Showing results by narrator "Brigid Lohrey" in All Categories

Stella and her mother-in-law, Margie, are two very different women. Stella is kind, compassionate and a little chaotic. Margie is prickly and demanding, with bitter memories of the past. When Margie needs help recovering from a major operation, she reluctantly returns to the family farm, where for decades, until Stella's arrival, she was the one in charge. But the two women gradually form an unlikely bond, as the ambitions, secrets, and tragedies that have shaped their lives are slowly uncovered....

In Stop Being Reasonable, philosopher and journalist Eleanor Gordon-Smith tells six lucid, gripping stories that show the limits of human reason. From the woman who realised her husband harboured a terrible secret, to the man who left the cult he had been raised in since birth, and the British reality TV contestant who, having impersonated someone else for a month, discovered he could no longer return to his former identity, all of the people interviewed radically altered their beliefs about the things that matter most.

Audrey is the black sheep of the family. Always in trouble. Always causing problems. She's there in her mother's luxury house in the hills above a small rural town. There with her secrets and her issues. Now she's a teenager, things can hardly improve.

One night, Daphne's teenage son Gabriel returns early from a house party, completely distraught. He refuses to let his mother know what's wrong and becomes very reclusive. But Daphne's son is not her only concern. Far from it. Her husband is acting oddly. And she is getting messages from an ex-partner she'd very much rather forget. Her family life seems to be unravelling at the seams, so when Gabriel's classmate Leo gets in touch and promises to help her son, she has hopes she can address at least one problem.

Do you love your partner enough to share them with someone else? This is the question facing Laura when a group of close friends, all neighbors living on the same street, decide one night to put their keys in a bowl and swap partners. No one is obliged to do anything but the rules state that what does happen remains under wraps. Not everyone is keen on the idea, though Laura's husband certainly is, but group pressure mixed with alcohol means they run with it. This will set off a chain of jaw-dropping events that will change all their lives forever.

Recent years have seen out-of-control wildfires rage across remote Brazilian rainforests, densely populated California coastlines, and major cities in Australia. What connects these separate events is more than immediate devastation and human loss of life. In Global Burning, Eve Darian-Smith contends that using fire as a symbolic and literal thread connecting different places around the world allows us to better understand the parallel, and related, trends of the growth of authoritarian politics and climate crises and their interconnected global consequences.

This is the optimistic story of our fraught relationship to universal consciousness, the domain that transcends every local mind. It is also the story of how reality is relative and changeable to the way each of us makes meaning. Truth, on the other hand, represents the permanent and timeless state of being beyond history and culture that is called nonlocal universal consciousness. This is the state of nonpersonal awareness within insight and eyesight.

This is a book of collected poems of time and place, compiled in the season of the coronavirus 2020, during lockdown.

A glimpse into the life of Elizabeth Fenton appeared in print in 1901 when her early diaries of colonial life in India and arrival in Van Dieman's Land were edited and published in London. Now Mrs. Fenton's direct descendant, Tasmanian journalist Margaretta Pos, reveals the full story of Elizabeth Fenton's life, from her joyful but ultimately tragic life as a well-bred young Anglo-Irish wife in India to her new life as a wife, mother, and grandmother in the still-wild colony of Van Dieman's Land - Tasmania.

Elizabeth Cranwell's children left home, her husband divorced her and dissolved their shared business, and she's set to spend Christmas alone. Without her husband or the thriving business she spent years of her life building, Elizabeth doesn't know who she is or what to do with her days. She's dreading spending her first Christmas alone when her friends convince her to book a holiday at the Waratah Inn.

1882 England: The grand estate of Summerfield needs an influx of cash. Will a marriage to a rich American save the Weston family's legacy--or destroy it? American heiress Genevieve Farrow travels to Summerfield to marry Morgan Weston, the heir to the earldom--a man she's only met in letters. In need of confidence, and under the thumb of an ambitious mother, she struggles to win the heart of the man she's come to love.

When Olivia Sheridan arrives in the Whitsundays as spokesperson for a big mining company, it should be a straightforward presentation to the town about their proposed project. But when a handsome local fisherman shows her what ecological impact the proposal will have, Olivia is forced to question her father's motives for the scheme. Struggling with newly divided loyalties, Olivia is thrown further into turmoil when she is mistaken for a woman who disappeared more than 60 years before.

It was winter. Lauren Keenan was separated from her husband, lonely and miserable. Then came the night of 27 Rejections of Doom: she asked 27 people to hang out one Friday night and every single person said no. Lauren realised her life wasn’t working for her and that she needed to change it. It was time to try something new. Fifty-two new things, in fact. She made a resolution: she’d try 52 new things in 52 weeks.

When Livia Prescott fights off a terrifying assault in a deserted car park, the media hail her bravery. And after a difficult year - watching her father fade away, her business struggle and her marriage fall apart - it feels good to strike back for once. But as the police widen their search for her attacker, menacing notes start arriving. And brave is not what she feels any longer.... Someone has decided to rip her life apart, then kick her when she's down. But is it a stranger or someone much closer to home? In fact, is there anyone she can now trust?

Piracy and the Making of the Spanish Pacific World demonstrates that piracy is key to explaining the surprising longevity of Spain's Asian empire, which survived the Age of Revolutions and endured almost to the end of the nineteenth century. It offers important new insight into piracy's impact on the trajectory of globalization and European imperial expansion in maritime Asia.

Smart Girls Screw Up Too brings together: the latest research into gut science, neuroscience, and epigenetics; ancient tribal wisdom; interviews with game changers; and insights from the author's two-year study of over 2000 women. Together with Bella, you'll embark on a series of simple daily challenges that will not only get you to the root causes of why you think, feel, and behave, but see you making changes that stick.