An inspirational true story of a 4 year old girl who fell into the power of a man whose evil knew no bounds. She encountered terrifying mental and physical torture from her psychopathic stepfather for a period of 17 years until she managed to break free, her spirit still unbroken Jane Elliott fell into the hands of her sadistic and brutal stepfather when she was 4 years old. Her story is both inspiring and horrifying. Kept a virtual prisoner in a fortress-like house and treated to dail...
Melissa Harris’s dream of being a mother again shatters when a fertility doctor tells her she may never have another child due to a physical anomaly in her uterus. Determined to persevere, she undergoes nine surgeries and a year of fertility treatments until she finally gets a positive pregnancy test—only to miscarry both twins within the first fifteen weeks. When what she’s decided will be her last attempt results in her finally becoming pregnant, she’s told that this baby, Sam, is also at ri...
Damian longs for home, but one man stands in his way … Damian is just seven when he is taken in by foster carer Cathy Glass. His mother, Rachel, loves her three young children dearly, but she is vulnerable, naive and unable to cope on her own. Cathy sets about helping Damian overcome his eating issues, with the hope that he will eventually return home. But when Rachel’s new boyfriend, Troy, arrives on the scene, Cathy becomes deeply concerned. She soon...
When this thing happened: the story of a father, a son, and the wars that changed them
by Michael McKernan
A tour de force about the impact of war on one family over the twentieth century. As deputy director of the Australian War Memorial for many years, Michael McKernan had heard and written about many stories of war. For him, war was never about the big picture; it always came down to the individual. Yet little did he know when he met his future wife in 1989 that her father would soon be telling him, over many leisurely afternoons, his own story, of being made a slave to the Nazis in the S...
Guo Sheng now lives in a New Zealand city, but during China's Cultural Revolution her family were persecuted by the Red Guards and subjected to unspeakable violence. In her story brutal beatings and public humiliations become a daily occurrence. Their property was destroyed and her grandfather shot and killed. Meanwhile Guo herself was in love with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks: he and his family were Red Guard sympathisers. Her family was horrified. A decade later the couple met up ag...
'A thrilling reading experience! One of the greatest adventure stories of our times.' New York Times Book Review In 1914 Sir Ernest Shackleton and a crew of 27 men set sail for the South Atlantic on board a ship called the Endurance. The object of the expedition was to cross the Antarctic overland. In October 1915, still half a continent away from their intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in ice. For five months Shackleton and his men, drifting on ice packs, were castaways on one...
An unhealthy obsession and a dark secret spell trouble for Louise in a disturbing case… A baby is named ‘Marilyn’ after the Hollywood legend, Norma Jean. Marilyn inherits her mother’s fascination for Marilyn Monroe and develops an obsession with her alter-ego. She wears red lipstick and mirrors the curvy, platinum-blonde film star from a very young age. When her family is torn apart by tragedy, she finds herself in the care system. Suddenly placed with Louise, she turns the family’s longed-...
Embracing the Light Within
by Abdule A Lawrence Esquire and Truthbetolld
Refugee Lives in the Archives (New Directions in Life Narrative)
by Gillian Whitlock
This book introduces the unique archive of letters, textiles, hand-drawn maps, emails and photographs from asylum seekers held indefinitely in offshore detention at Topside Camp, Nauru 2001-5. These artefacts introduce the distinctive and creative forms of resistance produced by asylum seekers in the remote Pacific camps on Nauru and Manus Island, and they expose their experiential histories of radical suffering and trauma. Paying due deference to the creative and aesthetic agency of these vario...
A classic memoir retold to reveal a long kept secret. When Ben Duncan chronicled his evolution from a Depression-era orphan in Alabama to an Oxford educated writer and commentator in England in 1962, he was unable to tell his whole story. He revealed much - a harrowing childhood, his tenacity and drive for self-definition and self-creation. But he also hid crucial parts of his life that would remain masked for fifty years. As a gay man living in Great Britain at a time when homosexuality was agg...
There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came from
by Bryan Charles
There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From is the memoir of a young Midwestern man struggling to carve out a life as a writer, and to find meaning, or at least a job, in his new and alien landscape of New York City. In a voice at once coolly detached and utterly confident, we follow Bryan Charles's journey navigating love, work, and family, from the streets of Manhattan to the upper floors of corporate America. This is a gripping meditation on the self, ricocheting between the multi...
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Colin O’Brady’s awe-inspiring memoir spans his triumphant recovery from a tragic accident to his gripping 932-mile solo crossing of Antarctica. Prior to December 2018, no individual had ever crossed the landmass of Antarctica alone, without support and completely human powered. Yet, Colin O’Brady was determined to do just that, even if, ten years earlier, there was doubt that he’d ever walk again normally. From the depths of a tragic accident, he fought his way ba...