New Books / Reviews
Listings and Reviews of New Books Winter 2024
Legendary art restorer and spy Gabriel Allon joins forces with a brilliant and beautiful master-thief to track down the world’s most valuable missing painting but soon finds himself in a desperate race to prevent an unthinkable conflict between Russia and the West.
On the morning after the Venice Preservation Society’s annual black-tie gala, art restorer and legendary spy Gabriel Allon enters his favorite coffee bar on the island of Murano to find General Cesare Ferrari, the commander of the Art Squad, eagerly awaiting his arrival. The Carabinieri have made a startling discovery in the Amalfi villa of a murdered South African shipping tycoon-a secret vault containing an empty frame and stretcher matching the dimensions of the world’s most valuable missing painting. General Ferrari asks Gabriel to quietly track down the artwork before the trail goes cold.
In 1969, sisters Trang and Quỳnh, desperate to help their parents pay off debts, leave their rural village and become “bar girls” in Sài Gòn, drinking, flirting (and more) with American GIs in return for money. As the war moves closer to the city, the once-innocent Trang gets swept up in an irresistible romance with a young and charming American helicopter pilot, Dan.
Decades later, Dan returns to Việt Nam with his wife, Linda, hoping to find a way to heal from his PTSD and, unbeknownst to her, reckon with secrets from his past. At the same time, Phong, the son of a Black American soldier and a Vietnamese woman, embarks on a search to find both his parents and a way out of Việt Nam. Abandoned in front of an orphanage, Phong grew up being called “the dust of life,” “Black American imperialist,” and “child of the enemy,” and he dreams of a better life for himself and his family in the U.S.
The Forever War tells the story of how America’s political polarization is 250 years in the making and argues that the roots of its modern-day malaise are to be found in its troubled past. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the American experiment is failing. Division, mistrust and misinformation are now its defining characteristics. The storming of the Capitol, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the increasing spotlight on Second Amendment rights raise the spectre of further political violence, and even the possibility of a second civil war.
Nick Bryant argues that the hate, divisiveness and paranoia we see today are in fact a core part of America’s story. Combining brilliant storytelling with historical research, Bryant argues that insurrections, assassinations and massacres from the American Civil War through to JFK and the inner city race riots of the late ’60s, up to the more recent high school shootings and the murder of George Floyd should sadly not be seen as abnormalities; in fact they are a part of the fabric of the history of America
The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties, all single, all with PhDs, they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill, until one day their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home.
Together for the first time in years, the Flatterys descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found. Sheltered in a derelict bungalow, they reach into their common past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future. Warm, fiercely witty, and unexpectedly hopeful, The Alternatives is an unforgettable portrait of a family perched on our collective precipice, told by one of Ireland’s most gifted storytellers.
This is probably the best-known work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, essayist, poet and activist. It centres on the lives of a Southern Baptist missionary and his family who move to the Congo, a place where Kingsolver lived as a child.
The story of family tragedy and undoing, narrated by the wife and four daughters, is set against the background of the fight for independence from Belgium and the ensuing events that rob the new African nation of its economic and political autonomy. I would also recommend other books by Barbara Kingsolver, including her latest novel, Demon Copperhead. Published in 2022, this coming-of-age story is a contemporary Dickensian tragedy set in the back blocks of America with battles against neglect, poverty, exploitation and opioid addiction. Don’t be put off: it is also the story of survival and resilience.
This is an anthology of 51 short works, reflecting the diversity of responses to the question what was it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia?
Some of the authors are familiar: Miranda Tapsell, writing with humour about her determination to dress up as Baby Spice, and not be typecast as ‘the dark Spice’; Adam Goodes, describing his childhood playing sport, and the need to have a dream and to work hard to achieve it; Deborah Cheetham, who identified the ‘when’ of growing up as the moment that she could not sing a national anthem that described the oldest living culture as ‘young’. Others are less well known, some young, some reflecting on a childhood in Australia of the 50s and 60s. If I had to single out one it is the response of Alice Eather, teacher, activist and poet, who grew up In Brisbane but returned to her ancestral country in Maningrida, Northern Territory. A spoken word poet, you can view her reading the poem Yuya Karraburra (Fire is Burning) on youtube.com. Alice Eather died in 2017, aged 28.
Nearly two hundred condemned women are 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. As the Rajah sails farther from land, the women forge a tenuous kinship while sewing the Rajah Quilt together.
Then 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 your innocence when you are already a convicted criminal?
These are the last days of 1999. At St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, as the world waits for the new millennium, Lucy, a young Australian woman looks up at Michelangelo’s Pietà behind its pane of bullet-proof glass; a red kabbalah string circles her wrist. She has come with the mysterious parcel her recently deceased mother asked her to bring to the box marked POSTE VATICANE.
But before Rome there is Saint-Cloud. Here, on the outskirts of Paris, Lucy works as an au pair for Jean-Claude and his wife Mathilde. When Mathilde leaves for Central Australia to research the Aboriginal artist Kumanjayi, Lucy’s circle of contacts becomes smaller and strangely intimate: Jean-Claude, the baby Felix for whom she cares, and the couple’s charismatic friend Sébastien, a marble restorer. Yet Lucy’s homesickness for Australia and its vastness haunts her world, surfacing in the memories of her mother, the Australian garden at Empress Joséphine’s Malmaison, and Mathilde’s letters from Alice Springs.
Lucy’s mother, Jude, who was a nun in the 1970s, once warned her daughter ‘to be careful what she wished for’. It is a caution that marks but rarely alters the choices these characters make. With lushness and tenderness, and revelation, Fitzgerald’s unforgettable novel Pietà exquisitely captures the glorious and imperfect relationships between parents and children, between art and life.
Taking on law’s old boys club can have deadly results. A gripping thriller from a bold new voice about misogyny, corruption and the legal industry.
Gavin Jones is dead at thirty-nine. As an in-house lawyer who controlled millions of dollars in fees per year, he was legal firm Howard Greene’s biggest client and wielded that power with manipulative contempt. But he saved his worst behaviour for women, at work and at home. The partners of Howard Greene relied on his favour to fund their lavish lifestyles. If sycophantic admiration of the man was all it took to secure work from Gavin, that’s what they delivered. But no one liked Gavin. The list of those who suffered from his cruelty was long enough to include pretty much everyone who had contact with him. So who actually killed him?
Where do secrets live? Carol is a divorced teacher living in a small town in Ireland, her only son now grown. A second chance at love brings her unexpected connection and belonging and sparks a flurry of speculation. What does a woman like her see in a man like that? What happened to his wife who abandoned him and his children all those years ago? Carol and Declan know their relationship is the talk of the town, but the gossip only serves to bring the couple closer.
When Declan becomes ill, their relationship falters. His children are untrusting and cruel, and Carol is forced to leave their beloved home, with its worn oak floors and elegant features, and move back with her parents. Carol’s mother is determined to get to the bottom of things, she won’t see her daughter suffer this way. It seems there are secrets in Declan’s past, strange rumours that were never confronted, and suddenly the house they shared takes on a more sinister significance that affects them all.
Peter James, the number one, multi-million copy bestselling author of the Grace Series returns to finally reveal the events of Roy Grace’s tortured past – the truth behind his wife’s disappearance. Thrillingly told from her perspective, this is Sandy’s story. Some will know how it begins . . .My name is Sandy. My husband is Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, but when I disappeared, even he couldn’t find me . . .There’s more to Sandy than meets the eye. A woman with a dubious past, a complicated present and an uncertain future. Then she was gone. Her disappearance caused a nationwide search. Even the best detective on the force couldn’t find her. They thought she was dead.
Where did she go? Why did she run? What would cause a woman to leave her whole life behind and simply vanish? For the first time the truth behind Sandy Grace’s dramatic disappearance is revealed. They Thought I Was Dead will thrill fans and new readers alike with its gripping story of a woman on the run. This is Sandy’s story.
The new novel from the Miles Franklin award-winning author of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.
It was a beautiful evening. The wind gathered speed, lifting the frangipanis from the grove behind him, pink and yellow petals defying gravity. Beyond the trees, hidden by the foliage and rows of towering palm trees, the detention centre slept fitfully in the heavy summer heat. The palms blocked the ocean gust that now swirled around him, filling his lungs with the taste of temple flowers and salt. It reminded him of home. He took a deep breath, stepped off the escarpment and felt the red sand rush up towards him. After arriving in Australia seeking asylum, Fina dedicates herself to aiding the refugees held in a detention centre at Port Camden, a remote island outpost. Appalled by the mistreatment of those in custody, Fina speaks out to the media about the poor conditions within the facility, as a result she is arrested, taken from her home in the small country town of Hastings and threatened with deportation. When a security officer dies under suspicious circumstances, Lucky, a special investigator, arrives to uncover the truth. Her mystery is tied to Fina’s fate and the secrets of the detention centre will divide the town and the nation.
When a Russian superweapon is let loose under the waves, it’s up to President Jack Ryan to find a countermove. US intelligence says there’s something going on in Russia. While their land forces have been decimated by corruption and incompetence, the Navy seems to be pouring money into some secret project.
Analysts are stumped, until the knot is untangled by one particularly bright young woman at the Office of Naval Intelligence, Katie Ryan, the youngest daughter of President Jack Ryan. Like her father, she sees patterns where other don’t, and she’s determined that the Russians are about to launch a super missile submarine, the Belgorod. Now the race is on to determine where the sub is and whether it poses a threat to the continental US.
It doesn’t take long for the students on Fielding campus to become obsessed with Hannah, Leslie and Jimmy. The three graduate students are mysterious, inaccessible, and brilliant. Leslie, glamorous and brash, has declared that she wants to write erotica and make millions. Hannah is quietly confident, loyal, elegantly beautiful, and the person they all want to be; and Jimmy is a haunted genius with no past. After Simone, young, bestselling author and erstwhile model shows up as a visiting professor, and after everything that happened with her, the trio only become more notorious.
Love. Death. Revenge. These age-old tropes come to life as the semesters unfold. The threesome came to study writing, to be writers, and this is the story they’ve woven together: of friendship and passion; of competition and envy; of creativity as life and death. Now, they submit this story, We Wish You Luck, for your reading pleasure.
All it took was a lapse, a momentary lapse, to bring Clementine Jones’ world crashing down. Now she’s living like a hermit in small-town Katinga, coaching the local footy club. She’s supposed to be lying low, but here she is, with her team on the cusp of their first premiership in fifty years and the whole bloody town counting on her, cheering her on.
So why the hell would her star player quit on the eve of the finals?
It’s a question she wishes she’d left alone. Others are starting to ask questions too, questions about her. Clem’s not the only one with a secret, and as tension builds, the dark violence just below the town’s surface threatens to erupt. Pretty soon there’ll be nowhere left for Clem to hide.
From award-winning journalists Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel, the gripping, true-crime story of a notorious maritime hijacking at the heart of a massive conspiracy and the unsolved murder that threatened to unravel it all.
In July 2011, the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso was drifting through the treacherous Gulf of Aden when a crew of Somali pirates attacked and set her ablaze in a devastating explosion. But when David Mockett, a maritime surveyor working for Lloyd’s of London, inspected the damaged vessel, he was left with more questions than answers. How had the pirates gotten aboard so easily? And if they wanted to steal the ship and bargain for its return, then why did they destroy it? The questions didn’t add up and Mockett would never answer them. Soon after his inspection, David Mockett was murdered.
The ambitious culmination of more than four years of reporting, Dead in the Water uncovers an intricate web of conspiracy amidst the lawless, old-world industry at the backbone of our new global economy.
Alan Stern and David Grinspoon take us behind the scenes of the science, politics, egos, and public expectations that fuelled the greatest space mission of our time: New Horizons’ mission to Pluto.
On July 14, 2015, something amazing happened. More than 3 billion miles from Earth, a small NASA spacecraft called New Horizons screamed past Pluto at more than 32,000 miles per hour, focusing its instruments on the long mysterious icy worlds of the Pluto system, and then, just as quickly, continued on its journey out into the beyond.
How did this happen? Chasing New Horizons is the story of the men and women behind the mission: of their decades-long commitment; of the political fights within and outside of NASA; of the sheer human ingenuity it took to design, build, and fly the mission; and of the plans for New Horizons’ next encounter, one billion miles past Pluto. Told from the insider’s perspective of Dr. Alan Stern–the man who led the mission–Chasing New Horizons is a riveting story of scientific discovery, and of how far humanity can go when people focused on a dream work together toward their incredible goal.
In late 2015, Georgia Blain was diagnosed with a tumour sitting right in the language centre of her brain. Prior to this, Georgia’s only warning had been a niggling sense that her speech was slightly awry. She ignored it, and on a bright spring day, as she was mowing the lawn, she collapsed on a bed of blossoms, blood frothing at her mouth.
Waking up to find herself in the back of an ambulance being rushed to hospital, she tries to answer questions, but is unable to speak. After the shock of a bleak prognosis and a long, gruelling treatment schedule, she immediately turns to writing to rebuild her language and herself. At the same time, her mother, Anne Deveson, moves into a nursing home with Alzheimer’s; weeks earlier, her best friend and mentor had been diagnosed with the same brain tumour. All three of them are writers, with language at the core of their being. The Museum of Words is a meditation on writing, reading, first words and last words, picking up thread after thread as it builds on each story to become a much larger narrative. This idiosyncratic and deeply personal memoir is a writer’s take on how language shapes us, and how often we take it for granted until we are in danger of losing it.
The internationally bestselling author of the Guido Brunetti mysteries tells her
own adventurous life story as she enters her eighties. In a series of vignettes full of affection, irony, and good humour, Donna Leon narrates a remarkable life she feels has rather more happened to her than been planned.
Following a childhood in the company of her New Jersey family, with frequent visits to her grandfather’s farm and its beloved animals, and summers spent selling home-grown tomatoes by the roadside, Leon got her first taste of the classical music and opera that would enrich her life. She also developed a yen for adventure. In 1976, she made the spontaneous decision to teach English in Iran, before finding herself swept up in the early days of the 1979 Revolution. After teaching stints in China and Saudi Arabia, she finally landed in Venice. Leon vividly animates her decades-long love affair with Italy, fromher first magical dinner when serving as a chaperone to a friend, to the hunt for the perfect cappuccino, to the warfare tactics of grandmothers doing their grocery shopping at the Rialto Market.
When satirist John Clarke died, in April 2017, many people mourned his passing as if they had lost a friend or a member of the family. Many of us felt we grew up with him. After all, for the best part of half a century, since he burst into our lives as Fred Dagg in 1974, he was a performer, an actor, a writer, a satirist and as a commentator in both Australia and New Zealand.
In this fascinating memoir, Lorin Clarke tells the story of growing up with her famous father, her art historian mother Helen, and her little sister Lucia. Much has been written about John Clarke, but this is the insider’s view of his childhood, his relationship with his parents, his decision to leave New Zealand and live in Australia, and the choices he and Helen made to create a family life that is right out of the box.
These days Wendy Whiteley is a legendary figure in the art world, the keeper of the Brett Whiteley legacy, best known for creating the Secret Garden on the land below her house on Sydney Harbour. But before she met Brett, Wendy was herself a budding artist; her creative work ever since has been under-recognised.
Wendy is a survivor: of drug dependence, bitter divorce, the deaths of Brett and their beloved daughter, Arkie. More than that, she is a remarkable figure whose life has had its own contours and priorities. Now in her early eighties, reflective yet outspoken, with a dry wit she has much to tell about it.
Two tales of a city: The historical race to discover one of the world’s most mythologized places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of Al-Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.
To Westerners, the name Timbuktu long conjured a tantalizing paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of explorers gripped by the fever for discovery tried repeatedly to reach the fabled city. But one expedition after another went disastrously awry, succumbing to attack, the climate, and disease. Timbuktu was rich in another way too. A medieval centre of learning, it was home to tens of thousands, according to some, hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts, on subjects ranging from religion to poetry, law to history, pharmacology, and astronomy. When Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists surged across Mali in 2012, threatening the existence of these precious documents, a remarkable thing happened: a team of librarians and archivists joined forces to spirit the manuscripts into hiding.
A gripping and explosive account of Vladimir Putin’s tyranny, charting his rise from spy to tsar, exposing the events that led to his invasion of Ukraine and his assault on Europe. In Killer in the Kremlin, award-winning journalist John Sweeney takes readers from the heart of Putin’s Russia to the killing fields of Chechnya, to the embattled cities of an invaded Ukraine.
In a disturbing exposé of Putin’s sinister ambition, Sweeney draws on thirty years of his own reporting, from the Moscow apartment bombings to the atrocities committed by the Russian Army in Chechnya, to the annexation of Crimea and a confrontation with Putin over the shooting down of flight MH17, to understand the true extent of Putin’s long war.
In her twenties, Rachel Walsh was a mess. Since her spell in rehab she’s come a long way on the road to recovery and now she’s ready to go back to where it all began. But this time, the student has become the teacher. She used to hate the staff in charge of treating her addiction. Now, she’s one of them. Rachel’s finally got herself on track but life never stops being messy and when an old flame resurfaces, will she go back to who she once was?
Nearing fifty, can she find herself all over again?
It is 2021 and the world has experienced unimaginable suffering, death and despair. The pandemic has had a devastating effect on global extreme poverty and harrowing scenes from around the world continue to leave us shocked. As the pandemic rages on, it’s natural to ask: how can I help?
Peter Singer, often considered to be the world’s most influential living philosopher, answers this question in The Life You Can Save. In this book Singer compellingly lays out the case for why and how we can take action to provide immense benefit to others, at minimal cost to ourselves. Using ethical arguments, illuminating examples, and case studies of charitable giving, he shows that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but morally indefensible. And he provides practical recommendations of charities proven to dramatically improve, and even save, the lives of children, women and men living in extreme poverty.
One of the great but often unmentioned causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of walls, chairs, buildings and streets that surround us. Yet a concern for architecture and design is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. The Architecture of Happiness starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and it argues that it is architecture’s task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.
Whereas many architects are wary of openly discussing the word beauty, this book has at its centre the large and naïve question: What is a beautiful building? It is a tour through the philosophy and psychology of architecture that aims to change the way we think about our homes, our streets and ourselves.
With nothing left to lose, he’s prepared to risk it all!
Used-car salesman Gary Braswell owes thousands to a violent loan shark. Desperate to save his skin, he joins forces with a ruthless Russian crime syndicate that doesn’t take too kindly to being double-crossed. As his life spirals further out of control, Gary’s inflated ego can only land him in more trouble.
Dodgy real estate agents, nouveau riche Russian émigrés, corrupt federal cops and femme fatales, Sold’s characters jump off the page.
The novel opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles.
The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex wife Katia, and the times in which they lived—World War 1, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile.
Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet, and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief, blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and drafty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, and on to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968.
David Mitchell’s captivating new novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue; of riots in the streets and revolutions in the head; of drugs, thugs, madness, love, sex, death, art; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder. Can we change the world in turbulent times, or does the world change us?
Roya Hakakian was twelve years old in 1979 when the revolution swept through Tehran. The daughter of an esteemed poet, she grew up in a household that hummed with intellectual life. Family gatherings were punctuated by witty, satirical exchanges and spontaneous recitations of poetry. But the Hakakians were also part of the very small Jewish population in Iran who witnessed the iron fist of the Islamic fundamentalists increasingly tightening its grip. It is with the innocent confusion of youth that Roya describes her discovery of a swastika, “a plus sign gone awry, a dark reptile with four hungry claws”, painted on the wall near her home. As a schoolgirl she watched as friends accused of reading blasphemous books were escorted from class by Islamic Society guards, never to return. Only much later did Roya learn that she was spared a similar fate because her teacher admired her writing.
Hakakian relates in the most poignant, and at times painful, ways what life was like for women after the country fell into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who had declared an insidious war against them, but we see it all through the eyes of a strong, youthful optimist who somehow came up in the world believing that she was different, knowing she was special.
The extraordinary true story of a boy’s journey from starvation at sea to becoming one of Australia’s best-loved comedians. A story of true inspiration.
Morally bereft popular historian Patrick Renmark flees London in disgrace after the accidental death of his infant son. With one card left to play, he reluctantly takes a commission to write the biography of his legendary pioneering adventurer-anthropologist grandfather.
With no enthusiasm and even less integrity, Patrick travels to Jesustown, the former mission town in remote Australia where his grandfather infamously brokered ‘peace’ between the Indigenous custodians of the area and the white constabulary. He hasn’t been back there since he was a teenager when a terrible confrontation with his grandfather made him vow never to return.
Of course nothing is as it seems or as Patrick wants it to be. Unable to lay his own son to rest, Patrick must re-examine the legacy of his renowned grandfather and face the repercussions of his actions on subsequent generations. Will what he finds bring him redemption or add to the vault of family secrets and terrible guilt he keeps uncovering?
Morally bereft popular historian Patrick Renmark flees London in disgrace after the accidental death of his infant son. With one card left to play, he reluctantly takes a commission to write the biography of his legendary pioneering adventurer-anthropologist grandfather.
With no enthusiasm and even less integrity, Patrick travels to Jesustown, the former mission town in remote Australia where his grandfather infamously brokered ‘peace’ between the Indigenous custodians of the area and the white constabulary. He hasn’t been back there since he was a teenager when a terrible confrontation with his grandfather made him vow never to return.
Of course nothing is as it seems or as Patrick wants it to be. Unable to lay his own son to rest, Patrick must re-examine the legacy of his renowned grandfather and face the repercussions of his actions on subsequent generations. Will what he finds bring him redemption or add to the vault of family secrets and terrible guilt he keeps uncovering?
In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat. His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost.Desperate to ignore it all Ned dreams of open water.
As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.
Along the Great Barrier Reef, having fun in the sun, lived a mother dolphin and her little calf one.
‘Leap,’ said the mother. ‘I leap,’ said the one, as they leapt out of the water and had fun in the sun.
Join the little dolphin calf and many more familiar ocean animals in this vivid counting book based on the classic rhyme ‘Over in the Meadow’.
In a narrative tour de force, Simon Winchester dramatises the life story of the Atlantic Ocean, from its birth in the farther recesses of geological time to its eventual extinction millions of years in the future.
“In Sea of Many Returns, master storyteller Arnold Zable delivers a cavalcade of stories, characters and places. He takes us to the island of Ithaca, the Ionian Sea, Kalgoorlie and Melbourne, as well as Port Said, the Black Sea and Danube River ports. The stories are told by Mentor, an Ithacan who arrives in Kalgoorlie in 1916 as a young man, and by his Melbourne-born granddaughter, Xanthe. Through them we meet many people and hear their stories, spanning more than a century. Like Homer’s Odysseus, they left Ithaca to journey to distant places. We follow the lives of two brothers, who, as teenagers in the 1930s, build a boat and ferry freight and passengers across the Ionian Sea until one brother leaves for Australia. We meet Antonios Lekatsas and learn of his partnership with architect Walter Burley Griffin to design some of Melbourne’s most creative buildings. And we hear the stories of the women who waited on Ithaca while their men sought fortune in Australia. Sea of Many Returns is a moving novel exploring the immigrant experience and our connection with place.”–Provided by publisher.
It doesn’t take long for the students on Fielding campus to become obsessed with Hannah, Leslie and Jimmy. The three graduate students are mysterious, inaccessible, and brilliant. Leslie, glamorous and brash, has declared that she wants to write erotica and make millions. Hannah is quietly confident, loyal, elegantly beautiful, and the person they all want to be; and Jimmy is a haunted genius with no past. After Simone, young, bestselling author and erstwhile model shows up as a visiting professor, and after everything that happened with her, the trio only become more notorious.
Love. Death. Revenge. These age-old tropes come to life as the semesters unfold. The threesome came to study writing, to be writers, and this is the story they’ve woven together: of friendship and passion; of competition and envy; of creativity as life and death. Now, they submit this story, We Wish You Luck, for your reading pleasure.
All it took was a lapse, a momentary lapse, to bring Clementine Jones’ world crashing down. Now she’s living like a hermit in small-town Katinga, coaching the local footy club. She’s supposed to be lying low, but here she is, with her team on the cusp of their first premiership in fifty years and the whole bloody town counting on her, cheering her on.
So why the hell would her star player quit on the eve of the finals?
It’s a question she wishes she’d left alone. Others are starting to ask questions too, questions about her. Clem’s not the only one with a secret, and as tension builds, the dark violence just below the town’s surface threatens to erupt. Pretty soon there’ll be nowhere left for Clem to hide.
From award-winning journalists Matthew Campbell and Kit Chellel, the gripping, true-crime story of a notorious maritime hijacking at the heart of a massive conspiracy and the unsolved murder that threatened to unravel it all.
In July 2011, the oil tanker Brillante Virtuoso was drifting through the treacherous Gulf of Aden when a crew of Somali pirates attacked and set her ablaze in a devastating explosion. But when David Mockett, a maritime surveyor working for Lloyd’s of London, inspected the damaged vessel, he was left with more questions than answers. How had the pirates gotten aboard so easily? And if they wanted to steal the ship and bargain for its return, then why did they destroy it? The questions didn’t add up and Mockett would never answer them. Soon after his inspection, David Mockett was murdered.
The ambitious culmination of more than four years of reporting, Dead in the Water uncovers an intricate web of conspiracy amidst the lawless, old-world industry at the backbone of our new global economy.
Alan Stern and David Grinspoon take us behind the scenes of the science, politics, egos, and public expectations that fuelled the greatest space mission of our time: New Horizons’ mission to Pluto.
On July 14, 2015, something amazing happened. More than 3 billion miles from Earth, a small NASA spacecraft called New Horizons screamed past Pluto at more than 32,000 miles per hour, focusing its instruments on the long mysterious icy worlds of the Pluto system, and then, just as quickly, continued on its journey out into the beyond.
How did this happen? Chasing New Horizons is the story of the men and women behind the mission: of their decades-long commitment; of the political fights within and outside of NASA; of the sheer human ingenuity it took to design, build, and fly the mission; and of the plans for New Horizons’ next encounter, one billion miles past Pluto. Told from the insider’s perspective of Dr. Alan Stern–the man who led the mission–Chasing New Horizons is a riveting story of scientific discovery, and of how far humanity can go when people focused on a dream work together toward their incredible goal.
In late 2015, Georgia Blain was diagnosed with a tumour sitting right in the language centre of her brain. Prior to this, Georgia’s only warning had been a niggling sense that her speech was slightly awry. She ignored it, and on a bright spring day, as she was mowing the lawn, she collapsed on a bed of blossoms, blood frothing at her mouth.
Waking up to find herself in the back of an ambulance being rushed to hospital, she tries to answer questions, but is unable to speak. After the shock of a bleak prognosis and a long, gruelling treatment schedule, she immediately turns to writing to rebuild her language and herself. At the same time, her mother, Anne Deveson, moves into a nursing home with Alzheimer’s; weeks earlier, her best friend and mentor had been diagnosed with the same brain tumour. All three of them are writers, with language at the core of their being. The Museum of Words is a meditation on writing, reading, first words and last words, picking up thread after thread as it builds on each story to become a much larger narrative. This idiosyncratic and deeply personal memoir is a writer’s take on how language shapes us, and how often we take it for granted until we are in danger of losing it.
The internationally bestselling author of the Guido Brunetti mysteries tells her
own adventurous life story as she enters her eighties. In a series of vignettes full of affection, irony, and good humour, Donna Leon narrates a remarkable life she feels has rather more happened to her than been planned.
Following a childhood in the company of her New Jersey family, with frequent visits to her grandfather’s farm and its beloved animals, and summers spent selling home-grown tomatoes by the roadside, Leon got her first taste of the classical music and opera that would enrich her life. She also developed a yen for adventure. In 1976, she made the spontaneous decision to teach English in Iran, before finding herself swept up in the early days of the 1979 Revolution. After teaching stints in China and Saudi Arabia, she finally landed in Venice. Leon vividly animates her decades-long love affair with Italy, fromher first magical dinner when serving as a chaperone to a friend, to the hunt for the perfect cappuccino, to the warfare tactics of grandmothers doing their grocery shopping at the Rialto Market.
When satirist John Clarke died, in April 2017, many people mourned his passing as if they had lost a friend or a member of the family. Many of us felt we grew up with him. After all, for the best part of half a century, since he burst into our lives as Fred Dagg in 1974, he was a performer, an actor, a writer, a satirist and as a commentator in both Australia and New Zealand.
In this fascinating memoir, Lorin Clarke tells the story of growing up with her famous father, her art historian mother Helen, and her little sister Lucia. Much has been written about John Clarke, but this is the insider’s view of his childhood, his relationship with his parents, his decision to leave New Zealand and live in Australia, and the choices he and Helen made to create a family life that is right out of the box.
These days Wendy Whiteley is a legendary figure in the art world, the keeper of the Brett Whiteley legacy, best known for creating the Secret Garden on the land below her house on Sydney Harbour. But before she met Brett, Wendy was herself a budding artist; her creative work ever since has been under-recognised.
Wendy is a survivor: of drug dependence, bitter divorce, the deaths of Brett and their beloved daughter, Arkie. More than that, she is a remarkable figure whose life has had its own contours and priorities. Now in her early eighties, reflective yet outspoken, with a dry wit she has much to tell about it.
Two tales of a city: The historical race to discover one of the world’s most mythologized places, and the story of how a contemporary band of archivists and librarians, fighting to save its ancient manuscripts from destruction at the hands of Al-Qaeda, added another layer to the legend.
To Westerners, the name Timbuktu long conjured a tantalizing paradise, an African El Dorado where even the slaves wore gold. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a series of explorers gripped by the fever for discovery tried repeatedly to reach the fabled city. But one expedition after another went disastrously awry, succumbing to attack, the climate, and disease. Timbuktu was rich in another way too. A medieval centre of learning, it was home to tens of thousands, according to some, hundreds of thousands of ancient manuscripts, on subjects ranging from religion to poetry, law to history, pharmacology, and astronomy. When Al-Qaeda-linked jihadists surged across Mali in 2012, threatening the existence of these precious documents, a remarkable thing happened: a team of librarians and archivists joined forces to spirit the manuscripts into hiding.
A gripping and explosive account of Vladimir Putin’s tyranny, charting his rise from spy to tsar, exposing the events that led to his invasion of Ukraine and his assault on Europe. In Killer in the Kremlin, award-winning journalist John Sweeney takes readers from the heart of Putin’s Russia to the killing fields of Chechnya, to the embattled cities of an invaded Ukraine.
In a disturbing exposé of Putin’s sinister ambition, Sweeney draws on thirty years of his own reporting, from the Moscow apartment bombings to the atrocities committed by the Russian Army in Chechnya, to the annexation of Crimea and a confrontation with Putin over the shooting down of flight MH17, to understand the true extent of Putin’s long war.
In her twenties, Rachel Walsh was a mess. Since her spell in rehab she’s come a long way on the road to recovery and now she’s ready to go back to where it all began. But this time, the student has become the teacher. She used to hate the staff in charge of treating her addiction. Now, she’s one of them. Rachel’s finally got herself on track but life never stops being messy and when an old flame resurfaces, will she go back to who she once was?
Nearing fifty, can she find herself all over again?
It is 2021 and the world has experienced unimaginable suffering, death and despair. The pandemic has had a devastating effect on global extreme poverty and harrowing scenes from around the world continue to leave us shocked. As the pandemic rages on, it’s natural to ask: how can I help?
Peter Singer, often considered to be the world’s most influential living philosopher, answers this question in The Life You Can Save. In this book Singer compellingly lays out the case for why and how we can take action to provide immense benefit to others, at minimal cost to ourselves. Using ethical arguments, illuminating examples, and case studies of charitable giving, he shows that our current response to world poverty is not only insufficient but morally indefensible. And he provides practical recommendations of charities proven to dramatically improve, and even save, the lives of children, women and men living in extreme poverty.
One of the great but often unmentioned causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of walls, chairs, buildings and streets that surround us. Yet a concern for architecture and design is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. The Architecture of Happiness starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and it argues that it is architecture’s task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.
Whereas many architects are wary of openly discussing the word beauty, this book has at its centre the large and naïve question: What is a beautiful building? It is a tour through the philosophy and psychology of architecture that aims to change the way we think about our homes, our streets and ourselves.
With nothing left to lose, he’s prepared to risk it all!
Used-car salesman Gary Braswell owes thousands to a violent loan shark. Desperate to save his skin, he joins forces with a ruthless Russian crime syndicate that doesn’t take too kindly to being double-crossed. As his life spirals further out of control, Gary’s inflated ego can only land him in more trouble.
Dodgy real estate agents, nouveau riche Russian émigrés, corrupt federal cops and femme fatales, Sold’s characters jump off the page.
The novel opens in a provincial German city at the turn of the twentieth century, where the boy, Thomas Mann, grows up with a conservative father, bound by propriety, and a Brazilian mother, alluring and unpredictable. Young Mann hides his artistic aspirations from his father and his homosexual desires from everyone. He is infatuated with one of the richest, most cultured Jewish families in Munich, and marries the daughter Katia. They have six children. On a holiday in Italy, he longs for a boy he sees on a beach and writes the story Death in Venice. He is the most successful novelist of his time, winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a public man whose private life remains secret. He is expected to lead the condemnation of Hitler, whom he underestimates. His oldest daughter and son, leaders of Bohemianism and of the anti-Nazi movement, share lovers. He flees Germany for Switzerland, France and, ultimately, America, living first in Princeton and then in Los Angeles.
The Magician is an intimate, astonishingly complex portrait of Mann, his magnificent and complex wife Katia, and the times in which they lived—World War 1, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile.
Utopia Avenue is the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folk singer Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet, and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief, blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and drafty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the cusp of chart success, and on to glory in Amsterdam, prison in Rome, and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968.
David Mitchell’s captivating new novel tells the unexpurgated story of Utopia Avenue; of riots in the streets and revolutions in the head; of drugs, thugs, madness, love, sex, death, art; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of fame’s Faustian pact and stardom’s wobbly ladder. Can we change the world in turbulent times, or does the world change us?
Roya Hakakian was twelve years old in 1979 when the revolution swept through Tehran. The daughter of an esteemed poet, she grew up in a household that hummed with intellectual life. Family gatherings were punctuated by witty, satirical exchanges and spontaneous recitations of poetry. But the Hakakians were also part of the very small Jewish population in Iran who witnessed the iron fist of the Islamic fundamentalists increasingly tightening its grip. It is with the innocent confusion of youth that Roya describes her discovery of a swastika, “a plus sign gone awry, a dark reptile with four hungry claws”, painted on the wall near her home. As a schoolgirl she watched as friends accused of reading blasphemous books were escorted from class by Islamic Society guards, never to return. Only much later did Roya learn that she was spared a similar fate because her teacher admired her writing.
Hakakian relates in the most poignant, and at times painful, ways what life was like for women after the country fell into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who had declared an insidious war against them, but we see it all through the eyes of a strong, youthful optimist who somehow came up in the world believing that she was different, knowing she was special.
The extraordinary true story of a boy’s journey from starvation at sea to becoming one of Australia’s best-loved comedians. A story of true inspiration.
Morally bereft popular historian Patrick Renmark flees London in disgrace after the accidental death of his infant son. With one card left to play, he reluctantly takes a commission to write the biography of his legendary pioneering adventurer-anthropologist grandfather.
With no enthusiasm and even less integrity, Patrick travels to Jesustown, the former mission town in remote Australia where his grandfather infamously brokered ‘peace’ between the Indigenous custodians of the area and the white constabulary. He hasn’t been back there since he was a teenager when a terrible confrontation with his grandfather made him vow never to return.
Of course nothing is as it seems or as Patrick wants it to be. Unable to lay his own son to rest, Patrick must re-examine the legacy of his renowned grandfather and face the repercussions of his actions on subsequent generations. Will what he finds bring him redemption or add to the vault of family secrets and terrible guilt he keeps uncovering?
Morally bereft popular historian Patrick Renmark flees London in disgrace after the accidental death of his infant son. With one card left to play, he reluctantly takes a commission to write the biography of his legendary pioneering adventurer-anthropologist grandfather.
With no enthusiasm and even less integrity, Patrick travels to Jesustown, the former mission town in remote Australia where his grandfather infamously brokered ‘peace’ between the Indigenous custodians of the area and the white constabulary. He hasn’t been back there since he was a teenager when a terrible confrontation with his grandfather made him vow never to return.
Of course nothing is as it seems or as Patrick wants it to be. Unable to lay his own son to rest, Patrick must re-examine the legacy of his renowned grandfather and face the repercussions of his actions on subsequent generations. Will what he finds bring him redemption or add to the vault of family secrets and terrible guilt he keeps uncovering?
In the heat of a long summer Ned hunts rabbits in a river valley, hoping the pelts will earn him enough money to buy a small boat. His two brothers are away at war, their whereabouts unknown. His father and older sister struggle to hold things together on the family orchard, Limberlost.Desperate to ignore it all Ned dreams of open water.
As his story unfolds over the following decades, we see how Ned’s choices that summer come to shape the course of his life, the fate of his family and the future of the valley, with its seasons of death and rebirth.
Along the Great Barrier Reef, having fun in the sun, lived a mother dolphin and her little calf one.
‘Leap,’ said the mother. ‘I leap,’ said the one, as they leapt out of the water and had fun in the sun.
Join the little dolphin calf and many more familiar ocean animals in this vivid counting book based on the classic rhyme ‘Over in the Meadow’.
In a narrative tour de force, Simon Winchester dramatises the life story of the Atlantic Ocean, from its birth in the farther recesses of geological time to its eventual extinction millions of years in the future.
“In Sea of Many Returns, master storyteller Arnold Zable delivers a cavalcade of stories, characters and places. He takes us to the island of Ithaca, the Ionian Sea, Kalgoorlie and Melbourne, as well as Port Said, the Black Sea and Danube River ports. The stories are told by Mentor, an Ithacan who arrives in Kalgoorlie in 1916 as a young man, and by his Melbourne-born granddaughter, Xanthe. Through them we meet many people and hear their stories, spanning more than a century. Like Homer’s Odysseus, they left Ithaca to journey to distant places. We follow the lives of two brothers, who, as teenagers in the 1930s, build a boat and ferry freight and passengers across the Ionian Sea until one brother leaves for Australia. We meet Antonios Lekatsas and learn of his partnership with architect Walter Burley Griffin to design some of Melbourne’s most creative buildings. And we hear the stories of the women who waited on Ithaca while their men sought fortune in Australia. Sea of Many Returns is a moving novel exploring the immigrant experience and our connection with place.”–Provided by publisher.