An enchanting and captivating novel, about how our untold stories haunt us - and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.

After her family suffers a tragedy, nine-year-old Alice Hart is forced to leave her idyllic seaside home. She is taken in by her grandmother, June, a flower farmer who raises Alice on the language of Australian native flowers, a way to say the things that are too hard to speak.

Under the watchful eye of June and the women who run the farm, Alice settles, but grows up increasingly frustrated by how little she knows of her family's story. In her early twenties, Alice's life is thrown into upheaval again when she suffers devastating betrayal and loss. Desperate to outrun grief, Alice flees to the dramatically beautiful central Australian desert. In this otherworldly landscape Alice thinks she has found solace, until she meets a charismatic and ultimately dangerous man.

Spanning two decades, set between sugar cane fields by the sea, a native Australian flower farm, and a celestial crater in the central desert, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart follows Alice's unforgettable journey, as she learns that the most powerful story she will ever possess is her own.

The art historian Noah Glass, having just returned from a trip to Sicily, is discovered floating face down in the swimming pool at his Sydney apartment block. His adult children, Martin and Evie, must come to terms with the shock of their father's death. But a sculpture has gone missing from a museum in Palermo, and Noah is a suspect. The police are investigating.

None of it makes any sense. Martin sets off to Palermo in search of answers about his father's activities, while Evie moves into Noah's apartment, waiting to learn where her life might take her. Retracing their father's steps in their own way, neither of his children can see the path ahead.

Tom Hope doesn't think he's much of a farmer, but he's doing his best. He can't have been much of a husband to Trudy, either, judging by her sudden departure. It's only when she returns, pregnant to someone else, that he discovers his surprising talent as a father. So when Trudy finds Jesus and takes little Peter away with her to join the holy rollers, Tom's heart breaks all over again.

Enter Hannah Babel, quixotic small town bookseller- the second Jew - and the most vivid person - Tom has ever met. He dares to believe they could make each other happy.

But it is 1968- twenty-four years since Hannah and her own little boy arrived at Auschwitz. Tom Hope is taking on a battle with heartbreak he can barely even begin to imagine.

In 1944 Emily Dean is dispatched from Melbourne to stay with her father's relatives in rural Victoria. At the family property of Mount Prospect, Grandmother is determined to keep up standards despite the war, while Emily's young aunt - the beautiful, fearless Lydia - refuses to befriend her. Feeling lonely and isolated, Emily can't wait to go home.

But things start to improve when she encounters Claudio, the Italian prisoner of war employed as a farm labourer. And become more interesting still when her uncle William returns home wounded. He's rude, traumatised and mostly drunk, yet a passion for literature soon draws them together.

A delightfully wry novel about desire, deceit and self-discovery.

'A resonant and engaging story - illuminating and subtly compelling.' - Rosalie Ham 'A rich evocation of an era and a beautiful insight into the process of emerging from childhood into womanhood. Such a great read!' - Margaret Pomeranz

Adam's life has been ruined by war . . . A veteran of the Iraq conflict who has suffered such extensive bodily trauma that he can only really survive by means of a mechanical skeleton.

Marianna's has been ruined by men . . . A woman who has had to flee the country after her husband lied to the wrong people.

John Philip's by too much money . . . Until he receives a surprise inheritance in the evening of his own life.

Rodney Hall, two-times winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, presents the story of three people experiencing a period of life they never thought possible, and, perhaps, should never have been granted at all...

Hall looks towards the future in this elegant and hopeful novel, tethering it to a particularly current mood, standing back and waiting for it to take flight. Weekend Australian PRAISE FOR RODNEY HALL Reminiscent of both Joyce and Garcia Marquez Washington Post Magnificent. So good that you wish you had written it yourself Salman Rushdie A wondrous blend of the fabulous and the surreal The Australian Brilliant David Mitchell

As a child, trapped in the savage act of growing up, Olive had sensed she was at the middle of something, so close to the nucleus she could almost touch it with her tongue. But like looking at her own nose for too long, everything became blurry and she had to pull away. She'd reached for happiness as a child not yet knowing that the memories she was concocting would become deceptive. That memories get you where they want you not the other way around.

The setting is the Mallee, wide flat scrubland in north-western Victoria, country where men are bred quiet, women stoic and the gothic is never far away. Olive Lovelock has just turned twelve. She is smart, fanciful and brave and on the cusp of something darker than the small world she has known her entire life.

She knows that adults aren't very good at keeping secrets and makes it her mission to uncover as many as she can. When she learns that she once had a baby sister who died - a child unacknowledged by her close but challenging family - Olive becomes convinced it was murder. Her obsession with the mystery and relentless quest to find out what happened have seismic repercussions for the rest of her family and their community. As everything starts to change, it is Olive herself who has the most to lose as the secrets she unearths multiply and take on complicated lives of their own.

Little Gods is a novel about the mess of family, about vengeance and innocence lost. It explores resilience and girlhood and questions how families live with all of their complexities and contradictions. Resonating with echoes of great Australian novels like Seven Little Australians, Cloudstreet, and Jasper Jones, Little Gods is told with similar idiosyncrasy, insight and style. Funny and heartbreaking, this is a rare and original novel about a remarkable girl who learns the hard way that the truth doesn't always set you free.

The war is over. But can there ever truly be peace?

'Thestory is equal parts Downton Abbey and wartimeaction, with enough romance and intrigueto make it 100% not-put-down-able.' - AustralianWomen's Weekly on Miss Lily's Lovely Ladies Australian heiress Sophie Higgs was 'a rose of no-man's land', founding hospitals across war-torn Europe during the horror that was WW1.

Now, in the 1920s, Sophie's wartime work must be erased so that the men who returned can find some kind of 'normality'.

Sophie is, however, a graduate of the mysterious Miss Lily's school of charm and intrigue, and once more she risks her own life as she attempts to save others still trapped in the turmoil and aftermath of war.

But in this new world, nothing is clear, in politics or in love. For the role of men has changed too. Torn between the love of three very different men, Sophie will face her greatest danger yet as she attempts an impossible journey across the world to save Nigel, Earl of Shillings - and her beloved Miss Lily.

In this sequel to the bestselling Miss Lily's Lovely Ladies, Jackie French draws us further into a compelling story that celebrates the passion and adventure of an unstoppable army of women who changed the world.

A tale of espionage, love and passionate heroism.

Inspired by true events, this is the story of how society's 'lovely ladies' won a war.

Each year at secluded Shillings Hall, in the snow-crisped English countryside, the mysterious Miss Lily draws around her young women selected from Europe's royal and most influential families. Her girls are taught how to captivate a man - and find a potential husband - at a dinner, in a salon, or at a grouse shoot, and in ways that would surprise outsiders. For in 1914, persuading and charming men is the only true power a woman has.

Sophie Higgs is the daughter of Australia's king of corned beef and the only 'colonial' brought to Shillings Hall. Of all Miss Lily's lovely ladies, however, she is also the only one who suspects Miss Lily's true purpose.

As the chaos of war spreads, women across Europe shrug off etiquette. The lovely ladies and their less privileged sisters become the unacknowledged backbone of the war, creating hospitals, canteens and transport systems where bungling officials fail to cope. And when tens of thousands can die in a single day's battle, Sophie must use the skills Miss Lily taught her to prevent war's most devastating weapon yet.

But is Miss Lily heroine or traitor?

And who, exactly, is she?

We'll play this silly game, but we're not going into the army. We're not going to support this war. We'll do anything we can to stop it.

Mark David visits a nursing home in search of a place for his elderly mother. There, he encounters the formidable Elizabeth Ryder, mother of his best friend, who he hasn't seen in forty years. The meeting catapults Mark back to his student days in the late 1960s: to Adelaide during the Vietnam War, when conscription was on everyone's minds and young people took to the streets in protest.

Stardust and Golden captures the heady days of resistance, of young lives shaped by a far-off war, and of music, and abandon.

'The Sixties liberated some and lost others, as Doug McEachern shows in a novel that revisits what happened when those changing times hit his hometown. Hanging over a generation of young men was the threat of conscription to fight in a war they did not support. Stardust and Golden offers a subtle retrospect on the hope and damage of those heady years, when politics turned lives around. Half a century later, conclusions are harder than ever to draw.' - Nicholas Jose

Definitive collection of the short fiction of an Australian master-storyteller who is in a league of his own.

Released simultaneously with Farrar Straus Giroux's editions of Border Districts and Collected Short Fiction in New York, an event which is likely to get international media attention.

This volume brings together Gerald Murnane's shorter works of fiction, most of which have been out of print for the past twenty five years. They include such masterpieces as `When the Mice Failed to Arrive', `Stream System', `First Love', `Emerald Blue', and `The Interior of Gaaldine', a story which holds the key to the long break in Murnane's career, and points the way towards his later works, from Barley Patch to Border Districts. Much is made of Murnane's distinctive and elaborate style as a writer, but there is no one to match him in his sensitive portraits of family members - parents, uncles and aunts, and particularly children - and in his probing of situations which contain anxiety and embarrassment, shame or delight.

Gerald Murnane is the author of eleven books of fiction, including Tamarisk Row, Inland, Barley Patch, A History of Books, A Million Windows and Border Districts, and a collection of essays, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs, which have been published by Giramondo. He is a recipient of the Patrick White Literary Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Adelaide Festival Literature Award for Innovation and the Victorian Premier's Literary Award.

Read The New York Times Magazine profile of Gerald Murnane here

Winner of the 2017 Stella Prize.

'This is a weirdly beautiful book.' David Walsh founder and curator, MONA 'Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.' Stella Adler 'Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity you must be fearless.' From The Museum of Modern Love She watched as the final hours of The Artist is Present passed by, sitter after sitter in a gaze with the woman across the table. Jane felt she had witnessed a thing of inexplicable beauty among humans who had been drawn to this art and had found the reflection of a great mystery. What are we? How should we live?

If this was a dream, then he wanted to know when it would end. Maybe it would end if he went to see Lydia. But it was the one thing he was not allowed to do.

Arky Levin is a film composer in New York separated from his wife, who has asked him to keep one devastating promise. One day he finds his way to The Atrium at MOMA and sees Marina Abramovic in The Artist is Present. The performance continues for seventy-five days and, as it unfolds, so does Arky. As he watches and meets other people drawn to the exhibit, he slowly starts to understand what might be missing in his life and what he must do.

This dazzlingly original novel asks beguiling questions about the nature of art, life and love and finds a way to answer them.

When paramedic Bruce Pike is called out to deal with another teenage adventure gone wrong, he knows better than his colleague, better than the kid's parents, what happened and how. Thirty years before, that dead boy could have been him.

A relentlessly gripping and deeply moving novel about the damage you do to yourself when you're young and think you're immortal.

Recently distracted by the arrival of her and Jamie's second son, Magnus, Isabel Dalhousie - philanthropic editor of the Review of Applied Ethics - is anxious. The next issue of the Review is far from ready, her eldest, Charlie, is jealous, and their housekeeper, Grace, has an officious approach to childcare. With some relief, Isabel returns to helping out at her niece Cat's delicatessen, where surely the most taxing duty is the preparation of sandwiches.

It's not long before Isabel's helpful, philosophical nature draws her into customers' problems, specifically that of ambitious, self-proclaimed matchmaker, Bea Shandon. Bea has staged a potentially dangerous liaison involving enigmatic plastic surgeon, Tony MacUspaig, who may not be quite who he claims to be - and Isabel's help is required in getting to the truth of the matter.

Good-hearted Isabel proceeds with her usual thorough attention to task, and on Bea's advice talks to her friend Rob, a trustworthy regular on Bea's dinner party circuit, and known to have deep suspicions about MacUspaig. It becomes clear, however, that Rob has an agenda of his own and Isabel is now contending with that, along with a mysterious medical condition of Jamie's and some frustrating dead ends when it comes to Bea's predicament.

When the truth finally reveals itself, Isabel must conclude that along with MacUspaig, Bea, Jamie - and even Cat - she herself is not immune to misunderstandings, or the neurotic fantasies that arise from keeping secrets . . .

A charmingly subversive novel about a library in 1950s England, by the acclaimed author of The Cleaner of Chartres Sylvia Blackwell, a young woman in her twenties, moves to East Mole, a quaint market town in middle England, to start a new job as a children's librarian. But the apparently pleasant town is not all it seems. Sylvia falls in love with an older man - but it's her connectionto his precocious young daughter and her neighbours' son which will change her life and put them, the library and her job under threat.

How does the library alter the young children's lives and how do the children fare as a result of the books Sylvia introduces them to?

When powerful real-estate tycoon Nero Golden immigrates to the States under mysterious circumstances, he and his three adult children assume new identities, taking 'Roman' names, and move into a grand mansion in downtown Manhattan. Arriving shortly after the inauguration of Barack Obama, he and his sons, each extraordinary in his own right, quickly establish themselves at the apex of New York society.

The story of the Golden family is told from the point of view of their Manhattanite neighbour and confidant, RenU, an aspiring filmmaker who finds in the Goldens the perfect subject. RenU chronicles the undoing of the house of Golden- the high life of money, of art and fashion, a sibling quarrel, an unexpected metamorphosis, the arrival of a beautiful woman, betrayal and murder, and far away, in their abandoned homeland, some decent intelligence work.

Invoking literature, pop culture, and the cinema, Rushdie spins the story of the American zeitgeist over the last eight years, hitting every beat- the rise of the birther movement, the Tea Party, Gamergate and identity politics; the backlash against political correctness; the ascendency of the superhero movie, and, of course, the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, narcissistic, media-savvy villain wearing make-up and with coloured hair.

In a new world order of alternative truths, Salman Rushdie has written the ultimate novel about identity, truth, terror and lies. A brilliant, heartbreaking realist novel that is not only uncannily prescient but shows one of the world's greatest storytellers working at the height of his powers.

'One of the funniest, most riotously inventive and enjoyable novels you'll read this year' - Observer Roland Barthes is knocked down in a Paris street by a laundry van. It's February 1980 and he has just come from lunch with Francois Mitterrand. Barthes dies soon afterwards. History tells us it was an accident.

But what if it were an assassination? What if Barthes was carrying a document of unbelievable, global importance? A document explaining the seventh function of language - an idea so powerful it gives whoever masters it the ability to convince anyone, in any situation, to do anything.

Police Captain Jacques Bayard and his reluctant accomplice Simon Herzog set off on a chase that takes them from the corridors of power to backstreet saunas and midnight meetings. What they discover is a worldwide conspiracy involving the President, murderous Bulgarians and a secret international debating society.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends and existential adventure - and the forces that work to destroy us.

In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother's home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon's grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten.

Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as my grandfather. It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact - and the creative power - of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies. A gripping, poignant, tragicomic, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the dark heart of the twentieth century, Moonglow ranges from the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to New York's Wallkill Prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of 'the American Century'. Collapsing an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week, Moonglow is a lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir.

Moonglow is Chabon at his most daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque.

A breathtaking debut about love and war, and the battle to save a precious legacy.

Each lace shawl begins and ends the same way – with a circle. Everything is connected with a thread as fine as gossamer, each life affected by what has come before it and what will come after.

1941, Estonia. As Stalin’s brutal Red Army crushes everything in its path, Katarina and her family survive only because their precious farm produce is needed to feed the occupying forces.

Fiercely partisan, Katarina battles to protect her grandmother’s precious legacy – the weaving of gossamer lace shawls stitched with intricate patterns that tell the stories passed down through generations.

While Katarina struggles to survive the daily oppression, another young woman is suffocating in her prison of privilege in Moscow. Yearning for freedom and to discover her beloved mother’s Baltic heritage, Lydia escapes to Estonia.

Facing the threat of invasion by Hitler’s encroaching Third Reich, Katarina and Lydia and two idealistic young soldiers, insurgents in the battle for their homeland, find themselves in a fight for life, liberty and love.

The great novel of 1920s Berlin life, in a new translation by Michael Hofmann, translator of Alone in Berlin Franz Biberkopf is back on the streets of Berlin. Determined to go straight after a stint in prison, he finds himself thwarted by an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Cheated, humiliated, thrown from a moving car; embroiled in an underworld of pimps, thugs, drunks and prostitutes, Franz picks himself up over and over again - until one day he is struck a monstrous blow which might just prove his final downfall.

A dazzling collage of newspaper reports, Biblical stories, drinking songs and urban slang, Berlin Alexanderplatz is the great novel of Berlin life: inventing, styling and recreating the city as reality and dream; mimicking its movements and rhythms; immortalizing its pubs, abattoirs, apartments and chaotic streets. From the gutter to the stars, this is the whole picture of the city.

Berlin Alexanderplatz brought fame in 1929 to its author Alfred Doeblin, until then an impecunious writer and doctor in a working-class neighbourhood in the east of Berlin. Success at home was short-lived, however; Doblin, a Jew, left Germany the day after the Reichstag Fire in 1933, and did not return until 1945. This landmark translation by Michael Hofmann is the first to do justice to Berlin Alexanderplatz in English, brilliantly capturing the energy, prodigality and inventiveness of Doeblin's masterpiece.

For readers of The Lives of Others and The Reader, and based on a true story, No Live Files Remain is a beautiful and moving novel of family, lies, betrayal and forgiveness.

He wanted to understand the past. Now he must live with the truth.

Thirty years after the fall of communism in Hungary, as acclaimed writer, translator, dramatist and visual artist Andras Forgach investigated his family's past he uncovered a horrifying truth. His mother, whom he deeply loved, had been an informant for the Kadar regime. She had informed not only on acquaintances but on family, friends and even her children.

In the eagerly anticipated No Live Files Remain, with rights sold around the world, Forgach gives voice to his deceased mother, holding her responsible for her deeds while defending the memories he cherished of her as a son, and imagining her response.

'Mother wasn't lacking in evocativeness, no, no, I can affirm that. She was the firmament, the high sky, and she still is, even covered in heavy clouds.' Andras Forgach

Eighty-year-old Herra Bjornsson lives alone in a garage with her laptop, an oxygen tank and her father's old hand grenade. Neglected by her family, she spends her days spying on her children by hacking their emails and preparing to lose the race against the ticking time bomb of lung cancer, even making an appointment for her own cremation. As she counts down her final days, Herra looks back at her own remarkable life. Her happy childhood in Iceland was disrupted by the outbreak of war and her father's fervent love of Hitler. Shipped off to supposed safety, Herra spent the war trekking alone across war-torn Europe in a desperate bid to survive.

Based on the first Icelandic president's real-life granddaughter, Hallgrímur Helgason's highly unusual and captivating tale spans the twentieth century in a way that is as hilarious as it is heart-breaking, taking readers on a whirlwind tour of Europe and South America before eventually returning home to Iceland where the final pieces of this haunting puzzle fall into place.

Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend.

Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything.

One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for granted - while searching for the courage to face the dark corners she's avoided all her life.

Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than... fine?

An astonishing story that powerfully depicts the loneliness of life, and the simple power of a little kindness

The perfect read for fans of Daphne du Maurier and Patricia Highsmith, set in 1950s Morocco, Tangerine is a gripping psychological literary thriller.

The last person Alice Shipley expected to see since arriving in Tangier with her new husband was Lucy Mason. After the horrific accident at Bennington, the two friends - once inseparable roommates - haven't spoken in over a year. But Lucy is standing there, trying to make things right.

Perhaps Alice should be happy. She has not adjusted to life in Morocco, too afraid to venture out into the bustling medinas and oppressive heat. Lucy, always fearless and independent, helps Alice emerge from her flat and explore the country.

But soon a familiar feeling starts to overtake Alice - she feels controlled and stifled by Lucy at every turn. Then Alice's husband, John, goes missing, and Alice starts to question everything around her: her relationship with her enigmatic friend, her decision to ever come to Tangier, and her very own state of mind.

Tangerine is an extraordinary debut, so tightly wound, so evocative of 1950s Tangier, and so cleverly plotted that it will leave you absolutely breathless.

The new novel from the bestselling author of Under the Tuscan Sun tells the story of four American women who become unexpected friends when they move to a beautiful villa in Tuscany.

She watches from her terrazza as the three American women carry their luggage into the stone villa down the hill. Who are they, and what brings them to this Tuscan village so far from home?

Kit Raine, an American writer living in the small Italian town of San Rocco, is working on a biography of her close friend, the novelist Margaret Merrill.

But her work is waylaid by the arrival of three women - Julia, Camille and Susan - all of whom have recently formed a friendship that will uproot them completely and redirect their lives. For Susan, the most fearless of the three, has enticed them to subvert expectations of a staid retirement in the States by taking on the lease of a big, beautiful house in Tuscany . . .

Though novices in a foreign culture, their renewed sense of adventure imbues each of them with a bright sense of bravery, a spirited lust for life, and a fierce determination to thrive.

With Kit's friendship and guidance, the three friends launch themselves into Italian life, pursuing passions long-forgotten - with drastic and unforeseeable results.

The beloved Frances Mayes seems to own the Italian sun. Her first Italian-set novel is a lovely and intimate journey of friendship, loss, and hope set in the eternal beauty of Tuscan countryside Adriana Trigiani

The sweetest, most uplifting, lovely book about courage, friendship, love ... It'll be huge; it deserves to be Marian Keyes, author of The Break London, 1940. Emmeline Lake and her best friend Bunty are trying to stay cheerful despite the Luftwaffe making life thoroughly annoying for everyone. Emmy dreams of becoming a Lady War Correspondent and when she spots a job advertisement in the newspaper she seizes her chance - but after a rather unfortunate misunderstanding, she finds herself typing letters for the formidable Henrietta Bird, the renowned agony aunt of Woman's Friend magazine.

Mrs Bird is very clear: letters containing any form of Unpleasantness must go straight into the bin. Emmy finds herself dismissing problems from lovelorn, grief-stricken and morally conflicted readers in favour of those who fear their ankles are unsightly or have trouble untangling lengths of wool. But soon the thought of desperate women going unanswered becomes too much to bear and Emmy decides the only thing for it is to secretly write back . . .

Irresistibly funny and enormously moving, Dear Mrs Bird by AJ Pearce is a love letter to female friendship, Blitz spirit, the kindness of strangers and the art of letter-writing itself.

When a newborn baby dies after a routine hospital procedure, there is no doubt about who will be held responsible: the nurse who had been banned from looking after him by his father.

What the nurse, her lawyer and the father of the child cannot know is how this death will irrevocably change all of their lives, in ways both expected and not.

Small Great Things is about that which divides and unites us. It is about opening your eyes.

'A gripping courtroom drama ... Given the current political climate it is quite prescient ... This is a writer who understands her characters inside and out.' - Roxane Gay, The New York Times Book Review

Some days Nora Nolan thinks that she and her husband, Charlie, lead a charmed life - except when there’s a crisis at work, a leak in the roof at home, or a problem with their twins at college. And why not? New York City was once Nora’s dream destination, and her clannish dead-end block has become a safe harbor, a tranquil village amid the urban craziness. Then one morning she returns from her run to discover that a terrible incident has shaken the neighborhood, and the fault lines begin to open: on the block, at her job, especially in her marriage. With humor, understanding, an acute eye, and a warm heart, Anna Quindlen explores what it means to be a mother, a wife, and a woman at a moment of reckoning.

Conceived while his larger-than-life father, Bear Bavinsky, cavorted around Rome in the 1950s, the young Pinch learns that his father's genius trumps everything else. After Bear abandons his family, Pinch strives to make himself worthy - first as a painter, and then as his father's biographer, before settling, disillusioned, into a job teaching Italian in London.

And when Bear dies, Pinch hatches a scheme to secure his father's legacy.

What makes an artist? With his signature compassion and humour, Tom Rachman conjures a life lived in the shadow of greatness. The Italian Teacher is a masterly novel about a son striving to make his own mark on the world.

The beloved, life-affirming international bestseller which has sold over half a million copies worldwide - now a major film coming in April 2018, starring Lily James, Matthew Goode, Jessica Brown Findlay, Tom Courtenay and Penelope Wilton.

It's 1946. The war is over, and Juliet Ashton has writer's block. But when she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams of Guernsey - a total stranger living halfway across the Channel, who has come across her name written in a second hand book - she enters into a correspondence with him, and in time with all the members of the extraordinary Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

Through their letters, the society tell Juliet about life on the island, their love of books - and the long shadow cast by their time living under German occupation. Drawn into their irresistible world, Juliet sets sail for the island, changing her life forever.

'I can't remember the last time I discovered a novel as smart and delightful as this one. Treat yourself to this book, please - I can't recommend it highly enough.' Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the international bestsellers Eat, Pray, Love and The Signature of All Things.

From the Nobel Laureate comes a politically charged detective novel weaving through the underbelly of Peruvian privilege. In the 1990s, during the turbulent and deeply corrupt years of Alberto Fujimori's presidency, two wealthy couples of Lima's high society become embroiled in a disturbing vortex of erotic adventures and politically driven blackmail.

One day Enrique, a high-profile businessman, receives a visit from Rolando Garro, the editor of a notorious magazine that specializes in salacious exposes. Garro presents Enrique with lewd pictures from an old business trip and demands that he invest in the magazine. Enrique refuses, and the next day the pictures are on the front page. Meanwhile, Enrique's wife is in the midst of a passionate and secret affair with the wife of Enrique's lawyer and best friend. When Garro shows up murdered, the two couples are thrown into a whirlwind of navigating Peru's unspoken laws and customs, while the staff of the magazine embark on their greatest expose yet.

Ironic and sensual, provocative and redemptive, the novel swirls into the kind of restless realism that has become Mario Vargas Llosa's signature style. A twisting, unpredictable tale, The Neighborhood is at once a scathing indictment of Fujimori's regime and a crime thriller that evokes the vulgarity of freedom in a corrupt system.

From the Orange Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author of The Song of Achilles comes the powerful story of the mythological witch Circe, inspired by Homer's Odyssey Chosen as must-read book of 2018 by the Guardian, Independent, Mail on Sunday, Sunday Express and Stylist In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe has neither the look nor the voice of divinity, and is scorned and rejected by her kin. Increasingly isolated, she turns to mortals for companionship, leading her to discover a power forbidden to the gods: witchcraft.

When love drives Circe to cast a dark spell, wrathful Zeus banishes her to the remote island of Aiaia. There she learns to harness her occult craft, drawing strength from nature. But she will not always be alone; many are destined to pass through Circe's place of exile, entwining their fates with hers. The messenger god, Hermes. The craftsman, Daedalus. A ship bearing a golden fleece. And wily Odysseus, on his epic voyage home.

There is danger for a solitary woman in this world, and Circe's independence draws the wrath of men and gods alike. To protect what she holds dear, Circe must decide whether she belongs with the deities she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.

Breathing life into the ancient world, Madeline Miller weaves an intoxicating tale of gods and heroes, magic and monsters, survival and transformation.

The new novel from the number one bestselling author of Cold Mountain - a stunning portrait of the devastation left by the American Civil War, as seen through the eyes of a woman who played a part at the heart of it.

With her marriage prospects ruined in the wake of her father's financial decline, teenage Varina Howell decides her best option is to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects a life of security as a Mississippi landowner. When he instead pursues a career in politics and is appointed President of the Confederacy, it puts Varina at the white-hot centre of one of the darkest moments in American history - culpable regardless of her intentions.

As the Confederacy prepares to surrender and she finds herself friendless and alone, Varina and her children escape Richmond. With her marriage in tatters and the country divided, they travel south, now fugitives with 'bounties on their heads, an entire nation in pursuit'.

The Emperor Claudius is dead. Nero rules. His half-brother Britannicus has also laid claim to the throne. A bloody power struggle is underway.

All Prefect Cato and Centurion Macro want is a simple army life, fighting with their brave and loyal men. But Cato has caught the eye of rival factions determined to get him on their side. To survive, Cato must play a cunning game, and enlist the help of the one man in the Empire he can trust: Macro.

As the rebel force grows, legionaries and Praetorian Guards are moved like chess pieces by powerful and shadowy figures. A political game has created the ultimate military challenge. Can civil war be averted? The future of the Empire is in Cato's hands...

If You Don't Know Simon Scarrow, You Don't Know Rome!

The charming, droll (and just a little bit bawdy) picaresque tale of one woman's coming of age both on and off the stage in seventeenth-century England.

On the 15th day of December in the year of our Lord 1664, a great light bloomed in the dark sky and crept slowly and silently across the blackness: a comet. Every evening afterwards, though snow lay on the ground and the air bit with frost, men across the land threw open their windows and went out of their doors in cloaks and mufflers to gaze at the heavens, necks stretched up, hands shielding eyes, crooking long fingers to trace the burning thing that flamed across the night, while dogs moaned in their kennels and wise women chanted incantations against bright malignant spirits.

Born on the night of an ill-auguring comet just before Charles II's Restoration, Ursula Flight has a difficult future written in the stars.

Against the custom of the age she begins an education with her father, who fosters in her a love of reading, writing and astrology.

Following a surprising meeting with an actress, Ursula's dreams turn to the theatre and thus begins her quest to become a playwright despite scoundrels, bounders, bad luck and heartbreak.

A vivid, passionate and gutsy tale of a most unusual girl in a world far away.

It is 1704 and Europe is at war ....

With Lord Churchill's rousing words ringing in his ears, the courageous young Captain Daniel Rawson embarks on a dangerous mission to lead his men into battle against the French enemy. He must succeed at all costs- the future of England is at stake. But Rawson is the target of the murderous General Salignac who will stop at nothing to see his adversary dead. As Rawson and his men march across the continent, he must keep one step ahead of Salignac's brigands and live to fight heroically at the Battle of Blenheim.

1470 The recent tensions between King Edward and his great ally the Earl of Warwick lie forgotten these past months, but even as winter tightens her grip on the land, the peace is shattered by a vicious attack on one of the King's allies.

Long buried secrets are brought to the surface, and Thomas and Katherine must finally decide where their loyalties lie and to choose between fight or flight, knowing either choice will incur a terrible price.

From Lincoln to Bruges, from Barnet to the great battle at Tewkesbury, both must play their part in one of the most savage wars in history.

The wars of the roses.

In 1788 a young gentlewoman raised in the vicarage of an English village married a handsome, haughty and penniless army officer. In any Austen novel that would be the end of the story, but for the real-life woman who became an Australian farming entrepreneur, it was just the beginning.

John Macarthur took credit for establishing the Australian wool industry and would feature on the two-dollar note, but it was practical Elizabeth who managed their holdings - while dealing with the results of John's manias- duels, quarrels, court cases, a military coup, long absences overseas, grandiose construction projects and, finally, his descent into certified insanity.

Michelle Scott Tucker shines a light on an often-overlooked aspect of Australia's history in this fascinating story of a remarkable woman.

'Have you met Mrs Edith Coleman? If not you must - I am sure you will like her - she's just A1 and a splendid naturalist.' In 1922, a 48-year-old housewife from Blackburn delivered her first paper, on native Australian orchids, to the Field Naturalists Club of Victoria. Over the next thirty years, Edith Coleman would write over 300 articles on Australian nature for newspapers, magazines and scientific journals. She would solve the mystery of orchid pollination that had bewildered even Darwin, earn the acclaim of international scientists and, in 1949, become the first woman to be awarded the Australian Natural History Medallion. She was 'Australia's greatest orchid expert', 'foremost of our women naturalists', a woman who 'needed no introduction'.

And yet, today, Edith Coleman has faded into obscurity. How did this remarkable woman, with no training or connections, achieve so much so late in life? And why, over the intervening years, have her achievements and her writing been forgotten?

Zoologist and award-winning writer Danielle Clode sets out to uncover Edith's story, from her childhood in England to her unlikely success, sharing along the way Edith's lyrical and incisive writing and her uncompromising passion for Australian nature and landscape.

"Life is not defined by the bad things that happen to us. It certainly isn't for me."

Written for her young son so that he would know what had happened to his mother, Cynthia Banham's inspiring family memoir uncovers a true picture of what survival means.

"This book tells a story that I tried to write many times before, but couldn't. For a long time, it was too painful to tell. It is also one I hadn't known how to tell. It had to be more than a story about surviving a plane crash, a random event without intrinsic meaning."

Unable until now to write her own story, Cynthia found that the lives of her Italian grandfather, Alfredo, and his intriguing older sister, Amelia, resonated with her own. Discovering their sacrifice, joy, fear and love, from Trieste to Germany and America, and finally to Australia, their stories mirror and illuminate Cynthia's own determination and courage in the face of overwhelming adversity.

From a remarkable writer, and told with unflinching honesty and compassion, A Certain Light speaks to the heart of what really matters in life.

A brilliant memoir about how learning the piano shaped the lives of two women worlds and generations apart that will resonate for music lovers everywhere and for anyone who has tried to master the piano.

Virginia Lloyd spent much of her childhood and adolescence learning and playing the piano and thought she would make a career as a pianist. When that didn't happen, she spent a long time wondering about those years of study: had they been wasted? What was their purpose? This intriguing memoir explores those questions and investigates the mystery of the author's very musical and deeply unhappy grandmother Alice, and how their lives--both at and away from the piano--intersected and diverged.

Girls at the Piano also explores the changing relationship between women and the piano over the course of the instrument's history, taking us from the salons of 18th-century Europe to an amateur jazz workshop in Manhattan in the early 21st century.

Funny, tender and fascinating, Girls at the Piano is an elegant and multi-layered meditation on identity, ambition and doubt, and on how learning the piano had a profound effect on two women worlds and generations apart. It is essential reading for music lovers everywhere, and for anyone who has undertaken their own voyage around a piano.

Rose Tremain grew up in post-war London, a city of grey austerity, still partly in ruins, where both food and affection were fiercely rationed. The girl known then as 'Rosie' and her sister Jo spent their days longing for their grandparents' farm, buried deep in the Hampshire countryside, a green paradise of feasts and freedom, where they could at last roam and dream.

But when Rosie is ten years old, everything changes. She and Jo lose their father, their London house, their school, their friends, and - most agonisingly of all - their beloved Nanny, Vera, the only adult to have shown them real love and affection.

Briskly dispatched to a freezing boarding-school in Hertfordshire, they once again feel like imprisoned castaways. But slowly the teenage Rosie escapes from the cold world of the Fifties, into a place of inspiration and mischief, of loving friendships and dedicated teachers, where a young writer is suddenly ready to be born.

The point is to find out who you are and to be true to that person. Because so often you can't. Won't people turn away if they know the real me? you wonder. The me that hates my own child, that put my perfectly healthy dog to sleep? The me who thinks, deep down, that maybe The Wire was overrated?

For nearly four decades, David Sedaris has faithfully kept a diary in which he records his thoughts and observations on the odd and funny events he witnesses. Anyone who has attended a live Sedaris event knows that his diary readings are often among the most joyful parts of the evening. But never before have they been available in print. Now, in Theft by Finding, Sedaris brings us his favorite entries. From the family home in Ralegh, North Carolina, we follow Sedaris as he sets out to make his way in the world. As an art student and then teacher in Chicago he works at a succession of very odd jobs, meeting even odder people, before moving to New York to pursue a career as a writer - where instead he very quickly lands a job in Macy's department store as an elf in Santaland...

Tender, hilarious, illuminating, and endlessly captivating, Theft by Finding offers a rare look into the mind of one of our generation's greatest comic geniuses.

Three years ago, Spiri Tsintziras found herself mentally, physically and spiritually depleted. She was stretched thin – raising kids, running a household and managing a business. She ate too much in order to keep going and then slumped in front of the telly at night, exhausted, asking herself ‘What is it all for?’

Spiri’s quest for a healthier, more nourishing life took her from her suburban home in Melbourne to her family’s homeland of Greece, and to the small Greek island of Ikaria. The people of Ikaria – part of the famous ‘Blue Zone’ – live happy, healthy and long lives. Inspired by their example, Spiri made some simple lifestyle changes and as a result lost weight, gained energy and deepened the connection to those closest to her. Best of all, she didn’t have to give up bread or wine!

Spiri’s heartwarming memoir, which includes delicious family recipes, will console and entertain all of us who are bogged down in the daily grind – encouraging us to put our health and happiness first.

Marking the centenary of female suffrage, this definitive history charts women's fight for the vote through the lives of those who took part, in a timely celebration of an extraordinary struggle An Observer Pick of 2018 A New Statesman Book of 2018 Between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak of the First World War, while the patriarchs of the Liberal and Tory parties vied for supremacy in parliament, the campaign for women's suffrage was fought with great flair and imagination in the public arena.

Led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, the suffragettes and their actions would come to define protest movements for generations to come. From their marches on Parliament and 10 Downing Street, to the selling of their paper, Votes for Women, through to the more militant activities of the Women's Social and Political Union, whose slogan `Deeds Not Words!' resided over bombed pillar-boxes, acts of arson and the slashing of great works of art, the women who participated in the movement endured police brutality, assault, imprisonment and force-feeding, all in the relentless pursuit of one goal: the right to vote.

A hundred years on, Diane Atkinson celebrates the lives of the women who answered the call to `Rise Up'; a richly diverse group that spanned the divides of class and country, women of all ages who were determined to fight for what had been so long denied. Actresses to mill-workers, teachers to doctors, seamstresses to scientists, clerks, boot-makers and sweated workers, Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English; a wealth of women's lives are brought together for the first time, in this meticulously researched, vividly rendered and truly defining biography of a movement.

Former FBI director James Comey shares his never-before-told experiences from some of the highest-stakes situations of his career in the past two decades of American government, exploring what good, ethical leadership looks like, and how it drives sound decisions.

His journey provides an unprecedented entry into the corridors of power, and a remarkable lesson in what makes an effective leader. Comey served as director of the FBI from 2013 to 2017, appointed to the post by President Barack Obama. He previously served as US attorney for the Southern District of New York, and US deputy attorney general in the administration of President George W Bush.

From prosecuting the Mafia and Martha Stewart to helping change the Bush administration's policies on torture and electronic surveillance, overseeing the Hillary Clinton email investigation, as well as ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, Comey has been involved in some of the most consequential cases and policies of recent American history.

Never before has an American president had so much impact on the country and the world in so short a time as Donald Trump. And no president has stirred so much controversy, dominating media coverage and conversation both on the right and the left.

Based on unique access, Inside the Trump White House- Changing the Rules of the Game tells the real story of what Donald Trump is like, who influences him, how he makes decisions, what he says about the people around him, and how he operates when the television lights go off, while portraying the inside story of the successes that have already brought solid results as well as the stumbles that have turned off even longtime supporters and undercut his agenda.

Crammed with media-grabbing revelations, Inside the Trump White House is the unvarnished and unbiased book on the Trump White House that answers the question- Who is President Donald Trump?

The remarkable story of the Knights Templar - the wealthiest, most powerful and most secretive of the military orders that flourished in the crusading era.

The Knights Templar were the wealthiest, most powerful - and most secretive - of the military orders that flourished in the crusading era. Their story - encompassing as it does the greatest international conflict of the Middle Ages, a network of international finance, a swift rise in wealth and influence followed by a bloody and humiliating fall - has left a comet's tail of mystery that continues to fascinate and inspire historians, novelists and conspiracy theorists.

The ancient world that Alexander the Great transformed in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death. The imperial dynasties of his successors incorporated and reorganized the fallen Persian empire, creating a new land empire stretching from the shores of the Mediterranean to as far east as Bactria. In old Greece a fragile balance of power was continually disturbed by wars. Then, from the late third century, the military and diplomatic power of Rome successively defeated and dismantled every one of the post-Alexandrian political structures.

The Hellenistic period (c. 323-30 BC) was then one of fragmentation, violent antagonism between large states, and struggles by small polities to retain an illusion of independence. Yet it was also a period of growth, prosperity, and intellectual achievement. A vast network spread of trade, influence and cultural contact, from Italy to Afghanistan and from Russia to Ethiopia, enriching and enlivening centres of wealth, power and intellectual ferment.

From Alexander the Great's early days building an empire, via wars with Rome, rampaging pirates, Cleopatra's death and the Jewish diaspora, right up to the death of Hadrian, Chaniotis examines the social structures, economic trends, political upheaval and technological progress of an era that spans five centuries and where, perhaps, modernity began.

The Minoans have for decades tantalized all those who have tried to understand this most enigmatic people of the ancient world. The Minoan allure lies in large part in the riddles to which their mysterious culture gives rise.

What is contained in their earliest writing script, the still un-deciphered Linear A? Did their likely extinction by volcanic eruption shape the Atlantis legend? Why was their religion so thoroughly matriarchal, with its symbols of snake goddess, serpent and labrys (double-headed axe)? What was the purpose of their great palaces at Knossos, Phaestos and Malia? What is the meaning of the atmospheric bull dance fresco uncovered at the palace of Knossos? The archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans controversially 'rediscovered' and then restored the Minoan civilization in the early twentieth century, and tied it to King Minos, builder of the famous labyrinth and keeper of the legendary Minotaur.

In this lucid and absorbing new history of Crete from the 9th millennium BCE to the end of the Bronze Age (c 1000 BCE), John Bennet expertly draws on the latest archaeological and textual discoveries to separate fact from imagination, history from myth.

Childhood stories of family, country and belonging. What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question. Accounts from well-known authors and high-profile identities sit alongside those from newly discovered writers of all ages. All of the contributors speak from the heart - sometimes calling for empathy, oftentimes challenging stereotypes, always demanding respect.

This groundbreaking collection will enlighten, inspire and educate about the lives of Aboriginal people in Australia today.

Contributors include- Tony Birch, Deborah Cheetham, Adam Goodes, Terri Janke, Patrick Johnson, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Jack Latimore, Celeste Liddle, Amy McQuire, Kerry Reed-Gilbert, Miranda Tapsell, Jared Thomas, Aileen Walsh, Alexis West, Tara June Winch, and many, many more.

After decades of silence, Serving Our Country is the first comprehensive history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's participation in the Australian defence forces.

While Indigenous Australians have enlisted in the defence forces since the Boer War, for much of this time they defied racist restrictions and were denied full citizenship rights on their return to civilian life. In Serving Our Country Mick Dodson, John Maynard, Joan Beaumont, Noah Riseman, Allison Cadzow, and others, reveal the courage, resilience, and trauma of Indigenous defence personnel and their families, and document the long struggle to gain recognition for their role in the defence of Australia.

*** The Sunday Times bestseller *** 'Vividly imagined and prodigiously researched' Helen Davies, Sunday Times, Books of the Year 'Such a rewarding read' John Preston, Daily Mail, Books of the Year 'This odd, secretive man is brought to life', Robbie Millen, The Times, Books of the Year Maxwell Knight was a paradox. A jazz obsessive and nature enthusiast (he is the author of the definitive work on how to look after a gorilla), he is seen today as one of MI5's greatest spymasters, a man who did more than any other to break up British fascism during the Second World War - in spite of having once belonged to the British Fascisti himself. He was known to his agents and colleagues simply as M, and was rumoured to be part of the inspiration for the character M in the James Bond series.

Knight became a legendary spymaster despite an almost total lack of qualifications. What set him apart from his peers was a mercurial ability to transform almost anyone into a fearless secret agent. He was the first in MI5 to grasp the potential of training female agents.

M is about more than just one man however. In its pages, Hemming reveals for the first time in print the names and stories of seven men and women recruited by Knight, on behalf of MI5, and then asked to infiltrate the most dangerous political organizations in Britain at that time. Until now, their identities have been kept secret outside MI5. Drawn from every walk of life, they led double lives-often at great personal cost-in order to protect the country they loved. With the publication of this book, it will be possible at last to celebrate the lives of these courageous, selfless individuals.

Drawing on declassified documents, private family archives and interviews with retired MI5 officers as well as the families of MI5 agents, M reveals not just the shadowy world of espionage but a brilliant, enigmatic man at its centre.

In a sweeping narrative encompassing political intrigue, illicit love affairs and even a murder mystery, Nancy Goldstone tells the riveting story of a queen who lost her throne, and of her four defiant daughters.

Elizabeth Stuart's marriage to a German count far below her rank was arranged with the understanding that her father, James I of England, would help his new son-in-law achieve the crown of Bohemia. The terrible betrayal of this promise would ruin 'the Winter Queen', as Elizabeth would forever be known, imperil the lives of those she loved and launch a war that would last thirty years.

Forced into exile, the Winter Queen found refuge for her growing family in Holland, where the glorious art and culture of the Dutch Golden Age formed the backdrop to her daughters' education. The eldest, Princess Elizabeth, counted the philosopher Rene Descartes as her closest friend. Louisa, whose lively manner would provoke heartache and scandal, was a gifted artist. Henrietta Maria, the beauty of the family, would achieve the dynastic ambition of marrying into royalty, although at great cost. But it was the youngest, Sophia, a heroine in the tradition of Jane Austen, with a ready wit and strength of character, who would fulfil the promise of her great-grandmother Mary, Queen of Scots, a legacy which endures to this day.

The Debatable Land was an independent territory which used to exist between Scotland and England. It is the oldest detectable territorial division in Great Britain. At the height of its notoriety, it was the bloodiest region in the country, and preoccupied the monarchs and parliaments of England, Scotland, and France. After most of its population was slaughtered or deported, it became the last part of Great Britain to be conquered and brought under the control of a state. Today, it has vanished from the map and no one knows exactly where and what it was.

When Graham Robb moved to a lonely house on the very edge of England, he discovered that the river which almost surrounded his new home had once marked the Debatable Land's southern boundary. Under the powerful spell of curiosity, Robb began a journey - on foot, by bicycle and into the past - that would uncover lost towns and roads, shed new light on the Dark Age, reveal the truth about this maligned patch of land, and lead to more than one discovery of major historical significance.

For the first time - and with all of his customary charm, wit and literary grace - Graham Robb, prize-winning author of The Discovery of France, has written about his native country. The Debatable Land is an epic and energetic book that takes us from 2016 back to an age when neither England nor Scotland could be imagined to reveal a crucial, missing piece in the puzzle of British history.

I can still feel, as if it were yesterday, the excitement of my first Channel crossing (as a child of nearly 7) in September 1936; the regiment of porters, smelling asphyxiatingly of garlic in their blue-green blousons; the raucous sound all around me of spoken French; the immense fields of Normandy strangely devoid of hedges; then the Gare du Nord at twilight, the policemen with their kepis and their little snow-white batons; and my first sight of the Eiffel Tower...

This book is written in the belief that the average English-speaking man or woman has remarkably little knowledge of French history. We may know a bit about Napoleon or Joan of Arc or Louis XIV, but for most of us that's about it. In my own three schools we were taught only about the battles we won: Crecy and Poitiers, Agincourt and Waterloo. The rest was silence. So here is my attempt to fill in the blanks...

John Julius Norwich (at 88) has finally written the book he always wanted to write, the extremely colourful story of the country he loves best.

From frowning Roman generals and belligerent Gallic chieftains, to Charlemagne (hated by generations of French children taught that he invented schools) through Marie Antoinette and the storming of the Bastille to Vichy, the Resistance and beyond, FRANCE is packed with heroes and villains, adventures and battles, romance and revolution. Full of memorable stories and racy anecdotes, this is the perfect introduction to the country that has inspired the rest of the world to live, dress, eat -- and love better.

A captivating portrait of those who lived, loved, fought, played and flourished in Paris between 1940 and 1950 and whose intellectual and artistic output still influences us today

'The live fire of the war, the furnace of emotions, the passion of politics, the spectacular falling-outs, the brutal sex, the insane and beautiful ideas so many failures and some remarkable achievements'

After the horrors of war that shaped and informed them, Paris was the place where the world's most original voices of the time came among them Norman Mailer, Miles Davis, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Juliette Greco, Alberto Giacometti, Saul Bellow and Arthur Koestler. Fuelled by the elation of the Liberation, they hoped to find an independent and original alternative to the Capitalist and Communist models for life, art and politics a Third Way. Those same pioneers also reinvented their relationships with others, questioning, shaking and often rejecting the institutions of marriage and family. They consumed drugs, cigarettes and alcohol with passion; their heightened sexuality proved an inherent part of their creativity and permeated everything they did. The fertility of the interaction between literature, theatre, anthropology, philosophy, politics and cinema was unrivalled by anywhere else in the world at that time, and Paris seemed to be at the heart of all that was new and brave and controversial.

Yet what did they achieve, these intellectuals in whom so much fierce hope had been placed' Postwar Parisian irresponsibility is as much the focus of Left Bank as political, artistic, moral and sexual incandescence. Agn s Poirier skilfully weaves together a collage of images and a kaleidoscope of destinies and the voices clamour from the pages, as fresh, vital and challenging as when they first were raised.

Some of the great untold stories of the Second World War concern the freedom trails, the highly dangerous escape routes out of Nazi Occupied Europe. Over 5,000 British, Commonwealth and American servicemen made the journey over the Pyrenees, the Slovenian mountains and the Italian alps. Many also died en route, killed by the perilous conditions or caught by the German army. It was just as dangerous for the brave men and women of the resistance who kept the routes open.

Escaping Hitler: The Freedom Trails includes the stories of the most charismatic figures of the Second World War, men like Blondie Haslar, leader of the Cockleshell Heroes, US airman Chuck Yaeger (whose story was immortalised in The Right Stuff) and Australian Ralph Churches who orchestrated the mass escape of 100 POWs from Slovenia. There are heroes like Andree de Jongh, a young woman in her twenties who risked her life to smuggle men through occupied France, survived being sent to two concentration camps, and has been described by MI-9 as 'the greatest of our war-time agents'). And villains like traitor Harold Cole who betrayed all the men and women who tried to help him escape France, giving their details to the Gestapo.

Mixing in depth research, interviews with survivors and his own experience of walking the trails, broadcaster and former Royal Marine Monty Halls brings the past to life in this dramatic and gripping slice of military history.

Nature, Money, Work, Care, Food, Energy, and Lives.

These are the seven things that have made our world and will continue to shape its future. By making these things cheap, modern commerce has controlled, transformed, and devastated the Earth.

In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore present a new approach to analyzing today's planetary emergencies. Bringing the latest ecological research together with histories of colonialism, indigenous struggles, slave revolts, and other uprisings, Patel and Moore demonstrate how throughout history, crises have always provided fresh opportunities to make the world cheap and safe for capitalism.

At a time of crisis for all these seven cheap things, innovative systemic thinking is urgently required. This book proposes a radical new way of understanding-and reclaiming-the planet in the turbulent twenty-first century.

The astonishing life of Ned Kelly's mother While we know much about the iconic outlaw Ned Kelly, his mother Ellen Kelly has been largely overlooked by Australian writers and historians - until now, with this vivid and compelling portrait by Grantlee Kieza, one of Australia's most popular biographers.

When Ned Kelly's mother, Ellen, arrived in Melbourne in 1841 aged nine, British convict ships were still dumping their unhappy cargo in what was then known as the colony of New South Wales. By the time she died aged ninety-one in 1923, having outlived seven of her twelve children, motor cars plied the highway near her bush home north of Melbourne, and Australia was a modern, sovereign nation.

Like so many pioneering women, Ellen, the wife of a convict, led a life of great hardship. Born in Ireland during a time of entrenched poverty and sectarian violence, she was a mother of seven when her husband died after months in a police lock-up. She lived through famine and drought, watched her babies die, listened through the prison wall while her eldest son was hanged and saw the charred remains of another of her children who'd died in a shoot-out with police. One son became Australia's most infamous (and ultimately most celebrated) outlaw; another became a highly decorated policeman, an honorary member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a worldwide star on the rodeo circuit. Through it all, 'the notorious Mrs Kelly', as she was dubbed by Victoria's Assistant Police Commissioner, survived as best she could, like so many pioneering women of the time.

By bestselling biographer Grantlee Kieza, Mrs Kelly is the astonishing story of one of Australia's most notorious women and her wild family, but it's also the story of the making of Australia, from struggling colony and backwater to modern nation.

Long Bay has housed some of Australia's most notorious criminals: Tilly Devine, Darcy Dugan, Russell Cox, Neddy Smith, Chow Hayes, Bernie Matthews, Rex Jackson and Roger Rogerson have all spent time behind its bars. Patrick Kennedy has a personal connection: his parents worked there as medical staff and he grew up metres from the outer wall. As a paramedic he tended to Russell Cox after his escape attempt and was one of the first on the scene at Prison Officer John Mewburn's murder. He takes us behind the scenes of Australia's hardest prison, telling the stories of inmates, prison officers and nurses. Kennedy is the only author to have been given access to the Forensic Hospital. Full of contemporary and historic photos, this is the first comprehensive history of Long Bay Correctional Centre.

This riveting book follows a small group of Australian front-line soldiers from their enlistment in the dark days of 1940 to the end of World War II.

No ordinary soldiers, they were members of Don Company of the Second 43rd Battalion, part of the famous 9th Australian Division, which - during campaigns in Tobruk, El Alamein, New Guinea, and Borneo - sustained more casualties and won more medals than any other Australian division. It is an evocative and detailed account of the day-to-day war of three infantry soldiers whose experiences included night patrols at Tobruk, advancing steadily through German barrages at Alamein, charging enemy machine guns in New Guinea, and repelling Japanese charges on Borneo.

Inspired by American historian Stephen Ambrose's landmark book, Band of Brothers, about the US Army's Easy Company of the 506th Regiment, Mark Johnston, one of our best military historians, here gives an Australian company the same treatment. Using the frank and detailed personal letters, diaries, and memoirs of three Australian soldiers, he brings to life their campaigns, battles, and interactions with their comrades and enemies. His book is a unique and powerful account of the everyday experiences of a small unit of Australian soldiers on the front line.

Henry Stuart's life is the last great forgotten Jacobean tale. Shadowed by the gravity of the Thirty Years' War and the huge changes taking place across Europe in seventeenth-century society, economy, politics and empire, his life was visually and verbally gorgeous.

NOW THE SUBJECT OF BBC2 DOCUMENTARY The Best King We Never Had By 1610, the precocious and dynamic Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales was the hope of Britain and Protestant Europe. Eldest son of James VI of Scotland & I of England, his interests ranged far beyond his Court's renowned love of the arts. He invested in cutting-edge science, and began modernising Britain's military and naval capacity. Hailed as `Protector of Virginia', Henry stood at the forefront of the founding of British America. All before his tragic death, aged 18.

In this rich and vibrant biography, prize-winning author, Sarah Fraser, brings Henry Stuart to life as the epitome of a Renaissance prince - active, virtuous, ambitious. Henry's story recreates an exciting part of the Jacobean era, during a transformational period of British history.

In 1474, a twenty-three year old woman ascended the throne of Castile, the largest and strongest kingdom in Spain. Ahead of her lay the considerable challenge not only of being a young, female ruler in an overwhelmingly male-dominated world, but also of reforming a major European kingdom that was riddled with crime, corruption, and violent political factionism. Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon was crucial to her success, bringing together as it did two kingdoms, but it was a royal partnership in which Isabella more than held her own. Her pivotal reign was long and transformative, uniting Spain and setting the stage for its golden era of global dominance. For by the time of her death in 1504, Isabella had laid the foundations not just of modern Spain, but of one of the world's greatest empires.

Acclaimed historian Giles Tremlett chronicles the life of Isabella of Castile as she led her country out of the murky middle ages and harnessed the newest ideas and tools of the early Renaissance to turn her ill-disciplined, quarrelsome nation into a sharper, modern state with a powerful, clear-minded, and ambitious monarch at its centre. With authority, insight and flair he relates the story of this legendary, if controversial, first initiate in a small club of great European queens that includes Elizabeth I of England, Russia's Catherine the Great, and Britain's Queen Victoria.

While the many extraordinary exploits of the seafarers who mapped the world have been well documented, those of their indispensable pest controllers, shipmates, and mascots haven't - until now. In Seafurrers, Bart the seafaring feline provides us with a cat's-eye view of maritime history - starting in the Fertile Crescent and Nile Valley and ultimately hopping aboard the ships that set sail for the New World.

Drawing on letters, journals, newspaper reports, photographs, and more, Bart acts as both curator and commentator, providing 40 tales of Seafurrers and their swashbuckling owners, including famous seamen such as Sir Richard Hawkins and John Locke. From the gut-wrenching math behind the damage rats could do on ships to the charming pleasures of chasing flying fish, Bart expertly crafts a portrait of feline life on deck, as well as a deft genealogy of cat-human friendship that is sure to leave readers with a newfound appreciation of the cats who helped us at sea, and whom we now helplessly serve at home in return.

What was Australia's climate like before official weather records began? How do scientists use tree-rings, ice cores and tropical corals to retrace the past? What do Indigenous seasonal calendars reveal? And what do settler diary entries about rainfall, droughts, bushfires and snowfalls tell us about natural climate cycles?

Sunburnt Country pieces together Australia's climate history for the first time. It uncovers a continent long vulnerable to climate extremes and variability. It gives an unparalleled perspective on how human activities have altered patterns that have been with us for millions of years, and what climate change looks like in our own backyard.

Sunburnt Country highlights the impact of a warming planet on Australian lifestyles and ecosystems and the power we all have to shape future life on Earth.

Since 2012, the fight to stop the opening of the vast Galilee coal basin has emerged as an iconic pivot of the Australian climate and environment movement.

The Coal Truth: the fight to stop Adani, defeat the big polluters and reclaim our democracy provides a timely and colourful contribution to one of the most important struggles in our national history - over the future of the coal industry. Written by an environmental insider with an eye on the world his daughters will inherit, The Coal Truth is told with wit and verve, drawing in other specialist voices to bring to life the contours of a contest that the people of Australia can't afford to lose.

Contributors include Tara Moss and Berndt Sellheim, Adrian Burragubba, Lesley Hughes, John Quiggin, Hilary Bambrick, Ruchira Talukdar and Geoffrey Cousins.

As this crucial book shows us beyond all doubt, there is no safe, livable future that involves digging up more Australian coal. But with the country's formidable movements fighting to keep that coal where it is, David Ritter makes an irresistible case that few places are better suited to lead a just and democratic transition to the next economy. Marshaling diverse voices and hard-hitting arguments, he shows us this promising future is well within our grasp. An inspiring must-read!

Can horses feel shame? Do deer grieve? Why do roosters deceive hens?

We tend to assume that we are the only living things able to experience feelings but have you ever wondered what's going on in an animal's head? From the leafy forest floor to the inside of a bee hive, The Inner Life of Animals opens up the animal kingdom like never before. We hear the stories of a grateful humpback whale, of a hedgehog who has nightmares, and of a magpie who commits adultery; we meet bees that plan for the future, pigs who learn their own names and crows that go tobogganing for fun. And at last we find out why wasps exist.

Is anything truly random? Does infinity actually exist? Could we ever see into other dimensions?

In this delightful journey of discovery, David Darling and extraordinary child prodigy Agnijo Banerjee draw connections between the cutting edge of modern maths and life as we understand it, delving into the strange - would we like alien music? - and venturing out on quests to consider the existence of free will and the fantastical future of quantum computers. Packed with puzzles and paradoxes, mind-bending concepts and surprising solutions, this is for anyone who wants life's questions answered - even those you never thought to ask.

Populism can be a dirty word. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump have certainly given it a bad name. But rather than associating it with demagoguery and exclusion, might we better see it as a backlash against free market globalisation? Might it be harnessed as a positive force able to thrive in difficult times?

This timely and persuasive book exposes the failures of globalisation: greedy banks, predatory privatisation, corporate tax avoidance and a growing underclass of temporary overseas workers. David McKnight argues that a progressive populism could address the genuine economic grievances of everyday people, without scapegoating immigrants or ethnic minorities. In fact, a progressive form of populism may be the best way of defeating the racist backlash of right-wing populism. It may also be the best way to save the planet.

In a world where the super-rich get richer, one that is charged with hate-filled language as people look for someone else to blame, the case for progressive populism must be heard. This important book helps give it voice.

Read the extract in The Guardian here

The revelatory story of the Bible in Australia, from the convict era to the Mabo land rights campaign, Nick Cave, the Bra Boys, and beyond. Thought to be everything from the word of God to a resented imposition, the Bible has been debated, painted, rejected, translated, read, gossiped about, preached, and tattooed.

At a time when public discussion of religion is deeply polarised, Meredith Lake reveals the Bible’s dynamic influence in Australia and offers an innovative new perspective on Christianity and its changing role in our society. In the hands of writers, artists, wowsers, Bible-bashers, immigrants, suffragists, evangelists, unionists, Indigenous activists, and many more – the Bible has played a defining and contested role in Australia.

A must-read for sceptics, the curious, the lapsed, the devout, the believer, and non-believer.

The CSIRO Low-carb Diet is based on strong scientific research that has successfully helped Australians lose weight and improve their overall health.

Building on the success of the first book, this new volume will make implementing the diet at home easier than ever. It includes:

* An update on the latest science * 80 NEW recipes with a focus on meals that are quick and easy to prepare * All daily allowances for recipes calculated and explained * Daily plans and meal builders to help you seamlessly incorporate this way of eating into your everyday life * 15 new excercises that complement those in the first book to add variety to your exercise routine, and further improve your fitness, strength and general health Accessible, affordable and achievable, this is a fully researched approach to better eating and improved health from Australia's peak science organisation.

Martin E. P. Seligman is one of the most decorated and popular psychologists of his generation. When he first encountered the discipline in the 1960s, it was devoted to eliminating misery: the science of how past trauma creates present symptoms. Today, thanks in large part to Seligman's own work pioneering the Positive Psychology movement, it is ever more focused on the bright side – gratitude, resilience and hope.

In this breakthrough memoir, Seligman recounts how he learned to study optimism – including a life-changing conversation with his five-year-old daughter. In wise, eloquent prose, Seligman tells the human stories behind some of his major findings. He recounts developing CAVE, an analytical tool that predicts election outcomes (with shocking accuracy) based on the language used in campaign speeches, and the canonical studies that birthed the theory of learned helplessness – which he now reveals was incorrect. And he writes at length for the first time about his own battles with depression at a young age.

All the while, Seligman works out his theory of psychology, making a compelling and deeply personal case for the importance of virtues like hope, anticipation, gratitude and wisdom for our mental health. You will walk away from this book not just educated but deeply enriched.

I'm a barrister, a job which requires the skills of a social worker, relationship counsellor, arm-twister, hostage negotiator, named driver, bus fare-provider, accountant, suicide watchman, coffee-supplier, surrogate parent and, on one memorable occasion, whatever the official term is for someone tasked with breaking the news to a prisoner that his girlfriend has been diagnosed with gonorrhoea.

Welcome to the world of the Secret Barrister. These are the stories of life inside the courtroom. They are sometimes funny, often moving and ultimately life-changing.

How can you defend a child-abuser you suspect to be guilty? What do you say to someone sentenced to ten years who you believe to be innocent? What is the law and why do we need it?

And why do they wear those stupid wigs?

From the criminals to the lawyers, the victims, witnesses and officers of the law, here is the best and worst of humanity, all struggling within a broken system which would never be off the front pages if the public knew what it was really like.

Both a searing first-hand account of the human cost of the criminal justice system, and a guide to how we got into this mess, The Secret Barrister wants to show you what it's really like and why it really matters.

In this indispensable guide to navigating the 21st century, two visionary thinkers reveal the unexpected ways power is changing - and how 'new power' is reshaping politics, business and life.

Why do some leap ahead while others fall behind in today's chaotic, connected age? In New Power, Australian Jeremy Heimans and Brit Henry Timms confront the biggest stories of our time - the rise of mega-platforms like Facebook and Uber; the out-of-nowhere victories or Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump; the unexpected emergence of movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo; and the erruption of darker forces such as ISIS.

For most of human history, the rules of power were clear: power was something to be seized and jealously guarded. This 'old power' was inaccessible to the vast majority of people. But widespread connectivity has made possible a different kind of power. 'New power' is made by the many rather than the few. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It works like a current, not a currency - and like water or electricity, it is most forceful when it surges.

In a world increasingly shaped by new power, this revelatory book gives each of us a new way to understand the world and our role in it.

In 1954, a group of boys attended a remote summer camp where they were split into two groups, and encouraged to bully, harass, and demonise each other. The results would make history as one of social psychology's classic - and most controversial - studies- the Robbers Cave experiment.

Conducted at the height of the Cold War, the experiment officially had a happy ending- the boys reconciled, and psychologist Muzafer Sherif demonstrated that while hatred and violence are powerful forces, so too are cooperation and harmony. Today it is proffered as proof that under the right conditions warring groups can make peace. Yet the true story of the experiments is far more complex, and more chilling.

In The Lost Boys, Gina Perry explores the experiment and its consequences, tracing the story of Sherif, a troubled outsider who struggled to craft an experiment that would vanquish his personal demons. Drawing on archival material and new interviews, Perry pieces together a story of drama, mutiny, and intrigue that has never been told before.

How Australians fund schooling has been a matter of bitter political, social, and religious division for almost two hundred years. And it remains so.

The 2012 Gonski Review, urging all jurisdictions to move towards consensus on a needs-based and socially just education system, has continued to encounter forms of political obstruction. By examining the principles, the motives, and the means of those who, since Menzies, have fought to develop and maintain a class-based education system at the expense of a broader view of social justice, this book explains how and why Australian education policy remains mired in political controversy.

Depreciation is a tax deduction available to property investors that, if claimed, can add thousands of dollars to the returns from their investments. In the May 2017 Budget, the government introduced legislative changes to areas of taxation that affect property investors - the main one being depreciation. These changes are covered in this book.

Do the changes mean investors will stop choosing property? Will current investment property owners now sell off their investments because they can no longer claim depreciation in quite the same way? The answer to both these questions is 'no', they will (and they should) 'Keep Claiming It!'

Google. Amazon. Facebook. The modern world is defined by vast digital monopolies turning ever-larger profits. Those of us who consume the content that feeds them are farmed for the purposes of being sold ever more products and advertising. Those that create the content - the artists, writers and musicians - are finding they can no longer survive in this unforgiving economic landscape.

But it didn't have to be this way.

In Move Fast and Break Things, Jonathan Taplin offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel and Larry Page who founded these all-powerful companies. Their unprecedented growth came at the heavy cost of tolerating piracy of books, music and film, while at the same time promoting opaque business practices and subordinating the privacy of individual users to create the surveillance marketing monoculture in which we now live.

It is the story of a massive reallocation of revenue in which $50 billion a year has moved from the creators and owners of content to the monopoly platforms. With this reallocation of money comes a shift in power. Google, Facebook and Amazon now enjoy political power on par with Big Oil and Big Pharma, which in part explains how such a tremendous shift in revenues from creators to platforms could have been achieved and why it has gone unchallenged for so long.

And if you think that's got nothing to do with you, their next move is to come after your jobs. Move Fast and Break Things is a call to arms, to say that is enough is enough and to demand that we do everything in our power to create a different future.

Across the globe, the so-called Big Four accounting and audit firms - Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG - are massively influential. Together, they earn more than US$100 billion annually and employ almost one million people. In many profound ways, they have changed how we work, how we manage, how we invest and how we are governed.

Stretching back centuries, their history is a fascinating story of wealth, power and luck. But today, the Big Four face an uncertain future - thanks to their push into China; their vulnerability to digital disruption and competition; and the hazards of providing traditional services in a new era of transparency.

Both colourful and authoritative, this account of the past, present and likely future of the Big Four is essential reading for anyone perplexed or fascinated by professional services, working in the industry, contemplating joining a professional services firm, or simply curious about the fate of the global economy.

Ian Gow is a professor at the University of Melbourne and Director of the Melbourne Centre for Corporate Governance and Regulation. He previously taught at Harvard Business School.

Stuart Kells is a Melbourne-based author whose history of Penguin Books - Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution - won the Ashurst Australian Business Literature Prize.

Although economic inequality provokes widespread disquiet, its supposed necessity is rarely questioned. At best, a basic level of inequality is seen as a necessary evil. At worst, it is seen as insufficient to encourage aspiration, hard work and investment, a refrain sometimes used to advocate ever greater inequality.

In this original new book, Danny Dorling critically analyses historical trends and contemporary assumptions in order to question the idea that inequality is an inevitability. What if, he asks, widespread economic inequality is actually just a passing phase, a feature of the capitalist transition from a settled rural way of life to our next highly urban steady-state? Is it really likely that we face a Blade Runner-style dystopian future divided between a tiny elite and an impoverished mass?

Dorling shows how a stabilising population, changing gender relations and rising access to education make a more egalitarian alternative to this nightmare vision not only preferable, but realistic. This bold contribution to one of most significant debates of our time will be essential reading for anyone interested in our economic, social and political destiny.

A Fascist , observes Madeleine Albright, ‘is someone who claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is utterly unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use violence and whatever other means are necessary to achieve the goals he or she might have.’

The twentieth century was defined by the clash between democracy and Fascism, a struggle that created uncertainty about the survival of human freedom and left millions of innocent people dead. Given the horrors of that experience, one might expect the world to reject the spiritual successors to Hitler and Mussolini should they arise in our era. In Fascism: A Warning, Madeleine Albright, draws on her own experiences as a child in war-torn Europe and her distinguished career as a diplomat to question that very assumption.

Fascism, as Albright shows, not only endured through the course of the twentieth century, but now presents a more virulent threat to international peace and justice than at any time since the end of World War II. The momentum toward democracy that swept the world when the Berlin Wall fell has gone into reverse. The United States, which has historically championed the free world, is led by a president who exacerbates popular divisions and heaps scorn on democratic institutions. In many countries, economic, technological and cultural factors are weakening the political centre and empowering the extremes of right and left. Contemporary leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un are employing many of the same tactics used by Fascists in the 1920s and 30s.

Fascism: A Warning is a book for our times that is relevant to all times. Written with wisdom by someone who has not only studied history but helped to shape it, this call to arms teaches us the lessons we must understand and the questions we must answer if we are to save ourselves from repeating the tragic errors of the past.

We are now living in a world where Brexit and Trump are daily realities. But how did this come about? And what does it mean for the future?

Populism and ultra-nationalism brought about the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in the 1930s. Now, as Trump sits in the White House, Britain negotiates its way out of the EU, and countries across Europe see substantial gains in support for the extreme Right, award-winning journalist, author, and historian Gwynne Dyer asks how we got here, and where we go next.

Dyer examines the global challenges facing us all today and explains how they have contributed to a world of inequality, poverty, and joblessness, conditions which he argues inevitably lead to the rise of populism. The greatest threat to social and political stability, he argues, lies in the rise of automation, which will continue to eliminate jobs, whether politicians admit that it is happening or not. To avoid a social and political catastrophe, we will have to find ways of putting real money into the pockets of those who have no work.

But this is not a book without hope. Our capacity for overcoming the worst has been tested again and again throughout history, and we have always survived. To do so now, Dyer argues, we must embrace radical solutions to the real difficulties facing individuals, or find ourselves back in the 1930s with no way out.

Two Harvard professors explain the dangerous world we face today Democracies can die with a coup d'etat - or they can die slowly. This happens most deceptively when in piecemeal fashion, with the election of an authoritarian leader, the abuse of governmental power and the complete repression of opposition. All three steps are being taken around the world - not least with the election of Donald Trump - and we must all understand how we can stop them.

In How Democracies Die, Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt draw insightful lessons from across history - from the rule of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile to the quiet undermining of Turkey's constitutional system by President Recip Erdogan - to shine a light on regime breakdown across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Notably they point to the dangers of an authoritarian leader faced with a major crisis.

Based on years of research, they present a deep understanding of how and why democracies die; an alarming analysis of how democracy is being subverted today in the US and beyond; and a guide for maintaining and repairing a threatened democracy, for governments, political parties and individuals.

History doesn't repeat itself. But we can protect our democracy by learning its lessons, before it's too late.

Before the good life was reduced to a bottle of Prozac, it was philosophers who offered answers to the most fundamental questions about who we are and how to live well. In Examined Lives, James Miller returns to this vibrant tradition with short and spirited biographies of twelve famous thinkers, examining the interplay of their life and thought. From Plato, who risked his reputation to tutor a tyrant, to Kant, who wrestled with hypochondria while advocating arch-rationality in his writings, each thinker took their own unique approach to 'the good life', but often struggled to put their theories into practice.

With a flair for rich anecdote, Miller provides a captivating insight into some of history's greatest thinkers – and confirms the continuing relevance of philosophy today.

Existentialism is back Carpe diem - 'seize the day' - is one of the oldest pieces of life advice in Western history. But its true spirit has been hijacked by ad men and self-help gurus, reduced to the instant hit of one-click online shopping, or slogans like 'live in the now'. We need to reclaim it to make sense of our complex, confusing times.

The last great expression of carpe diem was in the electrifying existential philosophy of the 1940s. Today it's an idea that challenges us to confront our mortality and live with greater passion and intention rather than scroll mindlessly on our phones or allow freedom to become a mere choice between brands.

In Carpe Diem Regained, Roman Krznaric reinvents existentialism for our age of information and choice overload. An essential and empowering work of contemporary philosophy, the book unveils the surprising ways of seizing the day that humankind has discovered over the centuries, ones we urgently need to revive.

Carpe diem is the existentialism for our times.

On All Hallow's Eve in 1517, a young monk named Martin Luther posted a document he hoped would spark an academic debate, but that instead ignited a conflagration that would forever destroy the world he knew. Written in riveting prose and impeccably researched, Martin Luther tells the searing tale of a humble man who, by bringing ugly truths to the highest seats of power, caused the explosion whose sound is still ringing in our ears. Luther's monumental faith and courage birthed the ideals of faith, virtue, and freedom that today lie at the heart of all modern life.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Walking the Bible and Abraham comes a revelatory journey across four continents and 4,000 years exploring how Adam and Eve introduced the idea of love into the world, and how they continue to shape our deepest feelings about relationships, family, and togetherness.

Since antiquity, one story has stood at the center of every conversation about men and women. One couple has been the battleground for human relationships and sexual identity. That couple is Adam and Eve. Yet instead of celebrating them, history has blamed them for bringing sin, deceit, and death into the world.
 
In this fresh retelling of their story, New York Times columnist and PBS host Bruce Feiler travels from the Garden of Eden in Iraq to the Sistine Chapel in Rome, from John Milton’s London to Mae West’s Hollywood, discovering how Adam and Eve should be hailed as exemplars of a long-term, healthy, resilient relationship. At a time of discord and fear over the strength of our social fabric, Feiler shows how history’s first couple can again be role models for unity, forgiveness, and love.
 
Containing all the humor, insight, and wisdom that have endeared Bruce Feiler to readers around the world, The First Love Story is an unforgettable journey that restores Adam and Eve to their rightful place as central figures in our culture's imagination and reminds us that even our most familiar stories still have the ability to surprise, inspire, and guide us today.

Already translated into over 40 languages, this is the first translation of To Kill A Mockingbird into Latin. Andrew Wilson has made the translation suitable for students at any level of proficiency.

While respecting Harper Lee's style, Wilson keeps to the requirements of the Cambridge Latin Course (which is used across the world).

Uniquely, this is a book that can be sold globally (after all, Latin is widely studied in non-English speaking countries as well). It is the perfect gift book for all lovers of literature.

This is the endorsed publication from OCR and Bloomsbury for the Latin AS and A-Level (Group 3) prescription of Aeneid Book XI, lines 1-224, and the A-Level (Group 4) prescription of Aeneid Book XI, lines 498-521, 532-596, 648-689, and 725-835, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary, with a detailed introduction that also covers the prescribed text to be read in English for A Level.

In Book XI Pallas, the warrior son of Evander who was killed by Turnus, is buried, amid the mourning of his father and the Trojans. After a truce to collect and bury the dead on both sides, fighting resumes, during which the warrior-maiden Camilla battles bravely for the Latins before being killed. The events of the book take up just four days: Pallas' funeral occupies the first; the second and third are devoted (briefly) to the truce and burials; the fourth, taking up the second half of the book, is concerned with Camilla's aristeia, in which she is likened to an Amazon.

Resources are available on the Companion Website www.bloomsbury.com/ocr-editions-2019-2021

This is the endorsed publication from OCR and Bloomsbury for the Latin AS and A-Level (Group 1) prescription of Histories Book I sections 4 (finis Neronis ...) to 7, 12-14, 17-23 and 26, and the A-Level (Group 2) prescription of Histories Book I sections 27-36, 39-44 and 49, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary, with a detailed introduction that also covers the prescribed text to be read in English for A Level.

Histories I starts in AD 69, during the civil war after the death of Nero. Tacitus describes the unstable conditions in the Roman Empire, as different generals are elevated by their soldiers to the position of emperor. In the prescribed selection, rebellion and violence break out in the city of Rome, as the Praetorian Guard of the emperor Galba transfer their support to a controversial younger man, Otho. Tacitus vividly portrays the elderly Galba's attempts to maintain order and discipline as power slips from his grasp, while Otho inspires the disorderly soldiers, keeping control only with difficulty over this volatile group of men.

Resources are available on the Companion Website www.bloomsbury.com/ocr-editions-2019-2021

This is the endorsed publication from OCR and Bloomsbury for the Latin AS and A-Level (Group 1) prescription of Cicero's Philippic II sections 44-50 (... viri tui similis esses) and 78 (C. Caesari ex Hispania redeunti...)-92, and the A-Level (Group 2) prescription of sections 100-119, giving full Latin text, commentary and vocabulary, with a detailed introduction that also covers the prescribed text to be read in English for A Level.

It is 44 BC. Following Caesar's assassination, his supporters are looking for a new leader. Caesar's deputy, Antony, and the 18-year-old Octavian, the future Augustus, are vying with each other to fill the role; each seems more concerned with personal power than the good of Rome. Cicero returns to the city to try to save it with the one weapon at his disposal: his oratory.

In this speech, the longest of the Philippics (so-called after a series of speeches made against Philip of Macedon), Cicero starts by defending his own career and then - the part we read - demolishes Antony's. A masterpiece of invective, it ensures Antony's bitter hostility and Cicero's eventual elimination.

Resources are available on the Companion Website www.bloomsbury.com/ocr-editions-2019-2021

The Sunday Times bestseller Paul Theroux collects a rich feast of his writing and essays - from travel to personal memoir - published all together here for the first time Drawing together a fascinating body of writing from over 14 years of work, Figures in a Landscape ranges from profiles of cultural icons (Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams) to intimate personal remembrances; from thrilling adventures in Africa to literary writings from Theroux's rich and expansive personal reading. Collectively these pieces offer a fascinating portrait of the author himself, his extraordinary life, restless and ever-curious mind.

Many books have become classics, must-reads or overnight publishing sensations, but how many can genuinely claim to have changed the way we see and think?

In 100 Books that Changed the World, prize-winning author Scott Christianson brings together an exceptional collection of truly groundbreaking books - from scriptures that founded religions, to scientific treatises that challenged beliefs, to novels that kick-started literary genres. This elegantly designed book offers a sweeping, chronological survey of the most important books from around the globe, from the earliest illuminated manuscripts to the age of the ebook publication.

Entries include:

Iliad and Odyssey, Homer (750 BC), Gutenberg Bible (1450s), The Qur'an (AD 609-632), On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Nicolaus Copernicus (1543), Shakespeare's First Folio (1623), Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton (1687), Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755), The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith (1776), The Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft (1792), The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848), Roget's Thesaurus (1852), On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1859), The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud (1899), Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence (1928), The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank (1947), Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (1964), A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (1988).

The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. Like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations.

What did we see in them? Swagger. Recklessness. Sexual charisma. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A certain way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes. Talent we wished we had.

What did we want of them? To be larger than life but also like us. To live out their songs. To stay young forever. No wonder many didn't stay the course.

In Uncommon People, David Hepworth zeroes in on defining moments and turning points in the lives of forty rock stars from 1955 to 1995, taking us on a journey to burst a hundred myths and create a hundred more.

As this tribe of uniquely motivated nobodies went about turning themselves into the ultimate somebodies, they also shaped us, our real lives and our fantasies. Uncommon People isn't just their story. It's ours as well.

A groundbreaking investigation into the early life of the iconic Akira Kurosawa in connection to his most famous film-taking us deeper into Kurosawa and his world.

Although he is a filmmaker of international renown, Kurosawa and the story of his formative years remain as enigmatic as his own Rashomon. Paul Anderer looks back at Kurosawa before he became famous, taking us into the turbulent world that made him. We encounter Tokyo, Kurosawa’s birthplace, which would be destroyed twice before his eyes; explore early twentieth-century Japan amid sweeping cross-cultural changes; and confront profound family tragedy alongside the horror of war. From these multiple angles we see how Kurosawa’s life and work speak to the epic narrative of modern Japan’s rise and fall.

With fresh insights and vivid prose, Anderer engages the Great Earthquake of 1923, the dynamic energy that surged through Tokyo in its wake, and its impact on Kurosawa as a youth. When the city is destroyed again, in the fire-bombings of 1945, Anderer reveals how Kurosawa grappled with the trauma of war and its aftermath, and forged his artistic vision. Finally, he resurrects the specter and the voice of a gifted and troubled older brother-himself a star in the silent film industry-who took Kurosawa to see his first films, and who led a rebellious life until his desperate end.

Bringing these formative forces into focus, Anderer looks beyond the aura of Kurosawa’s fame and leads us deeper into the tragedies and the challenges of his past. Kurosawa's Rashomon uncovers how a film like Rashomon came to be, and why it endures to illuminate the shadows and the challenges of our present.

Contending that 'for Picasso, what he is is far more important than what he does', this prescient 1965 work of criticism from the author of Ways of Seeing explores art, celebrity, commerce and the mass media. Investigating every aspect of Picasso's life and work - from the Blue Period through Cubism and the compositions that culminated in Guernica and beyond - John Berger's study of the 'undisputed emperor of modern art' is also a penetrating look at our age.

How do we see the world around us? This is one of a number of pivotal works by creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision for ever.

In this classic of art criticism, one of our foremost cultural historians grapples with the life and work of one of the twentieth century's most mercurial and prodigious artists. In The Success and Failure of Picasso, John Berger places the artist in the historical, social and political contexts that made his work possible.

A bruised ridge of hills. A scrub-mottled plain. Ghost gums framing a wash of sky ...

Pioneering Aboriginal watercolourist Albert Namatjira's landscape paintings are synonymous with our perception of the Australian outback. But these luminous landscapes also expressed Namatjira's deep connection with the Western Arrarnta Country for which he was a traditional custodian. This is the first publication of Namatjira's work since the copyright was returned to his descendants, and celebrates the legacy of this important artist through a selection of his evocative watercolours from the NGA's world-renowned collection.

True tales of lost art, built around case studies of famous works, their creators, and stories of disappearance and recovery From the bestselling author of The Art of Forgery comes this dynamic narrative that tells the fascinating stories of artworks stolen, looted, or destroyed in war, accidentally demolished or discarded, lost at sea or in natural disasters, or attacked by iconoclasts or vandals; works that were intentionally temporal, knowingly destroyed by the artists themselves or their patrons, covered over with paint or plaster, or recycled for their materials. An exciting read that spans the centuries and the continents.

Surrealism did not begin as an art movement but as a philosophical strategy, a way of life, and a rebellion against the establishment that gave rise to the First World War. In Lives of the Surrealists, Desmond Morris concentrates on the artists as people—as remarkable individuals. What were their personalities, their predilections, their character strengths and flaws?

Unlike the Impressionists or the Cubists, the surrealists did not obey a fixed visual code, but rather the rules of surrealist philosophy: work from the unconscious, letting your darkest, most irrational thoughts well up and shape your art. An artist himself, and contemporary of the later surrealists, Morris illuminates the considerable variation in each artist’s approach to this technique. While some were out-and-out surrealists in all they did, others lived more orthodox lives and only became surrealists at the easel or in the studio.

Focusing on the thirty-five artists most closely associated with the surrealist movement, Morris lends context to their life histories with narratives of their idiosyncrasies and their often complex love lives, alongside photos of the artists and their work.

With tried and true recipes for a perfect sausage roll snack, a succulent Greek-style roast chicken for dinner or honeycomb cheesecake slice for dessert, Everything I know about cooking I learned from CWA is the perfect kitchen companion, in a deceptively small format. Offering a range of tried and tested recipes to suit both the beginner and the expert cook,there are recipes for snacks, soups, sandwiches, salads, main courses, desserts, cakes, biscuits, slices and - of course - scones.

`A real and rare gem, this is the must-have book on Venice and its cooking' - Anna del Conte Skye McAlpine, author of the successful blog From My Dining Table, offers an insider's perspective on Venetian home cooking, illustrated with her stunning photographs.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists pass through the city of Venice each year, eat at trattorie, and leave having dined in Venice, but not having eaten well. It is the food cooked in homes and made with local ingredients, the recipes passed down through generations that is real Venetian food. It is romantic and it is exotic. It dabbles in spices, and delightfully foreign flavours. It's pine nuts and raisins, bay leaves and sweet vinegar, heady saffron and creamy mascarpone.

Some of the recipes in A Table in Venice are translated and barely adapted from old Venetian cookbooks, while other dishes are more loosely inspired by the ingredients, the flavours and the everyday life of Venice. All of the recipes are typical of Skye's cooking style: simple, fresh, colourful and always plentiful, whether it's quick-to-assemble cicheti - the small plates accompanying an afternoon spritz - or a hearty serving of risotto topped with an extra grating of Parmesan. From Apricot and raisin sticky pastries with a morning espresso, to dinner of Roast duck with apples, pears and chestnuts, A Table in Venice offers a rare glimpse into the tastes and secrets of a true Venetian kitchen.

Forget celebrity chefs. The books that truly reflect what most Australians cooked and ate at home for decades were put together by people you have never heard of, all in the name of helping others. Community cookbooks have raised millions of dollars for Australian charities and causes, ranging from cash-strapped local schools and churches to international movements like Variety and the Red Cross.

Many of these books were humble publications, hand-printed and stapled together by volunteers. But some, like the iconic PWMU Cookbook from Victoria, the Green and Gold Cookery Book in South Australia, the CWA's Cookery Book and Household Hints from WA and the Bundaberg CWA branch cookery book from Queensland, have outlived fleeting food fads, and are still in print and much-used today.

Tried, Tested and True: treasured recipes and untold stories from Australian community cookbooks celebrates this amazing tradition. Based on extensive original research, best-selling author and Gourmand World Cookbook award-winner Liz Harfull it brings to light previously untold stories about the cookbooks and the people who created them. Featuring carefully selected recipes, updated with additional tips and hints to ensure success for the most inexperienced modern cook, Tried, Tested and True is a treasure trove for your kitchen.

With treasured recipes, Chloe Shorten shows how eating together as a family offers more than a meal- it can nourish relationships and nurture your children.

Chloe reveals ways to encourage the connections we make at the family table. She shares her tried-and-true recipes passed down from family, friends and neighbours across Australia- her mum Dame Quentin Bryce's popular eggplant parmigiana, icon Wendy McCarthy's perfect roast chicken and a chocolate cake so divine it was served in restaurants.

The Secret Ingredient invites you to bring the remarkable power of the family meal into your home.

The word mezze stems from the Arabic term ‘tamazzaza’ – a single word that broadly embraces the idea of enjoying small portions of food and taking the time to indulge one’s tastebuds, eyes and nose by exposing them to a wide range of aromas and flavours. A complete mezze table is formed when many of these warm and cold dishes are presented together, as a meal in itself.

The mezzanic culture originated in the Ottoman Empire and can be found in the whole of the Levantian Mediterranean: from Greece and Cyprus to Turkey, Palestine, Jordan and Syria. But it is Lebanon, the cultural home of the authors, which has really developed and is famed for the richest, most extensive and sophisticated mezzanine culture.

In addition to the 100 classic and contemporary mezze recipes, Souk also delves into their personal stories and reminiscences about this food tradition, and the families and friends the authors meet along the way. Eating mezze is a social event, wrapped in warmth and cosiness, and spiced with waves of laughter and noisy chatter.

This rich and evocative memoir is not only an uplifting story of creating a French idyll in an Australian landscape, but a beautifully written account of how a garden changed their lives.

When Bryce and Marian Somes took a whistle-stop tour of France in 1986, they couldn't have imagined the lasting effect it would have on their future.

Having tried to coax various gardens to flourish along on the harsh Western Australian coastline and later moving on from suburban gardening in Melbourne, the Someses found 26 acres of bare but beckoning land in Victoria's Gippsland in 1992 and set about creating what Bryce lovingly referred to as a French folly. The ever-expanding garden, which now includes an olive grove and vineyard in addition to the orchard and extensive perennial and picking gardens inspired by Monet's Giverny, surround a rustic rammed earth farmhouse and barn that are also continually evolving.

Inspiration and practical ideas from popular Gardening Australia presenter Sophie Thomson.

A gorgeous, inspirational and fun gardening book jam-packed with ideas, tips, projects and great advice all based on Sophie's own garden in the Adelaide Hills, South Australia.

Sophie has transformed what was once a dry, windswept cow paddock surrounding her historic stone cottage into a lush garden. But it's not a mere showplace - it's a working garden that reflects all Sophie's passions: a kids' garden, an 'obsessive-compulsive' gardener's treasure trove, a recycled/repurposed garden, a haven for beneficial insects & bees, and a productive garden supplying her family with fruit, veg and eggs year-round. It's also a work in progress that everyone can learn from, including:

    * Sophie's 10 guiding principles (including soil, climate and waterwise gardening)
    * Top tips for planning your patch - from design principles to plant selection
    * Sophie's favourite plants - from top trees to great groundcovers
    * The edible garden
    * Garden structures that reduce, reuse and recycle - Sophie's garden has everything from an old tram carriage that now houses chooks to garden sculptures, a pizza oven and practical and striking 'gabion' walls, all made from repurposed materials
    * Kids in the garden
    * Wildlife gardening

With eye-catching shapes, interesting flavours, and enticing textures, sweets and candy are much-loved worldwide by people of all ages. They provide minor treats, lessons in economics for children, and colourful novelties to mark festivities. Methods for making sweets can be traced back to the importance of sugar in Arabic medicine and the probable origin of this in ancient India. But these seemingly inconsequential items are freighted with centuries of changing cultural attitudes, social and economic history, emotional attachments, and divergent views on the role of sugar in health. How did confectionery become so popular? Why do we value concentrated sweetness in such varied forms? Why persist in eating sweets?

From marzipan pigs and nutty nougat to bubblegum and bonbons, Sweets and Candy looks behind the glamour and sparkle to explore the sticky history of confectionery. Laura Mason describes many of the bewildering varieties and the fascinating ways in which different cultures have made, consumed, valued, and adored sweets and candy throughout history. Featuring a selection of scrumptious recipes to try at home, this global history will appeal to sweet-toothed readers, as well as all those interested in the history of food.

After a decade of making documentaries about offbeat characters on the fringes of US society, Louis had the urge to return to America and track down the people who most fascinated him. It would be a reunion tour, but this time without the cameras and the sense of performance being filmed inevitably brings. It would allow him to get closer to people, to discover what really motivated them, what they believed in, and what had happened to the assorted dreamers, outlaws and eccentrics since he last saw them.

On a journey that took him to the porn sets of Los Angeles, among the UFO contactees of Arizona, and up to far Northern Idaho for a festive get-together of leading neo-Nazis, he asked what 'weird people' have to tell us about our own secret natures. Had he learned anything about himself by being among them? Do we choose our beliefs or do our beliefs choose us?

Louis Theroux's first book is a hilarious, thought-provoking and at times surreal voyage into the heart of weirdness.

The urge to tidiness seems to be rooted deep in the human psyche. Many of us feel threatened by anything that is vague, unplanned, scattered around or hard to describe. We find comfort in having a script to rely on, a system to follow, in being able to categorise and file away.

We all benefit from tidy organisation - up to a point. A large library needs a reference system. Global trade needs the shipping container. Scientific collaboration needs measurement units. But the forces of tidiness have marched too far. Corporate middle managers and government bureaucrats have long tended to insist that everything must have a label, a number and a logical place in a logical system. Now that they are armed with computers and serial numbers, there is little to hold this tidy-mindedness in check. It's even spilling into our personal lives, as we corral our children into sanitised play areas or entrust our quest for love to the soulless algorithms of dating websites. Order is imposed when chaos would be more productive. Or if not chaos, then... messiness.

The trouble with tidiness is that, in excess, it becomes rigid, fragile and sterile. In Messy, Tim Harford reveals how qualities we value more than ever - responsiveness, resilience and creativity - simply cannot be disentangled from the messy soil that produces them.

This, then, is a book about the benefits of being messy: messy in our private lives; messy in the office, with piles of paper on the desk and unread spreadsheets; messy in the recording studio, the laboratory or in preparing for an important presentation; and messy in our approach to business, politics and economics, leaving things vague, diverse and uncomfortably made-up-on-the-spot. It's time to rediscover the benefits of a little mess.

Daniel Radcliffe, Galileo Galilei, Nelson Mandela, Louis Armstrong, Grayson Perry, Louis Braille, Lionel Messi, King George VI, Jamie Oliver... all dared to be different.

'This book can save lives. This book can change lives. This book can help to bring forth another generation of boys who dare to be different.' Benjamin Zephaniah Prince charming, dragon slayer, mischievous prankster... More often than not, these are the role-models boys encounter in the books they read at home and at school. As a boy, there is an assumption that you will conform to a stereotypical idea of masculinity.

But what if you're the introvert kind? What if you prefer to pick up a book rather than a sword? What if you want to cry when you're feeling sad or angry? What if you like the idea of wearing a dress?

There is an ongoing crisis with regards to young men and mental health, with unhelpful gender stereotypes contributing to this malaise. Stories for Boys Who Dare to Be Different offers a welcome alternative narrative. It is an extraordinary compilation of 100 stories of famous and not-so-famous men from the past to the present day, every single one of them a rule-breaker and innovator in his own way, and all going on to achieve amazing things. Entries include Frank Ocean, Salvador Dali, Rimbaud, Beethoven, Barack Obama, Stormzy, Ai Weiwei and Jesse Owens - different sorts of heroes from all walks of life and from all over the world.

A beautiful and transporting book packed with stories of adventure and wonderment, it will appeal to those who need the courage to reject peer pressure and go against the grain. It is the must-have book for all those boys who worry about stuff and all those parents who worry about their boys who worry about stuff. It will educate and entertain, while also encourage and inspire.

I remember when rain stopped,
When day by day the water dropped,
All across a sun-bleached land,
Drought spread its withered, deadly hand.

From the award-winning creators of Flood, Fire and Cyclone comes Drought a moving story about the devastating effects drought has on many Australians and their farms.

The Do family has a messy new house to clean up! Weir, Bella and Henry decide to do some extra work to earn pocket money. But can they handle wild lawns, dirty dishes and a vacuum cleaner explosion?

It won't be easy... but it will be FUNNY!

This is a story about a boy called Pender and a kangaroo called Brindabella, about how they became friends, and all the things that happened to them because of it.

Pender and his father live in an old house made of honey-coloured stone in the bush by the river, with only the company of his father's paintings and the loyal dog, Billy-Bob. Then, on one winter morning, a gunshot amongst the trees changes everything.

When Pender rescues Brindabella from the pouch of her murdered mother, an unusual friendship blossoms between the lonely boy and the orphaned joey. But Brindabella is no ordinary kangaroo. And though Pender has saved her life, the untameable wildness of the bush - and freedom - call to her...

Lyrical and unforgettable, Brindabella explores the brutal beauty of the Australian bush.

Why did Roman emperors wear purple? Which colour is made from crushed beetles? What green pigment might be used to build super-fast computers of the future? From black to white, and all the colours in between, every shade has a story to tell. Each colour group is introduced with a stunning and interpretative double-page spread illustration, followed by illustrated entries exploring the history of particular shades. With vivid, thought-provoking illustrations and engaging, bite-sized text, this book is a feast for the eyes and the mind, ready to enthral budding artists and historians alike.

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- Did you know Numbats have more teeth than any other land mammal? Or that Imperial Jezebel caterpillars eat their eggshells after hatching? Or that male Variegated Fairy-wrens use yellow petals to attract females? This attractive book by an award-winning illustrator/writer/artist goes through the alphabet from Azure Kingfisher to Zebra Finch by way of other interesting birds and animals. Not just Koalas, Quokkas, Red Kangaroos and Wombats as you might expect, but also creatures like Jabiru, Orange-bellied Parrot, Unadorned Rock-Wallaby and (my favourite!) Xanthotis Macleayanus (Macleays Honeyeater). Scientific names, facts and a concise summary of the animal and its habits are on one page, on the other, enchanting illustrations. A beautiful and informative book. Lindy Jones

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A beautifully illustrated hardback anthology of 26 of Australia's most fascinating animals from CBCA Honour Book author/illustrator Jennifer Cossins.

From the award-winning creator of A-Z OF ENDANGERED ANIMALS comes a stunning non-fiction picture book for boys and girls with a love of animals and a thirst for all things encyclopaedic. This exquisite full-colour picture book is packed with interesting facts and is perfect for young conservationists and students with a keen interest in the world around us.

On this expedition through the alphabet, you will encounter some of the Australia's rare and enchanting animals, from the gorgeous azure kingfisher and the sleepy koala, to the shy numbat and the friendly zebra finch.

Come on an illustrated journey through Australia's unique wildlife with Tasmanian artist Jennifer Cossins.

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- Part of the Nature Storybook series (previous titles include Koala, Emu, Big Red and others) where there is a story to follow about the featured animal (in one font) and on the same page, pertinent facts, or accessible explanations about the animal's behaviour (in a different font). Gorgeously illustrated by Tannya Harricks in a free flowing and energetic style that perfectly captures the posture of the dogs and the alpine landscape around them. An excellent addition to the series! Lindy Jones

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Can you see her? There   deep in the stretching shadows   a dingo. Her pointed ears twitch. Her tawny eyes flash in the low-slung sun. Dingo listens. Dusk is a busy time. Dusk is the time for hunting. This lyrical non-fiction picture book is written by award-winning author Claire Saxby and stunningly illustrated by fine artist Tannya Harricks.

An orphan in exile. A band of rebel girls. And a prince whose throne has been stolen. Come on a journey full of danger, intrigue, adventure and incredible secrets.

'The Ateban Cipher,' Lucien continued, 'is also known as the Book of Answers.' 'Answers to what?' Eddie asked. Lucien sighed. 'Everything.

In the second gripping Ateban Cipher novel, Gabe and his companions journey to a remote mountain citadel where they learn the secret of the mysterious, encrypted book that Gabe has been tasked with protecting. But their enemies are close behind them, and new dangers lie ahead.

As Eddie seeks to regain his crown, and Merry and Gwyn race to free their father, Gabe will discover the answer to his own great mystery - his true identity.

The alphabet is gloriously brought to life by international best-selling picture book creator, Oliver Jeffers. This beautiful paperback edition is based on Once Upon an Alphabet which won the CBI Book of the Year Award.

From an astronaut afraid of heights, to dynamic detectives the Owl and the Octopus, by way of some rusting robots, you will find within this book a short story inspired by every letter of the alphabet.

By turns funny, sad, mischievous and surprising, these entertaining mini-tales are accompanied by Jeffers' witty and inviting illustrations.

Age range 0 to 3 Quantum Computing for Babies by Chris Ferrie is a colorfully simple introduction to the innovative world of technology. Baby will find out how superposition and entanglement might be the future of computers! Co-written by William Hurley (aka whurley), an entrepreneur and the leading voice in the quantum computing movement. It is never too early to become a quantum physicist!

After doing herself near-fatal harm, Kit has returned to her island home. But it's a place she hardly recognises- the witch and the mermaids are hiding and the pirates have sailed to more bountiful shores. In their place is Neverland and its inhabitants - damaged teens too sick to be in regular school, watched over by her psychiatrist uncle. And now Kit is one of them.

Kit has a choice. She can use illicit night-time adventures with friends and mysterious new boy Rohan to avoid the truth. Or she can separate harsh reality from childhood fantasy and remember the night of her parents' deaths.

What really prompted her family's departure from the island? Did a monster drive them away? Is the monster still there?

Stack the Cats is a charming book about counting and organizing cats in various formations. But when the cats decide to go their own way-as cats often will-it's time to count down until there's only one proud cat and bird left. Counting forward and backward, understanding when there is more or less of something, and grouping and recognizing items are key early math skills for toddlers, making these books as developmentally sound as they are visually engaging.

Around the time that Freya loses her voice while recording her debut album, Harun is making plans to run away from home to find the boy that he loves, and Nathaniel is arriving in New York City after a family tragedy leaves him isolated on the outskirts of Washington state. After the three of them collide in Central Park, they slowly reveal the parts of their past that they haven't been able to confront, and together, they find their way back to who they're supposed to be.

Told over the course of a single day from three different perspectives, this is a story about the power of friendship and being true to who you are.

Age range 6 to 9 years The Eastern Barred Bandicoot is one of Australia's most threatened species. When their existence came under extreme threat from habitat loss, predators and human development, Eastern Barred Bandicoots found refuge in the most unlikely of places - a rubbish tip. This captivating true story details the plight these small, nocturnal marsupials faced, and the outstanding efforts that ensured their survival. Written by Rohan Cleave and illustrated by Coral Tulloch, Bouncing Back shows that even on the brink of extinction, there is hope for the protection of our most vulnerable species.

Rohan Cleave and Coral Tulloch's first book, Phasmid: Saving the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect, won a Whitley Award for Children's Natural History Book and was an Honour Book in the Children's Book Council of Australia Book Awards (Eve Pownall Information Book category).

Age range 5 to 9 The basis for the 2018 film, Peter Rabbit has been hailed as one of the bestselling stories of all time and has been adapted into countless mediums, including books, films, board games, coloring books, and more. The original story features a young rebellious rabbit who, despite his mother's wishes, enters the dangerous garden of Mr. McGregor to feast on its endless bounty. From there on out, he gets himself into all kinds of trouble.

Originally published as separate stories throughout the early twentieth century, The Complete Tales of Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit contains all four stories featuring the famous bunny, including The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, The Tale of Mr. Tod, and The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.

Featuring all of the original illustrations by Beatrix Potter enhanced and re-formatted, follow the exciting adventures of Peter Rabbit and some of his most famous furry friends.

When Hazel Wong's beloved grandfather passes away, Daisy Wells is all too happy to accompany her friend (and Detective Society Vice President) to Hazel's family estate in beautiful, bustling Hong Kong. But when they arrive they discover something they didn't expect: there's a new member of the Wong family. Daisy and Hazel think baby Teddy is enough to deal with, but as always the girls are never far from a mystery. Tragedy strikes very close to home, and this time Hazel isn't just the detective. She's been framed for murder! The girls must work together like never before, confronting dangerous gangs, mysterious suspects and sinister private detectives to solve the murder and clear Hazel's name - before it's too late...

Kipp Kindle and his friends Tobias Treachery and Cymphany Chan live in Huggabie Falls, the weirdest town on Earth. Weird things happen all the time - that's normal. But when an extremely weird thing happens Kipp and his friends know that something is wrong. They embark on a fast-paced, action-packed, hilarious adventure to find out what is making everything turn normal, and to return the weirdness to Huggabie Falls.

With an evil villain, Felonious Dark, a creepy scientist and a fierce wand-wielding teacher, who has turned Cymphany into a baby hippopotamus, to contend with, not to mention killer vampire bats, vegetarian piranhas and a Portuguese-speaking lab rat called Ralf, Kipp, Tobias and Cymphany have quite a task ahead of them.

Welcome to The Nothing to See Here Hotel! A hotel for magical creatures, where weird is normal for Frankie Banister and his parents who run the hotel.

When a goblin messenger arrives at The Nothing to See Here Hotel, announcing the imminent arrival of the goblin prince Grogbah, Frankie and his family rush into action to get ready for their important guest. But it soon becomes obvious that the Banister family are going to have their work cut out with the demanding prince and his never-ending entourage, especially when it turns out the rude little prince is hiding a secret...

The first book in a fabulously funny series by bestselling author Steven Butler, with a host of whacky characters brought to life with illustration from the wonderful Steven Lenton!

A middle-grade fantasy adventure perfect for fans of Frances Hardinge, Katherine Rundell and Sally Gardner. When witches kidnap Mup's dad, she must journey to their home to save him, and so begins a fantastical adventure of rhyming crows, talking cats and outlawed magic. For Witches Borough is a dangerous place, ruled by a tyrannical queen and her band of terrifying enforcers. Pale, cold and relentless, the raggedy witches will stop at nothing to keep order.

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- A large and informative picturebook which explains what a capital city is, and then gives information about more than 20 capitals (including Canberra). A little bit of history mixed with landmarks to see, colourfully illustrated over a double page spread. There are also sections on architecture, clean gren cities, transportation and even a little quiz at the end. Perfect for the young child who likes to pore over maps and dream about other places! Lindy Jones

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Journey to Italy, the USA, Thailand, Japan, the United Kingdom and many more countries around the world seeing the sights, learning the secrets and histories of the capital cities.

Animals of all shapes and sizes make epic journeys across our planet, through harsh weather, avoiding hungry predators, in their efforts to survive. Travel around the globe with some of the world's most incredible animals and discover their unique migration stories.

Follow the emperor penguin through snow, ice and bitter temperatures; watch as the great white shark swims 10,000 km in search of seals; track huge herds of elephants, on their yearly hunt for water and be amazed at the millions of red crabs, migrating across Christmas Island.

With stunning colour illustrations, uncover the astonishing migrations of 20 creatures, in this truly inspiring narrative. Written by Mike Unwin, a UK Travel Writer of the Year, and illustrated by Jenni Desmond, winner of the New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book, prepare yourself for a journey like no other.

Follow the amazing migrations of these 20 creatures: Arctic tern, barn swallow, bar-headed goose, ruby-throated hummingbird, osprey, wandering albatross, whooping crane, emperor penguin, African elephant, blue wildebeest, caribou, straw-coloured fruit bat, humpback whale, green turtle, Southern pilchard, salmon, great white shark, monarch butterfly, globe skimmer dragonfly, Christmas Island red crab.

In this brilliant follow up to the Caldecott Honour-winning They All Saw a Cat, bestselling author Brendan Wenzel presents a chain of animals of dazzling variety. Each one is different from the last, yet each is also linked by at least one common trait: some obvious, some more subtle. As colours and patterns mix and mingle, and as paws and snouts meet, each unexpected encounter celebrates the magnificent diversity of our world - and ultimately paints a story of connection. Joyous, rhythmic text and Wenzel's exuberant art encourage readers of all kinds to delight in nature's infinite differences, and to look for - and marvel at - its gorgeous similarities. It all starts with a simple 'Hello.'

One fine summer's day two bugs discover the most beautiful peach of the season and are faced with a dilemma... Who should eat it?

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- This is a translated French book which does not shy from the difficulties that face some members of our society. The old man of the title has been depersonalised by homelessness. It follows him through his long and lonely day - trying to find something to eat, somewhere to rest and sleep. At the same time, a little girl goes though her day - and when they intersect, a simple act of kindness leaves them both with something of value... Expressive watercolour and pencil illustrations and a valuable non-strident message simply conveyed. Primary ages. Lindy Jones

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Day breaks over the town. Wake up, everybody! Its time to go to school. Its time for the old man to get up, too. The night was icy and hes hungry. His name? He no longer knows... This is the story of a person with no job, no family, no homea nobody, who cant even remember his name. But his day changes when he is noticed by a child.

To find freedom, you must leave behind everything you've ever known.

It is 2011. You want nothing more than to be a journalist in Somalia like your aunty. But the truth can be dangerous - and when you and your little sister are left alone, you find yourself facing life-and-death choices at every turn.

Can you escape a terrorist organisation and find a safe place to call home? You'll be asked to cross a desert on foot, hide below deck in a leaky boat, and put your life in the hands of people smugglers.

At every turn, the choice is yours. How far will you go for freedom?

Major Poppa, Abbie, and her little brother Flynn are on a mission at the Royal Show. They must enter The Showbag Pavilion, fight their way through crowds, defeat powerful enemies, and somehow get to the other side to buy a Chunky Choco Cherry Chew Showbag. Will The Poppa Platoon win this battle? Will they make it out of there alive? Or is this a showbag too far?

Stuff to write! Pictures to draw! Puzzles to solve! And so much more!

Grab your Treehouse passport and hold on tight for an adventure through the bestselling Treehouse series. Join Andy, Terry and Jill as they combine animals, create magical kingdoms, time travel, solve crosswords, search for words, colour and scribble, spot the difference, find the odd one out, crack codes and so much more!

A touching tale from Australia's convict past, written and illustrated by award-winning author Mark Wilson.

John is a child convict, transported to New South Wales for stealing a shirt. Life is grim in the fledgling colony and when food runs short, John once again has to steal to survive. Starving and alone, he is taken in by Australia's first schoolteacher, Isabella Rosson. In her simple classroom, John learns to read and write and soon becomes her star pupil - until he is discovered by the soldiers and again sent away in chains.

Yet John never forgets Isabella's lessons, the power of words - and the hope for a brighter future.

Inspired by the life of convict Isabella Rosson, the first teacher in the colony at Port Jackson, and John Hudson, the youngest First Fleet convict, this touching story is illustrated with Mark Wilson's vividly realistic and evocative artwork.

Shif is just an ordinary schoolboy who loves chess and playing with his best friend. But, one day, he is forced to leave home to avoid conscription into the army. He embarks on an epic journey, in which he encounters dangers and cruelties - and great acts of human kindness - as he bravely makes his way to a future he can only imagine.

Told in the powerful first person, this startling debut novel will encourage understanding and empathy in young readers, and allow the news headlines of the day to resonate with the humanity involved in creating them.

To find freedom, you must leave behind everything you've ever known.

It is 1825. You and Ma have survived on the streets of London ever since the soldiers took Da away and you fled Ireland. Now, with Ma gone too, you find yourself facing life-and-death choices at every turn.

Can you carry a secret treasure across the ocean and finally be reunited with Da? You'll be asked to betray your friends, survive storms at sea and attacks by bushrangers, and trust thieves.

At every turn, the choice is yours. How far will you go for freedom?

What would happen if the end-of-school bell never rang? Meet Justin Monaghetti. He is destined to be a loser. His new school is terrifying. His only friend wants to run away forever. And he's just been given a detention for something he didn't do. But Justin isn't going to accept his fate without a fight. To survive his first horrible day of high school, he'll need a few tricks, a bit of luck - and an ingenious plan to mess with the rules. A super-weird story of overcoming odds and defying your destiny.

Meet RORY BRANAGAN - he eats bad guys for breakfast. Well, not ACTUALLY. But he IS the best detective in town. First in a hilarious seven-book comedy-crime series for readers of 8+. Hello. I am Rory Branagan. I am ACTUALLY a detective.

People always say, `How do you become a detective?'And I say, `Ahhhh... you don't just FIND YOURSELF suddenly sneaking up on baddies, or diving out of the way as they shoot, or hurtling from an open plane towards the ground! You have to WANT it.'And what made ME want it? I needed to find out what happened to my dad...

There are seven books in the RORY BRANAGAN (DETECTIVE) series and this is the first, in which you meet Rory and his Accomplice, Cassidy, as they investigate the poisoning of Rory's next-door neighbour. Rory's adventures are all highly illustrated so you can see everything he gets up to in glorious black and white.