The third volume of Catherine Hoffmann’s Lia Mendez trilogy is now available as an ebook. Find it on Amazon for $(US)4.99 a copy or the equivalent price in your own currency on your national Amazon site.
Taking Wing is a story about belonging to each other in family, loss of livelihood and hope in the much loved country of birth, and finally, arriving destitute in a new land far away to create a new home.
Catherine Hoffmann’s novel of love and survival during the Nazi occupation of Hungary, Across the Burning, the second story of the Lia Mendez trilogy, is now available as an ebook.
Find it on Amazon for $(US)5.99, or the equivalent in your local currency via your national branch of Amazon.
Catherine Hoffmann’s luxuriant novel, the first book of the Lia Mendez trilogy, Of Exile and Yearning, is now available as an ebook.
It is available on Amazon for $(US)6.99, or for the equivalent price in your own currency on your national Amazon.
“The author’s themes are thickly woven: history, the spiritual quest, exile, the question of destiny and choice, the imperatives of faith and the shapes it adopts.” Alex Skovron
Goldie Alexander adds to her already large collection of books for young adults with the new ebook, Dessi’s Romance. Emma asks her best friend, Dessi, to visit her boyfriend, Abdul, while she’s away at Schoolies’ Week in Surfers. Maybe not the best move, but staying home in Melbourne turned out okay for Dessi. And Emma wasn’t really lonely in Surfers! Dessi’s Romance is now available on Amazon’s Kindle.
The third novel of the Lia Mendez trilogy, Taking Wing, was released in September 2011.
The Lia Mendez trilogy, spans three generations of the Mendez-Kremzier and Heiman families, the paths of their lives intersected by the conflicts and changes which shaped Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Of Exile and Yearning (2009) and Across the Burning (2010) are the first two books of the trilogy.
Set in the era when Europe’s thousand year thrust for universal fraternity detours into the Communist tyranny, Taking Wing follows an ordinary man and an extraordinary woman, Frederic and Lia, as they struggle to stay sane in the face of civic stupidity and individual evil.
Lia is called to open her arms to the difficult truth that has always been her pillar of fire. Frederic, as husband and father, strives to hold on to all that is real, and not be stifled by his natural scepticism. Their children, Regan, inheritor of a past of wonder and betrayal, fights for self-definition, and Mercedes, a child born wounded, seeks the source of healing within.
Taking Wing is a story about belonging and forsaking, the loss of all and the state of abandonment, and finally, the coming to nothing that turns out to be everything under another land’s new stars.
ISBN 9781920787202
Literary fiction
pb 233 x 151 mm
268 pages
$28.95 rrp
Special offer: In Australia, a personal order for one copy with postage included costs $30.00.
Catherine Hoffmann’s novel, Across the Burning, was released by Indra in October 2010.
Across the Burning is the second novel of the Lia Mendez trilogy, an epic which spans three generations of the Mendez-Kremzier and Heiman families, the paths of their lives intersected by the conflicts and changes which shaped Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.
Once enthralled by the grand vistas of travel, Frederic returns to Hungary as Europe is about to burst into the fire of World War II. He, a sharp and worldly non-believer, returns to Rudi Wolf, his soul friend, to Lia Mendez, his only love – his two Jewish friends now married, but still welcoming him as part of their life. With passion and loyalty to each other the three friends face the Nazi occupation.
A story of sensibility and identity, of exile, abandonment and returning to yourself.
Of Exile and Yearning, the first book of the trilogy, was released in September 2009.
ISBN 9781920787189
Literary fiction
pb 234 x 150 mm
290 pp
$29.95 rrp
Special Offer: In Australia, a personal order for one copy with postage included costs $30.00.
Catherine Hoffmann’s novel, Of Exile and Yearning, was released on 15 September 2009 by Indra Publishing.
Of Exile and Yearning is the first book of the Lia Mendez trilogy.
This epic novel is set in Europe from 1910 to the mid-1930s, exploring lives buffeted by the turbulent historical forces transforming central Europe from the last flourish of the Austro-Hungarian empire to the chilling build-up of the Second World War.
Lia and Frederic meet as children, never declare their love for one another, and yet remain inseparably bonded. From the comfort and security of her Jewish home, Lia chooses her own exile, with devastating effect on her family. Her journey is a personal spiritual quest. Frederic, neither Jewish nor religious, emphatically refuses commitment to any ideal or belief. For him, life is for adventure and travel, the quest for enjoyment, and never to be taken too seriously.
For the continuation of Lia and Frederic’s story, wait for Across the Burning, the second book of the trilogy, to be released in mid-2010.
Catherine’s three earlier works, Perilous Journey (1981), Crystal (1987) and Forms of Bliss (1988), were all published by Greenhouse Publications.
ISBN 9781920787172
Literary fiction
pb 233 x 151 mm
451 pages
$34.95 rrp
Special offer: In Australia, a personal order for one copy with postage included costs $35.00.
Recent books attacking religion have held the headlines. Now this book presents the beliefs of ordinary people.
The interviews in this Australian book provide an indirect insight into the beliefs of ordinary Americans and Britons.
Non-fiction category: Sociology, religion
Paperback;346 pp
First Edition; 210 x 138 mm
ISBN: 9781920787165; November 2007
RRP/List Price: Australia: $(Aus)34.95; New Zealand: $(NZ)37.95: North America: $(US)30.00
The Author, Myer Bloom, lives in Melbourne, and researches in the sociology of religion. Past work includes:
After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Niqi Thomas, a young Czech Australian woman, returns with her father to Prague, to visit her ancestral city and to discover her grandfather, who was always ‘present’ in the family, but whom she had never met – Karel Goliath-Gorovsky, the Czech Solzhenitsyn.
For Niqi, it became a journey of self-discovery, through discovery of her grandfather. A rebel from birth, Czech lawyer, Karel Goliath-Gorovsky, was imprisoned in a Soviet gulag north of the Arctic Circle, because of his relentless political idealism. His potent black humour enabled him to survive those seventeen darkest years of his political life, which spanned from the brutal excesses of Stalin to the liberating hope of Dubcek.
His son, abandoned by his father at the age of one, developed his own black humour to survive Mischling status under the Nazi occupation, the Stalinist regime in his homeland, Czechoslovakia, and flight to Australia – his new land of opportunity where some people crossed the street when they saw a ‘wog’ approaching.
This family narrative includes a subversive retake on the biblical Goliath, who appears several times through the book, connecting Goliath-Gorovsky with the biblical character, who paradoxically, was killed by his Hebrew ancestors.
Minerva’s Owl is a literary treatment of national and personal history, which explores the effect of war and displacement upon the exiled individuals and their families. Throughout this book, the continually reinforced image is of the individual standing against the juggernaut of dictatorship and bureaucracy, and resolutely refusing to fear.
A sense of dark laughter – developed as a survival mechanism – in which the choice is to laugh or die, pervades the book. In Goliath-Gorovsky’s own words: “After the tragedy a humoresque. Instead of a conclusion.”
June 2003, 312pp
Non fiction, 1st Edition
Paperback, 216 x 138 mm
ISBN: 0 9578735 6 5
RRP: $aud 24-95
ISBN-13: 9780957873568
The Author With formal qualifications and teaching experience in creative writing at Victorian universities, Niqi Thomas has had several short stories and poems published in literary magazines during the 1990s.
Her works have appeared in New England Review, 8d Anthology of Erotica, Centoria Poetry Magazine, Journal of the Black Rose, Hidden Agenda, STET; Australian Writers and Writing, to name only a few. Niqi lives in Melbourne. Her next book is currently being considered for publication.
Set in the summer and autumn of 1938, Body and Soul is eighteen-year-old disabled Lilbet Marks’s very biased account of the love affair between Felix Goldfarb, a recent migrant to Melbourne, and Lilbet’s twin sister Ella. Lilbet adores Ella, but also envies her for being beautiful, for not being disabled and for her ability to dazzle men.
Lilbet’s father Simon Marks, her elder sister Julie, and all their friends are entranced by Felix Goldfarb’s winning blend of worldly sophistication and boyish charm. Only clever Lilbet suspects Felix might not be all that he seems. Also, it is imperative for her physical and psychological wellbeing that Ella remains at the family home, Adeline Terrace, in Caulfield. Lilbet is determined never to be parted from her twin.
Within a few months, Felix departs for Sydney, leaving behind gigantic gambling debts and a pregnant Ella. Though he subsequently sends for Ella, Lilbet manages through clever manipulation to keep her twin by her side.
As Lilbet records the day to day events at home, her newspaper cuttings and notes explore 1938 attitudes in general, the intolerance shown at the time towards the disabled, the ambivalence she feels towards her family, her insecurities, fear of loneliness and the double-edged sword of love and envy.
Though it is a young woman’s musings, the voice is appropriate to the times in which she lived. Among the press clippings, the unconfirmed reports coming out of Hitler’s Germany of anti-Jewish violence and disappearances of whole Jewish communities, and the increasing belligerence of Germany towards her neighbours add to the growing tension for this Jewish family in Melbourne of the 1930s.
September 2003
Fiction; First Edition
ISBN: 0 9578735 9 X
ISBN-13: 9780957873599
RRP $22-95, 240 pp
Paperback, 216 x 138 mm
The Author
Goldie Alexander was born in Melbourne and has lived there most of her life. She writes for adults, young adults and children of all ages, as well as taking workshops and seminars.
For adults
Unjust Desserts, 2002
For younger readers
Seawall, 2002
Killer Virus, 2002
Right and Wrong, 2002 (co-written with Hazel Edwards)
My Story: Surviving Sydney Cove, 2000 (Published in the UK as My Story: Transported, 2002)
Little Big School, 1998
6788, 1997
Email Murder Mystery, 1997 (co-written with Hazel Edwards)
Astronet, 1996