The reunion between Jack and Francesca is not an easy one. Thirteen years previously Francesca's best friend and Jack's girlfriend Kate disappeared while the trio were celebrating "Schoolies" on the Noosa North Shore. Desperate to avoid the resulting suspicion and scandal Jack's family moved north to Townsville leaving Francesca to cope alone with the loss of the two people she was closest to. To further complicate things Jack now has a partner (who has no knowledge of Kate's death) and a child while Francesca is single.
Social worker and part-time renovator Francesca is living a relatively quite life in suburban Brisbane until one fateful day when a removal house is delivered to the vacant block next door. Taking a casual sticky beak she is beyond stunned to discover the house belongs to Jack the childhood friend she had grown to love in her teens.
The reunion between Jack and Francesca is not an easy one. Thirteen years previously Francesca's best friend and Jack's girlfriend Kate disappeared while the trio were celebrating "Schoolies" on the Noosa North Shore. Desperate to avoid the resulting suspicion and scandal Jack's family moved north to Townsville leaving Francesca to cope alone with the loss of the two people she was closest to. To further complicate things Jack now has a partner (who has no knowledge of Kate's death) and a child while Francesca is single.
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Having poured her heart and soul into her ballet career from a very young age, Emma is left devastated and directionless when a career-ending injury forces her life down a very different path than she had planned. Unable to stay in London she heads home to Australia to learn that she had inherited a sheep station in Tasmania from her Grandma Beattie.
Emma's first thought is to clean the place up and sell as quickly as possible. However once she starts going through her Grandmother's old papers and photos she uncovers many things she never knew about Beattie's life and the huge struggles she overcame to succeed in life - a success that allowed Emma to live a life of privilege. I think just about everybody can relate to embellishing the facts a little when giving an account of their life. Whether it be at a school reunion, on Facebook or the annual Christmas letter that makes its way to family and friends. Angela Gillespie has faithfully sent out a cheerful Christmas letter for the past 33 years with funny anecdotes about life on a remote sheep station in South Australia. But this year she has hit a roadblock. Life is far from the rosy picture she has created and in a moment of therapeutic madness she pens a "warts and all" account of what is really happening with her husband Nick and their four children.
Of course Angela doesn't intend to send the email, but in a moment of helpfulness Nick presses send (without knowing what the letter contains). Suddenly the Gillespie's dirty laundry is on display for all the 100 recipients (as well as the many more it is virally forwarded onto). Ever since finishing the previous book in this series "In Strange Worlds" I have been looking forward to the sequel. I had so many questions - What happened to Meg? What caused most of the human race to die suddenly? And who are the strange guys in the helicopters? Without giving too much away I can reveal that several pressing questions are answered within "In A Time Where They Belong"... as well as many new twists and turns that I didn't see coming.
Continuing on from where Is Strange Worlds left off, the small community in Maleny on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland faces many new challenges. Again I can't reveal too much but suffice to say frightening new illnesses, animal plagues and some new survivors all add to the mix. As the story progressed I gained a deeper understanding of the concepts the author explores. Having not much read much in this genre before it is certainly an eye opening experience. We've all sat at the traffic lights with our mind a million miles away, but fortunately few of us have ever had to experience a random carjacking. For Miranda Jack (Jax) what was supposed to be a routine drive from Sydney to Newcastle turns into a nightmare in the space of a few seconds. Most puzzling is what the car jacker actually wants. Jax's car is not fancy and her abductor has not given her a specific destination. All he tells her is to drive on the freeway.
An experienced journalist, Jax does her best to calm her passenger down and extract some information, but it is largely a futile exercise. Although she manages a few snippets of his story such as the fact he has a wife and child, much of what he says is the ramblings of a person under great psychological stress. Alarmingly the one thing he keeps repeating is that he is "already dead". Bestselling novelist Nina Jones has always felt like a fraud and now it seems she has psyched herself out from writing anything worthwhile. Suffering from a severe case of writer's block she welcomes a distraction from her looming deadline when a storm damages her home on Ember Island, near Brisbane. Needing to go over and oversee the repairs she is happy to spend some time there and is hoping the space and isolation will re-boot her creativity.
The discovery of some old diary pages within the walls of her home are yet another distraction that prove to become an obsession as Nina becomes absorbed in a century old mystery involving young English woman Tilly Kirkland and her charge Nell. Tilly spent time in the very same house as a governess after escaping an unhappy marriage in England. Her intriguing story unravels slowly parallel with Nina's own. Isobel Richardson and her son Leo have worked hard to build a great life for themselves in Wales. Raising three healthy kids and having lovingly renovated their family home things are humming along nicely when out of the blue Leo's twenty year career at the local power plant ends in redundancy. Suddenly everything about their secure world is on shaky foundations as Leo struggles to find work and Isobel is left to deal with the fallout. Amidst all this stress, however, she finally voices a long held secret desire - to pack up the family and move to Australia.
Once committed the Richardsons set about making their big plan happen. Isobel assumes her beloved mother will come with them and is devastated when she not only refuses to consider the idea but withdraws from their life altogether. As her only child Isobel cannot fathom her mother's attitude but doesn't let it dissuade her from taking the leap she knows will provide their family with the future she has dreamt of for so long. When New York stockbroker Lachlan Colbert (aka Colby) and his friends decide to visit Australia to see in the new millennium their only plan is to have a good time. Unworldly local girl Caitlin's aim is to make some extra money working on the boat they have chartered. Yet in the space of a few days this unlikely pair are smitten and a couple of years later they are married and living in an apartment in Manhattan.
A decade later Colby and Caitlin have moved to the suburbs with their adopted son Benjamin. They live in a beautiful house in a nice neighbourhood. Colby's income allows Caitlin to be a full time home-maker. Yet within this veneer of the "perfect" suburban life exist some serious cracks that come to light all too horribly when a house fire finds Caitlin outside their home screaming for Benjamin while the neighbours gossip about just what going on in the Colberts home. Nobody is more surprised than Audrey herself when she decides to keep the abandoned rural property she has recently inherited. Situated in Queensland, it is 2000 kilometres away from Audrey's home and life in Melbourne and needs extensive repairs. Yet she can't deny there is something about Thornwood House that draws her in and before she knows it she and her daughter have moved in.
Initially Audrey cannot understand why her estranged husband Tony owned the property in the first place, let alone the reason he left it to her. But after some research she realises that both Tony's grandmother and his sister died on the property under tragic circumstances. After the discovery of an old diary, Audrey is well and truly ensnared in the mystery of Thornwood House. When she starts having disturbing dreams about the house's history Audrey becomes obsessed with finding out just what happened there. Journalist Rebecca is at a crossroads in her life. Single, unsettled in her life in Brisbane and all alone after the death of her mother, she decides to quit her job and head north to the small town of Sandpiper Bay. It is not a random choice, Rebecca had always longed to find out the mysterious circumstances surrounding her mother's adoption, and Sandpiper Bay is where she believes her grandparents came from.
While the town itself is beautiful and tranquil, Rebecca is not warmly welcomed by all the residents, especially when it is revealed what she is doing there. The further she digs into the past, the more obvious it becomes that her mother Maryanne's adoption is mired in some kind of scandal that people are simply not willing to talk about. Fortunately for Rebecca, there are a few locals who befriend her and help with the search, despite the general opposition. |
I am excited to once again be participating in the Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2019. Although I am not currently reviewing books for the challenge, I am still reading. You can find my reviews from previous years below. You can read my previous reviews by clicking on the links below.
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