Broken (52 page)

With the enthusiastic help of her family, old friends, new neighbours, and a stranger on the end of daily emails, can Chris succeed in making this spur of the moment decision revitalise her life, or has she put all her eggs in the wrong basket?

‘Ilsa Evans provides comical chaos … It's success, survival and lots of entertainment'
WOMAN'S DAY

‘Here you have the perfect read for summer holidays – it's entertaining, light and delectable'
BALLARAT COURIER

Debra Adelaide
The Household Guide to Dying

‘As I resigned myself to the fact that the latest
Household Guide
I'd written would be my last, I conceived in a flash the best idea ever. I rang Nancy and left a message. ‘Think of the title,' I said. ‘How catchy does
The Household Guide to Dying
sound?

When Delia Bennet – author and domestic advice columnist – is diagnosed with cancer, she knows it's time to get her house in order. After all, she's got to secure the future for her husband, their two daughters and their five beloved chickens. But as she writes lists and makes plans, questions both large and small creep in. Should she divulge her best culinary secrets? Read her favourite novels one last time? Plan her daughters'far-off weddings?

Complicating her dilemma is the matter of the past, and a remote country town where she fled as a pregnant teenager, only to leave broken-hearted eight years later.

Researching and writing her final
Household Guide
, Delia is forced to confront the pieces of herself she left behind. She learns what matters is not the past but the present – and that the art of dying is all about truly living.

Fresh, witty, deeply moving – and a celebration of love, family and that place we call home – this unforgettable story will surprise and delight the reader until the very last page.

Liz Byrski
Trip of a Lifetime

When Heather Delaney is injured in a shocking act of violence, her life is thrown off course. Struggling to return to work, she is haunted by the incident. Was it random or personal? Will they try again?

Heather is not the only one who is rocked by the attack. Her brother, Adam, and his second wife, Jill, already juggling the demands of work and pre-teen children, find their marriage is straining at the seams. Adam disappears into his music while Jill attempts to keep all the balls in the air. Shaun, Heather's offsider, young, loyal and ambitious, questions his relationship; Diane, an office volunteer, can't stop the bitterness pouring out after a mid-life divorce; and Heather's aunt, Barbara, is about to have her peaceful rural retirement disrupted by conflicting loyalties.

Then along comes Heather's old flame, Ellis. Romantic, flamboyant, determined to recapture the past and take control of the future, he seems to have all the answers. But can it really be that easy?

Katherine Howell
The Darkest Hour

Paramedic Lauren Yates stumbles into a world of trouble the night she discovers a body in an inner city alley – the killer still lurks nearby. When the murderer threatens to make her life hell if she tells the police, she believes him – he's Thomas Werner, her sister's ex and father to Lauren's niece … and not a man to mess with.

But when a stabbing victim tells her with his dying breath that Werner attacked him too, she finds herself with blood on her hands and Detective Ella Marconi on her back.

Keen to cement her temporary position in the homicide squad, Ella knows Lauren is the perfect witness for the stabbing since she can testify to the victim's last words. But when Lauren tries to change her statement, Ella realises that Lauren is hiding something big, and, while her colleagues label her suspicion an obsession, she begins her own investigation. The harder she digs into the paramedic's past, the more Lauren resists, and the worse the threat from Werner becomes.

Will Ella's investigation put her career on the line, just when she's finally got her foot in the door? Can Lauren keep her family safe before Werner makes good on his promise? Or will they all – Ella included – pay the ultimate price?