Hold the Ladder Steady

Growing up in Australia in the early fifties, Robin is intrigued by the folklore of the pink boto told by her father. A childhood fantasy confirms her belief that like all fairy tales, there will always be a boto somewhere waiting just for her. Robin observes the conflicts of Roman Catholicism and the social changes of the sixties that swept like a tide into her adolescence. It was the age of the pill, the Vietnam War and good girls who still wore their hats to mass on Sundays. When she launches herself into life in the city with a man having a cowlick, she leaves the sea behind. New and old friends bring an awareness of the issues that confront Australia in a new age, when the complexities of feminism and sexuality were a thorn in the side of a country that prided itself on fair play.

Held

A love story spanning decades as two men not only fight the world for their love and its changes surrounding them but also one another while they battle the one thing that tears them apart.

At the tender age of fifteen, Matt and Justin instantly fall in love. While time grows and matures, so do they and their relationship. Years pass and are torn from one another as their lives take them in separate directions. The political and social constructs start to define their lives and the people who they become.

Can what we believe holds us, end up being our own destructive force, potentially being the one thing that destroys us, crumbling our lives?

Eventually, we all have to let go.

Hearts of Cotton

When a famous writer steals a manuscript from his daughter and tragically dies after the book is released, Dasha, a young show business reporter from Vilnius, must make a decision that will define her future: to tell the truth about what the author did or hide it to protect his memory. Plagiarism scandal, the war for attention, drug abuse, love, greed, and ambition fuel the hunt for sensations of the young journalist and guide her in finding her own inner compass to navigate the uncertainty and find the way to happiness.

If the books of Frederic Beigbeder and Michel Houellebecq were hard liquors, Hearts of Cotton would be a cocktail, where Gossip Girl meets The Ideal and Atomised, leaving you wondering whether all the challenges and struggles are there to remind the characters of their true calling, or perhaps all of us should sometimes recalibrate our inner compasses to reflect on our goals and dreams.

Heart to Let

Amy Spencer, the novel’s heroine, is a 20^th-century Jane Eyre. Not born into a family of status or wealth, she nonetheless had a good education at a single-sex Grammar School near Elephant and Castle in London and an upbringing which enabled her to mix in the various strata of society she encounters in the changing and challenging world she lives in. Amy considers herself the equal, both socially and intellectually, of the men she meets and she succeeds in a profession steeped in tradition and precedent which is male-dominated when she enters it aged 23. But dear reader, does she marry her Mr Rochester? You will have to read the book to find out.

Gwennie's Girl

This is a visceral, engaging and demanding debut novel by a well-travelled author with first-hand experience in a variety of war zones. It is the story of Lizzie who is no hero. She is a coward who has fled Australia, an abusive and loveless existence and the sorrow of being abandoned by her loving mother, Gwennie, and her redoubtable nanna. She lands a job in Geneva, travelling to war zones and refugee camps, and gradually comes to relish her new independence. Physically, Lizzie survives. Emotionally, she shuts down, closing her mind to memories, nursing anger and feeling of guilt, and determined never to let herself be vulnerable again. She has what she thinks is a one-night stand with a war photographer. But eventually she has to choose whether to stay safe in emotional isolation or take another risk--trust someone else. After all, she is Gwennie's and Nanna's girl. The decision is made.

Granduncle Bertie

Sarah, a free-spirited artist in her late twenties, accepts an assignment from her granduncle, Albert Smithson, to write his memoir. ‘Bertie’ has a crippling terror of death brought about by the agonising death of his father, who was an atheist. He learns that there are three conditions one must attain to die in a peaceful state. At age fifty-four, he has none of them and is determined to achieve them all.

Gracie Browne

Gracie Browne lives an idyllic life, or so it seems. On the surface she and her husband Aiden are a successful couple: childhood sweethearts, with a marriage that others could only aspire to. Deborah, one of the golf club wives and an admirer of Aiden has a burning passion to take him for herself. It’s during one of the dinner parties that Gracie hosts for the men and wives of the golf club, that Gracie finally finds her voice. A voice she thought so long ago was lost. Gracie would be silenced no more. That night she leaves Aiden and starts on a path of not only self-discovery, but of friendship with an unexpected person. Will Aiden persuade Gracie to come back home and to give their marriage another chance? Or will what Gracie discovers be the final straw?

Good Boy Joe

Vicky Bhargav has fallen.

When India’s famed film industry turns its back on one of the brightest stars of its past, it takes a slum dweller, riding his rundown scooter, to save the day for him.

One unusual road trip and a series of comical misadventures later, the two men end up bringing a glimmer of joy and hope in each other’s downtrodden lives.

Free From The End Into Something New

The traumatic experiences of many sudden changes within her childhood leading up to her adulthood. A fight for Patricia’s life is needed in order to survive. A desperation of people fighting for her love parallel to a personal need to be accepted by her true love compels Patricia to realise that there is always an end to something new. What she has to leave at the end and bring with her in the new is what seems to always catch her by surprise. However, having faith in God throughout brings her through each stage of her life knowing that the new cannot control or oppress but only empower.

Free From The End Into Something New is a fictional book which covers real-life topics such as abuse, pain, emotional attachment, the Windrush generation, fostering, romance and marriage. This book will bring you an alternate thought-provoking narrative of characters which will leave you inspired, engaged and empowered.

Forgetting Jake

Ben is a rancher, living in Carter’s Pass, Oregon, a small town where nothing ever happens. He spends his days taking care of his young son, feeding horses, and mending fences around his property. That is, until early one morning, when a stranger ends up on the road to his ranch.

The young man is uninjured but has no idea who he is or how he ended up on the road. Named ‘Frankie’ by Ben’s son, the young man has flashes of his past. But as he begins falling for Ben his memories become clearer, and the past catches up with him. What will happen when the life Frankie has made with Ben clashes with the old?

Forever and a Day

Life is never dull in the seaside village of Trentmouth on the Dorset coast. Molly and Alistair await the joyous arrival of another new life into the family and to their friends they are the perfect happy couple. Bertie finally opens his vegetarian beachside café with the support of his wife Lucy, a midwife at the local hospital. The Reverend Suzanne has caused quite a stir in sleepy Trentmouth and Lady Isobel has plans of her own at the Manor.

Tranquillity is short-lived when Molly has to make some serious decisions about the veterinary practice she has worked so hard to build; Lucy’s health is threatened and she is faced with imminent changes at the hospital and the ‘Rev’ has ruffled one too many feathers.

Molly, Lucy and Suzanne continually find themselves thrown together for mutual help and support turning this quiet little backwater of village life upside down in ways they had not expected – will life for them ever be the same again?

For Redder

Harry Larsen’s boyhood in post-war Sydney is marred by the death of his Danish father. With the loss of their breadwinner, Harry and his mother move to a new life in the country in New South Wales. He takes with them an old biscuit tin containing letters and items left by his father. The letters, in a language he cannot understand, and the words ‘For redder’ levelled in anger at his father, become posers that the Harry seeks to solve. The adult Harry learns of his mother’s death while employed as an engineer on a copper mine on the island of Bouganville, a mine that is increasingly opposed by the islanders. Returning to Australia for his mother’s funeral he decides to give up his life as an engineer and go to Denmark to find the truth of his father’s wartime activities; to his resistance to the German occupation of his country. For Harry it is a journey of discovery to find the family that he has not known and, ultimately, to love.

“A debut novel of a boy raised in Sydney to the adult who seeks to find the truth of his father’s participation in resistance to German occupied Denmark.”