Showing results by narrator "Deidre Rubenstein" in All Categories

After many tumultuous years spent grappling with the past, Jenny Hooper might have expected her latter years to be the best of her life, and they are - until tragedy strikes. Left floundering in a house full of memories, not all of them good, Jenny knows a reckoning is in order. But it won't be easy. History is beginning to repeat itself for Jenny's adopted daughter, Trudy, who finds herself trapped in an abusive relationship. Jenny and her older daughter, Georgie, can only stand by and watch as Trudy's life implodes.

In six short stories Patrick White probes beneath the surface of events to expose a deeper, truer reality. These six short novels and stories achieve the majesty and power of the best of Patrick White’s great novels. They probe beneath the surface of events - a sexual lapse, the unaccustomed climate of a foreign country, interruptions in a cherished routine, a death, a toothache - to expose a deeper, truer reality.

Through the crumbling ruins of the once splendid Xanadu, Miss Hare wanders, half mad. In the wilderness she stumbles upon an Aboriginal artist and a Jewish refugee. They place themselves in the care of a local washerwoman. In a world of pervasive evil, all four have been independently damaged and discarded. Now in one shared vision they find themselves bound together, understanding the possibility of redemption.

Tells the story of Alex Gray, a woman possessed by several varied personalities, and who sees life through a shifting kaleidoscope of reality. The last Patrick White novel published in his lifetime, Memoirs of Many in One presents the eccentric, often fantastical recollections of the ageing actor, Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray. These are ‘edited’ by the writer Patrick White, her friend and executor, who is often the target of her scorn. Witty and affecting, Memoirs reveals another side of White’s fiction even as it echoes many of the themes running through his work.

To hesitate on the edge of life or to plunge in and risk change - this is the dilemma explored in The Living and the Dead. Patrick White's second novel is set in '30s London and portrays the complex ebb and flow of relationships within the Standish family. Mrs Standish, ageing but still beautiful, is drawn into secret liaisons, while her daughter Eden experiments openly and impulsively with left-wing politics and love affairs. Only the son, Elyot, remains an aloof and scholarly observer - until dramatic events shock him into sudden self-knowledge.  

Elizabeth Hunter, an ex-socialite in her 80s, has a mystical experience during a summer storm in Sydney which transforms all her relationships: her existence becomes charged with a meaning which communicates itself to those around her. From this simple scenario Patrick White unfurls a monumental exploration of the tides of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, impotence and longing that fester within family relationships. 

Set in Australia in the 1840s, A Fringe of Leaves combines dramatic action with a finely distilled moral vision. Returning home to England from Van Diemen's Land, the Bristol Maid is shipwrecked on the Queensland coast and Mrs Roxburgh is taken prisoner by a tribe of Australian Aboriginals, along with the rest of the passengers and crew. In the course of her escape, she is torn by conflicting loyalties - to her dead husband, to her rescuer, to her own and to her adoptive class.

In 1909, a young Australian actress made headlines around the world when she took to the sky over London in an airship emblazoned with the slogan 'Votes for Women' and dropped leaflets over the city. Muriel Matters was dubbed 'that daring Australian girl', and the American media declared it to be the world's first aerial protest. Just months earlier, Muriel had become the first woman to make a speech in the British House of Commons, after chaining herself to a brass grille to protest against the segregation of women in the Parliament.

While we know much about the iconic outlaw Ned Kelly, his mother Ellen Kelly has been largely overlooked by Australian writers and historians...until now. By best-selling biographer Grantlee Kieza, Mrs Kelly is the astonishing story of one of Australia's most notorious women and her wild family, but it's also the story of the making of Australia, from struggling colony and backwater to modern nation.

Independent and spirited, Georgie is her mother’s daughter through and through. But after a house fire takes the life of her sister, Margot, and burns her home to the ground, Georgie is lost. She flees town with nothing but a cardboard box and the determination to be somebody, anybody, else.

The wind is whispering in Woody Creek. Change is in the air. It's 1958 and Woody Creek is being dragged kicking and screaming into the swinging '60s. Jenny's daughters, Cara and Georgie, are now young women. They have inherited their mother's hands, but that is where their similarity ends. Raised separately, they have never met. A mistake from Cara's teenage years looms over her future, but she believes emphatically in the white-wedding and happily-ever-after myth. Georgie has seen enough of marriage and motherhood. She plans to live her life as her grandmother did, independent of a man.

Woody Creek is gearing up for its centenary celebrations - but for many of its townspeople, it's just another reminder of the old days, when life was more simple, before so-called progress, technology and a growing population roared through the town, altering everything in its wake. Not for Georgie, though. Long encumbered by responsibility for her half-sister, Margot, she's looking towards the future and more changes.

When Jenny Morrison fled Woody Creek for a new life in Melbourne she left behind a dysfunctional family, a town of small-minded gossips, and, most tragically, a newborn baby. Mustering all her strength, she resolved to put her past behind her, reclaim her identity, and pursue her dream of becoming a famous singer.... Yet just months later she is back - wiser and with an expensive new wardrobe - but with a second child growing in her belly.

Jenny Morrison is bravely trying to move on with her life. Her husband missing amidst the turmoil of WWII she takes refuge with Ray King, a slightly sinister, stuttering boy who disappeared from Woody Creek as a teenager but has now reappeared. In return for regular 'wifely duties', Ray offers Jenny and her three children sanctuary at his house in Melbourne. For a time, she is happy.

Growing up in an Australian country town before World War I, Jackie Hanna and Cushie Moy are carefree and innocent in their love for each other, but Jackie is a dwarf, and his devotion to the beautiful Cushie is condemned by her parents. This is the story of their life-long odyssey, and of the triumph of a special kind of courage. In Swords and Crowns and Rings Ruth Park brilliantly captures the mood and tempo of Australian life from 1907 until 1931.

They may never have a life together‚ but they will have their moment. They will have this much. England‚ September 1934. Two young lovers‚ Catherine and Daniel‚ have trespassed into the rose garden of Burnt Norton‚ an abandoned house in the English countryside. Hearing the sound of footsteps‚ they hide‚ and then witness the poet T.S. ('Tom') Eliot and his close friend Emily enter the garden and bury a mysterious tin in the earth.

Dominic Rose, a bachelor and teacher, has an antiquated hobby. He studies physiognomy, the art of judging somebody's character by their facial features and expressions. Living in a cottage at the edge of the woods with his frail, bedridden mother, he has spent decades pining after Clara, the love of his life, who vanished while staying with her grandparents. When Kate Winston and her family move to North Yorkshire, it sets in motion a chain of events that will alter the lives of those involved forever.

A psychological mystery filled with droll humour, brilliant language and unforgettable characters. Twenty-five-year-old Clemency James has moved from Sydney to a chilly bedsit on the other side of the world. During the day she studies for the bar by correspondence; in the evenings she gives French lessons to earn a meagre wage. When she meets Christian, a charismatic would-be actor, she can see he's trouble - not least because he's involved with an older woman who has children.