Showing results by narrator "Lisa Armytage" in All Categories

New South Wales, 1972. Following the death of her beloved Aunt Hilda, widow Clare Barclay inherits Bellevue, an historic property in the Blue Mountains township of Numbulla, Australia. Giving up her teaching job to move there, Clare plans to restore the house to its original glory. She also hopes to track down a box of missing documents that may shed light on why her husband Jack secretly second-mortgaged their home. Clare makes friends with the locals, including a boy named Joe. She soon hears of plans to redevelop Numbulla, and to exploit the land bordering the protected wilderness area.

Sandwiched between the needs of her elderly mother and her own family, Annie barely has time for a quick swim, let alone a leisurely chat about a long neglected tea set. But as the story unfolds, the modern world seems to fall away along with her mother's dementia, and forgotten family histories are revealed.

Romance can be found in every corner of the world and has changed the lives of people in every period of history. In this collection of 16 stand-alone short stories, including a brand-new tale, Anna Jacobs encapsulates the spark of first love and the glow of second chances in her inimitable style, which fans new and old will take to their hearts.

The Lockdown Diaries records a year in the life of Dawn, Rod, their kids, cats and garden. We will all identify with their daily struggles with the pandemic. She takes us from the beginning of the lockdown, as we all became used to wearing masks, turned into teachers and hairdressers and found that nail technicians were like gold dust. She touches on the everyday struggles too - being apart from her six children, missing friends, and getting fat. On the plus side, Dawn has contributed to glass-bottle recycling on a global scale and performed miracles for Smirnoff shares.

Childless Maeve Corrigan, though rich and successful, is dying of cancer. She wants to leave her business empire to one of the offspring of her two estranged brothers, Des and Leo. But which young relative should she choose? Des has four children, and he is overstretched financially. Leo is the unambitious owner of a hardware store in a remote Australian town and has two children.

Dan Ireland, a work-weary police crash investigator still hell-bent on punishing himself for his misspent youth, has ample justifications for not going home to Calingarry Crossing for the school reunion, but one very good reason why he should...Maggie Lindeman. Maggie is back in Calingarry Crossing trying to sell the family pub, while also dealing with a restless 17-year-old son, a father with dementia, a fame-obsessed musician husband back in the city and a dwindling bank account. The last thing she needs is a surprise houseguest for the summer.

IMAGINING THE BENNETS is a monumental prequel, spanning forty years of family saga before Pride and Prejudice. It’s original, intricate, intelligent, and moving. The story offers a wonderful interpretation of the earlier era and is an imagination that is loyal to the original. The narrative is an uncompromising, romantic, hard-hitting, heart-rending, viscerally real, historically epic tale.

In today's fast-paced and increasingly public society, we are expected to have the energy to manage a packed work schedule and a large network of friends, both online and offline, day and night. If you find yourself struggling to live up to, or even enjoy, these non-stop social expectations...

Suddenly, she isn't twenty-five; she's turning fifty. She doesn't have a big-deal boyfriend; she has a nerdy husband. While Kelli "celebrates" her Big Five-O birthday, she desperately schemes to get back to her glorious past. But what if there's no way out—and what if her future proves to be the life she really wants to lead?

Judith Drainger has always played life by her own rules. But these days life seems to be playing her right back. Divorced, orphaned and forcibly retired, 59-year-old Judith is determined to seize the opportunity to leave her broken home in London and move across the world to Australia. Here she reunites with her estranged adult daughter Cassandra–only to land smack bang in the emotional quagmire of her daughter’s anger and abandonment issues. To make matters worse, Judith can see her new granddaughter Emily has a serious health issue, but her offers of help are ignored and rejected.

The sudden death of her refugee friend sets off a chain of events that will change Shelley’s quiet life forever. Her burning desire for the truth uncovers a web of conspiracy, danger, and corruption that reaches all the way to the top. Shelley is reluctant to jeopardize her safe career and comfortable life, but it soon becomes clear that she will have to break rules and risk everything to uncover the truth.

Bequeathed a century-old house, four estranged friends return to their hometown, Calingarry Crossing, where each must stay for a season at Dandelion House to fulfil the wishes of their benefactor, Gypsy. But coming home to the country stirs up shameful memories of the past, including the tragic end-of-school muck-up day accident twenty years earlier.

After a 30-year absence Agnes is returning to Australia, the country of her birth, at the request of her aging, narcissistic mother. Having undergone a long period of psychotherapy she now entertains a hope that burning questions will be answered, haunting mysteries solved, and buried memories encouraged into the light. Something has blighted her life since childhood. Something has cast a long shadow over her existence, affecting her ability to grasp at life fully, to develop sustained relationships and to appreciate her own sense of self-worth.

Miss Hester Harper, middle-aged and eccentric, brings Katherine into her emotionally impoverished life. Together they sew, cook gourmet dishes for two, run the farm, make music and throw dirty dishes down the well. One night, driving along the deserted track that leads to the farm, they run into a mysterious creature. They heave the body from the roo bar and dump it into the farm's deep well. But the voice of the injured intruder will not be stilled and, most disturbing of all, the closer Katherine is drawn to the edge of the well, the farther away she gets from Hester.