From the best-selling and acclaimed author Barbara Else, Laughing at the Dark is a funny, moving memoir about how she rebelled against being a ‘good girl’. By the time she was in her forties, Barbara was married to a globally recognised academic physician and had two beautiful teenage daughters. As her writing career developed, her husband became angry at the prospect of her being anything but a housewife. In a moment of madness — or realisation — she packed her c...

The Warrior Queen is a subversive, funny novel about modern middle-class marriage. Kate Wildburn is in trouble. She is an extrovert, a lateral thinker and a talented pianist. She is also a good wife and mother, and an attractive woman who enjoys being a woman. Richard, her surgeon husband, is balding, aggressive, hard on his children – and is he having an affair? The Warrior Queen is a subversive look at modern middle-class marriage, a guerrilla war of t...

Accessible, warm and witty, Barbara Else's fifth novel is her most effervescent. Suzie, a thirty-seven-year-old single mother, is the youngest of three sisters and a stubborn misfit. While Lara is now going for a top job in the Ministry of Customs and Philippa runs the charity organisation 'Suite Three', Suzie is an on-call chef with a bank account at zero, has a fifteen-year-old son in trouble at school and a ballet-crazy seven year old with head lice. Her love life shoul...

This poignant, funny novel explores the intricate influences of memory and experience, invention and deception. 'Delia's body lay flat as a piece of paper, blank, as if everything on it had scurried off over the side.' Delia Whittborne finds herself in a hospital bed but can't recall how she got there, or even who she is. As her memory slowly returns, she realises it's not just her recent past and love-life she needs to make sense of but also her early childhood o...

A touching, tender and witty novel about men and women and family life. Sophie Redlove has a crumbling Gothic mansion to restore, three children to manage, a distraught friend - as well as possums in the laundry at midnight. She loves her absent husband, Russell - but there's an importunate older man who's after her, a slightly sycophantic younger one, an angel and a Viking on the scene . . . And what the hell is Russell up to? And indeed what's the story in Sophie's grad...

Combining essential information, professional insights, and lived experiences, this book offers a unique overview of the use of music therapy with active-duty service members, veterans, and other military-connected populations in the United States. Contributors include music therapists specializing with the military, as well as military personnel, veterans, and their families, providing an in-depth review of the impact that music therapy can have within this community.Detailing the...

A delicately layered, humorous novel, deliciously written, ranging over time and place. In the aftermath of Barnaby Rivers' death, complictions arise for three beautiful women: Bella, Ruth and wicked old Jocasta. Now nothing can go on in the old way. Crisis looms. In her funniest novel yet, Barbara Else contrasts attitudes to beauty, motherhood . . . and men. Looking down on it all is Barnaby himself, not sure if he's an angel or ghost.

A darkly humorous tale of rural isolation, violence, and a talking magpie.Tama is rescued by Marnie, but her husband Rob warns, 'If it keeps me awake, I'll have to wring its neck.' With Tama come new possibilities, but also a glimpse into the darkness of Marnie's marriage. As Tama's fame grows, the animal and human worlds intertwine, revealing the fragility and hope within.Set against the backdrop of a remote New Zealand farm, this literary fiction explores...

Like every other girl in her class, twelve-year-old Justine is drawn to her glamorous, charismatic new teacher, and longs to be her pet. However, when a thief begins to target the school, Justine' s sense that something isn't quite right grows ever stronger. With each twist of the plot, this gripping story of deception and the corrosive power of guilt takes a yet darker turn. Young as she is, Justine must decide where her loyalties lie. Set in New Zealand in 1984 and 2014, and probing them...

Birnam Wood is on the move ... A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass in the South Island of New Zealand, cutting off the town of Thorndike, leaving a sizable farm abandoned. This land offers an opportunity to Birnam Wood, a guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. But they hadn' t figured on the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who also has an interest in the place. Can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can ...

A raw domestic thriller for fans of Liane Moriarty and The Slap. If you were gripped by Big Little Lies, you'll love One of Those Mothers.'Domestic noir up there with the best of them. Beautiful settings, believable characters, and a moral quandary to keep you reading through the night - One of Those Mothers is a page turner in all the right ways. - Jacqueline Bublitz, Before You Knew My Name'With st...

This polyphonic novel of an S.S. officer, his ailing wife, and a concentration camp survivor "marks a vital turn in Holocaust literature" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).Being appointed administrator of the Buchenwald work camp is a major advancement for SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn. But as the prison population begins to rise, his job becomes ever more consuming. His wife, Frau Greta Hahn, finds their new home even lovelier than their apartment in...