New Books / Reviews
Listings and Reviews of New Books Summer 2024/2025
The millions of readers of Amor Towles are in for a treat as he shares some of his short stories set in New York City and a novella in Los Angeles. The New York stories, most of which are set around the turn of the millennium, take up everything from the death-defying acrobatics of the male ego, to the fateful consequences of brief encounters, and the delicate mechanics of compromise which operate at the heart of modern marriages. In Towles’s novella, Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September, 1938, with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood” describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself and others in the midst of Hollywood’s golden age.
No one does glamour, severity, girlish charm or tight-lipped witticism better than Dame Maggie Smith. Michael Coveney’s biography shines a light on the life and career of a truly remarkable performer, one whose stage and screen career spans six decades. From her days as a West End star of comedy and revue, Dame Maggie’s path would cross with those of the greatest actors, playwrights and directors of the era. Her film and television career has been just as starry. From the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the meddling chaperone in A Room With a View to the Harry Potter films and the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel films, Smith has thrilled, engaged and made audiences laugh. Paradoxically she remains an enigmatic figure, rarely appearing in public. Michael Coveney’s absorbing biography, written with the actress’s blessing and drawing on personal archives, as well as interviews with immediate family and close friends, is a portrait of one of the greatest actors of our time.
Young Jimmy Higgins is snatched from an airport security checkpoint while his guardian watches helplessly from the glass inspection box. But this is no ordinary abduction, as Jimmy is no ordinary child. His mother was Scarlett, a reality TV star who, dying of cancer and alienated from her unreliable family, entrusted the boy to the person she believed best able to give him a happy, stable life: her ghost writer, Stephanie Harker.
Assisting the FBI in their attempt to recover the missing boy, Stephanie reaches into the past to uncover the motive for the abduction. Has Jimmy been taken by his own relatives? Is Stephanie’s obsessive ex-lover trying to teach her a lesson? Has one of Scarlett’s stalkers come back to haunt them all?
In a narrative replete with poison arrows, devouring snakes, scientific miracles, and spiritual transformations, “State of Wonder” presents a world of stunning surprise and danger, rich in emotional resonance and moral complexity.
As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she journeys into the unforgiving heart of darkness.
In a classroom in Seoul, a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon the two discover a deeper pain binds them together. For her, in the space of just a few months, she has lost both her mother and the custody battle for her nine-year-old son. For him, it’s the pain of growing up between Korea and Germany, being torn between two cultures and languages, and the fear of losing his independence.
Slowly the two discover a profound sense of unity, their voices intersecting with startling beauty, as they move from darkness to light, from silence to breath and expression.
The Burrow follows members of the Lee family as they navigate grief and hope in their quiet Australian Jin, an emergency physician and father; Amy, a published author and mother; Lucie, their bookish and introverted ten-year-old; and Pauline, Amy’s mother who’s trying to make amends.
Racked with grief for Ruby, Lucie’s baby sister who died in a shocking accident, the family adopts a rabbit in the hopes of bringing much-needed cheer to their home. At first, each family member benefits from the distraction of a new and needy creature, but when a violent home invasion breaks their fragile sense of peace, the family is forced to confront the terrible circumstances surrounding Ruby’s death.
1589 – Princess Anne of Denmark is betrothed to King James VI of Scotland, a royal union designed to forever unite the two countries. But first she must pass the trial period: one year of marriage in which she must prove herself worthy of being Scotland’s new Queen. If the King and the Scottish royal court in Edinburgh find her wanting, she faces permanent exile to a convent. Determined to fulfil her duties to King and country, Anne resolves to be the perfect royal bride. Until she meets Lord Henry.
By her side is Kirsten Sorenson, her loyal and pious lady’s maid. But whilst tending to Anne’s every need, she has her own secret motives for the royal marriage to be a success. Meanwhile, in North Berwick, a young housemaid by the name of Jura is dreaming of a new life. She practises the healing charms taught to her by her mother, and when she realises she is no longer safe under her master’s roof, she escapes to Edinburgh. But it isn’t long before she finds herself caught up in the witchcraft mania that has gripped not just the capital but the new queen.
Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of US politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after US troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule. At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court.
Jake Whyte is living on her own in an old farmhouse on a craggy British island, a place of ceaseless rains and battering winds.
Her disobedient collie, Dog, and a flock of sheep are her sole companions, which is how she wanted it to be. But every few nights something, or someone, picks off one of the sheep and sets off a new deep pulse of terror. There are foxes in the woods, a strange boy and a strange man, rumours of an obscure, formidable beast. But there is also Jake’s past, hidden thousands of miles away and years ago, held in the silences about her family and the scars that stripe her back, a past that threatens to break into the present.
Tucked away on the fifth floor of an old building at the end of a narrow alley in Kyoto, the Nakagyō Kokoro Clinic for the Soul can be found only by people who are struggling in their lives and who genuinely need help.
The mysterious clinic offers a unique treatment to those who find their way there: it prescribes cats as medication. Patients are often puzzled by this unconventional prescription, but when they “take” their cat for the recommended duration, they witness profound transformations in their lives, guided by the playful, empathetic, and occasionally challenging yet endearing cats.
When Chloe Hooper’s partner is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive illness, she has to find a way to tell their two young sons.
By instinct, she turns to the bookshelf. Can the news be broken as a bedtime tale? Is there a perfect book to prepare children for loss? Hooper embarks on a quest to find what practical lessons children’s literature, with its innocent orphans and evil adults, magic, monsters and anthropomorphic animals, can teach about grief and resilience in real life.
At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, mainly Jewish women and girls, were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. This fashion workshop, called the Upper Tailoring Studio, was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant’s wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz, and for ladies from Nazi Berlin’s upper crust.
Drawing on diverse sources, including interviews with the last surviving seamstress, The Dressmakers of Auschwitz follows the fates of these brave women. Their bonds of family and friendship not only helped them endure persecution, but also to play their part in camp resistance. Weaving the dressmakers’ remarkable experiences within the context of Nazi policies for plunder and exploitation, historian Lucy Adlington exposes the greed, cruelty, and hypocrisy of the Third Reich and offers a fresh look at a little-known chapter of World War II and the Holocaust.
A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away, and he becomes lost in memory and beauty. He also begins to tell us a story.
A retired porn star is made an offer he can’t refuse for the sake of his family and future. So he returns to the world he fled years before, all too aware of the danger of opening the door to past temptations and long-buried desires. Can he resist the oblivion and bliss they promise?
Old friends and lovers reunite for a weekend in a secluded country home after spending decades apart.
They excavate old memories and pass clandestine judgments on the wildly divergent paths they’ve taken since their youth.
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly boundless wealth, all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the centre of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
Hernan Diaz’s Trust elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.
Perry and Gail are idealistic and very much in love when they splurge on a tennis vacation at a posh beach resort in Antigua. But the charm begins to pall when a big-time Russian money launderer enlists their help to defect.
In exchange for amnesty, Dima is ready to rat out his vory (Russian criminal brotherhood) compatriots and expose corruption throughout the so-called legitimate financial and political worlds. Soon, the guileless couple find themselves pawns in a deadly endgame whose outcome will be determined by the victor of the British Secret Service’s ruthless internecine battles.
This memoir describes Sandy McCutcheon’s long search for his own identity, so in it he reveals far more depth and the real person than in his airport thrillers. One can understand that to be adopted with no idea of his heritage left a gaping emptiness in Sandy’s life. He travelled the world, listening to various accents, hoping that some clue would spark memories. In the process he became a man of the world, absorbing various cultures and becoming fluent even in the most difficult languages like Finnish. After a life-long search, a radio interview while launching a book in New Zealand drew a phone call that led him to meet relatives, although his mother had not long died. McCutcheon writes movingly of his journeys to find self. This is an engrossing book. (Review by Ruth Bonetti)
Bryce Courtenay was a born storyteller. The success of his extraordinary debut The Power of One made publishing history, and in the years that followed Bryce continued to entertain and inspire thousands of devoted readers around the world with his sweeping epics and larger-than-life characters who embody the strength and triumph of the human condition.
When Christine Courtenay began penning her own memoir during lockdown, she found herself increasingly drawn to the remarkable story of her late husband’s life and reflecting upon his astonishing literary legacy. From his humble beginnings in Africa to his dazzling success in advertising and as a bestselling author, Bryce’s extraordinary, rags-to-riches life story reads like one of his epic novels. It was a life marked by all the big themes, overcoming adversity, love, loss, hard-won success, fame and fortune, and holding tight to a dream.
In the summer of 1938, Layla Beck’s father, a United States senator, cuts off her allowance and demands that she find employment on the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal jobs program. Within days, Layla finds herself far from her accustomed social whirl, assigned to cover the history of the remote mill town of Macedonia, West Virginia, and destined, in her opinion, to go completely mad with boredom.
But once she secures a room in the home of the unconventional Romeyn family, she is drawn into their complex world and soon discovers that the truth of the town is entangled in the thorny past of the Romeyn dynasty.
In Nottingham, England, widow Emma Taylor finds herself in desperate need of a job to provide for herself and her daughter, Olivia. But with the legal restrictions prohibiting widows with children from most employment opportunities, she’s left with only one option: persuading the manageress at Boots’ Booklover’s Library to take a chance on her.
When the threat of war becomes a reality, Olivia must be evacuated to the countryside. In her daughter’s absence, Emma seeks solace in the unlikely friendships she forms with her neighbours and coworkers, as well as the recommendations she provides to the library’s quirky regulars. But the job doesn’t come without its difficulties. Books are mysteriously mis-shelved and disappearing, and her work forces her to confront the memories of her late father and the bookstore they once owned together before a terrible accident.
As the eldest child in a single-parent family, Kylie’s always had more important things on her mind than smiling. Controlling her job, her home, her romantic life and most importantly, her family, takes all her concentration. She’s always succeeded, though, because that’s who Kylie is.
Until one Monday morning, when Kylie discovers the local pharmacy where she works is being taken over by a huge corporation, putting her stable job at risk. This leads to a cascade of disasters: her boyfriend is acting suspiciously and she finds herself caring for a high-maintenance Pomeranian. When her fiercely independent mother breaks an ankle and needs help, it’s up to Kylie, as usual, to fix things. She reluctantly packs her bags but back in her childhood home, things start to unravel. Could it be that Kylie’s carefully curated life is not so perfect after all?
In 1977, while she was in her twenties, Robyn Davidson set off with a dog and four camels to cross 1,700 miles of Australian desert to the sea.
A life of almost constant travelling followed: from the Outback to Sydney’s underworld; from sixties street life, to the London literary scene; from migrating with nomads in India and Tibet, to marrying an Indian prince. The only territory she avoided was the past. In Unfinished Woman, she ventures into that unknown, unearthing an ache for a lost but barely remembered mother and an unmet desire to feel at home in her freedom.
A mother and daughter travel from abroad to meet in Tokyo: they walk along the canals through the autumn evenings; escape the typhoon rains; share meals in small cafes and restaurants; and visit galleries to see some of the city’s most radical modern art.
All the while, they talk: about the weather; horoscopes; clothes; and objects; about family; distance; and memory. But uncertainties abound. Who is really speaking here – is it only the daughter? And what is the real reason behind this elliptical, perhaps even spectral journey?
Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily’s fierce-hearted black “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free. They escape to Tiburon, South Carolina, a town that holds the secret to her mother’s past. Taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters, Lily is introduced to their mesmerizing world of bees and honey, and the Black Madonna.
This is a remarkable novel about divine female power, a story women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.
The war is over, and Germany is in ruins. Posted to an Allied-run Hamburg, reporter Georgie Young returns to the country she fled seven years prior to find it unrecognisable. Amidst the stark horrors of a bombed-out city crumbling under the weight of millions of displaced Europeans, she discovers pockets of warmth: a violinist playing amidst the wreckage, couples dancing in the streets, and a nation trying to make amends.
But when she joins forces with local policeman Harri Schroder to solve a murder case he is working on, a woman with the word traitor engraved into her skin, she soon discovers that the darkest secrets of war haven’t been left in the past. And once again she is pulled into a world she hardly expected to see again.
Living through WWII working in a Paris bookstore with her young daughter, Vivi, and fighting for her life, Charlotte is no victim, she is a survivor.
But can she survive the next chapter of her life? Alternating between wartime Paris and 1950s New York publishing, Paris Never Leaves You is an extraordinary story of resilience, love, and impossible choices, exploring how survival never comes without a cost.
When entomologist Emlyn Rees arrives at Hidden Valley she wants nothing more than to escape her marriage breakdown by burying herself in the research team’s hunt for new species of insects in the depths of the dramatic Undara lava tubes. However, little does she suspect she will be the key to solving a mystery that’s more than one hundred years old.
Travis Carlyle is initially resistant to letting some city folks tramp over his cattle station, but soon the researchers’ findings and a growing friendship with Emlyn bring opportunities to turn around his struggling farm. With a broken marriage behind him and children to care for, Travis needs to plan for the future and this could be his family’s best chance. But when things start going wrong for the farm and around the dig site, Emlyn and Travis are at a loss to understand why. Are they cursed with bad luck, or is there a more sinister force at play? Are the tall tales of enigmatic stockman Bluey turning true? As the unseen saboteur grows bolder, Emlyn and Travis are caught in a race against time to save the station and their lives.
In January 1788, the First Fleet arrived in New South Wales, Australia and a thousand British men and women encountered the people who would be their new neighbours.
Dancing with Strangers tells the story of what happened between the first British settlers of Australia and these Aborigines. Inga Clendinnen interprets the earliest written sources, and the reports, letters and journals of the first British settlers in Australia. She reconstructs the difficult path to friendship and conciliation pursued by Arthur Phillip and the local leader ‘Bennelong’ (Baneelon) that was ultimately destroyed by the assertion of profound cultural differences.
In 1788, 11 small ships set sail from England on an eight-month-long voyage over the roughest of seas, carrying 1,500 people, food for two years, and all the equipment needed to build a colony of convicts in a land completely beyond their experience and imagination. In Portsmouth, the fleet’s preparation was characterized by disease, promiscuity, and death. The journey itself was one of unbearable hardship, but also of extraordinary resilience. Upon their arrival, however, the colonists faced their biggest challenges of all: conflict, starvation, and despair. Combining the skill of a vigilant journalist with the magic of a master novelist, this entrancing history brings the sights, sounds, sufferings, and joys of the “First Fleeters” back to life. Journals, letters, reports, and pleas to England are all interwoven here with the author’s own insight, and together they convey the innermost horrors and joys of the very first European Australians. The result is a narrative history that is surprising, compelling, and unforgettable.
The Spinning Jenny was invented in 1770, and with that, a new era of manufacturing and industry changed lives everywhere within a generation.
A world filled with unrest wrestles for control over this new world order: a mother’s husband is killed in a work accident due to negligence; a young woman fights to fund her school for impoverished children; a well-intentioned young man unexpectedly inherits a failing business; one man ruthlessly protects his wealth no matter the cost, all the while war cries are heard from France, as Napoleon sets forth a violent master plan to become emperor of the world. As institutions are challenged and toppled in unprecedented fashion, ripples of change ricochet through our characters’ lives as they are left to reckon with the future and a world they must rebuild from the ashes of war.
William Cooper’s passionate struggle against the dispossession of Aboriginal people and the denial of their rights and his heroic fight for them to become citizens in their own country has been widely commemorated and celebrated. By carefully reconstructing the historical losses his Yorta Yorta people suffered and endured, William Cooper: An Aboriginal Life Story reveals how the first seventy years of Cooper’s life inspired the remarkable political work he undertook in the 1930s. Focusing on Cooper’s most important campaigns: his famous petition to the British king George for an Aboriginal representative in the Australian parliament; his call for a day of mourning after 150 years of colonisation; the walk-off of the Yorta Yorta people from Cumeroogunga reserve in 1939 and his opposition to the establishment of an Aboriginal regiment in the Second World War, this carefully researched study sheds important new light on the long struggle that Indigenous people have fought to have the truth about Australia’s black history heard and win representation in Australia’s political order.
In 1990, Kári Gíslason travelled to Iceland to meet his father for the first time. What he finds is not what he expected.
Born from a secret liaison between a British mother and an Icelandic father, Kári Gíslason was the subject of a promise, a promise elicited from his father to not reveal his identity. The Icelandic city of Reykjavík, where Kári was born, was also home to his father and his father’s wife and five children none of whom knew of Kári’s existence. Moving regularly between Iceland and Australia, he grew up aware of his father’s identity, but understanding that it was the subject of a secret pact between his parents. At the age of 27, he makes a decision to break the pact and contacts his father’s other family. What follows, and what leads him there, makes for a riveting journey over landscapes, time and memory.
With the work of hundreds of artists on display throughout, this visually arresting volume showcases mosaics from all corners of the globe and teaches the skills needed to produce 15 beautiful pieces.
The history of the art, tools and materials, and techniques come first: bases, adhesives, and grout; shaping and placing tesserae; practical and artistic design considerations; and several methods of creating the actual mosaic. Put that information to use on an array of magnificent international projects, from a Blue Willow Tray to a Rock Garden Fountain, all beautifully illustrated and with the level of difficulty noted.
In the ballrooms and drawing rooms of Regency London, rules abound. From their earliest days, children of aristocrats learn how to address an earl and curtsey before a prince, while other dictates of the ton are unspoken yet universally understood. A proper duke should be imperious and aloof. A young, marriageable lady should be amiable but not too amiable. Daphne Bridgerton has always failed at the latter. The fourth of eight siblings in her close-knit family, she has formed friendships with the most eligible young men in London. Everyone likes Daphne for her kindness and wit. But no one truly desires her. She is simply too deuced honest for that, too unwilling to play the romantic games that captivate gentlemen.
Amiability is not a characteristic shared by Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings. Recently returned to England from abroad, he intends to shun both marriage and society, just as his callous father shunned Simon throughout his painful childhood. Yet an encounter with his best friend’s sister offers another option. If Daphne agrees to a fake courtship, Simon can deter the mamas who parade their daughters before him. Daphne, meanwhile, will see her prospects and her reputation soar. The plan works like a charm, at first. But amid the glittering, gossipy, cut-throat world of London’s elite, there is only one certainty: love ignores every rule.
Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish that hasn’t changed in a thousand years. For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living.
But now – just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity – the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can’t explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.
Just days after Raynor learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years, is terminally ill, their home and livelihood is taken away.
With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall. They have almost no money for food or shelter and must carry only the essentials for survival on their backs as they live wild in the ancient, weathered landscape of cliffs, sea and sky. Yet through every step, every encounter, and every test along the way, their walk becomes a remarkable journey.
Haskell repeatedly visits a dozen trees around the world, exploring the trees connections with webs of fungi, bacterial communities, cooperative and destructive animals, and other plants. An Amazonian ceibo tree reveals the rich ecological turmoil of the tropical forest, along with threats from expanding oil fields. Thousands of miles away, the roots of a balsam fir in Canada survive in poor soil only with the help of fungal partners. These links are nearly two billion years old: the fir’s roots cling to rocks containing fossils of the first networked cells.
Every living being is not only sustained by biological connections but is made from these relationships. Haskell shows that this networked view of life enriches our understanding of biology, human nature, and ethics.
Amory Ames is a wealthy young woman who regrets her marriage to her notoriously charming playboy husband, Milo.
Looking for a change, she accepts a request for help from her former fiancé, Gil Trent, not knowing that she’ll soon become embroiled in a murder investigation that will test not only her friendship with Gil but will upset the status quo with her husband.
This book is aimed at both the novice and experienced beekeeper in Australia and explains in detail the steps required to manage colonies of bees.
Supported by over 350 photographs and drawings, each action to be performed is explained in detail with photographs showing the steps as well as the final result.
It is only after the sudden death of his wife, Birgit, that Kaspar discovers the price she paid years earlier when she fled East Germany to join him: she had to abandon her baby. Shattered by grief, yet animated by a new hope, Kaspar closes up his bookshop in present day Berlin and sets off to find her lost child in the east.
His search leads him to a rural community of neo-Nazis, intent on reclaiming and settling ancestral lands to the East. Among them, Kaspar encounters Svenja, a woman whose eyes, hair, and even voice remind him of Birgit. Beside her is a red-haired, slouching, fifteen-year-old girl. His granddaughter? Their worlds could not be more different— an ideological gulf of mistrust yawns between them— but he is determined to accept her as his own.
Since giving up their city jobs in London and moving to rural France over ten years ago, Janine and husband Mark have renovated their dream home and built a new life for themselves, adjusting to the delights and the peculiarities of life in a small French village.
Including much-loved village characters such as Mr and Mrs Pepperpot, Jean-Claude, Claudette and the infamous Bread Man, in Toujours la France! Janine also introduces readers to some new faces and funny stories, as she and Mark continue their lives in this special part of northern France.
It was a gentle knock. Agnes had been waiting for it. Hoping he would be on time. Such a lovely fella, she thought. ‘Come on through. Got a surprise for you,’ she said. He had one for her too. Phil and Sweet Jimmy are cousins. Phil grows orchids, spider orchids, learnt about them in the nick. Jimmy likes orchids, too, but there are other things he likes even more.
Trish Bennett didn’t like her life. Hadn’t liked it for a long time. Been on the streets. Bit of this for a bit of that. The ‘that’ wasn’t always nice. Then Ahmed found her. Sam is a tea-leaf, a thief. Likes nickin’ anything, always has, until the day he knocked off more than the Volvo. Fell for the sexy and beautiful Sue May from Hong Kong, Frank Testy did. What price for ego? A huge price it turns out.
On a cold November evening, Guido Brunetti and Paola are up late when a call from his colleague Ispettore Vianello arrives, alerting the Commissario that a hand has been seen in one of Venice’s canals.
The body is soon found, and Brunetti is assigned to investigate the murder of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant. Because no official record of the man’s presence in Venice exists, Brunetti is forced to use the city’s far richer sources of information: gossip and the memories of people who knew the victim. Curiously, he had been living in a small house on the grounds of a palazzo owned by a university professor, in which Brunetti discovers books revealing the victim’s interest in Buddhism, the revolutionary Tamil Tigers, and the last crop of Italian political terrorists, active in the 1980s.
Possums in the roof, an echidna in the garden, or perhaps a python in the pantry? Living with A Guide for Our Homes and Backyards explores commonly asked questions and issues about encounters with wildlife.
Taking a wildlife-friendly approach, Tanya Loos provides practical information, advice and solutions, based on current guidance from wildlife rescue organisations and the latest research.
Mountains can tell us much about our past. Six iconic peaks in Central Victoria, Mounts Kooroocheang, Beckworth, Greenock, Tarrengower, Alexander and Franklin, tower above the rich volcanic grasslands. Each has borne witness to dramatic changes in Dja Dja Wurrung Country over the past two centuries. Six Peaks Speak tells the unique stories and continuing legacies of these mountains from a multidisciplinary perspective.
The peak-specific stories illustrate how many ‘taken for granted’ aspects of mountains may not be as they seem. Aside from what it reveals about the six peaks, the book showcases ideas and methodologies for creatively reconnecting with and healing other mountains and the people who today live on their flanks, and on Country in between.
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place – middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They’re exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work.
Problem is, they’re not alone.
So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.
Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favorite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now.
Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job…
Then a dead body, a bag of money, and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a lethal enemy?
A controversial entrepreneur is murdered in a remote mountain valley, but this is no ordinary case. Ivan and Nell are soon contending with cowboy lawyers, conmen, bullion thieves and grave robbers.
But it’s when Nell discovers the victim is a close blood relative, that the past begins to take on a looming significance.
What did take place in The Valley all those years ago? What was Nell’s mother doing there, and what was her connection to troubled young police officer Simmons Burnside? And why do the police hierarchy insist Ivan and Nell stay with the case despite an obvious conflict of interest?
Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father’s shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love – and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man.
But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter’s lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.
Set over the course of one December in the same village as Williams’ beloved This Is Happiness, Time of the Child is a tender return to Faha for readers who know its charms, and a heartwarming welcome to new readers entering for the very first time.
It’s footy season in Melbourne, and Helen Garner is following her grandson’s under-16s team. She not only goes to every game (give or take), but to every training session too, shivering on the sidelines at dusk, fascinated by the spectacle.
She’s a passionate Western Bulldogs fan (with an imperfect grasp of the rules) who loves the epic theatre of AFL football. But her devotion to the under-16s offers her something else. This is her chance to connect with her youngest grandchild, to be close to him before he rushes headlong into manhood. To witness his triumphs and defeats, to fear for his safety in battle, to gasp and to cheer for his team as it fights for a place in the finals.
With her sharp eye, her generous wit and her warm humour, Garner documents this pivotal moment, both as part of the story and as silent witness. The Season is an unexpected and exuberant a celebration of the nobility, grace and grit of team spirit, a reflection on the nature of masculinity, and a tribute to the game’s power to thrill us.
England, 1685. Decades after the end of the civil war, the country is once again divided when Charles II’s illegitimate son, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, arrives in Dorset to incite rebellion against his Catholic uncle.
Armed only with pitchforks, Monmouth’s army is quickly defeated by King James II’s superior forces and charged with high treason. Those found guilty will be hanged, drawn and quartered. As Dorset braces for carnage, the redoubtable Lady Jayne Harrier and a small group of trusted allies – including her courageous son and the independent-minded daughter of a local lawyer – contrive ways to save men from the gallows.
Compelling and powerful, The Players is a story of guile, deceit and compassion during the dark days of The Bloody Assizes. Secrets are kept and surprising friendships formed in a dangerous gamble to thwart a brutal king’s thirst for vengeance…
When human remains are discovered in the forests of regional Victoria, the police are baffled, the locals are shocked, and one group of old friends starts to panic. Their long-held secret is about to be uncovered.
It all began in 1999 when sixteen-year-old Aaron ran away from home, dragging his friends into an unforeseeable chain of events that no one escaped from unscathed …
In The Ledge, past and present run breathlessly, tensely parallel, leading to a cliff-hanger nobody will see coming. This is a mind-bending new novel from the master of the unexpected.
The body of a local teenage boy is found on the beach of a sleepy northern New South Wales town. David went for an evening swim and got into trouble . . . at least, that’s what it looks like.
Three weeks before, Leila, a young backpacker, didn’t turn up for her shift at the local cafe. Benny, the owner, isn’t worried. It happens – backpackers are always on the move. There’ll be another one.
One of the locals, Adrian, has been a help to Benny. He’s found him a nice little sideline. Not exactly legal. Is that all Adrian is arranging on the coast? He once was a cop but has he gone bad? And in the back-blocks outside town, a bikie gang is gearing up for a large consignment from South America.
Murder, drugs, liaisons and lies are stirring up this small coastal town.
It’s 1975, and at the threshold of his writing career Andy McPherson is navigating how to be fully present both for his partner, Jo, and their young daughter.
When forced to take a part-time teaching job Andy meets Lang Tzu, a charismatic and intriguing man. Andy is drawn deeper into a dangerous relationship when Lang asks him to prove his friendship by brokering a risky deal for a much-desired piece of art. Andy finally consents despite Jo’s opposition. In the process, Andy is in fact negotiating his own deal with himself as an artist and is compelled to face up to the conflict between his conception of art as a creative gift and the realities of the art market.
Powerful and perceptive, Miller’s profound and intimate depiction of Jo and her partnership with Andy, and his poignant portrait of Lang’s troubled genius, form the beating heart of this beautiful novel.
It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive’s apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known—“unrecorded lives,” Olive calls them—reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning.
A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. She does not believe in God, doesn’t know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive life almost by accident. As she gradually adjusts to the rhythms of monastic life, she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can’t forget.Disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who left the community decades before to minister to deprived women in Thailand – then disappeared, presumed murdered. Finally, a troubling visitor to the monastery pulls the narrator further back into her past.With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished?
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
‘One rainy Friday evening in the winter of 1993, a taxi swept through the streets of East Melbourne, on its way from the city to Richmond. That year was one of the few remaining when a great deal was known of the world, but not yet so much that the world had become over-known. Small gaps remained…’
Edinburgh, 1916:Thomas Wrenfether, a rich Scottish industrialist, is offered the opportunity to take on a startling project – to build a paddle steamer from European cherrywood on the other side of the world, in booming Melbourne, Australia. But nothing goes according to plan.
Melbourne, 1993. Martha is a lonely, frustrated lawyer. One night on impulse she stops at a strange pub in Fitzroy, The Cherrywood, for a bottle of wine. The building and its inhabitants make an indelible impression, and she slowly begins to deduce odd truths about the pub.
Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed.
Because on this ordinary, short, domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. For some, their death is far in the future—age 103!—and they laugh. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away at all. How do they know this? There were ostensibly more interesting people on the flight (the bride and groom, the jittery, possibly famous woman, the giant Hemsworth-esque guy who looks like an off-duty superhero, the frazzled, gorgeous flight attendant) but none would become as famous as “The Death Lady.” Not a single passenger or crew member will later recall noticing her board the plane. She wasn’t exceptionally old or young, rude or polite. She wasn’t drunk or nervous or pregnant. Her appearance and demeanor were unremarkable. But what she did on that flight was truly remarkable. A few months later, one passenger dies exactly as she predicted. Then two more passengers die, again, as she said they would. Soon no one is thinking this is simply an entertaining story at a cocktail party.
If you were told you only had a certain amount of time left to live, would you do things differently? Would you try to dodge your destiny?
John Gould and his beautiful wife Elizabeth sailed into Australia on a cold spring day in 1838 prepared for the most astonishing adventure of their lives. The Goulds had travelled 20,000 kilometres and crossed three oceans from their London home to find the treasures of Australia’s birdlife and showcase them to the outside world. It had been a rough voyage over and Elizabeth had fallen pregnant again for the seventh time at just 34. There would be little rest for her in illustrating her husband’s exquisite books that had made him England’s celebrated ‘Bird Man’, and a force of nature in both science and publishing. Elizabeth had always been the anonymous wind beneath his wings, always working in his shadow, but perhaps on this voyage, with his new book The Birds of Australia she would finally receive the deserved acclaim for her work.
Gould had studied birds from the Galapagos Islands and helped his fellow naturalist Charles Darwin expound his controversial theory of evolution by natural selection. In Australia, with the help of Aboriginal guides he would admire and befriend, Gould would gaze upon a vast array of Australian wildlife which would generate huge praise – and profits. Gould was and ambitious, hard-nosed businessman, the son of a poor gardener, and scrapped and fought to overcome his station in life. As a young taxidermist, he’d become chief ‘animal stuffer’ for King George IV – once climbing inside the immense corpse of the royal giraffe and preserving it for posterity – then chased fame and fortune preserving exotic birds. With his wife’s beautiful drawings, he became as a lucrative publisher of books sold in Britain, Europe and America.But he was a tough, ruthless man who drove everyone around him, including his wife. The Birds of Australia would become a landmark publication and cement the reputation of the husband and wife team forever, but tragically it was one that Elizabeth would never see.
In the distant highlands, a puma named Dusk is killing shepherds.
Down in the lowlands, twins Iris and Floyd are out of work, money and friends. When they hear that a bounty has been placed on Dusk, they reluctantly decide to join the hunt. As they journey up into this wild, haunted country, they discover there’s far more to the land and people of the highlands than they imagined. And as they close in on their prey, they’re forced to reckon with conflicts both ancient and deeply personal.
One of the most iconic Australians – one who has graced our screen and theatres for over forty years – Noni Hazlehurst is finally telling her story.
Noni Hazlehurst is an icon. A household name, our best-loved actor, she’s graced our screens and theatres with her presence for over forty years – and won our hearts and our respect in the process. From hosting Playschool for more than two decades to acting in films such as Ladies in Black, June Again, Monkey Grip, Candy and Little Fish; serving as host on Better Homes and Gardens, a starring role in fan favourite A Place to Call Home; most recently hosting the SBS miniseries Every Family Has a Secret; all that of course in addition to her theatre work.
In some ways, she is an ordinary woman – a single mother to two boys, she knows about sacrifice, stretching thin and juggling. Yet she is clearly also an extraordinary woman – only the second woman to be inducted into the Logies Hall of Fame in 32 years. She is ordinary, she is extraordinary. She is all class.
The stage is set. Marooned overnight by a snowstorm in a grand country house are a cast of characters and a setting that even Agatha Christie might recognize – a vicar, an Army major, a Dowager, a sleuth and his sidekick – except that the sleuth is Jackson Brodie, and the ‘sidekick’ is DC Reggie Chase. The crumbling house – Burton Makepeace and its chatelaine the Dowager Lady Milton – suffered the loss of their last remaining painting of any value, a Turner, some years ago. The housekeeper, Sophie, who disappeared the same night, is suspected of stealing it.
Jackson, a reluctant hostage to the snowstorm, has been investigating the theft of another The Woman with a Weasel, a portrait, taken from the house of an elderly widow, on the morning she died. The suspect this time is the widow’s carer, Melanie. Is this a coincidence or is there a connection? And what secrets does The Woman with a Weasel hold? The puzzle is Jackson’s to solve. And let’s not forget that a convicted murderer is on the run on the moors around Burton Makepeace. All the while, in a bid to make money, Burton Makepeace is determined to keep hosting a shambolic Murder Mystery that acts as a backdrop while the real drama is being played out in the house.
Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely, in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. As Melina wonders if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.
In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.
Told in intertwining timelines, By Any Other Name, a sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire centers two women who are determined to create something beautiful despite the prejudices they face. Should a writer do whatever it takes to see her story live on . . . no matter the cost? This remarkable novel, rooted in primary historical sources, ensures the name Emilia Bassano will no longer be forgotten.
Ginny Dilboong is a young poet, fierce and deadly. She’s making sense of the world and her place in it, grappling with love, family and the spaces in which to create her art. Like powerful women before her, Ginny hugs the edges of waterways, and though she is a daughter of Country, the place that shapes her is not hers. Determined and brave, Ginny seeks to protect the truth of others while learning her own. The question is how?
And, all the while, others are watching. Some old, some new. They are the sound of the belburd as it echoes through the world; the sound of cars and trucks and trains. They are in trees and paper and the shape of ideas. They are the builder and the built. Everything, even Ginny, is because of them.
Surging out of the sea, the Bass Rock has for centuries watched over the lives that pass under its shadow on the Scottish mainland. And across the centuries the fates of three women are linked: to this place, to each other. In the early 1700s, Sarah, accused of being a witch, flees for her life. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Ruth navigates a new house, a new husband and the strange waters of the local community.
Six decades later, the house stands empty. Viv, mourning the death of her father, catalogues Ruth’s belongings and discovers her place in the past and perhaps a way forward.
It’s June 2021, and Arkady knows that Russia is preparing to invade and subsequently annex Ukraine as it did Crimea in 2014. He is, however, preoccupied with other grievances. His longtime lover, Tatiana Petrovna, has deserted him for her work as an investigative reporter. His corrupt boss has relegated him to a desk job. And he is having trouble with his dexterity and balance. A visit to his doctor reveals that these are symptoms for Parkinson’s Disease.
An acquaintance has asked him to find his daughter, Karina, an anti-Putin activist who has disappeared. In the course of the investigation, Arkady falls for Karina’s roommate, Elena, a Tatar from Ukraine. The search leads them to Kyiv, where rumblings of an armed conflict grow louder. Later, in Crimea, Tatiana reemerges to complicate Arkady’s new romance. And as he gets closer to locating Karina, Arkady discovers something that threatens his life as well as the lives of both Elena and Tatiana.
She wonders if they have discovered her missing yet. Has it broken in the news? Who has been assigned to cover her story? Have they started spooling through her social media and pulling out photographs? Constructing a narrative about who she is and what possible reason any person has to kidnap or kill her?
Kate Delaney has made the biggest mistake of her life. She picked the wrong guy to humiliate on a girls’ night out and now she is living every woman’s worst nightmare. Kate finds herself brutalised, bound and gagged in the back of a car being driven who knows where by a man whose name she doesn’t know, and she is petrified about what’s in store for her.
As president of the Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs advocated for the disempowered, the disenfranchised, the marginalised. She withstood relentless political pressure and media scrutiny as she defended the defenceless for five tumultuous years. How did this aspiring ballet dancer, dignified daughter of a tank commander and eminent law academic respond when appreciative passengers on a full airplane departing Canberra greeted her with a round of applause?
Speaking Up shares with readers the values that have guided Triggs’ convictions and the causes she has championed. She dares women to be a little vulgar and men to move beyond their comfort zones to achieve equity for all. And she will not rest until Australia has a Bill of Rights.
‘Victoria and Its Metropolis’ is a large two volume history of Victoria, written in 1888 by Alexander Sutherland. Beautifully presented with many etchings and drawings throughout, this book is the perfect addition to any library of Australian and Victorian history. It contains a huge amount of information on the people of the colony and its early history.
The first volume covers information from the discovery of Australia, through to the exploration of Victoria and the first settlers to the pioneers. It then continues on to discuss immigration, the era of gold, the development of government, agriculture, music and art, literature and the metropolis of Melbourne.
A large portion of the second volume examines the colony by district, which covers many districts throughout the state as well as the metropolitan area. Hundreds of biographical entries are scattered throughout and a comprehensive biographical index is included at the end. This work provides an invaluable resource for all local and social historians of Victoria and the metropolis of Melbourne.