Showing results by narrator "Eloise Oxer" in All Categories

1879, Queensland. Fleeing her family home, 19-year-old Mary Oxnam has few prospects and no connections. Plain and penniless, she must rely on her audacious wit and fierce intelligence to survive. Mary soon finds work as a pianist in a Cooktown brothel, a cover for more lucrative employment as a spy into smuggling operations. Within a year she has moved to Lizard Island, locked into a marriage of convenience. It's a rough, isolated place, crawling with hidden enemies - and unexpected temptation.

A highly accomplished debut novel about our capacity for curiosity and our dangerous entitlement to it, which reminds us that the scariest ghosts aren’t those that go bump in the night but those that are born and create a place for themselves in the human soul. Jeff is dying. Haunted by memories and grappling with the shame of his desires, he runs away to remote Scotland with a piece of experimental tech that allows him to enter the mind of someone in the past. Instructed to only use it three times, Jeff - self-indulgent, isolated and deteriorating - ignores this advice.

A spellbinding tale of friendship, love and loyalty. In 1920, 17-year-old Maddie Bright gratefully accepts a job as a serving girl on the royal tour of Australia by Edward, Prince of Wales. Maddie's talents soon earn her the respect of Helen Burns, the prince's vivacious press secretary, and Rupert Waters, his most loyal man, and Maddie is in awe of Edward himself, the 'people's' prince. What starts as a desire to help her family, devastated by the recent war, becomes for Maddie a chance to work on something that matters. When the unthinkable happens, it is swift and life changing.

Leaving behind the loneliness and trauma of her past in country Australia, Annie Brand arrives to the political upheaval and glittering international society of Shanghai in the 1920s. Journeying up the Yangtze with her new husband, the ship's captain, Annie revels in the sense of adventure but when her husband sends her back to Shanghai, her freedom is quickly curtailed. Against her will, Annie finds herself living alone in the International Settlement, increasingly suffocated by the judgmental Club ladies and their exclusive social scene: one even more restrictive than that she came from.

Cora is eleven years old and missing one eye. She lives with an elderly lady named Dot in a room hidden behind a wall. In a crowded, industrial city, where everyone looks out for themselves, Cora and Dot hunt and sell rare and exotic things—apple seeds, silver forks, shoe polish. Until one day, Cora finds a few words scribbled on a piece of paper. She takes it home and says the words aloud. Then two plump, hairy fairies named Tick and Tock crash land in her path to warn her that she is in terrible danger. Cora has unknowingly summoned a sinister creature known as a Jinx.

Cora Bell has discovered she is full of magic. But without her protection bracelet, she is struggling to hold onto all the powers she has gained, especially the dark magic she took from the warlock, Archibald Drake. When Cora begins to have nightmares and visions, and unusual cracks appear on her skin, it is a race against time for Cora and her fairy friends to not only find a way to fix her magic, but also escape the hunters now chasing Cora, and search the magical world for her family.

Cora Bell is racing against time. With her beloved guardian, Dot, badly injured, Cora must face fearsome werewolves, gross beetle worms and a vengeful warlock in order to save her. But as questions about her long-lost parents arise, Cora and her fairy friends begin a search for the one person who might hold all the answers. The one person who disappeared the same night Cora's parents did. Will Cora finally discover the truth about her family? Or will the evil syphon return to finish what he started, and destroy Cora once and for all?