Lisa de Nikolits - Read Online Free Books Archive

The Rage Room

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 23:25:53 +0300

p>What if you had a chance to fix the worst mistake of your life...but only made things worse? The Rage Room dives into dystopia with an extraordinary tale about choices and second chances. Set in 2055, our plastic world is run by robots, fueled by consumerism, twisted religion, and virtual data. Satellites control the weather, food is grown in laboratories. Arts and culture are distant memories. Beneath the sunny skies and behind the garbage-free suburban McMansions live deeply disturbed, materialistic families. Prescribed visits to rage rooms lance anger, boredom, and discontent but the Band-Aid fix hides disturbing governmental motives. A provocative exploration of subliminal societal messages,The Rage Room is an action-packed story of unravelling and alternate realities, of disturbing and searching re-runs. Can an army of feminist hackers restore Mother Nature? Can love triumph over fear? And, ultimately, can the children be saved? Sharps Barkley jumps back in time and...

Between the Cracks She Fell

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 15:14:04 +0200

When Joss finds herself having to make mortgage payments without help from her depressed, stoner boyfriend who has just moved out, and the company she works for folds leaving her suddenly unemployed, she is forced to sell her house, on which she takes a financial loss, and decides to camp out in a vacant complex of school buildings to give herself time to decide what to do next. It turns out the building is used by a gang of teenagers for wild, drug-fueled parties and Joss soon finds herself both repelled by their charismatic evil leader, as well as sexually attracted to him. She knows he is dangerous even before she finds his girlfriend's dead and violently abused body in the school library. During this time, she meets and befriends two other people in difficulty: Emma, a narcissistic thief living with her dog in a stolen car and Ashley, a young homosexual who is heartbroken by the fact that he has been expelled from the Jehovah's Witness church because he is gay. When her...

The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 15:53:08 +0200

The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution is about a couple experiencing a mid-life crisis. The husband loses his job as editor of a financial magazine. Neither are happy with their aging bodies. He seems to have gotten by with charm and frozen emotions. The wife has no idea how angry she is with him for his detachment. It is her idea to sell the house and just travel. But he is not coping well with retirement, so he simply walks off a ferry in Australia and leaves her. He steals a cat (well, he steals an expensive SUV that happens to have a cat onboard) and he flees Sydney, ending up in Apollo Bay, a few hours south-west of Melbourne, where he falls in with a group of anarchists and punk rockers in a tattoo parlour, planning revolution. Meanwhile, the wife sits tight in Sydney with no idea of where her husband might be or what happened. She moves into the red-light Kings Cross area, befriending the owner of the hostel, a seventy-year-old ex-cop drag queen from...

The Nearly Girl

Fri, 25 Nov 2016 15:53:07 +0200

Fans of A Prayer for Owen Meany and One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest will love this clever, fast-paced and enjoyable thriller. Like a modern-day Joan of Arc, Amelia Fisher attempts to carve out a 'normal life', showing us how mythic the idea of 'normal' really is. With a poetic genius for a father, an obsessed body builder for a mother, and an enchantingly eccentric group seeking the help of an unorthodox therapist, what could possibly go wrong? A chance discovery propels Amelia and fellow therapy attendee, Mike, with whom she is in love, into a life-threatening situation instigated by the crazed doctor's own dark secret but Amelia's psychosis saves the day. Told with warmth, humor and populated with vividly original characters, this sprint-paced novel has it all, from restraining orders to sex in office bathrooms, and a nail-biting ending. A novel about an unusual family, expected social norms and the twists and turns of getting it all slightly wrong, the consequences of which...

Rotten Peaches

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 14:00:00 +0200

Rotten Peaches is a gripping epic filled with disturbing and unforgettable insights into the human condition. Love, lust, race and greed. How far will you go? Two women. Two men. One happy ending. It takes place in Canada, the U.S. and South Africa. Nature or nurture. South Africa, racism and old prejudices — these are hardly old topics but what happens when biological half-siblings meet with insidious intentions? Can their moral corruption be blamed on genetics — were they born rotten to begin with? And what happens when they meet up with more of their ilk? What further havoc can be wreaked, with devastating familial consequences?

Everything You Dream is Real

Sat, 07 May 2022 12:35:30 +0300

Eleven years after a world war destroyed the consumer-driven, plastic-based existence of 2055, a new order of players jostles for power. Streaky electricity, ravaging drought, a scarcity of food, and deadly Monarch butterflies make for an increasingly desperate situation.

Worlds collide when both Mother and Sharps's children are kidnapped by the unstable plastic surgeon Alpha Plus and taken to The Fountain of Youth compound. There's flowing water and beautiful people and beautiful clothes and an incongruous convent where children wear smart uniforms and are tutored by nuns. Lovely, until they discover that a subterranean sex trade funds the compound and the man who leads it is mad. Can Mother, Sharps, and the others take down Alpha Plus and his army? Or will they too become pawns in his bid for world domination?

Hilarious and at the same time poignant, Everything You Dream Is Real is a fabulous, adventure-filled sequel to highly acclaimed The Rage Room...

No Fury Like That

Sat, 25 Nov 2017 15:14:03 +0200

No Fury Like That is a literary thriller about life and death—and the power of second chances. What is your moral compass? Julia Redner has to die in order to find her answer to this question—but is she really dead or is she being given the opportunity to rethink her life while solving an intricate puzzle of murders? And she does not miss the opportunity to exact righteous revenge! With an unforgettable cast of characters, a surprising plot with twists and turns, and a powerful, determined female protagonist, the novel takes you on a fast-paced, funny, adventurous ride, exploring themes of love, friendship, revenge and family—and the transformation of character in impossible circumstances. Ultimately, No Fury Like That is about metamorphosis, and how friendship is more important than success, love is more important than money, and family is more important than power.

The Witchdoctor's Bones

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 15:53:07 +0200

A group of tourists gather in Namibia. Some have come to holiday, others to murder. Canadian Kate ditches her two-timing boyfriend and heads to Africa on a whim, hoping for adventure, encountering the unexpected and proving an intrepid adversary to mayhem. The tour is led by Jono, a Zimbabwean historian and philosopher, and the travellers follow him from Cape Town into the Namib desert, learning ancient secrets of the Bushmen, the power of witchcraft and superstition, and even the origins of Nazi evil. A ragged bunch, each member of the group faces their own challenges as third-world Africa pits against first-world greed, murderous intent and thwarted desire. The battle between goaded vanity and frustrated appetite culminates in a surprising conclusion with shocking twists. Unpredictable, flawed, fun-loving, courageous, bizarre, weak, kind-hearted and loathsome, the individuals in this novel exist beyond the page and into real life.

West of Wawa

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 06:57:36 +0200

Fiction. Emotionally battered and bruised, 29-year-old Australian immigrant Benny is looking for escape, not redemption. Escape from herself and the dismal failures of her life: her first solo art exhibition is panned by critics and her husband left her for an Andy Warhol look-alike. Isolated from her family, her career as an abstract artist in ruins, she comes to Canada and finds solace working eighteen hours a day as a graphic designer in a disreputable agency. Numbing her pain with hard work, she self-medicates with prescription meds, and becomes involved in a series of increasingly dubious relationships with ill-suited unreliable men who lead her into danger. Cutting all ties, Benny leaves her job and sets off on a road trip adventure across Canada, hoping she will discover who she wants to be and where she wants to be it. This coming-of-age novel is narrated with wry humor and filled with a cast of engaging characters. A tale of sexual adventure and feminist learning, Benny looks for escape but emerges a heroine instead; with mistakes, epiphanies and friendships helping forge her a home and a sense of identity in the true North.

About the Author

Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits has been a Canadian citizen for eight years and has lived in Canada for eleven. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Philosophy from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. As an art director, her magazine credits include marie claire, Vogue, Vogue Living and Cosmopolitan, she and Longevity. She is the author of the critically acclaimed THE HUNGRY MIRROR (Inanna Publications, 2010) and, most recently, WEST OF WAWA (Inanna Publications, 2011). She lives in Toronto.

The Hungry Mirror

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 23:50:07 +0200

An engaging novel about body image, eating disorders, diet myths and the big fat fabrications and lies that the media forces us to swallow. A compelling, entertaining story infused with fascinating little-known facts about ancient goddesses, curious New Age remedies, the foibles of modern-day celebrities and the truth about retouched images in the world of fashion magazines, from which so much self-body-hatred comes. A story of compassionate vulnerability and determined empowerment. The Hungry Mirror is the fictional tale of a young woman overwhelmed. Lured by false promise and seeking fickle social acceptability, she starves herself and fast becomes trapped when seeming-sanctuary proves a cage of addictions walled by self-hatred and filled with doubt. Within the context of fashion magazines, the young woman is both participant and observer in the perpetuation of the myth of beauty; the retouched images, the impossible standards that ordinary women are expected to follow and achieve. A firsthand account of the role of the media in the war with body image, this is the story of everywoman and the relentless ghosts that pursue her. Increasingly ill, her marriage cold, her family well-intentioned enablers of mistaken social belief, the young woman realizes the choice is hers; to live or die. The work encompasses the complex friendships between women, the unspoken truths about marriage and sexuality as well as various religious and spiritual messages, ancient philosophies, fairytales and legends. In the end, the young woman learns the true value of size zero is indeed nothing.

About the Author

Born in South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Philosophy. She has lived and worked all over the world, and has art directed on magazines such as marie claire, Vogue, Vogue Living and Cosmopolitan. Her fiction has been published in the anthologies Stories from Our Black Book and Simply the Best. Her prize-winning poetry was published in The Boy from New Brunswick. Her first novel, Single Girls Go Mad Sooner, was published in 1995. She lives in Toronto.