When you’re 12 years old and 6 foot tall, people ask the most annoying questions.The Number One Most Annoying Question according to Alma T. Best is,‘Do you play basketball?’
Uh,no. She hates basketball.
Then Alma wins a scholarship to attend Holy Grace, a fancy, basketball-obsessed girls’ school and she worries about fitting in.
And rather than admit she lives in Shellsville, home to Holy Grace’s biggest basketball rivals, she lies and pretends to have grown up on a distant peach farm.
But when a twist of fate means Alma has to suddenly produce large quantities of peaches, she finds herself in a bit of a jam.
Frances quite honestly isn’t that excited about the SpeechMakers annual national conference and public-speaking competition. What she’s excited about (relatively speaking) is that this year there’s a major prize. Frances has a few small problems and forty thousand dollars would go a long way to sorting them out. Keith is Frances’s probably-ex-mentor, it’s hard to tell since she’s not talking to him, and he disapproves of the prize money. He thinks SpeechMakers should be about self-improvement, not self-enrichment. He wants to win the competition, though. He thinks it might help the situation with his wife Linda. Neil doesn’t care about the competition at all but Judy, his mother and coach, does, so. And Rebecca… Actually, what the hell is Rebecca doing here? Rebecca belongs to Frances’s past, not her present. And certainly not her (hopefully) less-disastrous future. Published by Text Publishing (2022)
• Longlisted, Indie Book Awards for Debut Fiction, 2019 Germaine Johnson may not be all that good with people but she’s great with numbers. Unfortunately, as she discovers after the incident at Wallace Insurance, there are very few openings these days for senior mathematicians. Then her cousin gets her a job at the council. On the Senior Citizens Helpline. It’s not the resume entry Germaine wanted—but it turns out Mayor Verity Bainbridge has something more interesting in mind for her. A secret project involving the troublemakers at the senior citizens centre and their feud with the golf club next door. Which is run by the strangely attractive Don Thomas. Don and the mayor want the seniors closed down. Germaine wants what Don and the mayor want. But when she’s forced to get to know the ‘troublemakers’—things get more complicated. Published by Text Publishing (2018) in ANZ, the UK (S&S), the US (S&S), Italy (Garzanti) and Germany (Insel Verlag).
