New Books / Reviews
Listings and Reviews of New Books Summer 2023/2024
Passionate quilters Sarah Fielke and Amy Lobsiger first met a mutual obsession with quilting, a similar sense of humour, and an admiration for one another’s work brought them to each other’s attention. They discovered a shared love of small quilts and began swapping ideas and designs. Patterns, photos, and inspirations flew back and forth between Sarah in Australia and Amy in the USA, and the result is this charming book.
Cute Little Quilts features 15 step-by-step projects for doll-sized quilts. Sometimes the quilt is just one block, sometimes they comprise several blocks, but all have been designed with the same attention to detail as a full-sized quilt. There are seven quilts designed by Sarah and seven from Amy, and the final quilt is a collaboration with Amy making the central circle, then sending it to Sarah to turn it into a finished quilt. The techniques used include traditional piecing, paper piecing, hand appliqué, and embroidery, plus an array of expert tips and time-saving shortcuts. These charming small quilts will tempt you to try a new sewing technique or a new design concept, and you can either follow the instructions or use them as inspiration for your own quilt design. And with 15 very different quilts to choose from, you’ll find yourself returning to this book time and again.
This comprehensive guide by Jenifer Dick proves that appliqué is no longer an unattainable goal.
Inside, the author reveals her signature Invisible Zigzag Appliqué method with in-depth information, troubleshooting tips, and plenty of helpful hints. In addition, visual step-by-step instructions show you how to design, prepare, and sew an appliqué quilt. Intuitive and easy to follow, the book is organized into five parts showcasing 11 modern quilt projects. Each project uses a variety of preparation methods providing plenty of opportunity to test out your new skills.
In this outstanding new collection of 78 royalty-free designs, stained-glass artist Harry E. Zimmerman presents a wealth of excellent renderings that are very workable for a variety of stained glass projects.
The focus is on nature themes: many of the designs depict the sun, its light appearing through the clouds, bamboo plants, long reeds, and grasses. Also included are floral scenes with birds, small animals, and fish, plus many abstract designs, all imbued with the lovely, tranquil lines and rhythms of nature. Some of the compositions have a strong traditional feel, while others display a distinctively contemporary flair. Moreover, their varied shapes make them ideal for a broad range of stained glass work: windows, panels, and sidelights, mirrors, and much more. The beauty and adaptability of these designs will find an admiring audience among stained-glass artisans as well as those working in other arts and crafts.
Transform your ideas on creative fabric embellishment for textile art that’s full meaning and astounding texture, in this inspiring book by award-winning textile art tutor and artist Jan Dowson.
Whether it’s a landscape, a garden, an animal or a powerful memory of a place or object, Jan shows you how she develops them all into beautifully stitched representations that exude awe-inspiring detail, colour and expression.
Discover Jan’s unique sketchbook process, where she stores and collects natural items, and explores different patterns, textures, media and markings to cultivate her final design. See her simple yet effective methods for transforming her fabric for stitching, including dyeing, embellishing and stamping. Then, watch her transform an unassuming square of fabric into a contemporary piece of art brimming with colour, texture and extraordinary stitched markings, all made through the combination of traditional sewing techniques and other media.
Fat Quarterly e-zine members share the secrets of using colour in your quilting successfully.
Discover more about colour theory and how to use it in the context of quilting, then apply this theory to practical projects, from quilts and cushions, to wall hangings, table runners and bags. Features 6-color-themed sections with block ideas for every colour theory combination offers plenty of inspiration for you to create colourful projects. Fat Quarterly members include Brioni Greenberg, John Adams, Tacha Burecher and Lynne Goldsworthy.
Clear, step-by-step instructions for 50 stunning mosaic designs are included in this guide to mosaic creation for the home. Novices and seasoned mosaic artists alike will enjoy this fresh take on the art form and the thorough demonstrations of core techniques, from choosing materials and utilizing correct tools to applying grout and making the best use of colour.
Designs include magical nursery murals featuring castles, jungles, or pirate ships; bathroom panels depicting refreshing ocean scenes; and trompe l’oeil views perfect for kitchens. Suggestions for using found objects, such as pebbles, shells, and old pottery, to add further interest and originality to the finished piece are also included.
Keiko’s Ikebana offers an introduction to this international art form that is both practical and contemporary. Keiko’s unique approach combines traditional techniques with modern tastes, incorporating influences ranging from sculpture to today’s Western styles. The result is a one-of-a-kind look that is authentic, easy to create and attractive.
The book includes easy-to-follow instructions for creating 20 stunning ikebana arrangements to help readers bring this traditional Japanese art into their own homes. Readers will also be introduced to the history of ikebana, including its evolution from ancient times into the world of modern design, the basic ‘rules’ of ikebana design and suggestions for finding and choosing materials and supplies.
A must-read for pet lovers, an animal communicator reveals what animals would tell us if they could speak.
Readers should be prepared to be amazed and to laugh and cry as fascinating experiences of communicating telepathically with animals are shared. Full of amazing insights into animal behaviour, this heart-warming book is packed with remarkable stories. What dogs, cats, horses, and other creatures have to say about their health and happiness, their anxieties, and quiet despair is revealed; what animals want from their owners; what they love about the things their humans do, and what hurts them or drives them crazy. Sometimes sad, often funny, this book is full of lessons in how alike animals and humans are.
John and Jenny were young and deeply in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wiggly yellow fur ball of a puppy. Life would never be the same.
Marley quickly grew into an uncontrollable ninety-seven-pound steamroller of a Labrador retriever. Expelled from obedience school, even the tranquillisers prescribed by the vet couldn’t stop him.
Yet through the chaos and the hilarity, he won hearts and remained a steadfast model of devotion to his family, even when they were at their wits’ end. Unconditional love, they would learn, comes in many forms.
Winston and the Indoor Cat by Leila Rudge, 2021
A story about seeing what life is like on the other side of the window.
Two very different cats: Winston, a free-spirited explorer; and The Indoor Cat, lover of leisure; form a friendship and show each other how different their lives could be. Can The Indoor Cat be enticed by outdoor adventure? Will Winston be tempted by a life of indoor luxury?
Our Puppy’s Holiday by Ruth Brown, 1987
A story which chronicles the first day of a family’s holiday in Cornwall and their puppy’s first encounters with the delights of the seashore and countryside. Illustrated throughout in colour.
This novel tells the epic story of Violeta del Valle, a woman whose life spans one hundred years and bears witness to the greatest upheavals of the twentieth century. Violeta comes into the world on a stormy day in 1920, the first girl in a family of five boisterous sons. From the start, her life will be marked by extraordinary events, for the ripples of the Great War are still being felt, even as the Spanish flu arrives on the shores of her South American homeland almost at the moment of her birth.
Through her father’s prescience, the family will come through that crisis unscathed, only to face a new one as the Great Depression transforms the genteel city life she has known. Her family loses all and is forced to retreat to a wild and beautiful but remote part of the country. There, she will come of age, and her first suitor will come calling. She tells her story in the form of a letter to someone she loves above all others, recounting devastating heartbreak and passionate affairs, times of both poverty and wealth, terrible loss and immense joy. Her life will be shaped by some of the most important events of history: the fight for women’s rights, the rise and fall of tyrants, and, ultimately, not one but two pandemics.
Told through the eyes of a woman whose unforgettable passion, determination, and sense of humour will carry her through a lifetime of upheaval, Isabel Allende once more brings us an epic that is both fiercely inspiring and deeply emotional.
At the first wedding, there’s a shock.
The second wedding is unexpected.
By the third, Delphie thinks nothing could surprise her. But she’s wrong.
Delphie is enjoying her brother’s wedding. Her surprise last-minute Plus One has stunned her family and it’s also stopped any of them asking again why she’s still single. But when she sees all the missed calls that evening, she knows it can’t be good news. And she’s right.
Delphie has been living her best life, loving her job, her friends, her no-strings relationships and her dream house by the sea. Now she has to question everything she believed about who she is and what she wants. Is her mum right, is it time to settle down? Or does she want to keep on trying to have it all?
Each wedding of a glorious summer brings a new surprise. And as everything Delphie thought she had is threatened, she has the chance to reshape her future.
This anthology follows “Happy Endings” which collected stories by women on both sides of the Tasman from 1850 to 1930.
This collection includes writers such as Greville Texidor, Janet Frame, Helen Shaw, Fiona Farrell Poole, Beverley Farmer, Kate Greville and Helen Garner.
Colin dreams of escaping his parents’ New Zealand farm for a grand stage career. He makes it to London and a disastrous audition before meeting Tilda, beautiful Tilda, older, an artist who brings his future with her.
A heady romance leads to a new home in a decaying former bank in a small town hours from Melbourne. They are building a life together but there are cracks in the foundation.
This is a love story, told from passionate beginning to spectacular end. It is intimate and honest, blackly funny and emotionally devastating.
Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, 2010 – 4 DVD set
Shoah is Claude Lanzmann’s landmark documentary meditation on the Holocaust. Assembled from footage shot by the filmmaker during the 1970s and 1980s, it investigates the genocide at the level of experience: The geographical layout of the camps and the ghettos; the daily routines of imprisonment; the inexorable trauma of humiliation, punishment, extermination; and the fascinating insights of those who experienced these events first hand. Absent from the film is any imagery shot at the time the Holocaust occurred. There is only Lanzmann and his crew, filming in private spaces and now-dormant zones of eradication to extract testimony from a series of survivors, witnesses, and oppressors alike. Through his relentless questioning (aided on occasion by hidden camera), Lanzmann is able to coax out material of unparalleled emotional truth that constitutes both precious oral history and withering indictment.
Schindler’s List is a 1993 American epic historical drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Steven Zaillian. DVD.
It is based on the 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark by Australian novelist Thomas Keneally. The film follows Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand mostly Polish–Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as SS officer Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley as Schindler’s Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern.
Inspired by the true story of Muslims who saved the lives of Jewish children in the Second World War.
In 1942, in the Grand Mosque in Paris, 11-year-old Ruben is hiding from the Nazis. Already thousands of Jewish children have disappeared, and Rubens parents are desperately trying to find his sister. Ruben must learn how to pass himself off as a Muslim, while he waits for the infamous Fox to help him get to Spain to be reunited with his family. One hint of Ruben’s true identity and he’ll be killed. So will the people trying to save him. But when the mosque is raided and the Fox doesn’t come, Ruben is forced to flee. Finding himself in the south of France, he discovers that he must adjust to a new reality, and to the startling revelation of the Fox’s true identity.
In a memoir of a Jewish man’s search for his roots, the son of Holocaust survivors returns to his parents’ homeland in Poland to rediscover the former glory of East European Jewry.
It’s 1944 and sixteen-year-old ballerina and gymnast Edith Eger is sent to Auschwitz. Separated from her parents on arrival, she endures unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. When the camp is finally liberated, she is pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive.
The horrors of the Holocaust didn’t break Edith. In fact, they helped her learn to live again with a life-affirming strength and a truly remarkable resilience. The Choice is her unforgettable story.
A stirring account of the Australian government’s handling of the Children Overboard affair and the Pacific Solution is a remarkable piece of investigative journalism.
Marr and Wilkinson have pulled together the whole confronting tale of how through iron will, subterfuge, disregard for conventions of a civilised seafaring nation, the misuse of secret intelligence and the use of military force against the helpless, the federal government closed its borders in the quest for votes Through forensic research, the authors have managed to build a story that both thrills and appals. (Tony Wright, The Bulletin).
Telling the story of Australia as it is today, Gabrielle Chan has gone hyper-local. Unpacking the small towns around where she lives and the communities that keep them going through threat and times of plenty. With half her year spent in Canberra, reporting from Parliament House, and half her year in the sticks, she really does have a unique perspective. The Great Divide between city and country is only one subject that arises. The National Party talks about farmers, but what about those who live in regional towns? Her forensic focus in the nearby towns is on ordinary lives not often seen, and the conversations in this book are broad, national and at times international; immigration, transport, health, the NBN, globalization, and tariffs. Gabrielle also draws on her own observations about community. Newcomers initially face strong distrust based on money or race, but once you are accepted, there is a strong belonging and interaction, much more so than her experience in the city. Middle class people in the city, like Gabrielle, show compassion for poverty or racial difference, but there is little interaction with the “other.” That is the gift the country gave her. Gabrielle has spent 30 years covering politics and lived 20 of those years in the country. Her kids were raised in country schools where she did her time on school councils, watching the lives of fellow parents and their kids from the poorest to the richest rural families. Gabrielle served on community groups grappling with loss of population, economic recession and mundane parking issues. She has witnessed fiery town meetings dealing with bank closures and doctor shortages. She has felt parents’ extraordinary losses to ordinary causes like car accidents, drugs, and crime in a small town. And all this while documenting the modern Australian political story. This book is both the broad and the narrow, the personal and the public.
Nearly two hundred condemned women on board a sailing ship bound for Australia. One of them is a murderer. From debut author Hope Adams comes a thrilling novel based on the 1841 voyage of the convict ship Rajah, about confinement, hope, and the terrible things we do to survive.
London, 1841. One hundred eighty Englishwomen file aboard the Rajah, embarking on a three-month voyage to the other side of the world. They are daughters, sisters, mothers and convicts.
Transported for petty crimes. Except one of them has a deadly secret, and will do anything to flee justice. As the Rajah sails farther from land, the women forge a tenuous kinship. Until, in the middle of the cold and unforgiving sea, a young mother is mortally wounded, and the hunt is on for the assailant before he or she strikes again. Each woman called in for question has something to fear: Will she be attacked next? Will she be believed? Because far from land, there is nowhere to flee, and how can you prove innocence when you’ve already been found guilty?
Step into the lives of a team of regular middle-aged men who meet each week to play cricket in their local park. With these characters William will make us laugh and cry. Never again will we think that someone is just a regular bloke: everyone can be a king or a queen in their own suburb.
This landmark collection brings together the best Australian short stories written in the twentieth century. From early bush life to contemporary urban existence, The Penguin Century of Australian Stories celebrates our finest writers in all their modes: the lively comic fiction of Henry Lawson and Steele Rudd, the distinctive imaginations of Christina Stead and Patrick White, the experimental style of Peter Carey, and the highly lyrical prose of Brenda Walker and James Bradley.
Selected by Carmel Bird, these stories mirror the concerns of Australia’s past and present.
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.
A twisting new psychological thriller in which two women—one a former detective, the other a dangerous con artist—go head-to-head in an electrifying game of cat and mouse.
Mickey Gibson, single mother and former detective, leads a hectic life similar to that of many mums: juggling the demands of her two small children with the tasks of her job working remotely for ProEye, a global investigation company that hunts down wealthy tax and credit cheats.
When Mickey gets a call from a colleague named Arlene Robinson, she thinks nothing of Arlene’s unusual request for her to go and inventory the vacant home of an arms dealer who cheated ProEye’s clients and fled. That is, until she arrives at the mansion to discover a dead body in a secret room and that nothing is as it seems. Not only does the arms dealer not exist but the murder victim turns out to be Harry Lancaster, a man with mob ties who used to be in Witness Protection. What’s more, no one named Arlene Robinson works at ProEye.
In the blink of an eye, Gibson has become a prime suspect in a murder investigation and now her job is also on the line until she proves that she was set up. Before long, Gibson is locked in a battle of wits with a brilliant woman with no name, a hidden past, and unknown motives whose end game is as mysterious as it is deadly.
Honeymooners at a posh resort receive an ominous warning with deadly consequences in the latest gripping, twisty psychological thriller from New York Times bestselling author Sophie Hannah.
Jane and William are enjoying their honeymoon at an exclusive couples-only resort until Jane receives a chilling note warning her to “Beware of the couple at the table nearest to yours.” At dinner that night, five other couples are present, and none of their tables is any nearer or farther away than any of the others. It’s almost as if someone has set the scene in order to make the warning note meaningless but why would anyone do that?
Jane has no idea. But someone in this dining room will be dead before breakfast, and all the evidence will suggest that no one there that night could have possibly committed the crime.
A private investigator returning to the hometown he fled years ago becomes entangled in the disappearance of two teenage girls in this stunning literary crime thriller.
Reid left the small town of Manson a decade ago, promising his former Chief of Police boss he’d never return. He made a new life in the city, became a PI and turned his back on his old life for good.
Now an insurance firm has offered him good money to look into a suspicious car crash, and he finds himself back in the place he grew up – home to his complicated family history, a scarring relationship breakdown and a very public career-ending incident.
As Reid’s investigation unfolds, nothing is as it seems: rumours are swirling about the well-liked young woman who was driving the car which killed her professor husband, while a second local student has just disappeared. As Reid veers off course from the job he has been paid to do, will he find himself in the dangerous position of taking on the town again?
Nine strangers receive a list with their names on it in the mail. Nothing else, just a list of names on a single sheet of paper. None of the nine people know or have ever met the others on the list. They dismiss it as junk mail, a fluke – until very, very bad things begin happening to people on the list. First, a well-liked old man is drowned on a beach in the small town of Kennewick, Maine. Then, a father is shot in the back while running through his quiet neighbourhood in suburban Massachusetts. A frightening pattern is emerging, but what do these nine people have in common? Their professions range from oncology nurse to aspiring actor.
FBI agent Jessica Winslow, who is on the list herself, is determined to find out. Could there be some dark secret that binds them all together? Or is this the work of a murderous madman? As the mysterious sender stalks these nine strangers, they find themselves constantly looking over their shoulders, wondering who will be crossed off next.
Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers and Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley are back in the next Lynley novel from New York Time’s bestselling author Elizabeth George.
When a police detective is taken off life support after falling into a coma, only an autopsy reveals the murderous act that precipitated her death. She’d been working on a special task force within North London’s Nigerian community, and Acting Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley is assigned to the case, which has far-reaching cultural associations having nothing to do with life as he knows it. In his pursuit of a killer determined to remain hidden, he’s assisted by Detective Sergeants Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata. They must sort through the lies and the secret lives of people whose superficial cooperation masks the damage they do to one another.
Meet Harper Brown. Occupation: Arts journalist. Dream job: Hard-hitting news reporter. Location: Paris. Loves: True crime podcasts, art galleries, coffee, whiskey. Does not love: fake people, toxic positivity, being told how to live her life by smug workmates who have no life (that’s you, Stan), her narcissistic ex. Favourite book: 1984. Favourite artist: Noah X. Sometimes. Favourite painting: Klimt’s Schubert at the Piano. Special skills: breaking out of car boots, picking locks and escaping relationships.
Superpower: She can lose any guy in three minutes flat. Ask her how.
Secret: She’s hot on the trail of a murderer and the scoop of a lifetime.
That’s if the killer doesn’t catch her first.
Alone in the wilderness, they are picked off one by one. Gripping, a standalone romantic thriller from an author at the top of her game. A tragic accident, a terrible crime, an unknown threat.
Scarred by a recent tragedy on Federation Peak, Tess Atherton is reluctant to guide a group of young hikers in the wild Tasmanian winter, but it seems safer than remaining amid the violence that threatens them in Hobart. Little does she know that she has brought the danger with her …
Detective Senior Sergeant Jared Denham is closing in on a serial killer, but someone doesn’t want him getting to the truth and the case is becoming personal. He already owes Tess his life, and wants to return the favour, but when it comes to enemies, Jared may be looking in the wrong direction. Time is running out, and death is stalking them both.
Lynne Kelly has discovered that a powerful memory technique used by the ancients can unlock the secrets of the Neolithic stone circles of Britain and Europe, the ancient Pueblo buildings in New Mexico and other prehistoric stone monuments across the world. We can still use the memory code today to train our own memories.
In the past, the elders had encyclopaedic memories. They could name all the animals and plants across the landscape, and the stars in the sky too. Yet most of us struggle to memorise more than a short poem.
Using traditional Aboriginal Australian songlines as the key, Lynne Kelly has identified the powerful memory technique used by indigenous people around the world. She has discovered that this ancient memory technique is the secret behind the great stone monuments like Stonehenge, which have for so long puzzled archaeologists.
The stone circles across Britain and northern Europe, the elaborate stone houses of New Mexico, the huge animal shapes at Nasca in Peru, and the statues of Easter Island all serve as the most effective memory system ever invented by humans. They allowed people in non-literate cultures to memorise the vast amounts of practical information they needed to survive.
Dave and Si are back carving up the roads of the world, from Morocco, to Belgium, to India and more, on their motorbikes in search of adventure and delicious food.
Their infectious enthusiasm and natural charm makes them a joy to watch and their delicious, relaxed food is a pleasure to cook and eat.
This book is no exception, with recipes for fuss-free and tasty food using easy to source ingredients, as well as a load more of their fascinating travelling tales.
When Maeve O’Brien’s boss sends her to a dreary old island to finalise some paperwork, she couldn’t be happier. It’s the career boost she needs to become a fully-fledged lawyer and besides, it hasn’t been so great on the home front in Dublin. Maeve’s oldest friend and flat-mate has kicked her out, and moving back in with her uptight mother has been less than cosy.
But her reception on Hy Brasil, a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, couldn’t be any more hostile, it’s as if the island itself wants her gone. The locals are all ancient and spookily well preserved and they’re all so nasty. And what is that terrible screaming noise that echoes around the island? No island is going to scare Maeve off, even if she does miss her credit card, and her make-up, and bright shiny nightclubs, and the one night stands. She’s determined to track down Sean Fitzpatrick, the elusive islander, whose signature on Maeve’s paperwork is going to transform the island and open it up to the world.
And then, somehow, life begins to change. The island might be miserable and treacherous, but it’s also beautiful and strangely seductive. Maeve’s never felt better. And there’s also Killian, the dreamy teacher, who stirs up all kinds of unexpected feelings in Maeve.
Stella Hardy, the wisecracking social worker, is back to tackle crooked private contractors, an exotic cattle scam, and a delicious Mushroom Jalfrezi.
All Stella Hardy wants is a romantic country getaway with her artist boyfriend, Brophy. Instead, she must head to the Athol Goldwater Agricultural Prison (aka Arsehole Bogwater) to visit her jailbird brother, Ben, and sort out some ‘urgent’ family paperwork. But Stella has barely set foot in the prison when a prisoner, Joe Phelan, is found dead. Before she knows it, Stella finds herself tasked, against her will, with investigating Joe’s suspicious death away from the eyes of police, including her best friend, Detective Phuong Nguyen. Her old nemesis Minister for Justice Marcus Pugh is pressuring her from above to save his election-year bacon, and Joe’s old friend and former gang member, Percy Brash, is providing a much more chilling form of pressure from below, promising to reduce her to mush and bone fragments if she doesn’t give him the name of Joe’s killer, and soon. As the clock counts down, Stella becomes embroiled in a story of corruption, conspiracy, and high-tech cattle-wrangling, all while trying to manage her brother’s pregnant girlfriend, Loretta, get to the bottom of Brophy’s increasingly strange behaviour, and evade the murderous intentions of a shadowy mercenary. And then things get really crazy. It’s Stella’s last hurrah, and she’s going out with a bang.
Stoke Newington, 1863: Little Margaret Lovejoy is found brutally murdered in the outhouse at her family’s estate. A few days later, a man is cut down in a similar manner on the doorstep of courtesan and professional detective Heloise Chancey’s prestigious address. At the same time, Heloise’s maid, Amah Li Leen, must confront events from her past that appear to have erupted into the present day.
Once again Heloise is caught up in a maelstrom of murder and deceit that threatens to reach into the very heart of her existence.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
The husband, a heart surgeon at the top of his field, Stephen Aston is getting married again. But first he must divorce his current wife, even though she can no longer speak for herself.
The daughters, Tully and Rachel Aston look upon their father’s fiancée, Heather, as nothing but an interloper. Heather is younger than both of them. Clearly, she’s after their father’s money.
The former wife. With their mother in a precarious position, Tully and Rachel are determined to get to the truth about their family’s secrets, the new wife closing in, and who their father really is.
The younger wife, Heather has secrets of her own. Will getting to the truth unleash the most dangerous impulses in all of them?
This controversial bestselling novel in the Arab world reveals the political corruption, sexual repression, religious extremism, and modern hopes of Egypt today.
All manner of flawed and fragile humanity reside in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendour now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo: a fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed “scientist of women”; a sultry, voluptuous siren; a devout young student, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism; a newspaper editor helplessly in love with a policeman; a corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify his desires.
These disparate lives careen toward an explosive conclusion in Alaa Al Aswany’s remarkable international bestseller. Teeming with frank sexuality and heartfelt compassion, this book is an important window on to the experience of loss and love in the Arab world.
Boori Monty Pryor’s career path has taken him from the Aboriginal fringe camps of his birth to the runway, the catwalk, the basketball court, the DJ console, and now to performance and story-telling around the country. “You’ve got to try and play the white man’s game and stay black while you’re doing it,” his brother used to tell him.
With writer and photographer Meme McDonald, Boori leads you along the paths he has travelled, pausing to meet his family and friends, while sharing the story of his life, his pain and his hopes, with humour and compassion.
Shocking news reaches the Thursday Murder Club.
An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing. As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home.
With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?
The first comprehensive and authoritative history of the Koh-I-Noor, arguably the most celebrated and mythologised jewel in the world.
On 29 March 1849, the ten-year-old Maharajah of the Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the centre of the great Fort in Lahore. There, in a public ceremony, the frightened but dignified child handed over to the British East India Company in a formal Act of Submission to Queen Victoria not only swathes of the richest land in India, but also arguably the single most valuable object in the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-I-Noor diamond, the Mountain of Light.
The history of the Koh-I-Noor that was then commissioned by the British may have been one woven together from the gossip of Delhi Bazaars, but it was to be become the accepted version. Only now is it finally challenged, freeing the diamond from the fog of mythology which has clung to it for so long. The resulting history is one of greed, murder, torture, colonialism and appropriation through an impressive slice of south and central Asian history. It ends with the jewel in its current controversial setting: in the crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother
A provocative, immersive medieval novel starring one of literature’s most unforgettable characters in her own words: Chaucer’s bold and libidinous Wife of Bath.
England, 1364. When married off at aged twelve to an elderly farmer, brazen redheaded Eleanor quickly realizes it won’t matter what she says or does, God is not on her side or any poor woman’s for that matter. But then again, Eleanor was born under the joint signs of Venus and Mars, making her both a lover and a fighter.
Aided by a head for business (and a surprisingly kind husband), Eleanor manages to turn her first marriage into success, and she rises through society from a cast-off farm girl to a woman of fortune who becomes a trusted friend of the social-climbing poet Geoffrey Chaucer. But more marriages follow, some happy, some not, several pilgrimages, many lovers, murder, mayhem, and many turns of fortune’s wheel as Eleanor pursues the one thing that all women want: control of their own lives.
LARGE PRINT EDITION
All That I Am is a masterful and exhilarating exploration of bravery and betrayal, of the risks and sacrifices some people make for their beliefs, and of heroism hidden in the most unexpected places.
When eighteen-year-old Ruth Becker visits her cousin Dora in Munich in 1923, she meets the love of her life, the dashing young journalist Hans Wesemann, and eagerly joins in the heady activities of the militant political left in Germany. Ten years later, Ruth and Hans are married and living in Weimar Berlin when Hitler is elected chancellor of Germany. Together with Dora and her lover, Ernst Toller, the celebrated poet and self-doubting revolutionary, the four become hunted outlaws overnight and are forced to flee to London. Inspired by the fearless Dora to breathtaking acts of courage, the friends risk betrayal and deceit as they dedicate themselves to a dangerous mission: to inform the British government of the very real Nazi threat to which it remains wilfully blind. All That I Am is the heartbreaking story of these extraordinary people, who discover that Hitler’s reach extends much further than they had thought.
It’s 1944 and sixteen-year-old ballerina and gymnast Edith Eger is sent to Auschwitz. Separated from her parents on arrival, she endures unimaginable experiences, including being made to dance for the infamous Josef Mengele. When the camp is finally liberated, she is pulled from a pile of bodies, barely alive.
The horrors of the Holocaust didn’t break Edith. In fact, they helped her learn to live again with a life-affirming strength and a truly remarkable resilience. The Choice is her unforgettable story.
A stirring account of the Australian government’s handling of the Children Overboard affair and the Pacific Solution is a remarkable piece of investigative journalism.
Marr and Wilkinson have pulled together the whole confronting tale of how through iron will, subterfuge, disregard for conventions of a civilised seafaring nation, the misuse of secret intelligence and the use of military force against the helpless, the federal government closed its borders in the quest for votes Through forensic research, the authors have managed to build a story that both thrills and appals. (Tony Wright, The Bulletin).
Telling the story of Australia as it is today, Gabrielle Chan has gone hyper-local. Unpacking the small towns around where she lives and the communities that keep them going through threat and times of plenty. With half her year spent in Canberra, reporting from Parliament House, and half her year in the sticks, she really does have a unique perspective. The Great Divide between city and country is only one subject that arises. The National Party talks about farmers, but what about those who live in regional towns? Her forensic focus in the nearby towns is on ordinary lives not often seen, and the conversations in this book are broad, national and at times international; immigration, transport, health, the NBN, globalization, and tariffs. Gabrielle also draws on her own observations about community. Newcomers initially face strong distrust based on money or race, but once you are accepted, there is a strong belonging and interaction, much more so than her experience in the city. Middle class people in the city, like Gabrielle, show compassion for poverty or racial difference, but there is little interaction with the “other.” That is the gift the country gave her. Gabrielle has spent 30 years covering politics and lived 20 of those years in the country. Her kids were raised in country schools where she did her time on school councils, watching the lives of fellow parents and their kids from the poorest to the richest rural families. Gabrielle served on community groups grappling with loss of population, economic recession and mundane parking issues. She has witnessed fiery town meetings dealing with bank closures and doctor shortages. She has felt parents’ extraordinary losses to ordinary causes like car accidents, drugs, and crime in a small town. And all this while documenting the modern Australian political story. This book is both the broad and the narrow, the personal and the public.
Nearly two hundred condemned women on board a sailing ship bound for Australia. One of them is a murderer. From debut author Hope Adams comes a thrilling novel based on the 1841 voyage of the convict ship Rajah, about confinement, hope, and the terrible things we do to survive.
London, 1841. One hundred eighty Englishwomen file aboard the Rajah, embarking on a three-month voyage to the other side of the world. They are daughters, sisters, mothers and convicts.
Transported for petty crimes. Except one of them has a deadly secret, and will do anything to flee justice. As the Rajah sails farther from land, the women forge a tenuous kinship. Until, in the middle of the cold and unforgiving sea, a young mother is mortally wounded, and the hunt is on for the assailant before he or she strikes again. Each woman called in for question has something to fear: Will she be attacked next? Will she be believed? Because far from land, there is nowhere to flee, and how can you prove innocence when you’ve already been found guilty?
Step into the lives of a team of regular middle-aged men who meet each week to play cricket in their local park. With these characters William will make us laugh and cry. Never again will we think that someone is just a regular bloke: everyone can be a king or a queen in their own suburb.
This landmark collection brings together the best Australian short stories written in the twentieth century. From early bush life to contemporary urban existence, The Penguin Century of Australian Stories celebrates our finest writers in all their modes: the lively comic fiction of Henry Lawson and Steele Rudd, the distinctive imaginations of Christina Stead and Patrick White, the experimental style of Peter Carey, and the highly lyrical prose of Brenda Walker and James Bradley.
Selected by Carmel Bird, these stories mirror the concerns of Australia’s past and present.
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.
A twisting new psychological thriller in which two women—one a former detective, the other a dangerous con artist—go head-to-head in an electrifying game of cat and mouse.
Mickey Gibson, single mother and former detective, leads a hectic life similar to that of many mums: juggling the demands of her two small children with the tasks of her job working remotely for ProEye, a global investigation company that hunts down wealthy tax and credit cheats.
When Mickey gets a call from a colleague named Arlene Robinson, she thinks nothing of Arlene’s unusual request for her to go and inventory the vacant home of an arms dealer who cheated ProEye’s clients and fled. That is, until she arrives at the mansion to discover a dead body in a secret room and that nothing is as it seems. Not only does the arms dealer not exist but the murder victim turns out to be Harry Lancaster, a man with mob ties who used to be in Witness Protection. What’s more, no one named Arlene Robinson works at ProEye.
In the blink of an eye, Gibson has become a prime suspect in a murder investigation and now her job is also on the line until she proves that she was set up. Before long, Gibson is locked in a battle of wits with a brilliant woman with no name, a hidden past, and unknown motives whose end game is as mysterious as it is deadly.
Honeymooners at a posh resort receive an ominous warning with deadly consequences in the latest gripping, twisty psychological thriller from New York Times bestselling author Sophie Hannah.
Jane and William are enjoying their honeymoon at an exclusive couples-only resort until Jane receives a chilling note warning her to “Beware of the couple at the table nearest to yours.” At dinner that night, five other couples are present, and none of their tables is any nearer or farther away than any of the others. It’s almost as if someone has set the scene in order to make the warning note meaningless but why would anyone do that?
Jane has no idea. But someone in this dining room will be dead before breakfast, and all the evidence will suggest that no one there that night could have possibly committed the crime.
A private investigator returning to the hometown he fled years ago becomes entangled in the disappearance of two teenage girls in this stunning literary crime thriller.
Reid left the small town of Manson a decade ago, promising his former Chief of Police boss he’d never return. He made a new life in the city, became a PI and turned his back on his old life for good.
Now an insurance firm has offered him good money to look into a suspicious car crash, and he finds himself back in the place he grew up – home to his complicated family history, a scarring relationship breakdown and a very public career-ending incident.
As Reid’s investigation unfolds, nothing is as it seems: rumours are swirling about the well-liked young woman who was driving the car which killed her professor husband, while a second local student has just disappeared. As Reid veers off course from the job he has been paid to do, will he find himself in the dangerous position of taking on the town again?
Nine strangers receive a list with their names on it in the mail. Nothing else, just a list of names on a single sheet of paper. None of the nine people know or have ever met the others on the list. They dismiss it as junk mail, a fluke – until very, very bad things begin happening to people on the list. First, a well-liked old man is drowned on a beach in the small town of Kennewick, Maine. Then, a father is shot in the back while running through his quiet neighbourhood in suburban Massachusetts. A frightening pattern is emerging, but what do these nine people have in common? Their professions range from oncology nurse to aspiring actor.
FBI agent Jessica Winslow, who is on the list herself, is determined to find out. Could there be some dark secret that binds them all together? Or is this the work of a murderous madman? As the mysterious sender stalks these nine strangers, they find themselves constantly looking over their shoulders, wondering who will be crossed off next.
Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers and Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley are back in the next Lynley novel from New York Time’s bestselling author Elizabeth George.
When a police detective is taken off life support after falling into a coma, only an autopsy reveals the murderous act that precipitated her death. She’d been working on a special task force within North London’s Nigerian community, and Acting Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley is assigned to the case, which has far-reaching cultural associations having nothing to do with life as he knows it. In his pursuit of a killer determined to remain hidden, he’s assisted by Detective Sergeants Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata. They must sort through the lies and the secret lives of people whose superficial cooperation masks the damage they do to one another.
Meet Harper Brown. Occupation: Arts journalist. Dream job: Hard-hitting news reporter. Location: Paris. Loves: True crime podcasts, art galleries, coffee, whiskey. Does not love: fake people, toxic positivity, being told how to live her life by smug workmates who have no life (that’s you, Stan), her narcissistic ex. Favourite book: 1984. Favourite artist: Noah X. Sometimes. Favourite painting: Klimt’s Schubert at the Piano. Special skills: breaking out of car boots, picking locks and escaping relationships.
Superpower: She can lose any guy in three minutes flat. Ask her how.
Secret: She’s hot on the trail of a murderer and the scoop of a lifetime.
That’s if the killer doesn’t catch her first.
Alone in the wilderness, they are picked off one by one. Gripping, a standalone romantic thriller from an author at the top of her game. A tragic accident, a terrible crime, an unknown threat.
Scarred by a recent tragedy on Federation Peak, Tess Atherton is reluctant to guide a group of young hikers in the wild Tasmanian winter, but it seems safer than remaining amid the violence that threatens them in Hobart. Little does she know that she has brought the danger with her …
Detective Senior Sergeant Jared Denham is closing in on a serial killer, but someone doesn’t want him getting to the truth and the case is becoming personal. He already owes Tess his life, and wants to return the favour, but when it comes to enemies, Jared may be looking in the wrong direction. Time is running out, and death is stalking them both.
Lynne Kelly has discovered that a powerful memory technique used by the ancients can unlock the secrets of the Neolithic stone circles of Britain and Europe, the ancient Pueblo buildings in New Mexico and other prehistoric stone monuments across the world. We can still use the memory code today to train our own memories.
In the past, the elders had encyclopaedic memories. They could name all the animals and plants across the landscape, and the stars in the sky too. Yet most of us struggle to memorise more than a short poem.
Using traditional Aboriginal Australian songlines as the key, Lynne Kelly has identified the powerful memory technique used by indigenous people around the world. She has discovered that this ancient memory technique is the secret behind the great stone monuments like Stonehenge, which have for so long puzzled archaeologists.
The stone circles across Britain and northern Europe, the elaborate stone houses of New Mexico, the huge animal shapes at Nasca in Peru, and the statues of Easter Island all serve as the most effective memory system ever invented by humans. They allowed people in non-literate cultures to memorise the vast amounts of practical information they needed to survive.
Dave and Si are back carving up the roads of the world, from Morocco, to Belgium, to India and more, on their motorbikes in search of adventure and delicious food.
Their infectious enthusiasm and natural charm makes them a joy to watch and their delicious, relaxed food is a pleasure to cook and eat.
This book is no exception, with recipes for fuss-free and tasty food using easy to source ingredients, as well as a load more of their fascinating travelling tales.
When Maeve O’Brien’s boss sends her to a dreary old island to finalise some paperwork, she couldn’t be happier. It’s the career boost she needs to become a fully-fledged lawyer and besides, it hasn’t been so great on the home front in Dublin. Maeve’s oldest friend and flat-mate has kicked her out, and moving back in with her uptight mother has been less than cosy.
But her reception on Hy Brasil, a remote island off the west coast of Ireland, couldn’t be any more hostile, it’s as if the island itself wants her gone. The locals are all ancient and spookily well preserved and they’re all so nasty. And what is that terrible screaming noise that echoes around the island? No island is going to scare Maeve off, even if she does miss her credit card, and her make-up, and bright shiny nightclubs, and the one night stands. She’s determined to track down Sean Fitzpatrick, the elusive islander, whose signature on Maeve’s paperwork is going to transform the island and open it up to the world.
And then, somehow, life begins to change. The island might be miserable and treacherous, but it’s also beautiful and strangely seductive. Maeve’s never felt better. And there’s also Killian, the dreamy teacher, who stirs up all kinds of unexpected feelings in Maeve.
Stella Hardy, the wisecracking social worker, is back to tackle crooked private contractors, an exotic cattle scam, and a delicious Mushroom Jalfrezi.
All Stella Hardy wants is a romantic country getaway with her artist boyfriend, Brophy. Instead, she must head to the Athol Goldwater Agricultural Prison (aka Arsehole Bogwater) to visit her jailbird brother, Ben, and sort out some ‘urgent’ family paperwork. But Stella has barely set foot in the prison when a prisoner, Joe Phelan, is found dead. Before she knows it, Stella finds herself tasked, against her will, with investigating Joe’s suspicious death away from the eyes of police, including her best friend, Detective Phuong Nguyen. Her old nemesis Minister for Justice Marcus Pugh is pressuring her from above to save his election-year bacon, and Joe’s old friend and former gang member, Percy Brash, is providing a much more chilling form of pressure from below, promising to reduce her to mush and bone fragments if she doesn’t give him the name of Joe’s killer, and soon. As the clock counts down, Stella becomes embroiled in a story of corruption, conspiracy, and high-tech cattle-wrangling, all while trying to manage her brother’s pregnant girlfriend, Loretta, get to the bottom of Brophy’s increasingly strange behaviour, and evade the murderous intentions of a shadowy mercenary. And then things get really crazy. It’s Stella’s last hurrah, and she’s going out with a bang.
Stoke Newington, 1863: Little Margaret Lovejoy is found brutally murdered in the outhouse at her family’s estate. A few days later, a man is cut down in a similar manner on the doorstep of courtesan and professional detective Heloise Chancey’s prestigious address. At the same time, Heloise’s maid, Amah Li Leen, must confront events from her past that appear to have erupted into the present day.
Once again Heloise is caught up in a maelstrom of murder and deceit that threatens to reach into the very heart of her existence.
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
The husband, a heart surgeon at the top of his field, Stephen Aston is getting married again. But first he must divorce his current wife, even though she can no longer speak for herself.
The daughters, Tully and Rachel Aston look upon their father’s fiancée, Heather, as nothing but an interloper. Heather is younger than both of them. Clearly, she’s after their father’s money.
The former wife. With their mother in a precarious position, Tully and Rachel are determined to get to the truth about their family’s secrets, the new wife closing in, and who their father really is.
The younger wife, Heather has secrets of her own. Will getting to the truth unleash the most dangerous impulses in all of them?
This controversial bestselling novel in the Arab world reveals the political corruption, sexual repression, religious extremism, and modern hopes of Egypt today.
All manner of flawed and fragile humanity reside in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendour now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo: a fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed “scientist of women”; a sultry, voluptuous siren; a devout young student, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism; a newspaper editor helplessly in love with a policeman; a corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify his desires.
These disparate lives careen toward an explosive conclusion in Alaa Al Aswany’s remarkable international bestseller. Teeming with frank sexuality and heartfelt compassion, this book is an important window on to the experience of loss and love in the Arab world.
Boori Monty Pryor’s career path has taken him from the Aboriginal fringe camps of his birth to the runway, the catwalk, the basketball court, the DJ console, and now to performance and story-telling around the country. “You’ve got to try and play the white man’s game and stay black while you’re doing it,” his brother used to tell him.
With writer and photographer Meme McDonald, Boori leads you along the paths he has travelled, pausing to meet his family and friends, while sharing the story of his life, his pain and his hopes, with humour and compassion.
Shocking news reaches the Thursday Murder Club.
An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing. As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home.
With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?
The first comprehensive and authoritative history of the Koh-I-Noor, arguably the most celebrated and mythologised jewel in the world.
On 29 March 1849, the ten-year-old Maharajah of the Punjab was ushered into the magnificent Mirrored Hall at the centre of the great Fort in Lahore. There, in a public ceremony, the frightened but dignified child handed over to the British East India Company in a formal Act of Submission to Queen Victoria not only swathes of the richest land in India, but also arguably the single most valuable object in the subcontinent: the celebrated Koh-I-Noor diamond, the Mountain of Light.
The history of the Koh-I-Noor that was then commissioned by the British may have been one woven together from the gossip of Delhi Bazaars, but it was to be become the accepted version. Only now is it finally challenged, freeing the diamond from the fog of mythology which has clung to it for so long. The resulting history is one of greed, murder, torture, colonialism and appropriation through an impressive slice of south and central Asian history. It ends with the jewel in its current controversial setting: in the crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother
A provocative, immersive medieval novel starring one of literature’s most unforgettable characters in her own words: Chaucer’s bold and libidinous Wife of Bath.
England, 1364. When married off at aged twelve to an elderly farmer, brazen redheaded Eleanor quickly realizes it won’t matter what she says or does, God is not on her side or any poor woman’s for that matter. But then again, Eleanor was born under the joint signs of Venus and Mars, making her both a lover and a fighter.
Aided by a head for business (and a surprisingly kind husband), Eleanor manages to turn her first marriage into success, and she rises through society from a cast-off farm girl to a woman of fortune who becomes a trusted friend of the social-climbing poet Geoffrey Chaucer. But more marriages follow, some happy, some not, several pilgrimages, many lovers, murder, mayhem, and many turns of fortune’s wheel as Eleanor pursues the one thing that all women want: control of their own lives.
LARGE PRINT EDITION
All That I Am is a masterful and exhilarating exploration of bravery and betrayal, of the risks and sacrifices some people make for their beliefs, and of heroism hidden in the most unexpected places.
When eighteen-year-old Ruth Becker visits her cousin Dora in Munich in 1923, she meets the love of her life, the dashing young journalist Hans Wesemann, and eagerly joins in the heady activities of the militant political left in Germany. Ten years later, Ruth and Hans are married and living in Weimar Berlin when Hitler is elected chancellor of Germany. Together with Dora and her lover, Ernst Toller, the celebrated poet and self-doubting revolutionary, the four become hunted outlaws overnight and are forced to flee to London. Inspired by the fearless Dora to breathtaking acts of courage, the friends risk betrayal and deceit as they dedicate themselves to a dangerous mission: to inform the British government of the very real Nazi threat to which it remains wilfully blind. All That I Am is the heartbreaking story of these extraordinary people, who discover that Hitler’s reach extends much further than they had thought.