In his latest work, Antony Beevor—bestselling author of Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin 1945 and one of our most respected historians of World War II—brings us the true, little-known story of a family torn apart by revolution and war. Olga Chekhova, a stunning Russian beauty, was the niece of playwright Anton Chekhov and a famous Nazi-era film actress who was closely associated with Hitler. After fleeing Bolshevik Moscow for Berlin in 1920, she was recruited by her composer brother Lev to become a Soviet spy—a career she spent her entire postwar life denying. The riveting story of how Olga and her family survived the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, the Stalinist Terror, and the Second World War becomes, in Beevor’s hands, a breathtaking tale of survival in a merciless age.

Agent Nine is an intergalactic secret agent on a mission to save his organization. As he tries to complete this mission, he falls in love and loses focus.Where do wishes come from?From long hours and an overworked staff who are on call 24/7 to make sure all your dreams come true. Did you think riches and yachts came from nowhere? Magic doesn't come from trees, you know. There are people behind the scenes making the impossible happen, no matter how ridiculous that impossible is.

Agent Nine, an intergalactic secret agent, is forced to complete his coworker's failed mission. As his team tries to protect the world from hearing the most horrific music ever produced, Russia and America are on the brink of a nuclear war.Academicessaywriters.com has the capacity to turn around your misfortunes by enabling you to get a good essay in record time. It is never easy to trust someone with your most important and urgent essay. It also takes a lot of professionalism and dedication to deliver a paper that will be a top contender for marks. These are the qualities that we have instilled in our writers over time and it is these qualities that will be employed in crafting your essay. Your trust matters to us because it is from the trust that a long lasting working relationship is natured.

When Fabergé specialist Assia Wynfield learns of the discovery of a long-lost Fabergé egg made for the Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, daughter of the last Tsar of Russia, she appears to be the only person with misgivings. On travelling to St. Petersburg to see the egg, Assia moves among Russia's new rich but finds herself pulled back into a family past she would rather forget. With news that a friend is missing, Assia starts to dig deeper. But does she really want the answers to the questions she is asking? Set in today's glamorous world of Russian art with glimpses into the lives of the last Romanovs as their empire crumbled in the wake of the Russian Revolution, Olga's Egg is an enthralling tale of love, family secrets and the artistic treasures that conceal them.

Never underestimate a librarian. Comfortably padded and in her middle years, Shona McMonagle may look bookish and harmless, but her education at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls has left her with a deadly expertise in everything from martial arts to quantum physics. It has also left her with a bone-deep loathing for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, that scurrilous novel that spread scandalous untruths about the finest educational institution in Edinburgh. Her skills, her deceptively mild appearance, and her passionate loyalty make Shona the perfect recruit for a new and interesting project: Time-travel to Tzarist Russia, prevent a gross miscarriage of romance, and – in any spare time – see to it that only the right people get murdered. It's a big job, but no task is too daunting for a Head Girl from Miss Blaine's.

The Nobel Prize winner’s latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.   A century after the publication of...

With Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Man Booker International Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk returns with a subversive, entertaining noir novel. In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She is reclusive, preferring the company of animals to people; she's unconventional, believing in the stars; and she is fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, Duszejko becomes involved in the investigation. By no means a conventional crime story, this existential thriller by 'one of Europe's major humanist writers' (Guardian) offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalized people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in predestination – and caused a genuine political uproar in Tokarczuk's...

A subversive, entertaining noir novel from the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize.Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead takes place in a remote Polish village, where Janina, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, she becomes involved in the investigation. Janina is reclusive, preferring the company of animals to people; she's unconventional, believing in the stars, and she is fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken.Filled with wonderful characters like Maladroit, Big Foot, Black Coat, Dizzy and Boros, this subversive, entertaining noir novel, by 'one of Europe's major humanist writers' (Guardian), offers thought-provoking ideas on our perceptions of madness, injustice against marginalised people, animal rights, the hypocrisy of traditional religion, belief in...

The witty new novel from this internationally acclaimed Polish author blends horror, folklore and feminist parable

The "Laces of Love" is a collection that includes Olga Kryuchkova's famous novels such as "The Gift of Aphrodite", "Family Silver Cross", "Mysteries of Fate" and "The Cupid's Apple", formerly known as "The Lucky Choice". The actions of the novels take place in Russia in the 19th century. The heroines are charming young women who seek to win their place under the sun and find true love, despite all the obstacles, trials and dizzying adventures that destiny sends them. The novels are written in an entertaining and easy vaudeville style. 

Shortlisted for the International Booker prize, The Employees reshuffles a sci-fi voyage into a riotously original existential nightmareFunny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew becomes strangely and deeply attached to them, even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.Olga Ravn's prose is chilling, crackling, exhilarating, and foreboding. The Employees probes into what makes us human, while delivering a hilariously stinging critique of life governed by the logic of productivity.

An award-winning debut novel about a quirky immigrant's journey through a multicultural, post-nationalist landscape Set in Frankfurt, All Russians Love Birch Trees follows a young immigrant named Masha. Fluent in five languages and able to get by in several others, Masha lives with her boyfriend, Elias. Her best friends are Muslims struggling to obtain residence permits, and her parents rarely leave the house except to compare gas prices. Masha has nearly completed her studies to become an interpreter, when suddenly Elias is hospitalized after a serious soccer injury and dies, forcing her to question a past that has haunted her for years. Olga Grjasnowa has a unique gift for seeing the funny side of even the most tragic situations. With cool irony, her debut novel tells the story of a headstrong young woman for whom the issue of origin and nationality is immaterial--her Jewish background has taught her she can survive anywhere. Yet Masha isn't...

A resourceful middle-aged Scottish librarian travels back in time to stop Macbeth and his wife from killing Duncan while avoiding three dangerous witches.  Shona McMonagle is your ordinary, garden-variety librarian: comfortably padded, in her middle years, expert in various arcane martial arts. She also has an impressive knack for time travel (“impressive” may be overstating things: her first two forays—revolutionary Russia, 19th-century France—went less than smoothly).   Her latest mission? Head to 11th-century Scotland, cozy up to Macbeth and Lady M, prevent them from murdering Duncan. In the ordinary course of things, this would be a doddle. But then there are the witches, who prove remarkably quick to take offense. And the business of being turned into a mouse. And the fact that the mission is in truth threefold. One, keep Duncan alive and kicking; two, correct the historical record and lay bare the ludicrous lies introduced...

Almost a century after an asteroid impact and subsequent nuclear exchange almost ended all human life on Earth, a strange artifact is discovered on one of the moons of Saturn. Dr. Varsaad Volhard, an evolutionary-socio-historian, is chosen to investigate an alien civilization that sent an artifact to Mimas some thirty thousand years ago.

From the award-winning author comes a sophisticated literary fairy tale for the twenty-first century, in which Cinderella, thirteen years after her marriage, is on the brink of leaving her supposedly perfect life behind.Cinderella married the man of her dreams—the perfect ending she deserved after diligently following all the fairy-tale rules. Yet now, two children and thirteen and a half years later, things have gone badly wrong and her life is far from perfect. One night, fed up, she sneaks out of the palace to get help from the Witch who, for a price, offers love potions to disgruntled housewives. But as the old hag flings the last ingredients into the cauldron, Cinderella doesn't ask for a love spell to win back her Prince Charming. Instead, she wants him dead. Endlessly surprising, wildly inventive, and decidedly modern, The Charmed Wife weaves together time and place, fantasy and reality, to conjure a world unlike any other. Nothing in it is...

From the acclaimed author of the International Booker Prize–shortlisted literary sensation, The Employees, comes a radical, funny, and mercilessly honest novel about motherhood.Anna is utterly lost. Still in shock after the birth of her son, she moves to snowbound Stockholm with her newborn and boyfriend, where a chasm soon opens between the couple. Lonely and isolated, Anna reads too many internet articles and shops for clothes she cannot afford. To avoid sinking deeper into her depression, she must read and write herself back into her proper place in the world.My Work is a fervent, intimate, and compulsive examination of the relationship between motherhood, writing, and everyday life. In a mesmerizing, propulsive blend of prose, poetry, journal entries, and letters, Olga Ravn probes the pain, postpartum depression, housework, shopping, mundanity, and anxiety of motherhood, all the while celebrating the unbounded that comes from...

In the year 2017 in Russia– exactly 100 years after the revolution– poets and writers are obsolete, class distinctions are stingingly clear, and mischievous spirits intervene in the lives of humans from their home high in the mythical Riphean Mountains.Professor Anfilogov, a wealthy and emotionless man, sets out on an expedition to unearth priceless rubies that no one else has been able to locate. His expedition reveals ugly truths about man's disregard for nature and the disasters created by insatiable greed.Olga Slavnikova stuns with this witty, engaging, and remarkable tale of love, obsession, murder, and the lengths people will go to get what they want. Her biting prose is brought to life vividly and faithfully by acclaimed translator Marian Schwartz. With 2017, Slavnikova takes up the mantle of Russia's unrivaled literary heritage.

When Hammoudi, a young surgeon based in Paris, returns to Syria to renew his passport, he only expects to stay there a few days. But the authorities refuse to let him leave and Hammoudi finds himself caught up in the fight against the regime. Meanwhile, budding actress Amal has also joined the protests against the government and her own father, by whom she feels betrayed. Realising that they will never again be safe in their homeland, Amal and her boyfriend Youssef decide to flee to Europe in a desperate bid to survive. But the path to safety brings its own risks, and Amal and Youssef once again narrowly escape death when their overcrowded ship sinks. Eventually they reach Germany, but soon discover that in this new life – where they are perceived as nothing but refugees – their struggle is far from over. God Is Not Shy is an intimate and striking novel that offers real insight into the horrors and inhumanity of war, whilst also focusing on...

A sweeping novel of love and passion from author of the international bestseller The Reader about a woman out of step with her time, whose life is witness to some of the most tumultuous events of modern age.Abandoned by her parents, young Olga is raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village in the early years of the twentieth century. Smart and precocious, endearing but uncompromising, she fights against ingrained chauvinism to find her place in a world run by lesser men.When Olga falls in love with her neighbor, Herbert, the son of a local aristocrat, her life is irremediably changed. While Herbert indulges his thirst for exploration and adventure, Olga is limited by her gender and circumstance. Her love for Herbert goes against all odds and encounters many obstacles, but even when they are separated, it enduresUnfolding across decades—from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century—and across continents—from...

The intrepid librarian Shona McMonagle, erstwhile Marcia Blaine Academy prefect and an accomplished linguist and martial artist, finds herself in an isolated French mountain village, Sans-Soleil, which has no sunlight because of its topography. It's reeling from a spate of unexplained deaths, and Shona has once again travelled back in time to help out.Forging an uneasy alliance with newly widowed Madeleine, Shona is soon drawn into a full-blown vampire hunt, involving several notable villagers, the world-renowned soprano Mary Garden – and even Count Dracula himself. Will Shona solve the mystery, secure justice for the murder victims and make it through a deathly denouement in the hall of mirrors to return to present-day Morningside Library?

Olga Fortuna loves pretty clothes, sewing, and anything to do with fashion. When her father brings her and her sisters to Needful, Texas to find husbands, she soon discovers that she enjoys making clothing for others more than the idea of wedded bliss. For years, Olga has managed to have the best fashions on a very tight budget, but now her mind is turning to the needs of a man she barely knows. Working for him is fun and Olga finds the attention of a handsome cowboy intriguing. Besides, Mr. Harker will be moving on soon leaving her to live a life of her choosing. Will she be able to keep up the new shop she and the preacher's petite wife have started in the tiny Texas town, or will she give up everything for a man with a rowdy past and too much time on his hands?

Olga Rimmler's secret assignment for the Third Reich was the creation of the Joy Division, a special brothel peopled by teenage girls and maintained for the sole pleasure of the SS officer korps. The girls were trained in every perversion. They could ask nothing for themselves, and their only reason for living was to provide sexual gratification for sadistic and perverted Nazi officers. And Olga, she-wolf of Death Kamp 69, ruled over them all with an iron will and a whip razored with human teeth.

Humans have always wanted to know what goes on inside the minds of other animals. But what if humans could become animals? Toby’s father leads a team of neuroscientists directly connecting the brains of humans with those of animals. And Toby is a prodigy at throwing her mind into the animal subjects in his lab—she’s the best there is. But Toby suffers from cystic fibrosis and she’s not likely to live into adulthood. Could a radical plan to embed her consciousness into an animal allow Toby to survive? And what does it mean to live without a human body? Can Toby and her father solve the problem of fully merging two beings before she takes her last breath? Will the government succeed in stopping their efforts before they are done? It’s a race against death and into the minds of animals.

Based on a true story, Olga Browney born in Jamaica into a large close-knit, coloured Catholic family was a kind, naïve, gentle girl who came to London in 1939 intending to stay only six months with her malevolent, alcoholic aunt. But world events, personal tragedy and malicious intent prevented her from returning home to Jamaica until over half a century later when her past caught up with her.

This inspiring and fascinating book is the first truly comprehensive study of women's letters ever published. Organised by subject matter, and covering a wide range of topics from politics, work and war, to childhood, love and sexual passion. '800 Years of Women's Letter' reveals the depth, breadth and diversity of women's lives through the ages. Here Holoise writes to Abelad of her undying devotion, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woofl correspond about life and writing, and Queen Victoria complains to Robert Peel about the neglect of Buckingham Palace. Many more women write letters that reveal the compassion, humour, love and tenacity with which they confront the often difficult circumstances of everyday life. This is an intriguing insight, and a rare opportunity to read the real words of real women, in their own intimate language. "No literary form is more revealing, more spontaneous of more individual than a letter." P D James

Mama and I climbed aboard. I waved to Papa until he was only a tiny speck in the distance. The train turned the curve, and he was gone.The powerful autobiographical account of a young girls' struggle as a Jewish refugee in England from 1939-1945.

When Peter forged travel documents during Stalin's formidable reign to see his parents in a Siberian labour camp before they perished, he knew he was facing the life-or-death challenge of his life. What followed in the years after that journey could not have been foreseen by Peter or his countrymen. In 1941, the Ukraine was invaded by Hitler's army and remained under its control until its retreat two years later, taking Peter and his young family with them, as workers in Germany's labour camps where he has to draw on every ounce of his being to keep his family alive. After years of hardship and suffering, a hand of hope is offered in the form of a ship that would take Peter and his family, now displaced persons, with no country they could claim as their own, as far away from Stalin's Soviet Union as possible: to Australia, a land of opportunity and fairness before the law. Based on a true story, The Man from Talalaivka is both a political and personal story. But above...

The summer of '47. In the sleepy town of Villiers-la-Foret, roughly an hour from Paris, the peaceful radiance of the day is interrupted by the discovery that, along a nearby riverbank, the body of a man has washed up, a gaping wound in his skull. Beside him rests a beautiful, nearly bare-breasted woman, her dress soaked and in tatters. An accident or foul play? A crime of passion? Soon there are almost as many speculations and theories as there are townspeople. The woman, it turns out, is a Russian princess, Olga Arbyelina, a refugee from the Bolshevik revolution who in the 1930s had settled in town along with many of her compatriots. Rumor was that Olga's husband, a dashing prince given to gambling and revels, had deserted her some years after the couple's arrival in France, leaving her alone to care for their young son. About the victim, also a Russian refugee, little is known: many years Olga's elder, he was a taciturn, rather coarse, slightly ridiculous man name Sergei...

Charged to fetch Lady Margaret Thurton home from a nunnery, Sir Richard de Heigham never expects to find himself completely captivated with the beautiful heiress. Suddenly thrust into a new life, the innocent Meg is dazzled by the charming young knight and his lessons in the social graces that her uncle forces upon her. When it becomes obvious that Earl Thurton has some nefarious scheme in mind for Meg's wedding day, Sir Richard must quickly ascertain whether his love for Meg is requited and if his efforts to protect her could put them both in danger….

Loving Daughters takes place in a small village in New South Wales and is a brilliant, unsentimental portrait of two sisters: one artistic and restless, the other houseproud and her father's favorite. The entry of an eligible young man into their lives creates a disturbing triangle of desire and rivalry.

Do plots involving exciting murders still work and who exactly is the victim? Antonia Darcy never imagined that taking her young grandson to his first day at school would embroil her in a most baffling case of mistaken identity and murder. Major Payne, on the other hand, believed that it was their destiny. Olga Klimt played a dangerous game with the affections of the men in love with her, though she knew perfectly well there might be a high price to pay... Among the unlikely murder suspects are a rich young heir to a biscuit fortune, his Aconite-addicted mother, his manservant and the headmistress of a prestigious nursery school. As the questions mount, husband and wife sleuths Antonia Darcy and Major Payne search desperately for answers before the killer strikes again.

'One among a very few signal European novelists of the past quarter-century.' Economist Flights is a series of imaginative and mesmerising meditations on travel in all its forms, not only the philosophy and meaning of travel, but also fascinating anecdotes that take us out of ourselves, and back to ourselves.Olga Tokarczuk brilliantly connects travel with spellbinding anecdotes about anatomy, about life and death, about the very nature of humankind. Thrilling characters and stories abound: the Russian sect who escape the devil by remaining constantly in motion; the anatomist Verheyen who writes letters to his amputated leg; the story of Chopin's heart as it makes its journey from Paris to Warsaw, stored in a tightly sealed jar beneath his sister's skirt; the quest of a Polish woman who emigrated to New Zealand as a teen but must now return in order to poison her terminally ill high-school sweetheart... You will never read anything like...

When architect Holly Fairfield lands a dream job renovating a posh San Francisco restaurant, she discovers nothing has happened by chance. Soon she's caught in a dangerous game between Cutty family rivals--and a dark legacy of obsession and murder. Enigmatic and sensual Ryan Cutty warns her to get out while she can. He taunts her with the portrait of a woman called Nina, a woman he planned to marry...a woman whose past Holly can't ignore. Suddenly Holly realizes that her presence here may be part of a sinister plan to exact vengeance for Nina's murder. As Holly is drawn deeper into Ryan's world and his intoxicating embrace, she can only wonder if his passion is a desperate attempt to save her from Nina's fate...or protect the family he loves from the secrets Holly is determined to uncover. She is dangerously close to unlocking the truth--but is it worth her life?

'The creme de la creme of crime debuts.' Al GuthrieFifty-something Shona is a proud former pupil of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, but has a deep loathing for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which she thinks gives her alma mater a bad name.Impeccably educated and an accomplished martial artist, linguist and musician, Shona is thrilled when selected by Marcia Blaine herself to travel back in time for a one-week mission in 19th-century Russia: to pair up the beautiful, shy, orphaned heiress Lidia Ivanovna with Sasha, a gorgeous young man of unexplained origins. But, despite all her accomplishments and good intentions, Shona might well have got the wrong end of the stick about her mission. As the body count rises, will she discover in time just who the real villain is?

A child lies dying. To save her, to preserve some of her identity, memories need to be retrieved from her avatar—Lizard Girl. Jude’s dad is using a cyber reality game to recover some of his sick girl’s memories in an attempt to restore brain function. The avatar’s personality patterns help patch the holes in Jude’s brain ravaged by the disease. But what becomes of a virtual mind left to roam in cyberspace after its host falls sick? The Far Cinct is a cyber city forbidden to school kids and average citizens. The Far Cinct is where rogue entities go to hide and to innovate and to die. It’s where illegal cyber enhancements and compulsions are sold to those who have the money and the connections to find them. But that’s cyberspace for you—nothing is ever what it appears to be on the surface. As Jude’s consciousness starts to slip, her cyber awareness gains independence. What is a girl’s avatar without her human? Can consciousness and identity be tied up in a digital world without the wet works of a human body? Jump into the world of weird and surreal, and as you journey to look for memories of a sick girl, you might accidentally discover a virtual soul of her avatar.

An award-winning debut novel about a quirky immigrant’s journey through a multicultural, post-nationalist landscape Set in Frankfurt, All Russians Love Birch Trees follows a young immigrant named Masha. Fluent in five languages and able to get by in several others, Masha lives with her boyfriend, Elias. Her best friends are Muslims struggling to obtain residence permits, and her parents rarely leave the house except to compare gas prices. Masha has nearly completed her studies to become an interpreter, when suddenly Elias is hospitalized after a serious soccer injury and dies, forcing her to question a past that has haunted her for years.Olga Grjasnowa has a unique gift for seeing the funny side of even the most tragic situations. With cool irony, her debut novel tells the story of a headstrong young woman for whom the issue of origin and nationality is immaterial—her Jewish background has taught her she can survive anywhere. Yet Masha isn’t equipped to deal with grief, and this all-too-normal shortcoming gives a particularly bittersweet quality to her adventures.

Abandoned by her feckless husband during the Depression, Amy decides to leave her country town, and her three infant children, and try her luck in the big smoke. Life in wartime Sydney is far from easy, but for Amy there are the hard-won satisfactions of an office job and a house of her own. Until her eldest, Kathleen, appears needing a home while she attends high school. And Amy falls in love with a married man...Enlivened with note-perfect observations of the everyday, wrenching in its portrayal of a young woman struggling to succeed yet often wilfully ignorant of her own children, Olga Masters' second and last novel is a triumph. At its centre is Amy, one of the great characters in Australian literature. This edition comes with an introduction by the novelist Eva Hornung. Olga Masters was born in Pambula, New South Wales, in 1919. She married at twenty-one and had seven children, working part-time as a journalist, leaving her little...

At fifty-six, Anatoly Sukhanov has everything a man could want. Nearly twenty-five years ago, he traded his precarious existence as a brilliant underground artist for the perks and comforts of a high-ranking Soviet apparatchik . Once he created art; now he censors it. But a series of increasingly bizarre events transforms Sukhanov's perfect world into a nightmare. Buried dreams return to haunt him, long-repressed figures from his past surface to torment him, new political alignments threaten to undo him, and his once loving family and loyal comrades grow distant. As he stumbles through the dark corridors of memory, his life begins to unravel, and he finds himself losing everything he sold his soul to gain. Olga Grushin tells the story of Sukhanov's betrayal of his talent, his friends, and his principles in dream sequences that may be real and in real time that may be nightmare, effortlessly shifting the borders between the two. Her masterly play with voice, time, and reality makes this often surreal exploration of self-dissolution and faithlessness an extraordinary reading experience. And her subtle transformation of Sukhanov from an arrogant and self-absorbed member of the ruling class to a terrified beggar in his own private hell is nothing short of miraculous. The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a virtuoso performance, original, startling, haunting.

Humans have always wanted to know what goes on inside the minds of other animals. But what if humans could become animals? Toby’s father leads a team of neuroscientists directly connecting the brains of humans with those of animals. And Toby is a prodigy at throwing her mind into the animal subjects in his lab—she’s the best there is. But Toby suffers from cystic fibrosis and she’s not likely to live into adulthood. Could a radical plan to embed her consciousness into an animal allow Toby to survive? And what does it mean to live without a human body? Can Toby and her father solve the problem of fully merging two beings before she takes her last breath? Will the government succeed in stopping their efforts before they are done? It’s a race against death and into the minds of animals.

The Home Girls is a collection of candid, witty stories about rural and suburban life. Set in the mid-twentieth century, these are tales of ordinary people and domestic life. Masters was, as the Advertiser remarked, 'a natural storyteller'. Between the publication of The Home Girls, in 1982, and her death, Olga Masters was acclaimed as one of Australia's finest writers. Her short stories, distinguished by their acute observation of human behaviour, drew comparison with the finest exponents of the form, such as Chekhov.The stories in this collection:The Home GirlsThe Rages of Mrs TorrensOn the TrainLeaving HomePassenger to BerrigoThe Done ThingA Rat in the BuildingA Dog that SqueakedA Young Man’s FancyThe Lang WomenThe Snake and Bad TomA Poor WinnerCall Me PinkieAdams and BarkerMrs ListerThe Creek WayThe Children Are ComingA Good...