Showing results by narrator "Anna Hruby" in All Categories

When 25-year-old journalist Zara Ellison receives her mother's ominous text message, 'Call me when you can', Zara knows it's not good news. Two weeks later, Zara has left her much-loved city life to relocate to Barker, the sleepy country town in which she grew up. For Zara, family comes first. But she needs to work too, and the town's police force is a rural journalist's best source of information. Meeting Detective Dave Burrows and Dave's second-in-charge, Senior Constable Jack Higgins, is a priority. 

Penny McIntyre loves her life as an ambitious city professional, so when she's floored by a mystery illness and ordered back to the family farm for three months' rest and recuperation, she is horrified to find her perfect life imploding. Within days, she is forced to leave her job, her live-in boyfriend and her beloved city apartment...to return to the small country town in which she grew up. Back to her dad and three sisters, one of whom has never forgiven her for abandoning her family. And to her ex-boyfriend, Tim Patterson, who was the biggest reason she ran in the first place.

Nine years ago, 30-year-old Chelsea Taylor left the small country town of Barker to rise to the top as a concert pianist. Yet here she was, back again with her four-year-old daughter, Aria, readying herself to face her father, Tom. The father who'd shouted down the phone nine years ago never to come home again....

Mai and Hikaru went to school together in the city of Nagoya, until Hikaru disappeared when they were 18. It is not until 10 years later, when Mai runs into Hikaru's mother, Hiromi Sato, that she learns Hikaru has become a hikikomori, a recluse unable to leave his bedroom for years. In secret, Hiromi Sato hires Mai as a 'rental sister', to write letters to Hikaru and encourage him to leave his room.

Former social worker Elle Castillo is the host of a popular true-crime podcast that tackles cold cases of missing children in her hometown. After four seasons of successful investigations, Elle decides to tackle her white whale: the Countdown Killer, or TCK. Twenty years ago, TCK established a pattern of taking and ritualistically murdering girls, each a year younger than the last. No one’s ever known why - why he stopped abruptly with his 11-year-old victim, or why he followed the ritual at all.

Don’t let retirement just happen to you. Make it the retirement you want and deserve. Will you have enough money to enjoy your retirement? The No-Regrets Guide to Retirement is your definitive guide to making your later years your best years. Qualified financial planner Patricia Howard explains why retirement is a good news story in Australia and offers no-nonsense, upbeat advice to help get you to, and comfortably through, your retirement.  

After a fractured childhood spent in foster homes, city girl Roni has convinced herself that she has no need of anyone - other than her not-as-tough-as-he-looks rescued street cat, Scritches, and her unborn baby. Despite facing a bleak future, Roni distrusts the news of a bequest from an unknown aunt, Marian Nelson. But, out of options, she and Scritches leave Sydney behind, bound for the 800-acre property on the edge of the wheat belt of South Australia. 

Between managing a bustling beauty salon, hectic volunteer commitments and the lion's share of parenting two-year-old Claudia, Angie McIntyre barely has time to turn around. And with each passing month, she feels her relationship with fly-in, fly-out boyfriend Rob Jones slipping through her fingers. When Rob faces retrenchment and the most fabulous fixer-upper comes onto the market, Angie knows this derelict weatherboard cottage will be the perfect project to draw their little family together.

The Mothers' Group tells the story of six very different women who agree to regularly meet soon after the births of their babies. Each woman strives in her own way to become the mother she wants to be and finds herself becoming increasingly reliant on the friendship and support of the members of the mothers' group. Until one day an unthinkably shocking event changes everything, testing their bonds and revealing closely held secrets that threaten to shatter their lives.

Dumped by her husband of twenty-five years, Jo Peck—smart, successful, and sixty—is totally floored. There's the complete bombshell of the news, the cliché of a younger woman—a much younger woman—there's the disappointment of cancelled retirement travel plans, and there's the foundation-rocking loss of her sense of identity—if she's no longer Rex's wife, who the hell is she?

Hallie, a young and successful fashion blogger, recently married to a station owner, is having trouble adjusting to the flies, dust, snakes and isolation in the Flinders Ranges. Left alone with her baby while her husband, Alex is often out on long bore runs during the day, she also has to contend with her father-in-law, Rod, who insists on making himself at home in their house. Alex is out on a bore run, and as Hallie and their daughter, Ruby, watch him in real time on the camera from the homestead, Alex suddenly disappears from view. He is found later, dead at the bottom of a windmill.