Showing results by narrator "Cat Gould" in All Categories

How does a mother cope when she is forced to walk away from her three children and never see them again? That is what happened to JB's mother, Myrtle. Eventually, rescued from her despair by tall, dark, and handsome George Rowley, who fell in love with her, Myrtle started a new life and had seven more children. She buried the grief of losing her first children deep within and kept her pain secret. JB and her siblings were unaware of the existence of Myrtle's first three children until after she died.

In 1947 Tilly’s grandmother bought an island. Its name is Småhølmene and it sits just off the coast of Norway. At first sight, the island seems bare, hardly more than a collection of rocks rising determinedly out of the water. Glittering and bittersweet, Island Summers lovingly portrays three generations of women and the island that became so irrevocably part of their lives. Now Mor-mor’s great-grandchildren are taking their turn, enjoying endless summers on Småhølmene, continuing the story that was begun over 50 years ago.

Drawing on insights from across the social, behavioral, and natural sciences, Michelle Baddeley explores contexts in which behavior is driven by the herd. She analyzes the rational vs nonrational and cognitive vs emotional forces involved, and she investigates why herding only sometimes works out well. With new perspectives on followers, leaders, and the pros and cons of herd behavior, Baddeley shines vivid light on human behavior in the context of our ever-more-connected world.

Nevertheless We Persisted is a special audio-first anthology of poems, essays, and stories that explores themes of loss, love, and finding your own power. It's an astonishing collection filled with heart, tears, laughter, and ultimately hope. This collection was created from writers across the United States and also in Australia, England, India, and New Zealand. Each piece is performed by a talented narrator.

When you are in the bush, pregnant, and your husband is hurt what do you do? Will you trust just about anyone? When their car gets a flat tire in the Australian outback, it should be a simple job for capable Hal to fix. His wife pregnant, he sets to it. But an accident befalls him, leaving him immobilized. Paige is now their only hope of getting out of the bush. When Paige chances upon a stranger, it seems her prayers are answered. But the stranger doesn't want to help. She wants something else, and it's not Paige's husband....

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a longstanding problem that has increasingly come to the forefront of international and national policy debates and news. Yet, while we frequently read or learn about particular experiences or incidents of VAWG, we are often unaware of the full picture. Author Jacqui True provides an expansive frame for understanding VAWG in this book.

This is Marguerite van Geldermalsen's story of how a New Zealand-born nurse came to be married to Mohammad Abdallah Othman, a Bedouin souvenir-seller from the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. It was 1978, and she and a friend were travelling through the Middle East when Marguerite met the charismatic Mohammad, who convinced her that he was the man for her. Marguerite's light-hearted and guileless observations of the people she comes to love are as heart-warming as they are valuable, charting Bedouin traditions now lost to the modern world.

The situation was complicated, but the rules were simple. Rule number one: No catching feelings. Rule number two: We do this one time and one time only. Rule number three: This is our little secret. We made a hasty agreement fueled by heartbreak and liquor, but it turned out to be so much more. Darcy Shearer isn't the same woman I laid eyes on five years ago—everything has changed since that night . . . except the way I feel about her. I gave her my word, but now I'm taking her heart. She forgot the most important rule . . . that they're all made to be broken.

Wicked, irreverent, and utterly charming, Leader of the Band introduces a heroine unabashedly devoted to her own desires. Starlady Sandra, discoverer of the planet Athena, television astronomer, and wife to a humorless barrister, runs off with the leader of the band. He is Jack the sax player, so provocative that it's into the bushes and off with her slinky white dress between sets.

In How to Build a Billion-Dollar Business, former Swisse CEO Radek Sali unpacks how his unique approach to product, people, and branding took Swisse Wellness from an Australian favorite to a blockbuster brand that sold for $2.1 billion.

Flame-haired, six-foot-two in stocking feet, newly orphaned Carlotta Dell'oro recounts the lives of her parents - solitary glassmaker Leopoldo Dell'oro and beautiful, unreachable Clotilde Girard - and discovers in their loves and losses, their omissions and obsessions, the circumstances of her abandonment and the weight of her inheritance. With a master artisan's patience and exquisite craft, debut novelist Lori Baker has created a gemlike Victorian world, a place where mistakes of the past reappear in the future, art can destroy, and family is not to be trusted.

It's only for a year. That's what sixteen-year-old Zel keeps telling herself after moving to Sydney for her dad's work. She'll just wait it out until she gets back to New York and Prim, her epic crush/best friend, and the unfinished subway project. Even if Prim hasn't spoken to her since that day on Coney Island. But Zel soon finds life in Sydney won't let her hide. There's her art teacher, who keeps forcing her to dig deeper. There's the band of sweet, strange misfits her cousin has forced her to join for a Drama project. And then there's the curiosity that is the always-late Stella.

At a summer journalism course for teens in Tasmania, privileged Samira, from a conservative, political family, and over-achiever country girl Alex bang heads. While covering a news story together, their fiery clashes turn into first love. But when things fall apart, they're left hurting. A year later, they discover they're both interning for the same university student paper. Awkward isn't even the start of the tension between them. One thing that hasn't died is the attraction between them.

Katrina Mahoney lives in Western Sydney, Australia. She has a very full life attending university to study a law degree and training for triathlons, and now she is working part time as well. She couldn't possibly find time for a relationship, especially after her last one ended so catastrophically. Right now she is content focusing on work, study, and training while hanging out with her best friend, David Taylor, a womanizer with a heart of gold who would do anything for Katrina - except watch her get hurt again.

All his life, David has seen Katrina as the one woman he wanted in his life forever, and Katrina has felt the same. So why does she keep putting off their wedding? When they meet Elliot's new wife and family, David can't help but notice that Katrina is acting strangely. The questions is...why? Old insecurities and feelings resurface to threaten their happiness. Will their love be enough overcome them and get them to the altar?

When Melody Horrill arrived at university she was a troubled and lost young woman, hiding behind a carefully crafted exterior. She had experienced a childhood of emotional and physical trauma mainly at the hands of her violent father that was as damaging as it was brutal. One day Melody volunteered to help her lecturer monitor pods of river dolphins nearby. There for the first time she encountered Jock, a solitary dolphin with a maimed fin, who lived apart from the highly social pods. Melody was to form a bond with Jock that gave her the key to freeing herself from the demons of her own past.

In 2003 Rachel Aspden arrived in Egypt as a 23-year-old journalist. She found a country on the brink of change. The two thirds of Egypt's eight million citizens under the age of 30 were stifled, broken, and frustrated, caught between a dictatorship that had nothing to offer them and their autocratic parents' generation, defined by tradition and obedience. In January 2011 the young people's patience ran out.

Ants have been walking the Earth since the age of the dinosaurs. Today there are one million ants for every one of us. The closer you get to ants, the more human they look: they build megacities, grow crops, raise livestock, tend their young and infirm, and even make vaccines. They also have a darker side: they wage war, enslave rivals and rebel against their oppressors. From fearsome army ants, who stage 12-hour hunting raids where they devour thousands, to gentle leafcutters gardening in their peaceful underground kingdoms, every ant is engineered by nature to fulfil a role.

The stories in Here Until August follow the fates of characters who, by choice or by force, are traveling beyond the boundaries of their known worlds. These are people who move with the seasons. We meet them negotiating reluctant or cowardly departures, navigating uncertain returns, or biding the disquieting calm that so often precedes moments of decisive action.

A group of housemates in Sydney’s inner city contend with gentrification, divisive politics, stalled careers, their own complicated privilege as second-generation Australians, and the evolving world of dating in this moving, funny, and stylish debut novel.