear-sightedness?Immensely satisfying, Prochownik's Dream is a work of great subtlety, strength and intellect. Its examination of the artist at work is complex and completely absorbing. But at its heart, very simply, it is a book about love.

Catch Us The Foxes


Nicola West - 2021
    Others you don’t dare let out … Twin Peaks meets The Dry in a deliciously dark and twisted tale that unravels a small town Ambitious young journalist Marlowe ‘Lo’ Robertson would do anything to escape the suffocating confines of her small home town. While begrudgingly covering the annual show for the local paper, Lo is horrified to discover the mutilated corpse of Lily Williams, the reigning showgirl and Lo’s best friend. Seven strange symbols have been ruthlessly carved into Lily’s back. But when Lo reports her grisly find to the town’s police chief, he makes her promise not to tell anyone about the symbols. Lo obliges, though it’s not like she has much of a choice – after all, he is also her father. When Lily’s murder makes headlines around the country and the town is invaded by the media, Lo seizes the opportunity to track down the killer and make a name for herself by breaking the biggest story of her life. What Lo uncovers is that her sleepy home town has been harbouring a deadly secret, one so shocking that it will captivate the entire nation. Lo’s story will change the course of her life forever, but in a way she could never have dreamed of.

The Empty Nest


Fiona Palmer - 2014
    But this year won't be the same. Her daughter, Gracie, has joined her brother Jack at boarding school and Sandi dreads waking up to a quiet house. Even her husband, Paul, seems distant and preoccupied with farm work. So she never could have guessed what the day has in store...

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.

Heart of the Cross


Emily Madden - 2019
    Tinahely, Ireland, 1959 Rosie Hart is content leaving her home behind to follow her new husband to Australia. But she soon discovers there is no room for her or their young son in the life he has built in vibrant Kings Cross. As their marriage crumbles, Rosie will need to fight for the golden future her son deserves.Rose Bay, 1984 Haunted by her past, Rosie is determined her daughter Maggie will follow the path she has set out for her. But Maggie has plans of her own, and Rosie can only pray the grief that plagues the Hart name won't follow her.Sydney, 2017 When her grandmother dies and leaves Brianna Hart a secret apartment in Kings Cross, Brie wonders what else Rosie was keeping from her. As Brie chases the truth of Rosie's past she uncovers an incredible story of passion, violence, love and tragedy. Is the Hart family's legacy of loss inescapable, or has Rosie gifted her granddaughter with a future of hope?MORE PRAISE'Expertly woven ... a heartbreaking tale of first love lost, second chances, new beginnings and overwhelming guilt. It captured my heart and my imagination.' - Beauty and Lace on The Lost Pearl

The Mothers


Rod Jones - 2015
    When Alma falls pregnant, her daughter Molly is born in secret. As Molly grows up, there is a man who sometimes follows her on her way to school.Anna meets Neil in 1952 at her parents’ shack at Cockatoo. She later enters a Salvation Army home for unmarried mothers, but is determined to keep her baby.Fitzroy, 1975. Student life. Things are different now, aren’t they? Cathy and David are living together, determined not to get married. Against the background of the tumultuous events of the sacking of the Whitlam government, a new chapter is added to the family’s story.The Mothers is a book about secrets. It interweaves the intimate lives of three generations of Australian women who learn that it’s the stories we can’t tell that continue to shape us and make us who we are.

O


Steven Carroll - 2021
    Something she always thought of as a fairy tale. A fairy tale with a dark side, like the best of fairy tales...Occupied France, 1943. France's most shameful hour. In these dark times, Dominique starts an illicit affair with a distinguished publisher, a married man. He introduces her to the Resistance, and she comes to have a taste for the clandestine life - she has never felt more alive. Shortly after the war, to prove something to her lover, she writes an erotic novel about surrender, submission and shame. Never meant to be published, Story of O becomes a national scandal and success, the world's most famous erotic novel. But what is the story really about - Dominique, her lover, or the country and the wartime past it would rather forget?

The Women's Pages


Victoria Purman - 2020
    The armaments factories are making washing machines instead of bullets and war correspondent Tilly Galloway has hung up her uniform and been forced to work on the women's pages of her newspaper - the only job available to her - where she struggles to write advice on fashion and make-up.As Sydney swells with returning servicemen and the city bustles back to post-war life, Tilly finds her world is anything but normal. As she desperately waits for word of her prisoner-of-war husband, she begins to research stories about the lives of the underpaid and overworked women who live in her own city. Those whose war service has been overlooked; the freedom and independence of their war lives lost to them.Meanwhile Tilly's waterside worker father is on strike, and her best friend Mary is struggling to cope with the stranger her own husband has become since being liberated from Changi a broken man. As strikes rip the country apart and the news from abroad causes despair, matters build to a heart-rending crescendo. Tilly realises that for her the war may have ended, but the fight is just beginning...

Sweetness and Light


Liam Pieper - 2020
    Connor, an Australian expat with a brutal past, spends his time running low-stakes scams on tourists in a sleepy beachside town. Sasha, an American in search of spiritual guidance, heads to an isolated ashram in the hope of mending a broken heart. When one of Connor’s grifts goes horribly wrong, it sets in motion a chain of events that brings the two lost souls together – and as they try to navigate a world of gangsters, gurus and secret agendas, they begin to realise that within the ashram’s utopian community, something is deeply, deeply wrong . . . Racing from the beaches of Goa to the streets of Delhi to the jungles of Tamil Nadu, Sweetness and Light is an intoxicating, unsettling story of the battle between light and dark, love and lust, morality and corruption. This is an explosive and unforgettable novel that confirms Liam Pieper's place as one of Australia's finest, sharpest writers.

Wood Green


Sean Rabin - 2016
    Peopled by an ensemble cast, the local publican the single mother who manages the pub’s kitchen, the unhappily married couple that runs the corner store, a newcomer from Johannesburg with a murky past, a snivelling B&B proprietor and a determined ex-girlfriend, Wood Green artfully evokes the claustrophobia of small-town life. While Michael believes he is making a new life for himself, Lucian has other plans. Rabin writes with wit and intelligence – and deftly executes an unsuspected plot twist – in his exploration of the perils of literary ambition and the elusive prospect of artistic legacy.

The Strangers We Know


Pip Drysdale - 2019
    Now imagine that’s the best thing to happen to you all week …When Charlie sees a man who is the spitting image of her husband Oliver on a dating app, her heart stops. Her first desperate instinct is to tell herself she must be mistaken – after all, she only caught a glimpse from a distance as her friends were laughingly swiping through the men on offer. But no matter how much she tries to push her fears aside, she can’t because she took that photo. On their honeymoon. She just can’t let it go.Suddenly other signs of betrayal begin to add up and so Charlie does the only thing she can think of to defend her position – she signs up to the app to catch Oliver in the act.But Charlie soon discovers that infidelity is the least of her problems. Nothing is as it seems and nobody is who she thinks they are ...