New Books / Reviews
Listings and Reviews of New Books Spring 2023
At the age of 19, Don Tate volunteered for duty in the Vietnam War. This is his story: of the trouble-strewn path to manhood in the shadow of his father, a violent petty criminal surviving horrific war injuries and years of hospitalisation and struggling to find a place in society that did not want to recognise his military service.
On the airwaves, all the talk is of the new blue planet, pristine and habitable, like our own 65 million years ago, before we took it to the edge of destruction. And off the air, Billie and Spike are falling in love. What will happen when their story combines with the world’s story?
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The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert’s, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one.
Maugham, having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair, and, learning of Lesley’s past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder.
Other Women is inspired by a murder that took place almost a hundred years ago. A devastating story of fantasy, obsession and ultimately the lengths we will go to in order to save the ones we love. Six years after the end of the Great War, the country is still in mourning. Thousands of husbands, fathers, sons and sweethearts were lost forever and the sea of women they left behind must carry on without them.
But Beatrice Cade is not a wife, not a widow, not a mother. There are thousands of other women like her: nameless and invisible. Determined to carve out a richer and more fulfilling life for herself, Bea takes a job in the City and a room in a Bloomsbury Ladies’ Club. Then a fleeting encounter changes everything. Her emerging independence is destroyed when she falls in love for the first time. Kate Ryan is a wife, a mother, and an accomplished liar. She has managed to build an enviable life with her husband and young daughter. To anyone looking in from the outside, they seem like a normal, happy family. On the south coast of England, an anguished moment between lovers becomes a horrific murder. And two women who should never have met are connected forever.
When builders discover a human skeleton while renovating a café, they call in archaeologist Dr. Ruth Galloway, who is preoccupied with the threatened closure of her department and by her ever-complicated relationship with DCI Nelson. The bones turn out to be modern, the remains of Emily Pickering, a young archaeology student who went missing in 2002. Suspicion soon falls on Emily’s Cambridge tutor and also on another archaeology enthusiast who was part of the group gathered the weekend before she disappeared, Ruth’s good friend Cathbad. Then, just when the team seem to be making progress, Cathbad disappears. The trail leads Ruth a to the Neolithic flint mines in Grimes Graves. The race is on, first to find Cathbad and then to exonerate him, but will Ruth and Nelson uncover the truth in time to save their friend?
This is more than just a picture book. It is full on immersion in a range of fun activities that will have toddlers up and moving about.
A bear is given as a gift to a young boy who grows up and passes it on to another young boy who grows up and passes it on to another young boy.
To each young boy the bear makes the same special promise, “I’ll never leave you. Wherever you go I will go and wherever you are I’ll be there!” This is a book designed to enchant readers young and old.
One day when Rose’s ball goes over the fence into Mr Wintergarten’s garden Rose decides to visit her mysterious next-door neighbour.
On advice from her mother she walks up to the door of Mr Wintergarten’s house bearing hot fairy cakes and flowers. I wonder what Mr Wintergarten’s reaction will be. In this, another heart-warming story from Bob Graham we find out just what is needed to build relationships in a neighbourhood.
Not happy with family members not paying attention to her Nora decides to do something her family can’t – make noise.
Nora slams windows, bangs doors, and upsets furniture but she is still being ignored and so goes off to hide. The big question is ‘Will Nora be missed? Read the book and find out how her family react when they realise that Nora is nowhere to be found.
In this children’s classic it is the illustrations that tell the real story.
Rosie the he sets off for a stroll around the farm unaware that someone is following her. But, as Rosie walks around the farm her follower keeps his eyes only on her and fails to see the obstacles in his way with hilarious consequences. This is a great book to share one to one with a toddler.
Another delightful book in the Noni the Pony series by a much celebrated Australian author.
In this book Noni the Pony and her friends help a lost wallaby joey find his family. To find out if Noni and her friends can help their new friend find his family and his way home you will need to read the book.
Exploring the history of the Wiradjuri people, the conflict of colonization, their mythologies, and their attachment to the land, author Patti Miller reveals both her own story and the position of Aboriginal people in today’s society in this fascinating memoir. For 40,000 years, the Central New South Wales area of Wellington was Aboriginal Wiradjuri land. Following the arrival of white men, it became a penal settlement, a mission station, a gold-mining town, and a farming centre with a history of white comfort and black marginalization. In the late 20th century, it was also the subject of the first post-Mabo native title claim, bringing new hope and controversy to the area and its people. Patti, a local of the area, explores Australian identity in relation to her beloved but stolen country.
During 1974 and 1975 the IRA subjected London to a terrifying bombing campaign. In one day alone, they planted seven bombs at locations across central London. Some were defused, some were not. Jane Tennison is now a fully-fledged detective. On the way to court one morning, Jane passes through Covent Garden Underground station and is caught up in a bomb blast that leaves several people dead, and many horribly injured. Jane is a key witness, but is adamant that she can’t identify the bomber. When a photograph appears in the newspapers, showing Jane assisting the injured at the scene, it puts her and her family at risk from IRA retaliation.
The sequel to Jonas Jonasson’s international bestseller The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared.
It all begins with a hot air balloon trip and three bottles of champagne. Allan and Julius are ready for some spectacular views, but they’re not expecting to land in the sea and be rescued by a North Korean ship, and they could never have imagined that the captain of the ship would be harbouring a suitcase full of contraband uranium, on a nuclear weapons mission for Kim Jong-un …
Soon Allan and Julius are at the centre of a complex diplomatic crisis involving world figures from the Swedish foreign minister to Angela Merkel and President Trump.
Abandoned by her mother, beaten by her father, and hurriedly married off at twelve to an abusive man twice her age, Baby Halder’s early life was marked by overwhelming challenges and heartbreak. Exhausted and desperate, the young mother finally fled with her three children in 1999 to Delhi, where she found work as a maid in some of the city’s wealthiest homes. Expected to serve her employers’ every gruelling demand, Halder faced a staggering workload that often left her no time to care for her own children.
The young woman’s luck finally turned when she started working for Prabodh Kumar, a retired anthropology professor who noticed Halder’s interest in his library. Kumar helped her to read his books and newspapers then suggested that she write down her own life story.
In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Indian Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.
Then, one by one, they began to be killed off. One Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, watched as her family was murdered. Her older sister was shot. Her mother was then slowly poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.
In this last remnant of the Wild West, where oilmen like J. P. Getty made their fortunes and where desperadoes such as Al Spencer, “the Phantom Terror,” roamed, virtually anyone who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll surpassed more than twenty-four Osage, the newly created F.B.I. took up the case, in what became one of the organization’s first major homicide investigations. But the bureau was then notoriously corrupt and initially bungled the case. Eventually the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including one of the only Native American agents in the bureau.
Fierce winds, dark secrets, deadly intentions.
When Jem Rosco, sailor, adventurer, and legend, blows into town in the middle of an autumn gale, the residents of Greystone, Devon, are delighted to have a celebrity in their midst. But just as abruptly as he arrived, Rosco disappears again, and soon his lifeless body is discovered in a dinghy, anchored off Scully Cove, a place with legends of its own.
This is an uncomfortable case for Detective Inspector Matthew Venn. Greystone is a place he visited as a child, a community he parted ways with. Superstition and rumour mix with fact as another body is found, and Venn finds his judgment clouded.
As the winds howl, and Venn and his team investigate, he realizes that no one, including himself, is safe from Scully Cove’s storm of dark secrets.
They keep everyone’s secrets, until there’s a murder…
Sydney, 1965: After a chance encounter with a stranger, tea ladies Hazel, Betty and Irene become accidental sleuths, stumbling into a world of ruthless crooks and racketeers in search of a young woman believed to be in danger.
In the meantime, Hazel’s job at Empire Fashionwear is in jeopardy. The firm has turned out the same frocks and blouses for the past twenty years and when the mini-skirt bursts onto the scene, it rocks the rag trade to its foundations. War breaks out between departments and it falls to Hazel, the quiet diplomat, to broker peace and save the firm.
When there is a murder in the building, the tea ladies draw on their wider network and put themselves in danger as they piece together clues that connect the murder to a nearby arson and a kidnapping. But if there’s one thing tea ladies can handle, its hot water!
Across six decades, Sir Tom Jones has maintained a vital career in a risky, unstable business notorious for the short lives of its artists. With a drive that comes from nothing but the love for what he does, he breaks through and then wrestles with the vagaries of the music industry, the nature of success and its inevitable consequences. Having recorded an expansive body of work and performed with fellow artists from across the spectrum and across every popular music genre, from rock, pop and dance to country, blues and soul, the one constant throughout has been his unique musical gifts and unmistakable voice.
But how did a boy from a Welsh coal-mining family attain success across the globe and how has he survived the twists and turns of fame and fortune to not only stay exciting, but actually become more credible and interesting with age? In this, his first and only autobiography, Tom revisits his past and tells the tale of his journey from wartime Pontypridd to LA and beyond. He reveals the stories behind the ups and downs of his fascinating and remarkable life, from the early heydays to the subsequent fallow years to his later period of artistic renaissance.
It’s the story nobody else knows or understands, told by the man who lived it, and written the only way he knows how, simply and from the heart. Raw, honest, funny and powerful, this is a memoir like no other from one of the world’s greatest ever singing talents.
A remarkable autobiography of the last great wartime icon, this account depicts the life and times of Dame Vera Lynn. Born Vera Welch on March 20, 1917 in the East End of London, Lynn’s career was set from an early age, along with her father, who also did a “turn,” she sang in Working Men’s Clubs at the mere age of seven years old. She had a successful radio career with Joe Loss and Charlie Kunz in the 1920s and 30s, but it was with World War II that she became the iconic figure that captured the imagination of the national public. Her spirit and verve, along with her ability to connect with the men fighting for their country and those left behind praying for their loved ones, made her the “Forces’ sweetheart.” Performing the songs that she will always be associated with, such as “We’ll Meet Again” and “Yours,” Vera toured Egypt, India, and Burma to entertain the troops and bring them a sense of “back home.” Her career after the war flourished, with hits in the U.S. and the UK, but Vera was never able to leave behind her wartime role and was deeply affected by what she had seen. Still heavily involved with veteran and other charities, this is Dame Vera’s story of her life and her war, from bombs and rations to dance halls and the searing heat of her appearances abroad. Epitomizing British fortitude and hope, Dame Vera gives a vivid portrait of Britain at war and a unique story of one woman who came to symbolize a nation. Previously unpublished photographs of Dame Vera and wartime Britain from her personal archives are also included.
Ever since legwarmers were cool, best friends Tara, Katherine, and Fintan have survived small-town ennui, big-city heartbreak, and endless giddy nights out on the town. But now that they’ve graduated to their slightly more serious thirties, only Fintan has what can honestly be called a “love life.” With Tara, struggling daily with her eternal diet and her dreadful, penny-pinching boyfriend, and Katherine keeping her single existence as organized as her drawer full of matching bra and panty sets, it seems they’ll never locate the exit door out of the “last chance saloon.”
But it’s always when you are least ready for change that fate insists on one. And when catastrophe inevitably follows crisis, the lives of three best friends are sure to change in unexpected ways .and not necessarily for the worse.
Inspired by the 1831 discovery of a hoard of priceless chess pieces on a remote Scottish Island, Missing Pieces tells the story of four women who created and protected the now famous artefacts.
When Marianne is coerced into leaving the security of her comfortable London life to curate an exhibition on the Isle of Lewis, she uncovers her own ancestral connection to the mysterious island. Her eerie connections to the past introduce us to Magrit, the Icelandic artisan, beholden to a power-hungry Bishop, Morven, the rescuer, who seeks intimacy with a mysterious stranger and Mhairi, the negotiator, fighting a greedy landlord to stave off starvation and eviction.
Missing Pieces is a story about women’s determination, passion and cunning and the power of love to right the wrongs of the past.
Who are you when you are forced to walk in someone else’s shoes?
Nisha Cantor lives the globetrotting life of the seriously wealthy, until her husband announces a divorce and cuts her off. Nisha is determined to hang onto her glamorous life. But in the meantime, she must scramble to cope and she doesn’t even have the shoes she was, until a moment ago, standing in.
That’s because Sam Kemp, in the bleakest point of her life, has accidentally taken Nisha’s gym bag. But Sam hardly has time to worry about a lost gym bag, she’s struggling to keep herself and her family afloat. When she tries on Nisha’s six-inch high Christian Louboutin red crocodile shoes, the resulting jolt of confidence that makes her realize something must change and that thing is herself.
Material Girls presents a timely and opinionated critique of the culturally influential theory that we each have an inner feeling about our sex called a gender identity, and that this feeling is more socially significant than our actual biological sex. It makes a clear and humane feminist case for retaining the ability to discuss material reality about biological sex in a range of important contexts, including female-only spaces and resources, healthcare, epidemiology, political organization and data collection.
It investigates the intellectual history of gender identity, showing how the concept is linked to a misguided philosophical picture which broadly rejects science and conflates facts about intersex people with facts about trans people. Material Girls concludes with a positive vision for the future, of collaboration between feminists and trans activists, detailing how they could work together to achieve some of their political aims.
According to Confucius, “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” but Tan Yunxian, born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations: looking; listening; touching; and asking, something a man can never do with a female patient.
From a young age, Yunxian learns about women’s illnesses, many of which relate to childbearing, alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose despite the prohibition that a doctor should never touch blood while a midwife comes in frequent contact with it and they vow to be forever friends, sharing in each other’s joys and struggles. But when Yunxian is sent into an arranged marriage, her mother-in-law forbids her from seeing Meiling and from helping the women and girls in the household. Yunxian is to act like a proper wife, embroider bound-foot slippers, pluck instruments, recite poetry, give birth to sons, and stay forever within the walls of the family compound, the Garden of Fragrant Delights.
The Port Fairy Murders is the sequel to The Holiday Murders, an historical crime novel set in 1943 in the newly formed Homicide department of Victoria Police. The Holiday Murders explored the little known fascist groups that festered in Australia both before and during the war, particularly an organisation called Australia First. The Port Fairy Murders continues with this exploration but looks, as well, at the bitter divide between Catholics and Protestants. This divide was especially raw in small rural communities.
The Homicide team, which includes Detective Joe Sable and Constable Helen Lord, is trying to track down a man named George Starling. Starling is a dangerous loose end from the investigation in The Holiday Murders. At the same time they are called to investigate a double murder in Port Fairy. It seems straightforward as they have a signed confession but it soon becomes apparent that nothing is straightforward about the incident.
If only the killings had stopped at two. The police are desperate to come to grips with an extraordinary and disquieting upsurge of violence. For Constable Helen Lord, it is an opportunity to make her mark in a male-dominated world where she is patronised as a novelty. For Detective Joe Sable, the investigation forces a reassessment of his indifference to his Jewish heritage.
Racing against the clock, the police uncover simmering tensions among secretive local Nazi sympathisers as a psychopathic fascist usurper makes his move.
Anna Walsh is officially a wreck. Physically broken and emotionally shattered, she lies on her parents’ Dublin sofa with only one thing on her mind: getting back to New York. New York means her best friends, The Most Fabulous Job In The World™ and above all, it means her husband, Aidan.
But nothing in Anna’s life is that simple anymore. Not only is her return to Manhattan complicated by her physical and emotional scars but Aidan seems to have vanished. Is it time for Anna to move on? Is it even possible for her to move on? A motley group of misfits, an earth-shattering revelation, two births and one very weird wedding might help Anna find some answers and change her life forever.
On the way to Isle of Palms, a barrier island off the South Carolina coast, forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan receives a call from the Charleston coroner. During the storm, a medical waste container has washed up on the beach. Inside are two decomposed bodies wrapped in plastic sheeting and bound with electrical wire. Chillingly, Tempe recognizes many details as identical to those of an unsolved case she handled in Quebec fifteen years earlier. With a growing sense of foreboding, she flies to Montreal to gather evidence and convince her boss Pierre LaManch to reopen the cold case. She also seeks the advice and comfort of her long time beau Andrew Ryan.
Meanwhile, a storm of a different type gathers force in South Carolina. The citizens of Charleston are struck by a bacterium that, at its worst, can eat human flesh. Thousands panic and test themselves for a rare genetic mutation that may have rendered them vulnerable. Shockingly, Tempe eventually discovers that not only are the victims in both grisly murder cases related, but that the murders and the disease outbreak also have a common cause.
Bestselling author Simon Winchester writes a magnificent history of the pioneering engineers who developed precision machinery to allow us to see as far as the moon and as close as the Higgs boson. Precision is the key to everything. It is an integral, unchallenged and essential component of our modern social, mercantile, scientific, mechanical and intellectual landscapes. The items we value in our daily lives, a camera, phone, computer, bicycle, car, a dishwasher perhaps, all sport components that fit together with precision and operate with near perfection. We also assume that the more precise a device the better it is. And yet whilst we live lives peppered and larded with precision, we are not, when we come to think about it, entirely sure what precision is, or what it means. How and when did it begin to build the modern world? Simon Winchester seeks to answer these questions through stories of precision’s pioneers. Exactly takes us back to the origins of the Industrial Age, to Britain where he introduces the scientific minds that helped usher in modern production: John ‘Iron-Mad’ Wilkinson, Henry Maudslay, Joseph Bramah, Jesse Ramsden, and Joseph Whitworth. Thomas Jefferson exported their discoveries to the United States as manufacturing developed in the early twentieth century, with Britain’s Henry Royce developing the Rolls Royce and Henry Ford mass producing cars, Hattori’s Seiko and Leica lenses, to today’s cutting-edge developments from Europe, Asia and North America. As he introduces the minds and methods that have changed the modern world, Winchester explores fundamental questions. Why is precision important? What are the different tools we use to measure it? Who has invented and perfected it? Has the pursuit of the ultra-precise in so many facets of human life blinded us to other things of equal value, such as an appreciation for the age-old traditions of craftsmanship, art, and high culture? Are we missing something that reflects the world as it is, rather than the world as we think we would wish it to be? And can the precise and the natural co-exist in society?
A detective duo of sisters finds themselves in the crosshairs of a dangerous and lawless group. Attorney Rhonda Bird returns home after a long estrangement when she learns her father has died. There she makes two important discoveries: her father stopped being an accountant and had opened up a private detective agency, and she has a teenage half-sister named Baby.
Baby brings in a client to the detective agency, a young man who claims he was abducted. During the course of the investigation, Rhonda and Baby become entangled in a dangerous case involving a group of over privileged young adults who break laws for fun, their psychopath ringleader, and an ex-assassin victim who decides to hunt them down for revenge.
Born Declan Patrick MacManus, Elvis Costello was raised in London and Liverpool, grandson of a trumpet player on the White Star Line and son of a jazz musician who became a successful radio dance band vocalist. Costello went into the family business and had taken the popular music world by storm before he was twenty-four.
Costello continues to add to one of the most intriguing and extensive songbooks of the day. His performances have taken him from a cardboard guitar in his front room to fronting a rock and roll band on your television screen and performing in the world’s greatest concert halls in a wild variety of company. Unfaithful Music describes how Costello’s career has somehow endured for almost four decades through a combination of dumb luck and animal cunning, even managing the occasional absurd episode of pop stardom.
When Jessica’s partner disappears into the dark Tasmanian forest, there is of course the mystery of what happened to him. The deserted car; the enigmatic final image on his phone. There is the strange circle of local women, widows of disappeared men, with their edgy fellowship and unhinged theories. And the forest itself: looming hugely over this tiny settlement on the remote tip of the island.
But for Jessica there is also the tight community in which she is still a stranger and Matthew was not. What secrets do they know about her own life that she doesn’t? And why do they believe things that should not, cannot, be true. For her own sanity, Jessica needs to know two things. Who was Matthew? And who, or what, has he become?
On a hot morning in199 in the regional town of Clarke, Barney Clarke (no relation) is woken by the unexpected arrival of many policemen: they are going to search his backyard for the body of a missing woman. Next door, Leonie Wallace and little Joe, watch the police cars through their kitchen window. Leonie has been waiting for this day for six years. She is certain that her friend, Ginny Lawson, is buried in that backyard under a slab of suspicious concrete.
But the fate of Ginny Lawson is not the only mystery in Clarke. Barney lives alone in a rented house with a ring on his finger, but where is Barney’s wife? Leonie lives with four-year-old Joe, but where is Joe’s mother? Clarke is a story of family and violence, of identity and longing, of unlikely connections and the comedy of everyday life. At its centre stands Leonie Wallace, a travel agent who has never travelled, a warm woman full of love and hope and grief, who must steer Joe safely through a very strange time indeed.
‘You clamber up, heading for the exit, the circle of faint light, as the radiance of the pre-dawn leads you on toward freedom. I follow. You spread your darling wings. You enter the net that awaits you.’
Bold, tender, and often fantastical, Love Letter to Lola enters the very pain of loss and grief while preserving a wise, sly, humorous, and ironic point of view. The thylacine, the dodo, the passenger pigeon, the blue macaw are all candidates to return from extinction, and here each is given its own moving narrative. The meaning of the British monarchy is challenged by a green spider; a unicorn and the rainbow serpent contemplate the end of the world; an angel gives his perspective on human life and love with thoughtful and exquisite mischief. The author’s own ‘Reflection’ on the inspiration and the construction of the stories is a swift and penetrating conversation on how writing happens.
When Stephanie Plum is woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of footsteps in her apartment, she wishes she didn’t keep her gun in the cookie jar in her kitchen. And when she finds out the intruder is fellow apprehension agent Diesel, six feet of hard muscle and bad attitude whom she hasn’t seen in more than two years, she still thinks the gun might come in handy.
Turns out Diesel and Stephanie are on the trail of the same fugitive: Oswald Wednesday, an international computer hacker as brilliant as he is ruthless. Stephanie may not be the most technologically savvy sleuth, but she more than makes up for that with her dogged determination, her understanding of human nature, and her willingness to do just about anything to bring a fugitive to justice. Unsure if Diesel is her partner or her competition in this case, she’ll need to watch her back every step of the way because Oswald is a killer.
A true crime story cannot often be believed, at least at the beginning. In Bowraville, all three of the victims were Aboriginal. All three were killed within five months, between 1990 and 1991. The same white man was linked to each, but nobody was convicted.
More than two decades later, homicide detective Gary Jubelin contacted Dan Box, asking him to pursue this serial killing. At that time, few others in the justice system seemed to know or care about the murders in Bowraville. Dan spoke to the families of the victims, Colleen Walker-Craig, Evelyn Greenup and Clinton Speedy-Duroux, as well as the lawyers, police officers and even the suspect involved in what had happened. His investigation, as well as the families own determined campaigning, forced the authorities to reconsider the killings. This account asks painful questions about what ‘justice’ means and how it is delivered, as well as describing Dan’s own shifting, uncomfortable realisation that he was a reporter who had crossed the line.
Long before Ronald Dale Barassi played his first match of Australian Rules Football, he’d already made a significant impact on the game. At the age of five his soldier father was killed at Tobruk, and so great was the footy fraternity’s respect for the Barassi family, that several years later the father/son rule was introduced. Innovative, creative, visionary, and ferociously tenacious, Ron’s achievements are legendary. As a champion player he is credited with having all but invented the position of ruck rover and as a premiership coach he is said to have revolutionized the use of handball. He was also one of the first (and certainly one of the loudest) to push for fully nationalizing the game.
As integral as Ron Barassi is to football, he is quick to point out that, “It was never my life.” Now for the first time Barassi tells his story the whole story in his own words. Barassi goes behind the legend to reveal the devoted family man, the dabbler in the arts, the champion for disadvantaged kids, and the tale of a fatherless boy who was determined to make his own way in the world. Barassi is a wonderfully warm, astonishingly self-deprecating, and deeply personal portrait of an Australian sporting legend.
The Battle of Le Hamel on 4 July 1918 was an Allied triumph and strategically very important in the closing stages of WWI. A largely Australian force, commanded by the brilliant Sir John Monash, fought what has been described as the first modern battle where infantry, tanks, artillery and planes operated together as a coordinated force.
Monash planned every detail meticulously, with nothing left to chance. Integrated use of tanks, planes, infantry, wireless (and even carrier pigeons!) was the basis, and it went on from there, down to everyone using the same maps, with updated versions delivered by motorbike despatch riders to senior commanders, including Monash. Each infantry battalion was allocated to a tank group, and they advanced together. Supplies and ammunition were dropped as needed from planes. The losses were relatively few. Monash planned for the battle to last for 90 minutes – in the end it went for 93. What happened in those minutes changed for the rest of the war the way the British fought battles, and the tactics and strategies used by the Allies.
By teaching you the foundations of natural dyeing, and guiding you through the simple stitch techniques, this book will allow you to dip in and out of projects while learning how to forage for and grow your own dye plants.
In The Wild Dyer, Abigail Booth demystifies the `magic’ of natural dyeing and shows how to use the results to stunning effect in 15 exquisite patchwork and stitch projects, including a drawstring forager’s bag, an apron, samplers, cushions and a reversible patchwork blanket. Focusing on how to grow or gather your own dyeing materials, from onion and avocado skins to chamomile and comfrey, nettles and acorns, as well as scouring, mordanting (using fixative) and setting up a dye vat, Abigail explains how to create effective dyes. And once you have them, how you can produce beautiful, contemporary textiles that can then be used to create projects that build on your skills.
An archive of letters written by the late John le Carré, giving readers access to the intimate thoughts of one of the greatest writers of our time.
The never-before-seen correspondence of John le Carré, one of the most important novelists of our generation, are collected in this beautiful volume. During his lifetime, le Carré wrote numerous letters to writers, spies, politicians, artists, actors and public figures. This collection is a treasure trove, revealing the late author’s humour, generosity, and wit, a side of him many readers have not previously seen.
The true story of an undercover ASIO agent who was hung out to dry in the Cold War.
‘I have lost everything in coming here. I have lost my friends… I have probably lost my position; I shall probably have to remove my child from the school and my mother from the house in which she lives. I do not think there is anything else I can possibly lose.’
Mercia Masson dressed stylishly and loved to host a party. She was a journalist in an era when there were few female journalists, she always wanted to be in the thick of things, and she knew people in very high places. She also led a dangerous double life.
This is the remarkable story of an ASIO agent who was hung out to dry. She was exposed at a royal commission called to investigate the extent of Soviet espionage in Australia, following the defection of Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov. Written in association with Mercia’s daughter Cindy, this story brings to life a determined woman at the centre of dramatic events in Australian politics during the Cold War.
On a sweltering day, 26 January, 1788, on a bluff high above Sydney Cove, seven Aboriginal men stand looking out to sea. Moored off-shore is a huge nowee (boat) then there are two, then more. Who are these visitors? Where are they from? What do they want? Should they be turned away by force or welcomed to country?
In The Visitors, Muruwari playwright Jane Harrison (Stolen, Rainbow’s End) reimagines the arrival of the First Fleet from a First Nations’ perspective. These senior men, carrying the weight of cultural responsibility, must decide what action they’ll take toward these unwanted arrivals. A decision, under pressure, that will have unforeseeable repercussions and forever. Told with wit, charm, and a fierce intelligence, Harrison’s story upends the dominant point of view of this pivotal event. Annotated and with an introduction by Wesley Enoch.
Adelaide Hills, Christmas Eve, 1959: At the end of a scorching hot day, beside a creek on the grounds of the grand and mysterious mansion, a local delivery man makes a terrible discovery. A police investigation is called and the small town of Tambilla becomes embroiled in one of the most shocking and perplexing murder cases in the history of South Australia.
Sixty years later, Jess is a journalist in search of a story. Having lived and worked in London for almost twenty years, she now finds herself laid off from her full-time job and struggling to make ends meet. A phone call out of nowhere summons her back to Sydney, where her beloved grandmother, Nora, who raised Jess when her mother could not, has suffered a fall and been raced to the hospital.
At loose ends in Nora’s house, Jess does some digging of her own. In Nora’s bedroom, she discovers a true crime book, chronicling the police investigation into a long-buried tragedy: the Turner Family Tragedy of Christmas Eve, 1959. It is only when Jess skims through the book that she finds a shocking connection between her own family and this once-infamous crime, a crime that has never been resolved satisfactorily. And for a journalist without a story, a cold case might be the best distraction she can find.
In the First World War of 1914–1918, thousands of boys across Australia and New Zealand lied about their age, forged a parent’s signature and left to fight on the other side of the world. Though some were as young as thirteen, they soon found they could die as well as any man. Like Peter Pan’s lost boys, they have remained forever young. These are their stories.
This extraordinary book captures the incredible and previously untold stories of forty Anzac boys who fought in the First World War, from Gallipoli to the Armistice. Featuring haunting images of the boys taken at training camps and behind the lines, these tales are both heartbreaking and rousing, full of daring, ingenuity, recklessness, random horror and capricious luck.
A unique perspective on the First World War, The Lost Boys is military history made deeply personal, a powerful homage to youthful bravery and a poignant reminder of the sacrifice of war.
This is the story of the marriage behind some of the most famous literary works of the 20th century and a probing consideration of what it means to be a wife and a writer in the modern world.
Eileen O’Shaughnessy married Orwell in 1936. O’Shaughnessy was a writer herself, and her literary brilliance not only shaped Orwell’s work, but her practical common sense saved his life. But why and how, Funder wondered, was she written out of their story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder re-creates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in London. As she peeks behind the curtain of Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer—and what it is to be a wife.
Grandmothers is the story of three very different women and their relationship with the younger generation, fiercely independent Nan, who leads a secret life as an award-winning poet when she is not teaching her grandson Billy how to lie; glamorous Blanche, deprived of the company of her beloved granddaughter Kitty by her hostile daughter-in-law, who finds solace in rebellious drinking and shoplifting; and shy, bookish Minna who in the safety of a shepherd’s hut shares with her surrogate granddaughter Rose her passion for reading.
The outlook of all three women subtly alters when through their encounters with each other they discover that the past is always with us and that we go on learning and changing until the very end.
This collection brings together the two sequences of stories that were published as Things Could be Worse and What God Wants, following the lives of a company of Melbourne friends who survived the holocaust, and the complex lives of the children they raised.
Always under the shadow of their terrible history, the close-knit Jewish community portrayed in these stories tackles life with exuberance, passion and extraordinary humour.
Lily Brett’s third book of non-fiction once again offers the unsparing Brett candour full-on as it traces a number of physical and emotional journeys.
In Mexico, she tries to write a novel, while the toilet explodes in the house, the gardener hoses her notes and the young maid questions her about plastic surgery. In Poland, she retraces the steps of her much-loved character from Too Many Men, Ruth Rothwax, and finds herself surprised to hear Ruth’s words coming out of her own mouth. In between she writes for the first time about the devastation of losing her New York home to fire and having to rebuild not only a life but a history. She also offers powerful insights into her adopted city New York, both before and after the tragic events of September 11.
The captivating story of the first global cosmetics empire, the fascinating woman who built it, and the past she preferred to leave behind.
This meticulously researched and wryly entertaining portrait of Helena Rubinstein (1872-1965) focuses on the years she spent in Australia as a young woman, recovering a ‘lost’ chapter in the grand narrative of the woman who created one of the first global cosmetics corporations. At its height, Rubinstein’s brand was synonymous with elegance and employed 30,000 women around the world.
Rubinstein arrived in Australia from Poland when she was twenty-three years old. She lived in Australia for the next eleven years, working first as a governess and then as a waitress, before opening her first beauty salon in Melbourne. In later years, owing to the degree of control she exercised over her glamorous image, many details of her early life in Australia were suppressed. But the events she airbrushed out of her own myth reveal the surprising origins of her extraordinary rise. In this absorbing book, we see her laying the foundations for a global empire.
Fat child, self-denying adolescent, hungry young woman; a body now burgeoning uncontrolled into middle age. Kris Kneen has borne the usual indignities: the confrontations with clothes that won’t fasten, with mirrors that defame, with strangers whose gaze judges and dismisses. This is the story of how Kris learned to look unblinkingly at her recalcitrant body, and ultimately found the courage to carry it to freedom.
Layla Byrnes is exhausted. She’s juggling a demanding job as an anaesthetist, a disintegrating marriage, her young kids, and a needy lover. And most particularly she’s managing her histrionically unstable mother, who repeatedly threatens to kill herself. But this year, it’s different.
When her mother rings just before Christmas, she doesn’t follow the usual script. Instead, she tells Layla that there’s something she needs to tell her about her much-loved father. In response, Layla drops everything to rush to her childhood home on the wild, west coast of Tasmania. She’s determined to finally confront her mother and find out what really happened to her father.
A childhood spent moving around the world left Revelle Lee with an unusual gift, the ability to fluently speak 11 languages. Now, Revelle spends her days translating for witnesses, victims, and the accused across London crime scenes and courtrooms. It’s a stressful job, though not as stressful as the process she is currently going through to adopt little boy, Elliot. She is determined to be the mother to him that she never had, and to make up for her own past mistakes.
But when it seems a murderer will go free, Revelle puts the adoption and her job at risk, deliberately mistranslating the alibi to ensure he is found guilty. No one can ever find out that she interfered or she will lose her son and her livelihood. The problem is someone already knows what she’s done and they want justice of their own.
After a puzzling death in the wild bushlands of Australia, detective Dana Russo has just hours to interrogate the prime suspect, a silent, inscrutable man found at the scene of the crime, who disappeared without trace 15 years earlier.
But where has he been? Why won’t he talk? And exactly how dangerous is he? Without conclusive evidence to prove his guilt, Dana faces a desperate race against time to persuade him to speak. But as each interview spirals with fevered intensity, Dana must reckon with her own traumatic past to reveal the shocking truth.