When two young doctors, Michele and Michael Browne, embarked on a two-year volunteer sojourn to a tiny Pacific island in the 1980s, they were faced with far more than they had expected. While they experienced adventure and humour in this picturesque setting, their intense isolation, and the life and death encounters that they faced in their medical work, tested their resilience as never before. When personal tragedy struck their young family late in their posting, they found themselves profoundly changed – both then and ever since. BUY NOW Book Depository Amazon What Readers are Saying: ‘The expat’s life is on full display in Michele Browne’s ‘Beyond the Reef’, a book about moving from Australia to a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific, about learning to cope, learning the customs, and saving lives as doctors during their stay in the Cook Islands from 1988 to 89. In these pages you’ll have the unique opportunity to live the sometimes harrowing, at times … [Read more...]
Out of Latvia Out Now.
Available now A story of two men, a generation apart, one growing up in the shadow of the other. Peter Jirgens tells the story of his youth as the son of Arnold Jirgens, a Latvian immigrant, who struggled against discrimination to establish his family in Nowra, Australia. He shares the stories his father told him of the hardship of life under Soviet rule, his escape from Europe after World War Two and the early days of his new life as an immigrant in a land far from home. Fiercely Latvian, Arnold Jirgens longs to see his homeland once more and find out if his remaining family has survived, but as a Latvian citizen he, and any son of his, could be drafted into the Soviet army or sent to Siberia. Over the years, Arnold’s longing becomes Peter’s dream. Though his father is prepared to wait until the Soviets no longer control his country, Peter is not. In 1980, against the wishes of his parents and the advice of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, twenty-seven … [Read more...]
