Showing results by narrator "Cat Gould" in All Categories

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.

What's wrong with preferring domestic assistants with feminine personalities? We like our assistants to conform to gender stereotypes - so what? For one thing, Strengers and Kennedy remind us, the design of gendered devices reinscribes outdated and unfounded stereotypes. Strengers and Kennedy offer a Smart Wife "manifesta", proposing a rebooted Smart Wife that would promote a revaluing of femininity in society in all her glorious diversity.

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.

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.

When Sylvia Jensen-Graham travels to London to inform her country neighbor, the new Earl of Greyfalcon, that his recently widowed mama needs him, she little realizes that she'll need to employ trickery just to see the Earl. But the Dowager Countess's complaints about her health and her rakish son have been driving Sylvia to distraction, so she poses as a messenger and boldly enters Greyfalcon's club. He unmasks her but soon begins minding his affairs - and Sylvia's - until Sylvia fears that she'll need rescuing from the consequences of her own good deed.

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.

In the midst of a devastating epidemic, how far will a desperate mother go to keep her loved ones safe? There is a deadly virus spreading around the world. At first it is a distant alarm bell in the background of Hannah's comfortable suburban life. Then suddenly, it has arrived on the doorstep. The quarantine traps Hannah, her husband, and their young sons in their home and forces them to rely on their own resourcefulness as water and power supplies are cut, food reserves dwindle, and their formerly idyllic backyard and quiet street become battlefields.

After the video of his public outburst catapulted him to superstardom, Marcus now has everything he ever wanted. Or so he thought. Be careful what you wish for, his mother always told him.... After spending two years touring the globe, he's growing tired, and that endless line of women has become a sea of blurry and meaningless faces. When he returns home and receives a visit from Naomi, his previous object of affection, he finally starts to look at himself and what he's become. He doesn't like it.

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.

When Jonathan decided to help Lisa, he was trying to atone in some way for his past sins. He certainly wasn't expecting to be pulled into a night full of hiding out from the press with a journalist called Sandra Haegen and almost being choked to death by a rockstar in love with his ex. When Sandra decided to help Lisa by feeding Perry, she was just trying to be a good person. She also wasn't expecting to spend the night hiding from the press.

After ruining the best relationship he thought he'd ever had, Elliot's life takes a turn for the worst, and he isn't happy with who he's become. Deciding to spend three months in the UK on a working visa in a bid to find himself again, he boards a plane to London. During the flight he meets Paige, a fellow Aussie with a closed heart and a lot to hide. The closer he gets to Paige, the more he's sure she's hiding something. Will it be enough to send him running? Or does he love her enough to fight this time?

The photographs stop you in your tracks. Five children and their grandmother sheltering under an old wooden jetty as the air around them burns a fierce orange. Seen around the world, these were the images from the heart of the inferno that showed the Tasmanian township of Dunalley fighting for survival. On the morning of 4 January 2013, the people of Dunalley had watched with caution as a bush fire burned slowly on top of the hill. It was not an unusual occurrence - fires are a part of Australian life - and Dunalley had never been troubled before.

Milly has barely spoken to her sister Judith in years. They hardly exchanged a word at their mother's funeral. They could not be further apart. So when Milly gets an invitation to go on a hiking trip, she hopes it will be an opportunity for reconciliation. Inviting her school-friend Harper along with her for support, the small party head off together into the bush. What awaits Milly is far from just a bracing hike in the wilderness, but an unexpected encounter with the past. The form it takes is revenge. But who is enacting it against Milly, and why?

Theo and Naomi want nothing more than to spend the rest of their life together as husband and wife. The only hold up has been Theo's brother Marcus - without him there, Theo didn't feel right about sealing his union with the woman he loves. When Marcus finally swallows his pride and returns to the family, he realizes just how much damage his silence has done and endeavors to right some of those wrongs by giving his brother and Naomi their dream wedding. The problem is - whose dream wedding is it?

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.

Praxis Duveen is a survivor. At five years old, in 1920s England, she is still innocent, the product of an unstable mother and a flighty father who abandoned Praxis and her half-crazy sister, Hypatia. As the decades fly by, Praxis experiences many incarnations. Now, from her dingy basement apartment, where she's attempting to write a memoir, Praxis tells about the story of her remarkable journey - peppered with more than a few detours along the way.

After being unceremoniously kicked out of home at a young age, Paige is forced to fend for herself. In a bid to survive, she does things that most people would never dream of and stops caring about herself as a result. When the fastest way to get food and shelter is to use her body, and the fastest way to forget is to self-medicate, Paige embarks on a steady downward spiral. Until, finally, she hits rock bottom....

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.

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.

Naomi thought she'd met someone wonderful when Elliot came into her life, but he simply wasn't into her. It's the story of her life. While everyone around her is settling down, she gives up on trying to find her Mr. Right, and turns back to the one thing she has always loved - music. Enter Marcus - he was a year above Naomi at school, and she always had a killer crush on him. He now fronts a band with his older brother Theo. Marcus has the reputation of a playboy, and Theo, well...he's just bad news.