Abbey's Advocate

Out in that country the sun smeared the sky and nothing ever altered, except that one day a scrap man came by ...HER name is scarcely known or remembered. All in all, she is worth less than the nine shillings and sixpence counted into her father's hand. She bides her time. She does her work. Way back in the corner of her mind is a thought she is almost too frightened to shine a light on: one day she will run away. A dark and unsettling tale from the turn of the twentieth century by a master of Australian literature.

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- What better set-up in order to dissect attitudes, skewer pretensions and tell lots of stories, than a huge family gathering? On a hot November weekend at his newly acquired vineyard near Ballarat, barrister Hugh Cleary is hosting a family reunion to celebrate 160 years since Conor Cleary arrived in Australia. Amongst the attendees is his notorious rock star brother Simon/Sly, who thinks he’s dead and is the complacent host to Conor’s ghost; sister Thea, a doctor with a family health revelation; their father Mick, a die-hard Richmond fan still nursing a grudge about being made redundant years ago; cousin Doug, who was part of the team that sacked Mick; cousin Ryan, Catholic priest/ex-Afghanistan forces padre with a secret crush. Then there’s the strangely familiar teenager, tattooed and disruptive, who in a Puck-like way spreads mischief and spite wherever he goes.

With such a vast number of characters to choose from, Drewe has sly fun commenting on family, society and history. Sometimes a little stretched with so many characters, and occasionally veering towards stereotype, this is nonetheless an entertaining read, the family dynamics leading to many humorous set pieces, and Drewe’s descriptive powers perfectly capturing the landscape. Lindy Jones

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Kungadgee, Victoria, Australia. A weekend in late November, 2014. At Hugh and Christine Cleary's new vineyard, Whipbird, six generations of the Cleary family are coming together from far and wide to celebrate the 160th anniversary of the arrival of their ancestor Conor Cleary from Ireland. Hugh has been meticulously planning the event for months - a chance to proudly showcase Whipbird  to the extended clan. Some of these family members know each other; some don't. As the wine flows, it promises to be an eventful couple of days.  Comic, topical, honest, sharply intelligent, and, above all, sympathetic, Robert Drewe's exhilarating new novel tells a classic Australian family saga as it has never been told before.

Neve Ayres has always been so careful. Since her mother’s death when Neve was seven, she’s learned to look after herself and to keep her cards close. But now her deliberately constructed world has collapsed: her partner’s left her when she was eight months pregnant. And so, alone with her newborn son, she’s retreated to her cliff-top holiday house in coastal Flinders.

There, another child comes into her life.

The first time Neve sees Jessie, the small girl is playing on an empty stretch of beach. On the cold autumn day, she is bare-legged and alone, while her mother is distracted by her own troubles. At once, almost despite herself, Neve is intrigued and concerned, and Jessie is drawn to Neve’s kindness – and to her home.

To Neve’s surprise, Jessie becomes an unlikely source of much needed care for her and her baby. Having been lost in the sleepless haze of new motherhood, Neve is touched, and finds herself grappling with how to best help the forgotten girl. She has the spacious house, the full pantry, the resources... But how much can you – should you – do for a stranger’s child?

Beautifully written and emotionally compelling, The Lone Child is about parenting and judgement, loss and love. From the acclaimed author of What Came Before, this is a gripping, atmospheric novel that explores how the desire to mother, and to be mothered, can be overwhelmingly seductive.

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- Taking place over three years, this traces the friendships and changing lives of a small community just outside the outback town of Katherine. It follows a formula - the standoffish woman, her misfit friend, the English rose daughter-in-law, and the outsider and the abused wife - all women needing to prove their worth in a male-oriented world. Together they find friendship and succour while attempting to find something finer (and more literary) in their difficult lives. And yes, while it isn't wildly original, it is an enjoyable, competent and satisfying read, probably best accompanied with a plate of scones and a pot of tea! Lindy Jones

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In 1978 the Northern Territory has begun to self-govern. Cyclone Tracy is a recent memory and telephones not yet a fixture on the cattle stations dominating the rugged outback. Life is hard and people are isolated. But they find ways to connect.

Sybil is the matriarch of Fairvale Station, run by her husband, Joe. Their eldest son, Lachlan, was Joe's designated successor but he has left the Territory - for good. It is up to their second son, Ben, to take his brother's place. But that doesn't stop Sybil grieving the absence of her child.

With her oldest friend, Rita, now living in Alice Springs and working for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and Ben's English wife, Kate, finding it difficult to adjust to life at Fairvale, Sybil comes up with a way to give them all companionship and purpose: they all love to read, and she forms a book club.

Mother-of-three Sallyanne is invited to join them. Sallyanne dreams of a life far removed from the dusty town of Katherine where she lives with her difficult husband, Mick.

Completing the group is Della, who left Texas for Australia looking for adventure and work on the land.

If you loved The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul and The Thorn Birds you will devour this story of five different women united by one need: to overcome the vast distances of Australia's Top End with friendship, tears, laughter, books and love.

Van Diemen's Land, 1826. A desperate convict flees into the wilderness. But the land that hides her will show her no mercy. A brilliant literary debut from a writer of rare talent.

When Bridget Crack arrives in the colony, she is just grateful to be on dry land. But finding the life of an indentured domestic servant intolerable, she pushes back and is punished for her insubordination-sent from one place to another, each significantly worse than the last. Too late, she realises the place she has ended up is the worst of all: the 'Interior,' where the hard cases are sent-a brutally hard life with a cruel master, miles from civilisation.

She runs from there and finds herself imprisoned by the impenetrable Tasmanian wilderness. What she finds there-what finds her-is Matt Sheedy, a man on the run, who saves her from certain death. Her precarious existence among volatile and murderous bushrangers is a different kind of hell and, surrounded by roaring rivers and towering columns of rock, hunted by soldiers and at the mercy of killers, Bridget finds herself in an impossible situation. In the face of terrible darkness, what will she have to do to survive?

A gripping and moving story of a woman's struggle for survival in a beautiful and brutal landscape, Bridget Crack is a unique and deeply accomplished novel by a rare talent.

From Kim Scott, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, comes a work charged with ambition and poetry, in equal parts brutal, mysterious and idealistic, about a young woman cast into a drama that has been playing for over two hundred years ...

Taboo takes place in the present day, in the rural South-West of Western Australia, and tells the story of a group of Noongar people who revisit, for the first time in many decades, a taboo place: the site of a massacre that followed the assassination, by these Noongar's descendants, of a white man who had stolen a black woman. They come at the invitation of Dan Horton, the elderly owner of the farm on which the massacres unfolded. He hopes that by hosting the group he will satisfy his wife's dying wishes and cleanse some moral stain from the ground on which he and his family have lived for generations.

But the sins of the past will not be so easily expunged.

We walk with the ragtag group through this taboo country and note in them glimmers of re-connection with language, lore, country. We learn alongside them how countless generations of Noongar may have lived in ideal rapport with the land. This is a novel of survival and renewal, as much as destruction; and, ultimately, of hope as much as despair.

Amid the furious ocean there was no human sound on deck: some people standing, watching the wave, but no one capable of words. On the Java Ridge, skipper Isi Natoli and a group of Australian surf tourists are anchored beside an idyllic reef off the Indonesian island of Dana. In the Canberra office of Cassius Calvert, Minister for Border Integrity, a Federal election looms and (not coincidentally) a hardline new policy is being announced regarding maritime assistance to asylum-seeker vessels in distress. A few kilometres away from Dana, the Takalar is having engine trouble. Among the passengers fleeing from persecution are Roya and her mother, and Roya's unborn sister. The storm now closing in on the Takalar and the Java Ridge will mean catastrophe for them all. With On the Java Ridge Jock Serong, bestselling author of The Rules of Backyard Cricket, brings us a literary novel with the pace and tension of a political thriller-and some of the most compelling, heartstopping writing about the sea since Patrick O'Brian.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ALS GOLD MEDAL 2017
LONGLISTED FOR THE INDIE AWARD FOR FICTION 2017
LONGLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN LITERARY AWARD 2017

If you could help someone in pain, would you?

Evan is a nurse, a suicide assistant. His job is legal... just. He's the one at the hospital who hands out the last drink to those who ask for it.

Evan's friends don't know what he does during the day. His mother, Viv, doesn't know what he's up to at night. And his supervisor suspects there may be trouble ahead.

As he helps one patient after another die, Evan pushes against legality, his own morality and the best intentions of those closest to him, discovering that his own path will be neither quick nor painless.

He knows what he has to do.

In this powerful novel, award-winning author Steven Amsterdam challenges readers to face the most taboo and heartbreaking of dilemmas. Would you help someone end their life?

LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2017Selected as a Book of the Year - Observer, Sunday Times, Times, Guardian, i magazine Felix is at the top of his game as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he's staging a Tempest like no other. It will boost his reputation. It will heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. Also brewing revenge. After twelve years, revenge finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on his Tempest and snare the traitors who destroyed him. It's magic! But will it remake Felix as his enemies fall?

From actress Diksha Basu comes a sparkling comedy of manners about social climbing, social rivalry and social anxiety in the New India Anil Kumar Jha has worked hard and is ready to live well. After thirty years in a modest flat, he and his family are moving to Gurgaon, one of Delhi's richest areas. But his wife, Bindu, is heartbroken about leaving their neighbours, and doesn't want to wear designer saris or understand interior decoration. Meanwhile their son, Rupak, is failing business school in the US - and secretly dating an American girl. Once installed in their mansion, the Jhas are soon drawn into a feverish game of one-upmanship with their new neighbours, the Chopras, as each couple seeks to outdo the other with increasingly lavish displays of wealth. As an imitation Sistene Chapel is pitted against a crystal-encrusted sofa, Bindu wonders where it will all end. A sharply observed tale of social aspiration and anxiety, The Windfall is a thoroughly modern comedy of manners about family, friendship and what it means to belong in a rapidly changing India.

When Mata Hari arrived in Paris she was penniless.Soon she was feted as the most elegant woman in the city.A dancer who shocked and delighted audiences, as a confidante and courtesan she bewitched the era's richest and most powerful men.But as paranoia consumed a country at war, Mata Hari's lifestyle brought her under suspicion. In 1917 she was arrested in her hotel room on the Champs- lysUes and accused of espionage.Told through Mata Hari's final letter, The Spy is the unforgettable story of a woman who dared to break the conventions of her time, and paid the price.

'The first rule is that you don't fall in love. There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. Because otherwise, of course, you slowly lose your mind . . .'Tom Hazard is a history teacher living a quiet suburban life in a Cathedral town in England. He likes his job but has no real friends, spends his time on the internet or playing the piano, and pushes away anyone who tries to get close to him.But Tom has a secret. He suffers from progeria, a condition that causes the body to age ten times slower than normal. He looks 40 but is actually 408. He won't die for another few centuries. In his lifespan he has had time to learn 13 languages, has become an expert at fighting and piano playing, but all of this has a cost. He must change his identity every few years to avoid discovery. And as he has learned the risks of love and the pain it can cause, he has turned away from other people.How to Stop Time is his story.

Our Souls at Night is a deeply affecting love story, adapted into a film starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford. This is a love story. A story about growing old with grace. Addie Moore and Louis Waters have been neighbours for years. Now they both live alone, their houses empty of family, their quiet nights solitary. Then one evening Addie pays Louis a visit. Soon to be a major film starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. Their brave adventures form the beating heart of Our Souls at Night, Kent Haruf's exquisite final novel.

Sixteen years on from his last novel, Bernard MacLaverty reminds us why he is regarded as one of the greatest living Irish writers. A retired couple, Gerry and Stella Gilmore, fly from their home in Scotland to Amsterdam for a long weekend. A holiday to refresh the senses, to do some sightseeing and generally to take stock of what remains of their lives. Their relationship seems safe, easy, familiar – but over the course of the four days we discover the deep uncertainties which exist between them.

Gerry, once an architect, is forgetful and set in his ways. Stella is tired of his lifestyle, worried about their marriage and angry at his constant undermining of her religious faith. Things are not helped by memories which have begun to resurface of a troubled time in their native Ireland. As their midwinter break comes to an end, we understand how far apart they are – and can only watch as they struggle to save themselves.

Bernard MacLaverty is a master storyteller, and Midwinter Break is the essential MacLaverty novel: accurate, compassionate observation, effortlessly elegant writing and a tender, intimate, heart-rending story – but it is also a profound examination of human love and how we live together, a chamber piece of real resonance and power. Forty years on from his first book, Bernard MacLaverty has written his masterpiece.

After sixty-eight-year-old David Granger crashes his BMW, medical tests reveal a brain tumor that he readily attributes to his wartime Agent Orange exposure. He wakes up from surgery repeating a name no one in his civilian life has ever heard - that of a Native American soldier whom he was once ordered to discipline. David decides to return something precious he long ago stole from the man he now calls Clayton Fire Bear. It might be the only way to find closure in a world increasingly at odds with the one he served to protect. It might also help him finally recover from his wife's untimely demise.

As David confronts his past to salvage his present, a poignant portrait emerges: that of an opinionated and goodhearted American patriot fighting like hell to stay true to his red, white, and blue heart, even as the country he loves rapidly changes in ways he doesn't always like or understand. Hanging in the balance are Granger's distant art-dealing son, Hank; his adoring seven-year-old granddaughter, Ella; and his best friend, Sue, a Vietnamese-American who respects David's fearless sincerity.

Through the controversial, wrenching, and wildly honest David Granger, Matthew Quick offers a no-nonsense but ultimately hopeful view of America's polarized psyche. By turns irascible and hilarious, insightful and inconvenient, David is a complex, wounded, honorable, and ultimately loving man. The Reason You're Alive examines how the secrets and debts we carry from our past define us; it also challenges us to look beyond our own prejudices and search for the good in our supposed enemies.

Freya Wyley meets Nancy Holdaway amid the wild celebrations of VE Day, the prelude to a devoted and competitive friendship...

Freya, ambitious and outspoken, pursues a career on Fleet Street while Nancy, less self-confident, struggles to get her first novel published. Both friends become entangled with Robert Cosway, a charismatic young man whose own ambition will have a momentous bearing on their lives.

Flitting from war-haunted Oxford to the bright new shallows of the 1960's, Freya plots the unpredictable course of a woman’s life and loves in extraordinary times.

'Are you waiting for Monsieur Bellivier, madame?'

Helena Folasadu should of course say no. She doesn't know the man talking to her, she doesn't know Monsieur Bellivier, and she certainly isn't waiting for him. But, bored of life, and sparked by a whim, she says yes. The go-between leads her to a deserted floor in an office building and offers her a large sum of money to sit at a computer and forward emails to Monsieur Bellivier. The emails turn out to be in code, and the bouquets Helena is handed every evening entangle her in an even greater mystery.

Mancebo, a Tunisian shopkeeper, lives a quiet and ordered life, manning his grocery on a street leading to the Sacre-C ur. But one day he is approached by a woman asking whether he will spy on her boyfriend, who lives in the apartment across the street. To his surprise, Mancebo agrees. As he begins to focus on the man, his own life comes into focus, and he starts to suspect that his wife and cousin are leading secret lives.

Helena and Mancebo don't know it yet - they haven't even met - but their missions will overlap in the most surprising ways. And, as they do, we will realise that the City of Light harbours secrets in its cafes and courtyards - more secrets than its inhabitants and visitors could possibly suspect...

'The haunting portrayal of conflict and carnage in the final weeks of the second world war makes this German novel a modern classic.... This remarkable work charts a most terrible coming of age . . . The central relationship is tenderly rendered, and what the war does to it is devastating... In this, as in so much, the novel holds its own against [Gunter] Grass and [Erich Maria] Remarque; it is an excellent work, and one deserving of its wide readership.' Guardian Walter Urban and Friedrich 'Fiete' Caroli work side by side as hands on a dairy farm in northern Germany. By 1945, it seems the War's worst atrocities are over. When they are forced to 'volunteer' for the SS, they find themselves embroiled in a conflict which is drawing to a desperate, bloody close. Walter is put to work as a driver for a supply unit of the Waffen-SS, while Fiete is sent to the front. When the senseless bloodshed leads Fiete to desert, only to be captured and sentenced to death, the friends are reunited under catastrophic circumstances. In a few days the war will be over, millions of innocents will be dead, and the survivors must find a way to live with its legacy.

A dazzling novel from the bestselling author of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, winner of the 2017 Indie Prize for Literary Fiction.

Nathan Nelson is the average son of a genius. His father, a physicist of small renown, has prodded him toward greatness from an early age, but despite Samuel Nelson's efforts Nathan remains ordinary.

Then, in the summer of 1987, everything changes. Nathan is involved in a terrible accident and falls into a coma. When he awakens, he finds that everyday life is radically different. His perceptions of sight, sound and memory have been irrevocably changed. The doctors and his parents fear permanent brain damage, but the truth of his condition is more unexpected and leads to a renewed chance for Nathan to find his place in the world.

Thinking that his son's altered brain is worthy of serious inquiry, Samuel arranges for Nathan to attend a research centre where savants, prodigies and neurological misfits are studied and their specialties applied. Immersed in this strange atmosphere - where an autistic boy can tell you what day Christmas falls on in 3026 but can't tie his shoelaces - Nathan begins to unravel the mysteries of his new mind and finally makes peace with the crushing weight of his father's expectations.

It is some years since a virus killed all the adults. Now Sicily lies in ruins while the disease lies in wait, poised to claim the children as they reach adolescence. Brave, stubborn thirteen-year-old Anna looks after her brother Astor in the cottage where their mother's skeleton rests, lovingly decorated, in a locked bedroom. She tells him fearsome stories about monsters, hoping to keep him safe at home while she forages among the real hazards. Wild dogs. Gangs of savage, blue-painted kids. But then Astor starts to question Anna's version of the world, just as the blue kids are turning their attention to the cottage-and suddenly, everything will change.

Arimnestos of Plataea was one of the heroes of the Battle of Marathon, in which the heroic Greeks halted the invading Persians in their tracks, and fought in the equally celebrated naval battle at Salamis. But even these stunning victories only served to buy the Greeks time, as the Persians gathered a new army, returning with overwhelming force to strike the final killing blow. For the Greeks, divided and outnumbered, there was only one possible strategy: attack. And so, in the blazing summer of 479 BC, Arimnestos took up his spear one final time at the Battle of Plataea.

'How long do I have?' I force a laugh. 'Not long,' he says very quietly. 'They have confirmed your sentence of death. You are to be beheaded tomorrow. We don't have long at all.'

Seventeen-year-old Jane Grey was queen of England for nine days. Using her position as cousin to the deceased king, her father and his conspirators put her on the throne ahead of the king's half-sister Mary, who quickly mustered an army, claimed her crown and locked Jane in the Tower. When Jane refused to betray her Protestant faith, Mary sent her to the executioner's block. There Jane turned her father's greedy, failed grab for power into her own brave and tragic martyrdom.

'Learn you to die' is the advice that Jane gives in a letter to her younger sister Katherine, who has no intention of dying. She intends to enjoy her beauty and her youth and find love. But her lineage makes her a threat to the insecure and infertile Queen Mary and, when Mary dies, to her sister Queen Elizabeth, who will never allow Katherine to marry and produce a potential royal heir before she does. So when Katherine's secret marriage is revealed by her pregnancy, she too must go to the Tower.

'Farewell, my sister,' writes Katherine to the youngest Grey sister, Mary. A beautiful dwarf, disregarded by the court, Mary finds it easy to keep secrets, especially her own, while avoiding Elizabeth's suspicious glare. After watching her sisters defy the queen, Mary is aware of her own perilous position as a possible heir to the throne. But she is determined to command her own destiny and be the last Tudor to risk her life in matching wits with her ruthless and unforgiving cousin Elizabeth.

Since the death of Ragnvald's father in battle, he has worked hard to protect his sister Svanhild and planned to inherit his family's land when he comes of age. But when the captain of his ship tries to kill Ragnvald on the way home from a raiding excursion, he must confront his stepfather's betrayal, and find a way to protect his birthright. It is no easy feat in Viking-Age Norway, where a hundred petty rulers kill over parcels of land, and a prophesied high king is rising. But where Ragnvald is expected to bleed, and even die, for his honour, Svanhild is simply expected to marry well. It's not a fate she relishes, and when the chance to leave her stepfather's cruelty comes at the hand of her brother's arch-rival, Svanhild is forced to make the ultimate choice: family or freedom.Drawing from the Icelandic Sagas, The Half-Drowned King tells the true story of Ragnvald of Maer, the right hand man of King Harald Fairhair, first king of all Norway, and his sister, Svanhild, as she tries to find freedom in a society where the higher her brother rises, the greater her worth as a political pawn.

An astonishing historical novel set in the shadowy, magical forests of South America, which draws on the captivating world of the international bestseller The Watchmaker of Filigree Street AN AMAZON BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH Deep in uncharted Peru, the holy town of Bedlam stands at the edge of a forest. The shrine statues move, and anyone who crosses the border dies. But somewhere inside are cinchona trees, whose bark yields quinine: the only known treatment for malaria. On the other side of the Pacific, it is 1859 and India is ravaged by the disease. The hunt for a reliable source of quinine is critical and in its desperation, the India Office searches out its last qualified expeditionary. Struggling with a terrible injury from his last mission and the strange occurrences at his family's ruined estate, Merrick Tremayne finds himself under orders to bring back cinchona cuttings at any cost and dispatched, against his own better judgement, to Bedlam. There he meets Raphael, a priest around whom the villagers spin unsettlingly familiar stories of impossible disappearances and living stone. Gradually, he realises that Raphael is the key to a legacy left by two generations of Tremayne explorers before him, one which will prove more dangerous and valuable than the India Office could ever have imagined.

One minute my wife was there. In a flash she was gone. In the ten months of Kerryn's dying, I prepared myself for everything except for her death. Now that she is gone, I am desperate to know her as I never knew her. Thirty Days is a portrait of grief, of a marriage and of a family. It is the moving memoir of Mark's wife of 33 years, Kerryn Baker, who died ten months after her diagnosis, aged 55, from stomach cancer. It is also a study in how we construct our own version of the past, after Mark discovers a cache of Kerryn's letters in the laundry cupboard and has to rethink their relationship. It is a book about memory and its uncertainties, as Mark sifts through photos and home movies, as his wife gets sicker, and his search for clues about their relationship grows more desperate. In her last days, Kerryn reveals her traumatic childhood to Mark for the first time. She emerges as the rock of the family, a brave and wise woman, clear-eyed about her treatment, focused on finding the path to a peaceful death. Paradoxically, her dying brings the couple back to the intensity of their first love. In the tradition of Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air and Cory Taylor's remarkable memoir, Dying, Mark Baker's Thirty Days is an inspirational book about death and dying.

The time I have spent writing this book has caused me a lot of pain. Sometimes because of what I have remembered about my childhood and sometimes because of what I couldn't remember. It is funny how your mind blocks things out when those things can hurt you. There are a lot of things I wish I didn't remember...

A household name, an Australian rock icon, the elder statesman of Ozrock - there isn't an accolade or cliche that doesn't apply to Jimmy Barnes. But long before Cold Chisel and Barnesy, long before the tall tales of success and excess, there was the true story of James Dixon Swan - a working class boy whose family made the journey from Scotland to Australia in search of a better life.

Working Class Boy is a powerful reflection on a traumatic and violent childhood, which fuelled the excess and recklessness that would define, but almost destroy, the rock'n'roll legend. This is the story of how James Swan became Jimmy Barnes. It is a memoir burning with the frustration and frenetic energy of teenage sex, drugs, violence and ambition for more than what you have.

Raw, gritty, compassionate, surprising and darkly funny - Jimmy Barnes's childhood memoir is at once the story of migrant dreams fulfilled and dashed. Arriving in Australia in the Summer of 1962, things went from bad to worse for the Swan family - Dot, Jim and their six kids. The scramble to manage in the tough northern suburbs of Adelaide in the 60s would take its toll on the Swans as dwindling money, too much alcohol, and fraying tempers gave way to violence and despair.

This is the story a family's collapse, but also a young boy's dream to escape the misery of the suburbs with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to join a rock'n'roll band and get out of town for good.

As in life, Sam Dastyari's memoir is unexpected and unorthodox. This is the man who introduced Pauline Hanson to the halal snack pack and accountability to big banks.

Named Sahand by his hippy Iranian parents, he changed his name to Sam to fit in with his schoolmates. But Sam was always going to stand out. He joined the Labor Party when he was 16 and was elected as a senator only 13 years later.

Sam brings his super-charged approach to life to his writing and the result is hilarious: part-memoir, part-political treatise and part-reflection on hard times. We learn about his cats, Lenin and Trotsky; how to deal with neighbours when their front lawns are under siege from the media thanks to your misdemeanour; and how the most dangerous mosh pits are to be found among parents at the school nativity play.

One Halal of a Story is a no-holds-barred look at the good and bad of family, politics and being Sam Dastyari.

Leading Australian journalist John Lyons will take readers on a fascinating personal journey through the wonders and dangers of the Middle East. From the sheer excitement of arriving in Jerusalem with his wife and eight-year-old son, to the fall of dictators and his gripping account of what it feels like to be taken by Egyptian soldiers, blindfolded and interrogated, this is a memoir of the Middle East like no other.

Drawing on a 20-year interest in the Middle East, Lyons has had extraordinary access - he's interviewed everyone from Israel's former Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert to key figures from Hezbollah and Hamas. He's witnessed the brutal Iranian Revolutionary Guard up close and was one of the last foreign journalists in Iran during the violent crackdown against the 'Green Revolution'. He's confronted Hamas officials about why they fire rockets into Israel and Israeli soldiers about why they fire tear gas at Palestinian school children.

By telling the story of his family travelling through the region, this book is extremely readable and entertaining, full of humour, colour. It is sometimes dazzling in its detail, sometimes tragic. Lyons says he has written it in a way that readers can feel they are there with him - so they can smell the wonderful markets of the Middle East and feel the fear of what it is like to be blindfolded and have your hands bound with electrical cord. Lyons also looks at 50 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank - the mechanics of how this works and the effect it now has on both Israelis and Palestinians.

Lyons explains the Middle East through every day life and experiences - his son's school, his wife's friends and his own dealings with a range of people over six years. If you only read one book on the Middle East, this is it.

Australia's official war correspondent during WWI, Charles Bean was also Australia's first official war historian and the driving force behind the creation of the Australian War Memorial. Famously criticised for his deliberate myth-making as editor of The Anzac Book, Bean was also a public servant, institutional leader, author, activist, thinker, doer, philosopher, and polemicist. In Charles Bean, Man, myth, legacy, Australia's top military historians - including Peter Stanley, Peter Burness, Michael McKernan, Jeffrey Grey, Peter Edwards, David Horner, Peter Rees and Craig Stockings - analyse the man, the myth, and his long-reaching legacy.

 

'I had made it! All my dreams had come true. I had an operating fridge, I was doing brilliantly, and I had written the memoir to prove it. I even had online haters. I had conquered life at 30 and nothing was ever going to go wrong again!' It was all going so well for Rosie Waterland.

 

Until it wasn't. Until, shockingly, something awful happened and Rosie went into agonising free fall. Until late one evening she found herself in a hospital emergency bed, trembling and hooked to a drip. Over the course of that long, painful night, she kept thinking about how ironic it was, that right in the middle of writing a book about lies, she'd ended up telling the most significant lie of all.

A raw, beautiful, sad, shocking - and very, very funny - memoir of all the lies we tell others and the lies we tell ourselves.

 

"I ate and ate and ate in the hope that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere... I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognised or understood, but at least I was safe."

New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance and health. As a woman who describes her own body as  wildly undisciplined, she understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care.

In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye over her childhood, teens and 20s - including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life - and brings readers into the present, and the realities, pains and joys of her daily life. With the bracing candour, vulnerability and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, she explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen.

Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, telling a story that hasn't yet been told, but needs to be.

'Emer O'Sullivan has made an indispensable contribution to Wildean literature ...Compelling, informative and fascinating' Stephen Fry Oscar Wilde's father - scientist, surgeon, archaeologist, writer - was one of the most eminent men of his generation. His mother - poet, journalist, translator - hosted an influential salon at 1 Merrion Square. Together they were one of Victorian Ireland's most dazzling and enlightened couples. When, in 1864, Sir William Wilde was accused of sexually assaulting a female patient, it sent shock waves through Dublin society. After his death some ten years later, Jane attempted to re-establish the family in London, where Oscar burst irrepressibly upon the scene, only to fall in a trial as public as his father's. A remarkable and perceptive account, The Fall of the House of Wilde is a major repositioning of our first modern celebrity, a man whose fall from grace marked the end of fin de siecle decadence.

Xsaya-rsa (Khshayarsha) to the Persians, Ahasuerus to the Jews, Xerxes to the Greeks. So great was his power, that he was hailed by the Persians as 'King of Kings', and by the Greeks as simply  The King.

Famed for his beauty and magnificence, he ruled over the greatest empire the world had known, and built cities the like of which the world had never seen. He was the king who re-conquered Egypt and subdued the rebels of Babylon; he was the king who captured Athens and burnt the temples of the Acropolis; and he was the king who defeated Leonidas, the greatest of the Warrior-Kings of Sparta. Some claim that he was the king who saved the Jews. The life of Xerxes, however, has never been told - until now.

Ian Macgregor Morris brings together a variety of evidence, literary and archaeological, to create a nuanced account that fully takes into account the context of fifth-century Persia. Macgregor Morris reviews the background of Xerxes' upbringing and his early taste of power, the problems of the succession, and the challenges he faced as a new king. 

The Greek expedition will be considered from a Persian perspective, while the effect of its failure on Persian policy in general, and on Xerxes in particular, forms a major theme of the later chapters. The character of Xerxes, so often depicted as hubristic, will be re-examined in terms of notions of Persian kingship, while his domestic policies on issues such as religious tolerance and the ambitious building programmes will be seen in light of the political events of the period.

Born in the province of Leptis Magna in Africa Septimius Severus was Roman Emperor from 193 to 211. Severus seized power after the death of Emperor Pertinax in 193 during the Year of the Five Emperors. Once he had reaffirmed his rule over the Western Provinces, Severus waged a brief war in the East against the Parthian Empire, sacking their capital Ctesiphon in 197 and expanding the eastern frontier to the Tigris. Late in his reign he travelled to Britain, strengthening Hadrian's Wall and and re-occupying the Antonine Wall. In 208 he began the conquest of Caledonia (modern Scotland) but his ambitions were cut short when he fell fatally ill in late 210. With the succession of his sons, Severus founded the Severan Dynasty, the last dynasty of the Empire before the Crisis of the Third Century.

If you want real change, change the system.Reboot offers a tantalising glimpse of a better future, where politicians work directly and closely with those who voted for them.Utopian? Disillusional? Richard Walsh makes a tour de force argument for doing away with the senate, embracing a republic and having a government where the prime minister and ministers are the best people in the country, not just chosen from the politicians who sit in the parliament.

In late 1942, on the recommendation of 26-year-old Bob Santamaria, Australia’s Catholic bishops took the first steps in creating a clandestine church organisation to smash the Communist Party’s massive trade union base. Before long, The Movement, as it was known, developed into a sophisticated intelligence agency, with its tentacles reaching into every corner of politics and also working closely with official intelligence agencies, especially the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).

Santamaria based his Movement (also called The Show) completely on the Communist Party, copying its spectacularly successful union-organising machinery. Within a decade, it had defeated communist power in many major unions. He also adopted the communists’ strategy of infiltrating the Labor Party, and embarked on an aggressive program to transform it into a Catholic political machine, helping spark the great Labor Split of the mid-1950s.

Ironically, in modelling the Movement on his enemy, Santamaria imported its most odious characteristic: Stalinism. He rapidly embraced the characteristics of a Stalinist leader, actively cultivating his own ‘cult of personality’. Over time, this infected The Movement, as it adopted authoritarian practices and imposed anti-democratic policies on the unions it controlled, mirroring the communists’ modus operandi. As in the Communist Party, this inevitably caused internal battles and catastrophic splits that undermined and, eventually, destroyed The Movement.

Weaving together a rich story from previously secret archives of both The Movement and the Communist Party, ASIO’s massive files, and extensive oral history interviews, The Show exposes a previously unseen side of Santamaria’s Catholic Movement.

The Whitlam government propelled Australia out of the presumptions and certainties of twenty-three years of conservative government and changed it irrevocably. It passed a record number of bills into law and became the most successful reformist government in Australia’s history. This book brings to light aspects of Whitlam’s ambitious reform agenda that have been neglected for too long.

The Australian Assistance Plan generated networks of regional and community cooperation that remain today. Plans for energy infrastructure and self-sufficiency that would ensure the use of the nation’s resources for the common good, appear more and more visionary. The ground-breaking Royal Commission into Human Relationships is clearly a forerunner of the current royal commissions into institutionalised child abuse and family violence. New research shows the extent to which this reforming agenda continued the post-war reconstruction plans of Curtin and Chifley.

Finally, this book reassesses the place of the Whitlam government, and its dismissal, in history, in light of new material that continues to emerge from the personal papers of Sir John Kerr, and new analyses that challenge previous assessments.

Edited by Jenny Hocking, with contributors including Stuart Macintyre, Michelle Arrow, Nicholas Brown, Eric Eklund, Murray Goot, Carol Johnson, David Lee, Lyndon Magarrity, Greg Mellueish, and more.

It is fifty years since Australia unilaterally issued petroleum exploration permits in the Timor Sea. For fifty years the Australian government has schemed to assert the integrity of those permits. Australia did nothing to stop Indonesia's devastating occupation of East Timor, when - on our doorstep - 120,000 lives were lost from a population of 650,000. Instead, our government colluded with the Indonesian government in pursuit of our Timor Sea oil agenda. With access to never-before-seen classified documents, Kim McGrath tells the story of Australia and Timor's secret history. With many explosive revelations, she shows how access to resources has been a key factor in how Australia has responded to Timor, right up to the UN hearings scheduled for conclusion in September 2017. It is time, she argues, for Australia to reconsider our ruthless determination to claim oil and gas wealth in the Timor Sea that does not belong to us.

A compelling account of Australia's bloodiest and most significant battle of the Vietnam War, in time for the battle's 50th anniversary, by critically-acclaimed war writer David Cameron.

On the afternoon of 18 August 1966, a rubber plantation in Phuoc Tuy Province, South Vietnam, Australian troops fought one of their bloodiest, most significant battles of the Vietnam War.

The Australians had arrived at Nui Dat four months earlier to open up the province. While out on patrol, Delta Company of 6RAR, originally numbering just 105 Australians and three New Zealanders, collided with Viet Cong forces numbering around 2500 troops, ahead of a planned Vietnamese ambush.

Under heavy fire and short on ammunition, the Australians could only guess at the enemy’s strength and number. Morning light revealed a shattered woodland, trees bleeding latex – and hundreds of dead enemy soldiers who had fallen in the numerous assaults against the small Anzac force. What was first thought by the Australians to be a significant defeat quickly turned out to be a major victory.

Marking the battle's 50th anniversary, and drawing on unpublished first-hand accounts, David Cameron brings to life the events of this famous battle as it unfolded – minute by minute, hour by hour – and reveals the deeds of heroism and mateship now part of Australia's Vietnam War story. His compelling account commemorates the men who fought in the rubber plantation of Long Tan – and those who did not come home.

Britain formally colonised Van Diemen’s Land in the early years of the nineteenth century. Small convict stations grew into towns. Pastoralists moved in to the aboriginal hunting grounds. There was conflict, there was violence. But, governments and gentlemen succeeded in burying the real story of the Vandemonian War for nearly two centuries.

The Vandemonian War had many sides and shades, but it was fundamentally a war between the British colony of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) and those Tribespeople who lived in political and social contradiction to that colony. In The Vandemonian War acclaimed history author Nick Brodie now exposes the largely untold story of how the British truly occupied Van Diemen’s Land deploying regimental soldiers and special forces, armed convicts and mercenaries.

In the 1820s and 1830s the British deliberately pushed the Tribespeople out, driving them to the edge of existence. Far from localised fights between farmers and hunters of popular memory, this was a war of sweeping campaigns and brutal tactics, waged by military and paramilitary forces subject to a Lieutenant Governor who was also Colonel Commanding. The British won the Vandemonian War and then discretely and purposefully concealed it.

Historians failed to see through the myths and lies – until now. It is no exaggeration to say that the Tribespeople of Van Diemen’s Land were extirpated from the island. Whole societies were deliberately obliterated. The Vandemonian War was one of the darkest stains on a former empire which arrogantly claimed perpetual sunshine. This is the story of that fight, redrawn from neglected handwriting nearly two centuries old.

This insightful and accessible new biography of Alfred Deakin, Australia's second prime minister, shines fresh light on one of the nation's most significant figures. It brings out from behind the image of a worthy, bearded father of federation the gifted, passionate and intriguing man whose contributions continue to shape the contours of Australian politics. The acclaimed political scientist Judith Brett scrutinises both Deakin's public life and his inner life. Deakin's private papers reveal a solitary, religious character who found distasteful much of the business of politics, with its unabashed self-interest, double-dealing, and mediocre intellectual levels. And yet politics is where Deakin chose to do his life's work. Destined to become a classic of biography, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin is a masterly portrait of a complex man who was instrumental in creating modern Australia.

The fascinating story of the Chinese presence in and influence on this country - our intertwined history from colonial times to today.

Chinese 'presence' in Australia extends from well before the time of Captain Cook - trading with northern Australia long before Europeans came here - right through to the present day, with Chinese activities ranging from being the main customer for our iron ore, to their very extensive intelligence operations here.

Robert Macklin, bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Hamilton Hume and Dark Paradise, has traced a new history of the two nations. Macklin's engrossing narrative reaches from pre-colonial times, to John Macarthur's 'coolie' shepherds, the only Chinese bushranger, Sam Pu, and the multiple atrocities committed against the Chinese in the gold rush; through to the 20th century, where the two Australians - 'Morrison of Peking' and William Donald - played a significant role in the downfall of the last Chinese emperor and the creation of the first republic, before World War II and decades of Cold War brinkmanship; to our current economic bonds and Australia's role in the dangerous geopolitics of the South China Sea.

Dragon and Kangaroo is an absorbing account of a vastly underestimated part of Australia's story: this is our shared history, from an immensely important - and entirely new - angle.

In October 1943 Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin signed a solemn pact that once their enemies were defeated the Allied powers would 'pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusers in order that justice may be done'. Nowhere did they say that justice would be selective. But it would prove to be.

TRAITORS outlines the treachery of the British, American and Australian governments, who turned a blind eye to those who experimented on Australian prisoners of war. Journalist and bestselling author Frank Walker details how Nazis hired by ASIO were encouraged to settle in Australia and how the Catholic Church, CIA and MI6 helped the worst Nazi war criminals escape justice.

While our soldiers were asked to risk their lives for King and country, Allied corporations traded with the enemy; Nazi and Japanese scientists were enticed to work for Australia, the US and UK; and Australia's own Hollywood hero Errol Flynn was associating with Nazi spies.

The extraordinary revelations in TRAITORS detail the ugly side of war and power and the many betrayals of our ANZACs. After reading this book you can't help but wonder, what else did they hide?

Visitors to the Red Centre come looking for the real Australia, but find a place both beautiful and disturbing. There is wilderness, desire and an Aboriginal philosophy of home. But there is also the confusing countenance of the Australian frontier, a meeting place between black and white, ancient and modern. Songlines and Fault Lines explores the Red Centre through the eyes of those who have walked it, in six remarkable stories that have shaped our nation. It follows Aboriginal Dreamtime Ancestors along a songline, trudges with John McDouall Stuart as he crosses the continent, and walks the Finke River in the footsteps of anthropologist T.G.H. Strehlow. It keeps pace with conservationist Arthur Groom as he reimagines the country's heart as tourist playground, ponders a philosophy of walking with British travel writer Bruce Chatwin, and then strolls the grog-troubled streets of Alice Springs with Eleanor Hogan.Retracing time-worn pathways and stories of Australia's centre, Glenn Morrison finds fresh answers to age-old queries.

In 1924 the grand old battle cruiser HMAS Australia I, once the pride of the nation, was sunk off Sydney Heads. She had saved Australia from a German attack in the Pacific in World War I, but after the war she was a victim in the race to disarm. There was a day of national mourning when they blew the bottom out of her.

In 1928 the RAN acquired a new ship of the same name, the fast, heavy cruiser HMAS Australia II, and she finally saw action when World War II began, patrolling the North Atlantic on the lookout for German battleships.

By March 1942 Australia had returned home, where the ship was stunned by a murder. One night one of her sailors, Stoker Riley, was found stabbed and bleeding to death. Before he died, he named his two attackers, who'd tried to kill him because, he said, he'd threatened to expose their homosexual activities. At a hastily arranged court martial, the two men were found guilty and sentenced to death under British Admiralty law.

Only weeks later Australia fought in the Battle of the Coral Sea near Papua New Guinea, the first sea battle to stop the Japanese advance in the Pacific. She was heavily attacked and bombed from the air but, with brilliant ship-handling, escaped unscathed. In 1944 she took part in the greatest sea fight of all time, the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which returned the American General Douglas MacArthur to the Philippines. She was struck by a kamikaze bomber, killing her captain and 28 other men. The next year, she was hit by no fewer than four kamikaze planes on four successive days. She was, in fact, attacked by more kamikaze aircraft than any other Allied ship in the war, and in the end this finished her war.

She retired gracefully, laden with battle honours, and was scrapped in 1956 – the last of her name, for the navy no longer uses Australia for its ships. In this riveting book, with his inimitable panache and flawless research Mike Carlton tells the story of Australia, which encompasses the era's fascinating naval and social history.

The Great War continues to fascinate us all. In this original approach, prize-winning historian Peter Stanley cleverly weaves his narrative around striking images - many never seen before - to create a visual history that immerses the reader in each moment. Peter has selected documents, photographs, artefacts, and images - drawings, prints, postcards, advertisements, souvenirs, song-sheets, posters, leaflets, maps, and cartoons - which together tell stories of battles overseas with Turks and Germans, and battles at home, for and against conscription, over 'loyalty' and 'disloyalty', and the war's many imposts on Australia's people. The National Library's war memorabilia and documents help to connect the conflict overseas with the equally bitter struggle at home. Men faced life-changing choices: volunteer to fight or stay at home; join the industrial battles for hard-won working conditions or break the strikes. Women bore the burdens of voting to send men to their deaths, of raising children on their own, of waiting and worrying. As communities fractured under the stress, even children were drawn into the animosities between 'German', 'Irish', and 'British' Australians. The Crying Years evokes the drama and tragedy, suffering and sacrifice, the pain and the pity, of Australia's Great War.

The tall, handsome Abdul Karim was just twenty-four years old when he arrived in England from Agra to wait at tables during Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee. An assistant clerk at Agra Central Jail, he suddenly found himself a personal attendant to the Empress of India herself. Within a year, he was established as a powerful figure at court, becoming the queen's teacher, or Munshi, and instructing her in Urdu and Indian affairs. Devastated by the death of John Brown, her Scottish ghillie, the queen had at last found his replacement. But her intense and controversial relationship with the Munshi led to a near-revolt in the royal household. Now a major motion picture starring Dame Judi Dench, Victoria & Abdul examines how a young Indian Muslim came to play a central role at the heart of the empire, and tells a tender love story between an ordinary Indian and his elderly queen.

A clear and fast-paced account of how and why the French Revolution descended into the Terror

The fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 has become the commemorative symbol of the French Revolution. But this violent and random act was unrepresentative of the real work of the early revolution, which was taking place ten miles west of Paris, in Versailles. There, the nobles, clergy and commoners of France had just declared themselves a republic, toppling a rotten system of aristocratic privilege and altering the course of history forever.

The Revolution was led not by angry mobs, but by the best and brightest of France's growing bourgeoisie: young, educated, ambitious. Their aim was not to destroy, but to build a better state. In just three months they drew up a Declaration of the Rights of Man, which was to become the archetype of all subsequent Declarations worldwide, and they instituted a system of locally elected administration for France which still survives today. They were determined to create an entirely new system of government, based on rights, equality and the rule of law. In the first three years of the Revolution they went a long way toward doing so. Then came Robespierre, the Terror and unspeakable acts of barbarism.

In a clear, dispassionate and fast-moving narrative, Ian Davidson shows how and why the Revolutionaries, in just five years, spiralled from the best of the Enlightenment to tyranny and the Terror. The book reminds us that the Revolution was both an inspiration of the finest principles of a new democracy and an awful warning of what can happen when idealism goes wrong.

WINNER OF THE FRANCO-BRITISH SOCIETY BOOK PRIZE 2016.

June, 1940. German troops enter Paris and hoist the swastika over the Arc de Triomphe. The dark days of Occupation begin. How would you have survived? By collaborating with the Nazis, or risking the lives of you and your loved ones to resist?

The women of Paris faced this dilemma every day - whether choosing between rations and the black market, or travelling on the Metro, where a German soldier had priority for a seat. Between the extremes of defiance and collusion was a vast moral grey area which all Parisiennes had to navigate in order to survive.

Anne Sebba has sought out and interviewed scores of women, and brings us their unforgettable testimonies. Her fascinating cast includes both native Parisiennes and temporary residents: American women and Nazi wives; spies, mothers, mistresses, artists, fashion designers and aristocrats. The result is an enthralling account of life during the Second World War and in the years of recovery and recrimination that followed the Liberation of Paris in 1944. It is a story of fear, deprivation and secrets - and, as ever in the French capital, glamour and determination.

Tells the real story of the British in India - from the arrival of the East India Company to the end of the Raj - and reveals how Britain's rise was built upon its plunder of India. In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial 'gift' - from the railways to the rule of law - was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry. In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain's stained Indian legacy.

The young men who would become known as “The Ritchie Boys” arrived in America as “enemy aliens,” and although they were allowed to enlist in the U.S. military, they were distrusted by everyone. So, in effect, they became outsiders all over again. Until one day in 1942, when the Pentagon woke up to the incredible asset they had on their hands. These men knew the language, culture and psychology of the enemy better than any Americans and had the greatest motivation to fight Hitler’s anti-Semitic regime.

The Pentagon came up with a top-secret plan to harness their expertise by training them in the art of prisoner interrogation. And so off they were sent, back into the belly of the beast, Jews returning to Nazi Germany to occupy the very front lines of battlefields across Europe. Many of them re-entered Europe on D-Day. Their mission, to extract vital intel from freshly-captured POWs about troop movements and command structures and so on, was hugely successful and provided key information that led to victory by the Allied forces.

Meanwhile, few of these men knew what had happened to the families they left behind in Germany, families who had sacrificed to send them on to the safety of America. As the intelligence they gathered revealed increasingly horrific details about the Holocaust (most of which was only then beginning to come to light), they came to fear – and, in many cases, discovered – that the worst had befallen their own fathers and mothers and siblings.

The extraordinary inside story of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in the years after 9/11. Following the attacks on the Twin Towers, Osama bin Laden, the most wanted man in the world, eluded intelligence services and Special Forces units for almost a decade. Using remarkable, first-person testimony from bin Laden's family and closest aides, The Exile chronicles this astonishing tale of evasion, collusion and isolation. In intimate detail, The Exile reveals not only the frantic attack on Afghanistan by the United States in their hunt for bin Laden but also how and why, when they found his family soon after, the Bush administration rejected the chance to seize them. It charts the formation of ISIS, and uncovers the wasted opportunity to kill its Al Qaeda-sponsored founder; it explores the development of the CIA's torture programme; it details Iran's secret shelter for bin Laden's family and Al Qaeda's military council; and it captures the power struggles, paranoia and claustrophobia within the Abbottabad house prior to the raid. A landmark work of investigation and reportage, The Exile is as authoritative as it is compelling, and essential reading for anyone concerned with history, security and future relations with the Islamic world.

The Pursuit of Power draws on a lifetime of thinking about nineteenth-century Europe to create an extraordinarily rich, surprising and entertaining panorama of a continent undergoing drastic transformation.

The book aims to reignite the sense of wonder that permeated this remarkable era, as rulers and ruled navigated overwhelming cultural, political and technological changes. It was a time where what was seen as modern with amazing speed appeared old-fashioned, where huge cities sprang up in a generation, new European countries were created and where, for the first time, humans could communicate almost instantly over thousands of miles. 

In the period bounded by the Battle of Waterloo and the outbreak of World War I, Europe dominated the rest of the world as never before or since: this book breaks new ground by showing how the continent shaped, and was shaped by, its interactions with other parts of the globe.  Richard Evans explores fully the revolutions, empire-building and wars that marked the nineteenth century, but the book is about so much more, whether it is illness, serfdom, religion or philosophy.

The Pursuit of Power is a work by a historian at the height of his powers: essential for anyone trying to understand Europe, then or now.

In May 1940, the small British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was sent to help the Belgians and French hold back the German army. When the Germans invaded, the BEF found themselves in mortal danger thanks to the collapse of the French army on one flank and the Belgian on another. Ill-equipped and under-trained, they nevertheless fought hard for three weeks, conducting a successful fighting withdrawal in the face of a formidable foe.

Drawing on previously unpublished and rare material, Julian Thompson recreates the action from the misunderstandings between the British and French generals to the experiences of the ordinary soldier. He describes the fighting inland and takes us on to Dunkirk harbour and the beaches as the Royal Navy raced against time to bring the British soldiers home.

A masterly work of military history, Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory is also a tribute to the soldiers whose courage and self-belief sustained them through their darkest hours.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Cod and Salt, a definitive history of paper and the astonishing ways it has shaped today’s world.

Paper is one of the simplest and most essential pieces of human technology. For the past two millennia, the ability to produce it in ever more efficient ways has supported the proliferation of literacy, media, religion, education, commerce, and art; it has formed the foundation of civilizations, promoting revolutions and restoring stability. One has only to look at history’s greatest press run, which produced 6.5 billion copies of Máo zhuxí yulu, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Zedong) - which doesn’t include editions in 37 foreign languages and in braille - to appreciate the range and influence of a single publication, in paper. Or take the fact that one of history’s most revered artists, Leonardo da Vinci, left behind only 15 paintings but 4,000 works on paper. And though the colonies were at the time calling for a boycott of all British goods, the one exception they made speaks to the essentiality of the material; they penned the Declaration of Independence on British paper.

Now, amid discussion of “going paperless” - and as speculation about the effects of a digitally dependent society grows rampant - we’ve come to a world-historic juncture. Thousands of years ago, Socrates and Plato warned that written language would be the end of “true knowledge,” replacing the need to exercise memory and think through complex questions. Similar arguments were made about the switch from handwritten to printed books, and today about the role of computer technology. By tracing paper’s evolution from antiquity to the present, with an emphasis on the contributions made in Asia and the Middle East, Mark Kurlansky challenges common assumptions about technology’s influence, affirming that paper is here to stay. Paper will be the commodity history that guides us forward in the twenty-first century and illuminates our times.

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. The Beatles learn to be brilliant in an hour and a half. An Englishman arrives back from Calcutta but refuses to adjust his watch. Beethoven has his symphonic wishes ignored. A US Senator begins a speech that will last for 25 hours. The horrors of war are frozen at the click of a camera. A woman designs a ten-hour clock and reinvents the calendar. Roger Bannister lives out the same four minutes over a lifetime. And a prince attempts to stop time in its tracks. Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalise it and make it meaningful. It has two simple intentions: to tell some illuminating stories, and to ask whether we have all gone completely nuts.

Acclaimed scientist Tim Flannery investigates exciting new technologies currently being developed to address our most pressing environmental threats in a book that presents a positive future for us and our planet.

Climate change, food production and toxic pollution present huge challenges, but, as Flannery shows, we already have innovative, practical and inspiring solutions. Solar energy has, until now, been limited to supplying power only when the sun is shining. But new technology using concentrated sunlight to provide intense heat energy that can be effectively stored overcomes this problem, providing clean renewable power around the clock. Further, the large amounts of power produced can be used to tackle the issue of feeding the world’s growing population - by enabling energy-intense methods of purifying polluted land for agricultural production.

Drawing carbon out of the atmosphere is an essential component in limiting climate change. Flannery explores the potential of kelp, a fast-growing sea algae, to be used on a large scale to convert carbon from the air to a non-gaseous form, reducing levels of atmospheric carbon.

With accessible and engaging explanations of the fascinating science behind these technologies, as well as accounts of the systems already in operation around the world, Sunlight and Seaweed is an enlightening and uplifting view of the future.

Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Europe changed out of all recognition and particularly transformative were the ardent quest for knowledge and the astounding discoveries and inventions which resulted from it. The movement of blood round the body; the movement of the earth round the sun; the velocity of falling objects (and, indeed, why objects fall) - these and numerous other mysteries had been solved by scholars in earnest pursuit of scientia. Several keys were on offer to thinkers seeking to unlock the portal of the unknown: Folk religion had roots deep in the pagan past. Its devotees sought the aid of spirits. They had stores of ancient wisdom, particularly relating to herbal remedies. Theirs was the world of wise women, witches, necromancers, potions and incantations. Catholicism had its own magic and its own wisdom. Dogma was enshrined in the collective wisdom of the doctors of the church and the rigid scholastic system of teaching. Magic resided in the ranks of departed saints and the priestly miracle of the mass.

Alchemy was at root a desire to understand and to exploit the material world. Practitioners studied the properties of natural substances. A whole system of knowledge was built on the theory of the four humours. Astrology was based on the belief that human affairs were controlled by the movement of heavenly bodies. Belief in the casting of horoscopes was almost universal. Natural Philosophy really began with Francis Bacon and his empirical method. It was the beginning of science 'proper' because it was based on observation and not on predetermined theory. Classical Studies. University teaching was based on the quadrivium - which consisted largely of rote learning the philosophy and science current in the classical world (Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, etc.). Renaissance scholars reappraised these sources of knowledge. Islamic and Jewish Traditions. The twelfth-century polymath, Averroes, has been called 'the father of secular thought' because of his landmark treatises on astronomy, physics and medicine. Jewish scholars and mystics introduced the esoteric disciplines of the Kabbalah. New Discoveries.

Exploration connected Europeans with other peoples and cultures hitherto unknown, changed concepts about the nature of the planet, and led to the development of navigational skills. These 'sciences' were not entirely self-contained. For example physicians and theologians both believed in the casting of horoscopes. Despite popular myth (which developed 200 years later), there was no perceived hostility between faith and reason. Virtually all scientists and philosophers before the Enlightenment worked, or tried to work, within the traditional religious framework. Paracelsus, Descartes, Newton, Boyle and their compeers proceeded on the a priori notion that the universe was governed by rational laws, laid down by a rational God. This certainly did not mean that there were no conflicts between the upholders of different types of knowledge. Dr Dee's neighbours destroyed his laboratory because they believed he was in league with the devil. Galileo famously had his run-in with the Curia. By the mid-seventeenth century 'science mania' had set in; the quest for knowledge had become a pursuit of cultured gentlemen.

In 1663 The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge received its charter. Three years later the French Academy of Sciences was founded. Most other European capitals were not slow to follow suit. In 1725 we encounter the first use of the word 'science' meaning 'a branch of study concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified'. Yet, it was only nine years since the last witch had been executed in Britain - a reminder that, although the relationship of people to their environment was changing profoundly, deep-rooted fears and attitudes remained strong.

Our relationship to birds is different from our relationship to any other wild creatures. They are everywhere and we love to watch them, listen to them, keep them as pets, wear their feathers, even converse with them. Birds, Jim Robbins posits, are our most vital connection to nature. They compel us to look to the skies, literally and metaphorically; draw us out into nature to seek their beauty; and let us experience vicariously what it is like to be weightless. Birds have helped us in many of our endeavors: learning to fly, providing clothing and food, and helping us better understand the human brain and body. And they even have much to teach us about being human.

A natural storyteller, Robbins illuminates how qualities unique to birds make them invaluable to humankind from the Australian brush turkey, which helped scientists discover how dinosaurs first flew, to the eagles in Washington D.C. that rehabilitated the troubled teenagers placed in charge of their care.

From the “good luck” ravens in England to the superb lyrebird, whose song is so sophisticated it can mimic koalas, crying babies and chainsaws, Robbins shows our close relationship with birds, the ways in which they are imperiled and how we must fight to save them for the sake of both the planet and humankind.

Renowned for its unusual mammals, Australia is a land of birds that are just as unusual, just as striking, a result of the continent's tens of millions of years of isolation. Compared with birds elsewhere, ours are more likely to be intelligent, aggressive and loud, to live in complex societies, and are long-lived. They're also ecologically more powerful, exerting more influences on forests than other birds. But unlike the mammals, the birds did not keep to Australia; they spread around the globe. Australia provided the world with its songbirds and parrots, the most intelligent of all bird groups.

It was thought in Darwin's time that species generated in the Southern Hemisphere could not succeed in the Northern, an idea that was proven wrong in respect of birds in the 1980's but not properly accepted by the world's scientists until 2004 - because, says Tim Low, most ornithologists live in the Northern Hemisphere. As a result, few Australians are aware of the ramifications, something which prompted the writing of this book. Tim Low has a rare gift for illuminating complex ideas in highly readable prose, and making of the whole a dynamic story.

Here he brilliantly explains how our birds came to be so extraordinary, including the large role played by the foods they consume (birds, too, are what they eat), and by our climate, soil, fire, and Australia's legacy as a part of Gondwana. The story of its birds, it turns out, is inseparable from the story of Australia itself, and one that continues to unfold, so much having changed in the last decade about what we know of our ancient past. Where Song Began also shines a light on New Guinea as a biological region of Australia, as much a part of the continent as Tasmania.

This is a work that goes far beyond the birds themselves to explore the relationships between Australia's birds and its people, and the ways in which scientific prejudice have hindered our understanding.

Why do humans love animals? The bestselling author of In Defence of Dogs and Cat Sense gives us the answers.

Keeping pets is expensive, time-consuming, and seemingly irrational - so why do so many of us have an animal in our lives? Modern-day  pet-keeping has been justified for many reasons, from the potential  therapeutic role pets can play, to their appealing 'cuteness'.

But  pet-keeping is much more than just a simple pastime. It is part of the  broader history of humanity's relationship with animals - a relationship  that comes from deep within our nature. As John Bradshaw reveals in  this highly original new work, our connection with animals is one of the  very things that makes us human.

In The Animals Among Us,  Bradshaw takes us to the heart of Anthrozoology, a new science dedicated  to discovering the true nature and depth of the human-animal bond.  Following the thread of our affection for animals, from today's pet  lovers all the way back to our ancient ancestors, Bradshaw reveals how  animals have always been an integral part of our lives: indeed, they  have shaped the evolution of our minds and our bodies. The ways in which  we relate to animals today stem ultimately from our evolutionary  journey from hominid to Homo sapiens.An affinity for animals  drove our evolution as humans.

Now, as increasing numbers of species are  under threat, John Bradshaw shows us that pet-keeping can act as a  bridge between the domestic and the wild, even aiding conservation. If  we lose the animals among us, he warns, we risk losing an essential part  of ourselves.

'Inspirational' Buzz AldrinWhen exactly did life begin? What really happened during the big bang - and before it? Is the universe expanding? Is dark matter real? Do we live in one of many worlds? What's more, how can we prove any of this?This book is all about how we - any of us - can gain an understanding of the Universe in all its awe-inspiring glory. Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw take us on an epic journey of scientific exploration, revealing how the biggest questions - from the size of the earth to the distance to the stars - are answerable from our own back gardens. You don't need a Large Hadron Collider or a Hubble Space Telescope to explore the cosmos. You just need this book.

When put to the test, most people have difficulty identifying what justice is, especially when there is tension between proper process and a desired result. Due process is inherent in our conception of justice. But bad process can yield the right result, just as good process can produce the wrong result. The legal system is designed to produce justice. We call it the justice system - sometimes un-selfconsciously, sometimes with bitter irony. It is designed to produce justice according to law. Whether it achieves that goal is not the subject of general agreement.’

In Watching Out, a successor volume to his best-selling Watching Brief, noted barrister and human-rights advocate Julian Burnside explains the origins of our legal system, looks at the way it operates in practice, and points out ways in which does and doesn’t run true to its ultimate purposes.

He examines fundamental legal principles, such as the presumption of innocence, explains why good barristers defend bad people, and sets out legal remedies for wrongs done to individuals and groups.

The law’s reach is immense, and so is the territory this book covers. Legal aid, class actions, assisted dying, counter-terrorism, unjust verdicts, and the treatment of asylum-seekers are some of the contentious subjects dealt with here. There is also a compelling chapter on the plight of people who are bereft of legal remedies, living on the margins of society, and shocking examples of hate mail that Burnside’s defence of refugees has provoked.

Rich with fascinating case studies, and eloquent in its defence of civil society, Watching Out is a beacon of legal liberalism in an intemporate age.

From the writers of The Chaser's Australia (Mark Humphries and Evan Williams) comes a savage look at television, entertainment and culture.

Including:

    * A run-down of celebrity sexually transmitted diseases. Who's hot in Hollywood... (because they've got a burning rash). Includes full pathology reports.
    * A look forward to reality shows of the future: including the first actual Hunger Games series in 2018, involving genuine child vs child combat
    * Where are they now? Remember Scarlett Johansson? You might be surprised to find out that nowadays she's a successful actress. We look at stars of the past and find out what they're up to.
    * Plus Ozzie Ostrich speaks out: an interview with the pink Ostrich who says he's been kept in a dungeon for the past 25 years by Daryl Somers

Also includes bonus 16-page Car Guide for Dicks with celebrity guest editor Jeremy Clarkson. It's the perfect Father's Day gift.

(Written by Mark Humphries, Evan Williams with additional contributions from some of Australia's top comedy writers including Chris Taylor, Charles Firth, Andrew Hansen, Craig Reucassel, Rhys Muldoon, Alice Fraser, Jenna Owen, Victoria Zerbst and Cam Smith).

'I fancy Malcolm (Turnbull) is like the big red bunger. You're lighting up, there's a bit of a fizz, then nothing. Nothing.' An updated, gift edition of the bestselling The Book of Paul, presenting the one and only Mr Paul Keating - at his straight-shooting, scumbag-calling, merciless best. Paul lets rip - on John Howard- 'The little desiccated coconut is under pressure and he is attacking anything he can get his hands on.' On Peter Costello- 'The thing about poor old Costello is he is all tip and no iceberg.' On John Hewson- '(His performance) is like being flogged with a warm lettuce.' On Tony Abbott- 'If Tony Abbott ends up the prime minister of Australia, you've got to say, God help us.' And that's just a taste

Aussie Aussie Aussie celebrates the Australians who made Australia great, as well as the ones who stopped Australia from being as great as it could have been, but who have ended up with their own Wikipedia pages anyway. TV columnist, comedian and history buff Ben Pobjie recaps the history of Australia from its humble beginnings as a colonial outpost to its modern-day status as a Commonwealth realm, where its people have the right to discuss - and reject - the idea of an actual Australian ever becoming head of state.

Like any good historian, Pobjie provides an intimate sense of what it was like to be there in the moment at our nation's defining events, and with the people who made them happen.

Meet pioneers such as:

- Charles Kingsford-Smith and Howard Florey, whose groundbreaking efforts moved the country forward;

- artists and entertainers such as Joan Sutherland and Peter Allen, who left an indelible imprint on our national psyche despite, in practical terms, doing nothing of real value;

- captains of industry such as Kerry Packer and Gina Rinehart, who shaped Australia's love affair with people who amass phenomenal quantities of personal wealth;

- sporting heroes such as Cathy Freeman and Don Bradman who, by being elite athletes, helped define every other Australian as just ordinary;

- the mavericks such as Chopper Read and Julian Assange, who crossed the line to show the rest of us where the line clearly was;

- the Lest We Forgetters such as Weary Dunlop and Albert Jacka, who occasionally made us feel like we mattered at all to anyone;

- the humanitarians who found fame by dedicating their lives to others, such as Fred Hollows and Tony Abbott.

Aussie Aussie Aussie is the book for any proud Australian seeking to learn more about the national heroes who make our own pathetic lives seem so insignificant.

A satirical state of the union delivered by the most marginalised voice in Australian media: an angry, white male.

"It's remarkable that I'm able to write this at all. I'm surprised that those lefty hate groups haven't kicked down my door and stolen my keyboard and thrown it into a creek. I suspect the only thing stopping them is the thought of having to put in an honest day's work of vigilante justice and the environmental impact of the gesture…" Peter Chudd, Real Australian

Move over Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt, Australia's leading conservative privileged white man has arrived. And even better, he's written a masterpiece that dismantles every loony left - or even vaguely moderate - political argument ever made in this country!

In Too Right, Peter Chudd, Australia's most controversial far-right columnist, tells it like it is, unafraid of who's 'offended' by his 'poorly researched' opinions.

Global warming? The only thing warming the world is the hot air from environmentalists. And what would climate scientists know about climate science anyway?

Welfare? Well, that's anything but, well, fair.

Racism? Every columnist has a right to be a bigot, and how dare people dismiss him as a 'white man'.

Read the tragic story of how this wealthy, privileged man believes he is, against all odds, the most maligned, victimised, discriminated-against person in the entire country for simply daring to speak the truth. Understand his dismay when people describe him as a hideous husk of a human who is single-handedly tearing the nation apart.

"I didn't know how to deal with the poisonous and toxic people in my life or why they behaved the way they did, so I went looking for an answer. This book is what I found."

Bestselling author David Gillespie turns his attention to a phenomenon that damages businesses, seeds mental disease and discomfort and can bring civilisations to the brink of implosion- the psychopath.

Psychopaths are often thought of as killers and criminals, but actually five to ten per cent of people are probably psychopathic without ever indulging in a single criminal act. These everyday psychopaths may be charming in the early stages of relationships or employment but, Gillespie argues, their presence in your life is at best disruptive, and at worst highly dangerous: they will leave you feeling cheated and humiliated, dominating and manipulating you to the point where you question your sanity. Worse, he caution, at a societal level their tendency to gravitate towards positions of power can be disastrous.

Taming Toxic People is a practical guide to restraining that difficult person in your life, be it your boss, your spouse or a parent. But it is also a serious and meticulously researched warning: if we value a free and well-functioning society, we need to rebuild the sense of community that has historically kept the everyday psychopath in check, and we must understand and act to manage the psychopathic behaviour in our midst.

A world-renowned media and cultural critic offers an insightful analysis of serial TV drama and the modern art of the small screen Television and TV viewing are not what they once were-and that's a good thing, according to award-winning author and critic Clive James. Since serving as television columnist for the London Observer from 1972 to 1982, James has witnessed a radical change in content, format, and programming, and in the very manner in which TV is watched. Here he examines this unique cultural revolution, providing a brilliant, eminently entertaining analysis of many of the medium's most notable twenty-first-century accomplishments and their not always subtle impact on modern society-including such acclaimed serial dramas as Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Mad Men, and The Sopranos, as well as the comedy 30 Rock. With intelligence and wit, James explores a television landscape expanded by cable and broadband and profoundly altered by the advent of Netflix, Amazon, and other cord-cutting platforms that have helped to usher in a golden age of unabashed binge-watching.

Balmain's shock defeat of Souths in the 1969 Grand Final has been called the biggest boilover in rugby league history. The true story of the Tigers' upset win has remained untold for almost 50 years, so it has kept its sense of mystery. Until now ...They were coached by Leo Nosworthy, a savvy operator who'd grown up around the Balmain docks. His team was full of character and characters, but lacked big names. The star-studded Rabbitohs were the two-time defending premiers. Famous names such as Provan, Churchill, Beetson and Sattler are prominent in the story. Shady figures linked to organised crime lurk in the background; this was Balmain in the '60s. The relationship between the two clubs had an edge that had simmered for 60 years. Huge sums were bet on the match. Tigers players were accused of faking injury, to slow the game down. The referee's integrity was questioned. It needed a master researcher to comprehend all the intrigue. Ian Heads, the author of many acclaimed sports books, trawled through archives and interviewed a vast range of participants - players, officials, fans and media - to discover what really happened.

Inspiring, practical, generous and optimistic, one of our finest communicators and most successful businesswomen shares what she’s learned about leadership, the culture of the workplace and the vital importance of living a whole life.

Gail Kelly’s presence reaches far beyond her own profession. The first female CEO of one of Australia’s big four banks, listed by Forbes in 2010 as the 8th most powerful woman in the world, and mother of four (including triplets), Gail is celebrated as one of our finest, most innovative thinkers on leadership and workplace culture.

In these personal, practical chapters, Gail Kelly shares what she’s learned over her remarkable career, drawing from her personal and professional life.

As a leader, she argues passionately for the importance of putting people and customers at the heart of a business; of leading with courage and generosity of spirit; and of resilience. Some of those lessons were learnt at times of high pressure, and Gail takes us into her thinking as she led Westpac through the global financial crisis and the merger with St. George.

But Gail’s voice speaks to each of us, whatever our role in life. She explores the absolute importance of loving what you do; learning to learn; backing yourself; and most importantly, placing your family above all things.

At the heart of Gail’s refreshing, authentic, integrated approach is how both individuals and companies thrive when they openly address the meaning of what they do, and understand the need to live a whole life.

Live, Lead, Learn is the inspiring story of one of the world’s most prominent business people, who started as a Latin teacher and became mother of four and CEO of Westpac – and everything she has learned along the way.

In 2006, Ben S. Bernanke was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve, capping a meteoric trajectory from a rural South Carolina childhood to professorships at Stanford and Princeton, to public service in Washington's halls of power. There would be no time to celebrate, however-the burst of the housing bubble in 2007 set off a domino effect that would bring the global financial system to the brink of meltdown.

In The Courage to Act, Ben Bernanke pulls back the curtain on the tireless and ultimately successful efforts to prevent a mass economic failure. Working with two US presidents and two Treasury secretaries, Bernanke and his colleagues used every Fed capability, no matter how arcane, to keep the US economy afloat. From his arrival in Washington in 2002 and his experiences before the crisis, to the intense days and weeks of the crisis itself, and through the Great Recession that followed, Bernanke gives readers an unequalled perspective on the American economy. This narrative will reveal for the first time how the creativity and decisiveness of a few key leaders prevented an economic collapse of unimaginable scale.

Bernanke explains the inspiration behind the book's title, saying, "When the economic well-being of their nation demanded a strong and creative response, my colleagues at the Federal Reserve, policymakers and staff alike, mustered the moral courage to do what was necessary, often in the face of bitter criticism and condemnation. I am grateful to all of them and proud to have been part of the global effort to contain the most dangerous economic crisis of our time."

It's Robert Kiyosaki's position that, It is our educational system that causes the gap between the rich and everyone else. He laid the foundation for many of his messages in the international best-seller Rich Dad Poor Dad - the #1 personal finance book of all time - and in Why the Rich Are Getting Richer, he makes his case...In this book, the reader will learn why the gap between the rich and everyone else grows wider; why savers are losers; why debt and taxes make the rich richer; why traditional education actually causes many highly educated people - such as Robert's poor dad - to live poorly.In this book, the reader will find out why going to school, working hard, saving money, buying a house, getting out of debt, and investing for the long term in the stock market is the worst financial advice for most people. In this book, the reader will find out why real financial education may never be taught in schools.In this book, Robert shares the answers found on his life-long search, after repeatedly asking the question, When will we learn about money? In this book, the reader will find out What financial education is... really.

The Great Financial Crash had cataclysmic effects on the global economy, and took conventional economists completely by surprise. Many leading commentators declared shortly before the crisis that the magical recipe for eternal stability had been found. Less than a year later, the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression erupted. In this explosive book, Steve Keen, one of the very few economists who anticipated the crash, shows why the self-declared experts were wrong and how ever-rising levels of private debt make another financial crisis almost inevitable unless politicians tackle the real dynamics causing financial instability. He also identifies the economies that have become The Walking Dead of Debt , and those that are next in line ? including Australia, Belgium, China, Canada and South Korea. A major intervention by a fearlessly iconoclastic figure, this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the true nature of the global economic system.

In today's challenging job-market, the time-tested advice of What Color Is Your Parachute? is needed more than ever. Recent grads facing a tough economic landscape, workers laid off mid-career, and people searching for an inspiring work-life change all look to career guru Richard N. Bolles for support, encouragement, and advice on which job-hunt strategies work--and which don't. This revised edition combines classic elements like the famed Flower Exercise with updated tips on social media and search tactics. Bolles demystifies the entire job-search process, from writing resumes to interviewing to networking, expertly guiding job-hunters toward their dream job.

The present is a contest between the bright and dark sides of discovery. To avoid being torn apart by its stresses, we need to recognize the fact-and gain courage and wisdom from the past. Age of Discovery shows how.

Now is the best moment in history to be alive, but we have never felt more anxious or divided. Human health, aggregate wealth and education are flourishing. Scientific discovery is racing forward. But the same global flows of trade, capital, people and ideas that make gains possible for some people deliver big losses to others-and make us all more vulnerable to one another.

Business and science are working giant revolutions upon our societies, but our politics and institutions evolve at a much slower pace. That's why, in a moment when everyone ought to be celebrating giant global gains, many of us are righteously angry at being left out and stressed about where we're headed.

To make sense of present shocks, we need to step back and recognize: we've been here before. The first Renaissance, the time of Columbus, Copernicus, Gutenberg and others, likewise redrew all maps of the world, democratized communication and sparked a flourishing of creative achievement. But their world also grappled with the same dark side of rapid change: social division, political extremism, insecurity, pandemics and other unintended consequences of discovery.

Now is the second Renaissance. We can still flourish-if we learn from the first.

An essential overview of the problems of our world today - and how we should prepare for tomorrow - from the world's leading public intellectual.

We have two choices. We can be pessimistic, give up, and help ensure that the worst will happen. Or we can be optimistic, grasp the opportunities that surely exist, and maybe help make the world a better place. Not much of a choice.

From peerless political thinker Noam Chomsky comes an exploration of rising neoliberalism, the refugee crisis in Europe, the Black Lives Matter movement, the dysfunctional US electoral system, and the prospects and challenges of building a movement for radical change.

Including four up-to-the-minute interviews on the 2016 American election campaign and global resistance to Trump, this Penguin Special is a concise introduction to Chomsky's ideas and his take on the state of the world today.

We are living through a period of dramatic political change? Brexit, the election of Trump, the rise of extreme right movements in Europe and elsewhere, the resurgence of nationalism and xenophobia and a concerted assault on the liberal values and ideals associated with cosmopolitanism and globalization. Suddenly we find ourselves in a world that few would have imagined possible just a few years ago, a world that seems to many to be a move backwards.

How can we make sense of these dramatic developments and how should we respond to them? Are we witnessing a worldwide rejection of liberal democracy and its replacement by some kind of populist authoritarianism?

This timely volume brings together some of the world's greatest minds to analyse and seek to understand the forces behind this 'great regression'. Writers from across disciplines and countries, including Paul Mason, Pankaj Mishra, Slavoj ?i?ek, Zygmunt Bauman, Arjun Appadurai, Wolfgang Streeck and Eva Illouz, grapple with our current predicament, framing it in a broader historical context, discussing possible future trajectories and considering ways that we might combat this reactionary turn.

The Great Regression is a key intervention that will be of great value to all those concerned about recent developments and wondering how best to respond to this unprecedented challenge to the very core of liberal democracy and internationalism across the world today.

In this book of brief essays, Singer applies his controversial ways of thinking to issues like climate change, extreme poverty, animals, abortion, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, the ethics of high-priced art, and ways of increasing happiness. Singer asks whether chimpanzees are people, smoking should be outlawed, or consensual sex between adult siblings should be decriminalised, and he reiterates his case against the idea that all human life is sacred, applying his arguments to some recent cases in the news. In addition, he explores, in an easily accessible form, some of the deepest philosophical questions, such as whether anything really matters and whether the pale blue dot that is our planet has any value. The collection also includes some more personal reflections, like Singer's thoughts on one of his favourite activities, surfing, and an unusual suggestion for starting a family conversation over a holiday feast. Provocative and original, these essays will challenge-and possibly change-your beliefs about a wide range of real-world ethical questions.

In a democracy, should everyone - absolutely everyone - get a vote? Does it really matter if tigers become extinct? Why does murder carry a heavier penalty than attempted murder? If you don't like the socks your grandma gives you for Christmas, should you tell her so? This thought-provoking, interactive, and entertaining introduction to ethics will bring you face to face with some tough moral choices. It presents you with 101 imaginative scenarios--sometimes amusing, sometimes tragic, and sometimes uncomfortably realistic - which will force you to re-examine your most cherished assumptions about right and wrong. Including: -Paul, the torturer with a conscience; -Sally, who can prevent enormous suffering for the price of a latte; -Paul, who is handy with a weapon, but not a killer, surely. 101 Dilemmas for the Armchair Philosopher is packed with problems, puzzles, quizzes, and questions, as well as ethical ideas and insights from history's greatest philosophers.

In a virtuoso display of erudition, thoughtfulness and humour, Terry Eagleton teases apart the concept of hope as it has been (often mistakenly) conceptualised over six millennia, from ancient Greece to today. He distinguishes hope from simple optimism, cheeriness, desire, idealism or adherence to the doctrine of Progress, bringing into focus a standpoint that requires reflection and commitment, arises from clear-sighted rationality, can be cultivated by practice and self-discipline, and which acknowledges but refuses to capitulate to the realities of failure and defeat. Authentic hope is indubitably tragic, yet Eagleton also argues for its radical implications as 'a species of permanent revolution, whose enemy is as much political complacency as metaphysical despair'. It is a means of facing the future without devaluing the moment or obviating the past. Traversing centuries of thought about the many modes of hoping - from Ernst Bloch's monumental work through the Stoics, Aquinas, Marx and Kierkegaard, among others - this penetrating book throws new light on religious faith and political ideology as well as issues such as the problem of evil, the role of language and the meaning of the past. Hope Without Optimism is a brilliantly engaged, impassioned chronicle of human belief and desire in an increasingly uncertain world.

We used to say "seeing is believing"; now, googling is believing. With 24/7 access to nearly all of the world's information at our fingertips, we no longer trek to the library or the encyclopedia shelf in search of answers. We just open our browsers, type in a few keywords and wait for the information to come to us. Now firmly established as a pioneering work of modern philosophy, The Internet of Us has helped revolutionize our understanding of what it means to be human in the digital age. Indeed, demonstrating that knowledge based on reason plays an essential role in society and that there is more to "knowing" than just acquiring information, leading philosopher Michael P. Lynch shows how our digital way of life makes us value some ways of processing information over others, and thus risks distorting the greatest traits of mankind. Charting a path from Plato's cave to Google Glass, the result is a necessary guide on how to navigate the philosophical quagmire that is the "Internet of Things."

For curious readers young and old, a rich and colorful history of religion from humanity's earliest days to our own contentious times In an era of hardening religious attitudes and explosive religious violence, this book offers a welcome antidote. Richard Holloway retells the entire history of religion-from the dawn of religious belief to the twenty-first century-with deepest respect and a keen commitment to accuracy. Writing for those with faith and those without, and especially for young readers, he encourages curiosity and tolerance, accentuates nuance and mystery, and calmly restores a sense of the value of faith. Ranging far beyond the major world religions of Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism, Holloway also examines where religious belief comes from, the search for meaning throughout history, today's fascinations with Scientology and creationism, religiously motivated violence, hostilities between religious people and secularists, and more. Holloway proves an empathic yet discerning guide to the enduring significance of faith and its power from ancient times to our own.

What exactly does Islamism mean? And what explains its violent expansion in recent decades? Are there similarities between Islamism and classical totalitarian regimes and ideologies? Will it fail, as those regimes did in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; or can it adapt effectively to changing realities? What are the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of the Islamic project? Addressing these questions within a context both historical and global, Mehdi Mozaffari provides an important new framework for understanding the full impact of Islamism in the Middle East and beyond.

'Being a copper's son, I've always got one eye out for trouble. I can't help it. But I don't go looking for it anymore.' In Tim Winton's fiction, chaos shapes the lives of his characters. So too Winton's own life. The extraordinarily powerful true stories that make up The Boy Behind the Curtain take us behind the scenes, revealing the accidents, both serendipitous and traumatic, that have influenced his view of life and fuelled his distinctive artistic vision. By turns impassioned, funny, joyous, astonishing, this is Winton's most personal book to date, an insight into the man who's held us enthralled for three decades and helped us reshape our view of ourselves. Behind it all, from risk-taking youth to surprise-averse middle age, has been the crazy punt of staking everything on becoming a writer.

This volume is designed to accompany the OCR A-Level specification in Latin (first teaching September 2016), with practice unseen passages from Livy, the set prose for Paper 1, together with passages from a selection of other writers to support Paper 2, for which no author is set. A bank of 80 passages aims to take Sixth Form students from the level of heavily adapted post-GCSE ( AS '-equivalent) passages and develop their knowledge and skills to reach A-Level standard.

But this is not just a book of unseen passages- there is a chronological progression through the unseens in order to give the reader a sense of the narrative of Roman history, exploring key events through the words of original texts. Every passage begins with an introduction, outlining the basic content of the passage, followed by a 'lead-in' sentence, paraphrasing the few lines before the passage begins. Part 1 passages are straight translation exercises on the model of the A-Level Paper 1. They also feature, however, a Discendum ' box, highlighting a facet of Latin prose with which students may not be familiar, or extension questions on grammar and style. Part 2 passages are accompanied by questions on comprehension, translation and grammar, replicating the demands of Paper 2 in full.

An extensive word list is provided in the form of checklists which build the reader 's knowledge of the most commonly occurring words and phrases in Latin prose. The passages are punctuated with discussions of Roman history during the periods covered in the passages, and a comprehensive introduction includes portraits of the authors featured in the book, as well as grammatical reminders to help readers deal with both the trickier elements of unseen prose and with A-Level grammatical analysis questions.

This new edition of Essential GCSE Latin is updated in the light of the 2016 GCSE specification from OCR. Neither a complete course from scratch nor a reference grammar, but a summary of all the linguistic requirements for the OCR Latin examination, this is the perfect book for classes who are on a reduced schedule or who are using other longer Latin courses that require a supporting grammar and exercise textbook.

Whatever course students of Latin have used, many remain very hazy about grammar. It is difficult to track back in a multi-volume course to the first introduction of a particular construction. Traditional grammars, on the other hand, can be forbidding, and often do not give enough help with syntax and idiom. This book breaks everything down into bite-sized chunks, with examples and practice sentences (600 in all) on each point, and generous cross-referencing. Written by an experienced examiner, teacher and author of textbooks for the classical languages, it concentrates on the understanding of principles in both accidence and syntax, in order to cut down on rote learning. Practice passages for the optional harder unseen translation passage are included.

The new edition is supported by a companion website with further resources and answers, and is endorsed by OCR.

The surprising hidden history behind Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre.

Why did Charlotte Brontë go to such great lengths on the publication of her acclaimed, best-selling novel, Jane Eyre, to conceal its authorship from her family, close friends, and the press? In The Secret History of Jane Eyre, John Pfordresher tells the enthralling story of Brontë’s compulsion to write her masterpiece and why she then turned around and vehemently disavowed it.

Few people know how quickly Brontë composed Jane Eyre. Nor do many know that she wrote it during a devastating and anxious period in her life. Thwarted in her passionate, secret, and forbidden love for a married man, she found herself living in a home suddenly imperiled by the fact that her father, a minister, the sole support of the family, was on the brink of blindness. After his hasty operation, as she nursed him in an isolated apartment kept dark to help him heal his eyes, Brontë began writing Jane Eyre, an invigorating romance that, despite her own fears and sorrows, gives voice to a powerfully rebellious and ultimately optimistic woman’s spirit.

The Secret History of Jane Eyre expands our understanding of both Jane Eyre and the inner life of its notoriously private author. Pfordresher connects the people Brontë knew and the events she lived to the characters and story in the novel, and he explores how her fecund imagination used her inner life to shape one of the world’s most popular novels.

By aligning his insights into Brontë's life with the timeless characters, harrowing plot, and forbidden romance of Jane Eyre, Pfordresher reveals the remarkable parallels between one of literature’s most beloved heroines and her passionate creator, and arrives at a new understanding of Brontë's brilliant, immersive genius.

Between 1787 and 1850, over 160,000 convicts were sent from Britain to penal colonies in Australia. First Fleet tells the story of the first eleven ships that sailed from Portsmouth on a 15,000 mile voyage to establish the first British penal settlement at Sydney Cove. Drawing on the surviving journals from some of those on board the prison convoy, these poems inhabit the imaginary voices of convicts, crew, marines, and Aboriginal people to give intimate voice - lyrical, poignant and unsentimental - to the poverty they left behind and the terrible starvation years they faced when they reached Australia.

Are we tired of hearing that fall is a season, sick of being offered fries and told about the latest movie? Yeah. Have we noticed the sly interpolation of Americanisms into our everyday speech? You betcha. And are we outraged? Hell, yes. But do we do anything? Too much hassle. Until now.In That's The Way It Crumbles Matthew Engel presents a call to arms against the linguistic impoverishment that happens when one language dominates another. With dismay and wry amusement, he traces the American invasion of our language from the early days of the New World, via the influence of Edison, the dance hall and the talkies, right up to the Apple and Microsoft-dominated present day, and explores the fate of other languages trying to fend off linguistic takeover bids. It is not the Americans' fault, more the result of their talent for innovation and our own indifference.He explains how America's cultural supremacy affects British gestures, celebrations and way of life, and how every paragraph and conversation includes words the British no longer even think of as Americanisms. Part battle cry, part love song, part elegy, this book celebrates the strange, the banal, the precious and the endangered parts of our uncommon common language.

'The ideal interpreter of the Ring ... a fascinating and valuable study ... absorbing and convincing' Sunday TimesThe Ring of the Nibelung is one of the greatest works of art created in modern times. Roger Scruton's brilliant and passionate exploration of the drama, music, symbolism and philosophy of Wagner's masterpiece - with its themes of love, death, sacrifice and freedom - shows how, ultimately, it expresses the truth about the human condition. 'Highly original and penetrating ... tremendous' Tim Blanning, Literary Review'A rich, historical account ... After reading this book, only the most unadventurous reader would turn down the chance to see Wagner's masterpiece' Economist'A brilliant gallop through the master's religious, musical and philosophical contexts' Sue Prideaux, Spectator'Scruton is one of the finest philosopher-musicians since Schopenhauer' Jonathan Gaisman, Standpoint

Andrew Bovell has worked as a playwright and screenwriter for more than thirty years. In Platform Paper 52, he draws on this broad experience to discuss the place and role of the writer in the Australian theatre, film, and television industries, and examines how that place may have changed in each. He examines some of the philosophical, political, and practical ideas that inform his work, and makes a case for the centrality of the writer in the creative process, whilst discussing the crucial relationship he has with the other key creatives in the development of a new work.

Celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Reservoir Dogs by diving into the brilliant, twisted mind of Quentin Tarantino and discover the artistic process of an Oscar-winning legend.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1963, Quentin Tarantino spent many Saturday evenings during his childhood accompanying his mother to the movies, nourishing a love of film that was, over the course of his life, to become all-consuming. The script for his first movie took him four years to complete: My Best Friend’s Birthday, a seventy-minute film in which he both acted and directed. The script for his second film, Reservoir Dogs (1992), took him just under four weeks to complete. When it debuted, he was immediately hailed as one of the most exciting new directors in the industry.

Known for his highly cinematic visual style, out-of-sequence storytelling, and grandiose violence, Tarantino’s films have provoked both praise and criticism over the course of his career. They’ve also won him a host of awards—including Oscars, Golden Globes, and BAFTA awards - usually for his original screenplays. His oeuvre includes the cult classic Pulp Fiction, bloody revenge saga Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, and historical epics Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight.

This stunning retrospective catalogs each of Quentin Tarantino’s movies in detail, from My Best Friend’s Birthday to The Hateful Eight. The book is a tribute to a unique directing and writing talent, celebrating an uncompromising, passionate director’s enthralling career at the heart of cult filmmaking.

In December 1888, Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear. It is the most famous story about any artist in history. But what really happened on that dark winter night?In Van Gogh's Ear, Bernadette Murphy reveals the truth. She takes us on an extraordinary journey from major museums to forgotten archives, vividly reconstructing Van Gogh's world. We meet police inspectors and cafU patrons, prostitutes and madams, his beloved brother Theo and fellow painter Paul Gauguin.Why did Van Gogh commit such a brutal act? Who was the mysterious 'Rachel' to whom he presented his macabre gift? Did he really remove his entire ear? Murphy answers these important questions with her groundbreaking discoveries, offering a stunning portrait of an artist edging towards madness in his pursuit of excellence.

Leading Australian curator Felicity Fenner profiles activity-based and pop-up contemporary public art projects from Australia and around the globe. Running the City explores art projects that bring together diverse disciplines and cultures - including running, cycling, architecture, and guerilla gardening. From runners taking to the streets of Sydney's CBD in Runscape to Work No. 850, where athletes sprinted through the corridors of Tate Britain, the book surveys recent art projects that utilise the city both as subject matter and a site for art. Participatory, temporary, and permanent community-driven art projects reveal how public space can be activated in ways that are original, subversive, fun, and unexpected. The theme of running - both in the context of athleticism and agency - underscores the artworks here. More than just site-specific public art, the art projects examined in Running the City change the way we think about and inhabit our cities.

Hopper is generally considered the major twentieth-century realist. Such paintings as House by the Railroad, Early Sunday Morning, and Nighthawks seem to embody the very character of our time. Yet few people have penetrated the mask of Hopper's public image. Here, Gail Levin has gone beyond the standard evaluations of the man and his work to investigate the authentic identity of the artist and the way his personality informed his art. She has uncovered aspects of Hopper's life (and even unknown works) that provide the first comprehensive view of the artists early development. The fascinating and often poignant story of Hopper's long struggle for recognition gives new insight into his later pessimism. A complex man is revealed, introspective and intellectual, yet romantic, illuminating the many levels of meaning in the paintings of his maturity. In addition to Hopper's watercolors and oil paintings, there are study drawings for his major works and documentary photographs illuminating all phases of his life.

From the author of Women from the Ankle Down comes a lively cultural biography of diamonds, which explores our society's obsession with the world's most brilliant gemstone and the real-world characters who make them shine. A diamond is forever. Who among us doesn't recognize this phrase and, with it, the fascination that these shiny gemstones hold in our collective imagination as symbols of royalty, stars, and eternal love? But who gave us this catchphrase? Where do these gemstones and their colorful legacies originate? How did they become our culture's symbol of engagement and marriage? Why have they retained their coveted status throughout the centuries?Rachelle Bergstein's cultural biography of the diamond illuminates the enticing, often surprising story of our society's enduring obsession with the hardest gemstone-and the people who have worked tirelessly to ensure its continued allure. From the South African mines where most diamonds have been sourced since the late 1890s to the companies who have fought to monopolize them; from the stars who have dazzled in them to the people behind the scenes who have carefully crafted our understanding of their value-Brilliance and Fire offers a glittering history of the world's most coveted gemstone and its greatest champions and most colorful enthusiasts.Brilliance and Fire is illustrated with 16 pages of color photographs.

Halliday Wine Companion is recognised as the industry benchmark for Australian wine. The 2018 edition has been completely revised to bring you up-to-the-minute information. In his inimitable style, Halliday shares his extensive knowledge of wine through detailed tasting notes with points, price, value symbol and advice on best-by drinking, as well as each wine's closure and alcohol content. He provides information about wineries and winemakers, including vineyard sizes, opening times and contact details.

The expert guide to growing vegies organically in your own backyard. Featuring top advice from ABC Organic Gardener magazine, horticultural editor Penny Woodward and expert contributors present a practical guide to growing vegetables organically, whether you're starting a patch from scratch or you're an old hand who wants to go greener. This book has all you need to know to grow your own healthy and sustainable produce: from getting started, preparing your patch and making compost, to an A-Z of popular vegetables with a month-by-month planting and growing guide, as well as natural ways to combat pests and diseases. So what are you waiting for? Go organic and start reaping your own healthy backyard harvest now!

In 2013, Australian earth scientist Chris Turney led an ambitious expedition to Antarctica. It promised so much - discovery, history, adventure - but came with great risk. The story of Turney's ship, the Shokalskiy, and the plight of the 71 people on board was broadcast around the world. We watched, listened and read as they became trapped on Christmas Eve, the hull of the ship pierced by a tower of ice. Efforts to rescue them were thwarted by fierce blizzards and roaming icebergs. It was the modern, wired version of Shackleton's ill-fated voyage and rescue, with one massive difference- Shackleton's wife and children were not with him. Shackled is a classic adventure story with a twist. As the ghosts of explorers like Shackleton, Mawson and Ross look on, the day-to-day tribulations of a ship facing uncertain danger unfold before our very eyes. We discover firsthand the latest scientific findings from the frozen continent and learn the fates of the many intrepid explorers in whose footsteps Turney and his team walked.

From the author of Leviathan, or, The Whale, comes a composite portrait of the subtle, beautiful, inspired and demented ways in which we have come to terms with our watery planet. In the third of his watery books, the author goes in pursuit of human and animal stories of the sea. Of people enchanted or driven to despair by the water, accompanied by whales and birds and seals – familiar spirits swimming and flying with the author on his meandering odyssey from suburbia into the unknown.

Along the way, he encounters drowned poets and eccentric artists, modernist writers and era-defining performers, wild utopians and national heroes – famous or infamous, they are all surprisingly, and sometimes fatally, linked to the sea.

Out of the storm-clouds of the twenty-first century and our restive time, these stories reach back into the past and forward into the future. This is a shape-shifting world that has never been certain, caught between the natural and unnatural, where the state between human and animal is blurred. Time, space, gender and species become as fluid as the sea.

Here humans challenge their landbound lives through art or words or performance or myth, through the animal and the elemental. And here they are forever drawn back to the water, forever lost and found on the infinite sea.

Growing up on the Cambridgeshire Fens, Will Millard never felt more at home than when he was out with his granddad on the riverbank whiling away the day catching fish. As he grew older his competitive urge to catch more and bigger fish led him away from that natural connection between him, his grandfather and the rivers of his home and into large commercial fisheries catching fish after fish. That is, until the fateful day he let a record-breaking sand eel slip through his fingers and he knew that he had lost the magic of those days down by the river, and that something had to change. Armed with his late grandfather's well-thumbed fishing encyclopaedia Will set out on a quest to get back to his roots and catch some of our great forgotten fish species, hidden deep in our lost waterways. The Old Man and the Sand Eel is at its heart the story of three generations of men trying to figure out what it is to be a man, a father and a fisherman. It plots Will's scaly stepping stones back to his childhood innocence and late granddad, and a return to the importance of understanding the truly feral through a child's eyes, when anything was possible and the wild was everywhere.

In 1948, Ben Carlin set out from New York City with an audacious, lunatic plan to circumnavigate the world in an army surplus amphibious jeep called Half-Safe. Fuelled by cigarettes and adrenaline, the Australian army major pushed his fragile, claustrophobic vehicle through fierce Atlantic hurricanes, across uncharted North African desert, into dense South-East Asian jungle and over the icy dark swells of the North Pacific. It was a 50,000-mile roll of the dice that by all rights should have killed him. When Ben finally pulled into Times Square a decade later, he found himself alone and forgotten, his legacy little more than a wake of women and empty whiskey bottles. And the worst was yet to come.Was it all a fool's errand? Or a pure manifestation of spirit? Where does a dream end and an obsession begin? What's an acceptable cost to pay, and to what lengths will a person go not to be left with the haunting question- what if? The Last Great Australian Adventurer is the compelling account of Ben Carlin's attempt to make an enduring mark on the world at the twilight of the Golden Age of Adventure.

Buckle up for the next instalment of Lonely Planet's 'Epic' series: Epic Drives of the World. This beautifully illustrated hardcover follows on from the bestselling Epic Bike Rides of the World, and features 50 classic road trips across the world with 150 additional suggestions for both long and short drives. Each road trip features a first-hand account, map, practical advice and gorgeous, full-colour photography. Drives include Hawaii's Hana Highway, Australia's Great Ocean Road, and the Pamir Highway in Central Asia. All travellers will be inspired to hit the open road and explore.

Featuring communist bunkers, burning gas craters and at least one sponge-rock fluorescent grotto built by Polish monks, this book reveals weird and wonderful sights the crowds don't reach. We've all heard of India's Taj Mahal, but what about Karna Mata Temple? It's a building teeming with rats so revered they enjoy A-list treatment with daily offerings of milk and fruit. It's no secret that visitors to Berlin can see parts of its infamous Wall still standing in the city. Not so many people know that segments of the wall have travelled all around the world and can be found in places including Los Angeles, Japan and Iceland. Stonehenge is one of the UK's most popular tourist sites. So why not beat the crowds and head to Nebraska instead, where you can marvel at a Carhenge - a replica of the great monolith site constructed entirely from vintage cars. This packed and fascinating title takes its readers on a journey through the world's lesser known marvels. Dive into an underworld of the planet's most surprising, fun, perplexing, kitsch and downright bizarre sights - and explore human stories and mysterious happenings that you won't find inside a regular guidebook. From eerie natural wonders to historical oddities and bizarre architecture, this is a travel companion for the incurably curious.

John Drawbridge has moved to Widemoat Castle to learn to become a knight. And there is a LOT to learn. . . How to charge with a lance on horseback without falling off. Why the spiral staircases always go up in a clockwise direction. How to defend the castle against invading parties. Why the plates served at banquets are made of stale bread (and why you shouldn't eat them...). And much, MUCH more. So it's no wonder that John decides to keep a diary (even if it is only an imaginary one...) of his time at the castle. Things REALLY liven up when the castle is attacked by an invading Welsh party - but can John foil their plot before it's too late...?

The Clockwork Sparrow meets Downton AbbeyIt's a bitterly cold winter in Yorke and Rose Raventhorpe and her butler Heddsworth are stuck with Rose's unpleasant cousin Herbert, and his equally horrible butler, Bixby. When an orphan boy named Orpheus interrupts the Cathedral's Mistletoe Service, saying that his sister has been kidnapped, Rose vows to help. Solving the mystery will be a lot better than accompanying ghastly Herbert! But the investigation is more complicated than Rose has anticipated and will lead her and her butler friends through fancy tea-rooms, horrible factories, secret underground passages and more... Fireplace pokers are much more dangerous than you might imagine . . .

Aaron Becker, creator of the award-winning Journey and its stunning, celebrated sequel, Quest, presents the final chapter in his luminous, wordless fantasy. Failing to get the attention of her busy father, a lonely girl turns back to a fantastic world for friendship and adventure. It's her third journey into the enticing realm of kings and emperors, castles and canals, exotic creatures and enchanting landscapes. But this time, it will take something truly powerful to persuade her to return home, as a gripping backstory is revealed that will hold readers in its thrall.

This delightful book for Early Childhood will mesmerise young children and older readers. The black linework and colourful wash backgrounds work beautifully with the lyrical text. Together they introduce extraordinary creatures and birds that we can discover and observe around our Australian coastline. `Dancing jellyfish', `scuttling crabs', `beautiful shells', `tangled seaweed' and a `soaring kite' evoke the wonder of our beaches and the treasures to be found.

This is my Guff. He's really nice. I've known him since I was little. And I still know him even now I'm biga A funny and delightful picture book for 4+ for anyone who's ever had a little fabric friend. From the award-winning and best-selling author, Aaron Blabey.

We weren't supposed to be going to the pictures that night. We weren't even meant to be outside, not in a blackout, and definitely not when German bombs had been falling on London all month like pennies from a jar.February, 1941. After months of bombing raids in London, twelve-year-old Olive Bradshaw and her little brother Cliff are evacuated to the Devon coast. The only person with two spare beds is Mr Ephraim, the local lighthouse keeper. But he's not used to company and he certainly doesn't want any evacuees. Desperate to be helpful, Olive becomes his post-girl, carrying secret messages (as she likes to think of the letters) to the villagers. But Olive has a secret of her own. Her older sister Sukie went missing in an air raid, and she's desperate to discover what happened to her. And when a sneaky peek at a letter reveals a clue, she knows she'll have to break all the rules to find her.

Poor old dragon. Nobody wants him in their story. Not Goldilocks, not Hansel and Gretel - no one. But Dragon will not give up! He shall continue on his course of finding someone who wants him in their story. ANYONE. His boundless enthusiasm surely won't get him into any trouble. Surely ... A glorious story about dragons, heroes and one very big sneeze. From author Lou Carter, a phenomenal new talent, and Deborah Allwright, illustrator of the bestselling The Night Pirates.

The sandpiper stretched its wings in the chilling breeze. It knew it was time to leave... so it took flight. Follow the feathers as they fall along this exquisite journey of heartache, hope and home.

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- Sparrow is in juvenile detention, and on an exercise off the Kimberley coast when the boat taking his group back to the mainland catches fire. In a split instant and despite the fear of saltwater crocodiles and sharks, he decides to escape. Reaching the shore and eluding his pursuers, Sparrow has to survive on his wits and determination not to go back. As the reader follows him in his quest for survival in what could be a hostile and unforgiving landscape, we also learn the life that Sparrow is so desperate to escape, and that the wilderness doesn't hold as many threats as his past. Weaving in themes of survival, resilience and environmental awareness, this is an interesting and powerful novel for readers 13+ Lindy Jones

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One, two, three, breath. When a juvenile detention exercise off the coast of the Kimberley goes wrong, sixteen-year-old Sparrow must swim to shore. There are sharks and crocs around him but the monsters he fears most live in the dark spaces in his mind. He's swimming away from his prison life and towards a desolate, rocky coastland and the hollow promise of freedom. He'll eat or be eaten, kill or be killed. With no voice, no family and the odds stacked against him, Sparrow has nothing left to lose. But to survive he'll need something more potent than desperation, something more dangerous than a makeshift knife. Hope.

Gorgeously illustrated and with a classic feel, this is a brilliantly funny story of a rabbit and a bear who discover that things are always better when they're shared with a friend. Ideal for readers moving on from picture books. 'PEACE AND QUIET,' shouts Rabbit. 'THAT'S ALL I WANT.'Owch. He's hurt his own ears again.What with Bear's snoring, and a BANG!BANG!BANG! noise from up in the tree, Rabbit knows that Something Simply Has To Be Done.But high in the branches, perhaps Bear can show Rabbit how to see the world from a different place... From novelist and playwright Julian Gough, and the winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, Jim Field, this is a tale of friendship, wisdom, and how to be REALLY NOISY.

Join Andy and Terry in their ridiculous 91-storey treehouse!

Go for a spin in the world's most powerful whirlpool, take a ride in a submarine sandwich, get marooned on a desert island, hang out in a giant spider web, visit the fortune-teller's tent to get your fortune told by Madame Know-it-all and decide whether or not to push the mysterious big red button.

Well, what are you waiting for? Come on up!

The 7th in this bestselling series.

Seventeen-year-old Iliad Piper - Ily for short - is named after war and angry at the world. Growing up with a violent father and abused mother, she doesn't know how to do relationships, family or friends. Her love-hate friendship with Max turns into a prank war and she nearly destroys her first true friendship with misfit Mia. She takes off her armour for nobody, until she meets Jared, a local actor and someone who's as complicated as she is.

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- There are many A-Z books using Australian animals but this one is set apart by giving a handful of interesting facts on the featured creature (and by the distribution maps at the back of the book in case the young reader wants to know where they might find them!) Colourful slightly naïve and joyful illustrations show the animals in natural poses and simplified habitats. I rather liked that X stood for Crusader Bugs because the insects have a x-shaped cross on their backs! A book both useful and attractive, for ages 3-5. Lindy Jones

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Australia is full of the most amazing animals on the planet! What animal has six thumbs? What animal produces square poo? What animal is made up of 95 per cent water and is highly venomous? Discover the answers to these questions and more in this factastic tour of Australian animals.

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- Quil Medway is an orphan who lives with her high-flying, loving but distant, aunt. Packed off to a holiday camp, 11 year old Quil gets the oddest feeling as her train goes through a small town on the other side of the mountains, and before she has time to reconsider, she gets off. She's drawn to an old shop, and when a cheeky dog and the shop's owner appear, it's the start of her finding a home and the real feeling of family… Told with all the considerable charm you would expect from one of Australia's best-loved authors, this is a lovely read for upper primary ages. Lindy Jones

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From one of Australia's most renowned children's authors, this is a story about coming home when you didn't even know that was where you belonged. 

Eleven-year-old Jonquil (known as Quil) Medway is a girl with more than an unusual name. Quil's parents died in a car accident when she was a baby and she now goes to boarding school, but spends her holidays with an aunt - or at camp, which is where Quil is heading when she decides to get off early at a train stop called Hoopers Bend. 

It is there that Quil meets Pirate, a chunky little white dog with black spots who immediately adopts her and Bailey, a crabby older lady who has gone to Hoopers Bend to check out the shop that has been left to her by an uncle. 

There is something magical about the shop at Hoopers Bend though, and once it casts its spell on Quil and Bailey they are drawn together in an unlikely friendship and their fight to save the shop from developers. 

From one of Australia's most renowned children's authors, this is a story about coming home when you didn't even know that was where you belonged. Ages: 9+

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- Whatley is known for his simple illustration styles (Diary of a Wombat etc) or impressionist style (Fire) but this book is completely different. The inevitable comparison will be with Shaun Tan's Arrival as it is a work of graphite on paper, although unlike that other masterpiece this book does have text. Rather surreal text, which allows the reader to fill in the gaps and construct the meaning for themselves. Ruben is a small, almost stunted figure, living alone in a threatening city, but one day he notices another small figure slipping in and out of the shadows, and gives chase. From such beginnings grow possibilities of change... Will appeal to anyone who admires the artistry of children's illustration. Lindy Jones

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Ruben’s dreams were of places that made no sense to him.

Places that didn’t exist. At least not anymore.

Ruben lives in a safe place in a city that takes everything and gives nothing back. He begins to feel that he is in danger and ventures to Block City where he meets Koji. She too has been hiding from the dangers of the industrial city and its excesses. Ruben and Koji realise that if they combine their knowledge of how the city works they can find a way to escape... together.

This luminous tale of loss, love and finding family is threaded through with the power of storytelling, and a touch of magic. 'A giant of a little thing', as Alberto would say, The Boy, the Bird, & the Coffin Maker reads like a classic. Kiran Millwood Hargrave, author of The Girl of Ink and Stars. Alberto lives alone in the town of Allora, where fish fly out of the sea and the houses shine like jewels. He is a coffin maker, spending his quiet, solitary days creating the final resting places of Allora's people. Until the day a mysterious boy and his magical bird arrive - flying from danger and searching for a safe haven. Tito is fearful, suspicious of kindness, but as the winter days grow colder and darker, Alberto's home grows warmer and brighter. Can Tito and his bird be sheltered from the town's prying eyes and the shadows of their past? A story of life and death and of how hope can burn bright in a place faded by sadness.