In this engaging first novel, narrator Dolores Price recounts her life story from age four to age 40. The troubled product of a stormy marriage, she is already sipping Maalox in grade school. Then her father walks out on her mother, who suffers a nervous collapse, and Dolores moves to her repressive grandmother's house in Rhode Island. By the time she reaches eighth grade, she has only one friend: a boarder who eventually rapes her. Anesthetizing herself with junk food and soap operas, Dolores becomes an obese, isolated young woman who attempts suicide during her first semester in college and spends seven years in a mental institution.
Felt Jewelry: 25 Pieces to Make Using a Variety of Simple Felting Techniques
The author of Heartfelt and Textile Jewelry is back with more of her exceptionally lovely designs for using felt in creative ways. As felt is easy to make and work with it has become a favorite material used by crafters, knitters and others, and now combined with other decorative elements, like decorative stitching and beads it becomes irresistible!
Eric Downer and his father John Downer are returning home, after John's annual binge in town, to the 150,000 acres of land they lease at Lake Jane. Three years of drought have dried the lake, killed all the vegetation and most of the sheep. Even from a distance the homestead looks frighteningly desolate. The dog at the gate is near death, the "chooks" are all dead and outside lies the body–not of Brandt the overseer who had stayed behind, but of a stranger. Bony becomes more and more unhappy as he investigates the case and the scant clues all point in a direction which will cause those he has grown to admire much unhappiness.
Bony is the sort of detective who enjoys nothing better on a holiday than a little informal investigation. When he agrees to help a colleague in the matter of the disappearance of George Loftus, a farmer whose car was found wrecked near the world's longest fence in the wheat country of western Australia, he cannot immediately find evidence of the murder he suspects. Loftus's wife seems concerned about him, but his handsome hired man is an enigma. It is not until Bony becomes absorbed in the second mystery of Mr. Jelly, an amateur criminologist who himself often disappears on secret business, that he finds the key to the strange goings-on in this seemingly ordinary farming community.
For twenty years, Pam did her duty as loyal, compliant wife. She and John shared their friends, their careers, and a son - for richer for poorer, for better for worse. Until the day tragedy struck their family and John betrayed his wife in the most public of ways, walking away to a lucrative new life. For three years John becomes richer while Pam becomes poorer; John's life becomes increasingly better while Pam's becomes worse. But then a reversal of fortune brings them back together, and Pam gets the chance for a revenge John could never have dreamt of ...
