Book picks similar to
CLOWN SECRET by Ira Seidenstein
acrobatics
australia
israel
theatre-script
The Making of Christina
Meredith Jaffe - 2017
Jackson Plummer quickly becomes the cure to Christina's loneliness and a surrogate father to her young daughter Bianca.When Jackson suggests moving to a run-down farm in the mountains, Christina is uncertain about uprooting their lives in the city. She soon forgets her hesitation, absorbing herself in restoring the rambling century-old house, Bartholomews Run, and becoming obsessed with solving its mysterious history.But while living on the isolated farm, her once effervescent child transforms into a quiet sullen teenager and Christina increasingly struggles to connect with her.Because Bianca has a secret. And the monstrous truth threatens to destroy them all.Poignant and thought-provoking, The Making of Christina will have you questioning how well you know the people you love, the price of truth, and how easily it could happen to you.
Journey of a Thousand Storms: A Refugee's Story
Kooshyar Karimi - 2016
Until he was kidnapped by the Intelligence Service.Behind his professional success, Kooshyar was a rebel on several fronts. Marginalised since boyhood as a Jew in a fundamentalist Islamic state, he was a member of a political group that opposed the government. He'd also been using his medical skills illegally, to save unmarried pregnant women from death by stoning.Snatched from the street, he was jailed and tortured and then forced to spy for the regime, before finally escaping to Turkey. There he faced a whole new struggle to keep his family safe while awaiting refugee status from the UN. He was forbidden to work and at the mercy of corrupt police, con men and red tape. Then life became more dangerous still, when the Intelligence Service tracked him down and used his mother, back in Iran, as blackmail.Kooshyar's inspiring story of how he managed to forge a new life in Australia is heightened by his largeness of heart, strength of character, and insight into human behaviour, from the unfathomably evil to the selflessly kind. With the skill of a natural storyteller, Journey of a Thousand Storms recounts a life of endurance, compassion and gritty determination.
Blood on my hands: A surgeon at war
Craig Jurisevic - 2010
It is hardly to be credited that the enlightened nations of Europe are allowing this nightmare to occur only sixty minutes by jet from Paris and London. The forces of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic have swept into Kosovo on the Balkan Peninsula leaving a trail of death and heartbreak. Scenes of Milosevic’s ‘ethnic cleansing’ play out on television screens all over the world; haunted figures huddled behind barbed wire fences, bodies heaped in ditches.Adelaide surgeon Craig Jurisevic recalls his grandfather’s ordeal in a Nazi concentration camp and resolves to honour his memory by offering his skills as a surgeon to the victims of the conflict. Leaving behind a wife and son, Jurisevic flies to the Balkans under the auspices of the International Medical Corps. Struggling to maintain his moral bearings, Jurisevic’s journey from Adelaide to the hell of Kosovo has become a descent into the heart of darkness. Blood on My Hands, co-written with award-winning author Robert Hillman, tells a story of terrible suffering, of extraordinary heroism, and of the savagery that lies coiled in the human heart.
Left for Dead in the Outback: How I Survived 71 Days Lost in a Desert Hell
Ricky Megee - 2008
Last Day in the Dynamite Factory
Annah Faulkner - 2015
If nobody asks, you never have to tell.'Christopher Bright is a well-respected conservation architect, good neighbour and friend. He has a devoted wife, two talented children and an old Rover. He plays tennis on Saturdays and enjoys a beer with his business partner after work.Life is orderly, yet an unresolved question has haunted him for as long as he can remember: Who was his birth father?Devotion to his adoptive parents has always prevented Chris from enquiring too deeply, but when his mother dies, information emerges that becomes the catalyst for changes he has never imagined.As light is cast on his father, attention turns to his birth mother, but when he goes in search of the person behind the photo, he encounters a conspiracy of silence. His quest for information, however, reveals not only the truth about his mother's life but exposes the fault lines in his own, and Chris finds the price of knowledge increasingly heavy. Nevertheless, the truth must be told ...Or must it?
Where Fortune Lies
Mary-Anne O'Connor - 2020
For fans of Nicole Alexander, Colleen McCullough, and Fiona McIntosh.1879: 'Invisible' Anne Brown fears she'll never escape the harshness and poverty of her life in County Donegal, Ireland. Until, one heartbreaking Beltane night, her life is changed forever and she leaves to seek her fortune in far-flung Australia.Upon the death of their father, charismatic Will Worthington and his beloved sister Mari are stunned to find he has left all their money and a ticket to the far shores of Australia to an enigmatic painted woman. It seems their only hope for a brighter future also lies in Australia, where together with Will's best friend, the artist Charlie Turner, they seek their fortunes.Charlie finds love with a mysterious exotic dancer, yet there is trouble on the horizon. His new friends up in the Victorian Alps might be teaching him to run with the wild horses and find his talent with a brush at last, but life in a bushranger gang is a dangerous game.As Charlie struggles to break free from his fate, all four are left with impossible choices as fortunes waver between life and death, loyalty and the heart.
The Fairest Among Women
Shifra Horn - 1998
She was born during the War of Independence in the 1940s and disappears on a cold winter night in the 1990s.
Out of the Box: The Highs and Lows of a Champion Smuggler
Julie McSorley - 2014
He returned to Australia in a box, but that was only the start of his adventures.Crazily impulsive, romantic, and free-spirited, Reg became a national hero for smuggling himself 13,000 miles home as air freight. But as his fame and sporting career faded, Reg decided to smuggle something very different. Soon, he was on the run with his girlfriend, playing a cat-and-mouse game with police on three continents. A wild road trip across India and Africa—idyllic beaches and prison hellholes, shady friends and shadier cops, gun-toting militias and drug-running gangsters —led to a court room in Sri Lanka and the fight of his life. Could Reg beat the death sentence he’d just been given, or was this box too big to climb out of?
The Ballad of Banjo Crossing
Tess Evans - 2011
Jack McPhail is a man on the run from his past, a drifter who lands by accident in a sleepy outback Australian town called Banjo Crossing. Jack - almost despite himself - becomes slowly drawn into the town, its community, its characters and its concerns.He's on the brink of falling in love with Mardi, a young widow and owner of the local coffee shop, when the community is confronted and divided by an unexpected development. A coal mining company has come to town, intent on buying up the local properties to build an open cut mine. The town of Banjo Crossing rallies together to fight off the threat. Jack wants to help out his new friends, but if he does, he's at risk of his past being exposed. Having his secret out there could change everything for him. Will he help them out, even if it costs him his second chance at happiness?'Highly topical and engaging ... incubating a mystery which must not be revealed until the exact psychological moment ... entertaining and charismatic' Adelaide Advertiser
Yoni's Last Battle: The Rescue at Entebbe, 1976
Iddo Netanyahu - 2001
Their captors were Arab and German terrorists, aided by the Ugandan army; their liberators were members of Israel's elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal, simply known as the Unit. Lt.-Col. Yoni (Jonathan) Netanyahu, the Unit's commander, earned world-wide fame in the wake of the operation's stunning success. He was the only Israeli soldier killed in the Entebbe raid. As a brother of the rescue force's commander, and himself a member of the Unit, Iddo Netanyahu had ready access to the participants in the raid. He was able to obtain detailed accounts from the men of the Unit who, for the first time, described the planning and preparations for the mission and its near-perfect execution. What emerged from their accounts is a powerful and stirring story of how the daring undertaking was accomplished after only 48 hours of frantic preparations. Yoni's Last Battle portrays the men who carried out an incredibly hazardous operation in far-away Africa. Above all, it depicts the heroic - and tragic - figure of their commander, Yoni.
Crossing The Ditch
James Castrission - 2009
It tells the story of two mates, a kayak, and the conquest of the Tasman.
My Story: Schapelle Corby: Fully Revised and Updated Since Her Release and Return Home
Schapelle Corby - 2019
She had been Hotel K's most famous inmate.Schapelle was a 27-year-old beauty-school student when, in 2004, Bali customs officers found 4.2 kilograms of marijuana in her boogie-board bag. She was convicted of a crime she still vehemently denies committing.She spent ten years in Hotel K, where she survived unimaginable horrors, corrupt guards, degrading conditions, and abuse at the hands of other prisoners, but also, amazingly, found the love of her life - a love that still burns strong.In this revised and updated edition of My Story, first published in 2006, Schapelle describes her descent into madness, and finding her way back, the chaos of her release, the trials of surviving outside on parole and, eventually, her dramatic return to Australia, all the while hounded mercilessly by the media.This is the first time since 2006 that Schapelle has spoken, driven by a determination to show she has emerged, scarred, but with her dignity, humour and courage intact.Written with bestselling author Kathryn Bonella, this is a deeply unsettling but utterly compelling tale of what should have been a holiday in paradise but instead turned into 13 years of living hell. You won't be able to put it down.
Mother of Pearl
Angela Savage - 2019
Rich in characterisation and feeling, Mother of Pearl, and the timely issues it raises, will generate discussion amongst readers everywhere.
White Gum Creek
Nicole Hurley-Moore - 2018
On the occasional trip into nearby White Gum Creek he keeps to himself and that's the way he likes it. And though over the last six years the townsfolk have tried to reach out to Nick, he's pushed them all away.Whenever Nick comes into the Gumnut Bakery, Natasha Duroz tries to engage him in conversation when she serves him. There's something about him that intrigues Tash, but she's not sure if it's because she feels sorry for him or there's something more.At last encouraged by the warmth of a few old and new friends, Nick gradually begins to re-engage with the outside world. Then, suddenly some minor vandalism on his farm escalates and odd things begin to happen on Winters Hill. Is someone out to hurt Nick or have his years of solitude been playing tricks on his mind? This entrancing novel is about overcoming heartache and loss through the power of friendship and love.
The Multiple Effects Of Rainshadow
Thea Astley - 1996
Is he evil? Or crazy? His violence is in fact a mirror for the brutality of Australian life - and is a dim reflection at that, in a country where atrocities by whites against blacks are so ingrained few question them.The effects of the rampage ripple out from the island to link the fates of those who witnessed it, across the north and down through the decades. It is a time when silence in the face of tyranny is at its loudest. When allegiance to English niceties is confounded by the landscape and by the weather. And change is a slow wind that brings little real difference.