New Books / Reviews
Reviews of New Books Summer 2025/2026
Superstar footballer Luca Bruni is being blackmailed for a night of lust he swears he didn’t participate in, except the ransom photo denies that.
A media darling on and off the field, he has powerful charisma, a perfect home life he’ll do anything to protect, and more money than he knows what to do with. He’s determined to defy the extortion racket. When Detective Superintendent Jack Hawksworth learns that the cunning mastermind behind this crime has already swindled a dozen of the world’s most highly prized male athletes, he is instructed to keep the situation from escalating and prevent a media frenzy.
Classic British motorcycles were more than simple machines; they were a cultural phenomenon that lasted half a century.
From the early days of motoring, British innovators led the way, building some of the world’s most famous motorcycles, as well as some of the best performers. At one point, the rest of the motorcycle world followed Britain’s lead, and by the late 1950s, the British were by far the largest producers of motorcycles in the world. However, barely a decade later, the British motorcycle industry was almost bankrupt and in utter disarray. Illustrated with over 150 photographs, this book explores the rise and fall of the British motorcycle industry, looking at its history through the years and then at the motorcycles themselves by brand, giving the complete story of these amazing machines.
In this authoritative version, the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman, this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse and a vivid, contemporary idiom, this engrossing translation matches the number of lines in the Greek original, thus striding at Homer’s sprightly pace and singing with a voice that echoes Homer’s music. Wilson’s Odyssey captures the beauty and enchantment of this ancient poem as well as the suspense and drama of its narrative. Its characters are unforgettable, from the cunning goddess Athena, whose interventions guide and protect the hero, to the awkward teenage son, Telemachus, who struggles to achieve adulthood and find his father; from the cautious, clever, and miserable Penelope, who somehow keeps clamouring suitors at bay during her husband’s long absence, to the “complicated” hero himself, a man of many disguises, many tricks, and many moods, who emerges in this translation as a more fully rounded human being than ever before.
In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France, but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.
Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.
It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country.
The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain: a man brought up by an absent French father and a poor Vietnamese mother, a man who went to university in America, but returned to Vietnam to fight for the Communist cause. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.
Seft, a talented flint miner, walks the Great Plain in the high summer heat, to witness the rituals that signal the start of a new year.
He is there to trade his stone at the Midsummer Fair, and to find Neen, the girl he loves. Her family lives in prosperity and offer Seft an escape from his brutish father and brothers within their herder community. Joia, Neen’s sister, is a priestess with a vision and an unmatched ability to lead. As a child, she watches the Midsummer ceremony, enthralled, and dreams of a miraculous new monument, raised from the biggest stones in the world. Circle of Days invites you to join master storyteller Ken Follett in exploring one of the greatest mysteries of our age: Stonehenge.
Alex Cross is gravely injured. Only his partner and friend John Sampson can keep him safe and get justice.
For the first time, John Sampson is on his own. When military-style attacks erupt, brutally sidelining Cross, Sampson is sent reeling. The patterns are too random, Sampson’s friend, his partner, his brother, have told him.
As a shadow force advances on the nation’s capital, Sampson alone must protect the Cross family, his own young daughter, and every American, including the president.
A vividly rendered and empathetic exploration of how two of the greatest poets of the 20th century, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, became bitter rivals and, eventually, friends.
Introduced at a workshop in Boston University led by the acclaimed and famous poet Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton formed a friendship that would soon evolve into a fierce rivalry, coloured by jealousy and respect in equal terms. In the years that followed, these two women would not only become iconic figures in literature, but also lead curiously parallel lives haunted by mental illness, suicide attempts, self-doubt, and difficult personal relationships. With weekly martini meetings at the Ritz to discuss everything from sex to suicide, theirs was a relationship as complex and subversive as their poetry.
A vividly rendered and empathetic exploration of how two of the greatest poets of the 20th century, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, became bitter rivals and, eventually, friends.
Introduced at a workshop in Boston University led by the acclaimed and famous poet Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton formed a friendship that would soon evolve into a fierce rivalry, coloured by jealousy and respect in equal terms. In the years that followed, these two women would not only become iconic figures in literature, but also lead curiously parallel lives haunted by mental illness, suicide attempts, self-doubt, and difficult personal relationships. With weekly martini meetings at the Ritz to discuss everything from sex to suicide, theirs was a relationship as complex and subversive as their poetry.
Tim Fischer takes readers into the fascinating and grand story of steam transportation over ten vital decades of transformation in Australia’s history.
This book is so much more than a history or a set of lists, it is about the great tapestry of transport weaved by the steam locomotive, and Tim details how the nation was galvanised with economic growth delivered by steam. Fischer tracks key steam locomotives that traversed Australia during critical stages of our nation’s development and transported soldiers to fields of conflict as we fought in two world wars. For a century, from 1850 to 1950, steam locomotive haulage dominated Australia’s various rail systems and, during that period, rail networks expanded from a few short routes in the big capital cities to huge networks reaching every corner of each state.
The American South is rife with stories of a haunted past, especially its houses.
In this eclectic and impressive collection, thirteen novelists were asked to build their tales around the photo of a dilapidated mansion. They were given two requirements–the house must appear in the story, and it should be a Southern Gothic tale. From childish demons to a mad novelist, from the Mississippi delta to the Appalachians, this collection from emerging voices and New York Times bestselling authors explores what happens when secrets that lie beneath the dust are disturbed–and our worst nightmares begin. Darkness lurks behind every corner, especially dead ends.
Ten suspects. Ten heists. A mystery only Ernest Cunningham can solve.
He’s spent the last few years solving murders. But a bank heist is a new one, even for him. He’s never been a hostage before. The doors are chained shut. No one in or out. Which means that when someone in the bank is murdered, hostages become suspects.
Turns out, more than one person planned to rob the bank today. You can steal more from a bank than just money. Who is stealing what? Are they willing to kill for it? And can he solve the crime before the police kick down the door and rescue them?
Robert Dessaix’s Chameleon is about everything that matters, a book of memories that flow so freely they seem to happen as we read.
Cartwheeling from story to story, Dessaix describes an identity in his beginnings as an adopted child named Thomas Robert Jones, his youthful interest in religious thinking, his obsession with all things Russian, his marriage to Lisa and divorce, his discovery of travel. In North Africa he finds different ways of feeling and being, and in Australia he begins his abiding relationship with his partner Peter Timms. At every point he muses on pleasure, art, sex, literature, infatuation, happiness, music, life, death and all the rest. Chameleon is a virtuoso performance of self-revelation, as Dessaix explores how the restless mind takes constant detours to search for what makes life good, a place of wisdom and love.
In The Shortest History of Australia, Mark McKenna offers a compelling new version of our national story.
This is a modern Australia permeated by First Nations history; a multicultural society with an island mindset; a continent of epic beauty and extreme natural events; a country obsessed by war abroad but blind to its founding war at home; and a thriving nation-state still to realise its political independence.
One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim.
Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
A compelling history of the world’s most powerful country from acclaimed author Don Watson This is the extraordinary story of the United States, a nation that contains multitudes.
When Britain’s thirteen American colonies declared their independence on 4 July 1776, the United States of America was born. But it was hardly united. In this superbly written book, Don Watson traces how the central conflicts of the US, those over freedom, race, frontiers, enterprise, religion and violence, play out. It’s a country at war with itself in the 1860s, the leader of the free world less than a hundred years later, and a nation beset by wild division and turmoil in the twenty-first century.
Mickey Haller, The Lincoln Lawyer, leaves criminal court behind for his first civil lawsuit. But to him, this is still a murder trial. An AI company’s chatbot encouraged a sixteen-year-old boy to kill his ex-girlfriend. Can Haller prove the company knew the dangers of its own creation?To do so, he turns to Jack McEvoy, a journalist who knows how powerful the coming wave will be. Together they soon uncover a whistleblower in hiding.
As the tech titans try to buy or bully their way out the scale of the courtroom battle before them becomes clear. Because billions are at stake, along with countless lives, in an all or nothing case, which could change everything.
Wait for the boxes to open, wait for the race to begin. Wait, and your greyhound will cease to be the dog you know and become an entirely different kind of animal.
Brisbane, 1975: Andie Tanner’s world is small but whole. Her mum is complicated, but she adores her dad and the kennel of racing greyhounds that live under their house. Andie is a serious girl with plans: finish school with her friends, then apprentice to her father until she can become a greyhound trainer, with dogs of her very own. But real life rarely goes to plan, and the world is bigger and more complex than Andie could imagine. When she loses everything she cares about, her family, her friends, the dogs, it’s up to Andie to reclaim her future. She will need all her wits to survive this new reality of secrets and half-truths, addictions and crime.
A gripping, enigmatic collection of linked short stories about the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of everyday people.
In 1998, an apparently ordinary Australian man is arrested and charged for a series of brutal murders. The news shocks the nation, bringing both horror and resolution to the victims’ families, but its impact travels even into the past, as the murders rewrite personal histories, and into the future, as true crime podcasts and biopics tell the story of the crimes.
Mark Raphael Baker was no stranger to death. Over seven years he had become a mourner three times for his first wife, for his brother and for his father. When diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he began to reflect on their deaths, his probable death and on Death as, in the words of Ecclesiastes, a ‘season’ that produced a large and bitter harvest for the Baker family.
Powerful and conflicting emotions assailed him, but their destructive power was always defeated by his love of his family and of life, which never deserted him even when his spirit was most weary. Over the short course of his illness, he came to realise that to love both truly, he must die as the most authentic version of himself he can achieve. It enabled him to die with humbling grace and dignity.
Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-coloured house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior centre that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he’s known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the centre. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.
Behind Bob Comet’s straight-man facade is the story of an unhappy child’s runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian’s vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob’s experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsize players to welcome onto the stage of his life.
Noah Cork has just published the scoop of a white-hot true-crime book about the cold-blooded killer who slipped an unfolding murder mystery into his mailbox.
But if this is his moment of triumph, then why is the tin roof being ripped from the walls of his reality? Why are skeletons standing upright in his closet? Why do people want to run him over in the street? And why does his wife keep writing a cryptic message across the bathroom mirror? As a severe storm heads towards Brisbane, Noah is hurtling headfirst into a swirling storm of secrets. He must now cling for dear life to the only story that ever really mattered. He must hold on to the truth. He must hold on to the story. He must hold on to love.
In Looking from the North, Reynolds again turns Australian history on its axis with an exploration of colonisation north of the Tropic of Capricorn.
Reynolds tells the stories of the European, Chinese, Japanese and Pacific Islander people who were vital to the settlement of the north. Along with the experience of First Nations peoples, from employment on stations and as native police to the land rights and homelands movements, Reynolds shows how the colonisation of the north, officially beginning in 1861, was a very different venture to settlement in the south. He argues that it provides profoundly important lessons for the world we live in today.
Born and raised in Port Talbot, a small Welsh steelworks town, amid war and depression, Sir Anthony Hopkins grew up around men who were tough, to say the least, and eschewed all forms of emotional vulnerability in favour of alcoholism and brutality. A struggling student in school, he was deemed by his peers, his parents and other adults as a failure with no future ahead of him. But, on a fateful Saturday night, the disregarded Welsh boy watched the 1948 adaptation of Hamlet, sparking a passion for acting that would lead him on a path that no one could have predicted.
With candour and a voice that is both arresting and vulnerable, Sir Anthony recounts his various career milestones and provides a once-in-a-lifetime look into the brilliance behind some of his most iconic roles. Sir Anthony also takes a deeply honest look at the low points in his personal life. His addiction cost him his first marriage, his relationship with his only child, and nearly his life, the latter ultimately propelling him toward sobriety, a commitment he has maintained for nearly half a century.
A young man named Levi McAllister decides to build a coffin for his twenty-three-year-old sister, Charlotte, who promptly runs for her life. A water rat swims upriver in quest of the cloud god. A fisherman named Karl hunts for tuna in partnership with a seal. And a father takes form from fire.
The answers to these riddles are to be found in this tale of grief and love and the bonds of family, tracing a journey across the southern island that takes us full circle.
The compelling and as-yet-untold story of the Australian women whose secret work helped to end World War II. Many swore they would keep their covert roles hidden, even from their families. Eighty years later, their intriguing stories are starting to emerge.
As World War II climbed to its crescendo in the Asia-Pacific, the Australian government called in a new weapon: women. Within this female arsenal was a top-secret group focused on signals intelligence. These young women, many just teens, were soon dotted across Australia, working in discreet locations, from an outback bunker disguised as a farmhouse to a Melbourne apartment block, from the garage of a Brisbane manor to a Perth girls’ school. As war inched closer to home, they became our secret weapon, intercepting enemy messages and passing intelligence between local networks and allies across the globe, from Bletchley Park to the United States and across the Asia-Pacific. Some information was so sensitive it was burned to ensure its security. Their covert work helped the Allies win the pivotal battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, and plot the assassination of the Japanese commander behind the Pearl Harbour bombings.
For 150 years, women have been going missing. All of the investigators who went in search of them, from 1877 to the present day, have disappeared, too. Now Sam Speedman, a most unique private detective, is on the case. Brilliant, direct and disarming, Sam is different. He’s not your average private detective. But then again, this isn’t your average case. For not even he will be prepared for what he will find.
Set in the darkest corners of the American South, tapping into hot-button issues that simmer beneath the surface of the modern United States, this is Matthew Reilly writing faster and bolder than ever before, bringing you a detective thriller like no other.
Labor’s landslide victory on 3 May 2025 wreaked havoc across the political landscape. It triggered ministerial assassinations, trashed reputations, destroyed careers, fractured the Coalition, and threatened to fracture it again. It took the Liberal Party to the brink of extinction and turned Anthony Albanese into a Labor hero.
When the Coalition government was overthrown in 2022 after nine years in office, it was tempting to portray the loss as merely a personal repudiation of Scott Morrison. Then, when opposition leader Peter Dutton torpedoed the referendum on establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament, his standing as a political leader improved and the prime minister’s nosedived. That was when, according to Niki Savva, the conservative Coalition thought it had the upcoming election in the bag.
But Niki had noticed the ground the emergence of the teal independents and the long-term threat they represented to the Liberals; the false dawn of Dutton saying no to the Voice referendum; and the overlooked reality, even back in August 2023, that, ‘The 2022 federal election result was no ordinary defeat … It delivered last rites to the broad-church party that Robert Menzies created.’
July 1346: Ten men land on the beaches of Normandy. They call themselves the Essex Dogs: an unruly platoon of archers and men-at-arms led by a battle-scarred captain whose best days are behind him. The fight for the throne of the largest kingdom in Western Europe has begun. Heading ever deeper into enemy territory toward Crécy, this band of brothers knows they are off to fight a battle that will forge nations, and shape the very fabric of human lives. But first they must survive a bloody war in which rules are abandoned and chivalry itself is slaughtered.
Rooted in historical accuracy and told through an unforgettable cast, Essex Dogs delivers the stark reality of medieval war on the ground and shines a light on the fighters and ordinary people caught in the storm.
Europe, 1940: Imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, Spanish fighter and photographer Mateo Baca is ordered to process images of the camp and inmates for a handful of photo books being made for presentation to top Nazi figures. Just five books in total, or so the officials think. Mateo manages to make a secret sixth book and, with the help of a local woman, Lena Lang, it remains hidden until the end of the war.
Australia, present: When thirteen-year-old Hannah Campbell’s Yugoslavian grandfather, Nico Antonov, arrives in Australia to visit his family, one of the gifts he brings with him is an intriguing-looking parcel wrapped in calico cloth which Roza, Hannah’s mother, quickly hides. Later, Hannah sneaks off in search for the mysterious package. She is horrified to find in it a photo book full of ghastly historical photographs of a terrible place full of people suffering.
Why would a married woman with a thoroughly Protestant background and often more doubt than faith be drawn to the ancient practice of monasticism, to a community of celibate men whose days are centred around a rigid schedule of prayer, work, and scripture?
This is the question that poet Kathleen Norris asks us as, somewhat to her own surprise, she found herself on two extended residencies at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota.
Part record of her time among the Benedictines, part meditation on various aspects of monastic life, The Cloister Walk demonstrates, from the rare perspective of someone who is both an insider and outsider, how immersion in the cloistered world, its liturgy, its ritual, its sense of community can impart meaning to everyday events and deepen our secular lives. In this stirring and lyrical work, the monastery, often considered archaic or otherworldly, becomes immediate, accessible, and relevant to us, no matter what our faith may be.
This book examines the development of electric traction from overhead catenerary on Australian and New Zealand railways from the 1910s to the 1990s. It describes the basics of electric traction, examines the routes that have been selected for electrification, the reasons behind the decisions, and looks at the locomotives and multiple units that have been developed for use over these routes.
Over 100 photos in full colour, 47 in black and white, plus several maps and scale drawings make this an essential reference work for anyone interested in Australian and New Zealand railways and their motive power. (Publisher’s description).
This collection of photographs focuses on the last days of steam in Britain, from March 1966 to August 1968, right up to the final twenty-four hours of mainline steam operation.
A wide range of motive power is illustrated, hauling main-line expresses as well as freight trains. (Publisher’s description).
Small creatures, a rat, a rabbit, a squirrel, have been turning up throughout Charlotte, North Carolina, mutilated and displayed in the same bizarre manner. But one day, as Tempe is relaxing at home alongside her aimless, moody great-niece Tory, she’s diverted by a disturbing call. Now, it seems, the perp is upping the ante. This find is larger. Could the remains be human?
Tempe visits the scene and discovers that the victim is a dog. Someone’s pet. As one who has always found animal cruelty deeply abhorrent, Tempe vows to help apprehend the person responsible for the killings, and due to Tory’s especially layered knowledge of animal behaviour, the young woman turns out to be a valuable ally in the hunt for answers. Oddly, Tempe discovers that semi-retired homicide detective Erskine “Skinny” Slidell is equally outraged and committed.
And then it happens. A woman is found disfigured and posed in a manner that mimics the earlier killings. As Tempe and Slidell follow the horrifying clues to a shocking conclusion, they’re forced to confront an increasingly terrifying question: “What is pure evil?”
Detective Superintendent Jack Hawksworth is seconded by counter-terrorism to investigate a spate of domestic events.
First it was needles in strawberries, then tampering with lipstick samplers and baby formula. But when toxic mushrooms enter the market system and a death occurs, a wave of terror is set to sweep the country. Breaking news of a possible serial killer only heightens the alarm. There are no leads, no DNA, no witnesses, no CCTV footage. Jack and his team must work on instinct to figure out why someone would want to harm innocent victims, each of them curiously linked to a single blood transfusion.
In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible, for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.
She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.
Definitive listing of railroad engines in Australia from 1854 to 1996.
With over 500 bw photographs, many of which are new to this edition, this book is the resource to turn to for all locomotive enthusiasts. The included commentary on railroad acquisitions and technological advances provides insight into the social history of Australia as well. (Publisher’s description)
This book charts in detail the restoration of a very special Morris Minor to the highest possible standard. It details the trials, tribulations traumas and triumphs of a father and son working together towards a common goal.
What is all the more remarkable is the fact that they undertake the restoration of a much loved British car in a remote location in the Australian Bush. Richard and Bill McKellar are not professional restorers. However they are most definitely enthusiastic and dedicated Morris Minor devotees. Bill is a retired Bank manager and Richard is Creative Director in his own Graphic Design and Advertising Company based in Melbourne. Nevertheless, through sheer hard work and dedication they have overseen the transformation of what Richard engagingly describes as a ‘bitser’ car, to one that would grace any Concours D’Elegance competition. (Publisher’s description)
Every chapter in this book is a true and colourful picture of the uproarious days when Australia was like a great golden magnet.
It consists of the recollections of pioneers on the central goldfields of Victoria, assembled from the 1880s onwards. Written in the pioneers’ own words, it provides a unique record of the way in which men and women thought, spoke, and acted during the golden era which had such far reaching effects on Australian history. (Publisher’s description)
In Normal Women, Gregory draws on an enormous archive of primary and secondary sources to rewrite British history, focusing on the agency, persistence, and effectiveness of everyday women throughout periods of social and cultural transition. She sweeps from the making of the Bayeux tapestry in the eleventh century to the Black Death in 1348, after which women were briefly paid the same wages as men, the last time for seven centuries, to the 1992 ordination of women by the Church of England, when the church accepted, for the first time, that a woman could perform the miracle of the mass.
Through the stories of the female soldiers of the civil war, the guild widows who founded the prosperity of the City of London, highwaywomen and pirates, miners, ship owners, international traders, the women who ran London theatres and commissioned plays from Shakespeare, and the “female husbands” who married each other legally in church and lived as husband and wife, Gregory redefines “normal” female behaviour to include heroism, rebellion, crime, treason, money-making, and sainthood. As she makes clear, normal women make history.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a razor-sharp satire set in Texas during America’s war in Iraq. It explores the gaping national disconnect between the war at home and the war abroad.
Ben Fountain’s remarkable debut novel follows the surviving members of the heroic Bravo Squad through one exhausting stop in their media-intensive “Victory Tour” at Texas Stadium, football mecca of the Dallas Cowboys, their fans, promoters, and cheerleaders.
In life there are few, if any, moral absolutes for us to rely on, and facing an increasing array of choices we often lack the confidence of knowing we have made the right choice.
In Right & Wrong, respected social commentator Hugh Mackay suggests some personal strategies that will make it easier to work out what is right and wrong for each of us in a particular situation. In an engaging, conversational style, Mackay tackles the minefield of personal relationships, business ethics, morality and religion, the benefits of moral mindfulness and the reasons why we should strive for a good life in which we are true to ourselves and sensitive to the wellbeing of others.
A family story spanning two world wars and several generations in a German family. In the devastating opening scene, a woman named Helene stands with her seven-year-old son in a provincial German railway station in 1945, amid the chaos of civilians fleeing west. Having survived with him through the horror and deprivation of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns.
The story quickly circles back to Helene’s childhood with her sister Martha in rural Germany, which came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of the First World War. Their father is sent to the eastern front, and their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. In the early 1920s, after their father’s death, Helene and Martha move to Berlin, where Helene falls in love with a philosophy student named Carl, and finds a place for herself for the first time. But when Carl dies just before their engagement, life becomes largely meaningless for her, and she takes refuge in her work as a nurse. At a party Helene meets an ambitious civil engineer who wants to build motorways for the Reich and make Helene his wife. Their marriage proves disastrous, but produces a son, and Helene soon finds the love demanded by the little boy more than she can provide.
The beautiful city of Venice has been Lydia’s home for many years, a place where she has found peace and fulfillment.
Then one day she glimpses a young man’s face in the crowd that threatens to change everything. He’s a heart-stopping reminder of a dreadful secret she believed she had banished to the past. As a young child, Lydia and her sister were sent to live with grandparents they’d never even met before. It was a cruel and loveless new world for them and it forced Lydia to grow up fast. She learned to keep secrets and to trust sparingly, and through it all she was shadowed by grief and guilt. Now, 28 years later, Lydia is persuaded to leave behind the safe new life she has created for herself and return to England to face the past and maybe her future.
Strange things are happening at Biehl’s Academy when this elite school opens its doors to a group of orphans and reform-school rejects, kids at the end of the system’s tether.
The school is run by a peculiar set of rules by which every minute is regimented and controlled. Soon, they suspect they are guinea pigs in a bizarre social experiment and that their only hope of escape is to break through a dangerous threshold of time and space.
It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plansand first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favourite criminal.
But when Elizabeth meets a wedding guest who’s in trouble, kidnap and death are hot on their heels once more. A villain wants access to an uncrackable code, and will stop at nothing to get it. Plunged back into action once more, can the gang solve the puzzle and a murder in time?
From her idyllic life in sea country in Nerrm (Port Phillip Bay, Victoria), Nannertgarrook is abducted and taken to a slave market, leaving behind a husband, daughter and son. Pregnant when seized, she soon gives birth to another son, whom she raises with the children of her fellow captives.
Nannertgarrook is separated not only from her Boonwurrung family, but from her birthright: the ceremonies she once was so joyously part of, the majestic whales who are her totem, the land and sky and sea country and its creatures. All these things she loves as deeply as she does her blood kin.
2014 : At a dinner for close friends and colleagues, renowned poet Francis Blundy honours his wife’s birthday by reading aloud a new poem dedicated to her, ‘A Corona for Vivien’. Much wine is drunk as the guests listen, and a delicious meal consumed. Little does anyone gathered around the candlelit table know that for generations to come people will speculate about the message of this poem, a copy of which has never been found, and which remains an enduring mystery.
2119 : Just over one hundred years in the future, much of the western world has been submerged by rising seas following a catastrophic nuclear accident. Those who survive are haunted by the richness of the world that has been lost. In the water-logged south of what used to be England, Thomas Metcalfe, a lonely scholar and researcher, longs for the early twenty-first century as he chases the ghost of one poem, ‘A Corona for Vivian’.
We perform ceremonies every day
We perform ceremonies every day. Some are personal, some highly organised and others are repeated for generations.
For First Nations Australians, ceremonies create the backbone of cultural practice. All Yesterdays for Today tells how Indigenous ceremonies link people today to those of the past in a continuum of inherited stories, places and memories, from rites of passage to smoking ceremonies and Welcomes to Country, and many others.
In Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward provides the most intimate and sweeping portrait yet of the young president as commander in chief.
Drawing on internal memos, classified documents, meeting notes and hundreds of hours of interviews with most of the key players, including the president, Woodward tells the inside story of Obama making the critical decisions on the Afghanistan War, the secret campaign in Pakistan and the worldwide fight against terrorism.
In this memoir, Kim Huynh traces his parents’ lives from a poor village in central Vietnam through affluence in Saigon, to their harrowing experiences after the American withdrawal and the fall of Saigon in 1975.
In the snowy mountains of Vermont, Sonia is lonely. A college student and aspiring writer homesick for India, she turns to an older artist for inspiration and intimacy, a man who will cast a dark spell on the next many years of her life. In Brooklyn, Sunny is lonely, too. A struggling journalist originally from Delhi, he is both beguiled and perplexed by his American girlfriend and the country in which he plans to find his future. As Sonia and Sunny each becomes more and more alienated, they begin to question their understanding of happiness, human connection, and where they belong.
Back in India, Sonia and Sunny’s extended families cannot fathom how anyone could be lonely in this great, bustling world. They arrange a meeting between the two, a clumsy meddling that only drives Sonia and Sunny apart before they have a chance to fall in love.
For this extraordinary book, the lone wolves became a team. Garner, Hooper and Krasnostein tracked Erin Patterson’s preliminary hearings and trial, joined the media scrum at the Latrobe Valley Law Courts, slept over in Morwell and spent countless hours in fervent discussion of the case and the themes it raises: love, hate, jealousy, revenge, marriage, money, mycology and murder.
The Mushroom Tapes is a true crime book like no other, an unputdownable record of the writers’ private conversations about their impressions from inside the courtroom. They explore the gap between the certainties of the law and the messiness of reality, their own ambivalence about the true crime genre, and all that remains unknowable about Erin Patterson.
There are two kinds of people no one ever expects to be: little girls and old ladies.
Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is eighty-one years old. She’s lived on her idyllic street for sixty years, longer than anyone else. Aside from being a curmudgeon who minds everyone else’s business, few would suspect that Elsie has a past she’s worked exceedingly hard at concealing because when it comes to murder, no one ever suspects little girls or old ladies. And Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick, once a little girl and now an old lady, has a strange history of people in her life coming to a foul end.
It’s been several years since Detective Jimmy Perez left Shetland. He has settled into his new home in Orkney, the group of islands, off the northern coast of Scotland, with his partner Willow Reeve and their growing family. One stormy winter night, his oldest and closest friend, Archie Stout, goes missing. Ever the detective, Perez catches a boat to the island of Westray, where Archie worked as a farmer and lived with his wife and children.
But when he arrives he finds a shocking Archie’s body, on an archaeological dig site and an ancient Westray story stone with precise spirals carved into it beside him, the clear murder weapon. The artifact, taken from a nearby museum, seems to suggest a premediated murder. But Perez is so close to the case that he struggles to maintain an objective distance from the potential suspects. He finds it difficult to question Archie’s wife, whom he’s known for years. Rumours swirl about the dead man’s relationship with a young woman new to the island, an artist. With each new lead, the case becomes more twisted and Perez wonders if he will ever find out what happened in his friend’s final days.
When brilliant young student Jessica Mowbrie is left in a coma after being abandoned in a remote patch of New Zealand bush, the local Masterton police don’t have a clue what happened. Isolated and under-resourced, the detectives struggle even to begin piecing it together. Police records clerk Lorraine Henry will not accept that Jessie simply had a lucky escape. She thinks whoever hurt her needs to be hunted down, and worries that her employers are a bit hopeless.
As Jessie’s life hangs in the balance, it looks as if Lorraine will do the hunting. She’s not getting any younger, of course. But she has all the police records at her fingertips and as much information about who hates who as anyone in their small town. Plus, she’s used to being under-estimated. And you should never under-estimate a middle-aged woman with justice in her sights.
In the fading glow of Australia’s print journalism era, The National is an institution, and the only place that George Desoulis has ever felt at home. A world-weary subeditor with a bookish sensibility and a painful past, George is one of nature’s loners.
But a late-night encounter with an unorthodox and self-assured reporter, Cassandra Gwan, begins to unravel both of their carefully managed worlds. As the decline of the newspaper enters a desperate stage, George and Cassandra struggle to balance their turbulent relationship with their responsibilities to family, and the compromises each has built their life upon.
With a deft wit and a sharp eye for emotional complexity, Pippos examines the stories we tell ourselves, and the ways people handle grief, guilt and generational change. The Transformations is a novel about endings of dreams, relationships, institutions- and the chance of new beginnings.
Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?
The answer to these questions, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make clear, is “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype looks and smells It twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. In The AI Con, Bender and Hanna offer a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms.