Showing results by narrator "Anna Hruby" in All Categories

When twenty-five-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...

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, thirty-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...

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.  

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.

A poetic, roaming work of creativity and intellect Is it possible to live wondrously by fluorescent light? In The Ruin of Magic, award-winning writer Kate Holden follows in the footsteps of Katherine May, Maggie Nelson and André Aciman, crafting essays of intimate personal experience and...

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?

Framed by the turning of the seasons in her small suburban garden, Carol Lefevre's Bloomer documents the year in which she turned seventy. Memoir threads through meditations on aspects of ageing, from its hidden grief and potential for loneliness to our relationship with the past and with our own mortality.