Check out our top picks this month by clicking on the cover images below. For a full list of New Release titles across all categories, click here.
FICTION
NON FICTION
Check out our top picks this month by clicking on the cover images below. For a full list of New Release titles across all categories, click here.
FICTION
NON-FICTION
FICTION
The Abstainer
Ian McGuire
Two men, haunted by their pasts.
Driven by the need for justice.
Blood begets blood.
In a fight for life and legacy.
Manchester, 1867
Stephen Doyle arrives in Manchester from New York. He is an Irish-American veteran of the Civil War and a member of the Fenians, a secret society intent on ending British rule in Ireland, by any means necessary. Now he has come to seek vengeance.
James O’Connor has fled grief and drink in Dublin for a sober start in Manchester as Head Constable. His mission is to discover and thwart the Fenians’ plans. When his long-lost nephew arrives on his doorstep, he never could have foreseen how this would imperil his fragile new life – or how his and Doyle’s fates would come to be intertwined.
The rebels will be hanged at dawn, and their brotherhood is already plotting revenge.
From the acclaimed author of The North Water comes an epic story of revenge and obsession.
The Lying Life of Adults
Elena Ferrante
‘Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly. The sentence was uttered under his breath, in the apartment that my parents, newly married, had bought in Rione Alto, at the top of Via San Giacomo dei Capri. Everything – the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a very cold February, those words – remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion: only a tangled knot, and nobody, not even the one who at this moment is writing, knows if it contains the right thread for a story or is merely a snarled confusion of suffering, without redemption.’
Giovanna’s pretty face has changed: it’s turning into the face of an ugly, spiteful adolescent. But is she seeing things as they really are? Into which mirror must she look to find herself and save herself?
She is searching for a new face in two kindred cities that fear and detest one another: the Naples of the heights, which assumes a mask of refinement, and the Naples of the depths, which professes to be a place of excess and vulgarity. She moves between these two cities, disoriented by the fact that, whether high or low, the city seems to offer no answer and no escape.
A powerful new novel set in a divided Naples by Elena Ferrante, the beloved best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend.
The Survivors
Jane Harper
Kieran Elliott’s life changed forever on the day a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences.
The guilt that still haunts him resurfaces during a visit with his young family to the small coastal community he once called home.
Kieran’s parents are struggling in a town where fortunes are forged by the sea. Between them all is his absent brother, Finn.
When a body is discovered on the beach, long-held secrets threaten to emerge. A sunken wreck, a missing girl, and questions that have never washed away…
The compelling new novel from Jane Harper, the bestselling author of The Dry.
The Mother Fault
Kate Mildenhall
You will not recognise me, she thinks, when I find you . . .
Mim’s husband is missing. No one knows where Ben is, but everyone wants to find him – especially The Department. And they should know, the all-seeing government body has fitted the entire population with a universal tracking chip to keep them ‘safe’.
But suddenly Ben can’t be tracked. And Mim is questioned, made to surrender her passport and threatened with the unthinkable – her two children being taken into care at the notorious BestLife.
Cornered, Mim risks everything to go on the run to find her husband – and a part of herself, long gone, that is brave enough to tackle the journey ahead.
From the stark backroads of the Australian outback to a terrifying sea voyage, Mim is forced to shuck off who she was – mother, daughter, wife, sister – and become the woman she needs to be to save her family and herself.
Piranesi
Susanna Clarke
Piranesi lives in the House.
Perhaps he always has.
In his notebooks, day after day, he makes a clear and careful record of its wonders: the labyrinth of halls, the thousands upon thousands of statues, the tides that thunder up staircases, the clouds that move in slow procession through the upper halls.
On Tuesdays and Fridays Piranesi sees his friend, the Other. At other times he brings tributes of food and waterlilies to the Dead. But mostly, he is alone.
Messages begin to appear, scratched out in chalk on the pavements. There is someone new in the House. But who are they and what do they want? Are they a friend or do they bring destruction and madness as the Other claims?
Lost texts must be found; secrets must be uncovered. The world that Piranesi thought he knew is becoming strange and dangerous.
The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.
The Darkest Evening (Vera Stanhope #9)
Ann Cleeves
Driving home during a swirling blizzard, Vera Stanhope’s only thought is to get there quickly.
But the snow is so heavy, she becomes disoriented and loses her way. Ploughing on, she sees a car slewed off the road ahead of her. With the driver’s door open, Vera assumes the driver has sought shelter but when she inspects the car she is shocked to find a young toddler strapped in the back seat.
Afraid they will freeze, Vera takes the child and drives on, arriving at Brockburn, a run-down stately home she immediately recognizes as the house her father Hector grew up in.
Inside Brockburn a party is in full swing, with music and laughter to herald the coming Christmas. But outside in the snow, a young woman lies dead and Vera knows immediately she has a new case. Could this woman be the child’s mother, and if so, what happened to her?
A classic country house mystery with a contemporary twist, Ann Cleeves returns with a brilliant Vera novel to savour.
State Highway One
Sam Coley
This is what I want to do. I want to go home. I want you to come with me.
‘I want to go from here . . .’
Finger on Cape Reinga.
‘. . . to here.’
Finger at the bottom of Stewart Island, right at the bottom of the map.
It’s been years since Alex was in New Zealand, and years since he spent any one-on-one time with his twin sister, Amy. When they lose their parents in a shock accident it seems like the perfect time to reconnect as siblings. To reconnect with this country they call ‘home’.
As they journey the length of State Highway One, they will scratch at wounds that have never healed – and Alex will be forced to reckon with what coming home really means.
The Burning Island
Jock Serong
A father’s obsession. A daughter’s quest.
Eliza Grayling, born in Sydney when the colony itself was still an infant, has lived there all her thirty-two years. Too tall, too stern—too old, now—for marriage, she looks out for her reclusive father, Joshua, and wonders about his past. There is a shadow there: an old enmity.
When Joshua Grayling is offered the chance for a reckoning with his nemesis, Eliza is horrified. It involves a sea voyage with an uncertain, probably violent, outcome. Insanity for an elderly blind man, let alone a drunkard.
Unable to dissuade her father from his mad fixation, Eliza begins to understand she may be forced to go with him. Then she sees the vessel they will be sailing on. And in that instant, the voyage of the Moonbird becomes Eliza’s mission too.
Irresistible prose, unforgettable characters and magnificent, epic storytelling: The Burning Island delivers everything readers have come to expect from Jock Serong. It may be his most moving, compelling novel yet.
Troubled Blood (Cormoran #6)
Robert Galbraith
Private Detective Cormoran Strike is visiting his family in Cornwall when he is approached by a woman asking for help finding her mother, Margot Bamborough – who went missing in mysterious circumstances in 1974.
Strike has never tackled a cold case before, let alone one forty years old. But despite the slim chance of success, he is intrigued and takes it on; adding to the long list of cases that he and his partner in the agency, Robin Ellacott, are currently working on. And Robin herself is also juggling a messy divorce and unwanted male attention, as well as battling her own feelings about Strike.
As Strike and Robin investigate Margot’s disappearance, they come up against a fiendishly complex case with leads that include tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot all be trusted. And they learn that even cases decades old can prove to be deadly . . .
The Evening and the Morning (A Pillars of the Earth Prequel Novel)
Ken Follett
A TIME OF CONFLICT
It is 997 CE, the end of the Dark Ages, and England faces attacks from the Welsh in the west and the Vikings in the east. Life is hard, and those with power wield it harshly, bending justice according to their will – often in conflict with the king. With his grip on the country fragile and with no clear rule of law, chaos and bloodshed reign.
THREE LIVES INTERTWINED
Into this uncertain world three people come to the fore: a young boatbuilder, who dreams of a better future when a devastating Viking raid shatters the life that he and the woman he loves hoped for; a Norman noblewoman, who follows her beloved husband across the sea to a new land only to find her life there shockingly different; and a capable monk at Shiring Abbey, who dreams of transforming his humble abbey into a centre of learning admired throughout Europe.
THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE
Now, with England at the dawn of the Middle Ages, these three people will each come into dangerous conflict with a ruthless bishop, who will do anything to increase his wealth and power, in an epic tale of ambition and rivalry, death and birth, and love and hate.
Thirty years ago we were introduced to Kingsbridge in The Pillars of the Earth, and now in this masterful prequel international bestseller Ken Follett will take us on a journey into a rich past, which will end where his masterpiece begins.
The Book of Two Ways
Jodi Picoult
Dawn Edelstein knows everything there is to know about dying. She specialises in helping her clients make peace with the end of their lives. But as she’s flying home from her latest case, she is forced to confront her own mortality for the first time.
Instead of seeing her brilliant quantum physicist husband and their beloved daughter flash before her eyes in what she assumes are her last moments, only one face is shockingly clear: Wyatt Armstrong.
Safely on the ground, Dawn now faces a desperate decision. Should she return to Boston, her family and the life she knows, or journey back to an Egyptian archaeological site she left over a decade earlier, reconnect with Wyatt, and finally finish her abandoned magnum opus, The Book of Two Ways?
As the story unfolds, Dawn must confront the questions she’s never truly answered: What does a life well-lived look like? When we depart this earth, what do we leave behind of ourselves? And who would you be if you hadn’t turned out to be the person you are right now?
House of Correction
Nicci French
‘So,’ said Mora Piozzi, her lawyer, looking down at her laptop. ‘In brief: you are charged with the murder of Stuart Robert Rees, on December 21st, between the hours of ten-forty in the morning and half-past three o’clock in the afternoon.’
Tabitha is accused of murder. She is in prison awaiting trial.
There is a strong case against her, and she can’t remember what happened on December 21st.
She is alone, frightened and confused.
But somehow, from the confines of her cell, she needs to prove everyone wrong.
House of Correction is beautifully written, clever, shocking, twisty, so believable and utterly compelling. This is another stunningly brilliant novel to relish from Nicci French.
I Give My Marriage a Year
Holly Wainwright
Lou and Josh have been together for 14 years. They share two kids, a mortgage, careers and plenty of history. Now, after a particularly fraught Christmas, Lou is ready to ask herself: is this marriage worth hanging on to?
Every month for a year, Lou sets a different test for their relationship – from daily sex to brutal honesty – to help her decide if she should stay or go. Secrets are exposed, old wounds reopened and a true-to-life suburban love story unfolds.
I Give My Marriage a Year paints a sharply accurate, often hilarious picture of a modern Australian marriage. Lou and Josh are a couple on the edge, and their efforts to bring their relationship back from the brink will resonate with anyone who has ever asked themselves: is this enough?
Whose side will you take? Who deserves a second chance? And will Josh and Lou stay together or split for good?
Betty
Tiffany McDaniel
A girl comes of age against the knife.’
So begins the story of Betty Carpenter.
Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty and violence – both from outside the family and also, devastatingly, from within. When her family’s darkest secrets are brought to light, Betty has no choice but to reckon with the brutal history hiding in the hills, as well as the heart-wrenching cruelties and incredible characters she encounters in her rural town of Breathed, Ohio.
Despite the hardship she faces, Betty is resilient. Her curiosity about the natural world, her fierce love for her sisters and her father’s brilliant stories are kindling for the fire of her own imagination, and in the face of all she bears witness to, Betty discovers an escape: she begins to write.
A heartbreaking yet magical story, Betty is a punch-in-the-gut of a novel – full of the crushing cruelty of human nature and the redemptive power of words.
The Kingdom
Jo Nesbo
When Roy and Carl’s parents die suddenly, sixteen-year-old Roy is left as protector to his impulsive younger brother. But when Carl decides to travel the world in search of his fortune, Roy stays behind in their sleepy village, satisfied with his peaceful life as a mechanic.
Some years later, Carl returns with his charismatic new wife, Shannon – an architect. They are full of exciting plans to build a spa hotel on their family land. Carl wants not only to make the brothers rich but the rest of the village, too.
It’s only a matter of time before what begins as a jubilant homecoming sparks off a series of events that threaten to derail everything Roy holds dear, as long-buried family secrets begin to rise to the surface…
The Kingdom is a simmering and complex thriller full of unexpected twists, devastating family legacies and an ever growing body count.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars
Christopher Paolini
During a routine survey mission on an uncolonized planet, xenobiologist Kira Navárez finds an alien relic that thrusts her into the wonders and nightmares of first contact. Epic space battles for the fate of humanity take her to the farthest reaches of the galaxy and, in the process, transform not only her – but the entire course of history.
To Sleep in a Sea of Stars is a masterful epic science fiction novel from the New York Times and Sunday Times bestselling author of the Inheritance Cycle, Christopher Paolini.
Just Like You
Nick Hornby
The person you are with is just like you: same background, same age, same interests. The perfect match.
And it is a disaster.
Then, when and where you least expect it, you meet someone new. You seem to have nothing in common and yet, somehow, it feels totally right.
Nick Hornby’s brilliantly observed, tender but also brutally funny new novel gets to the heart of what it means to fall surprisingly and headlong in love with the best possible person – someone who is not just like you at all.
The Tolstoy Estate
Steven Conte
In the first year of the doomed German invasion of Russia in WWII, a German military doctor, Paul Bauer, is assigned to establish a field hospital at Yasnaya Polyana – the former grand estate of Count Leo Tolstoy, the author of the classic War and Peace. There he encounters a hostile aristocratic Russian woman, Katerina Trubetzkaya, a writer who has been left in charge of the estate. But even as a tentative friendship develops between them, Bauer’s hostile and arrogant commanding officer, Julius Metz, becomes erratic and unhinged as the war turns against the Germans. Over the course of six weeks, in the terrible winter of 1941, everything starts to unravel…
From the critically acclaimed and award-winning author, Steven Conte, The Tolstoy Estate is ambitious, accomplished and astonishingly good: an engrossing, intense and compelling exploration of the horror and brutality of conflict, and the moral, emotional, physical and intellectual limits that people reach in war time. It is also a poignant, bittersweet love story – and, most movingly, a novel that explores the notion that literature can still be a potent force for good in our world.
Sorrow and Bliss
Meg Mason
This novel is about a woman called Martha. She knows there is something wrong with her but she doesn’t know what it is. Her husband Patrick thinks she is fine. He says everyone has something, the thing is just to keep going.
Martha told Patrick before they got married that she didn’t want to have children. He said he didn’t mind either way because he has loved her since he was fourteen and making her happy is all that matters, although he does not seem able to do it.
By the time Martha finds out what is wrong, it doesn’t really matter anymore. It is too late to get the only thing she has ever wanted. Or maybe it will turn out that you can stop loving someone and start again from nothing – if you can find something else to want.
The book is set in London and Oxford. It is sad and funny.
Revenge: Murder in Three Parts
S.L. Lim
‘Before I go into my grave,’ she says out loud, ‘I will kill that man.’
A family favour their son over their daughter. Shan attends university before making his fortune in Australia while Yannie must find menial employment and care for her ageing parents.
After her mother’s death, Yannie travels to Sydney to become enmeshed in her psychopathic brother’s new life, which she seeks to undermine from within …
This is a novel that rages against capitalism, hetero-supremacy, mothers, fathers, families – the whole damn thing. It’s about what happens when you want to make art but are born in the wrong time and place.
S. L. Lim brings to vivid life the frustrations of a talented daughter and vengeful sister in a nuanced and riveting novel that ends in the most unexpected way. It will not be easily forgotten.
Bluebird
Malcolm Knox
A house perched impossibly on a cliff overlooking the stunning, iconic Bluebird Beach. Prime real estate, yet somehow not real estate at all, The Lodge is, like those who live in it, falling apart.
Gordon Grimes has become the accidental keeper of this last relic of an endangered world. He lives in The Lodge with his wife Kelly who is trying to leave him, their son Ben who will do anything to save him, his goddaughter Lou who is hiding from her own troubles, and Leonie, the family matriarch who has trapped them here for their own good.
But Gordon has no money and is running out of time to conserve his homeland. His love for this way of life will drive him, and everyone around him, to increasingly desperate risks. In the end, what will it cost them to hang onto their past?
Acclaimed writer Malcolm Knox has written a classic Australian novel about the myths that come to define families and communities, and the lies that uphold them. It’s about a certain kind of Australia that we all recognise, and a certain kind of Australian whose currency is running out. Change is coming to Bluebird, whether they like it or not. And the secrets they’ve been keeping and the lies they’ve been telling can’t save them now.
Savage, funny, revelatory and brilliant, Bluebird exposes the hollowness of the stories told to glorify a dying culture and shows how those who seek to preserve these myths end up being crushed by them.
The Good Teacher
Petronella McGovern
A good teacher can change lives…
Every evening, Allison watches her husband’s new house, desperate to find some answers. Every morning, she puts on a brave face to teach kindergarten. She’s a good teacher, everyone says so – this stalking is just a tiny crack in her usual self-control.
A late enrolment into her class brings little Gracie. Allison takes the sick girl under her wing, smothering Gracie with the love she can’t give her own son. When Gracie has a chance to go to America for treatment, Allison whips up the community into a frenzied fundraising drive.
But as others start to question her judgement and the police arrive at her door, Allison wonders if she can trust herself. Has she crossed a line?
How far will the good teacher go to save a life? And whose life will that be?
An intriguing tale of our times about kindness and betrayal, and the danger of good deeds.
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
Between life and death there is a library.
When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.
The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.
Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?
The touching, funny and heartwarming new novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of How to Stop Time and Reasons to Stay Alive.
The Mayflies
Andrew O’Hagan
Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life.
In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently.
Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news.
Mayflies is a memorial to youth’s euphorias and to everyday tragedy. A tender goodbye to an old union, it discovers the joy and the costs of love.
The Morbids
Ewa Ramsey
Caitlin is convinced she’s going to die.
Two years ago she was a normal twenty-something with a blossoming career and a plan to go travelling with her best friend, until a car accident left her with a deep, unshakable understanding that she’s only alive by mistake.
Caitlin deals with these thoughts by throwing herself into work, self-medicating with alcohol, and attending a support group for people with death-related anxiety, informally known as the Morbids.
But when her best friend announces she’s getting married in Bali, and she meets a handsome doctor named Tom, Caitlin must overcome her fear of death and learn to start living again.
Beautiful, funny, and universally relatable this story of hidden loneliness and the power of compassion and companionship reminds us that life is an adventure truly worth living.
NON-FICTION
Sam Bloom: Heartache and Birdsong
Samantha Bloom, Cameron Bloom & Bradley Trevor Greive
The heart-warming Australian story Penguin Bloom – the miraculous tale of a baby magpie that helped save a young mother and her family – is a homegrown and international bestseller; soon to be a major Hollywood movie, starring Naomi Watts and Andrew Lincoln. Sam’s personal message at the end of the book has resonated powerfully with readers – where, pulling no punches, she writes about what it is really like to face life in a wheelchair.
In Sam Bloom, Sam tells her own story for the first time – how a shy but determined Australian girl became a nurse and travelled across Africa. How she fell in love with a like-minded free spirit, raised three boys and built a life together on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. And then, in a single horrific moment, how everything changed. Sam’s journey back from the edge of death and the depths of despair is so much more than an account of overcoming adversity. Sam’s captivating true story – written by close friend, New York Times bestselling author Bradley Trevor Greive, and featuring extraordinary photographs taken by Sam’s husband, Cameron Bloom – is humbling, heartbreaking and uplifting in equal measure. A triumph of raw emotion and incredible beauty, Sam Bloom: Heartache & Birdsong is a truly unforgettable book.
My Tidda, My Sister
Marlee Silva
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture and society has existed on this continent for millennia. It’s a culture that manifests itself as the ultimate example of resilience, strength and beauty. It’s also a culture that has consistently been led by its women.
My Tidda, My Sister shares the experiences of many Indigenous women and girls, brought together by author and host of the Tiddas 4 Tiddas podcast, Marlee Silva. The voices of First Nations’ women that Marlee weaves through the book provide a rebuttal to the idea that ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’. For non-Indigenous women, it demonstrates the diversity of what success can look like and offers an insight into the lives of their Indigenous sisters and peers.
Featuring colourful artwork by artist Rachael Sarra, this book is a celebration of the Indigenous female experience through truth-telling. Some stories are heart-warming, while others shine a light on the terrible realities for many Australian Indigenous women, both in the past and in the present. But what they all share is the ability to inspire and empower, creating a sisterhood for all Australian women.
Also features foreword by Helpmann and AACTA award-winning actor Leah Purcell.
The Doctor Who Fooled the World
Brian Deer
A reporter uncovers the secrets behind the scientific scam of the century.
The news breaks first as a tale of fear and pity. Doctors at a London hospital claim a link between autism and a vaccine given to millions of children: MMR. Young parents are terrified. Immunisation rates slump. And as a worldwide ‘anti-vax’ movement kicks off, old diseases return to sicken and kill.
But a veteran reporter isn’t so sure, and sets out on an epic investigation. Battling establishment cover-ups, smear campaigns, and gagging lawsuits, he exposes rigged research and secret schemes, the heartbreaking plight of families struggling with disability, and the scientific deception of our time.
Great Expectations: Emigrant Governesses in Colonial Australia
Patricia Clarke
For educated middle-class women in nineteenth-century Britain, options were limited. Marry and bear children, accept the drudgery of keeping house for relatives or friends, or attempt to find a position in one of the very few industries that would employ women. This is the story of a group of intrepid ladies who found a different solution on the other side of the world.
The Female Middle Class Emigration Society scheme helped governesses and would-be governesses emigrate to the colonies from 1861 to 1886. The women who participated were encouraged to write back to the society, and it is their letters—sometimes plaintive, sometimes upbeat—that form the heart of this book. Written by women who were often fluent in multiple foreign languages, skilled artists and musicians, able to teach the liberal arts, as well as algebra and geometry, the letters describe wildly different experiences and stories of culture clash abound.
Great Expectations tells of the colonial experiences of a particular group of emigrant women, but it also tells a broader story, of emigration, education, class prejudice and the development of Australian society.
Ottolenghi FLAVOUR
Yotam Ottolenghi & Ixta Belfrage
Flavour-forward, vegetable-based recipes are at the heart of Yotam Ottolenghi’s food.
In this stunning new cookbook Yotam and co-writer Ixta Belfrage break down the three factors that create flavour and offer innovative vegetable dishes that deliver brand-new ingredient combinations to excite and inspire.
Ottolenghi FLAVOUR combines simple recipes for weeknights, low-effort high-impact dishes, and standout meals for the relaxed cook. Packed with signature colourful photography, FLAVOUR not only inspires us with what to cook, but how flavour is dialled up and why it works.
The book is broken down into three parts, which reveal how to tap into the potential of ordinary vegetables to create extraordinary food:
- Process explains cooking methods that elevate veg to great heights;
- Pairing identifies four basic pairings that are fundamental to great flavour;
- Produce offers impactful vegetables that do the work for you.
With surefire hits, such as Aubergine Dumplings alla Parmigiana, Hasselback Beetroot with Lime Leaf Butter, Miso Butter Onions, Spicy Mushroom Lasagne and Romano Pepper Schnitzels, plus mouthwatering photographs of nearly every one of the more than 100 recipes, Ottolenghi FLAVOUR is the impactful, next-level approach to vegetable cooking that Ottolenghi fans and vegetable lovers everywhere have been craving.
Another Now
Yanis Varoufakis
Imagine it is 2025. Years earlier, in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, a global hi-tech uprising has birthed a post-capitalist world in which work, money, land, digital networks and politics have been truly democratised.
In a thought-experiment of startling originality, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis offers a glimpse of this alternative reality. Through the eyes of three characters – a libertarian ex-banker, a Marxist-feminist and a maverick technologist – we see the genesis of a world without commercial banks or stock markets, where companies are owned equally by all staff, basic income is guaranteed, global imbalances and climate change cancel each other out, and housing is socialised.
Is a liberal socialism feasible? Can prosperity grow without costing the Earth? Are we able to build the good society, despite our flaws? As radical in its form as in its vision, Another Now blends Platonic dialogue with speculative fiction to show that there is an alternative to capitalism, while also confronting us with the greatest question – how far are we willing to go to bring it about?
This One Wild and Precious Life
Sarah Wilson
Will you sleep through the revolution? Or do you want to wake up and reclaim your one wild and precious life?
We live in truly overwhelming times. The climate crisis, political polarisation, racial injustice and coronavirus have left many of us in a state of spiritual PTSD. We have retreated, morally and psychologically; we are experiencing a crisis of disconnection – from one another, from our true values, from joy, and from life as we feel we are meant to be living it.
Sarah Wilson argues that this sense of despair and disconnection is ironically what unites us – that deep down, we are all feeling that same itch for a new way of living. this one wild and precious life opens our eyes to how we got here and offers a radically hopeful path forward. Drawing on science, literature, philosophy, the wisdom of some of the world’s leading experts, and her personal journey, Wilson weaves a one-of-a-kind narrative that lights the way back to the life we love. En route, she leads us through a series of ‘wildly awake’ and joyful practices for reconnecting again that include:
- Go to your edge.
Do what scares you and embrace discomfort daily. Use it to grow into your Big Life. - #buylesslivemore.
Break the cycle of mindless consumption and get light with your life. - Become a soul nerd.
Embrace poetry, deep reading, art, and classical music to light up your intellect. - Get ‘full-fat spiritual’.
How to have an active practice – beyond the ‘lite’ ‘rainbows and unicorns’ – and use it to change the world. - Hike. Just hike.
Walking in nature reconnects us with ourselves, and with our true purpose. - Practise wild activism.
If you can get 3.5 per cent of a population to participate in sustained, non-violent protest, change happens. We create our better world.
The time has come to boldly, wildly, imagine better. We are being called upon, individually and as a society, to forge a new path and to find a new way of living. Will you join the journey?
From Boys to Men
Maggie Dent
For boys, adolescence can be a confusing minefield and parents are often bewildered as to how to best guide their precious sons.
Many parents wake one day to find that their beautiful little boys have grown into silent, withdrawn, sometimes angry and often unmotivated tweens and teens.
Well-known Australian author, parenting and resilience educator, and one of Australia’s favourite boy experts Maggie Dent, offers parents and guardians a compassionate and practical guidebook, packed with advice and ground-breaking techniques on how to stay calm and:
- Communicate effectively to defuse conflict
- ‘Unstick’ an unmotivated son
- Teach them to cope with loss and failure, and how to recover
- Help them foster healthy friendships and intimate relationships
- Navigate technology and the digital world.
From Boys to Men empowers parents with insights, tips and a common-sense approach to help all boys – and their families – thrive as they progress through adolescence, offering hope for a future of adventure, stability, engagement and connection.
Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy
Ben Macintyre
In the quiet Cotswolds village of Great Rollright in 1945, an elegant housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted wife and mother-of-three, Mrs Burton seemed to epitomise rural British domesticity.
However, rather than pedalling towards the shops with her ration book, she was racing through the Oxfordshire countryside to gather scientific intelligence from one of the country’s most brilliant nuclear physicists. Secrets that she would transmit to Soviet intelligence headquarters via the radio transmitter she was hiding in her outdoor privy.
Far from a British housewife, Mrs Burton – born Ursula Kuczynski, and codenamed ‘Sonya’ – was a German Jew, a dedicated communist, a colonel in Russia’s Red Army, and a highly-trained spy. From planning an assassination attempt on Hitler in Switzerland, to spying on the Japanese in Manchuria, and helping the Soviet Union build the atom bomb, Sonya conducted some of the most dangerous espionage operations of the twentieth century. Her story has never been told – until now.
Agent Sonya is the exhilarating account of one woman’s life; a life that encompasses the rise and fall of communism itself, and altered the course of history.
The Carbon Club
Marian Wilkinson
As the climate crisis threatens more extreme bushfire seasons, droughts and floods, many Australians are demanding their leaders answer the question: ‘Why didn’t you do something?’
The Carbon Club reveals the truth behind Australia’s two decades of climate inaction. It’s the story of how a loose confederation of influential climate-science sceptics, politicians and business leaders sought to control Australia’s response to the climate crisis. They shared a fear that dealing with climate change would undermine the nation’s wealth, jobs and competitive advantage – and the power of the carbon club.
Central to their strategy was an international campaign to undermine climate science and the urgency of the climate crisis. The more the climate science was questioned, the more politicians lost the imperative to act. The sustained success of the carbon club over two decades explains why Australian governments failed to deal with the challenge of climate change. But at what cost to us and the next generation?
One of Australia’s most respected investigative journalists, Marian Wilkinson has tracked the rise and rise of Australia’s carbon club in brilliant detail, with extraordinary access to key players on all sides. The result is a book that is both essential and disturbing reading.
Happy (and Other Ridiculous Aspirations)
Turia Pitt
Thousands of people have told me the one thing they’re searching for in life is happiness. So, I set out on a dragon-free quest to prove if ‘happy’ is, actually, an attainable goal, and not just a ridiculous aspiration.
Happiness. Everyone wants more of it. But can you actually get happier? Inspirational Australian, Turia Pitt, dives into this idea, interviewing high-profile athletes, comedians, scientists and world experts to explore how everything from money to our relationships has an impact on how happy we can be.
In this book, with her characteristic humour and gutsy intelligence,* Turia Pitt goes on a quest to answer the question, Is it possible to be happier?
What does she discover on her journey? Well, look, that’s why we want you to buy the bloody book, but we can tell you that it entails, among other things, practising gratitude, working on kindness, self-love, strengthening your relationships and accepting the hard times and bad days.
Turia unpacks all of the above with easy-to-implement tips and strategies, hilarious insights into her own life and relationships, and introduces us to some of the world’s most fabulous people along the way, including Leigh Sales, Scott Pape, Zoë Foster Blake, Maria Forleo and Mick Fanning.
*She made us say that.
When America Stopped Being Great
Nick Bryant
The presidency of Donald Trump is commonly seen as an historical accident. In When America Stopped Being Great, Nick Bryant argues that by 2016 it had become almost historically inescapable. In this highly personal account, drawing on decades of covering Washington for the BBC, Bryant shows how the billionaire capitalised on the mistakes of his five predecessors – Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama – and how also he became a beneficiary of a broken politics, an iniquitous economy, an ailing media, a facile culture, disruptive new technology and the creation of a modern-day presidency that elevated showmanship over statesmanship. Not only are we starting to see the emergence of a post-American world, Bryant fears we are seeing the emergence of a post-American America.
The history of Trump’s rise is also a history of America’s fall. A comprehensive analysis of the political, economic, cultural and technological factors that contributed to America’s decline and inadvertently paved the way for Trump’s presidency.
How to Grow Your Dinner Without Leaving the House
Claire Ratinon
A vegetable garden is not an option for everyone, and so container growing has become desirable for people with little outside space.
Many have discovered the love of growing houseplants and want to take their skills to another level; others are inspired by the idea of growing their own food organically and sustainably. The book covers all the essentials of growing a range of edible plants in pots, and meeting each crop’s specific needs.
Author Claire Ratinon brings her urban food growing expertise to this popular subject, in a book designed to appeal to new gardeners and anyone who would like to take on the rewarding challenge of growing their own dinner, even if they’ve only got a window box or balcony to work with.
The People of the River
Grace Karskens
Dyarubbin, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River, is where the two early Australias – ancient and modern – first collided. People of the River journeys into the lost worlds of the Aboriginal people and the settlers of Dyarubbin, both complex worlds with ancient roots.
The settlers who took land on the river from the mid-1790s were there because of an extraordinary experiment devised half a world away. Modern Australia was not founded as a gaol, as we usually suppose, but as a colony. Britain’s felons, transported to the other side of the world, were meant to become settlers in the new colony. They made history on the river: it was the first successful white farming frontier, a community that nurtured the earliest expressions of patriotism, and it became the last bastion of eighteenth-century ways of life.
The Aboriginal people had occupied Dyarubbin for at least 50,000 years. Their history, culture and spirituality were inseparable from this river Country. Colonisation kicked off a slow and cumulative process of violence, theft of Aboriginal children and ongoing annexation of the river lands. Yet despite that sorry history, Dyarubbin’s Aboriginal people managed to remain on their Country, and they still live on the river today.
The Hawkesbury-Nepean was the seedbed for settler expansion and invasion of Aboriginal lands to the north, south and west. It was the crucible of the colony, and the nation that followed.
My Year of Living Mindfully
Shannon Harvey
In the midst of a global mental health crisis, millions of people have turned to mindfulness. But does it actually work? In a world-first experiment, journalist Shannon Harvey recruited a team of scientists to put mindful meditation to the test. But what began as a year-long self-experiment soon became a life-changing experience.
Overwhelmed with insomnia and an incurable autoimmune disease, Shannon Harvey needed to make a change. But while the award-winning health journalist found plenty of recommendations on diet, sleep and exercise, when she looked for the equivalent of a 30-minute workout for her mental wellbeing, there was nothing.
Also worried for the future mental health of her kids, who were growing up amidst critical levels of stress, anxiety, depression and addiction, Shannon enlisted a team of scientists to put meditation to the test. Could learning to quiet our busy minds be the simple solution the world so desperately needs?
During her year of living mindfully Shannon is poked, prodded, scanned and screened. After a 30,000 kilometre journey from Australia to the bright lights of Manhattan and the dusty refugee camps of the Middle East – interviewing the world’s leading mindfulness experts along the way – what begins as a quest for answers transforms into a life-changing experience.
From the director of the internationally acclaimed documentary of the same name, My Year of Living Mindfully is filled with compelling stories, groundbreaking science, and unexpected insights that go to the heart of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.
The Genes That Make Us
Edwin Kirk
Genes — we all have them and we’re all affected by them, often in unknown ways.
Whether directly inherited or modified by our environment, genes control or significantly influence almost every aspect of our lives. From the success of our conception and the development of our sexual characteristics, to the colour of our skin, hair, and eyes. From our height and weight, to our daily health. And, unfortunately, our genes are involved in an untold number of diseases. For many, the first time that genetics truly matters is in a doctor’s office as they learn about a condition that may affect them, their unborn children, or even their wider family.
Yet from the first laborious survey of the human genome twenty years ago to the commercial machines that now sequence 6,000 genomes per year, a revolution is taking place in medicine. Genetic screening is already available for major diseases and will become an increasingly prevalent medical tool. Around the world, teams of researchers are working on cures for diseases such as cancer, certain degenerative disorders, and a host of syndromes, while others are inventing new ways to conceive — and even modifying our genome in ways that could change what it means to be human.
Navigating this world of heartbreaking uncertainties, tantalising possibilities, and thorny questions of morality is Professor Edwin Kirk, who in addition to having over two decades of experience is that rare doctor who works both in the lab and with patients. In The Genes That Make Us, he explains everything you need to know with humour, insight, and great humanity.
No Matter Our Wreckage
Gemma Carey
My mother knew I was abused as a child. She had read letters sent from my abuser to me…But she never spoke to me about them, or what they described. And she never intervened to stop the abuse…Now she is dying and the past is rising to the surface like a bruise.
When Gemma Carey was twelve years old, a man twice her age would sneak into her bedroom on a weekly basis and sexually assault her. When Gemma was seventeen, she took the perpetrator to court without anyone else knowing and had him placed on the child sex offenders register. When she was thirty-three, her mother died of cancer. For twenty years, her mother had known about this man. But why had she not acted to protect her daughter? Could the genesis of this betrayal be found in her own family history?
No Matter Our Wreckage is the story of past and present colliding. It seeks to capture the complexity of forces which lead to abuse; to understand the intertwined narratives of mothers and daughters and how trauma becomes encoded in our DNA through generations. It explores grooming and the intricacies of consent, and how as a society we have not yet figured out how to deal with these types of crimes or the people who commit them.
No Matter Our Wreckage is a powerful, poetic and unflinching memoir about what it means not to matter, and how an extraordinary woman refused to listen to the stories she was being told about herself – by her history, by her abuser, by her mother, by society. It is only by speaking out that Gemma Carey learns she can break free from her past and reclaim her life, her self and her future.
From Snow to Ash
Anthony Sharwood
At the start of the hellish, fiery Australian summer of 2019/20, Walkley Award-winning journalist and suburban dad Anthony Sharwood set off on a journey. Abandoning his post on a busy news website to clear his mind, he solo-trekked the Australian Alps Walking Track, Australia’s most gruelling and breathtakingly beautiful mainland hiking trail, which traverses the entirety of the legendary High Country from Gippsland in Victoria to the outskirts of Canberra.
The journey started in a blizzard and ended in a blaze. Along the way, this lifelong lover of the mountains came to realise that nothing would ever be the same – either for him or for the imperilled Australian Alps, a landscape as fragile and sensitive to the changing climate as the Great Barrier Reef.
Hysteria
Katerina Bryant
When Katerina Bryant suddenly began experiencing chronic seizures, she was plunged into a foreign world of doctors and psychiatrists, who understood her condition as little as she did. Reacting the only way she knew how, she immersed herself in books, reading her way through her own complicated diagnosis and finding a community of women who shared similar experiences.
In the tradition of Siri Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman, Bryant blends memoir with literary and historical analysis to explore women’s medical treatment. Hysteria retells the stories of silenced women, from the ‘Queen of Hysterics’ Blanche Wittmann to Mary Glover’s illness termed ‘hysterica passio’ a panic attack caused by the movement of the uterus — in London in 1602 and more. By centring these stories of women who had no voice in their own diagnosis and treatment, Bryant finds her own voice: powerful, brave and resonant.
Just Ignore Him
Alan Davies
The story of a life built on sand. In the rain.
In this compelling memoir, comedian and actor Alan Davies recalls his boyhood with vivid insight and devastating humour. Shifting between his 1970s upbringing and his life today, Davies moves poignantly from innocence to experience to the clarity of hindsight, always with a keen sense of the absurd.
From sibling dynamics, to his voiceless, misunderstood progression through school, sexuality and humiliating ‘accidents’, Davies inhabits his younger mind with spectacular accuracy, sharply evoking an era when Green Shield Stamps, Bob-a-Job week and Whizzer & Chips loomed large, a bus fare was 2p – and children had little power in the face of adult motivation. Here, there are often exquisitely tender recollections of the mother he lost at six years old, of a bereaved family struggling to find its way, and the kicks and confusion of adolescence.
Through even the joyous and innocent memories, the pain of Davies’s lifelong grief and profound betrayal is unfiltered, searing and beautifully articulated. Just Ignore Him is not only an autobiography, it is a testament to a survivor’s resilience and courage.
A Year of Simple Family Food
Julia Busuttil Nishimura
Family food is generous, unfussy and demonstrates love and care. No matter what busyness the day brings, the act of setting the table and enjoying a simple meal together is comforting and ever-reassuring.
Eating simply and seasonally is at the core of Julia Busuttil Nishimura’s recipes.
Whether it’s a cooling coffee granita to start a summer’s day or the comfort of a hearty baked maccheroni in darkest winter, this is the kind of food you will want to share with your loved ones throughout the year.
The dishes in this book are brought to life by great ingredients. There are plenty of quick recipes and some that require more time to bubble away on the stove. Overall, they are linked by taste and pleasure, and making the most of seasonal produce. This is generous, delicious food that the whole family will love, all year round.
The Secret Life of the Savoy and the D’Oyly Carte family
Olivia Williams
In 1889, Victorian impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte opened The Savoy, Britain’s first luxury hotel. Allowing the rich to live like royalty, it attracted glamour, scandal and a cast of eccentric characters, with the D’Oyly Carte family elevated to a unique vantage point on high society.
The Secret Life of the Savoy tells their story through three generations: Richard (a showman who made his fortune from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas), Rupert (who expanded the D’Oyly Carte empire through two world wars and the roaring twenties), and Bridget (the reluctant heiress and last of the family line). In this, the first biography of the family, Olivia Williams revives their extroardinary cultural legacy, told through the prism of their iconic hotel and its many distinguished guests.
Rising Heart
Aminata Conteh-Biger
One woman’s astonishing journey from unimaginable trauma to becoming a power for good.
In 1999, Sierra Leone was in the midst of a brutal civil war where mindless violence, vicious amputation and the rape of young enslaved women were the everyday weapons of bloody conflict.
It was also where rebel soldiers snatched the young Aminata Conteh-Biger from her father’s arms, then held her captive for months.
After she was released, the UNHCR recognised that her captors still posed a serious threat to her safety. So, still in her teens, she was put on a plane and flown to Australia to start afresh as a refugee in a land she knew nothing about.
It is here that she has proudly built a life, while never allowing her trauma to define her. Yet it was a near-death experience she suffered during the birth of her child that turned her attention to the women of Sierra Leone – where they are 200 times more likely to die while having a baby than in Australia.
So she set up the Aminata Maternal Foundation, then returned to the land of her birth to help. This is her story.
Second Best: The Amazing Untold Histories of the Greatest Runners-up
Ben Pobjie
History is always written by the winners and about the winners. But what about the men and women of the past who reached for gold but grasped only morale-sapping silver?
Australia’s second-best comedy historian Ben Pobjie celebrates the fascinating stories of those pipped at the post of greatness – from Buzz Aldrin following footsteps on the moon, to the woman not credited with discovering DNA because she had two X chromosomes, and Australia’s second Prime Minister whose name everyone keeps forgetting.
Second Best shines a light on those plucky men and women who, through no fault of their own – or at least only a little bit of fault of their own – didn’t quite get there before everyone else, but did get there before almost everyone else.
365 Days of Art in Nature
Lorna Scobie
In 365 Days of Art in Nature, Lorna Scobie, invites the reader to take a closer look at the natural world – whether that’s outside on location, or inside their own home – reminding us all that regardless of whether we live in the city or the countryside, wildlife is just on our doorstep.
Observe the slow, constant pace of the nature that surrounds you every day, and use it to inspire you in your art and creativity. Activities may include visiting a particular tree, four times in the year and drawing it. How has it changed? Study the colours you find in autumn leaves. Explore drawing them in different materials.
Featuring nature-inspired quotes, breakaway activities to get you outdoors and plenty of supportive prompts and tips, this book will spark your imagination and help you to open your eyes and appreciate the natural beauty in our world.
FICTION
The Pull of the Stars
Emma Donoghue
In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city centre, where expectant mothers who have come down with an unfamiliar Flu are quarantined together.
Into Julia’s regimented world step two outsiders: Doctor Kathleen Lynn, on the run from the police, and a young volunteer helper, Bridie Sweeney. In the darkness and intensity of this tiny ward, over three days, these women change each other’s lives in unexpected ways. They lose patients to this baffling pandemic, but they also shepherd new life into a fearful world.
With tireless tenderness and humanity, carers and mothers alike somehow do their impossible work.
The Girl in the Mirror
Rose Carlyle
Identical twins only look the same …
Beautiful twin sisters Iris and Summer are startlingly alike, but beyond what the eye can see lies a darkness that sets them apart. Cynical and insecure, Iris has long been envious of open-hearted Summer’s seemingly never-ending good fortune, including her perfect husband, Adam.
Called to Thailand to help sail the family yacht to the Seychelles, Iris nurtures her own secret hopes for what might happen on the journey. But when she unexpectedly finds herself alone in the middle of the Indian Ocean, everything changes.
Now is her chance to take what she’s always wanted – the idyllic life she’s always coveted. But just how far will she go to get the life she’s dreamed about? And how will she make sure no one discovers the truth?
Written with the chilling suspense of The Girl on the Train and Before I Go to Sleep, The Girl in the Mirror is an addictive thriller about greed, lust, secrets and deadly lies.
The Book of Hidden Wonders
Polly Crosby
Hidden in the pages of a book, a secret story…
Romilly lives in a ramshackle house with her eccentric artist father and her cat, Monty. She knows little about her past – but she knows that she is loved.
When her father finds fame with a series of children’s books starring her as the main character, everything changes: exotic foods appear on the table, her father appears on TV, and strangers appear at their door, convinced the books contain a treasure hunt leading to a glittering prize.
But as time passes, Romilly’s father becomes increasingly suspicious of everything around him, until, before her eyes, he begins to disappear altogether.
In her increasingly isolated world, Romilly turns to the secrets her father has hidden in his illustrated books, realising that there is something far darker and more devastating locked within the pages…
The truth.
Summer
Ali Smith
In the present, Sacha knows the world’s in trouble. Her brother Robert just is trouble. Their mother and father are having trouble. Meanwhile the world’s in meltdown – and the real meltdown hasn’t even started yet.
In the past, a lovely summer. A different brother and sister know they’re living on borrowed time.
This is a story about people on the brink of change. They’re family, but they think they’re strangers. So: where does family begin? And what do people who think they’ve got nothing in common have in common? Summer.
The unmissable finale to Ali Smith’s dazzling literary tour de force: the Seasonal quartet concludes in 2020 with Summer.
The Night Whistler
Greg Woodland
Are you lonesome tonight…
It’s 1966. Hal and his little brother, newly arrived in Moorabool with their parents, are exploring the creek near their new home when they find the body of a dog.
Not just dead, but recently killed.
Not just killed, but mutilated.
Constable Mick Goodenough, recently demoted from his city job as a detective, is also new in town – and one of his dogs has gone missing. He’s experienced enough to know what it means when someone tortures an animal to death – it means they’re practising. So when Hal’s mother starts getting anonymous calls – a man whistling, then hanging up – Goodenough, alone among the Moorabool cops, takes her seriously.
The question is – will that be enough to keep her safe?
Nostalgic yet clear-eyed, simmering with small-town menace, Greg Woodland’s wildly impressive debut populates the rural Australia of the 1960s with memorable characters and almost unbearable tension.
Wild
Kristin Hannah
In the rugged Pacific Northwest of the United States lies the Olympic National Forest – a vast expanse of impenetrable darkness and impossible beauty. From deep within this mysterious land, a six-year-old girl appears. Speechless and alone, she offers no clue as to her identity, no hint of her past.
Having retreated to her hometown after a scandal left her career in ruins, child psychiatrist Dr. Julia Cates begins working with the extraordinary little girl. Naming her Alice, Julia is determined to free her from a prison of unimaginable fear and isolation, and discover the truth about Alice’s past. The shocking facts of Alice’s life test the limits of Julia’s faith and strength, even as she struggles to make a home for Alice – and find a new one for herself.
The Question of Love
Hugh Mackay
What really goes on in a marriage?
Richard and Freya are, on the surface, a perfect couple. He has a thriving architectural practice; she plays the violin like an angel. They live in a beautiful home. They seem respectful and caring of one another.
They should be happier than they are.
In The Question of Love, Hugh Mackay has constructed a novel of stunning originality – both a sympathetic examination of a marriage and a nuanced exposition of the complexities and contradictions of human love.
Starkly observed, beautifully written and intricately plotted, The Question of Love explores the myriad ways we resist the terrible beauty of true intimacy.
Mary Toft or the Rabbit Queen
Dexter Palmer
In 1726 in the small town of Godalming, England, surgeon John Howard is a rational man. His apprentice Zachary knows John is reluctant to believe anything that purports to exist outside the realm of logic. But even John cannot explain how or why Mary Toft, the wife of a local farmer, manages to give birth to a dead rabbit.
When this singular event becomes a regular occurrence, John realizes that nothing in his experience as a village physician has prepared him to deal with a situation as disturbing as this. He writes to several preeminent surgeons in London, three of whom quickly arrive in the small town of Godalming ready to observe and opine.
When Mary’s plight reaches the attention of King George, Mary and her doctors are summoned to London, where Zachary experiences for the first time a world apart from his small-town existence, and is exposed to some of the darkest corners of the human soul. All the while, Mary lies in bed, waiting for another birth, as doubts begin to blossom among the surgeons and a growing group of onlookers grow impatient for another miracle . . .
A stunning, powerfully evocative new novel based on a true story.
When She Was Good
Michael Robotham
She has secrets.
Six years ago, Evie Cormac was found hiding in a secret room in the aftermath of a brutal murder. But nobody has ever discovered her real name or where she came from, because everybody who tries ends up dead.
He needs answers.
Forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven believes the truth will set Evie free. Ignoring her warnings, he begins to dig into her past, only to disturb a hornet’s nest of corrupt and powerful people, who have been waiting to find Evie – the final witness they have been searching for. Unbeknownst to him, Cyrus is leading them straight to Evie. The truth will not set her free. It will get them killed.
From Australia’s foremost crime writer, Michael Robotham, this is the second explosive novel featuring gifted criminal psychologist Cyrus Haven following the Edgar-award nominated Good Girl, Bad Girl.
The Miseducation of Evie Epworth
Matson Taylor
July, 1962
Sixteen year-old Evie Epworth stands on the cusp of womanhood. But what kind of a woman will she become?
The fastest milk bottle-delivery girl in East Yorkshire, Evie is tall as a tree and hot as the desert sand. She dreams of an independent life lived under the bright lights of London (or Leeds). The two posters of Adam Faith on her bedroom wall (‘brooding Adam’ and ‘sophisticated Adam’) offer wise counsel about a future beyond rural East Yorkshire. Her role models are Charlotte Bronte, Shirley MacLaine and the Queen. But, before she can decide on a career, she must first deal with the malign presence of her future step-mother, the manipulative and money-grubbing Christine.
If Evie can rescue her bereaved father, Arthur, from Christine’s pink and over-perfumed clutches, and save the farmhouse from being sold off then maybe she can move on with her own life and finally work out exactly who it is she is meant to be.
Moving, inventive and richly comic, The Miseducation of Evie Epworth is the most joyful debut novel of the year and the best thing to have come out of Yorkshire since Wensleydale cheese.
The Labyrinth
Amanda Lohrey
Erica Marsden’s son, an artist, has been imprisoned for homicidal negligence. In a state of grief, Erica cuts off all ties to family and friends, and retreats to a quiet hamlet on the south-east coast near the prison where he is serving his sentence.
There, in a rundown shack, she obsesses over creating a labyrinth by the ocean. To build it—to find a way out of her quandary—Erica will need the help of strangers. And that will require her to trust, and to reckon with her past.
The Labyrinth is a hypnotic story of guilt and denial, of the fraught relationship between parents and children, that is also a meditation on how art can both be ruthlessly destructive and restore sanity. It shows Amanda Lohrey to be at the peak of her powers.
The Mission House
Carys Davies
Fleeing the dark undercurrents of contemporary Britain, Hilary Byrd takes refuge in a hill station in South India. There he finds solace in life’s simple pleasures, travelling by rickshaw around the small town and staying in a mission house beside the local presbytery, where the Padre and his adoptive daughter Priscilla have taken him under their wing.
As his friendship with the young woman grows, Hilary begins to wonder whether his purpose lies in this new relationship. But religious tensions are brewing and the mission house may not be the safe haven it seems.
The Mission House boldly and imaginatively interrogates the fractures between faith and non-belief, young and old, imperial past and nationalistic present. Tenderly subversive and meticulously crafted, it is a deeply human story of the wonders and terrors of connection in a modern world.
Moonflower Murders
Anthony Horowitz
Retired publisher Susan Ryeland is running a small hotel on a Greek island with her long-term boyfriend. But life isn’t as idyllic as it should be: exhausted by the responsibility of making everything work on an island where nothing ever does, Susan is beginning to miss her literary life in London – even though her publishing career once entangled her in a lethal literary murder plot.
So when an English couple come to visit with tales of a murder that took place in a hotel the same day their daughter Cecily was married there, Susan can’t help but find herself fascinated.
And when they tell her that Cecily has gone missing a few short hours after reading Atticus Pund Takes The Case, a crime novel Susan edited some years previously, Susan knows she must return to London to find out what has happened.
The clues to the murder and to Cecily’s disappearance must lie within the pages of this novel.
But to save Cecily, Susan must place her own life in mortal danger…
Kokomo
Victoria Hannan
When Mina receives an urgent call from her best friend back in Melbourne, her world is turned upside down. Her reclusive mother, Elaine, has left the house for the first time in twelve years.
Mina drops everything to fly home, only to discover that Elaine will not talk about her sudden return to the world, nor why she’s spent so much time hiding from it. Their reunion leaves Mina raking through pieces of their painful past in a bid to uncover the truth.
Both tender and fierce, heartbreaking and funny, Kokomo is a story about how secrets and love have the power to bring us together and tear us apart.
The Space Between Worlds
Micaiah Johnson
My mother used to say I was born reaching, which is true. She also used to say it would get me killed, which it hasn’t. Not yet, anyway.
Born in the dirt of the wasteland, Cara has fought her entire life just to survive. Now she has done the impossible, and landed herself a comfortable life on the lower levels of the wealthy and walled-off Wiley City. So long as she can keep her head down and avoid trouble, she’s on a sure path to citizenship and security – on this world, at least.
Of the 380 realities that have been unlocked, Cara is dead in all but 8.
Cara’s parallel selves are exceptionally good at dying – from disease, turf wars, or vendettas they couldn’t outrun – which makes Cara wary, and valuable. Because while multiverse travel is possible, no one can visit a world in which their counterpart is still alive. And no one has fewer counterparts than Cara.
But then one of her eight doppelgangers dies under mysterious circumstances, and Cara is plunged into a new world with an old secret. What she discovers will connect her past and future in ways she never could have imagined – and reveal her own role in a plot that endangers not just her earth, but the entire multiverse.
The Last Migration
Charlotte McConaghy
A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive.
How far you would you go for love? Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica.
As animal populations plummet and commercial fishing faces prohibition, Franny talks her way onto one of the few remaining boats heading south. But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny’s life begin to unspool. A daughter’s yearning search for her mother. An impulsive, passionate marriage. A shocking crime. Haunted by love and violence, Franny must confront what she is really running towards – and from.
The Last Migration is a wild, gripping and deeply moving novel from a brilliant young writer. From the west coast of Ireland to Australia and remote Greenland, through crashing Atlantic swells to the bottom of the world, this is an ode to the wild places and creatures now threatened, and an epic story of the possibility of hope against all odds.
The Stray Cats of Homs
Eva Nour
‘A cat has seven souls in Arabic. In English cats have nine lives. You probably have both nine lives and seven souls, because otherwise I don’t know how you’ve made it this far.’
Sami’s childhood is much like any other – an innocent blend of family and school, of friends and relations and pets (including stray cats and dogs, and the turtle he keeps on the roof).
But growing up in one of the largest cities in Syria, with his country at war with itself, means that nothing is really normal. And Sami’s hopes for a better future are ripped away when he is conscripted into the military and forced to train as a map maker.
Sami may be shielded from the worst horrors of the war, but it will still be impossible to avoid his own nightmare.
Inspired by extraordinary true events, The Stray Cats of Homs is the story of a young man who will do anything to keep the dream of home alive, even in the face of unimaginable devastation. Tender, wild and raw, it is a novel which will stay with you for ever.
Meanwhile in Dopamine City
DBC Pierre
Dopamine City is the story of Lonny Cush, sanitation worker and single parent, kind-hearted and red-blooded, who is trying his best to protect his kids from the hysterical hyper-reality of 21st century life.
He lives in an unnamed fictional world city, dominated by a huge tech company akin to Google. A manual worker – although he has been put forward for ‘retraining’, a euphemism for redundancy – Lonny is out of sync with the changes in his hometown and his century, and doesn’t have the means to give his quiet teenage son Egan and his precocious, ultra-demanding nine-year-old daughter Shelby (one of the most memorably awful children in literature!) what they need, or say they need. But with his mother-in-law circling for custody, and needing to win back his kids’ favour after he maybe went too far in discipling Shelby, he succumbs, splashing out on the thing Shelby wants more than anything else: her first smartphone.
And so begins the silken silence as she drifts off to her room and down the rabbit hole of memes, trolls, hysteria and peer-pressure, and the true, vertiginous terrors of 21st-century life start flooding into the Cush household. And what should Lonny do? Rescue her or follow her? Because who is right: Lonny, or the world he and everybody else is living in now?
The Suicide House
Charlie Donlea
‘On the other side of that wall are the woods, and in those woods is a forgotten path that leads to the infamous boarding house.’
Beyond the manicured campus of Indiana’s elite Westmont Preparatory School sits an abandoned boarding house, popular among students as a late-night hangout – and recently the scene of a dangerous game gone wrong.
One year ago, two students were killed there in a grisly slaughter. Though a teacher was convicted of the murders, mysteries and questions remain. The most urgent among them is why three survivors of that terrible night have returned to the house to kill themselves.
Well-known criminal profiler Dr Lane Phillips, hired as an adviser on a popular podcast about the tragedy, knows this is the perfect puzzle for his partner Rory Moore, a forensic reconstructionist with an uncanny ability to spot the details others miss.
But the more Lane and Rory learn about the school and its students, the more convinced they are that the game hasn’t ended. And for its players, there may be no way to win – or to survive . . .
Olive
Emma Gannon
OLIVE is many things.
Independent.
Adrift.
Anxious.
Loyal.
Kind.
She knows her own mind.
And it’s ok that she’s still figuring it all out, navigating her world without a compass. But life comes with expectations, there are choices to be made and – sometimes – stereotypes to fulfil. So when her best friends’ lives branch away towards marriage and motherhood, leaving the path they’ve always followed together, she starts to question her choices – because life according to Olive looks a little bit different.
Moving, memorable and a mirror for anyone at a crossroads, OLIVE has a little bit of all of us. Told with great warmth and nostalgia, this is a modern tale about the obstacle course of adulthood, milestone decisions and the ‘taboo’ about choosing not to have children.
The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually
Helen Cullen
‘There’s a crack in everything, it’s how the light gets in’ Leonard Cohen
On an island off the west coast of Ireland the Moone family are poised for celebration – but are instead shattered by tragedy. Murtagh Moone is a potter and devoted husband to Maeve, an actor struggling with her most challenging role yet, mother to their four children. Now Murtagh must hold his family close as we bear witness to their story before that night.
We return to the day Maeve and Murtagh meet, outside Trinity College in Dublin, and watch how one love story gives rise to another. As the Moone children learn who their parents truly are, we journey onwards with them to a future that none of the Moones can predict.
Except perhaps Maeve herself.
A celebration of the complex, flawed and stubbornly optimistic human heart.
This Tender Land
William Kent Krueger
1932, Minnesota—the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O’Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent’s wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.
Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphans will journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and traveling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds. With the feel of a modern classic, This Tender Land is an enthralling, big-hearted epic that shows how the magnificent American landscape connects us all, haunts our dreams, and makes us whole.
A magnificent novel about four orphans on a life-changing odyssey during the Great Depression, from the bestselling author of Ordinary Grace.
NON-FICTION
The Happiest Man on Earth
Eddie Jaku
Life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful. It is up to you.
Eddie Jaku always considered himself a German first, a Jew second. He was proud of his country. But all of that changed in November 1938, when he was beaten, arrested and taken to a concentration camp.
Over the next seven years, Eddie faced unimaginable horrors every day, first in Buchenwald, then in Auschwitz, then on a Nazi death march. He lost family, friends, his country.
Because he survived, Eddie made the vow to smile every day. He pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story, sharing his wisdom and living his best possible life. He now believes he is the ‘happiest man on earth’.
Published as Eddie turns 100, this is a powerful, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful memoir of how happiness can be found even in the darkest of times.
Fire: A Brief History
Stephen Pyne
What does a full-blown Fire Age look like? We are about to find out, and Australia will feel the looking-glass transition from an ice world to a fire world more fully and suddenly than elsewhere.
Over vast expanses of time, fire and humanity have interacted to expand the domain of each, transforming the Earth and what it means to be human.
In this concise yet wide-ranging book, Stephen J. Pyne – named by Science magazine as ‘the world’s leading authority on the history of fire’ – explores the surprising dynamics of fire prior to humans, fire and human origins, hunting and foraging, agricultural and pastoral uses of fire, fire ceremonies, fire as an idea and a technology, and industrial fire. With this revised and expanded edition, Pyne looks to the future of fire as an informing presence on Earth. He explores its importance for the 21st century, with special attention to its role in the Anthropocene, or what he posits might equally be called the Pyrocene.
Includes a new preface about Australia and our ever-expanding, catastrophic fire season.
Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality and the Future of Humanity
Sam Harris
Neuroscientist, philosopher, podcaster and bestselling author Sam Harris, has been exploring some of the greatest questions concerning the human mind, society, and the events that shape our world.
Harris’ search for deeper understanding of how we think has led him to engage and exchange with some of our most brilliant and controversial contemporary minds – Daniel Kahneman, Robert Sapolsky, Anil Seth and Max Tegmark – in order to unpack and understand ideas of consciousness, free will, extremism, and ethical living.
For Harris, honest conversation, no matter how difficult or contentious, represents the only path to moral and intellectual progress.
Featuring twelve conversations from the hit podcast, these electric exchanges fuse wisdom with rigorous interrogation to shine a light on what it means to make sense of our world today.
Wild Nature: Walking Australia’s South East Forests
John Blay
John Blay laces up his walking boots and goes bush to explore Australia’s rugged south east forests – stretching from Canberra to the coast and on to Wilsons Promontory – in a great circle from his one-time home near Bermagui.
In Wild Nature, the bestselling author of On Track charts the forests’ shared history, their natural history, the forest wars, the establishment of the South East Forests National Park and the threats that continue to dog their existence, including devastating bushfires.
Along the way Blay asks the big questions. What do we really know about these wild forests? How did the forests come to be the way they are? What is the importance of wild nature to our civilisation? An epic journey of discovery into the heart of a vast and contested Australian wilderness.
Paul Kelly: The Man, the Music and the Life in Between
Stuart Coupe
He’s been called Australia’s Bob Dylan and likened to Springsteen and Neil Young, but Paul Kelly stands alone as a chronicler of his and our times.
He is Australia’s best-loved singer, songwriter, author and poetic observer and though he has written his own stories, no one has captured the broader life and times of Paul Kelly – until now.
Renowned music journalist, author and for many years Kelly’s manager, Stuart Coupe takes us from Kelly’s family life as the sixth of nine children in Adelaide to his life today. With Paul’s blessing and access to friends, family, band mates and musical collaborators, Coupe shows Paul’s evolution from a young man who only really picked up a guitar in his late teens, to an Australian music icon.
Through hundreds of interviews, Coupe details the way Paul juggled the demands, temptations and excesses of rock’n’roll with real life. Revealing Paul Kelly’s personal relationships, his friendships, his generosity and support of other artists, such as Archie Roach, Kasey Chambers, Kev Carmody, Vika and Linda Bull and Courtney Barnett, the force of Kelly’s powerful storytelling, his musical creativity, his activism and his work ethic also shines through. Paul Kelly: The Man, the Music and the Life in Between is honest, revealing and a must-read for anyone interested in one of Australia’s greatest artists.
Reprehensible: Polite Histories of Bad Behaviour
Mikey Robins
It is often said that we live in an era of constant outrage, but we are definitely not the inventors of outrageousness. Let’s be honest, human beings have always been appalling. Not everyone and not all the time, but our history is littered with those whose work and deeds have rendered them . . . reprehensible. Sometimes it’s our most esteemed luminaries who behave the worst…
What are we to make of Catherine the Great’s extensive collection of pornographic furniture, Hans Christian Andersen’s too-much-information diary and Karl Marx’s epic pub crawls? Or hall-of-fame huckster William McCloundy, who in 1901 actually ‘sold’ the Brooklyn Bridge to an unsuspecting tourist, and the pharaoh who covered his slaves in honey to keep flies off his meal? Did you know about the royal ticklers of the House of Romanov, and the bizarre coronation rituals of early Irish kings? (Let’s just say that eating a white horse wasn’t the weirdest part of the ceremony.)
So sit back and rest your conscience: there will be a host of scoundrels, bounders and reprobates, tales of lust and power aplenty, as we indulge in that sweet spot where history meets outrage, with just a bit of old-school TMZ thrown in for good measure. Rollicking and informative, Reprehensible: Polite Histories of Bad Behaviour is your guide through some of the most shameful behaviour indulged in by humanity’s most celebrated figures, as told by Mikey Robins, one of Australia’s most loved comedians.
The Ultimate Guide to Preserving Vegetables
Angi Schneider
Master the best preservation techniques for every veggie in your garden with seamless instruction and incredible recipes. Angi Schneider, a homesteader herself, will teach you to prepare your harvest so you can enjoy home grown produce in any season. She’ll lead you through everything you need to know from canning, pickling and fermenting to dehydrating and freezing—with step-by-step photos for every technique!
Each chapter teaches you the most effective preservation method for each vegetable with guidelines for safe procedures and the tastiest results. Spice up your pantry with unique flavor twists like Fermented Thai Green Beans and Dried Carrot Chai Chips. By preserving your own produce, you ensure that every veggie is at its peak ripeness so that it retains the most nutrients. With 100 recipes for the most common garden produce, you can make the freshest jams, sauces, pickles and more from Canned Sweet and Spicy Radishes to Granny’s Bread and Butter Pickles. Whether from your own garden or from the farmer’s market, this book will help you make the most of your harvest.
This book has 100 recipes and over 100 photos.
Bush School
Peter O’Brien
There was a bed, a timber floor, thin tar paper on one side for privacy from the nearby road but nothing else. The flimsiest of ‘walls’, no pegs or nails to hang even a hat, no door, no rug for cold morning bare feet, no bookshelf for a voracious reader, no bedside cupboard for a lamp or a glass of water, no light source – just a bed and a suitcase for the next two years.
In 1960, newly minted teacher Peter O’Brien started work as the only teacher at a bush school in Weabonga, two days’ travel by train and mail car from Armidale.
Peter was only 20 years old and had never before lived away from his home in Sydney. He’d had some teaching experience, but nothing to prepare him for the monumental challenge of being solely responsible for the education of 18 students, ranging in age from 5 to 15 years old. With few lesson plans, scant teaching materials, a wide range of curious minds and ages to prepare for, Peter was daunted by the enormity of the task ahead.
Because of Weabonga’s remoteness, the students were already at a disadvantage, but they were keen and receptive and had been blessed with an enthusiastic and committed teacher. Indeed it was the children and their thirst for learning who kept Peter afloat during the early days of shockingly inadequate living conditions, a deficient diet and the terrible loneliness he felt being isolated so far from family, friends and his burgeoning romance.
Bush School is an engaging and fascinating memoir of how a young man rose to a challenge most would shrink from today. It tells movingly of the resilience and spirit of children, the importance of learning and the transformative power of teaching.
Glimpses of Utopia: Real Ideas for a Fairer World
Jess Scully
It’s hard to be excited about the future right now. Climate change is accelerating; inequality is growing; politics is polarised; institutions designed to protect us are strained; technology is disrupting the world of work. We need to upgrade the operating systems of our society. Jess Scully asks, What can we do? The answer is: plenty! All over the world, people are refusing the business-as-usual mindset and putting humans back into the civic equation, reimagining work and care, finance and government, urban planning and communication, to make them better and fairer for all.
Meet the care workers reclaiming control in India and Lebanon, the people turning slums into safe havens in Kenya and Bangladesh, and champions of people-powered digital democracy in Iceland and Taiwan. There are radical bankers funding renewable energy in the USA and architects redesigning real estate in Australia, new payment systems in Italy and the Philippines that keep money in local communities, and innovators redesigning taxation to cut pollution and incentivise creative solutions.
Glimpses of Utopia is a call for optimism. Humans everywhere are rising up to confront our challenges with creativity, resilience and compassion. Harnessing technology and imagination, we can reshape our world to be fair and sustainable. This book shows us how.
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
James Nestor
No matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or wise you are, none of it matters if you’re not breathing properly.
There is nothing more essential to our health and wellbeing than breathing: take air in, let it out, repeat 25,000 times a day. Yet, as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, with grave consequences. Journalist James Nestor travels the world to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.
The answers aren’t found in pulmonology labs, as we might expect, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites, secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of São Paulo, Brazil. Nestor tracks down men and women exploring the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices like Pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya and Tummo and teams up with pulmonary tinkerers to scientifically test longheld beliefs about how we breathe.
Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance, rejuvenate internal organs, halt snoring, allergies, asthma and autoimmune disease, and even straighten scoliotic spines. None of this should be possible, and yet it is.
Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry and human physiology, Breath turns the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about our most basic biological function on its head.
You will never breathe the same again.
Golden Daze
Seah Doherty
Golden Daze tells the story of Australian surfing one year at a time through the lives of our greatest surfers. The book takes a deep dive into a significant year of their surfing lives. Years when they won, years when they lost. Years where their surfing and their surfboards changed the game. Grommet years when the days never ended. Years where they surfed up the coast, down the coast and globetrotted into the great unknown.
Years when both surfing and society changed. Years when they made high art, experienced spiritual awakenings or were just tubed out of their minds. Even years where they survived the embrace of a great white shark.
Part journal, part biography, part surf culture memoir, Australia’s best surf writer brings to life the wild, bold, brave story of Australian surfing from 1915 to the present through the stories of Surfing Australia’s Hall of Fame surfers and contemporary surfing legends – a fascinating insight into what makes Australian surfing tick.
Body Count: How Climate Change is Killing Us
Paddy Manning
Suddenly, when the country caught fire, people realised what the government has not: that climate change is killing us.
But climate deaths didn’t start in 2019. Medical officers have been warning of a health emergency as temperatures rise for years, and for at least a decade Australians have been dying from the plagues of climate change – from heat, flood, disease, smoke. And now, pandemic.
In this detailed, considered, compassionate book, Paddy Manning paints us the big picture. He revisits some headline events which might have faded in our memory – the Brisbane Floods of 2011; Melbourne’s thunderstorm asthma fatalities of 2016 – and brings to our attention less well-publicised killers: the soil-borne diseases that amplify after a flood; the fact that heat itself has killed more people than all other catastrophes put together. In each case, he has interviewed scientists to explore the link to climate change and asks how – indeed, whether – we can better prepare ourselves in the future.
Most importantly, Manning has spoken to survivors and the families of victims, creating a monument to those we have already lost. Donna Rice and her 13-year-old son Jordan. Alison Tenner. The Buchanan family. These are stories of humans at their most vulnerable, and also often at their best. In extremis, people often act to save their loved ones above themselves. As Body Count shows, we are now all in extremis, and it is time to act.
When the Ship Hits the Fan
Rob Anderson
Rob Anderson was a magnet for trouble long before he went to sea at 15. But when he became Captain Rob Anderson, one of the youngest Australian masters ever, it was suddenly his responsibility to keep everything afloat – no easy feat when the seas were unregulated, full of madmen, and more like the Wild West than anything on land.
Whether stashing a headless body in a cargo freezer, dodging pirates in Singapore Straits, losing the deceased before a sea burial, or treating a crew member who had swallowed a pair of knickers, it was all part of the job for Captain Rob.
Visceral, charming and definitely not for the faint of heart, When the Ship Hits the Fan is a treasure trove of hilarious incidents, accidents and seafaring shenanigans from working on every type of ship in every ocean of the world.
The Last Lions of Africa
Anthony Ham
This is the riveting and illuminating story of Australian writer Anthony Ham’s extraordinary journey into the world of lions. Haunted by the idea that they might disappear from the planet in our lifetime, he ventured deep into the African wilderness, speaking to local tribespeople and activists as well as to rangers, scientists and conservationists about why lions are close to extinction and what can be done to save them.
In The Last Lions of Africa, we walk alongside Anthony as he reveals the latest extraordinary science surrounding the earth’s dwindling lion populations and their often surprising relationship to mankind. As he uncovers heartbreaking and astonishing accounts of individual lions, prides and habitats, each chapter unfolds as both gripping campfire story and deeply researched exploration of larger mysteries in the natural world.
Anthony’s vivid storytelling weaves together natural history, ancient lore and multidisciplinary science to show us a world in which human populations are growing and wild lands are shrinking; where lions and indigenous peoples fight not for sovereignty over the land but for their very existence. In this gripping and crucial book, Anthony Ham brings Africa, its people and its endangered lions to magnificent life and shows the surprising ways those last lions might be saved.
Golden Maze: A Biography of Prague
Richard Fidler
In 1989, Richard Fidler was living in London as part of the provocative Australian comedy trio The Doug Anthony All Stars when revolution broke out across Europe. Excited by this galvanising historic, human, moment, he travelled to Prague, where a decrepit police state was being overthrown by crowds of ecstatic citizens. His experience of the Velvet Revolution never let go of him.
Thirty years later Fidler returns to Prague to uncover the glorious and grotesque history of Europe’s most instagrammed and uncanny city: a jumble of gothic towers, baroque palaces and zig-zag lanes that has survived plagues, pogroms, Nazi terror and Soviet tanks. Founded in the ninth Century, Prague gave the world the golem, the robot, and the world’s biggest statue of Stalin, a behemoth that killed almost everyone who touched it.
Fidler tells the story of the reclusive emperor who brought the world’s most brilliant minds to Prague Castle to uncover the occult secrets of the universe. He explores the Black Palace, the wartime headquarters of the Nazi SS, and he meets victims of the communist secret police. Reaching back into Prague’s mythic past, he finds the city’s founder, the pagan priestess Libussa who prophesised: I see a city whose glory will touch the stars.
Following the story of Prague from its origins in medieval darkness to its uncertain present, Fidler does what he does so well – curates an absolutely engaging and compelling history of a place. You will learn things you never knew, with a tour guide who is erudite, inquisitive, and the best storyteller you could have as your companion.
The Ethical Omnivore
Laura Dalrymple & Grant Hillard
Can you have your meat and eat it too?
We live in an affluent era marked by an increasingly fraught relationship to food, and meat is arguably the most controversial ingredient. There is a communal ache for authenticity, for a way forward with good conscience. The Ethical Omnivore explores the solution: living with a conscience; asking the right questions of whomever sells you meat or of the labels you read; and learning how to respect the animal so much that you’re willing to cook something other than chicken breast.
This book traces how animals can be raised ethically, and demonstrates some ways regenerative farmers are outstanding in how they care for their animals. It offers tried-and-tested recipes from the Feather and Bone community, from simple and easy weeknight meals to slow roasts for special occasions. And it shows all of us how to live with less impact on the animals and environment that support us. The Ethical Omnivore is a user-friendly recipe and handbook that will open your eyes to a better way to buy, cook and eat.
FICTION
A Room Made of Leaves
Kate Grenville
What if Elizabeth Macarthur – wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney – had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? That’s the starting point for A Room Made of Leaves, a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.
Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power in a society that gave women none- this Elizabeth Macarthur manages her complicated life with spirit and passion, cunning and sly wit. Her memoir lets us hear -at last! – what one of those seemingly demure women from history might really have thought.
At the centre of A Room Made of Leaves is one of the most toxic issues of our own age – the seductive appeal of false stories. This book may be set in the past, but it’s just as much about the present, where secrets and lies have the dangerous power to shape reality.
Kate Grenville’s return to the territory of The Secret River is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand by one of our most original writers.
The Bluffs
Kyle Perry
I won’t walk alone by the mountain trees, or the hungry man will come for me . . .
At the bottom of the world, there is an island. It is a land of rugged wilderness, of ice and snow and blistering heat, of the oldest trees on earth . . . They say tigers still roam there. They say other things roam, too.
When a school group of teenage girls goes missing in the remote wilderness of Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers, the people of Limestone Creek are immediately on alert. Three decades ago, five young girls disappeared in the area of those dangerous bluffs, and the legend of ‘the Hungry Man’ still haunts locals to this day.
Now, authorities can determine that the teacher, Eliza Ellis, was knocked unconscious, so someone on the mountain was up to foul play. Jordan Murphy, the local dealer and father of missing student Jasmine, instantly becomes the prime suspect. But Detective Con Badenhorst knows that in a town this size – with corrupt cops, small-town politics, and a teenage YouTube sensation – everyone is hiding something, and bluffing is second nature.
When a body is found, mauled, at the bottom of a cliff, suspicion turns to a wild animal – but that can’t explain why she was discovered barefoot, her shoes at the top of the cliff, laces neatly tied.
The Family Holiday
Elizabeth Noble
Charlie is determined to celebrate his eightieth birthday surrounded by family. The trouble is that ever since he lost his wife – the true north of the Chamberlain family – his children’s differences have pulled them apart.
His daughter Laura is divorced and struggling with her new reality. And with her teenage son accused of a crime by his girlfriend’s parents, she doesn’t know which crisis to deal with first. Charlie’s sons couldn’t be in more different positions- Scott is recently married, acquiring two stepdaughters and breaking his confirmed bachelor ways. Nick is still reeling from losing his wife in a tragic accident, and coping alone with three young children.
Now, brought together for Charlie’s birthday and two weeks away from the world, the family must untangle what divides them and discover, at last, what binds them all together . . .
Hex
Rebecca Dinerstein Knight
Nell Barber, an expelled PhD candidate in Biological Science, is exploring the fine line between poison and antidote, working alone to set a speed record for the detoxification of poisonous plants. Her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas, is the hero of Nell’s heart. Nell frequently finds herself standing in the doorway to Joan’s office despite herself, mesmerized by Joan’s elegance, success, and spiritual force.
Surrounded by Nell’s ex, her best friend, her best friend’s boyfriend, and Joan’s buffoonish husband, the two scientists are tangled together at the center of a web of illicit relationships, grudges, and obsessions. All six are burdened by desire and ambition, and as they collide on the university campus, their attractions set in motion a domino effect of affairs and heartbreak.
Meanwhile, Nell slowly fills her empty apartment with poisonous plants to study, and she begins to keep a series of notebooks, all dedicated to Joan. She logs her research and how she spends her days, but the notebooks ultimately become a painstaking map of love. In a dazzling and unforgettable voice, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight has written a spellbinding novel of emotional and intellectual intensity.
Rogue
James Swallow
All spooks know that, in modern espionage, every action has a reaction. One wrong move could sink an entire region into turmoil – even war.
Former MI5 operative Marc Dane understands this better than anyone. Dedicating your life to protecting the country means collecting enemies, and a lot of them. But for those hellbent on bringing the West to its knees, each failed plot has one common denominator: private intelligence agency The Rubicon Group, and Dane’s employer. Only if Rubicon crumbles will their path truly be clear. With the clock ticking, Dane must unpick a monstrous and deadly conspiracy that stretches from the corridors of Westminster to the mountains of Mozambique. One that threatens not only Rubicon, but the lives of millions of civilians. And time is fast running out…
A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing
Jessie Tu
Jena Lin plays the violin. She was once a child prodigy and now uses sex to fill the void left by fame. She’s struggling a little. Her professional life comprises rehearsals, concerts, auditions and relentless practice; her personal life is spent managing the demands of her strict family and creative friends, and hooking up. And then she meets Mark – much older and worldly-wise – who consumes her. But at what cost to her dreams?
When Jena is awarded an internship with the New York Philharmonic, she thinks the life she has dreamed of is about to begin. But when Trump is elected, New York changes irrevocably and Jena along with it. Is the dream over? As Jena’s life takes on echoes of Frances Ha, her favourite film, crucial truths are gradually revealed to her.
A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing explores female desire and the consequences of wanting too much and never getting it. It is about the awkwardness and pain of being human in an increasingly dislocated world – and how, in spite of all this, we still try to become the person we want to be. This is a dazzling and original debut from a young writer with a fierce, intelligent and audacious voice.
The Fogging
Luke Horton
Tom and Clara are two struggling academics in their mid-thirties, who decide to take their first holiday in ten years. On the flight over to Indonesia, Tom experiences a debilitating panic attack, something he hasn’t had in a long time, which he keeps hidden from Clara. At the resort, they meet Madeleine, a charismatic French woman, her Australian partner, Jeremy, and five-year-old son, Ollie, and the two couples strike up an easy friendship. The holiday starts to look up, even to Tom, who is struggling to get out of his own head. But when Clara and Madeleine become trapped in the maze-like grounds of the hotel during ‘the fogging’ – a routine spraying of pesticide – the dynamics suddenly shift between Tom and Clara, and the atmosphere of the holiday darkens.
Told with equal parts compassion and irony, and brimming with observations that charm, illuminate, and devastate, The Fogging dives deep into what it means to be strong when your foundation is built on sand.
The Light at the End of the Day
Eleanor Wasserberg
A family scattered. Lovers torn apart. A painting that unites them all.
When Jozef is commissioned to paint a portrait of the younger daughter of Kraków’s grand Oderfeldt family, it is only his desperate need for money that drives him to accept. He has no wish to indulge a pampered child-princess or her haughty, condescending parents – and almost doesn’t notice Alicia’s bookish older sister, Karolina. But when he is ushered by a servant into their house on Kraków’s fashionable Bernady ska street in the winter of 1937, he has no inkling of the way his life will become entangled with the Oderfeldts’. Or of the impact that the German invasion will have upon them all.
As Poland is engulfed by war, and Jozef’s painting is caught up in the tides of history, Alicia, Karolina and their parents are forced to flee – their Jewish identity transformed into something dangerous, and their comfortable lives overturned … Spanning countries and decades The Light at the End of the Day is a heart-breaking novel of exile, survival and how we remember what is lost.
Antkind
Charlie Kaufman
B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film by an enigmatic outsider – a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur ninety years to complete.
Convinced that the film will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core, that it might possibly be the greatest movie ever made, B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: the film is destroyed, leaving him the sole witness to its inadvertently ephemeral genius. All that’s left is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the work of art that just might be the last great hope of civilization.
Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language, B. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of “likes” and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bête noire and his raison d’être.
A searing indictment of the modern world, Antkind is a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself – the grain of truth at the heart of every joke. A bold and boundlessly original debut novel from the Oscar®-winning screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Synecdoche, New York.
The Silent Wife
Karin Slaughter
He watches.
A woman runs alone in the woods. She convinces herself she has no reason to be afraid, but she’s wrong. A predator is stalking the women of Grant County. He lingers in the shadows, until the time is just right to snatch his victim.
He waits.
A decade later, the case has been closed. The killer is behind bars. But then another young woman is brutally attacked and left for dead, and the MO is identical.
He takes.
Although the original trail has gone cold – memories have faded, witnesses have disappeared – agent Will Trent and forensic pathologist Sara Linton must re-open the cold case. But the clock is ticking, and the killer is determined to find his perfect silent wife …
Sex and Vanity
Kevin Kwan
On her very first morning on the jewel-like island of Capri, Lucie Churchill sets eyes on George Zao and she instantly can’t stand him. She can’t stand it when he gallantly offers to trade hotel rooms with her so that she can have a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea, she can’t stand that he knows more about Casa Malaparte than she does, and she really can’t stand it when he kisses her in the darkness of the ancient ruins of a Roman villa.
The daughter of an American-born Chinese mother and a blue-blooded New York father, Lucie has always sublimated the Asian side of herself, and she adamantly denies having feelings for George. But several years later, when George unexpectedly appears in East Hampton, where Lucie is weekending with her new fiance, she finds herself drawn to him again. Soon, Lucie is spinning a web of deceit that involves her family, her fiance and ultimately herself, as she tries to deny George entry into her world – and her heart.
Moving between summer playgrounds of privilege, peppered with decadent food and extravagant fashion, Sex and Vanity is a truly modern love story, a daring homage to A Room with a View, and a brilliantly funny comedy of manners set between two cultures.
The Phone Box at the Edge of the World
Laura Imai Messina
When you have lost everything, what will you find?
When Yui loses her mother and daughter in the tsunami, she wonders how she will ever carry on. Yet, in the face of this unthinkable loss, life must somehow continue. Then one day she hears about a widower who has an old disused telephone box in his garden. There the old man finds the strength to speak to his late wife and begin to come to terms with his grief. As news of the phone box spreads, people from miles around will travel there to connect with their own lost loved ones.
Soon Yui will make a pilgrimage to the phone box, too. But once there she cannot bring herself to speak into the receiver. Then she finds Takeshi, a bereaved husband whose own daughter has stopped talking in the wake of their loss. What happens next will warm your heart, even when it feels as though it is breaking . . .
A Safe Place
Anna Downes
For struggling actress Emily Proudman, life in London is falling apart. So when she is offered a live-in job working for a wealthy family on their luxurious coastal property in France, she jumps at the opportunity to start over. The estate is picture-perfect, and its owners exude charisma and sophistication.
But as Emily gets to know the family, their masks begin to slip, and what at first appears to be a dream come true turns out to be a prison from which none of them will ever escape – unless Emily can find a way to set them all free.
Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook
Celia Rees
An ordinary woman. A book of recipes. The perfect cover for spying…
Sent to Germany in the chaotic aftermath of World War II, Edith Graham is finally getting the chance to do her bit. Having taught at a girls’ school during the conflict, she leaps at the opportunity to escape an ordinary life – but Edith is not everything she seems to be. Under the guise of her innocent cover story, Edith has been recruited to root out Nazis who are trying to escape prosecution. Secretly, she is sending coding messages back to the UK, hidden inside innocuous recipes sent to a friend – after all, who would expect notes on sauerkraut to contain the clues that would crack a criminal underground network?
But the closer she gets to the truth, the muddier the line becomes between good and evil. In a dangerous world of shifting loyalties, when the enemy wears the face of a friend, who do you trust?
The Order
Daniel Silva
It was nearly one a.m. by the time he crawled into bed. Chiara was reading a novel, oblivious to the television, which was muted. On the screen was a live shot of St. Peter’s Basilica. Gabriel raised the volume and learned that an old friend had died …
Gabriel Allon has slipped quietly into Venice for a much-needed holiday with his wife and two young children. But when Pope Paul VII dies suddenly, Gabriel is summoned to Rome by the Holy Father’s loyal private secretary, Archbishop Luigi Donati. A billion Catholic faithful have been told that the pope died of a heart attack. Donati, however, has two good reasons to suspect his master was murdered. The Swiss Guard who was standing watch outside the papal apartments the night of the pope’s death is missing. So, too, is the letter the Holy Father was writing during the final hours of his life. A letter that was addressed to Gabriel.
Swiftly paced and elegantly rendered, The Order will hold readers spellbound, from its opening passages to its breathtaking final twist of plot. It is a novel of friendship and faith in a perilous and uncertain world. And it is still more proof that Daniel Silva is his generation’s finest writer of suspense and international intrigue.
The Constant Rabbit
Jasper Fforde
A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom
John Boyne
Some stories are universal. Some are unique. They play out across human history, and time is the river that flows through them. This story starts with a family. For now, it is a father and a mother with two sons. One with his father’s violence in his blood. One with his mother’s artistry. One leaves. One stays. They will be joined by others whose deeds will determine their fate. It is a beginning.
Their stories will intertwine and evolve over the course of two thousand years. They will meet again and again at different times and in different places. From Palestine at the dawn of the first millennium and journeying across fifty countries to a life amongst the stars in the third, the world will change around them, but their destinies remain the same. It must play out as foretold.
From the award-winning author of The Heart’s invisible Furies comes A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, an epic tale of humanity. The story of all of us, stretching across two millennia. Imaginative, unique, heart-breaking, this is John Boyne at his most creative and compelling.
Small Pleasures
Clare Chambers
Jean Swinney is a feature writer on a local paper, disappointed in love and – on the brink of forty – living a limited existence with her truculent mother: a small life from which there is no likelihood of escape.
When a young Swiss woman, Gretchen Tilbury, contacts the paper to claim that her daughter is the result of a virgin birth, it is down to Jean to discover whether she is a miracle or a fraud. But the more Jean investigates, the more her life becomes strangely (and not unpleasantly) intertwined with that of the Tilburys: Gretchen is now a friend, and her quirky and charming daughter Margaret a sort of surrogate child. And Jean doesn’t mean to fall in love with Gretchen’s husband, Howard, but Howard surprises her with his dry wit, his intelligence and his kindness – and when she does fall, she falls hard. But he is married, and to her friend – who is also the subject of the story she is researching for the newspaper, a story that increasingly seems to be causing dark ripples across all their lives.
And yet Jean cannot bring herself to discard the chance of finally having a taste of happiness… But there will be a price to pay, and it will be unbearable.
The Year of the Witching
Alexis Henderson
The daughter of a union with an outsider that cast her once-proud family into disgrace, Immanuelle does her best to worship the Father, follow Holy Protocol and lead a life of submission, devotion and absolute conformity, like all the women in the settlement.
But a chance mishap lures her into the forbidden Darkwood that surrounds Bethel – a place where the first prophet once pursued and killed four powerful witches. Their spirits are still walking there, and they bestow a gift on Immanuelle- the diary of her dead mother, who Immanuelle is shocked to learn once sought sanctuary in the wood.
Fascinated by secrets in the diary, Immanuelle finds herself struggling to understand how her mother could have consorted with the witches. But when she begins to learn grim truths about the Church and its history, she realises the true threat to Bethel is its own darkness. And if Bethel is to change, it must begin with her . . .
NON-FICTION
Women and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons
Julia Gillard & Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
As a result of their broad experience on the world stage in politics, economics and global not-for-profits, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Julia Gillard have some strong ideas about the impact of gender on the treatment of leaders. Women and Leadership takes a consistent and comprehensive approach to teasing out what is different for women who lead.
Almost every year new findings are published about the way people see women leaders compared with their male counterparts. The authors have taken that academic work and tested it in the real world. The same set of interview questions were put to each leader in frank face-to-face interviews. Their responses were then used to examine each woman’s journey in leadership and whether their lived experiences were in line with or different from what the research would predict.
Women and Leadership presents a lively and readable analysis of the influence of gender on women’s access to positions of leadership, the perceptions of them as leaders, the trajectory of their leadership and the circumstances in which it comes to an end. By presenting the lessons that can be learned from women leaders, Julia and Ngozi provide a road map of essential knowledge to inspire us all, and an action agenda for change that allows women to take control and combat gender bias.
Featuring Jacinda Ardern, Hillary Clinton, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Theresa May, Michelle Bachelet, Joyce Banda, Erna Solberg, Christine Lagarde and more.
Plastic Free
Rebecca Prince-Ruiz and Joanna Atherfold Finn
‘I’m going plastic free next month, who wants to join me?’
When Rebecca Prince-Ruiz asked her colleagues this question in 2011, she had no idea that less than a decade later it would inspire a global movement of 250 million people in 177 countries to reduce their plastic use. Plastic Free tells the incredible story of how a simple community initiative grew into one of the world’s most successful environmental movements. It also shares tips from people around the world who have taken on the Plastic Free July challenge and significantly reduced their waste.
Plastic Free is a book about positive change and reminds us that small actions can make a huge impact, one step – and piece of plastic – at a time.
The Last Lighthouse Keeper
John Cook
I loved the life of the island, because I knew my body was more alive than it was on the mainland. People asked how we stood the isolation and boredom, but in some ways, it was more stimulating to have your senses turned up.
In Tasmania, John Cook is known as ‘The Keeper of the Flame’. As one of Australia’s longest-serving lighthouse keepers, John spent 26 years tending Tasmania’s well-known kerosene ‘lights’ at Tasman Island, Maatsuyker Island and Bruny Island.
From sleepless nights keeping the lights alive, battling the wind and sea as they ripped at gutters and flooded stores, raising a joey, tending sheep and keeping ducks and chickens, the life of a keeper was one of unexpected joy and heartbreak. But for John, nothing was more heartbreaking than the introduction of electric lights, and the lighthouses that were left empty forever.
Evocatively told, The Last Lighthouse Keeper is a love story between a man and a dying way of life, as well as a celebration of wilderness and solitude.
The Room Where it Happened: A White House Memoir
John Bolton
As President Trump’s National Security Advisor, John Bolton spent many of his 453 days in the room where it happened, and the facts speak for themselves. The result is a White House memoir that is the most comprehensive and substantial account of the Trump Administration, and one of the few to date by a top-level official.
With almost daily access to the President, John Bolton has produced a precise rendering of his days in and around the Oval Office. What Bolton saw astonished him: a President for whom getting reelected was the only thing that mattered, even if it meant endangering or weakening the nation. He shows a President addicted to chaos, who embraced our enemies and spurned our friends, and was deeply suspicious of his own government. In Bolton’s telling, all this helped put Trump on the bizarre road to impeachment.
The turmoil, conflicts, and egos are all there-from the upheaval in Venezuela, to the erratic and manipulative moves of North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, to the showdowns at the G7 summits, the calculated warmongering by Iran, the crazy plan to bring the Taliban to Camp David, and the placating of an authoritarian China that ultimately exposed the world to its lethal lies. But this seasoned public servant also has a great eye for the Washington inside game, and his story is full of wit and wry humor about how he saw it played.
We Are Family
Susan Golombok
Our understanding of what makes a family has undergone a revolution in the last few decades, from same-sex parenthood to surrogacy and IVF. But what has the impact been on children?
In We Are Family, Professor Susan Golombok visits lesbian mothers, gay fathers, single parents, co-parents, trans parents, surrogates, and donors, and, more importantly, their children, to find out if they are as well-adjusted, happy, and emotionally stable as children from traditional nuclear families. And she discovers that the answer is yes – and sometimes even more so.
Susan’s work at the Centre for Family Research at Cambridge proves that any family set-up can provide a loving, secure home for a child – although, inevitably, the children from these families will often face prejudiced attitudes from others. Since the 1970s, when she was first drawn to this area of research after reading about lesbian mothers whose children were being removed from their care, Susan has worked tirelessly to challenge outdated attitudes and prevent families being split up for no good reason. This book tells the stories of those families – their struggles and their triumphs – while celebrating love and family in all its wonderful variations.
Soupology
Drew Smith
From buying basic ingredients and making simple broths to crafting superlative, show-stopping soups, Soupology demonstrates how soups can transform your cooking and your health.
Former editor of The Good Food Guide, Drew Smith will show you how to build different variations of soups from six basic broths, ensuring you make the most of your leftovers and expand your kitchen repertoire. From the value of bone broth in your cooking to getting five to seven vegetables a day, this is a strategy that is both delicious and nutritionally optimal. Easy to follow, with beautiful colour photographs, Soupology is a masterclass in how to prepare soups that are tasty, nutritious and waste-free.
Troop 6000
Nikita Stewart
The extraordinary true story of the first Girl Scout troop designated for homeless girls – from the homeless families it brought together in Queens, New York, to the amazing citywide and countrywide responses it sparked.
Giselle Burgess, a young mother of five, and her children, along with others in the shelter, become the catalyst for Troop 6000. Having worked for the Girl Scouts earlier on, Giselle knew that these girls, including her own daughters, needed something they could be a part of, where they didn’t need to feel the shame or stigma of being homeless, but could instead develop skills and build a community that they could be proud of.
New York Times journalist Nikita Stewart embedded with Troop 6000 for more than a year, at the peak of New York City’s homelessness crisis in 2017, spending time with the girls and their families and witnessing both their triumphs and challenges. Stewart takes the reader with her as she paints intimate portraits of Giselle’s family and the others whom she met along the way. Readers will feel an instant connection and express joy when a family finally moves out of the shelter and into a permanent home, as well as the pain of the day-to-day life of homelessness. And they will cheer when the girls sell their very first cookies.
Ultimately, Troop 6000 puts a different face on homelessness. Stewart shows how shared experiences of poverty and hardship sparked the political will needed to create the troop that would expand from one shelter to fifteen in New York City and ultimately to other cities around the country. Also woven throughout the book is a history of the Girl Scouts, and how the organization has changed and adapted to fit the times, meeting the needs of girls from all walks of life. Troop 6000 is the ultimate story of how when we come together, we can improve our circumstances, find support and commonality, and experience joy, no matter how challenging life may be.
The Louvre
James Gardner
Almost nine million people from all over the world flock to the Louvre in Paris every year to see its incomparable art collection. Yet few, if any, are aware of the remarkable history of that location and of the buildings themselves, and how they chronicle the history of Paris itself – a fascinating story that historian James Gardner elegantly tells for the first time.
Before the Louvre was a museum, it was a palace, and before that a fortress. But much earlier still, it was a place called le Louvre for reasons unknown. People had inhabited that spot for more than 6,000 years before King Philippe Auguste of France constructed a fortress there in 1191 to protect against English soldiers stationed in Normandy.
Two centuries later, Charles V converted the fortress to one of his numerous royal palaces. After Louis XIV moved the royal residence to Versailles in 1682, the Louvre inherited the royal art collection, which then included the Mona Lisa, given to Francis by Leonardo da Vinci; just over a century later, during the French Revolution, the National Assembly established the Louvre as a museum to display the nation’s treasures. Subsequent leaders of France, from Napoleon to Napoleon III to Francois Mitterand, put their stamp on the museum, expanding it into the extraordinary institution it has become.
With expert detail and keen admiration, James Gardner links the Louvre’s past to its glorious present, and vibrantly portrays how it has been a witness to French history – through the Napoleonic era, the Commune, two World Wars, to this day – and home to a legendary collection whose diverse origins and back stories create a spectacular narrative that rivals the building’s legendary stature.
How to Talk About Climate Change in a Way that Makes a Difference
Rebecca Huntley
Why is it so hard to talk about climate change?
While scientists double down on the shocking figures, we still find ourselves unable to discuss climate change meaningfully among friends and neighbours – or even to grapple with it ourselves.
The key to progress on climate change is in the psychology of human attitudes and our ability to change. Whether you’re already alarmed and engaged with the issue, concerned but disengaged, a passive skeptic or an active denier, understanding our emotional reactions to climate change – why it makes us anxious, fearful, angry or detached – is critical to coping on an individual level and convincing each other to act.
This book is about understanding why people who aren’t like you feel the way they do and learning to talk to them effectively. What we need are thousands – millions – of everyday conversations about the climate to enlarge the ranks of the concerned, engage the disengaged and persuade the cautious of the need for action.
Lost Companions: Reflections on the Death of Pets
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Our society is still learning how to dignify the relationship between a pet and their human with proper mourning rituals. We have only recently allowed the conversation of how to grieve for our non-human family members to come front and centre. In examining the special bond between pets and their people, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson validates the grief that we feel when a special pet dies.
Lost Companions is full of poignant stories about dogs, cats, horses, birds, wombats and other animals that beautifully illustrate the strong bond humans form with them. A heartfelt exploration of human grief after the loss of a pet by the New York Times bestselling author of Dogs Never Lie About Love, Lost Companions is a thought-provoking book on pet loss. Masson takes a personal approach, allowing readers to explore their own responses, suggesting ways through and out of grief, as well as meaningful ways to memorialize our best friends.
The Last Navigator
Paul Goodwin
The choking, chest-tightening feeling of being trapped in a burning Lancaster, enduring the uncertainty, you count down the requisite 60 seconds for the tanks to blow. Your skip has thrown off the fighters with yet another brilliant corkscrew manoeuvre but will you get your badly wounded bomber home?
Gordon Goodwin was a decorated airman and an inspired leader. During World War II he served in probably the most dangerous occupation of all, flying with the Pathfinders as they led bombing raids into Germany. He undertook 32 Pathfinder missions, including nine over Berlin, and 65 missions over enemy territory with Bomber Command. But to survive his childhood was perhaps a greater achievement.
Raised in harsh and loveless circumstances outside Brisbane during the Depression, his accomplishments were remarkable. This is the powerful first-hand account of Gordon’s dangerous and brave war experiences as recalled for his son Paul. ‘My father told me that to survive you had to surrender all hope.’ That extraordinary formula followed by the men of Bomber Command allowed Gordon to not only come through the war, but to find a successful career with Qantas, finishing as its chief, and possibly last, navigator. The Last Navigator is an illuminating, compelling and ultimately uplifting insight into a time that should not be forgotten.
The Number Bias: How Numbers Lead and Mislead Us
Sanne Blauw
Even if you don’t consider yourself a numbers person, you are a numbers person. The time has come to put numbers in their place. Not high up on a pedestal, or out on the curb, but right where they belong: beside words.
It is not an overstatement to say that numbers dictate the way we live our lives. They tell us how we’re doing at school, how much we weigh, who might win an election and whether the economy is booming. But numbers aren’t as objective as they may seem; behind every number is a story. Yet politicians, businesses and the media often forget this – or use it for their own gain.
Sanne Blauw travels the world to unpick our relationship with numbers and demystify our misguided allegiance, from Florence Nightingale using statistics to petition for better conditions during the Crimean War to the manipulation of numbers by the American tobacco industry and the ambiguous figures peddled during the EU referendum. Taking us from the everyday numbers that govern our health and wellbeing to the statistics used to wield enormous power and influence, The Number Bias counsels us to think more wisely.
Due North
James Viles
This is award-winning chef James Viles’ photographic journal of his road trip from Tassie to the Top End, from Flinders Island in the Tasman Sea to the Gulf of Carpentaria. His focus is real food, where it comes from, how it’s grown, tended and harvested and how it sometimes flourishes in the most hostile and breathtakingly beautiful parts of Australia.
James describes the people he meets along the road and the conversations he has with foragers, food producers, fishermen, tribal elders, local farmers, all of whom are knowledgeable and passionate about Australia and Australian ingredients. James also discovers that sleeping in a swag under the stars reminds him about what matters and reconnects him to his creative self. With exquisite imagery from Adam Gibson, this is an extraordinary portrait of a country.
Enemy of All Mankind
Steven Johnson
Henry Every was the seventeenth century’s most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular-and wildly inaccurate-reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Every’s most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a major shift in the global economy. Enemy of All Mankind focuses on one key event-the attack on an Indian treasure ship by Every and his crew-and its surprising repercussions across time and space. It’s the gripping tale one of the most lucrative crimes in history, the first international manhunt, and the trial of the seventeenth century.
Johnson uses the extraordinary story of Henry Every and his crimes to explore the emergence of the East India Company, the British Empire, and the modern global marketplace- a densely interconnected planet ruled by nations and corporations. How did this unlikely pirate and his notorious crime end up playing a key role in the birth of multinational capitalism? In the same mode as Johnson’s classic historical thriller The Ghost Map, Enemy of All Mankind deftly traces the path from a single struck match to a global conflagration.
Witcraft
Jonathan Ree
In Witcraft Jonathan Ree offers compelling intellectual portraits of celebrated British and American philosophers such as Locke, Hume, Emerson, Mill and James. But he also does much more. He draws attention to the philosophical work of literary authors like William Hazlitt and George Eliot, and dozens of others now largely forgotten, while paying tribute to the hundreds of ordinary men and women who engaged with philosophy while getting on with the rest of their lives.
Philosophers in Britain and America have often been regarded as narrow-minded and pedestrian compared to their counterparts in continental Europe- this lively and eventful book reveals them instead as colourful, diverse, inventive and cosmopolitan.
Philosophy, in Ree’s interpretation, turns out to be not the work of a few canonical old men, but of masses of ordinary people who have insisted on thinking for themselves, and reaching their own conclusions about religion, politics, art and everything else. ‘We English men have wits’, as Ralph Lever wrote in the sixteenth century. The history of philosophy will never look the same again.
One Way Ticket: Nine Lives on Two Wheels
Jonathan Vaughters
One Way Ticket is the story of a man and modern cycling. Jonathan Vaughters is one of the leading figures in world cycling, a record-breaking mountain climber, Tour de France stage winner and former teammate to Lance Armstrong. He is now manager and influential figurehead of the renowned Education First World Tour team.
Vaughters describes his journey from driven teenage prodigy, travelling to races in the back of his Dad’s station wagon, to an obsessive determination to make it big in European racing – whatever the cost. He tells the story of his transformation from poacher to gamekeeper, detailing his painful decision to finally come clean about his own descent into doping – and to persuade others to do likewise – by providing more than enough shocking testimony to USADA (US Anti-Doping Agency) to explode the Armstrong myth.
Working in collaboration with Jeremy Whittle, former cycling correspondent to The Times, now writing for The Guardian, Vaughters reveals the ease with which, his illusions shattered, he walked away from European racing. He documents his own suffering in races, the trials of establishing a team and mentoring young riders, and the dizzying highs of success in races such as the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia and Paris-Roubaix. Vaughters’ long and winding road mirrors that of cycling itself, as this compelling but troubled sport still struggles, after years of scandal, to restore its credibility. Along the way, he shares his unique experience to lift the lid on a world he has both loathed and loved, detailing the fights and fall-outs with cycling’s leading figures, including Lance Armstrong, Pat McQuaid, Johan Bruyneel, Bradley Wiggins and Dave Brailsford.
Step-by-step Veg Patch: How to Grow Your Own Food in Australia
Lucy Chamberlain
Step-by-step Veg Patch- How to Grow Your Own Food in Australia contains brilliantly simple instructions on how to grow the most common vegetables, fruits and herbs (including 275 varieties), especially designed for Australian climates.
You just look up the crop you want to grow, then follow the photographic instructions and practical advice about starting, nurturing, harvesting and pruning. This fully revised edition includes clear and helpful yearly planners for vegetables and fruit crops, as well as information on how to plan and prepare your space.
Whether you have a few pots inside, a small raised bed, a vegetable patch or a larger area, this is the one-stop shop for anyone wanting to grow and eat their own food.
Outraged: Why Everyone is Shouting and No One is Talking
Ashley Dotty Charles
Ours is a society where many exploit the outrage of others in order to gain power – and we all too quickly take the bait. But by shouting about everything, we are in fact creating a world where outrage is without consequence.
There is still much to be outraged by in our final frontier, but in order to enact change and become more effective online, we must learn to channel our responses.
This is the essential guide to living through the age of outrage.
FICTION
The Rain Heron
Robbie Arnott
Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading-and forgetting.
But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a local myth, Ren is inexorably drawn into her
impossible mission.
As their lives entwine, unravel and erupt-as myths merge with reality-both Ren and the soldier are forced to confront what they regret, what they love, and what they fear.
Robbie Arnott’s stunning second novel remakes our relationship with the natural world. The Rain Heron is equal parts horror and wonder, and utterly gripping.
The Silk House
Kayte Nunn
Australian history teacher Thea Rust arrives at an exclusive boarding school in the British countryside only to find that she is to look after the first intake of girls in its 150-year history. She is to stay with them in Silk House, a building with a long and troubled past.
In the late 1700s, Rowan Caswell leaves her village to work in the home of an English silk merchant. She is thrust into a new and dangerous world where her talent for herbs and healing soon attracts attention.
In London, Mary-Louise Stephenson lives amid the clatter of the weaving trade and dreams of becoming a silk designer, a job that is the domain of men. A length of fabric she weaves with a pattern of deadly flowers will have far-reaching consequences for all who dwell in the silk house.
Intoxicating, haunting and inspired by the author’s background, The Silk House is an exceptional gothic mystery.
The Geometry of Holding Hands
Alexander McCall Smith
In Edinburgh, rumours and gossip abound. But Isabel Dalhousie knows that such things can’t be taken at face value. Still, the latest whispers hint at mysterious goings-on, and who but Isabel can be trusted to get to the bottom of them? At the same time, she must deal with the demands of her two small children, her husband and her rather tempestuous niece, Cat, whose latest romantic entanglement comes – to no one’s surprise – with complications. Even with so much going on, Isabel, through the application of good sense, logic and ethics, will, as ever, triumph.
Isabel Dalhousie applies her moral philosopher’s mind to wrongdoings in Edinburgh, and will have to call upon her powers of deduction and her unflappable moral code to unravel another mystery in the new novel from the bestselling author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.
Heaven and Earth
Paolo Giordano
Every summer Teresa follows her father to his childhood home in Puglia, down in the heel of Italy, a land of relentless, shimmering heat and centuries-old olive groves. There Teresa spends long afternoons enveloped in a sun-struck stupor, reading her grandmother’s cheap crime paperbacks.
Everything changes the summer she meets the three boys who live on the masseria next door: Nicola, Tommaso and Bern – the man Teresa will love for the rest of her life. Raised like brothers on a farm that feels to Teresa almost suspended in time, the three boys share a complex, intimate and seemingly unassailable bond.
But no bond is unbreakable and no summer truly endless, as Teresa soon discovers.
Because there is resentment underneath the surface of that strange brotherhood, a twisted kind of love that protects a dark secret. And when Bern – the enigmatic, restless gravitational centre of the group – commits a brutal act of revenge, not even a final pilgrimage to the edge of the world will be enough to bring back those perfect, golden hours in the shadow of the olive trees.
From the creator and writer of the new HBO series We Are Who We Are, co-written and directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) and starring Chloe Sevigny.
Night Sleep Death The Stars
Joyce Carol Oates
When a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. Night Sleep Death The Stars is a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy.
Stark and penetrating, Joyce Carol Oates’s latest novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author’s bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys.
Latitudes of Longing
Shubhangi Swarup
In the feverish tropics of the Andaman Islands, a young botanist tends to a fragile rose he has imported to welcome his bride. Hoping their marriage will bloom in this strange life, hundreds of miles from the east coast of India, he is entranced by Chanda Devi’s fierce nature and unusual gifts; speaking to trees and the ghosts of former colonialists. These islands, she tells her adoring husband, rest on a faultline, cracked so deep into the earth that spirits cross the boundary freely. But it is not this fracture that takes a tragic bite out of their happiness.
With the family riven by heartbreak, their maid takes the chance to resolve her own past mistakes. Having abandoned her son many years before, she now traces him to Myanmar, only to find him in prison – the enemy of a brutal regime. The faultline she followed over the Indian Ocean now cuts north into Nepal, where the prisoner’s ally, an itinerant drug dealer, tries to rescue a young woman from the dancing bars of Kathmandu. It shadows his footsteps into the Karakorum mountains, where a scientist looks deep into the abyss between India and Pakistan. It rises all the way to the snow deserts, beyond the reach of nation or war, where an elder of the village waits for the return of his true love, bringing all their journeys full circle.
A breathtaking epic, Latitudes of Longing possesses the reader with a blazing sense of wonder. Shubhangi Swarup’s vision goes deeper than the human stories of the subcontinent to reveal the conscious history of the earth itself. Tender in every detail, touched with humour and profound, this is a novel brimming with life, an original masterpiece
Last Survivor
Tony Park
Greed.
Joanne Flack is on the run – suspected of stealing a rare African plant thought to be extinct and worth millions of dollars.
Danger.
Sonja Kurtz is hired by the CIA to hunt down Joanne and find the link between the missing plant and a terrorist group hiding out in South Africa.
Treachery.
Joanne is a member of the Pretoria Cycad and Firearms Appreciation Society who take it upon themselves to track down the plant … and the traitor in their midst who is willing to kill for it.
The Museum of Forgotten Memories
Anstey Harris
When Cate and Richard met at university they felt an immediate spark, but as the couple matured Richard’s inner demons threatened their happiness. With time, he receded further and further into darkness until he disappeared altogether.
Now, four years after Richard’s passing, Cate is let go from her teaching job and can’t pay the rent on the London flat she shares with her and Richard’s son, Leo. She packs the two of them up and ventures to Richard’s grandfather’s old Victorian museum in the small town of Crouch-on-Sea, where the dusty staff quarters await her. Despite growing pains and a grouchy caretaker, Cate falls in love with the quirky taxidermy exhibits and sprawling grounds and makes it her mission to revive them. But as Cate becomes more invested in Hatters, she must finally confront the reality of Richard’s death – and the role she played in it – in order to reimagine her future.
The Museum of Forgotten Memories masterfully weaves life with death, past with present, and grief with hope.
On a Barbarous Coast
Craig Cormick & Harold Ludwick
We were becoming the wild things we most feared, but could not see it at the time.
On a night of raging winds and rain, Captain Cook’s Endeavour lies splintered on a coral reef off the coast of far north Australia. A small disparate band of survivors, fracturing already, huddle on the shore of this strange land – their pitiful salvage scant protection from the dangers of the unknown creatures and natives that live here.
Watching these mysterious white beings, the Guugu Yimidhirr people cannot decide if they are ancestor spirits to be welcomed – or hostile spirits to be speared. One headstrong young boy, Garrgiil, determines to do more than watch and to be the one to find out what exactly they are.
Fierce, intriguing and thoughtful, On a Barbarous Coast is the story of a past and future that might have been.
The Court of Miracles
Kester Grant
Liberty
1828 and the citizens of Paris still mourn in the wake of their failed revolution. Among them, in the dark alleys and crumbling cathedrals of the city, the most wretched have gathered into guilds of thieves, assassins – and worse. Together they are known as The Court of Miracles.
Family
Eponine has lost more than most. When her father, Thénardier, sells her sister to the Guild of Flesh she makes a promise to do anything she can to get her sister back, even if that means joining the Court of Miracles, the very people keeping her sister a slave.
Treachery
Eponine becomes perhaps the greatest thief the Court has ever known, finding a place among them and gaining another sister, Cosette. But she has never forgotten the promise she made, and if she’s to have any hope of saving one sister, she will have to betray the other.
This beautiful reimagining of Les Misérables tells the stories of your favourite characters and what might have happened if the French Revolution had not come to pass.
The Last Trial
Scott Turow
Already eighty-five years old, and in precarious health, Stern has been persuaded to defend an old friend, Pavel Pafko. A former Nobel Prize-winner in Medicine, Pafko, shockingly, has been charged in a federal racketeering indictment with fraud, insider trading and murder.
As the trial progresses, Stern will question everything he thought he knew about his friend. Despite Pafko’s many failings, is he innocent of the terrible charges laid against him? How far will Stern go to save his friend, and—no matter the trial’s outcome—will he ever know the truth? Stern’s duty to defend his client and his belief in the power of the judicial system both face a final, terrible test in the courtroom, where the evidence and reality are sometimes worlds apart.
Full of the deep insights into the spaces where the fragility of human nature and the justice system collide, Scott Turow’s The Last Trial is a masterful legal thriller that unfolds in page-turning suspense—and questions how we measure a life.
One Day I’ll Tell You Everything
Emmanuelle Pagano
When I was a little boy, I would often pretend to be dead. I wanted people to weep over me. I wept for myself, usually near a tree, under it or up inside it, just like I’m crying today, a woman weeping, in my weeping birch tree…
After ten years away, Adèle has returned to drive the school bus in the village in the Ardèche mountains where she grew up. Her body has undergone seismic transformations, just like the landscape around her. No one recognises her. But when a snowstorm strands the bus on a mountainside, Adèle and her passengers take shelter in a cave, and the secrets begin to emerge.
One Day I’ll Tell You Everything is the haunting story of two siblings—a younger brother and his older sister, who used to be his brother. A powerful and beautifully written story of a boy who wanted to be a girl, who became a woman, who lives intensely through her new body and through the physical world around her.
The Roxy Letters
Mary Pauline Lowry
Roxy is underemployed, sexually frustrated, and uninspired. Tired of her job as a deli maid at the original Whole Foods, Roxy daydreams of breaking out of her funk and finding a job that will get her creative juices flowing. She also wouldn’t mind finding love and finding herself off the brink of financial ruin—though Everett’s late rent payments aren’t helping her with the latter.
On top of it all, gentrification is slowly changing her beloved Austin in new and evilly corporate ways. When a new Lululemon pops up at the intersection of 6th and Lamar where the old Waterloo Video used to be, Roxy can stay silent no longer.
Encouraged by her ex-deli counter comrade Annie—now assistant to the Whole Foods CEO and planning an animal rights revolution from the inside—and her new friend Artemis, a vivacious and mercurial man-eater with a string of personas and paramours all over town, Roxy decides to take action. But can this spunky, unforgettable millennial keep Austin weird, avoid arrest, and discover good sex, true love, and her purpose in life in the process??
The Roxy Letters is a hilarious and heartwarming novel told through the letters that the charming and hapless Roxy, a twenty-eight-year old Austin native, sends to her ex-boyfriend (and current roommate) Everett.
Sticks and Stones
Katherine Firkin
It’s winter in Melbourne and Detective Emmett Corban is starting to regret his promotion to head of the Missing Persons Unit, as the routine reports pile up on his desk.
So when Natale Gibson goes missing, he’s convinced this is the big case he’s been waiting for – the woman’s husband and parents insist the devoted mother would never abandon her children, and her personal accounts remain untouched.
But things aren’t all they seem. The close-knit Italian family is keeping secrets – none bigger than the one Natale has been hiding.
Just as the net seems to be tightening, the investigation is turned on its head. The body of a woman is found . . . then another.
What had seemed like a standard missing person’s case has turned into a frightening hunt for a serial killer, and time is running out.
But to really understand these shocking crimes, Emmett and his team will need to delve back through decades of neglect – back to a squalid inner-city flat, where a young boy is left huddling over his mother’s body . . .
The Vanishing Half
Brit Bennett
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ story lines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
The Spill
Imbi Neeme
In 1981, a car overturns on a remote West Australian road. Nobody is hurt, but the impact is felt for decades.
Nicole and Samantha Cooper both remember the summer day when their mother, Tina, lost control of their car – but not in quite the same way. It is only after Tina’s death, almost four decades later, that the sisters are forced to reckon with the repercussions of the crash. Nicole, after years of sabotaging her own happiness, seems finally content but still can’t get through to her sister. And Samantha is hiding something that might just tear apart the life she’s worked so hard to build for herself.
The Spill explores the cycles of love, loss and regret that can follow a family through the years – moments of joy, things left unsaid, and things misremembered. Above all, it is a deeply moving portrait of two sisters falling apart and finding a way to fit back together.
The Sight of You
Holly Miller
Joel is afraid of the future.
Since he was a child he’s been haunted by dreams about the people he loves. Visions of what’s going to happen – the good and the bad. And the only way to prevent them is to never let anyone close to him again.
Callie can’t let go of the past.
Since her best friend died, Callie’s been lost. She knows she needs to be more spontaneous and live a bigger life. She just doesn’t know how to find a way back to the person who used to have those dreams.
Joel and Callie both need a reason to start living for today.
And though they’re not looking for each other, from the moment they meet it feels like the start of something life-changing.
Until Joel has a vision of how it’s going to end . . .
NON-FICTION
Hidden Hand
Clive Hamilton & Mareike Ohlberg
With its enormous economic power, China is now a global political and military force engaged in an ideological struggle with the West. Combining a mass of evidence with unique insights, Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg lay bare the nature and extent of the Chinese Communist Party’s influence operations across the Western world – in politics, business, universities, think tanks and international institutions such as the UN. This new authoritarian power is using democracy to undermine democracy in pursuit of its global ambitions.
Combining meticulous research with compelling prose, this landmark follow up to the best-selling Silent Invasion brings to light the Chinese Communist Party’s threats to democratic freedoms and national sovereignty across Europe and North America – and show how we might push back against its autocratic influence.
Landscapes of our Hearts
Matthew Colloff
On this ancient continent, waves of people have made their mark on the landscape; in turn, it too has shaped them.
If we look afresh at our history through the land we live on, might Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians find a path to a shared future?
An epic exploration of our relationship with this country, Landscapes of Our Hearts takes us from the Great Barrier Reef to the Central Desert, the High Country to Canberra’s Limestone Plains. It is a book of hope and offers the possibility that a renewed connection to the landscape and to each other could pave the way towards reconciliation.
It will change the way you see this land.
Staying Alive
Kate Gregorevic
Discover how to thrive and live better for longer. By the time we turn 60 most of us will still have one-third of our lives to live. How well we live these years will depend on our health: are we agile, disease free, dependent on medication or require medical assistance?
In Staying Alive you’ll discover proven scientific details on how you can avoid or manage the major diseases that impact us as we age, including heart health, diabetes and dementia, and boost your everyday behaviours to improve your enjoyment of life.
Specialist Australian geriatrician, Dr Kate Gregorevic, clearly outlines the key lifestyle enhancing strategies for nutrition, exercise, cognitive and emotional health and the positive impact they will have as you age.
Easy to understand and based on the latest research, this is the day-to-day lifestyle guide you need to benefit you now and into a long and healthy future.
The Insider
Christopher Pyne
Christopher Pyne has been many things and called many things throughout his long career in politics. Member for Sturt. Minister for Defence. Manager of Opposition Business. Leader of the House. ‘The Fixer’. Any Canberra story he doesn’t know isn’t worth telling.
Now, after 26 years, the ultimate insider is outside the House and ready to burst the Canberra bubble with his trademark sharp wit. His revelations of dealings, double dealings, friendships and feuds shine a light on the political processes of those in power: the egos, the sacrifices, the winners, the losers, the triumphs and the failures. From Howard to Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison, Christopher Pyne has seen and heard it all.
The Insider is one of the most brilliant, funny, engaging books by an Australian public figure you’ll ever read.
Coconut and Sambal
Lara Lee
Coconut and Sambal reveals the secrets behind authentic Indonesian cookery. With more than 80 traditional and vibrant recipes that have been passed down through the generations, you will discover dishes such as Nasi goreng, Beef rendang, Chilli prawn satay and Pandan cake, alongside a variety of recipes for sambals: fragrant, spicy relishes that are undoubtedly the heart and soul of every meal.
Lara uses simple techniques and easily accessible ingredients throughout Coconut and Sambal, interweaving the recipes with beguiling tales of island life and gorgeous travel photography that shines a light on the magnificent, little-known cuisine of Indonesia.
What are you waiting for? Travel the beautiful islands of Indonesia and taste the different regions through these recipes.
Rone: Street Art and Beyond
Mo Wyse (Editor)
Known for his multi-storey murals gracing buildings all over the world, Melbourne-based artist Rone uses his work to explore the friction and connection between beauty and decay, youth and ruin.
Rone was a seminal figure in the explosive Melbourne street art scene of the early 2000s. With his beginnings in street art, stencil and screen printing, Rone is now best known for his haunting images of women’s faces, rendered in arresting detail on silos and store fronts, museums and apartment blocks. His immersive installations have continued his investigation into divergent themes of beauty and ruin, materiality and loss, through the transformation of condemned, derelict or forgotten spaces – with each artwork painstakingly produced, only to be destroyed.
Rone: Street Art and Beyond presents a survey of the artist’s work from the street, the studio, and the ephemeral installations. The works are bookended by essays that trace the evolution of Rone’s career over the last two decades, delve into his depictions of women, and go behind the scenes of his most ambitious installation to date: Empire (2019), set in the disused Art Deco mansion Burnham Beeches on the outskirts of Melbourne. Anecdotal notes from the artist unpack the stories behind the portraits, tying them to their communities in London, Paris, New York, Havana, Christchurch, Hong Kong and beyond.
One Punch: The Tragic Toll of Random Acts of Violence
Barry Dickens
In One Punch Barry Dickins reflects on the many types of violence that can now affect everyday life. In his heartfelt exploration of the subject, Barry talks to many of the people whom this violence impacts, including the parents of children who have been killed, professionals in the justice system, and children who live in communities where violence is rife. He looks at how the world has changed in his lifetime and discusses where we are going as a society.
The Trials of Portnoy
Patrick Mullins
For more than seventy years, a succession of politicians, judges, and government officials in Australia worked in the shadows to enforce one of the most pervasive and conservative regimes of censorship in the world. The goal was simple- to keep Australia free of the moral contamination of impure literature. Under the censorship regime, books that might damage the morals of the Australian public were banned, seized, and burned; bookstores were raided; publishers were fined; and writers were charged and even jailed. But in the 1970s, that all changed.
In 1970, in great secrecy and at considerable risk, Penguin Books Australia resolved to publish Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth’s frank, funny, and profane bestseller about a boy hung up about his mother and his penis. In doing so, Penguin spurred a direct confrontation with the censorship authorities, which culminated in criminal charges, police raids, and an unprecedented series of court trials across the country.
Sweeping from the cabinet room to the courtroom, The Trials of Portnoy draws on archival records and new interviews to show how Penguin and a band of writers, booksellers, academics, and lawyers determinedly sought for Australians the freedom to read what they wished – and how, in defeating the forces arrayed before them, they reshaped Australian literature and culture forever.
Sad Mum Lady
Ashe Davenport
‘If people knew how bad this was,’ I said to a friend two weeks after the birth, nipples flashing red like emergency lights under my dressing-gown, ‘they would be sterilised on their thirteenth birthdays.’
It sometimes feels like there’s a rule for parents: if you’re going to say anything mildly unhappy about parenting, you must also be at pains to stress that it is all worth it. What joy! What wonder! How lucky we are!
But then there’s the crying. And the body horror. The tearing and the leaking. And the crippling isolation. And the sleep deprivation. And somehow a dead rat in the cubbyhouse and the endless judgement of peers and neighbours and the internet.
But fear not. Ashe Davenport is here. And she’s not afraid to say it’s fucked.
Unapologetic and frank, Sad Mum Lady navigates the joys of motherhood in ways that will be familiar, hilarious and essential reading for parents and non-parents alike. Savage, true and deeply relatable – finally, a book that resists the sanitised, acceptable face of parenting. You might not feel better, but at least you’ll feel less alone.
How Innovation Works
Matt Ridley
The products of innovation are all around us, from light bulbs and nuclear energy to antibiotics, artificial intelligence and even wheelie suitcases.
In the 1950s, the economist Robert Solow calculated that 87% of economic growth came not from applying more capital or more labour, but from innovation making people more productive. It’s probably even higher today – new materials, new machines and new ideas to cut costs and enable people to spend less time fulfilling more of their needs: that’s what growth means.
But innovation is still a remarkably mysterious process. It’s more than just the invention of a new gadget: it requires lots of hard work making something affordable and useful. Innovation is an evolutionary activity that happens in the cloud of shared experiences; it relies on recombination or exchange; it is incremental; it feeds upon itself. And innovation is the great equaliser: today some of the poorest African communities have mobile phones that work as well as Tim Cook’s. Innovation is why the number of people living in extreme poverty is declining rapidly – and it is the reason the number will continue to decline.
From the bestselling author of The Rational Optimist, How Innovation Works draws on evolutionary biology and archeology as well as technology, politics and economics, telling the real stories behind the great leaps forward that have defined modern society. Looking at key developments from harnessing steam power to nuclear fusion, genetic modification and now the impact of social media on polarisation, How Innovation Works explores significant the breakthroughs in science, technology and economics that we all benefit from today – and considers where they might originate in future.
The Convict Valley
Mark Dunn
In 1790, five convicts escaped Sydney by boat and were swept ashore near present-day Newcastle. They were taken in by the Worimi people, given Aboriginal names and started families. Thus began a long and at times dramatic series of encounters between Aboriginal people and convicts in the second penal settlement in Australia.
The fertile valley of the Hunter River was the first area outside the Sydney basin explored by the British, and it became one of the largest penal settlements. Today manicured lawns and prosperous vineyards hide the struggle, violence and toil of the thousands of convicts who laid its foundations. The Convict Valley uncovers this rich colonial past, as well as the story of the original Aboriginal landholders. While there were friendships and alliances in the early years, in the later scramble for land in the 1820s – as the Valley was opened to free settlers – tensions rose and bloodshed ensued.
With fascinating stories about convicts, white settlers and the Aboriginal inhabitants that have long been forgotten, The Convict Valley is a new Australian history classic.
The Gospel of the Eels
Patrik Svensson
I can’t recall us ever talking about anything other than eels and how to best catch them, down there by the stream. Actually, I can’t remember us speaking at all. Maybe because we never did.
The European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is one of the strangest creatures nature ever created. Remarkably little is known about the eel, even today. What we do know is that it’s born as a tiny willow-leaf shaped larva in the Sargasso Sea, travels on the ocean currents toward the coasts of Europe – a journey of about four thousand miles that takes at least two years. Upon arrival, it transforms itself into a glass eel and then into a yellow eel before it wanders up into fresh water. It lives a solitary life, hiding from light and science both, for ten, twenty, fifty years, before migrating back to the sea in the autumn, morphing into a silver eel and swimming all the way back to the Sargasso Sea, where it breeds and dies.
And yet . . . There is still so much we don’t know about eels. No human has ever seen eels reproduce; no one can give a complete account of the eel’s metamorphoses or say why they are born and die in the Sargasso Sea; no human has even seen a mature eel in the Sargasso Sea. Ever. And now the eel is disappearing, and we don’t know exactly why.
What we do know is that eels and their mysterious lives captivate us.
This is the basis for Patrik Svensson’s quite unique natural science memoir; his ongoing fascination with this secretive fish, but also the equally perplexing and often murky relationship he shared with his father, whose only passion in life was fishing for this obscure creature.
Through the exploration of eels in literature (Günter Grass and Graham Swift feature, amongst others) in the history of science (we learn about Aristotle’s and Sigmund Freud’s complicated relationships with eels) as well as modern marine biology (Rachel Carson and others) we get to know this peculiar animal, and in this exploration, also learn about the human condition, life and death, through natural science and nature writing at its very best.
Smorgasbord
Signe Johansen with Peter’s Yard
Traditionally served whenever family and friends get together, smorgasbords are a celebration of food and gatherings. They have always featured crispbreads (knackebrod), which in Sweden are eaten like bread. This collection of simple recipes reflects the modern, more informal approach to smorgasbords so as well as classics, such as skagen (prawn salad) and citrus and spice cured gravadlax, it includes dishes such as fried chanterelles on toasted sourdough, barbecued zesty cod burgers and orange and ginger waffles with rhubarb compote.
For spring, there are ideas for an Easter celebration and a bonfire party, for summer a midsummer gathering and crayfish party. Autumn has a feast supper and foraged dinner and Winter a Christmas drinks and New Year’s brunch. The emphasis always is on selecting quality, seasonal ingredients to share and enjoy with friends and family.
Explore the seasons of Swedish cooking with these deliciously simple modern Scandinavian recipes.
Niki Lauda: The Biography
Maurice Hamilton
In 1975, Lauda became world champion for the first time. Driving for Ferrari, he looked to retain his title in 1976 and was dominating the campaign ahead of James Hunt in his McLaren. Then, on 1 August, he was involved in a horrendous crash at the Nurburgring and was badly burned and in hospital he was given the last rites, so severe were his injuries. Remarkably, six weeks later, he was back racing again, determined to show he could still compete. As they came to the final race of the season in Japan, Lauda held a narrow lead in the championship, but in appalling weather conditions, Lauda withdrew from the race, while Hunt went on to secure the points he needed to become world champion. It was high-speed drama at its best.
Lauda came back to win the title again in 1977 and then, having temporarily retired, he won it for a third time in 1984, driving for McLaren. When he finally finished as an F1 driver, he started his own airline, before he returned to the sport in various management roles, latterly as chairman of Mercedes, where he helped in the negotiations to bring Lewis Hamilton to the team.
Maurice Hamilton, who first met Lauda in 1971, draws together the remarkable story of one of the greatest stars in Formula One history. Based on interviews with friends and family, rival drivers and those he worked with later in his career, Niki Lauda is a superb and definitive tribute to a remarkable character, who died in May 2019 at the age of seventy.
The Coal Curse: Resources, Climate and Australia’s Future (Quarterly Essay No.78)
Judith Brett
Australia is a wealthy nation with the economic profile of a developing country – heavy on raw materials, and low on innovation and skilled manufacturing. Once we rode on the sheep’s back for our overseas trade; today we rely on cartloads of coal and tankers of LNG. So must we double down on fossil fuels, now that Covid-19 has halted the flow of international students and tourists? Or is there a better way forward, which supports renewable energy and local manufacturing?
Judith Brett traces the unusual history of Australia’s economy and the “resource curse” that has shaped our politics. She shows how the mining industry learnt to run fear campaigns, and how the Coalition became dominated by fossil-fuel interests to the exclusion of other voices.
In this insightful essay about leadership, vision and history, she looks at the costs of Australia’s coal addiction and asks, where will we be if the world stops buying it?
Paris Match: Falling in (love) with the French
John von Sothen
In Brooklyn, John von Sothen fell in love with Anais, a French waitress. And then, one night in Paris, on the Pont Neuf, she agreed to marry him (“Bah, we can always get divorced!”). A couple of decades in, the two have become quatre, living in their beloved 10th arondissement with teenage kids who chat to their African neighbours in fluent Parisian slang, and John has even become kind of French himself. Well, he likes to think he has. The family still see him as an American innocent abroad.
Paris Match is one of those rare books that makes you laugh out loud, as von Sothen attempts to understand what makes the French tick. Why do they take such long holidays with friends who ration snacks and mock you for sleeping in; why do French men turn to him (an American!) for fashion tips; what really is the correct way to cut brie, and how do you tell if you’re being invited to a super-exclusive secret society of intellectuals or a weird sex club? John von Sothen has found most of the answers and in this delightful, witty book shares his experience, insights and humour into the fine art of becoming everyday French.
The Great Imperial Hangover
Samir Puri
For the first time in millennia we live without formal empires. But that doesn’t mean we don’t feel their presence rumbling through history. The Great Imperial Hangover examines how the world’s imperial legacies are still shaping the thorniest issues we face today.
From Russia’s incursions in the Ukraine to Brexit; from Trump’s ‘America-first policy’ to China’s forays into Africa; from Modi’s India to the hotbed of the Middle East, Puri provides a bold new framework for understanding the world’s complex rivalries and politics.
Organised by region, and covering vital topics such as security, foreign policy, national politics and commerce, The Great Imperial Hangover combines gripping history and astute analysis to explain why the history of empire affects us all in profound ways.
Mackenzie’s Mission
Rachael Casella
Rachael and Jonathan were thrilled to welcome their baby Mackenzie into the world and to start their new lives as parents. Little did they know that in a few months they would be tested to endurance and beyond.
Like many other couples starting a family, Rachael and Jonathan had no idea they were both carriers for a genetic disease, and that 1 in 20 babies are affected by genetic birth defects. Their daughter was one of those babies, and Mackenzie’s Mission is Rachael’s beautiful and heartwarming account of Mackenzie’s life, child loss, and a journey through IVF.
Determined that other couples should not go through the same heartbreak, Rachael and Jonathan are now champions for genetic testing.
This is a story of triumph over adversity, the strength that can be found in kindness and the power of one couple to affect positive change in the world.
Becoming John Curtin and James Scullen
Liam Byrne
Before becoming the prime ministers who led Australia in moments of extraordinary crisis and transformation, John Curtin and James Scullin were two young working-class men who dreamt of changing their country for the better. Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin tells the tale of their intertwined early lives as both men became labour intellectuals and powerbrokers at the beginning of the twentieth century. It reveals the underappreciated role each man played in the events that defined the modern Australian Labor Party- its first experience of national government, the turmoil of war, the great conscription clash and party split of 1916, and the heated debates over the party’s socialist objective.
Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin shows how they became the leaders that history knows best by painting a portrait of two young men struggling to establish their identities and find their place in the world. It tells of their great friendships, loves and passions, and reminds us that these were real men, with real weaknesses, desires and dreams. It explains how their early political careers set the scene for their later prime ministerships as they honed the techniques of power that led them to the summit of Australian politics.
This is the story of two young men striving to better the world they had inherited, a story of optimism and hope with enduring relevance for today’s troubled politics.
FICTION
The Things She Owned
Katherine Tamiko Arguile
Years after the death of her cruel and complicated mother, Erika’s house is still full of the things Michiko left behind: an onigiri basket, a Wedgwood tea set, a knotted ring from Okinawa. In defiance of Japanese tradition, Erika has also kept the urn containing Michiko’s ashes, refusing to put her memory to rest. Erika throws herself into working as a chef at a high-end London restaurant and pretends everything is fine. But when a cousin announces that she will be visiting from Japan, Erika’s resolve begins to crack.
Slowly the things Michiko owned reveal stories of Michiko’s youth amid the upheaval of Tokyo during and after the war. As the two women’s stories progress and entwine, Erika is drawn to the island of Okinawa, the homeland of her grandmother. It’s a place of magic and mysticism where the secrets of Erika’s own past are waiting to be revealed.
Beautiful and mysterious, The Things She Owned explores the complexity of lives lived between cultures, the weight of crossgenerational trauma, and a mother and daughter on a tortuous path to forgiveness.
In the Time of Foxes
Jo Lennan
A fox could be a shape-shifter, a spirit being. It could appear in human form if this suited its purposes; it could come and go as it pleased, play tricks, lead men astray.’
A film director in Hackney with a fox problem in her garden; an escapee from a cult in Japan; a Sydney café-owner rekindling an old flame; an English tutor who gets too close to an oligarch; a journalist on Mars, face-to-face with his fate.
The world has taught these men and women to live off their wits. They know how to play smart, but what happens when they need to be wise?
In the Time of Foxes is both compellingly readable and deeply insightful about the times in which we live, each narrative a compressed novel. With an exhilarating span of people and places, woven together by the most mercurial of animals, it shows the short story collection at its most entertaining and rewarding, and introduces Jo Lennan as a captivating new storyteller.
The Drop-off
Fiona Harris & Mike McLeish
Lizzie, Megan and Sam became accidental friends over good coffee, banter and wrong-world jokes at school drop off. Lizzie is a part-time midwife with four kids and a secret past. Sam is an ex-chef and stay-at-home dad with an absent, high-flying corporate wife. Megan is an ex-model single mum with a thriving online business and no time for loneliness.
None of them have much interest in their school community, but when tragedy deals Baytree Primary’s reputation a potentially crippling blow, this unlikely trio have to step up. Forced out of their respective comfort zones, Lizzie, Megan and Sam learn more about each other, the school and themselves than they thought possible.
And it all begins at The Drop-off.
Find Them Dead
Peter James
A Brighton gangster is on trial for conspiracy to murder, following the death of a rival crime family boss. As the jury file into Lewes Crown Court, twelve anonymous people selected randomly from fifty, there is one person sitting in the public gallery observing them with keen interest, and secretly filming them. Later, a group of the accused’s henchmen sit around a table with the full personal details of each of the twelve jurors in front of them. They need to influence two of them – a jury can convict if directed on a 10-2 majority verdict but no less. But which two?
When Roy Grace is called in to investigate a murder that has links to the accused and the trial, and the suspicion that an attempt has been made to intimidate jurors, he finds the reach and power of the accused’s tentacles go higher than he had ever imagined.
Love
Roddy Doyle
One summer’s evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant.
Old friends, now married and with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy, a grief he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be.
Neither Davy nor Joe know what the night has in store, but as two pints turns to three, then five, and the men set out to revisit the haunts of their youth, the ghosts of Dublin entwine around them. Their first buoyant forays into adulthood, the pubs, the parties, broken hearts and bungled affairs, as well as the memories of what eventually drove them apart.
As the two friends try to reconcile their versions of the past over the course of one night, Love offers up a delightfully comic, yet moving portrait of what love, in its many forms, can take throughout our lives.
The Discomfort of Evening
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
I asked God if he please couldn’t take my brother Matthies instead of my rabbit. ‘Amen.’
Ten-year-old Jas has a unique way of experiencing her universe: the feeling of udder ointment on her skin as protection against harsh winters; the texture of green warts, like capers, on migrating toads; the sound of ‘blush words’ that aren’t in the Bible. But when a tragic accident ruptures the family, her curiosity warps into a vortex of increasingly disturbing fantasies – unlocking a darkness that threatens to derail them all.
A bestselling sensation in the Netherlands, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld’s radical debut novel is studded with images of wild, violent beauty: a world of language unlike any other.
Goldilocks
Laura Lam
Despite increasing restrictions on the freedoms of women on Earth, Valerie Black is spearheading the first all-female mission to a planet in the Goldilocks Zone, where conditions are just right for human habitation.
It’s humanity’s last hope for survival, and Naomi, Valerie’s surrogate daughter and the ship’s botanist, has been waiting her whole life for an opportunity like this – to step out of Valerie’s shadow and really make a difference.
But when things start going wrong on the ship, Naomi starts to suspect that someone on board is concealing a terrible secret – and realises time for life on Earth may be running out faster than they feared . . .
Fair Warning
Michael Connolly
Veteran reporter Jack McEvoy has taken down killers before, but when a woman he had a one-night stand with is murdered in a particularly brutal way, McEvoy realizes he might be facing a criminal mind unlike any he’s ever encountered.
McEvoy investigates–against the warnings of the police and his own editor–and makes a shocking discovery that connects the crime to other mysterious deaths across the country. But his inquiry hits a snag when he himself becomes a suspect.
As he races to clear his name, McEvoy’s findings point to a serial killer working under the radar of law enforcement for years, and using personal data shared by the victims themselves to select and hunt his targets.
Called ‘the Raymond Chandler of this generation’ (Associated Press), Michael Connelly once again delivers an unputdownable thriller that reveals a predator operating from the darkest corners of human nature-and one man courageous and determined enough to stand in his way.
Three Apples Fell from the Sky
Narine Abgaryan
In a remote village high in the Armenian mountains, a close-knit community bickers, gossips and laughs. Their only connection with the outside world is an ancient telegraph wire and a perilous mountain road that even cows struggle to navigate. As they go about their daily lives – harvesting crops, making baklava, tidying their houses – the villagers are sustained by one thing: their belief in magic. But when 58-year old Anatolia becomes pregnant, it looks like the fortunes of this isolated village are about to change…
With sumptuous imagery and warm humour, Narine Abgaryan’s enchanting fable brilliantly captures the idiosyncrasy of a small community. Three Apples Fell from the Sky is a vibrant tale of resilience, bravery and the rejuvenating power of love, available in English for the first time.
Night Lessons in Little Jerusalem
Rick Held
The hero of this book was not a saint, nor even a tzadik – the nearest Jewish equivalent – but he was a hero. Someone who risked his own life to make a difference to the life of another. Were his motives selfless? No. He was after all flesh and blood. A man. And a very young one. But life is not black and white. Heroes are not without their flaws. This is his story.
Tholdi is a romantic. A musical prodigy whose brilliant future is extinguished when the horror unfolding across Europe arrives at his door. One day he’s captivated by the beautiful, mysterious Lyuba who he meets on his sixteenth birthday; the next he wakes to the terrors of war as the Nazi-allied Romanians attack his town of Czernowitz.
A ghetto is built to imprison the town’s Jews before herding them onto trains bound for the concentration camps of Transnistria. With each passing day, Tholdi and his parents await their turn. And then Fate intervenes, giving them all a reprieve.
At the weaving mill Tholdi secures work that spares him. He is elated. Until he discovers the two brothers who run the mill are Nazi collaborators hiding a terrible secret: the threat of transportation remains. When Tholdi sees one of the brothers with Lyuba, he glimpses a way to save himself and his family. But the stakes of his gamble are high. Will Lyuba be the key to their survival, or will Tholdi’s infatuation with her become a dangerous obsession that guarantees their death?
Night Lessons in Little Jerusalem is an unforgettable debut novel of war, family and love.
If It Bleeds
Stephen King
News people have a saying: ‘If it bleeds, it leads’. And a bomb at Albert Macready Middle School is guaranteed to lead any bulletin.
Holly Gibney of the Finders Keepers detective agency is working on the case of a missing dog – and on her own need to be more assertive – when she sees the footage on TV. But when she tunes in again, to the late-night report, she realises there is something not quite right about the correspondent who was first on the scene.
So begins ‘If It Bleeds’, a stand-alone sequel to the No. 1 bestselling The Outsider featuring the incomparable Holly on her first solo case – and also the riveting title story in Stephen King’s brilliant new collection of four uniquely wonderful long stories.
Katheryn Howard, the Tainted Queen (Tudor Queens #5)
Alison Weir
A naive young woman at the mercy of her ambitious family.
At just nineteen, Katheryn Howard is quick to trust and fall in love.
She comes to court. She sings, she dances. She captures the heart of the King.
Henry declares she is his rose without a thorn. But Katheryn has a past of which he knows nothing. It comes back increasingly to haunt her. For those who share her secrets are waiting in the shadows, whispering words of love… and blackmail.
Katheryn Howard
The fifth of Henry’s queens.
Her story.
Acclaimed, bestselling historian Alison Weir draws on extensive research to recount one of the most tragic tales in English history – that of a lively, sweet but neglected girl, used by powerful men for their own gain.
Sea Wife
Amity Gaige
Juliet is failing to juggle motherhood and her anemic dissertation when her husband, Michael, informs her that he wants to leave his job and buy a sailboat. The couple are novice sailors, but Michael persuades Juliet to say yes. With their two kids – Sybil, age seven, and George, age two, Juliet and Michael set off for Panama, where their forty-four-foot sailboat awaits them – a boat that Michael has christened the Juliet.
The initial result is transformative: their marriage is given a gust of energy, and even the children are affected by the beauty and wonderful vertigo of travel. The sea challenges them all – and most of all, Juliet, who suffers from postpartum depression.
Sea Wife is told in gripping dual perspectives: Juliet’s first-person narration, after the journey, as she struggles to come to terms with the dire, life-changing events that unfolded at sea; and Michael’s captain’s log – that provides a riveting, slow-motion account of those same inexorable events.
Exuberant, harrowing, witty, and exquisitely written, Sea Wife is impossible to put down.
Dear Child
Romy Hausmann
A windowless shack in the woods. Lena’s life and that of her two children follows the rules set by their captor, the father: Meals, bathroom visits, study time are strictly scheduled and meticulously observed. He protects his family from the dangers lurking in the outside world and makes sure that his children will always have a mother to look after them.
One day Lena manages to flee – but the nightmare continues. It seems as if her tormentor wants to get back what belongs to him. And then there is the question whether she really is the woman called ‘Lena’, who disappeared without a trace 14 years ago. The police and Lena’s family are all desperately trying to piece together a puzzle which doesn’t quite seem to fit.
Like a House on Fire
Caroline Hulse
Things Stella and George have had blazing rows about:
– Misquoting Jurassic Park.
– Leaving a Coke can on the side of the bath.
– Fitting car seats for their hypothetical kids.
In other news, they’re getting divorced.
But first, Stella’s mum is throwing a murder mystery party and – with her dad losing his job, her mum’s recent diagnosis, and some very odd behaviour from her sister – now is not the time to tell everyone. All Stella and George have to do is make it through the day without their break-up being discovered – though it will soon turn out that having secrets runs in the family…
Catherine House
Elisabeth Thomas
That was the Catherine experiment: give the house three years – three profound, total years – then become anything or anyone you want to be. Watch all your dreams come true
Catherine House is an American college with a difference. Only the most brilliant minds enter, and its graduates earn prestige, wealth and honour. But over the three years they attend the school, they remain within its black gates; they have no contact with their loved ones; no association with the outside world. Those who break these rules will find themselves facing time in the school’s infamous tower.
Ines enters Catherine House on the run from an incredibly dark secret, and welcomes the school’s isolation. Sharing a room with the sweet, damaged Baby, she slowly begins to build the group of friends she never had outside its walls. One day, however, Baby is summoned to the tower – and never returns. Ines is heartbroken, left to uncover the secrets that Catherine House conceals while slowly becoming more and more seduced herself by its dark, magetic power.
Swirling with atmosphere and the subtle tingling of horror, Catherine House is a novel that will steal your heart and swallow you whole.
The Lizard
Dugald Bruce-Lockhart
Obsessed with his ex-girlfriend, Alistair Haston heads off to Greece, where she is on holiday, to try and rekindle their relationship. On the ferry from Athens he is offered a lucrative job, recruiting tourists to pose for and, he later discovers, to sleep with, Heinrich a wealthy and charismatic, German artist.
Swept away on a tide of wild parties, wild sex, fine food and drugs Haston sheds his reserve and throws himself headlong into the pursuit of pleasure. Until, a body is found and the finger of blame points to Haston. His world collapses. Arrested but allowed to escape, the body count piles up and Halston finds himself on the run by land and sea on a journey more breathtaking and more frightening than his wildest dreams.
HRT Husband Replacement Therapy
Kathy Lette
What do you do when you’re told you’ve got terminal cancer at 50? Take up crochet, get religion and bow out gracefully? Or upend your life and spend every remaining minute exploring new pleasures?
Ruby has always been the generous mediator among her friends, family and colleagues, which is why they have all turned up to celebrate her 50th birthday. But after a few too many glasses of champers, Ruby’s speech doesn’t exactly go to plan. Instead of delivering the witty and warm words her guests are expecting, Ruby takes her moment in the spotlight to reveal what she really thinks of every one of them. She also accuses her husband, Harry, of having an affair.
Saving the best till last, Ruby lambasts her octogenarian mother for a lifetime of playing her three daughters against each other. It’s blisteringly brutal. As the stunned gathering gawks at Ruby, the birthday girl concludes her bravura monologue with the throwaway comment that she has terminal cancer. She has cashed in her life savings and plans on taking her two sisters cruising into the sunset for a dose of Husband Replacement Therapy. Courageous? Or ruthlessly selfish?
But, do they even want to go with her now that she’s cast herself off into social Siberia?
If I Had Your Face
Frances Cha
‘I would live your life so much better than you if I had your face . . . ‘
If I Had Your Face plunges us into the mesmerizing world of contemporary Seoul – a place where extreme plastic surgery is as routine as getting a haircut, where women compete for spots in secret ‘room salons’ to entertain wealthy businessmen after hours, where K-Pop stars are the object of all-consuming obsession, and ruthless social hierarchies dictate your every move.
Navigating this cut-throat city are four young women balancing on the razor-edge of survival: Kyuri, an exquisitely beautiful woman whose hard-won status at an exclusive ‘room salon’ is threatened by an impulsive mistake with a client; her flatmate Miho, an orphan who wins a scholarship to a prestigious art school in New York, where her life becomes tragically enmeshed with the super-wealthy offspring of the Korean elite; Wonna, their neighbour, pregnant with a child that she and her husband have no idea how they will afford to raise in a fiercely competitive economy; and Ara, a hair stylist living down the hall, whose infatuation with a fresh-faced K-Pop star drives her to violent extremes.
Blue Ticket
Sophie Mackintosh
Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the station to learn what kind of woman you will be. A white ticket grants you children. A blue ticket grants you freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice. And, once you’ve taken your ticket, there is no going back.
But what if the life you’re given is the wrong one?
Blue Ticket is a devastating enquiry into free will and the fraught space of motherhood. Bold and chilling, it pushes beneath the skin of female identity and patriarchal violence, to the point where human longing meets our animal bodies.
NON-FICTION
Untethered
Hayley Katzen
When urban academic Hayley Katzen moves to a remote Australian cattle property to live with her farmer girlfriend, she hopes, at last, to find home.
But this is no happy-ever-after tree change. Lecture halls, law reform and the arts are replaced with castrating calves, shovelling manure, fire-fighting and anti-gas blockades. In a place that attracts people who live by their own rules, Hayley must confront her limitations and preconceptions to forge her own identity.
Set in the unpredictable beauty of the Australian landscape, and told with Hayley Katzen’s compelling candour and rigour, Untethered charts one migrant’s search for home. Part love story and part off-the-grid adventure, Untethered is a powerful reminder that home can be found in many forms – in love, in family and friends, in ideologies and political movements, in landscapes and communities, and ultimately, in ourselves.
Wild Interiors
Hilton Carter
Bestselling author Hilton Carter brings his unique eye and love of plants to show you how to create luscious interiors that not only look amazing but are good for your well-being, too.
Hilton first guides you through his own plant journey, his inspirations, and his top ten favorite house plants. He then takes you on a Journey in Greenery where he showcases the homes of 12 inspiring plant parents that demonstrate the versatility of decorating with plants. From a tiny house in Venice, California and a light-filled loft in New York City, to a Berlin apartment decorated with vintage finds, and the Barcelona home of a ceramic artist, there are ideas for all types of spaces and budgets. Hilton then sets you off on your very own plant journey, taking you room by room, profiling the plants that are most suited to each: those that thrive in the tropical humidity of bathrooms, the erratic heat changes of kitchens, and plants that can live happily in the indirect light of an entryway or bedroom.
Packed full of interior design advice such as using &;statement plants like Fiddle-leaf figs to create a focal point, how to layer your greenery by using hanging baskets, and how to assemble the perfect plant shelf, Hilton shows you how bringing houseplants into your home creates instant impact. Be inspired to create your own Wild Interiors with Hilton’s expert styling advice, plus his hints and tips on plant care that take the mystery out of looking after your green friends.
Yes to Life In Spite of Everything
Viktor Frankl
Just months after his liberation from Auschwitz renowned psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl delivered a series of talks revealing the foundations of his life-affirming philosophy. The psychologist, who would soon become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience and his conviction that every crisis contains opportunity.
Published here for the very first time in English, Frankl’s words resonate as strongly today as they did in 1946. Despite the unspeakable horrors in the camp, Frankl learnt from his fellow inmates that it is always possible to say ‘yes to life’ – a profound and timeless lesson for us all.
With an introduction by Daniel Goleman.
Nonna Knows Best
Jaclyn Crupi
In Nonna Knows Best, Jaclyn Crupi celebrates the passion, generosity of spirit and good old- fashioned wisdom of nonnas and shares the secrets that make them so special, including mouth-watering recipes from la cucina della nonna (nonna’s kitchen), foolproof tips, sayings and advice for every life moment.
Charming, entertaining and insightful, Nonna Knows Best is the perfect gift for anyone in need of a big warm Italian hug (and a container full of leftover pasta).
Humankind: A Hopeful History
Rutger Brugman
It’s a belief that unites the left and right, psychologists and philosophers, writers and historians. It drives the headlines that surround us and the laws that touch our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Dawkins, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we’re taught, are by nature selfish and governed by self-interest.
Humankind makes a new argument- that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. The instinct to cooperate rather than compete, trust rather than distrust, has an evolutionary basis going right back to the beginning of Homo sapiens. By thinking the worst of others, we bring out the worst in our politics and economics too.
In this major book, international-bestselling author Rutger Bregman takes some of the world’s most famous studies and events and reframes them, providing a new perspective on the last 200,000 years of human history. From the real-life Lord of the Flies to the cooperation seen in the aftermath of the Blitz, the hidden flaws in the Stanford Prison Experiment to the true story of the Kitty Genovese murder, Bregman shows how believing in human kindness and altruism can be a new way to think o and act as the foundation for achieving true change in our society.
It is time for a new view of human nature.
Radio Girl
David Dufty
As you climbed the rickety stairs of an old woolshed at Sydney harbour in 1944, you would hear the thrum of clicks and buzzes. Rows of men and women in uniforms and headsets would be tapping away vigorously at small machines, under the careful watch of their young female trainers. Presiding over the cacophony was a tiny woman, known to everyone as ‘Mrs Mac’, one of Australia’s wartime legends.
A smart girl from a poor mining town who loved to play with her father’s tools, Violet McKenzie became an electrical engineer, a pioneer of radio and a successful businesswoman. As the clouds of war gathered in the 1930s, she defied convention and trained young women in Morse code, foreseeing that their services would soon be sorely needed. Always a champion of women, she was instrumental in getting Australian women into the armed forces.
Mrs Mac was adored by the thousands of young women and men she trained, and came to be respected by the defence forces and the public too for her vision and contribution to the war effort. David Dufty brings her story to life in this heartwarming and captivating biography.
Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change and Courage
Tori Amos
Since the release of her first, career-defining solo album Little Earthquakes, Tori Amos has been one of the music industry’s most enduring and ingenious artists. From her unnerving depiction of sexual assault in “Me and a Gun” to her post-9/11 album Scarlet’s Walk to her latest album Native Invader, her work has never shied away from intermingling the personal with the political.
Amos began playing piano as a teenager for the politically powerful at hotel bars in Washington, D.C., during the formative years of the post-Goldwater and then Koch-led Libertarian and Reaganite movements. The story continues to her time as a hungry artist in L.A. to the subsequent three decades of her formidable music career. Amos explains how she managed to create meaningful, politically resonant work against patriarchal power structures-and how her proud declarations of feminism and her fight for the marginalized always proved to be her guiding light. She teaches readers to engage with intention in this tumultuous global climate and speaks directly to supporters of #MeToo and #TimesUp, as well as young people fighting for their rights and visibility in the world.
Filled with compassionate guidance and actionable advice-and using some of the most powerful, political songs in Amos’s canon-this book is for readers determined to steer the world back in the right direction.
Inge’s War
Svenja O’Donnell
What does it mean to be on the wrong side of history?
Svenja O’Donnell’s beautiful, aloof grandmother Inge never spoke about the past. All her family knew was that she had grown up in a city that no longer exists on any map: Königsberg in East Prussia, a footnote in history, a place that almost no one has heard of today. But when Svenja impulsively visits this windswept Baltic city, something unlocks in Inge and, finally, she begins to tell her story.
It begins in the secret jazz bars of Hitler’s Berlin. It is a story of passionate first love, betrayal, terror, flight, starvation and violence. As Svenja teases out the threads of her grandmother’s life, retracing her steps all over Europe, she realises that there is suffering here on a scale that she had never dreamt of. And finally, she uncovers a desperately tragic secret that her grandmother has been keeping for sixty years.
Inge’s War listens to the voices that are often missing from our historical narrative – those of women caught up on the wrong side of history. It is a book about memory and heritage that interrogates the legacy passed down by those who survive. It also poses the questions: who do we allow to tell their story? What do we mean by family? And what will we do in order to survive?
Simply Living Well
Julia Watkins
Author Julia Watkins shares rituals, recipes, and projects for living simply and sustainably at home. For every area of your household – kitchen, cleaning, wellness, bath, and garden – Julia shows you how to eliminate wasteful packaging, harmful ingredients, and disposable items. Practical checklists outline easy swaps (instead of disposable sponges, opt for biodegradable sponges or Swedish dishcloths; choose a bamboo toothbrush over a plastic one) and sustainable upgrades for common household tools and products. Projects include scrap apple cider vinegar, wool dryer balls, kitchen bowl covers and cloth produce bags, non-toxic dryer sheets, all-purpose citrus cleaner, herbal tinctures and balms, and more, plus recipes for package-free essentials like homemade nut milk, hummus, ketchup, salad dressings, and veggie stock.
In 2017 Julia started her Instagram account, @simply.living.well, sharing her recipes, projects and thoughts around sustainable healthy living, inspired by wisdom rooted in traditional cultures and that of her own grandparents. Based on her hugely popular Instagram account, Julia’s book, Simply Living Well, is a comprehensive collection of her extensive yet accessible knowledge on sustainable living. Complete with her unique inviting aesthetic, it’s for every parent, millennial or anyone who cares about the health of of the planet we live on.
The Idea of the Brain: A History
Matthew Cobb
We’ve been trying to make sense of the link between our minds and our bodies since the very dawn of civilisation. Now the pace is hotting up.
Join the biologist and historian Matthew Cobb (Life’s Greatest Secret) to explore the weird theories, blasphemous experiments and terrifying operating theatres that got us here, to the cusp of revelation.
Written with ambition and verve and rooted in a solid scientific explanation of the issues, Thinking Matter spans the centuries to reveal how the lives and works of a parade of philosophers, surgeons, mystics and neuroscientists have shaped the way we understand ourselves at the most profound level. From primitive dissections to the latest complex computational models of brain function, Cobb charts the course of this continuing quest, and prepares us for the astonishing discoveries to come.
Orwell: A Man of Our Time
Richard Bradford
Despite the commonplace view that Animal Farm was aimed exclusively at Stalinist Russia, it was far more broadly focussed and the similarities between aspects of the novel and Trump’s America are obvious. `Not only the parallels with the current President, but also by those who feel that his cult of personality is a mandate for collective nastiness. ‘Doublethink’ features in Nineteen Eighty Four and it is the forerunner to ‘Fake News’.
Aside from Orwell’s importance as a political theorist and novelist his life in its own right is a beguiling narrative. His family was caught between upper middle-class complacency and uncertainty, and Orwell’s time at Prep School and as a scholarship boy at Eton caused him to despise the class system that spawned him despite finding himself unable to fully detach himself from it.
His life thereafter mirrored the history of his country; like many from his background he devoted himself to socialism as a salve to his conscience. He died at the point when Britain’s status as an Imperial and world power had waned.
An interest in him endures, principally because it is difficult to differentiate between the man who recorded the terrible events of the depression and the Spanish Civil War as an observer and the fiction writer who used literature to predict grim possibilities and diagnose horribly endemic inclinations. No other British writer of the 20th century has blended ideas, political commentary and literary art in such a manner.
For an author whose work has been regarded as the most important in terms of the turbulent years of the mid-20th century and who eroded the boundaries between literature, journalism and political commentary, there have been relatively few attempts to present a vibrant portrait of the man behind the writings. Fifteen years (closer to eighteen when this book appears) is a long time for the absence of a life of one of one of the best-known authors of the twentieth century.
Run to the Finish
Amanda Brooks
In her first book, popular runner blogger Amanda Brooks lays out the path to finding greater fulfilment in running for those who consider themselves “middle of the pack runners” – they’re not trying to win Boston (or even qualify for Boston); they just want to get strong and stay injury-free so they can continue to enjoy running.
Run to the Finish is not your typical running book. While it is filled with useful strategic training advice throughout, at its core, it is about embracing your place in the middle of the pack with humour and learning to love the run you’ve got without comparing yourself to other runners. Mixing practical advice like understanding the discomfort vs. pain, the mental side of running and movements to treat the most common injuries with more playful elements such as “Favourite hilarious marathon signs” and “Weird Thoughts We all Have at the Start Line,” Brooks is the down-to-earth, inspiring guide for everyone who wants to be happier with their run.
The Gardener’s Book of Patterns
Jack Wallington
Fully endorsed by the Royal Horticultural Society, this practical reference will help readers to create mood, proportion and scale in the garden. Packed with photos, images and illustrated planting plans featuring ‘patterns’ that can be scaled up or down to fit the area being planted. Examples include patterns for ‘natural’ designs as well as more formal approaches that create a stronger sense of order and detail.
Japanese Food Made Easy
Aya Nishimura
Japanese home cooking is simple – no need for the difficult techniques or hard-to-find produce sometimes used in restaurants. All you need are the well-selected ingredients and seasonings that elevate a dish to something truly special.
Japanese Food Made Easy showcases favourite recipes such as ramen, gyoza, teriyaki and tonkatsu, as well as Japanese dishes generally eaten at home, such as grilled peppers with bonito flakes, kakiage fritters and homemade fried tofu. You’ll discover how to make your own teriyaki sauce, tonkatsu sauce, miso dressing and shichimi togarashi (seven chilli mix) – these homemade versions are a healthier alternative to store-bought and will bring instant flavour to the simplest dish. There are also recipes for making dashi broth, sushi or sashimi from scratch, for those who want to try making more traditional Japanese food.
Indistractable
Nir Eyal
We are living through a crisis of distraction. Plans get sidetracked, friends are ignored, work never seems to get done.
Why does it feel like we’re distracting our lives away?
In Indistractable, behavioural designer Nir Eyal shows what life could look like if you followed through on your intentions. Instead of suggesting a digital detox, Eyal reveals the hidden psychology driving you to distraction, and teaches you how to make pacts with yourself to keep your brain on track. Indistractable is a guide to making decisions and seeing them through.
Empowering and optimistic, this is the book that will help you design your time, realise your ambitions, and live the life you really want.
Top End Girl
Miranda Tapsell
Sharing my story is important … I think it is true that you don’t aspire to be what you cannot see. I would like this book to show you that you can push yourself to do things you never dreamed you would do.
As a young Larrakia Tiwi girl Miranda Tapsell often felt like an outsider. Growing up, she looked for faces like hers on our screens. There weren’t many. And too often there was a negative narrative around First Nation lives, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women especially. As she got older, Miranda stopped expecting others would help change things and set about doing something herself. Combining her pride in her Aboriginality and passion for romantic comedies with her love of Darwin, the Tiwi Islands and the Top End, Miranda co-wrote, produced and starred in the box office hit Top End Wedding.
In this engaging memoir, Miranda shares the path she took to acting and how her role in The Sapphires and then in Love Child inspired her to create a film about coming back to family and culture. And, it would turn out, that as she was writing her romantic lead she was also conjuring up some magic that saw a real-life love ignite. This deadly, ballad-loving rom-com nerd also asks us all to open our minds and our hearts to the importance of country and culture, In doing so, Miranda shows us how we will all be richer for it.
Funny, wise and thought-provoking, Top End Girl will have you at hello.
Perimenopower
Katarina Wilk
We hear a lot these days about the menopause, but there may be up to fifteen years of hormonal changes in a woman’s body before she reaches the point where her periods stop. These years can be turbulent both emotionally and physically – with panic attacks, insomnia, acne, hot flashes, weight gain and low moods. It’s not uncommon for women to feel like they’ve gone crazy.
But you’re not insane, you’re just perimenopausal. As our hormones fluctuate from our mid-thirties, so do the needs of our bodies. With the right lifestyle and dietary changes, you can turn the perimenopause into a powerful life transition towards a stronger, healthier and happier you.
Katarina Wilk’s frank and funny guide is the essential companion to finding your perimenopower.
Everyday Food as Medicine
Kerryn Phelps & Jamie Rose Chambers
Hippocrates famous quote as well as evidence from many other ancient cultures such as the Ayurvedic tradition proves that the link between diet, lifestyle and our health has been well known for thousands of years. Yet despite this, chronic disease is still the major cause of illness and mortality worldwide.
Drawing on the expertise of Prof. Kerryn Phelps and dietitian Jaime Rose Chambers, The Doctor and The Dietitian explain the role food plays in protecting your body against disease. Focusing on the brain, gut and heart, there are more than 100 recipes to help you on your way to better health.
I Quit Plastics and You Can Too
Kate Nelson
Kate Nelson has been disposable-plastic free for a decade. She started small- stopping her use of plastic bags and water bottles, refusing straws and carrying a reusable cup for takeaway coffee. But unhappy with how much plastic she still handled in her day-to-day life, she knew she had to do more. It took years, but Kate has developed effective strategies that others can easily adopt.
I Quit Plastics is an inspiring and practical guide to reducing your use of plastics, packed with information, ‘how-to’s and tips to help you cook, clean, shop, wear and live plastic-free. Kate shows how to reduce your waste and live more simply and sustainably, no matter where you’re starting from.
With over 60 recipes covering nutrition, bodycare, hygiene and cleaning Kate Nelson provides the tools you need to make small personal changes that have lasting global impact.
Limitless
Jim Kwik
For the last 25 years, Jim Kwik has helped everyone from celebrities to CEOs to students improve their memory, increase their decision-making skills, learn to speed-read and unleash their superbrains.
In Limitless, readers will learn Jim’s revolutionary strategies and shortcuts to break free from their perceived limitations. They’ll learn how to supercharge their brains with simple, actionable tools to sharpen the mind, enhance focus and fast-track their fullest potential. The book is organized into four sections- Mindset, Motivation, Meta- Learning and Mission. Readers will discover the myths they’ve been told about their IQ, abilities and skillset; understand why learning matters; learn core habits and steps to becoming limitless; and explore how they can serve the world. They’ll also learn how to conquer the four supervillains- Distraction, Digital Dementia, Digital Deluge and Depression.
Believing that you are limited is holding you back from achieving your biggest dreams. But we all have superpowers inside of us, and the key to activating those superpowers is unlimiting yourself.
FICTION
The Dickens Boy
Tom Keneally
In the late 1800s, rather than run the risk of his under-achieving sons tarnishing his reputation at home, Charles Dickens sent two of them to Australia.
The tenth child of Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens, known as Plorn, had consistently proved unable ‘to apply himself ’ to school or life. So aged sixteen, he is sent, as his brother Alfred was before him, to Australia.
Plorn arrives in Melbourne in late 1868 carrying a terrible secret. He has never read a word of his father’s work. He is sent out to a 2000-square-mile station in remotest New South Wales to learn to become a man, and a gentleman stockman, from the most diverse and toughest of companions. In the outback he becomes enmeshed with Paakantji, colonists, colonial-born, ex-convicts, ex-soldiers, and very few women.
Plorn, unexpectedly, encounters the same veneration of his father and familiarity with Dickens’ work in Australia as was rampant in England. Against this backdrop, and featuring cricket tournaments, horse-racing, bushrangers, sheep droving, shifty stock and station agents, frontier wars and first encounters with Australian women, Plorn meets extraordinary people and enjoys wonderful adventures as he works to prove himself.
This is Tom Keneally in his most familiar terrain. Taking historical figures and events and reimagining them with verve, compassion and humour. It is a triumph.
The Dictionary of Lost Words
Pip Williams
Motherless and irrepressibly curious, Esme spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, a garden shed in Oxford where her father and a team of lexicographers are gathering words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary.
Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day, she sees a slip containing the word bondmaid flutter to the floor unclaimed. Esme seizes the word and hides it in an old wooden trunk that belongs to her friend, Lizzie, a young servant in the big house. Esme begins to collect other words from the Scriptorium that are misplaced, discarded or have been neglected by the dictionary men. They help her make sense of the world.
Over time, Esme realises that some words are considered more important than others, and that words and meanings relating to women’s experiences often go unrecorded. She begins to collect words for another dictionary: The Dictionary of Lost Words.
Set when the women’s suffrage movement was at its height and the Great War loomed, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. It’s a delightful, lyrical and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words, and the power of language to shape our experience of the world.
Providence
Max Barry
The video changed everything. Before that, we could believe that we were safe. Special. Chosen. We thought the universe was a twinkling ocean of opportunity, waiting to be explored.
Afterward, we knew better.
Seven years after first contact, Providence Five launches. It is an enormous and deadly warship, built to protect humanity from its greatest ever threat. On board is a crew of just four-tasked with monitoring the ship and reporting the war’s progress to a mesmerized global audience by way of social media.
But while pursuing the enemy across space, Gilly, Talia, Anders, and Jackson confront the unthinkable: their communications are cut, their ship decreasingly trustworthy and effective. To survive, they must win a fight that is suddenly and terrifyingly real.
An inventive, speculative adventure and the intimate tale of four people facing their most desperate hour – alone, together, at the edge of the universe.
Gathering Dark
Candice Fox
A convicted killer. A gifted thief. A vicious crime boss. A disillusioned cop.
Together they’re a missing girl’s only hope.
Blair Harbour, once a wealthy, respected surgeon in Los Angeles, is now an ex-con down on her luck. She’s determined to keep her nose clean to win back custody of her son.
But when her former cellmate, Sneak Lawlor, begs for help to find her missing daughter, Blair is compelled to put her new-found freedom on the line. Joined by LA’s most feared underworld figure, Ada Maverick, the crew of criminals bring outlaw tactics to the search for Dayly.
Detective Jessica Sanchez has always had a difficult relationship with the LAPD. And her inheritance of a $7 million mansion as a reward for catching a killer has just made her police enemy number one.
It’s been ten years since Jessica arrested Blair for the cold-blooded murder of her neighbour. So when Jessica opens the door to the disgraced doctor and her friends early one morning she expects abuse, maybe even violence.
What comes instead is a plea for help.
The Loudness of Unsaid Things
Hilde Hinton
Miss Kaye works at The Institute. A place for the damaged, the outliers, the not-quite rights. Everyone has different strategies to deal with the residents. Some bark orders. Some negotiate tirelessly. Miss Kaye found that simply being herself was mostly the right thing to do.
Susie was seven when she realised she’d had her fill of character building. She’d lie between her Holly Hobbie sheets thinking how slowly birthdays come around, but how quickly change happened. One minute her Dad was saying that the family needed to move back to the city and then, SHAZAM, they were there. Her mum didn’t move to the new house with them. And Susie hated going to see her mum at the mind hospital. She never knew who her mum would be. Or who would be there. As the years passed, there were so many things Susie wanted to say but never could.
Miss Kaye will teach Susie that the loudness of unsaid things can be music – and together they will learn that living can be more than surviving.
Sheerwater
Leah Swann
Ava and her two young sons, Max and Teddy, are driving to their new home in Sheerwater, hopeful of making a fresh start in a new town, although Ava can’t help but keep looking over her shoulder. They’re almost at their destination when they witness a shocking accident – a light plane crashing in the field next to the road. Ava stops to help, but when she gets back to the car, she realises that somehow, among the smoke, fire and confusion, her sons have gone missing …
From a substantial new Australian writing talent, Sheerwater is tense, emotional, unforgettable. Perfect for readers of Mark Brandi’s Wimmera and Stephanie Bishop’s The Other Side of the World, this is a beautifully written, propulsive, gut-wrenching and unputdownable novel – an aching, powerful story of the heroic acts we are capable of in the name of love.
Stone Sky Gold Mountain
Mirandi Riwoe
Family circumstances force siblings Ying and Lai Yue to flee their home in China to seek their fortunes in Australia. Life on the gold fields is hard, and they soon abandon the diggings and head to nearby Maytown. Once there, Lai Yue finds a job as a carrier on an overland expedition, while Ying finds work in a local store and strikes up a friendship with Meriem, a young white woman with her own troubled past. When a serious crime is committed, suspicion falls on all those who are considered outsiders.
Evoking the rich, unfolding tapestry of Australian life in the late nineteenth century, Stone Sky Gold Mountain is a heartbreaking and universal story about the exiled and displaced, about those who encounter discrimination yet yearn for acceptance.
The Glass Hotel
Emily St John Mandel
Vincent is the beautiful bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, a hooded figure scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: ‘Why don’t you swallow broken glass.’ Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship
Weaving together the lives of these characters, Emily St John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of remote British Columbia, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts. The extraordinary new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of Station Eleven.
Hamnet
Maggie O’Farrell
On a summer’s day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week.
Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright. It is a story of the bond between twins, and of a marriage pushed to the brink by grief. It is also the story of a kestrel and its mistress; flea that boards a ship in Alexandria; and a glovemaker’s son who flouts convention in pursuit of the woman he loves. Above all, it is a tender and unforgettable reimagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written.
The Motion of the Body Through Space
Lionel Shriver
Allergic to group activities of any kind, all her life Serenata has run, swum, and cycled – on her lonesome. But now that she’s hit 60, all that physical activity has destroyed her knees. As she contemplates surgery with dread, her previously sedentary husband Remington, recently and ignominiously redundant, chooses this precise moment to discover exercise.
Which should be good for his health, right? Yet as he joins the cult of fitness that seems increasingly to consume the whole of the Western world, her once-modest husband burgeons into an unbearable narcissist. Ignoring all his other obligations in the service of extreme sport, he engages a saucy, taunting personal trainer named Bambi, who treats his wife with contempt. When Remington announces his intention to compete in a legendarily gruelling triathlon, MettleMan, Serenata is sure he’s going to end up injured or dead – but the stubbornness of an ageing man in Lycra is not to be underestimated.
The story of an obsession, of a marriage, of a betrayal: The Motion of the Body Through Space is Lionel Shriver at her hilarious, sharp-eyed, audacious best.
Redhead by the Side of the Road
Anne Tyler
Micah Mortimer isn’t the most polished person you’ll ever meet. His numerous sisters and in-laws regard him oddly but very fondly, but he has his ways and means of navigating the world. He measures out his days running errands for work – his TECH HERMIT sign cheerily displayed on the roof of his car – maintaining an impeccable cleaning regime and going for runs (7-15, every morning). He is content with the steady balance of his life.
But then the order of things starts to tilt. His woman friend Cassia (he refuses to call anyone in her late thirties a ‘girlfriend’) tells him she’s facing eviction because of a cat. And when a teenager shows up at Micah’s door claiming to be his son, Micah is confronted with another surprise he seems poorly equipped to handle.
Redhead by the Side of the Road is an intimate look into the heart and mind of a man who sometimes finds those around him just out of reach – and a love story about the differences that make us all unique.
Hitler’s Peace
Philip Kerr
Autumn 1943. Hitler knows he cannot win the war: now he must find a way to make peace. FDR and Stalin are willing to negotiate; only Churchill refuses to listen. The upcoming Allied Tehran conference will be where the next steps – whatever they are – will be decided.
Into this nest of double- and triple-dealing steps Willard Mayer, OSS agent and FDR’s envoy to the conference. His job is to secure the peace that the USA and Hitler now crave. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
Showcasing Philip Kerr’s brilliant research and masterful plotting at its best, Hitler’s Peace is a fitting coda to the career of one of the masters of the historical thriller.
NON-FICTION
Friends and Rivals
Brenda Niall
Four Australian women writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-a time when stories of bush heroism and mateship abounded, a time when a writing career might be an elusive thing for a woman.
Friends and Rivals is a vivid and engaging account of the intersecting and entwined lives of Ethel Turner, author of the much loved Seven Little Australians, Barbara Baynton, who wrote of the harshness of bush life, Nettie Palmer, essayist and critic, and Henry Handel Richardson, of The Getting of Wisdom and The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney fame.
Brenda Niall illuminates a fascinating time in Australia’s literary history and brings to life the remarkable women who made it so.
Daddy Cool
Darleen Bungey
Who can ever truly know their parents?
He was a glamorous heart-throb, a famous American singer performing in front of Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Clark Gable and other stars at the Academy Awards. In the 1930s, his recording of ‘Hawaiian Paradise’ outsold those of Bing Crosby and Guy Lombardo.
So how did he become an Australian infantryman, fighting alongside and performing for his fellow Diggers in Palestine, Beirut, Egypt and New Guinea? Why did he leave Hollywood and the ritziest hotels in America for a modest Californian bungalow in suburban Sydney? And what caused him to cease his endless drifting from one woman to another, one marriage to another, and settle with the love of his life?
She was a strong Aussie woman, a talented radio broadcaster and publicity agent. Why did she take a chance on this reckless vagabond and notorious womaniser?
Seeking answers, Darleen Bungey turns her biographical skills on her own family, exploring her father’s multi-layered and at times tempestuous life with a truthful eye and loving heart.
Captain Cook’s Epic Voyage
Geoffrey Blainey
In 1768 Captain James Cook and his crew set sail on a small British naval vessel, the boldly named Endeavour, bound for the Pacific Ocean. He was ordered to establish an observatory at Tahiti in order to record the 1769 transit of Venus, and – with the skills of naturalist Joseph Banks and his team – to collect natural history in this far part of the world. But Cook’s brief also included a secret mission from the British Admiralty: to discover Terra Australis Incognita, an unknown southern land that might prove to be larger and richer than Australia.
Cook was not alone in this quest, and the Endeavour shared the Coral Sea and coastal New Zealand with an armed French merchant ship commanded by Jean de Surville. Eventually in 1770 Cook’s ship crossed the Tasman Sea and reached the southern coast of New South Wales. Sailing north, he charted Australia’s eastern coastline and claimed it for Great Britain. It was the most significant of Cook’s voyages, transforming the world map and the way Europeans viewed the South Pacific Ocean and its lands and peoples.
On this 250th anniversary of his major discovery, Captain Cook’s Epic Voyage reveals the hardships, adventure and achievements of Cook’s most important voyage. Reshaping his previous book, Sea of Dangers , Professor Geoffrey Blainey takes us on a vivid journey, challenging accepted views and the intersection of myth, science and exploration.
Grandmothers: Essays by 21st Century Grandmothers
Helen Elliott
An anthology of essays by twenty-four Australian women, edited by Helen Elliott, about the many aspects of being a grandmother in the 21st century. It seems so different from the experience we had of our grandmothers. Although perhaps the human essential, love, hasn’t shifted much? In thoughtful, provoking, uncompromising writing, a broad range of women reflect on vastly diverse experiences. This period of a woman’s life, a continuation and culmination, is as defining as any other and the words ‘grand’ and ‘mother’ rearrange and realign themselves into bright focus.
The contributors- Stephanie Alexander, Maggie Beer, Judith Brett, Jane Caro, Elizabeth Cheung, Cresside Collette, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Helen Garner, Anastasia Gonis, Glenda Guest, Katherine Hattam, Celestine Hitiura Vaite, Yvette Holt, Cheryl Kernot, Ramona Koval, Alison Lester, Joan London, Jenny Macklin, Auntie Daphnie Milward, Mona Mobarek, Carol Raye and Gillian Triggs.
A Bigger Picture
Malcolm Turnbull
When Malcolm Turnbull took over the nation’s top job there was a sense of excitement in Australia. Sky-high opinion polls followed as the political outsider with a successful business, legal and media career took charge. The infighting that dogged politics for the best part of a decade looked to be over. But a right-wing insurgency brutally cut down Turnbull’s time in office after three years, leaving many Australians asking, ‘Why?’
Exceptionally candid and compelling, A Bigger Picture is the definitive narrative of Malcolm Turnbull’s prime ministership. He describes how he legalised same-sex marriage, established Snowy Hydro 2.0, stood up to Donald Trump, rebooted Australia’s defence industry and many more achievements – remarkable in their pace, significance and that they were delivered in the teeth of so much opposition. But it’s far more than just politics. Turnbull’s life has been filled with colourful characters and controversies, success and failure. From his early years in Sydney, growing up with a single father, to defending ‘Spycatcher’ Peter Wright against the UK Government; the years representing Kerry Packer, leading the Republican Movement and making millions in business; and finally toppling Tony Abbott to become Prime Minister of Australia. For the first time he tells it all – in his own words.
With revelatory insights on the workings of Canberra and the contentious events of Turnbull’s life, A Bigger Picture explores the strengths and vulnerabilities of one of Australia’s best-known and dynamic business and political leaders. Lyrically written in highly readable and entertaining prose, this is a genuine page-turner that’s not just for political junkies.
Falastin
Sami Tamimi & Tara Wigley
FALASTIN is a love letter to Palestine, the land and its people; an evocative collection of over 110 unforgettable recipes and stories from the co-authors of Jerusalem and Ottolenghi: The Cookbook, and Ottolenghi SIMPLE.
Travelling through Bethlehem, East Jerusalem, Nablus, Haifa, Akka, Nazareth, Galilee and the West Bank, Sami and Tara invite you to experience and enjoy unparalleled access to Sami’s homeland. As each region has its own distinct identity and tale to tell, there are endless new flavour combinations to discover.
The food is the perfect mix of traditional and contemporary, with recipes that have been handed down through the generations and reworked for a modern home kitchen, alongside dishes that have been inspired by Sami and Tara’s collaborations with producers and farmers throughout Palestine.
With stunning food and travel photography plus stories from unheard Palestinian voices, this innovative cookbook will transport you to this rich and complex land.
So get ready to laden your table with the most delicious of foods – from abundant salads, soups and wholesome grains to fluffy breads, easy one-pot dishes and perfumed sweet treats – here are simple feasts to be shared and everyday meals to be enjoyed. These are stunning Palestinian-inspired dishes that you will want to cook, eat, fall in love with and make your own.
Fourteen
Shannon Molloy
This is a story about my fourteenth year of life as a gay kid at an all-boys rugby-mad Catholic school in regional Queensland. It was a year in which I started to discover who I was, and deeply hated what was revealed. It was a year in which I had my first crush and first devastating heartbreak. It was a year of torment, bullying and betrayal – not just at the hands of my peers, but by adults who were meant to protect me.
And it was a year that almost ended tragically.
I found solace in writing and my budding journalism; in a close-knit group of friends, all growing up too quickly together; and in the fierce protection of family and a mother’s unconditional love. These were moments of light and hilarity that kept me going.
As much as Fourteen is a chronicle of the enormous struggle and adversity I endured, and the shocking consequences of it all, it’s also a tale of survival.
Because I did survive.
Design Lives Here
Penny Craswell
Australian design has forged its own unique trajectory, influenced by geographic isolation, a distinctive natural environment and a modern sensibility. Design Lives Here showcases the best of Australian residential architecture and interiors, and pays homage to the local designers and makers who have crafted bespoke pieces of furniture and lighting for these homes, whether large or small.
From a reimagined Californian bungalow with a dining table inspired by the humble HB pencil to a monumental inner-city residence furnished with more than 100 custom pieces, these houses – and the objects that reside within – offer a compelling snapshot of contemporary Australian design through the lens of materiality, utility, site and place.
Pedantic
Ross Petras & Kathryn Petras
Your boss makes a joke about Schrodinger’s cat – something you’ve heard of, but what exactly happened (or didn’t happen) with that cat? Or you’re reading a New Yorker article that explains that ‘Solecism slipped into solipsism into full-blown narcissistic projection.’ An excellent point . . . if you know what ‘solecism’ means . . . or, for that matter, ‘solipsism’.
Language gurus Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras explain all of the words and phrases smart people should know. Covering the worlds of science, the arts and philosophy, they explore broad topics, like quantum physics and ontology, and more specific ones, like shibboleth and bete noire. From Latin phrases we often hear and read (prima facie, sui generis and the like) to those pesky words that have entered our vocabularies from other languages (bildungsroman, sturm und drang), this book will inform and delight even the most pernickety word nerds.
A compendium of 100 words and phrases smart people use – even if they only kinda sorta (secretly don’t) know what they mean – with pithy definitions and fascinating etymologies to solidify their meanings.
Party Animals: The Secret History of a Labor Fiasco
Samantha Maiden
How did Labor lose the unlosable election?
Secrets, lies, lawyers and covert recordings. If you thought the 2019 election was just about a death tax that didn’t exist, you’re in for a surprise.
From the dark arts of the dirt units to the role of billionaire Clive Palmer, this is the untold story of an election debacle.
The Labor Party was the unbeatable favourite to win the 2019 election right up until the polls closed and voters delivered the surprise verdict.
If the results staggered pundits, they also shocked Bill Shorten and his frontbench, who had spent the final weeks of the campaign carefully planning for their first days in office. Party Animals uncovers the secret history of a Labor fiasco, the untold story behind Scott Morrison’s miracle
Phosphorescence
Julia Baird
Over the last decade, we have become better at knowing what brings us contentment, well-being and joy. We know, for example, that there are a few core truths to science of happiness. We know that being kind and altruistic makes us happy, that turning off devices, talking to people, forging relationships, living with meaning and delving into the concerns of others offer our best chance at achieving happiness. But how do we retain happiness? It often slips out of our hands as quickly as we find it. So, when we are exposed to, or learn, good things, how do we continue to burn with them?
And more than that, when our world goes dark, when we’re overwhelmed by illness or heartbreak, loss or pain, how do we survive, stay alive or even bloom? In the muck and grit of a daily existence full of disappointments and a disturbing lack of control over many of the things that matter most – finite relationships, fragile health, fraying economies, a planet in peril – how do we find, nurture and carry our own inner, living light – a light to ward off the darkness?
Absorbing, achingly beautiful, inspiring and deeply moving, Julia Baird has written exactly the book we need for these times.
The Future of Us: Demography Gets a Makeover
Liz Allen
Demography is far more important than destiny.
By tracing connections between a population’s past and present, demographers can foresee its future. The true wonder of demography, though, is not its ability to predict the future but to shape it. With energy and passion, demographer Liz Allen sets out the potential paths to make Australia better.
Bold, fearless and revealing, The Future of Us does more than help you find your inner statistician. Looking beyond births, deaths and marriages, Allen takes apart inequality, migration, tax and home ownership. She also dissects how the word ‘population’ became so charged, daring to ask what Australia might look like in 20 years if we had zero immigration.
The Future of Us gives demography a makeover and sets out future possibilities for a better us … just like a Choose Your Own Adventure, but for the nation.
Life in a Box
Sarah Jane Adams
Auction catalogues can reveal a lot about a person: their life, their loves and their style. Antique jewellery dealer Sarah Jane Adams became an international model and overnight Instagram sensation in her sixties. She tells her story through a lifetime’s collection of rare pieces and worthless objects, as well as personal photographs and effects from her ‘estate’.
Told with wit, pathos and charm. Life In A Box illustrates the deeply personal connection that we have with our belongings: they are laden with rich meaning and adventure and, above all, redolent of our stories.
An Australian Garden
Philip Cox
The far south coast of New South Wales is a magical place, with remote coastlines, sheltered lagoons and pristine hinterland meeting mountain ranges. It was also once an area partly depleted by logging and long-term agricultural use. Some forty years ago, renowned architect Philip Cox and a group of like-minded friends purchased 80 hectares as a private retreat and a conservation exercise. Applying his own aesthetic principles of vista, light, texture, colour and mass, Philip worked with nature to reveal and enhance the bushland in an enticing way.
He replanted trees in denuded areas, cleared scrubby undergrowth in others and added lakes and ponds. Carefully, he curated extensive walks through bush and gullies, along the coast and river, offering wondrous experiences. These walks are punctuated with drama and romance as you enter various garden rooms and encounter sculptures, waterlily-adorned lakes, ponds and art-filled pavilions. As the world becomes more global, maintaining indigenous Australian landscapes and gardens becomes important. This book
Fathoms
Rebecca Giggs
When Rebecca Giggs encountered a humpback whale stranded on her local beach in Australia, she began to wonder how the lives of whales might shed light on the condition of our seas. How do whales experience environmental change? Has our connection to these fabled animals been transformed by technology? What future awaits us, and them? And what does it mean to write about nature in the midst of an ecological crisis?
In Fathoms: the world in the whale, Giggs blends natural history, philosophy, and science to explore these questions with clarity and hope. In lively, inventive prose, she introduces us to whales so rare they have never been named; she tells us of the astonishing variety found in whale sounds, and of whale ‘pop’ songs that sweep across hemispheres. She takes us into the deeps to discover that one whale’s death can spark a great flourishing of creatures. We travel to Japan to board whaling ships, examine the uncanny charisma of these magnificent mammals, and confront the plastic pollution now pervading their underwater environment.
In the spirit of Rachel Carson and John Berger, Fathoms is a work of profound insight and wonder. It marks the arrival of an essential new voice in narrative nonfiction and provides us with a powerful, surprising, and compelling view of some of the most urgent issues of our time.
Every Conceivable Way
Despina Meris
After relocating to Australia from New York, Despina Meris and her husband, Bill, settle down to baby-making. What they never expect is a string of heartbreaking unexplained miscarriages, even with the help of IVF. They turn to surrogacy – first in India, then in the Ukraine and finally in Thailand, where their baby is conceived.
But more drama unfolds when, overnight, they are caught up in the Thai government crackdown on commercial surrogacy, leaving them with no way of contacting their pregnant surrogate. Every Conceivable Way, a real-life story that is stranger than fiction, asks how far you would go before you call it quits, when it seems like all the odds are stacked against you.
Every Conceivable Way recounts one couple’s nine-year quest to become parents, while giving an inside peek into the IVF and surrogacy industries, the fertility merry-go-round, and what it’s like to live for years with uncertainty.
FICTION
The Mirror and the Light (Wolf Hall #3)
Hilary Mantel
England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the space of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, before Jane dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves.
Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him?
With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.
Sweetness and Light
Liam Pieper
India, monsoon season.
Connor, an Australian expat with a brutal past, spends his time running low-stakes scams on tourists in a sleepy beachside town. Sasha, an American in search of spiritual guidance, heads to an isolated ashram in the hope of mending a broken heart.
When one of Connor’s grifts goes horribly wrong, it sets in motion a chain of events that brings the two lost souls together – and as they try to navigate a world of gangsters, gurus and secret agendas, they begin to realise that within the ashram’s utopian community, something is deeply, deeply wrong…
Racing from the beaches of Goa to the streets of Delhi to the jungles of Tamil Nadu, Sweetness and Light is an intoxicating, unsettling story of the battle between light and dark, love and lust, morality and corruption. This is an explosive and unforgettable novel that confirms Liam Pieper’s place as one of Australia’s finest, sharpest writers.
The Good Turn (Cormac Reilly #3)
Dervla McTiernan
Police corruption, an investigation that ends in tragedy and the mystery of a little girl’s silence – three unconnected events that will prove to be linked by one small town.
While Detective Cormac Reilly faces enemies at work and trouble in his personal life, Garda Peter Fisher is relocated out of Galway with the threat of prosecution hanging over his head. But even that is not as terrible as having to work for his overbearing father, the local copper for the pretty seaside town of Roundstone.
For some, like Anna and her young daughter Tilly, Roundstone is a refuge from trauma. But even this village on the edge of the sea isn’t far enough to escape from the shadows of evil men.
Swimming in the Dark
Tomasz Jedrowski
You were right when you said that people can’t always give us what we want from them.
Poland, 1980. Anxious, disillusioned Ludwik Glowacki, soon to graduate university, has been sent along with the rest of his class to an agricultural camp. Here he meets Janusz – and together, they spend a dreamlike summer swimming in secluded lakes, reading forbidden books – and falling in love.
But with summer over, the two are sent back to Warsaw, and to the harsh realities of life under the Party. Exiled from paradise, Ludwik and Janusz must decide how they will survive; and in their different choices, find themselves torn apart.
Swimming in the Dark is an unforgettable debut about youth, love, and loss – and the sacrifices we make to live lives with meaning.
Melting Moments
Anna Goldsworthy
It is 1941. Eighteen-year-old Ruby leaves behind the family farm, her serious mother and roguish father, and heads for Adelaide. After a brief courtship, she enters into a hasty marriage with a soldier about to go to war – who returns a changed man.
In this absorbing novel, Anna Goldsworthy recreates the world of Adelaide half a century ago, and portrays the phases of a woman’s life with intimacy and sly humour. We follow Ruby as she contends with her damaged husband and eccentric in-laws. We see her experience motherhood and changing social circumstances, until, in a moving twist, a figure from the past reappears, to kindle a late-life romance.
In her captivating fiction debut, Goldsworthy evokes a woman’s life in a pre-feminist world. In this tender, funny book, she combines an Austenesque wit with Alice Munro’s feeling for human complexity.
The Recovery of Rose Gold
Stephanie Wrobel
Rose Gold Watts believed she was sick for eighteen years.
She thought she needed the feeding tube, the surgeries, the wheelchair…
Turns out her mum, Patty, is a really good liar.
After five years in prison Patty Watts is finally free. All she wants is to put old grievances behind her, reconcile with her daughter – and care for her new infant grandson. When Rose Gold agrees to have Patty move in, it seems their relationship is truly on the mend.
But Rose Gold knows her mother. Patty won’t rest until she has her daughter back under her thumb. Which is inconvenient because Rose Gold wants to be free of Patty. Forever.
Only one Watts will get what she wants.
Will it be Patty or Rose Gold?
Mother, or daughter?
The Coconut Children
Vivian Pham
Life in a troubled neighbourhood demands too much too young. But Sonny wouldn’t really know.
Watching the world from her bedroom window, she exists only in second-hand romance novels and falls for any fast-food employee who happens to spare her a glance.
Everything changes with the return of Vince, a boy who became a legend after he was hauled away in handcuffs at fourteen.
Sonny and Vince used to be childhood friends. But with all that happened in-between, childhood seems so long ago. It will take two years of juvie, an inebriated grandmother and a porn stash for them to meet again.
The Coconut Children is an urgent, moving and wise debut from a young and gifted storyteller.
The Boy from the Woods
Harlan Coben
Thirty years ago, a child was found in the New Jersey backwoods.
He had been living a feral existence, with no memory of how he got there or even who he is. Everyone just calls him Wilde.
Now a former soldier and security expert, he lives off the grid, shunned by the community – until they need him.
A child has gone missing. With her family suspecting she’s just playing a disappearing game, nobody seems concerned except for criminal attorney Hester Crimstein. She contacts Wilde, asking him to use his unique skills to find the girl.
But even he can find no trace of her. One day passes, then a second, then a third.
On the fourth, a human finger shows up in the mail.
And now Wilde knows this is no game. It’s a race against time to save the girl’s life – and expose the town’s dark trove of secrets…
The Origin of Me
Bernard Gallate
Lincoln Locke’s fifteen-year-old life is turned upside down when he’s thrust into bachelor-pad living with his father, after his parents’ marriage breaks up, and into an exclusive new school. Crestfield Academy offers Lincoln a new set of peers – the crème de la crème of gifted individuals, who also happen to be financially loaded – and a place on the swim relay team with a bunch of thugs in Speedos. Homunculus, the little voice inside his head, doesn’t make life any easier; nor does Lincoln’s growing awareness of a genetic anomaly that threatens to humiliate him at every turn.
On a search for answers to big LIFE questions, he turns to the school library, where he spies a nineteenth-century memoir, My One Redeeming Affliction by Edwin Stroud, a one-time star of Melinkoff’s Astonishing Assembly of Freaks. As Lincoln slowly reads this peculiar, life-changing book, the past reaches into his present in fascinating and alarming ways.
Ways that defy imagination…
Audacious, funny and wonderfully inventive, The Origin of Me is a song to friendship, to young love, to the joy of imagination, and to celebrating differences.
We Were Never Friends
Margaret Bearman
Lotti lives under the shadow of a genius: her father George Coates is a brilliant and celebrated Australian painter.
When Lotti meets the outcast waif Kyla at a suburban Canberra school, two worlds are set to collide. Slowly Kyla is drawn into the orbit of the Coates family.
Or is it the other way around?
As Lotti and Kyla navigate their way towards adulthood, dark secrets start to unravel, with devastating consequences…
We Were Never Friends is a compelling and powerful novel about friendship, the pursuit of a creative life and the legacies we leave behind.
The Yellow Bird Sings
Jennifer Rosner
Poland, 1941. After the Jews in their town are rounded up, Róza and her five-year-old daughter, Shira, spend day and night hidden in a farmer’s barn. Forbidden from making a sound, only the yellow bird from her mother’s stories can sing the melodies Shira composes in her head.
Róza does all she can to take care of Shira and shield her from the horrors of the outside world. They play silent games and invent their own sign language. But then the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Róza must face an impossible choice: whether to keep her daughter close by her side, or give her the chance to survive by letting her go…
The Yellow Bird Sings is a powerfully gripping and deeply moving novel about the unbreakable bond between parent and child and the triumph of humanity and hope in even the darkest circumstances.
You Are Not Alone
Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen
Shay Miller has three strikes against her: no job, no apartment, no love in her life. But when she witnesses a perfectly normal looking young woman about her age make the chilling decision to leap in front of an ongoing subway train, Shay realizes she could end up in the same spiral.
She is intrigued by a group of women who seem to have it all together, and they invite her with the promise: “You are not alone.” Why not align herself with the glamorous and seductive Moore sisters, Cassandra and Jane? They seem to have beaten back their demons, and made a life on their own terms – a life most people can only ever envy. They are everything Shay aspires to be, and they seem to have the keys to getting exactly what they want.
As Shay is pulled deeper and deeper under the spell of the Moore sisters, she finds her life getting better and better. But what price does she have to pay? What do Cassandra and Jane want from her? And what secrets do they, and Shay, have that will come to a deadly confrontation?
You are not alone: Is it a promise? Or a threat?
Amnesty
Aravind Adiga
Danny – Dhananjaya Rajaratnam – is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, denied refugee status after he has fled from his native Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal Australian life.
But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. When Danny recognizes a jacket left at the murder scene, he believes it belongs to another of his clients – a doctor with whom he knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported, or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of a single day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities.
Shuggie Bain
Douglas Stuart
It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest.
Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother’s sense of snobbish propriety. The miners’ children pick on him and adults condemn him as no’ right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.
Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist with a powerful and important story to tell.
Desire Lines
Felicity Volk
Arctic Circle, 2012. On a lightless day at the end of the polar winter, landscape architect Evie Waddell finds herself exhuming the past as she buries Australian seeds in a frozen mountain vault – insurance against catastrophe.
Molong, 1953. Catastrophe is all seven-year-old Paddy O’Connor has known. Shipped from institutional care in London to an Australian farm school, his world is a shadowy place where lies scaffold fragile truths and painful memories. To Paddy’s south in Canberra, young Evie is safe in her family’s embrace, yet soon learns there are some paths from which you can’t turn back; impulses and threats that she only half understands but seems to have known forever.
Blue Mountains, 1962. From their first meeting as teenagers at a country market, Paddy and Evie grow a compulsive, unconventional love that spans decades, taking them in directions neither could have foreseen.
Set against the uneasy relationship society has with its own truth-telling in history, war and politics, Desire Lines is an epic story of love and the lies we tell ourselves to survive – and a reminder that even truths which seem lost forever can find their way home.
The Salt Madonna
Catherine Noske
This is the story of a crime. This is the story of a miracle. There are two stories here.
Hannah Mulvey left her island home as a teenager. But her stubborn, defiant mother is dying, and now Hannah has returned to Chesil, taking up a teaching post at the tiny schoolhouse, doing what she can in the long days of this final year.
But though Hannah cannot pinpoint exactly when it begins, something threatens her small community. A girl disappears entirely from class. Odd reports and rumours reach her through her young charges. People mutter on street corners, the church bell tolls through the night and the island’s women gather at strange hours…And then the miracles begin.
A page-turning, thought-provoking portrayal of a remote community caught up in a collective moment of madness, of good intentions turned terribly awry. A blistering examination of truth and power, and how we might tell one from the other.
The Bell in the Lake
Lars Mytting
Norway, 1880. In the secluded village of Butangen at the end of the valley, headstrong Astrid dreams of a life beyond marriage, hard work and children. And then Pastor Kai Schweigaard comes into her life, taking over the 700-year-old stave church with its carvings of pagan deities. The two church bells were forged by her forefather in the sixteenth century, in memory of conjoined sisters Halfrid and Gunhild Hekne, and are said to have supernatural powers. But now the pastor wants to tear it down, to replace it with a modern, larger church. Though Astrid is drawn to him, this may be a provocation too far.
Talented architecture student Gerhard Schonauer arrives from Dresden to oversee the removal of the church and its reconstruction in the German city. Everything about elegant Schonauer is so different, so cosmopolitan. Astrid must make a choice: for her homeland and the pastor, or for a daunting and uncertain future in Germany.
Then the bells begin to toll…
Translated from the Norwegian by Deborah Dawkin
The Girl with the Louding Voice
Abi Dare
All you have are your words.
As the only daughter of a broke father, she is a valuable commodity. Removed from school and sold as a third wife to an old man, Adunni’s life amounts to this: four goats, two bags of rice, some chickens and a new TV. When unspeakable tragedy swiftly strikes in her new home, she is secretly sold as a domestic servant to a household in the wealthy enclaves of Lagos, where no one will talk about the strange disappearance of her predecessor, Rebecca. No one but Adunni…
As a yielding daughter, a subservient wife, and a powerless servant, fourteen-year-old Adunni is repeatedly told that she is nothing. But Adunni won’t be silenced. She is determined to find her voice – in a whisper, in song, in broken English – until she can speak for herself, for the girls like Rebecca who came before, and for all the girls who will follow.
The Night Watchman
Louise Erdrich
It is 1953. Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the first factory to open near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a prominent Chippewa Council member, trying to understand a new bill that is soon to be put before Congress. The US Government calls it an ’emancipation’ bill; but it isn’t about freedom – it threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land, their very identity. How can he fight this betrayal?
Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Pixie – ‘Patrice’ – Paranteau has no desire to wear herself down on a husband and kids. She works at the factory, earning barely enough to support her mother and brother, let alone her alcoholic father who sometimes returns home to bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to get if she’s ever going to get to Minnesota to find her missing sister Vera.
In The Night Watchman multi-award winning author Louise Erdrich weaves together a story of past and future generations, of preservation and progress. She grapples with the worst and best impulses of human nature, illuminating the loves and lives, desires and ambitions of her characters with compassion, wit and intelligence.
Fifty Fifty (Harriet Blue #2)
James Patterson & Candice Fox
It’s not easy being a good detective – when your brother’s a serial killer.
Sam Blue stands accused of the brutal murders of three young students, their bodies dumped near the Georges River. Only one person believes he is innocent: his sister, Detective Harriet Blue. And she’s determined to prove it.
Except she’s now been banished to the outback town of Last Chance Valley (population 75), where a diary found on the roadside outlines a shocking plan – the massacre of the entire town. And the first death, shortly after Harry’s arrival, suggests the clock is already ticking.
Meanwhile, back in Sydney, a young woman holds the key to crack Sam’s case wide open.
If only she could escape the madman holding her hostage…
The Rearranged Life of Oona Lockhart
Margarita Montimore
If you knew your future, would you change your past?
Brooklyn, 1982. Oona Lockhart is about to celebrate her 19th birthday and ring in the New Year. But at the stroke of midnight, she is torn from her friends and boyfriend, finding herself in her fifty-one-year-old body, thirty-two years into the future.
Greeted by a friendly stranger, Oona learns that on every birthday she will enter a different year of her adult life at random. Still a young woman on the inside, but ever changing on the outside, who will she be next year? Wealthy philanthropist? Nineties Club Kid? World traveller? Wife to a man she’s never met?
While Oona gets glimpses of the future and thinks she knows what’s to come, living a normal life is challenging. As she struggles between fighting her fate and accepting it, Oona must learn to navigate a life that’s out of order – but is it broken?
Margarita Montimore’s whip-smart debut is an uplifting joyride through an ever-changing world that shows us the endurance of love, the timelessness of family and what it means to truly live in the moment.
Adults
Emma Jane Unsworth
Jenny is unloved, unemployable and emotionally unfiltered. Her long-suffering friends seem sick of her and whilst her social media portrays her life as a bed of roses, it is more of a dying succulent.
Could things get any worse? Her mother is on her doorstep with a suitcase, and Jenny is about to find out…
Adults is a hilarious and heartbreaking novel about living online and trying to find yourself in real life; a hymn to the power of female friendship and an essential read for you and every woman you know.
The Temple House Vanishing
Rachel Donohue
Power. Jealousy. Desire. Twenty-five years ago, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl and her charismatic teacher disappeared without trace…
In an elite Catholic girls’ boarding-school, the pupils live under the repressive, watchful gaze of the nuns. Seeking to break from the cloistered atmosphere, two of the students – Louisa and Victoria – quickly become infatuated with their young, bohemian art teacher, who encourages their flirtation. Then, he and Louisa vanish.
Years later, a journalist uncovers the troubled past of the school and determines to resolve the mystery of the missing pair.
Below Deck
Sophie Hardcastle
And then, just like that, a thought bubbles inside me. It’s a beginning; a new beginning; my beginning. The beginning of the story I tell myself in order to survive. We choose to breathe, don’t we?
Twenty-one-year-old Olivia hears the world in colour, but her life is mottled grey. Estranged from her parents, and living with her grandfather who is drowning in sadness, Oli faces the reality of life beyond university alone.
When she wakes on a boat with no recollection of how she got there, she accepts the help of two strangers who change the course of her future forever. With Mac and Maggie, Oli learns to navigate a life upon open ocean and the world flowers into colours she’s never seen before.
Four years later, Oli, fluent in the language of the sea, is the only woman among men on a yacht delivery from Noumea to Auckland. In the darkness below deck, she learns that at sea, no one can hear you scream.
Moving to London, Oli’s life at sea is buried. When she meets Hugo, the wind changes, and her memories are dust blown into shapes. Reminding her of everything.
Below Deck is about the moments that haunt us, the moments that fan out like ripples through the deep. So that everything else, becomes everything after.
House on Endless Waters
Emuna Elon
At the behest of his agent, renowned author Yoel Blum reluctantly agrees to visit his birthplace of Amsterdam to meet with his Dutch publisher, despite promising his late mother that he would never return to that city. While touring the Jewish Museum with his wife, Yoel stumbles upon a looping reel of photos offering a glimpse of pre-war Dutch Jewish life, and is astonished to see the youthful face of his beloved mother staring back at him, posing with her husband, Yoel’s older sister Nettie…and an infant he doesn’t recognise.
This unsettling discovery launches him into a fervent search for the truth, revealing Amsterdam’s dark wartime history and the underground networks which hid Jewish children away from danger – but at a cost. The deeper into the past Yoel digs, the better he understands his mother’s silence, and the more urgent the question that has unconsciously haunted him for a lifetime – Who am I? – becomes.
Part family mystery, part wartime drama, House on Endless Waters is an unforgettable meditation on identity, belonging, and the inextricable nature of past and present.
A Thousand Moons
Sebastian Barry
Even when you come out of bloodshed and disaster in the end you have got to learn to live.
Winona is a young Lakota orphan adopted by former soldiers Thomas McNulty and John Cole. Living with Thomas and John on the farm they work in 1870s Tennessee, she is educated and loved, forging a life for herself beyond the violence and dispossession of her past. But the fragile harmony of her unlikely family unit, in the aftermath of the Civil War, is soon threatened by a further traumatic event, one which Winona struggles to confront, let alone understand.
Told in Sebastian Barry’s gorgeous, lyrical prose, A Thousand Moons is a powerful, moving study of one woman’s journey, of her determination to write her own future, and of the enduring human capacity for love. The much anticipated follow up to the acclaimed Days Without End.
The Inland Sea
Madeleine Watts
In the early 19th century, British explorer John Oxley traversed the then-unknown wilderness of central Australia in search of water. Oxley never found it, but he never ceased to believe it was out there. The myth of the inland sea was taken up by other men, and over the years search parties walked out into the desert, dying as they tried to find it. Two centuries later, his great-great-great-great granddaughter (and our narrator) spends a final year in Sydney reeling from her own self-destructive obsessions.
She’s working part-time as an emergency dispatch operator, drinking heavily, sleeping with strangers, wandering Sydney’s streets late at night, and navigating an affair with an ex-lover. Reckless and adrift, she prepares to leave. Written with down-to-earth lucidity and ethereal breeziness, this is an unforgettable debut about coming of age in a world that seems increasingly hostile. Watts explores feminine fear, apathy and danger, building to a tightly controlled bushfire of ecological and personal crisis.
Where The Truth Lies
Karina Kilmore
She was slipping away. The further she fell, the closer the clouds seemed to come. Wispy transparent slipstreams of white. Cirrus. Pain smashed her head. Floating …
When investigative journalist Chrissie O’Brian lands a senior job at The Argus, she is desperate to escape the nightmares of her past. Her life has become a daily battle to numb the pain. But her job is something she can do better than anyone else – and the only thing that keeps the memories at bay.
A face-off on the waterfront between the unions and big business is just the kind of story to get her career back on track. But after a dockworker who confided in her turns up dead, Chrissie becomes obsessed with unravelling the truth. When a gruesome threat lands on her desk, it’s clear someone is prepared to do anything to stop her.
But who is more dangerous – a ruthless enemy or a woman pushed to the edge? Used to fighting her own demons, this is one battle Chrissie is determined not to lose.
Here We Are
Graham Swift
It is Brighton, 1959, and the theatre at the end of the pier is having its best summer season in years. Ronnie, a brilliant young magician, and Evie, his dazzling assistant, are top of the bill, drawing audiences each night. Meanwhile, Jack – Jack Robinson, as in ‘before you can say’ – is everyone’s favourite compère, a born entertainer, holding the whole show together.
As the summer progresses, the off-stage drama between the three begins to overshadow their theatrical success, and events unfold which will have lasting consequences for all their futures.
Rich, comic, alive and subtly devastating, Here We Are is a masterly piece of literary magicianship which pulls back the curtain on the human condition.
NON-FICTION
Fire Country
Victor Steffensen
Delving deep into the Australian landscape and the environmental challenges we face, Fire Country is a powerful account from Indigenous land management expert Victor Steffensen on how the revival of Indigenous fire practices, including improved ’reading’ of country and undertaking ’cool burns’, could help to restore our nation.
Victor developed a passion for traditional cultural and ecological knowledge from a young age, but it was after leaving high school that Victor met two Elders who became his mentors, particularly to revive cultural burning. Developed over many generations, this knowledge shows clearly that Australia actually needs fire – with burning done in a controlled manner – for land care and healing.
Victor’s story is unassuming and honest, written in a way that reflects the nature of yarning. And while some of the knowledge shared in his book may be unclear to western world views, there is much evidence that, if adopted, it could benefit all Australians.
For every copy sold, Hardie Grant will donate $1 to Firesticks, which empowers Indigenous fire management practitioners to revive cultural burning.
We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know
Sophie McNeill
For more than 15 years, award-winning journalist Sophie McNeill has reported on some of the most war-ravaged and oppressive places on earth, including Syria, Gaza, Yemen, West Bank and Iraq.
In We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know , Sophie tells the human stories of devastation and hope behind the headlines – of children, families and refugees, of valiant doctors, steadfast dissidents and Saudi women seeking asylum. These innocent civilians bear the brunt of the lawlessness of the current age of impunity, where war crimes go unpunished and human rights are abused. Many risk everything they know to stand up for what they believe in and to be on the right side of history, and their courage is extraordinary and inspiring.
McNeill also examines what happens when evidence and facts become subjective and debatable, and how and why disinformation, impunity and hypocrisy now reign supreme. We can’t say we didn’t know – the question now is, what are you going to do about it?
FAST Asleep
Dr Michael Mosley with Dr Clare Bailey
Getting a good night’s sleep can improve your mood, cut your risk of depression, help you fight chronic disease, keep you slim and even improve your memory; so why is it that so many of us don’t prioritise the necessary 7-8 hours a night?
In Fast Asleep, Dr Michael Mosley brings together the latest science to explain exactly what happens to us when we sleep and why it is so important that we get enough of it. Prone to insomnia, he has taken part in numerous sleep experiments and tested every sleep remedy going. He explains why so many of us struggle with sleep, what works and what doesn’t and shares his own myth-busting programme to help you achieve a good night’s rest.
Along with fascinating case studies, 50 delicious, sleep-promoting recipes and menu plans by his wife Dr Clare Bailey, this book explains why gut health and meal times matter, explores the science of dreaming and reveals tips and tricks to help you not just to sleep better but to reduce stress levels and feel happier and healthier in general.
Sustainable Escapes
Lonely Planet
This is Lonely Planet’s guide to the world’s best eco-friendly resorts and experiences. From eco-lodges with cutting-edge sustainability initiatives to tours designed to protect wildlife and empower communities, you’ll discover remarkable places where you can feel good about spending your time and money.
There are nearly 180 escapes to choose from, organised across five themes: Nature, Relaxation, Culture, Urban and Learning, to make it easy for you to find your perfect getaway – from tracking rare black rhinos in Namibia to a high-end private island hideaway in Indonesia, or a remastered heritage hotel in Monaco to an innovative community tourism project in Cuba.
Each escape is labelled with the key sustainability features you can enjoy while staying at the hotel or participating on the tour – whether it’s wildlife spotting, sustainable dining, conservation opportunities, homestays, expert talks and more. We also tell you what makes each retreat so special, what you can do there, what’s on its doorstep, and provide contact details to help you find out more or book a visit.
The Watermill
Arnold Zable
Ranging from remote provinces in China and Cambodia to pre- and post-war Yiddish Poland, Kurdish Iraq and Iran, and Indigenous and present-day Melbourne, Arnold Zable’s quartet of stories depicts the ebbs and flows of trauma and healing, memory and forgetting, the ancient and the contemporary. And ever-recurring journeys in search of belonging.
Cry Me a River: The Tragedy of the Murray-Darling Basin (QE 77)
Margaret Simons
The Murray-Darling Basin is the food bowl of Australia, and it’s in trouble. What does this mean for the future – for water and food, and for the people and towns that depend on it?
In this Quarterly Essay, acclaimed journalist Margaret Simons takes a trip through the basin, all the way from Queensland to South Australia. She shows that its plight is environmental but also economic, and enmeshed in ideology and identity. Her essay is both a portrait of the Murray-Darling Basin and an explanation of its woes. It looks at rural Australia and the failure of political processes over the last few generations to meet the needs of communities forced to bear the heaviest burden of change. It considers corruption and resource politics, drought and climate change.
Growing Pineapples in the Outback
Rebecca Lister & Tony Kelly
When Rebecca Lister and Tony Kelly move from Melbourne to Mount Isa to care for Rebecca’s elderly mother, Diana, they have no idea what they’ve signed up for. The isolation, sweltering heat and limited employment opportunities make settling into the mining town a challenge. While Rebecca deals with her mother’s declining health and delves into her own past, Tony takes on a new role in native title law.
However, caring for Diana – a witty, crossword-loving 92-year-old – proves to be a more enriching experience than either Tony or Rebecca thought possible. As they make deeper connections to the land and community, they find themselves flourishing in a most unexpected place.
Growing Pineapples in the Outback explores the highs and lows of caring for an ageing parent, while also celebrating the rewards of a simpler life.
Beatrix Bakes
Natalie Paull
Nat Paull’s recipes are inspired by classics the world over, but they are irreverent too, and in this book she delights in showing readers that once they get the foundations right the truest magic will come from a willingness to play (with the insurance of her many clever ideas and back-up plans in their apron pocket ). The pages are filled with authentic photography that works as a stunning visual endorsement of Natalie’s favorite treats. The recipes are divided across ten chapters: Crusts, Doughs, Pastries & Crusts; Tarts, Pies, A Crostata & a Galette; The Cake List; One in the Hand; Yeasted Bakes; Fruit-full; Creams, Custards, Fillings, Glazes and Buttercreams; and Finishing Touches. Peppered throughout are infographics, offering readers a visual (pie chart) guide to following their baking hearts.
Beatrix Bakes embraces the unparalleled joys of baking seasonally and creatively. It invites you to choose your own adventure with unique features that inspire you to mix-and-match and create magic out of even the worst baking fails and to celebrate indulgence, slowing down and being in the (sweetest) moment.
We Need to Talk About Mum and Dad
Jean Kitson
This warm and witty practical guide is a one-stop shop for information on how to support your ageing loved ones: how to protect their health and wellbeing, keep them safe and secure, and enable them to be self-determining and independent for as long as possible.
Full of expert advice and first-hand experience, this is your go-to resource to help you:
- Navigate the bureaucratic maze while remaining sane
- Understand what is needed for your elder’s health and wellbeing and how to get it, especially in a medical emergency
- Survive the avalanche of legal papers and official forms
- Choose the best place for them to live – home, retirement village, residential aged care, or granny and grandpa flat – and help your elders relocate with love and respect.
Compelled to discuss some of life’s most confronting questions, Jean shares heartfelt stories and clear facts alongside wonderful cartoons from much-loved Australian cartoonist, Patrick Cook.
We Need to Talk About Mum and Dad is a guide to what happens when we become parents of our parents.
Grounded: A Companion for Slow Living
Anna Carlie
Grounded (adjective): used to describe a person who has a good understanding of what is really important in life.
This book is your entry into a world that spins slowly and draws its inspiration from the earth, the ocean, the sun and the sky. Each turn of the page through projects organized into chapters for the four seasons will lead to discover a new way to practice slow living and weave nature into your everyday life. Build a garden bed and plant seeds. Watch your vegetable garden grow, and pluck a tomato or two to make a salad. Go on a walk in the woods, build a campfire and then read the moon. Rediscover a childlike joy of nature through over 20 projects to cook, make or do outside.
Grounded is the ideal way to put down your devices and spend time in natural surrounds with your friends, your family and, of course, yourself.
Rust: A Memoir of Steel and Grit
Eliese Colette Goldbach
Steel is the only thing that shines in the belly of the mill…
To ArcelorMittal Steel Eliese is known as #6691: Utility Worker, but this was never her dream.
Fresh out of college, eager to leave behind her conservative hometown and come to terms with her Christian roots, Eliese found herself applying for a job at the local steel mill. The mill is everything she was trying to escape, but it’s also her only shot at financial security in an economically devastated and forgotten part of America.
In Rust, Eliese brings the reader inside the belly of the mill and the middle American upbringing that brought her there in the first place. She takes a long and intimate look at her Rust Belt childhood and struggles to reconcile her desire to leave without turning her back on the people she’s come to love. The people she sees as the unsung backbone of the nation.
Faced with the financial promise of a steelworker’s paycheck, and the very real danger of working in an environment where a steel coil could crush you at any moment or a vat of molten iron could explode because of a single drop of water, Eliese finds unexpected warmth and camaraderie among the gruff men she labors beside each day.
Appealing to readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Educated, Rust is a story of the humanity Eliese discovers in the most unlikely and hellish of places, and the hope that therefore begins to grow.
Australia’s Best 100 Walks
Australian Geographic
Our free time is precious and few people have the time to survey a range of walks – it can years to find a handful of good ones. Over 150 issues and 33 years Australian Geographic has explored Australian landscapes. Our editors, writers and photographers have the energy, expertise and contacts to know where all the most exciting and exhilarating walks are to be found. In this much anticipated book, we reveal our best 100 with detailed descriptions and stunning photography to inspire both walkers and armchair travellers.
The Australian Geographic guide to Australia’s Best 100 Walks will have walkers itching to lace their boots up with this showcase of the sheer beauty and diversity of our landscapes and wildlife. With this book, walkers can set out knowing they’re going to have an incredible day outdoors. A great walk can be an exhilarating experience that will stay with you forever. Perhaps you’re stirred by endless mountain views or soothed by stepping into a living green cathedral. Maybe the challenge drives you harder and farther than you thought possible. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in the presence of a rare creature and feel a jolt of connection. There’s always magic to be found when walking but the very best walks will do all of these things. Fortunately, Australia is full of extraordinary walks – here’s our collection of the best to be found in every corner of this country.
Plants for the People: A Modern Guide to Plant Medicine
Erin Lovell Verinder
Plants are our past. Plants are our future. We are diminished if we can’t celebrate plants, properly understand their powers and harness their energy to heal ourselves.
Plants for the People is an exploration of the plant world through the eyes of a master herbalist, weaving ancient wisdom with a modern approach to plant medicine. This is a beginner’s guide to using plants to restore vitality and a general sense of wellbeing, with recipes for easy-to-make teas, tinctures, syrups, balms and baths. Throughout there are golden tips and tonics for addressing common ailments such as bloating, bad skin, lack of energy, winter coughs and colds, jangling nerves and many other present-day complaints.
An evolution of herbal-medicine books of the past, Plants for the People is a modern presentation of an ancient craft. This is plant medicine’s time to shine.
My Lucky Stroke
Sarah Brooker
Sarah Brooker was an ambitious young woman studying to be a neuroscientist. She had the world at her feet. On New Year’s Eve, 2002, an unbelievable series of events occurred: a brain aneurysm, a devastating car accident, a body broken and a mind shattered. A life was changed forever.
Several weeks later Sarah woke from a coma with no idea of who or where she was or what had happened. But thanks to an extraordinary quirk of the brain, Sarah could remember neuroscience. In fact, when doctors came to visit her during the many months she spent in hospital, Sarah assumed they were consulting her as the brain expert, not attending to her as a patient.
My Lucky Stroke is an extraordinary memoir, full of life and insight, humour and drama, a story about rebuilding a life from square one that you won’t easily forget.
Missing William Tyrrell
Caroline Overington
One minute a little boy is playing outside his foster nana’s house, the next minute, he’s gone. How can a three year old child simply disappear?
On Friday 12 September 2014, William Tyrrell – a playful three-year-old boy dressed in a fire-engine red Spider-Man suit – disappears from a quiet street in broad daylight. It’s assumed he’s lost in the nearby bushland, but despite an intensive search, he’s not found, and police start to suspect he’s been abducted. No trace of William – not a shoe, not a hair – has ever been found, but now is not the time to surrender. How can a little boy just vanish? We have to find him.
From best-selling author and Walkley Award-winning journalist, Caroline Overington, Missing William Tyrrell is a moving and compelling exploration of one of Australia’s most baffling and heartbreaking mysteries.
Anxiety
Dr Mark Cross
Consultant psychiatrist Dr Mark Cross knows a lot about anxiety. Many of his patients are sufferers, which is hardly surprising, given anxiety is the most common mental health condition in Australia, affecting up to one in four people at some point in their lives. But Mark also knows about anxiety from another perspective, because he too has suffered from anxiety all his life.
In this book, the well-known author of Changing Minds, who featured on the award-winning ABC TV series of the same name, demystifies this mental illness in his trademark warm and friendly style. He looks at causes, treatments, both medical and natural, anxiety in the workplace and more, sharing his own experiences as well as stories from others.
Now For Something Sweet
Monday Morning Cooking Club
We are always dreaming of soft, airy, pale chiffon cake, thinking about chocolate-swirled, glossy yeasted babke, imagining flaky, chewy, jammy strudel, baking almond-studded, citrus-glazed Dutch buns, frying golden, syrup-drenched coiled fishuelas, biting into hot, sugared jam-filled doughnuts, eating crisp-shelled, marshmallowy vanilla-flecked meringues, feasting on sticky, steaming, sweet butterscotch pudding and sharing it all with abundance and love…’
After three best-selling cookbooks, the irrepressible Monday Morning Cooking Club returns with a stunning fourth book, a collection of mostly sweet heirloom recipes that are as treasured as they are mouthwatering.
Now for Something Sweet is the result of an intensive search to uncover, curate and celebrate the very best, most cherished sweet recipes from the Jewish community in Australia and around the world. (Including one outstanding savoury chapter to provide delicious relief from all the sweetness.) Alongside the recipes, they recount heart-warming and poignant stories of family, friendship, community and survival.
Ranging from the straightforward to the more elaborate, these recipes are always impressive and often show stopping. From the simple passionfruit-iced coconut slab cake to a Russian yeasted kulich which is worth the day it takes to make, from quick-bake chocolate-sandwiched romany cream biscuits to the perfect vanilla slice (mille feuille) for the home cook, this book has it all. Step-by-step ‘how to’ guides for a few essential techniques provide a helping hand to those who need it, and the more complex recipes offer a challenge for those who crave it.
Truganini
Cassandra Pybus
Cassandra Pybus’s ancestors told a story of an old Aboriginal woman who would wander across their farm on Bruny Island, in south-east Tasmania, in the 1850s and 1860s. As a child, Cassandra didn’t know this woman was Truganini, and that Truganini was walking over the country of her clan, the Nuenonne.
For nearly seven decades, Truganini lived through a psychological and cultural shift more extreme than we can imagine. But her life was much more than a regrettable tragedy. Now Cassandra has examined the original eyewitness accounts to write Truganini’s extraordinary story in full.
Hardly more than a child, Truganini managed to survive the devastation of the 1820s, when the clans of south-eastern Tasmania were all but extinguished. She spent five years on a journey around Tasmania, across rugged highlands and through barely penetrable forests, with George Augustus Robinson, the self-styled missionary who was collecting the survivors to send them into exile on Flinders Island. She has become an international icon for a monumental tragedy – the so-called extinction of the original people of Tasmania.
Truganini’s story is inspiring and haunting – a journey through the apocalypse.
Plant Tribe
Igor Josifovic & Judith de Graaff
This new book by the authors of the bestselling Urban Jungle addresses the life-changing magic of living with and caring for plants. Aimed at a wider audience than typical houseplant books, each chapter combines easily digestible plant knowledge, style guidance via real home interiors, and inspiring advice for using plants to increase energy, creativity, and well-being and to attract love and prosperity.
Also included: real-world @urbanjungleblog followers’ FAQs; a section on plants and pets; and plant care for the different stages of a houseplant’s life. The focus is on using plants to raise the positive energy of every room in the house and to live happily ever after with plants.
Man Raises Boy
Rob Sturrock
Welcome to Rob Sturrock’s journey into parenting. Since the birth of his daughter, Rob has been passionate about being an active and present father, but this hasn’t always been straightforward. Struggling with stereotypes, judgement, identity and isolation while on parental leave, Rob has tried to balance supporting his wife and young children with the societal expectation of being a breadwinner for his family.
With the arrival of his son, a new set of anxieties was born. In today’s climate, how do you raise a boy? The roar of the #MeToo movement has meant that men have had to learn to listen, and to confront their masculinity and what it means to be a man. Through extensive research and interviews with dads doing it differently – including Tony Sheldon, Adam Liaw and Bernie Shakeshaft – Rob Sturrock explores a new era of fathering that balances strength and vulnerability, allowing men to voice their insecurities and uncertainties, and encouraging them to truly cherish their families.
Man Raises Boy is at once an insightful and necessary call to arms for all new fathers, a guiding hand in the maze of love, guilt, anxiety and joy in fatherhood – and an ordinary dad’s beautifully moving love letter to his son.
The Feel-Good Family Food Plan
Joanna McMillan & Melissa Clark
Packed with simple solutions, easy-to-follow advice and expert tips, The Feel-Good Family Food Plan does the thinking for you, so you get delicious home-cooked food on the table, even on the most hectic of work and school days.
- 60 weeknight dinners the whole family will love.
- 4 weeks of meal plans take the stress out of shopping and cooking.
- Great ideas for getting the kids involved in the kitchen.
- Plant-rich meals to encourage good eating habits for life.
- Ideas for fussy eaters and getting kids to love vegies.
- Quick healthy breakfasts, lunch boxes and snacks, for fuel on the run.
- Tips for savvy shopping, storing and freezing.
When Life Is Not Peachy
Pip Lincolne
A warm hug in book form.
When life has taken a difficult turn, our heart is aching and we’re only just holding it together, it’s easy to question everything. Who even am I, and how will I keep going? We need someone in our corner to travel this journey with us and help keep our spirits up.
This book is a gentle guide for navigating loss, grief or other sad times – a resource both for those who are downhearted and those supporting a loved one. With thoughtful advice on dealing with friends and family; healthy tips for eating and exercise when you don’t feel like it; and a just-keep-yourself-going ‘101’ for when you’re feeling very low. It’s the bolstering force we need to feel a bit closer to ourselves, or find a bit of peace.
For years Pip Lincolne has had a dedicated readership through her blog Meet Me At Mike’s and frankie magazine. She wrote this book during some tough times of her own, in the hope that what she learned might help someone else feel a little better some day.
Grow Yourself Healthy
Beth Marshall & Marianne Majerus
Explore how gardening is good for your gut – emotionally, physically and psychologically.
There is currently a huge upsurge in interest into recent scientific research highlighting the importance gardening for health. This focuses on the activity of gardening for mental and physical health, as well as the way that if you garden for your gut you can improve your digestion too. The microbiome is the plethora of microbes that humans host in their gut, and other cells, and which are fundamental to well-being. Recent studies link digestive health and the human microbiome to a range of health conditions such as depression and anxiety, obesity, cancer, diabetes and autism. Interest in the topic has led to an array of related popular science publications, diet and recipe books. There is currently however very little literature on how to grow produce which has high nutritional value, and which optimizes the microbial life within our digestive systems.
What types of vegetable, fruit, and herbs should we being growing to encourage beneficial internal microbes? How do we design and plan a productive garden that supports gut health?
Grow Yourself Healthy introduces relevant recent science in an accessible way, provides practical guidance on how to grow, produce and design a productive garden to optimize your health, and provides information on how to grow and store vegetables for fermentation, including select recipes for gut health.
Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists
Julia Ebner
By day, Julia Ebner works at a counter-extremism think tank, monitoring radical groups from the outside. But two years ago, she began to feel she was only seeing half the picture; she needed to get inside the groups to truly understand them. She decided to go undercover in her spare hours – late nights, holidays, weekends – adopting five different identities, and joining a dozen extremist groups from across the ideological spectrum.
Her journey would take her from a Generation Identity global strategy meeting in a pub in Mayfair, to a Neo-Nazi Music Festival on the border of Germany and Poland. She would get relationship advice from ‘Trad Wives’ and Jihadi Brides and hacking lessons from ISIS. She was in the channels when the alt-right began planning the lethal Charlottesville rally, and spent time in the networks that would radicalise the Christchurch terrorist.
In Going Dark, Ebner takes the reader on a deeply compulsive journey into the darkest recesses of extremist thinking, exposing how closely we are surrounded by their fanatical ideology every day, the changing nature and practice of these groups, and what is being done to counter them.
The Power of Suffering
David Roland
The Power of Suffering is psychologist David Roland’s personal investigation into the nature of human suffering. When our world is turned upside down, what does it do to us, how do we survive it, and, most importantly, how can we grow as a result? David takes the lived experience of eleven incredible people and follows them along each step of their journey from crisis through to acceptance and triumph. Within each story, David draws on his own experience of life-altering trauma and clinical research to offer insights we all can gain from.
Each life story examined is a moving testimony of the human spirit’s ability to rise and rise again – an executive tragically loses his family in a car crash and finds healing in the rehabilitation of wildlife, a teenage victim of domestic violence becomes a fierce advocate for abused women and brain-injured youth, a football superstar overcomes bigotry and dyslexia to forge a career in acting, a mother experiences the aching depth of love lost after her teenage child’s life is tragically cut short. These are but a few of the intimately told stories, all pointing to a path through the storm and beyond.
The Power of Suffering is a revelatory account of how the darkest night can lead to the most profound dawn.
When Time Stopped
Ariana Neumann
In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book.
Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, travelled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo’s eyes. What Hans experienced was so unspeakable that, when he built an industrial empire in Venezuela, he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. All his daughter Ariana knew was that something terrible had happened.
When Hans died, he left Ariana a small box filled with letters, diary entries and other memorabilia. Ten years later Ariana finally summoned the courage to have the letters translated and she began reading. What she discovered launched her on a worldwide search that would deliver indelible portraits of a family loving, finding meaning, and trying to survive amid the worst that can be imagined.
When Time Stopped is an unputdownable detective story and an epic family memoir, spanning nearly ninety years and crossing oceans. Neumann brings each relative to vivid life. In uncovering her father’s story after all these years, she discovers nuance and depth to her own history and liberates poignant and thought-provoking truths about the threads of humanity that connect us all.
