New Books / Reviews
Reviews of New Books Autumn 2026
Australia is facing an aged care crisis, which is only going to escalate as Boomers age. This situation is made immeasurably worse by the fact that the medical system seems intent on keeping people alive, no matter how grim their circumstances and how reduced their quality of life. According to the latest Intergenerational Report, the ageing of our population is at the forefront of major issues we will face over the next half-century, ahead of climate change, the transformation to a net zero economy and looming geopolitical risks. There is a tsunami coming and ignoring its existence now will only make it more catastrophic.
Lucinda Holdforth says enough is enough. In this clear-eyed, entertaining and convincing polemic, she argues for a better approach to our approaching infirmity and asks the question we should all what price will our younger citizens pay for the rest of us going on and on?
Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters, to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.
Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has, a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.
David Cartwright, long buried, has left his library to the Spooks’ College in Oxford, and now one of the books is missing. Or perhaps it never existed.
River, once a “slow horse” of Slough House, MI5’s outpost for demoted and disgraced spies, has some time to kill while awaiting medical clearance to return to work, and starts investigating the secrets of his grandfather’s library. Over at the Park, MI5 First Desk Diana Taverner is in a pickle. An operation carried out during the height of the Troubles laid bare the ugly side of state security, and those involved are threatening to expose details. But every threat hides an opportunity, and Taverner has come up with a scheme. All she needs is the right dupe to get caught holding the bag.
Journalist Tatiana Petrovna is on the move. Arkady Renko, iconic Moscow investigator and Tatiana’s part-time lover, hasn’t seen her since she left on assignment over a month ago.
When she doesn’t arrive on her scheduled train, he’s positive something is wrong. No one else thinks Renko should be worried, Tatiana is known to disappear during deep assignments, but he knows her enemies all too well and the criminal lengths they’ll go to keep her quiet.
This is a lively and engaging series of chapters about women, convicts, shysters, aristocrats and politicians in the Castlemaine goldrush. There is a piece about Castlemaine’s remarkable but little known Gold Commissioner (then Warden) Captain John Edward Newell Bull, and his attempts to care for the environment by combating the puddlers. Captain Bull is an unsung hero of the colonial government, with visionary foresight about the environment and society’s future needs.
(Review: Royal Historical Society of Victoria)
November 1939: The Soviet Union, the largest army in the world, invades its tiny, relatively defenceless neighbour Finland, just three months after the declaration of World War II. So began what is known as the Winter War. A small makeshift company of soldiers, workers, and farmers must face off against columns of tanks and millions of Stalin’s Red Army fighters.
In this propulsive and deeply moving narrative based on the true story of the Finnish infantry division, heroes the star sniper Simo Häyhä, nicknamed the “White Death”; the young men from farms and villages who meet again on the battlefield to fight for their homes; nurses who must treat old childhood friends. The soldiers go to battle with old guns as their wounds freeze in the unforgiving cold, and yet not only do they resist the Soviet soldiers, but they force the superpower to offer terms for peace only six months later. The Winter Warriors is a testament to the Finnish quality of “sisu”: inner strength and determination which prevails in the face of overwhelming odds.
Newlyweds Lina and Cain don’t make it out to their vacation home on gorgeous Lake Tarawera as often as they’d like, so when Cain suggests they rent the property out on weekends, Lina reluctantly agrees. While the home has been special to her family for generations, their neighbours are all signing up to host renters, and frankly, she and Cain could use the extra money. What could go wrong? And at first, Lina is amazed at how quickly guests line up to spend a weekend–and at how much they’re willing to pay.
But both Lina and Cain have been keeping secrets, secrets that won’t be kept out by a new alarm system or a locked cupboard. When strange things begin happening on their property, and a visit takes a deadly turn, Lina becomes convinced that someone out there knows something they shouldn’t–and that when they come for her, there will be nowhere left to hide.
In January 2010, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency noticed that centrifuges at a uranium enrichment plant in Iran were failing and being replaced at an unprecedented rate. The cause of their failure was a complete mystery. Five months later, a seemingly unrelated event occurred. A computer security firm in Belarus was called in to troubleshoot some computers in Iran that were caught in a reboot loop, crashing and rebooting repeatedly.
At first, technicians with the firm believed the malicious code they found on the machines was a simple, routine piece of malware. But as they and other experts around the world investigated, they discovered a virus of unparalleled complexity and mysterious provenance and intent. They had, they soon learned, stumbled upon the world’s first digital weapon.
Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to see her. Gentle gossip about people from Lucy’s childhood in Amgash, Illinois, seems to reconnect them, but just below the surface lie the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of Lucy’s life: her escape from her troubled family, her desire to become a writer, her marriage, her love for her two daughters.
Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable.
It is 1540 and the hottest summer of the sixteenth century. Matthew Shardlake, believing himself out of favour with Thomas Cromwell, is busy trying to maintain his legal practice and keep a low profile. But his involvement with a murder case, defending a girl accused of brutally murdering her young cousin, brings him once again into contact with the king’s chief minister – and a new assignment.
The secret of Greek Fire, the legendary substance with which the Byzantines destroyed the Arab navies, has been lost for centuries. Now an official of the Court of Augmentations has discovered the formula in the library of a dissolved London monastery. When Shardlake is sent to recover it, he finds the official and his alchemist brother brutally murdered – the formula has disappeared. Now Shardlake must follow the trail of Greek Fire across Tudor London, while trying at the same time to prove his young client’s innocence. But very soon he discovers nothing is as it seems.
In “The Journey to Galway,” a mother who has learned of the death of her son, a fighter pilot in World War I, travels to Galway to inform his wife and their three now fatherless children. “Sleep,” originally published in The New Yorker, explores the rift between two lovers as one of them cannot reckon with his grief and fear after the death of his brother. Death, again, is a central character in the title story, “The News from Dublin,” as Maurice Webster travels to Dublin to try to save his younger brother who is dying of tuberculosis. Maurice must petition the health minister for access to a new experimental drug, and this is the only hope.
Tóibín’s stories are rich with the complexities of family dynamics, the haunting pull of the past, and the quiet revelations that define our lives. His characters, whether navigating the aftermath of war, or forbidden love, or the desires of a girl in Catalan, or the quiet struggles mundane life, are rendered with illuminating, unforgettable empathy and insight.
It is 1696. Louis XIV, absolute monarch in his sunset years, with his secret wife by his side, believes his grandson will succeed him and will continue the dynasty. As part of the spoils of war, he brings from Savoy, a child, a youthful bride for that grandson. In this bride the king gets more than he could ever have bargained for. She is enchanting, and he is bewitched. Has the king fallen madly in love with this Princess Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy? What exactly is the bond between these two?
At the court of Versailles, there is lavish magnificence including the vast gardens and the Hall of Mirrors. But it is also where dark, enchanting fairytales come to prominence. News of war is never far away. And tantalising beauty is undercut by threat. The tale is narrated in part by Sister Clare, a childhood friend of Marie-Adélaïde, who after losing the young man she loves to war and then the Princess to disease, becomes a nun. For Clare it is her devoted mission to tell the story of Marie-Adélaïde, mother of the child who will become Louis XV.
A thought-provoking, principled, clear-eyed chronicle of the culture, politics, and economic choices that have landed us where we are today with irresponsible economic bullies and corporations with immense wealth and lobbying power on top, demagogues on the rise, and increasing inequality fuelling anger and hatred across the country.
Nine months after World War II, Robert Reich was born into a united America with a bright future that went unrealized for so many as big money took over our democracy. His encounter with school bullies on account of his height, 4’11” as an adult, set him on a determined path to spend his life fighting American bullies of every sort. He recounts the death of a friend in the civil rights movement; his political coming of age witnessing the Berkeley free speech movement; working for Bobby Kennedy and Senator Eugene McCarthy; experiencing a country torn apart by the Vietnam War; meeting Hillary Rodham in college, Bill Clinton at Oxford, and Clarence Thomas at Yale Law. He details his friendship with John Kenneth Galbraith during his time teaching at Harvard, and subsequent friendships with Bernie Sanders and Ted Kennedy; his efforts as labour secretary for Clinton and economic advisor to Barack Obama.
Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbours, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive.
But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad, at himself and the people around him, and turns a question over and over in his mind “how is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us”? And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.
Sufferers of chronic pain learn how to adapt their lives and negotiate their discomfort with the techniques illustrated in this book.
A wide range of approaches for managing persistent pain are described, offering chronic pain sufferers options that take into account the level of pain and lifestyle. Based on two highly successful multidisciplinary pain-management programs in the UK and Australia, the suggestions demonstrate awareness of current medical thinking and draw on the latest scientific research. For people who do not wish to rely on prescribed drugs, an integrated method is used, including physiotherapy and psychological techniques.
Queenscliff, Victoria, 1951: A man has disappeared, leaving only a pile of neatly folded clothes on a beach.
Missing, presumed drowned. But for Detective Sergeant Stephen Minter, newly emigrated from England, it’s far from an open-and-shut case. Because this is no ordinary man. Harry Playford is a successful politician, a charming man who is a rising ministerial star, a possible contender for the top job, who leaves behind a beautiful wife and a mistress. There could be a simple explanation. But, these murky days of the Cold War, in a time of rising mistrust and suspicion, spies and espionage, Stephen can’t throw off his feeling that something’s definitely not right. About the whole business.
Welcome to The Leap, an outback town fuelled by fear, churning with corruption, prejudice and misogyny and blighted by its inescapable history of frontier violence.
Into this nightmarish morass falters traumatised British diplomat, Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill. He’s on his first Australian mission, one seemingly straightforward enough until he arrives in The Leap to battle a town conspiring against him. The Leap is baying for vengeance over the alleged murder of the celebrated daughter of a powerful local grazier. But Benedict is on an impossible quest for mercy for the young woman’s two accused female killers. The townspeople will challenge and threaten him at every turn as he fights for justice, his future, his sanity and ultimately his life.
A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A storm gathering force.
Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny weather-lashed island that is home to the world’s largest seed bank. As Shearwater risks being lost to rising sea levels, the island’s researchers have fled, and only the Salts remain. Until, during the worst storm in living memory, a stranger washes ashore. The family nurse the woman, Rowan, back to strength, but it seems she isn’t telling the whole truth about why she’s there. And when Rowan stumbles upon sabotaged radios and a recently dug grave, she realises that she’s not the only one on the island with a secret.
When Lena helps her teenage son gather sounds for his media studies project, she doesn’t expect her boom-microphone to pick up a conversation between her neighbours, the Morgans.
And she’s certain they are planning a crime. Her family and friends tell her that she must have misheard. After all, the Morgans are a well-respected, upstanding couple in their early sixties. They’ve never been in trouble with the law. Yet Lena can’t stop thinking about it. Because what if she hasn’t misheard? What if she can prevent something awful happening?
After reading J. A. Baker’s fifty-year-old British nature classic The Peregrine, John Lane found himself an ocean away, stalking resident red-shouldered hawks in his neighbourhood in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
What he observed was very different from what Baker deduced from a decade of chronicling the lives of those brooding migratory raptors. Baker imagined a species on the brink of extinction because of the use of agricultural chemicals on European farms. A half century later in America, Lane found the red-shouldered hawks to be a stable Anthropocene species adapted to life along the waterways of a suburban nation.
Sixteen years ago, teenage Maddie Marshall’s body was found on a desolate beach near her hometown, Carrinya. Vibrant, feisty Maddie was the only daughter of a high-profile politician. Nel Foley, daughter of the town doctor and Maddie’s best friend, was the last known person to see her alive, and the Carrinya rumour mill was vicious.
Nel fled the town and has never been back. Now a 32-year-old city GP, Nel returns after her father’s sudden death. Begrudgingly, she agrees to run his clinic for a few weeks, but during that time she meets local mum Sophie Warner and that changes everything. Sophie’s husband Ryan, a prominent local real estate agent, was Maddie’s boyfriend and Nel is certain he played a role in her death. When Nel discovers that Ryan is not the loving husband and father that he seems, she decides she must prove what he did all those years ago.
Senior Detective Antigone Pollard is feeling more settled in Deception Bay. The summer holiday season is off to a slow start and crime rates are down. But when a distraught mother calls the station to report her baby missing, Antigone begins a race against time to find the baby and the person who brazenly took him.
In the middle of the frantic investigation, Antigone’s mother, Dr Jilly Pollard, arrives for an unexpected visit and shares a tragic family secret, which she needs Antigone’s help to resolve. Antigone takes a DNA test that yields two surprising results. And just when things at the Deception Bay police station are running smoothly with a new commander, Senior Sergeant Amanda Filipovic, at the helm, circumstances change one stormy night. In the blink of an eye, Antigone’s old boss, Bill Wheeler, is back, making the missing baby investigation harder every day.
When Claire Corral goes missing from her home on Carnation Way, her neighbour Jamie isn’t too concerned. He’s busy caring for his dad, recovering from a broken heart and eating himself into a bigger pair of pants.
Then the police turn up. Is Claire’s disappearance connected with the body found next door thirteen years ago? Does Jamie’s father, now grappling with dementia, know more about these events than he should? And then there’s Tess, equal parts mysterious and charming, who just moved in at number thirty-five.
Eastern France. Winter. 1572. When Sidonie’s guardian dies, she flees Paris rather than submit to a forced marriage, seeking sanctuary in the home of her estranged aunt in Dole. A town consumed by fear and superstition.
Apolline left behind a violent and troubled past, hoping for a new life with her husband, where she can sell her herbs and assist women from the privacy of her forest home. But it is dangerous to be different, and as Sidonie and Apolline’s lives become intertwined, they are soon both being hunted. Aspiring witch hunter Pierre is drawn to Dole amid rumours of a werewolf hunting children. Desperate for respect and power, he allies himself with a priest who is fanning the flames of fear and hatred.
It’s summer in New York City and Faye Walker has it all. She’s not only scored one of the most highly coveted internships in all of Wall Street, she’s also just met the head-over-heels love of her life.
With her natural-born gift for numbers and a work ethic that knows no bounds, Faye is a shoo-in for a full-time position at the illustrious merchant bank, Greene Brothers Hale. Then, just as she awaits her offer and her signing bonus, a treacherous betrayal arrives to shatter Faye’s plans and her young life. But what her high finance masters-of-the-universe bosses don’t know is that Faye isn’t like any of the other interns. Having made her way past her humble small-town beginnings, for Faye, going back is not an option. That’s why Faye now has a new plan. One that involves Swiss watch timing, nerves of steel and ten million dollars in cold hard Wall Street cash.
Set in London in 1968, The Curtain Twitcher’s Book of Murder follows the lives of the inhabitants of a suburban London street.
But this is no ordinary road. “Ask anyone on Atbara Avenue how well they know their neighbours, and they’ll answer ‘well’. After all, they see each other across the vast distance afforded by close proximity, and that is probably for the best…”. For the best, because Atbara Avenue is a street where, all too often, murder feels like the solution.
January 1942. The Avallon Hotel & Spa has always offered elegant luxury in the wilds of West Virginia, its mountain sweet water washing away all of high society’s troubles.
Local girl-turned-general manager June Porter Hudson has guided the Avallon skilfully through the first pangs of war. The Gilfoyles, the hotel’s aristocratic owners, have trained her well. But when the family heir makes a secret deal with the State Department to fill the hotel with captured Axis diplomats, June must persuade her staff, many of whom have sons and husbands heading to the front lines, to offer luxury to Nazis. With a smile. Meanwhile FBI Agent Tucker Minnick, whose coal tattoo hints at an Appalachian past, presses his ears to the hotel’s walls, listening for the diplomats’ secrets. He has one of his own, which is how he knows that June’s balancing act can have dangerous consequences: the sweet water beneath the hotel can threaten as well as heal.
Alexandra Bouvier is born in Paris in 1900, at the dawn of a new century. From an early age, she is encouraged to think for herself by her enlightened father, a French doctor; her mother, an American nurse; and her maternal grandfather a highly regarded newspaperman back in the Midwest. At age fourteen, Alex’s comfortable life is upended as war erupts across Europe. Her parents follow their sense of duty to the front, performing triage at a field hospital and confronting the horrors of poison gas and trench warfare. The merciless fighting, coupled with the fast-spreading Spanish flu, wreaks havoc on the continent, as well as on Alex’s loved ones. By the time she is eighteen, she has suffered unimaginable losses.
With her grandfather’s support, she attends the University of Chicago and decides to follow his footsteps into journalism. As a newspaper intern she meets reporter Oliver Foster, who is covering the gang wars sparked by Prohibition. He too has known devastating loss, and the two are drawn to each other, though both fear any attachment. As it turns out, Alex has good reason to be cautious.
When African jihadis attack a Nigerian regiment using American weapons, Cabrillo and the Oregon crew are on the case, investigating from Afghanistan to Kuala Lumpur to track a mysterious arms dealer, a genius, or perhaps a devil, known only as the Vendor.
Cabrillo goes undercover to find the Vendor’s base, but his adversary isn’t just an arms smuggler. He’s an arms maker, and Cabrillo just walked into a lethal military game alongside the most dangerous mercenaries in the world, designed to test the Vendor’s cutting-edge AI arsenal. And yet, surviving an arena full of flame-throwing robots isn’t even his biggest problem. The Vendor has an army of high-speed drones headed for a pivotal military site, and if the Oregon crew can’t stop them from releasing a deadly neurotoxin, the entire globe will erupt in conflict.
Autopsies can reveal the secrets of the dead and this victim is sending Scarpetta a message…
Summoned to an unnerving, abandoned theme park to retrieve a body, Dr Kay Scarpetta is devastated to learn that the victim is a man she once loved. While teaching in Rome during the early days of her career, Scarpetta had an intense love affair with Sal Giordano that led to a lifelong friendship.
The murder scene is bizarre, with a crop circle of petals around the body, and Giordano’s skin is strangely red. Scarpetta’s niece Lucy believes he was dropped from an unidentified flying craft. Scarpetta knows an autopsy can reveal the dead’s secrets, but she is shocked to find her friend seems to have deliberately left her a clue.
As the investigators are torn between suspicions of otherworldly forces, and of Giordano himself, Scarpetta detects an explanation closer to home that, in her mind, is far more evil
Western Australia, 1958. A truck rumbles along a lonely outback road. A moment’s inattention, and in a few muddled seconds the lives of the MacBride family are shattered. Instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.
Set in the expanse of a vast and flat landscape, where the weather is a capricious god and a million-acre sheep station is barely a dot on the map, A Far-flung Life explores the hearts of a handful of isolated souls and the secrets they shield in order to survive.
Western Australia, 1958. A truck rumbles along a lonely outback road. A moment’s inattention, and in a few muddled seconds the lives of the MacBride family are shattered. Instead of leaving them to heal, fate comes back for them in a twist of consequences that will cause one of them to lose their life, and another to sacrifice theirs for the sake of an innocent child.
Set in the expanse of a vast and flat landscape, where the weather is a capricious god and a million-acre sheep station is barely a dot on the map, A Far-flung Life explores the hearts of a handful of isolated souls and the secrets they shield in order to survive.
Morocco, 1928. Eighteen-year-old Frenchwoman Marie-Madeleine is not the kind of woman who goes through life sitting down, something her new husband can attest. Her unconventionalities, rally car driving, flying planes and dabbling in intelligence work for the government, earn her a reputation, but she knows who she is at an adventurer.
Paris, 1938. As Europe teeters on the brink of war, a chance encounter with a mysterious man codenamed Navarre turns Marie-Madeleine’s life upside down. Recruited to help build a resistance network known only as Alliance, she conceals her identity and gender as she navigates a perilous double life away from her children and the man she loves. Capture and death are only a heartbeat away.
Sydney, 1942: a city in wartime. As nightclubs are raided the sly-grog trade thrives and public toilets become the hunting grounds for corrupt police running an entrapment scheme.
As journalists, lawyers and establishment figures close in on this scandal, figures from the city’s demi-monde must reckon with how to survive in dangerous times.
Jane Boleyn watches from the shadows of the Tudor court, where secrets are currency, every choice is dangerous, and even the faintest whisper can seal the fate of queens. For Jane, survival demands playing every role required of her: a loving wife who conceals her doubts, a devoted sister to Anne Boleyn at the height of her power, and an obedient spy who carefully wields her words.
But in a court ruled by ambition and a tyrant’s sword, Jane must rely on her sharp wit and skilful manoeuvring to outthink those around her, knowing that one wrong move could cost her everything.
.
Hirsch is checking firearms. The regular police all weapons secured, ammo stored separately, no unauthorised person with keys to the gun safe. He’s checking people, too. The drought is hitting hard in the mid-north, and Hirsch is responsible for the welfare of his scattered flock of battlers, bluebloods, loners and miscreants. He isn’t usually called on for emergency roadside assistance. But with all the other services fully stretched, it’s Hirsch who has to grind his way out beyond the Mischance Creek ruins to where some clueless tourist has run into a ditch.
As it turns out, though, Annika Nordrum isn’t exactly a tourist. She’s searching for the body of her mother, who went missing seven years ago. And the only sense in which she’s clueless is the lack of information unearthed by the cops who phoned in the original investigation. Hirsch owes it to Annika to help, doesn’t he? Not to mention that tackling a cold case beats the hell out of gun audits and admin.
An illustrated history of every kind of industrial enterprise in Bendigo from its earliest settlement.
Includes a chapter on 19th Century working conditions. Includes photographs, bibliography and index.
Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined.
Van Diemen’s Land, 1839. A young woman of means arrives in Hobart, with a young boy in her care.
Leasing an old cottage next to an abandoned vineyard, Caroline Douglas must navigate an insular colony of exiles and opportunists to create a new life on this island of extreme seasons and wild beauty. But Caroline is carrying a secret of such magnitude, it has led her to cross the world, and it will take all she is made of to bring it into the light.
It was a warm October day when his life splintered down the middle. She was gone in a flash. Everything changed forever. For three months, in shock at this horror, he maintained a regime of late-night walks across the city. There came a time when he had walked enough, and so he stopped. Bring Back Yesterday is a love story, and the account of the author finding his footing again after the death of his wife, Helena.
The anecdotes and insights Bob Carr shares will resonate with anyone who has ever been in a long-term relationship or lost a much-loved partner.
This collection of essays and journalism, published together for the first time, spans two turbulent decades.
With her trademark wit and wisdom, Lucashenko reflects on being caught in a siege, on the marginalised lives of prisoners and the urban poor, on Blak identity, Australian literature and on meeting her writing idol. Her non-fiction, like her novels, is deeply engaged with politics, activism, culture and social (in)justice.
Shortly before Christmas in 2018, Tess McCarthy, a hard-working English teacher who never does anything out of the ordinary, flies to Western Australia’s remote Abrolhos Islands.
She is in search of answers both to the infamous Batavia shipwreck and her personal family crises. Amsterdam, 1628. Saskia, an orphaned young Dutchwoman, boards Batavia with relatives, bound for a new and potentially dangerous life in the East Indies only for her world to first collide with Aris Jansz, the ship’s reluctant under surgeon. Tess, Saskia and Aris, their lives linked by secrets that span generations, carry the baggage of past losses and the uncertainty of their futures. And, in the most unlikely circumstances, they find qualities that echo through faith, acceptance, and love.
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river.
The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering bond, one built on empathy, spiritual reckoning, and heartbreak, with the power to alter Hai’s relationship to himself, his family, and a community at the brink.
The world knows Virginia Roberts Giuffre as Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s most outspoken victim: the woman whose decision to speak out helped send both serial abusers to prison, whose photograph with Prince Andrew catalysed his fall from grace. But her story has never been told in full, in her own words, until now.
In April 2025, Giuffre took her own life. She left behind a memoir written in the years preceding her death and stated unequivocally that she wanted it published. Nobody’s Girl is the riveting and powerful story of an ordinary girl who would grow up to confront extraordinary adversity.
It is estimated up to 100,000 people died in the frontier wars that raged across Australia for more than 150 years. This is equivalent to the combined total of all Australians killed in foreign battles to date. But there are few memorials marking these first, domestic wars.
This is the first book to tell the story of the continental sweep of massacres, guerilla warfare, resistance and the contests of firearms and traditional Aboriginal weaponry as Indigenous nations resisted colonial occupation of their lands, territory by territory. At stake was the sovereignty of an entire country.
Retired academic Martin Pottinger’s romantic aspirations for the delectable head of his former university’s archaeology department, Professor Mary Blake, seem about to be realised. If only he could devise a plan to manage the demands of his eccentric elderly mother, Edwina.
Recently bereaved Grace Cavendish spends her days helping out at All Souls Church, making it her mission to drown out the Reverend Rod’s tone-deaf hymn-singing and give each funeral recipient a hearty send-off. Yet the peace she craves remains elusive despite the comforts offered by psychic medium Rhondda and her eight-year-old son, Hudson. When Martin and Grace meet and bond at an All Souls service, they unwittingly set off a chain of events with far-reaching consequences. They become funeral crashers. But who could have predicted that crashing funerals might have such life-changing and life-affirming outcomes?
In the middle of Missing Persons Week, teenager Max Galbraith disappears after a party at the two-up ring on the outskirts of Kalgoorlie. With hundred-year-old mine shafts hidden in the area, no one can sure whether he become lost while he was under the influence of drugs or if something more sinister has happened. Lily Carter, a talk show radio host, receives information about Brendan Cook, another Kalgoorlie teenager who disappeared in similar circumstances the year before. But the police didn’t launch a full-scale search for Brendan. Why not?
Enter Detective Angie Sullivan, new to Kalgoorlie and yet to understand how the town works. With no clear links between the two cases, and Lily accusing the police of incompetence, the town is tipped into uproar.
Things are going well for Matt Buchanan. After some hard times, life is peaceful as sole-charge constable for the small, isolated settlement of Haast on New Zealand’s wild West Coast. He’s made friends among the locals, won their trust. He keeps their little world safe. And he’s working in spectacular surroundings: the fierce Tasman Sea; the dense beech forest; the dark, cold swamps and the snowy Southern Alps.
But then his much-loved predecessor, Gus, is discovered beside a river with a bullet through his head. He’d been looking into a disturbing murder-suicide from 1978: the parents’ bodies were found, but not their daughter’s. Suspecting a darker truth, Matt is certain the answers can’t be too far away in this close-knit community. How does former forest service ranger Liam, with his gang links, fit into the story? What about Joe, the alcoholic hermit whose knowledge and intelligence seem so at odds with his appearance and lifestyle?
When international lawyer Matilda ‘Tilly’ Marr is summoned back from London to a small town in South Australia’s wine country, she expects to close a billion-dollar deal in a matter of days. Instead, she’s handed an ultimatum: stay for a month and serve as the town’s only solicitor, or watch the opportunity slip away.
Setting up shop in the Beechwood Cafe, Tilly braces for a brief detour, but life in Watervale Downs soon proves to be anything but simple. Drawn into the orbit of three very different women, fierce matriarch Bev Jackson, fallen TV star Fenna de Vries, and warm-hearted librarian Jane Robertson, Tilly unexpectedly finds herself joining a local writing group and training with the country fire service. Slowly, friendships form, long-held secrets surface, and the rhythms of country life begin to change her in ways she didn’t anticipate.
Islamic Art is a product of certain forceful factors that created a cultural milieu which was centred on the religious ethos and intellectual affinities inspired by Islam and its followers.
No art can grow in isolation and nor did Islamic art. From its early manifestations to this date, it has taken from other cultural traditions and has also given to different social structures and visual languages of the world. This book looks at the artistic output of the Islamic civilization through the centuries, from the time of its inception to its interpretations in the contemporary world.
Eva Luna is the daughter of a professor’s assistant and a snake-bitten gardener, she is born poor, orphaned at an early age, and working as a servant.
Eva is a naturally gifted and imaginative storyteller who meets people from all stations and walks of life. Though she has no wealth, she trades her stories like currency with people who are kind to her. In this novel, she shares the story of her own life and introduces readers to a diverse and eccentric cast of characters including the Lebanese émigré who befriends her and takes her in; her unfortunate godmother, whose brain is addled by rum and who believes in all the Catholic saints and a few of her own invention; a street urchin who grows into a petty criminal and, later, a leader in the guerrilla struggle; a celebrated transsexual entertainer who instructs her in the ways of the adult world; and a young refugee whose flight from postwar Europe will prove crucial to Eva’s fate.
Will one week in Greece change their lives for ever?
Chef Maria is running a successful cookery school in her home village of Petalidi, Greece but she is also running from the secrets of her past. Food journalist Kayla thought this was going to be just another work trip. But right before she leaves for Greece, she discovers that her whole life is built on a lie. Jewellery-maker Alessandra has always lived according to her own rules despite what it has cost her to do so. But she has just had some devastating news. As these three very different women come together at the house in the olive grove, unlikely friendships blossom and a season of self-discovery begins.
At 9.01 pm, TV presenter Sam Midford delivers the monologue for his popular current affairs show Mr Midnight.
He seems nervous and the crew are convinced he’s about to propose to his girlfriend live on air. Instead, he pulls out a gun and shoots himself in the head. Sam’s grief-stricken brother Harry is convinced his brother was murdered. But how can that be, when one million viewers witnessed Sam pull the trigger?
In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known in the neighbourhood as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Causeway Housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project’s drug dealer at point-blank range.
McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbours, the local NYPD cops assigned to investigate what happened, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighbourhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.
A collection of twenty-four stories that express Murakami’s mastery of the form.
From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for.
Under a clear blue September sky, America’s financial centre in lower Manhattan became the site of the largest, deadliest terrorist attack in the nation’s history.
It was September 16, 1920. Four hundred people were killed or injured. The country was appalled by the magnitude and savagery of the incomprehensible attack, which remains unsolved to this day.
Someone is targeting Martin Scarsden. They bomb his book launch and shoot up his hometown. Fleeing for his life, he learns that nowhere is safe, not even the outback.
The killers are closing in, and it’s all he can do to survive. But who wants to kill him and why? Can he discover their deadly motives and turn the tables? In a dramatic finale, Martin finds his fate linked to the disgraced ex-wife of a football icon, a fugitive wanted for a decades-old murder, and two nineteenth-century explorers from a legendary expedition.
Raised by a distant father and an understanding but overprotective mother, Vivek suffers disorienting blackouts, moments of disconnection between self and surroundings.
As adolescence gives way to adulthood, Vivek finds solace in friendships with the warm, boisterous daughters of the Nigerwives, foreign-born women married to Nigerian men. But Vivek’s closest bond is with Osita, the worldly, high-spirited cousin whose teasing confidence masks a guarded private life. As their relationship deepens and Osita struggles to understand Vivek’s escalating crisis, the mystery gives way to a heart-stopping act of violence in a moment of exhilarating freedom.
Escher X Nendo | Between Two Worlds is the first major Australian exhibition to feature the extraordinary work of Dutch artist M.C. Escher in dialogue with the work of acclaimed Japanese design studio Nendo.
When Rowland Sinclair is invited to take his yellow Mercedes onto the Marouba Speedway, popularly known as the Killer Track, he agrees without caution or reserve.
But then people start to die. The body of a journalist covering the race is found in a House of Horrors, an English blueblood with Blackshirt affiliations is killed on the race track and it seems that someone has Rowland in their sights. A strange young reporter preoccupied with black magic, a mysterious vagabond, and up-and-coming actor by the name of Flynn and ruthless bookmakers all add mayhem to the mix. With danger presenting at every turn, and the brakes long since disengaged, Rowland Sinclair hurtles towards disaster with an artist, a poet and brazen sculptress along for the ride.
For many centuries, scientists have investigated the “fearful symmetry” that seemed to underlie the Universe. But increasingly, it looks as though life is the result of cosmic asymmetry, and scientists are now preparing to uncover the asymmetries at the heart of the Big Bang. Not only cosmic life but our own everyday variety is full of other examples of asymmetry, from the human body to the molecules of life.
In Lucifer’s Legacy, physicist Frank Close explores the origins of asymmetry from the molecular level to the Universe at large, and asks whether this multitude of examples can be traced back to a single event that took place at the origin of our Universe.
One of the most deeply ingrained beliefs of our age is that perpetual economic growth is the solution to most, if not all, of society’s problem.
In Slow Down or Die, French economist Timothée Parrique brilliantly challenges this myth, demonstrating how producing more won’t solve climate change, poverty, or inequality. In fact, our obsession with growth is accelerating social and ecological collapse. This book proposes a different vision, tracing a path toward a “post-growth” economy where decisions are made collectively and democratically. The goal is not the infinite accumulation of wealth but the creation of a just, equitable, and sustainable society.
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The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It’s the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to?
Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia’s first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions.
Every day, María Dolz stops for breakfast at the same café. And every day she enjoys watching a handsome couple who follow the same routine.
Then one day they aren’t there, and she feels obscurely bereft. It is only later, when she comes across a newspaper photograph of the man, lying stabbed in the street, his shirt half off, that she discovers who the couple are. Some time afterwards, when the woman returns to the café with her children, who are then collected by a different man, and Maria approaches her to offer her condolences, an entanglement begins which sheds new light on this apparently random, pointless death?
One clear ice-cold January morning shortly after dawn, a wolf crosses the border between Poland and Germany. His trail leads all the way to Berlin, connecting the lives of disparate individuals whose paths intersect and diverge.
On an icy motorway eighty kilometres outside the city, a fuel tanker jack-knifes and explodes. The lone wolf is glimpsed on the hard shoulder and photographed by Tomasz, a Polish construction worker who cannot survive in Germany without his girlfriend. Elisabeth and Micha run away through the snow from their home village, crossing the wolf’s tracks on their way to the city. A woman burns her mother’s diaries on a Berlin balcony. And Elisabeth’s father, a famous sculptor, observes the vast skeleton of a whale in his studio and asks: What am I doing here? And why?
In 1987, Miri Ammerman returns to her hometown of Elizabeth, New Jersey, to attend a commemoration of the worst year of her life. Thirty-five years earlier, when Miri was fifteen, and in love for the first time, a succession of airplanes fell from the sky, leaving a community reeling.
Against this backdrop of actual events that Blume experienced in the early 1950s, when airline travel was new and exciting and everyone dreamed of going somewhere, Judy Blume imagines and weaves together a haunting story of three generations of families, friends, and strangers, whose lives are profoundly changed by these disasters. She paints a vivid portrait of a particular time and place, Nat King Cole singing “Unforgettable,” Elizabeth Taylor haircuts, young (and not-so-young) love, explosive friendships, A-bomb hysteria, rumours of Communist threat. And a young journalist who makes his name reporting tragedy. Through it all, one generation reminds another that life goes on.