Abbey's Advocate

The bestselling novel that has taken Australia, and the world, by storm.

'Without exaggeration, the best Australian novel I have read in more than a decade ... A rollicking ride, rich in philosophy, wit, truth and pathos' Sydney Morning Herald

Brisbane, 1983: A lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crim for a babysitter. It's not as if Eli's life isn't complicated enough already. He's just trying to follow his heart, learning what it takes to be a good man, but life just keeps throwing obstacles in the way - not least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary Brisbane drug dealer.

But Eli's life is about to get a whole lot more serious. He's about to fall in love. And, oh yeah, he has to break into Boggo Road Gaol on Christmas Day, to save his mum.

A story of brotherhood, true love and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universe will be the most heartbreaking, joyous and exhilarating novel you will read all year - an instant Australian classic.

Part mystery, part coming of age story, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone is set in a distant suburb on the encroaching bushland, over the long hot summer of 1992.

It's the summer of the school's Showstopper concert. The summer Tikka never forgot. The summer the Van Apfel sisters disappeared.

'We lost all three girls that summer. Let them slip away like the words of some half-remembered song and when one came back, she wasn't the one we were trying to recall to begin with.'

Tikka Molloy was eleven and one-sixth years old during the long hot summer of 1992 - the summer the Van Apfel sisters disappeared. Hannah, beautiful Cordelia and Ruth vanished during the night of the school's Showstopper concert at the amphitheatre by the river, surrounded by encroaching bushland.

Now, years later, Tikka has returned home to try and make sense of the summer that shaped her, and the girls that she never forgot.

Blackly comic, sharply observed and wonderfully endearing, this is Picnic at Hanging Rock for a new generation, a haunting coming-of-age story with a shimmering, unexplained mystery at its heart.

Jenny Trelawney is no ordinary thief. Forced by poverty to live in the forest, she becomes a successful highwaywoman - until her luck runs out.

Transported to Britain's furthest colony, Jenny must tackle new challenges and growing responsibilities. And when famine hits the new colony, Jenny becomes convinced that those she most cares about will not survive. She becomes the leader in a grand plot of escape, but is survival any more certain in a small open boat on an unknown ocean?

Meg Keneally's debut solo novel is an epic historical adventure based on the extraordinary life of convict Mary Bryant.

'You look the type to break your father's heart.'
'Yeah, but he broke mine first.'

When Rosie Gennaro first meets Jimmy Hailler, she has walked away from life in Sydney, leaving behind the place on Dalhousie that her father, Seb, painstakingly rebuilt for his family but never saw completed. Two years later, Rosie returns to the house and living there is Martha, whom Seb Gennaro married less than a year after the death of Rosie's mother. Martha is struggling to fulfil Seb's dream, while Rosie is coming to terms with new responsibilities. And so begins a stand-off between two women who refuse to move out of the home they both lay claim to.

As the battle lines are drawn, Jimmy Hailler re-enters Rosie's life. Having always watched other families from the perimeters, he's now grappling, heartbreakingly, with forming one of his own...

An unforgettable story about losing love and finding love; about the interconnectedness of lives and the true nature of belonging, from one of our most acclaimed writers.

'Marriage isn't always a bed of roses. And there are many ways to be a wife,' the vicar informs the town...

It's 1930, and as the Depression overtakes rural New South Wales, what it means to be a wife tests the four respectable ladies of Prospect to their very limit.

Louisa Worthington fled to the city ten years ago, pregnant, poor and under a cloud of scandal. Now she's back - blonde and brazen - with her heart set on the married son of the town's mayor.

Adelaide Nightingale, newly widowed and starved of romance, yearns for adoration, security and a version of herself defined by beauty not business.

Maggie Albright dreams of empire building, but is hamstrung by her over-cautious husband, who grows less handsome by the day.

Then there's Pearl Fletcher, happily married to Joe, the district's most successful sheep farmer, but protecting a secret that could tear their family apart.

And hovering in the town's shadows is a ghost from their past. A man newly released from jail ruthlessly bent on exploiting the ladies' hopes and fears to get what he wants. And what he wants is Louisa...

I have wished so many times that I had acted differently.
I wish that I had been more worthy of you...
Eventually the war will end, and then we will find each other.

Until then, remember me.

Budapest, 1938. In a city park, beneath a bleakly looming statue, five Jewish mathematicians gather to share ideas, trade proofs and whisper sedition. Expelled from the university and persecuted by the state's laws, they live in an uneasy but not unhappy bubble of work, friendship and slim plans of escape.

Sydney, 2007. Illy has just buried her father, a violent, unpredictable man whose bitterness she never understood. And now, the day after his funeral, Illy's mother has gifted her a curious notebook. Its faded pages are a mix of personal stories and mathematical discovery, all recounted by a young woman seemingly blind to Europe's coming storm. A woman very different to the mother and grandmother everybody knows.

Inspired by a true story, Miriam Sved's beautifully crafted novel charts a course through both the light and dark of human relationships: a vivid recreation of Hungary before German occupation, a decades-old mystery locked in the histories of five students, and a story about the selfless power of love, even years and worlds apart.

Shortlisted for the Stella Prize 2018
Highly Commended in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards 2017
Shortlisted for the ABIA Matt Richell Award for New Writers 2018
Shortlisted for the Aurealis Award for a Science Fiction Novel 2017
Longlisted for the Indie Book Award for Debut Fiction 2018
Nominated for Ditmar Award Best New Talent 2018

In the near future Australia is about to experience colonisation once more. What have we learned from our past? A daring debut novel from the winner of the 2016 black&write! writing fellowship.

Jacky was running. There was no thought in his head, only an intense drive to run. There was no sense he was getting anywhere, no plan, no destination, no future. All he had was a sense of what was behind, what he was running from. Jacky was running.

The Natives of the Colony are restless. The Settlers are eager to have a nation of peace, and to bring the savages into line. Families are torn apart, reeducation is enforced. This rich land will provide for all.

This is not Australia as we know it. This is not the Australia of our history. This Terra Nullius is something new, but all too familiar. An incredible debut from a striking new Australian Aboriginal voice.

Unimaginable danger creeps ever closer to Miss Lily and her loved ones...

Amid the decadence and instability of Berlin in the 1920s, a band of women must unite to save all that is precious to them.

With her dangerous past behind her, Australian heiress Sophie Higgs lives in quiet comfort as the Countess of Shillings, until Hannelore, Princess of Arneburg, charms the Prince of Wales. He orders Sophie, Nigel - and Miss Lily - to investigate the mysterious politician Hannelore believes is the only man who can save Europe from another devastating war.

His name is Adolf Hitler.

As unimaginable peril threatens to destroy countries and tear families apart, Sophie must face Goering's Brownshirt Nazi thugs, blackmail, and the many possible faces of love.

And then the man she once adored and thought was lost reappears, and Sophie will be confronted by the girl intent on killing the mother who betrayed her family in the war: Miss Lily.

The third book in the Miss Lily series, The Lily in the Snow is a story filled with secrets that also explores the strength of friendship and the changing face of women in this new Europe.

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.

It is the mid-1980s. In Australia, stay-at-home wives jostle with want-it-all feminists, while AIDS threatens the sexual freedom of everyone. On the other side of the world, the Soviet bloc is in turmoil.

Mikhail Gorbachev has been in power for a year when twenty-four-year-old book illustrator Galina Kogan leaves Leningrad - forbidden ever to return. As a Jew, she's inherited several generations worth of Russia's chronic anti-Semitism. As a Soviet citizen, she is unprepared for Australia and its easy-going ways.

Once settled in Melbourne, Galina is befriended by Sylvie and Leonard Morrow, and their adult son, Andrew. The Morrow marriage of thirty years balances on secrets. Leonard is a man with conflicted desires and passions, while Sylvie chafes against the confines of domestic life. Their son, Andrew, a successful mosaicist, is a deeply shy man.

He is content with his life and work - until he finds himself increasingly drawn to Galina. While Galina grapples with the tumultuous demands that come with being an immigrant in Australia, her presence disrupts the lives of each of the Morrows. No one is left unchanged.Invented Lives tells a story of exile- exile from country, exile at home, and exile from one's true self. It is also a story about love.

In the ghost hours of a Monday morning a man feels a dull thud against the side of his car near the entrance to Redfern Station. He doesn't stop immediately. By the time he returns to the scene, the road is empty, but there is a dent in the car, high up on the passenger door, and what looks like blood. Only a man could have made such a dent, he thinks. For some reason he looks up, though he knows no one is there. Has he hit someone, and if so, where is the victim?

So begins a story that takes us to the heart of contemporary Australia's festering relationship to its indigenous past. A story about guilt for acts which precede us, crimes we are not sure we have committed, crimes gone on so long they now seem criminal-less.

Part crime novel, part road movie, part love story, No One takes its protagonist to the very heart of a nation where non-existence is the true existence, where crimes cannot be resolved and guilt cannot be redeemed, and no one knows what to do with ghosts that are real.

A story about art, murder, and making your place in history.

Whatever it was that drew me to Muriel, it wasn't her charm.

In 1992, morning sickness drives Jane to pre-dawn walks of her neighbourhood where she meets an unfriendly woman who sprays her with a hose as she passes by. When they do talk: Muriel Kemp eyes my pregnant belly and tells me if I really want to succeed, I'd get rid of the baby.

Driven to find out more about her curmudgeonly neighbour, Jane Cooper begins to investigate the life of Muriel, who claims to be a famous artist from Sydney's bohemian 1920s. Contemporary critics argue that legend, rather than ability, has secured her position in history. They also claim that the real Muriel Kemp died in 1936.

Murderer, narcissist, sexual deviant or artistic genius and a woman before her time: Who really is Muriel Kemp?

Winner of the 2018 Indie Book Award for Fiction!

'It is quite a feat to write characters with such nuance...in harnessing her storytelling facility to expose the flaws in the system with what is becoming trademark empathy, Laguna is an author proving the novel is a crucial document of the times.' - Louise Swinn, The Australian

I never had words to ask anybody the questions, so I never had the answers.

Abandoned by her mother and only occasionally visited by her secretive father, Justine is raised by her pop, a man tormented by visions of the Burma Railway. Justine finds sanctuary in Pop's chooks and The Choke, where the banks of the Murray River are so narrow it seems they might touch - a place of staggering natural beauty. But the river can't protect Justine from danger. Her father is a criminal, and the world he exposes her to can be lethal.

Justine is overlooked and underestimated, a shy and often silent observer of her chaotic world. She learns that she has to make sense of it on her own. She has to find ways to survive so much neglect. She must hang on to friendship when it comes, she must hide when she has to, and ultimately she must fight back.

The Choke is a brilliant, haunting novel about a child navigating an often dark and uncaring world of male power and violence, in which grown-ups can't be trusted and comfort can only be found in nature. This compassionate and claustrophobic vision of a child in danger and a society in trouble celebrates above all the indomitable nature of the human spirit.

Sofie Laguna, winner of the 2015 Miles Franklin Literary Award for The Eye of the Sheep, once again shows she is a writer of rare empathy, originality and blazing talent.

Ninety years after they were thought to have died heroically in the Great War, the stretcher-bearer Simpson and his donkey journey through country Victoria, performing minor miracles and surviving on offerings left at war memorials. They are making their twenty-ninth, and perhaps final, attempt to find the country's famed Inland Sea.

On the road north from Melbourne, Simpson and his weary donkey encounter a broke single mother, a suicidal Vietnam veteran, a refugee who has lost everything, an abused teenager and a deranged ex-teacher. These are society's downtrodden, whom Simpson believes can be renewed by the healing waters of the sea.

In Simpson Returns, Wayne Macauley sticks a pin in the balloon of our national myth. A concise satire of Australian platitudes about fairness and egalitarianism, it is timely, devastating and witheringly funny.

'A thoughtful, multi-layered tale that probes the stories we tell ourselves about family and friendship, power and control. MacColl's writing deftly - yet gently - explores the nature of courage and kept me guessing to the very end.' - Kirsty Manning, author of the bestselling The Jade Lily

In 1920, seventeen-year-old Maddie Bright gratefully accepts a job as a serving girl on the royal tour of Australia by Edward, Prince of Wales. Maddie's talents soon earn her the respect of Helen Burns, the prince's vivacious press secretary, and Rupert Waters, his most loyal man, and Maddie is in awe of Edward himself, the 'people's' prince.

What starts as a desire to help her family, devastated by the recent war, becomes for Maddie a chance to work on something that matters. When the unthinkable happens, it is swift and life changing.

Decades later, Maddie Bright is living in a ramshackle house in Paddington, Brisbane. She has Ed, her drunken and devoted neighbour, to talk to, the television news to shout at, and door-knocker religions to join. But when London journalist Victoria Byrd gets the sniff of a story that might lead to the true identity of a famously reclusive writer, Maddie's version of her own story may change.

1920, 1981 and 1997: the strands twist across the seas and over two continents to build a compelling story of love and fame, motherhood and friendship. Set at key moments in the lives of two of the most loved and hated figures of the twentieth century, in Maddie Bright, a reader will find a friend and, by novel's close, that friend's true and moving story.

'Astonishingly wonderful and magical and moving and uplifting and DIFFERENT.' Marian Keyes

Abigail Sorensen has spent her life trying to unwrap the events of 1990.

It was the year she started receiving random chapters from a self-help book called The Guidebook in the post.

It was also the year Robert, her brother, disappeared on the eve of her sixteenth birthday.

She believes the absurdity of The Guidebook and the mystery of her brother's disappearance must be connected.

Now thirty-five, owner of The Happiness Cafe and mother of four-year-old Oscar, Abigail has been invited to learn the truth behind The Guidebook at an all-expenses-paid retreat.

What she finds will be unexpected, life-affirming, and heartbreaking.

A story with extraordinary heart, warmth and wisdom.

Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding.

Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever – a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma.

Ian McEwan’s subversive and entertaining new novel poses fundamental questions: what makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns of the power to invent things beyond our control.

The thrilling new romance from E L James, author of the phenomenal number 1 bestselling Fifty Shades trilogy London, 2019. Life has been easy for Maxim Trevelyan. With his good looks, aristocratic connections, and money, he's never had to work and he's rarely slept alone. But all that changes when tragedy strikes and Maxim inherits his family's noble title, wealth, and estates, and all the responsibility that entails. It's a role he's not prepared for and one that he struggles to face.

But his biggest challenge is fighting his desire for an unexpected, enigmatic young woman who's recently arrived in England, possessing little more than a dangerous and troublesome past. Reticent, beautiful, and musically gifted, she's an alluring mystery, and Maxim's longing for her deepens into a passion that he's never experienced and dares not name. Just who is Alessia Demachi? Can Maxim protect her from the malevolence that threatens her? And what will she do when she learns that he's been hiding secrets of his own?

From the heart of London through wild, rural Cornwall to the bleak, forbidding beauty of the Balkans, The Mister is a roller-coaster ride of danger and desire that leaves the reader breathless to the very last page.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018

In a narrative as mysterious as memory itself - at once both shadowed and luminous - Warlight is a vivid, thrilling novel of violence and love, intrigue and desire. 

It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz and years of war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends- men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be?

A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all he didn?t know or understand in that time, and it is this journey - through reality, recollection, and imagination - that is told in this magnificent novel.

 

Spring will come. The leaves on its trees will open after blossom. Before it arrives, a hundred years of empire-making. The dawn breaks cold and still but, deep in the earth, things are growing.

The Parisian is a sublime reading experience- delicate, restrained, surpassingly intelligent, uncommonly poised and truly beautiful. Isabella Hammad is an enormous talent and her book is a wonder. --Zadie Smith As the First World War shatters families, destroys friendships and kills lovers, a young Palestinian dreamer sets out to find himself.

Midhat Kamal picks his way across a fractured world, from the shifting politics of the Middle East to the dinner tables of Montpellier and a newly tumultuous Paris. He discovers that everything is fragile- love turns to loss, friends become enemies and everyone is looking for a place to belong.

Isabella Hammad delicately unpicks the tangled politics and personal tragedies of a turbulent era - the Palestinian struggle for independence, the strife of the early twentieth century and the looming shadow of the Second World War. An intensely human story amidst a global conflict, The Parisian is historical fiction with a remarkable contemporary voice.

AN OBSERVER HOTTEST-TIPPED DEBUT NOVELIST OF 2019

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION 2019
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018.

A wondrous, exhilarating novel about nine strangers brought together by an unfolding natural catastrophe.

'The best novel ever written about trees, and really, just one of the best novels, period' Ann Patchett

An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.

This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.

Louis de Bernieres is one of our most treasured writers and these stories show his imaginative range and unique storytelling power. The collection includes 'Gunter Weber's Confession' which revisits characters from Captain Corelli.

Full of wit, warmth and charm, Louis de Berni res' Labels and Other Stories features tales from throughout his career as a masterful storyteller and transports us around the globe, from the London Underground to Turkish ruins to the banks of the Amazon. De Berni res' unlikely and unforgettable heroes are found collecting luxury tinned cat-food labels, posting fish to the President, falling in love with dolphin deities and dining with Brazilian street thieves. And in 'Gunter Weber's Confession', we return once more to the Greek island of Captain Corelli's Mandolin and its much-loved characters.

In this worldly and entertaining collection of stories, we are equally enchanted by familiar and fantastical occurrences, by de Berni res' wry sense of humour and powerful imagination.

What he experienced that day wasn't life-changing . . . It was life-making.

Tomura is startled by the hypnotic sound of a piano being tuned in his school. It seeps into his soul and transports him to the forests, dark and gleaming, that surround his beloved mountain village. From that moment, he is determined to discover more.

Under the tutelage of three master piano-tuners - one humble, one cheery, one ill-tempered - Tomura embarks on his training, never straying too far from a single, unfathomable question- do I have what it takes?

Set in small-town Japan, this warm and mystical story is for the lucky few who have found their calling - and for the rest of us who are still searching. It shows that the road to finding one's purpose is a winding path, often filled with treacherous doubts and, for those who persevere, astonishing moments of revelation.

Mega-bestselling winner of the Japan Booksellers Award, selected by bookshop staff as the book they most wanted to hand-sell- A tender and uplifting novel for fans of A WHOLE LIFE by Robert Seethaler.

Over a million copies sold.

Contains 5 exquisite hand-drawn illustrations

'An unapologetic novel of ideas which is also wise, funny and paced like a thriller' Observer

The magnificent new novel by bestselling award-winning Kate Atkinson In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past for ever.

Ten years later, now a producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence.

Transcription is a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit and empathy. It is a triumphant work of fiction from one of this country's most exceptional writers.

'How vehemently most novelists will wish to produce a masterpiece as good' Telegraph

'It shouldn't be possible for a book to be simultaneously heart-stopping, heart-shaking and pulse-racing, but that is only one of the extraordinary feats Max Porter pulls off in this astonishing novel.' - Kamila Shamsie

There is a village outside London, no different from many others. Everyday lives conjure a tapestry of fabulism and domesticity.

This village belongs to the people who live in it and to the people who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England's mysterious past and its confounding present.

But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort who has woken from his slumber and is listening, and watching.

He is watching Mad Pete the village artist. He is listening to ancient Peggy gossiping at her gate, to families recently moved here and to families dead for generations.

Dead Papa Toothwort hears them all as he searches, intently, for his favourite.

Looking for the boy.

Lanny.

A provocative, wildly funny, intellectually rigorous and engrossing novel, punctuated by Siri Hustvedt's own illustrations - a tour de force by one of America's most acclaimed and beloved writers.

Fresh from Minnesota and hungry for all New York has to offer, twenty-three-year-old S.H. embarks on a year that proves both exhilarating and frightening - from bruising encounters with men to the increasingly ominous monologues of the woman next door.

Forty years on, those pivotal months come back to vibrant life when S.H. discovers the notebook in which she recorded her adventures alongside drafts of a novel. Measuring what she remembers against what she wrote, she regards her younger self with curiosity and often amusement. Anger too, for how much has really changed in a world where the female presidential candidate is called an abomination?

Inspired by the incredible true story of Lee Miller, Vogue model turned one of the first female war photojournalists, the new novel by the bestselling author of The Paris Seamstress.

Manhattan, Paris, 1942: When Jessica May's successful modelling career is abruptly cut short, she is assigned to the war in Europe as a photojournalist for Vogue. But when she arrives the army men make her life as difficult as possible. Three friendships change that: journalist Martha Gellhorn encourages Jess to bend the rules, paratrooper Dan Hallworth takes her to places to shoot pictures and write stories that matter, and a little girl, Victorine, who has grown up in a field hospital, shows her love. But success comes at a price.

France, 2005: Australian curator D'Arcy Hallworth arrives at a beautiful chateau to manage a famous collection of photographs. What begins as just another job becomes far more disquieting as D'Arcy uncovers the true identity of the mysterious photographer -- and realises that she is connected to D'Arcy's own mother, Victorine.

Crossing a war-torn Europe from Italy to France, The French Photographer is a story of courage, family and forgiveness, by the bestselling author of The Paris Seamstress and A Kiss from Mr Fitzgerald.

The compelling new novel from the author of the bestselling CHOCOLAT.

Vianne Rocher has settled down. Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, the place that once rejected her, has finally become her home. With Rosette, her 'special' child, she runs her chocolate shop in the square, talks to her friends on the river, is part of the community. Even Reynaud, the priest, has become a friend.

But when old Narcisse, the florist, dies, leaving a parcel of land to Rosette and a written confession to Reynaud, the life of the sleepy village is once more thrown into disarray. The arrival of Narcisse's relatives, the departure of an old friend and the opening of a mysterious new shop in the place of the florist's across the square - one that mirrors the chocolaterie, and has a strange appeal of its own - all seem to herald some kind of change: a confrontation, a turbulence - even, perhaps, a murder...

EWA CHAPLIN WASN'T AFRAID TO MAKE DOLLS THAT WEREN'T COMFORTING. SHE SEEMED TO KNOW THAT DOLLS ARE PEOPLE, JUST LIKE US.

THE BEWITCHING NEW NOVEL FROM THE AWARD-WINNING GUARDIAN FRESH VOICES AUTHOR 'A fantastic book' Andrew O'Hagan 'Wholly original - worthy of a modern Grimm' Andrew Caldecott, author of Rotherweird 'A masterful and multi-layered haunted toyshop of a novel' Tony White, author of The Fountain in the Forest Stitch by perfect stitch, Andrew Garvie makes exquisite dolls in the finest antique style. Like him, they are diminutive, but graceful, unique and with surprising depths. Perhaps that's why he answers the enigmatic personal ad in his collector's magazine.

Letter by letter, Bramber Winters reveals more of her strange, sheltered life in an institution on Bodmin Moor, and the terrible events that put her there as a child. Andrew knows what it is to be trapped; and as they knit closer together, he weaves a curious plan to rescue her.

On his journey through the old towns of England he reads the fairytales of Ewa Chaplin - potent, eldritch stories which, like her lifelike dolls, pluck at the edges of reality and thread their way into his mind. When Andrew and Bramber meet at last, they will have a choice - to remain alone with their painful pasts or break free and, unlike their dolls, come to life.

A love story of two very real, unusual people, The Dollmaker is also a novel rich with wonders: Andrew's quest and Bramber's letters unspool around the dark fables that give our familiar world an uncanny edge. It is this touch of magic that, like the blink of a doll's eyes, tricks our own . . .

Miren and Bittori have been best friends all their lives, growing up in the same small town in the north of Spain. With limited interest in politics, the terrorist threat posed by ETA seems to affect them little. When Bittori's husband starts receiving threatening letters from the violent group, however - demanding money, accusing him of being a police informant - she turns to her friend for help. But Miren's loyalties are torn: her son Joxe Mari has just been recruited to the group as a terrorist and to denounce them as evil would be to condemn her own flesh and blood. Tensions rise, relationships fracture, and events race towards a violent, tragic conclusion...

Fernando Aramburu's Homeland is a gripping story and devastating exploration of the meaning of family, friendship, what it's like to live in the shadow of terrorism, and how countries and their people can possibly come to terms with their violent pasts.

Provocative, startling, prophetic, and more relevant than ever, The Handmaid's Tale has become a global phenomenon. Now, in this stunning graphic novel edition of Margaret Atwood's modern classic, the terrifying reality of Gilead is brought to vivid life like never before.

Everything Handmaids wear is red - the colour of blood, which defines us.

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships. She serves in the household of the Commander and his wife, and under the new social order she has only one purpose - once a month, she must lie on her back and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if they are fertile. But Offred remembers the years before Gilead, when she was an independent woman who had a job, a family, and a name of her own. Now, her memories and her will to survive are acts of rebellion.

The Handmaid's Tale and its iconic images - the red of the Handmaids, the blue of the Wives, the looming Gileadean Eye - have been adapted into a film, an opera, a ballet, and multi-award-winning TV series. This groundbreaking new graphic novel edition, adapted and featuring arresting artwork by Renee Nault, is destined to become a classic in its own right.

A murderer's confession - devastating, unblinking, poignant, unforgettable - which reveals a story of class, education and the inescapable workings of destiny.

Ah Hock is an ordinary, uneducated man born in a Malaysian fishing village and now trying to make his way in a country that promises riches and security to everyone, but delivers them only to a chosen few. With Asian society changing around him, like many he remains trapped in a world of poorly paid jobs that just about allow him to keep his head above water but ultimately lead him to murder a migrant worker from Bangladesh.

In the tradition of Camus and Houellebecq, Ah Hock's vivid and compelling description of the years building up to this appalling act of violence - told over several days to a local journalist whose life has taken a different course - is a portrait of an outsider like no other, an anti-nostalgic view of human life and the ravages of hope. It is the work of a writer at the peak of his powers.

The Miltons are a powerful old New York family - the kind of family that used to run the world. And in 1935, they still do. Kitty and Ogden Milton seem to have it all - an elegant apartment on the Upper East Side, two beautiful little boys, a love everyone envies. When a tragedy befalls them, Ogden comforts Kitty the only way he knows how - they go sailing, picnic on a small island off the coast of Maine, and buy it.

For generations the Miltons of Crockett Island revel in a place that is entirely their own. But it's 1959, and the world is changing - Ogden's firm hire a Jewish man, Len Levy, who earns the admiration of not only his boss, but his boss's beautiful young daughter. When Len and his friend visit the island, the Milton's principles and prejudices are challenged like never before.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the family money has run dry, and the island is up for sale. Returning for one last visit, Kitty's granddaughter uncovers disturbing evidence about her family's wealth - and realizes she is on the verge of finally understanding the silences that seemed to hover just below the surface of her family all her life.

Her heart died in the war - can she breathe new life to it?

Dora Simon and Joe O'Cleary live in separate countries, accepting of their twilight years. But their monochrome worlds are abruptly upended by the arrival of Barbara Hummel, who is determined to identify the mysterious woman whose photograph she has found among her mother's possessions.

Forced to confront a time they thought buried in the past, Dora and Joe's lives unravel - and entwine. For, trapped on the Channel Islands under the German occupation in the Second World War, Dora, a Jewish refugee, had concealed her identity; while Joe, a Catholic priest, kept quite another secret...

This is a story of love and betrayal, shame and survival. But can a speck of light diffuse the darkest shadows of war?

The Baby is a mother's project and a writer's project - how to reconcile these two demanding roles? What is a baby? And why are there so few of them in literature? Through notes taken in the months after her first child was born, Darrieussecq, in her characteristically ingenious style, makes observations that will bring smiles and grimaces of recognition, and raise important questions.

Along with the banal drudgery of childcare, there is the euphoria, the obsession, the terror and the visceral focus on the body. Arguing with `Saint de Beauvoir', Darrieussecq examines how women as mothers are targeted from all angles. How, she asks, can a woman be more and other than a mother?

Two Western men are sent to work far away from home, tasked with paving a road the length of a country. The country is dangerous and largely lawless, only just recovering from a devastating civil war, and the road will unite north and south. The road is Progress. The road is Hope. And, when it is completed, a great parade will march it end to end.

The two men follow a route from the outer villages to the capital, operating their high-tech road-building machine and bickering along the way. One man is highly experienced, reliable, focused, pausing only to sleep and eat the company-issued food. The other is chaotic, curious, forever joking with locals and breaking protocol. But when illness, corruption, and theft compromise their mission, the pair discover danger far greater than anything they had anticipated.

Why are we all so hostile? So quick to take offence? Truly we are living in the age of outrage.

A series of apparently random murders draws amiable, old-school Detective Mick Matlock into a world of sex, politics, reality TV and a bewildering kaleidoscope of opposing identity groups. Lost in a blizzard of hashtags, his already complex investigation is further impeded by the fact that he simply doesn't 'get' a single thing about anything anymore.

Meanwhile, each day another public figure confesses to having 'misspoken' and prostrates themselves before the judgement of Twitter. Begging for forgiveness, assuring the public that is not who I am .

But if nobody is who they are anymore - then who the f**k are we?

Ben Elton returns with a blistering comic satire of the world as it fractures around us. Get ready for a roller-coaster thriller, where nothing - and no one - is off limits.

`You can take a leap, do something off the wall, something reckless. It's your last chance, and most people miss it.'

Two London couples find themselves at a moment of reckoning. Melissa has a new baby and doesn't want to let it change her but, in the crooked walls of a narrow Victorian terrace, she begins to disappear. Michael, growing daily more accustomed to his commute, still loves Melissa but can't quite get close enough to her to stay faithful.

Meanwhile out in the suburbs, Stephanie is happy with Damian and their three children, but the death of Damian's father has thrown him into crisis - or is it something, or someone, else?

Ordinary People is an intimate study of identity and parenthood, sex and grief, love and ageing. It is the story of our lives, and those moments that threaten to unravel us.

A beautiful, bittersweet and magical tale about the distance one man will travel for the sake of love from the internationally bestselling author of The Little Paris Bookshop.

On his way to meet his son for the first time, hardened former war correspondent Henry Skinner is hit by a car after rescuing a child from drowning. He is rushed to hospital where he floats, comatose, between dreams, reliving the fairytales of his childhood and the secrets that made him run away in the first place.

His son, Sam, a thirteen-year old synesthete with an IQ of 144, waits at his father's bedside. There he meets Eddie Tomlin, a woman forced to confront her love for Henri after all these years, and twelve-year old Madelyn Zeidler, another coma patient and the sole survivor of an accident that killed her family.

A heartbreakingly moving and unforgettable story about what love means - the exquisite stirrings of first love, the love between fathers and sons, friendship and family, life and death - and making peace with the past in order to find a future.

When Ray turns up to visit his old university friends Charlie and Emily, he's given a special task: to be so much his useless self that he makes Charlie look good by comparison.

But Ray has his own buried feelings to contend with. Decades earlier, he and Emily would listen to jazz when they were alone, and now, as Sarah Vaughan sings through the speakers, he struggles to control everything the sound brings with it.

In Kazuo Ishiguro's hands, a snapshot of domestic realism becomes a miniature masterpiece of memory and forgetting.

On the whole, it was easier than I had expected. Only once did I feel myself at risk. That was when the Inspector suddenly intervened. He said in a harsh voice: 'He married your wife, didn't he? Took her away from you some people might say. Nice piece of goods, too, by the look of her. Didn't you feel any grievance?' I had been expecting this question. I knew exactly what I would say.' The late, great P. D. James takes us inside the mind of a murderer.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018

From the author of internationally acclaimed The Flamethrowers - a fearless and heartbreaking novel about love, friendship and incarceration.

Romy Hall is starting two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility. Her crime? The killing of her stalker.

Inside awaits a world where women must hustle and fight for the bare essentials. Outside- the San Francisco of her youth. The Mars Room strip club where she was once a dancer. Her seven-year-old son, Jackson.

As Romy forms friendships over liquor brewed in socks and stories shared through sewage pipes her future seems to unfurl in one long, unwavering line - until news from beyond the prison bars forces Romy to try and outrun her destiny.

Lips the colour of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like 'guilt, and guilt, and guilt': these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom.

'But what is the ninth kingdom?' she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. 'It is the kingdom of the frozen will,' comes the reply. 'There is no going back.' Sylvia Plath's strange, dark tale of independence over infanticide, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.

'My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.' Years ago, Sukie moved in with Nathan because her mother was dead and her father was difficult, and she had nowhere else to go. Now they are on the brink of the inevitable.

Sally Rooney is one of the most acclaimed young talents of recent years. With her minute attention to the power dynamics in everyday speech, she builds up sexual tension and throws a deceptively low-key glance at love and death.

This fantastically varied and exciting collection celebrates the great Japanese short story, from its modern origins in the nineteenth century to the remarkable works being written today. Short story writers already well-known to English-language readers are all included here - Tanizaki, Akutagawa, Murakami, Mishima, Kawabata - but also many surprising new finds. From Yuko Tsushima's 'Flames' to Yuten Sawanishi's 'Filling Up with Sugar', from Shin'ichi Hoshi's 'Shoulder-Top Secretary' to Banana Yoshimoto's 'Bee Honey', The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories is filled with fear, charm, beauty and comedy.

Curated by Jay Rubin, who has himself freshly translated several of the stories, and introduced by Haruki Murakami, this book will be a revelation to its readers.

Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends that come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village's all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook's mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility but also danger.

Despite their love for each other, Mi-ja and Young-sook's differences are impossible to ignore. The Island of Sea Women is an epoch set over many decades, beginning during a period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, followed by World War II, the Korean War and its aftermath, through the era of cell phones and wet suits for the women divers. Throughout this time, the residents of Jeju find themselves caught between warring empires. Mi-ja is the daughter of a Japanese collaborator, and she will forever be marked by this association. Young-sook was born into a long line of haenyeo and will inherit her mother's position leading the divers in their village. Little do the two friends know that after surviving hundreds of dives and developing the closest of bonds, forces outside their control will push their friendship to the breaking point.

This beautiful, thoughtful novel illuminates a world turned upside down, one where the women are in charge, engaging in dangerous physical work, and the men take care of the children. A classic Lisa See story-one of women's friendships and the larger forces that shape them-The Island of Sea Women introduces readers to the fierce and unforgettable female divers of Jeju Island and the dramatic history that shaped their lives

In his riveting new novel, internationally bestselling New York Times Notable author and Prix Medicis etranger winner David Vann reimagines his father's final days.

Middle-aged and deeply depressed, Jim arrives in California from Alaska and surrenders himself to the care of his brother Gary, who intends to watch over him. Swinging unpredictably from manic highs to extreme lows, Jim wanders ghostlike through the remains of his old life, attempting to find meaning in his tattered relationships with family and friends. As sessions with his therapist become increasingly combative and his connections to others seem ever more tenuous, Jim is propelled forwards by his thoughts, which have the potential to lead him, despairingly, to his end.

Halibut on the Moon is a searing exploration of a man held captive by the dark logic of depression struggling to wrench himself free. In vivid and haunting prose, Vann offers us an aching portrait of a mind in peril, searching desperately for some hope of redemption.

The third book in the compelling Birth of the Plantagenets series follows the battle for dominance between the Church and the Crown.

England's Archbishop of Canterbury is dying and with him the power of the Church. Seizing his chance, King Henry II is determined to enforce the rule of law that he has painstakingly established and bring the violent, corrupt and criminal clergy before his courts.

The ever-scheming Thomas Becket uses his mastery of deceit, sycophancy and wit to undermine the King and the Plantagenet dynasty. Should Becket be elected as the next Archbishop of Canterbury, against the wishes of Queen Eleanor and Empress Matilda, he will be one step closer to becoming England's strongman.

A story of passion, jealousy, rebellion and downfall, The Lions' Torment follows Henry, Eleanor and Becket in an era of power and vengeance that leads to one of the most scandalous and tragic murders in history.

Based on the seventeenth-century journal of a shipwrecked Dutch sailor, and testimonies of surviving Korean 'Comfort Women,' Typhoon Kingdom is a story of war, romance, and survival that brings to life the devastating history of Korea at crucial moments in its struggle for independence.

In 1653, the Dutch East India Company's Sparrowhawk is wrecked on a Korean island, and Hae-jo, a local fisherman, guides the ship's bookkeeper to Seoul in search of his surviving shipmates. The two men, one who has never ventured to the mainland, and the other unable to speak the language, are soon forced to choose between loyalty to each other, and a king determined to maintain his country's isolation.

Three-hundred years later, in the midst of the Japanese occupation, Yoo-jin is taken from her family and forced into prostitution, and a young soldier must navigate the Japanese surrender and ensuing chaos of the Korean War to find her.

'...brilliantly original, persuasive, revelatory and affecting.' - Gail Jones, author of The Death of Noah Glass

David wants Bathsheba. Henry too must have what he wants. He wants Ann, a divorce, a son. He looks up at his tapestry of David and sees a mighty predecessor who defended his faith and took what he liked. But he leaves it to others to count the costs.

Among those counting is the poet Wyatt, who sees a different David, a man who repented before God, in song as in life. This is the version of the biblical king which Wyatt must give voice to as he translates David's psalms.

As David pursues Bathsheba, Henry courts Ann, and Wyatt interweaves the past and present.

Lux is a story of love and its reach, fidelity and faith, power and its abuses.

1367: Europe stands on the brink of total war.

Political alliances are beginning to rupture. No state is immune: England, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Milan, Genoa, Venice, Constantinople . . . Every mercenary knight for hundreds of miles must sharpen his sword and prepare for battle.

But Sir William Gold has other problems. Just to reach Europe, he must capture its most unassailable fortress. He must also protect his liege-lord, the Green Count, from assassins hell-bent on his demise.

The balance of power in the West will change. William Gold must trust to hope, and his men, that he lands on the winning side . . .

Robert Menzies claimed the prime ministership in 1939 and led the nation during the early years of the war, but resigned two years later when he lost the confidence of his party. His political career seemed over, and yet he staged one of the great comebacks to forge a new political party, devise a new governing philosophy, and craft a winning electoral approach that as to make him Australia's longest-serving prime minister.

The lessons Menzies learned - and the way he applied them - made him a model that every Liberal leader since has looked to for inspiration. But debate over Menzies' life and legacy has never settled.

Who was Robert Menzies, what did he stand for, what did he achieve? Troy Bramston has not only researched the official record and published accounts, but has also interviewed members of Menzies' family, and his former advisers and ministers. He has also been given exclusive access to family letters, as well as to a series of interviews that Menzies gave that have never been revealed before. They are a major historical find, in which Menzies talks about his life, reflects on political events and personalities, offers political lessons, and candidly assesses his successors.

Robert Menzies is the first biography in 20 years of the Liberal icon - and it contains important contemporary lessons for those who want to understand, and master, the art and science of politics.

From the end of the Great War and into the 1920s, Alice Anderson was considered nothing less than a national treasure. She was a woman of 'rare achievement' who excelled as a motoring entrepreneur and inventor. Young, petite, boyish and full of charm, Alice was the first woman in Australia to successfully pull off an almost impossible feat: without family or husband to back her financially, she built a garage to her own specifications and established the country's first motor service run entirely by women.

Alice was also an adventurer, and her most famous road trip occurred in 1926 in a Baby Austin she had purchased exclusively to prove that the smallest car off a production line could successfully make the 1500-mile-plus journey on and off road from Melbourne to Alice Springs, central Australia.

However, less than a week after her return, Alice was fatally shot in the head at the rear of her own garage. She was only twenty-nine years old. Every newspaper in the country mourned her sudden loss. A coronial inquest concluded that Alice's death was accidental but testimonies at the inquest were full of inconsistencies.

Alice's life was brief but extraordinary, and in this richly detailed and entertainingly told book this pioneering Australian woman comes to life for readers for the first time.

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.

A fresh, spirited and engaging biography of a fascinating and influential woman who was absolutely instrumental in shaping modern Australia - but whose influence and importance has largely been forgotten.

Caroline Chisholm was a take-no-prisoners game-changer of Colonial Australia - as well as a charming, wholly committed, and utterly determined force of nature. Arriving in Australia in 1838, she was appalled by the plight of young female immigrants in Australia - there were no jobs for them, no accommodation, and many of them resorted to prostitution to survive. In response to this need, Caroline became a woman on a mission. She met every immigrant ship and became a familiar figure on the wharves, finding positions for immigrant girls and sheltering many of them in her home. As the government of the day refused to help, Chisholm established accommodation, services and the first emloyment office in the colony, drawing up the first ever employment contracts in Australia. She established minimum wages, found jobs and homes, created employment agencies in a dozen rural centres as well, and she managed to do all this without any assistance from the government of the time. In many ways a proto-feminist and committed social activist, she transformed life in Australia.

This is a long overdue, contemporary and lively reassessment of Caroline, bringing to life her spirited character, her modern relevance, her feminist credentials and her egalitarian spirit.

Julia Sorell was an original. A colonial belle from Tasmania, vivacious and warm-hearted, Julia's marriage to Tom Arnold in 1850 propelled her into one of the most renowned families in England and into a circle that included Lewis Carroll and George Eliot. Her eldest daughter became a bestselling novelist, while her grandchildren included the writer Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, and the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley.

With these family connections, Julia is a presence in many documented and famous lives, but she is a mostly silent presence. When extracted from her background of colonial life, extracted from the covers of marriage and family life, her story reveals an extraordinary woman, a paradox who defied convention as much as she embraced it.

What began as a marriage born of desire soon turned into a relationship riven by discord. Tom's sudden decision to become a Catholic and Julia's refusal to convert with him plunged their lives into a crisis wherein their great love for each other would be pitted against their profoundly different understandings of marriage and religion. It was a conflict that would play out over three decades in a time when science challenged religion, when industrialisation challenged agrarian forms, when democracy challenged aristocracy, when women began to challenge men. It was a conflict that would shape not only their own lives and that of their children, but also touch the lives of all those who came into contact with them.

Told with the pace, depth, and psychological richness of a great novel, An Unconventional Wife is a riveting biography that shines a shaft of light on a hidden but captivating life.

Jocelyn Moorhouse has a successful career as a gifted scriptwriter and film director, as well as a maintaining a marriage and a family of four children. How did she do it? Her memoir is a moving story of growing up with adoring parents and siblings. She knew early on that she wanted to be a filmmaker, and her dreams were encouraged by her family and by her teachers. Meeting P.J. Hogan, becoming parents and filmmakers together was a turning point. But when they discovered that two of their children were autistic, Jocelyn?s life turned upside down. In Unconditional Love, she talks from the heart, with humour and intelligence, about her fears for her children, the highs and lows in her international career, about Hollywood and home, and about her love for what she does best-filmmaking and motherhood.

Comic actors have made a particularly strong contribution to cultural life in Australia over the past sixty years. They have brought a range of memorable characters to the stage, television and film; they have transformed our image of ourselves, helped to overturn the crippling cultural cringe, and brought Australian humour and satire to the world. The Australian theatre, television and film industries are dynamic in ways that could never have been imagined fifty years ago. These industries have expanded and demonstrated extraordinary vitality, with actors, as the public face of the performing arts, carrying the immediate responsibility for the success of each show. It is the actors, and often the characters they play, that we remember when we recall a favourite television program, film or play, long after we have seen it. In spite of this they are frequently left out of history.

This book draws on extensive interviews to present full, rounded portraits of seven significant Australian comic actors: Carol Raye, Barry Humphries, Noeline Brown, Max Gillies, John Clarke, Tony Sheldon, and Denise Scott. Taken together, these actors' careers span the period from the Second World War until the present and contributed immensely to the cultural life of millions of Australians.

'Warning: this ain't no recipe book! But Jess's real, raw and often roaringly funny tales will nourish your soul. You'll devour it! And ask for seconds!' - Sarah Harris

'J-Ro's exuberance for this wonderful, sometimes messy and at times chaotic journey through life jumps joyfully out of each page. She's honest. She's disorganised. And she's got a heart of gold. Viva la Crap Housewife!' - Samantha Armytage

Why not cut the crap, take the pressure off, and admit to the moments, days, weeks and months when the wheels fall off?

In this fabulously funny, down-to-earth book, Diary of a Crap Housewife, Jessica Rowe writes honestly about her talent (or lack thereof) for cooking, about what's really important when it comes to mothering and family, and about her many and varied views, musings and commonsense advice on other crap housewife matters. As an added bonus, there are thirteen crap housewife recipes included, from Jessica's old favourite, spag bol, to a fresh and tasty Waldorf salad, and all so simple you can't go wrong.

Being a crap housewife is a badge Jessica wears with pride, and it's a title she invites other women to embrace. The idea of crap lies in the real-life messes, hiccups, disasters and bad meals that many of us dish up and deal with every day. This mum is tired of the photos of perfectly packed school lunches, posts about gourmet family dinners eaten together at the table, and tales of neat, tidy and obedient children with smoothly brushed hair.

It's time to reset the bar. Make expectations realistic. Strive to be kind, loving, smart and funny. Perfection is not required.

'Jess Rowe may be a crap housewife but she is a great writer and an even better friend. And she's right: I can be a bit of a smart arse.' - Joe Hildebrand

'This woman has enriched my life. And if you read this book your life will be enriched with honesty and love too!' - Denise Drysdale

In 1942, the Gestapo would stop at nothing to track down a mysterious 'limping lady' who was fighting for the freedom of France. The Nazi chiefs issued a simple but urgent command: 'She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her.'

The Gestapo's target was Virginia Hall, a glamorous American with a wooden leg who broke through the barriers against her gender and disability to be the first woman to infiltrate Vichy France for the SOE. In so doing she helped turn the course of the intelligence war.

This is the epic tale of an heiress who determined that a hunting accident would not define her existence; a young woman who gambled her life to fight for the freedoms she believed in; an espionage novice who helped to light the flame of French Resistance.

Based on new and extensive research, Sonia Purnell has for the first time uncovered the full secret life of Virginia Hall, an astounding and inspiring story of heroism, spycraft, resistance and personal triumph over shocking adversity.

Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most passionate and challenging of all modern philosophers, and is often regarded as the founder of existentialism. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen pursuing the question of existence - how to be a human being in the world? - while exploring the possibilities of Christianity and confronting the failures of its institutional manifestation around him.

Much of his creativity sprang from his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, a relationship which remained decisive for the rest of his life. He deliberately lived in the swim of human life in Copenhagen, but alone, and died exhausted in 1855 at the age of 42, bequeathing his remarkable writings to his erstwhile fiancee.

Clare Carlisle's innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard's life as far as possible from his own perspective, to convey what it was like actually being this Socrates of Christendom - as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.

Bret Easton Ellis has wrestled with the double-edged sword of fame and notoriety for more than thirty years now, since Less Than Zero catapulted him into the limelight in 1985, earning him devoted fans and, perhaps, even fiercer enemies.

An enigmatic figure who has always gone against the grain and refused categorization, he captured the depravity of the eighties with one of contemporary literature's most polarizing characters, American Psycho's iconic, terrifying Patrick Bateman, and received plentiful death threats in the bargain.

In recent years, his candor and gallows humor on both Twitter and his podcast have continued his legacy as someone determined to speak the truth, however painful it might be, and whom people accordingly either love or love to hate. He encounters various positions and voices controversial opinions, more often than not fighting the status quo.

Now, in White, with the same originality displayed in his fiction, Ellis pours himself out onto the page and, in doing so, eviscerates the perceived good that the social-media age has wrought, starting with the dangerous cult of likeability. White is both a denunciation of censorship, particularly the self-inflicted sort committed in hopes of being 'accepted', and a bracing view of a life devoted to authenticity.

A powerful, moving account of life in Damascus, and a story of how the power of music can unite people in the face conflict.

One morning on the outskirts of Damascus, two starving friends are walking through their desolate city and come across a familiar street that has been turned to rubble, concrete bridges towering above them like tombs and houses turned inside out. Aeham turns to the only comfort he has left and sits at his piano to play a song of hope to his fellow Syrians. It is a song that will reach far beyond the streets of his home and carry consequences he could never have dreamed of.

This tender and poetic account of Aeham's experiences, from losing his city, friends and family to leaving his country and finding safety, will move readers with raw and candid emotion. This is a gripping portrait of a man's search for solace and of a country that has been fiercely torn apart.

In So Much Longing in So Little Space, Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the life and work of Edvard Munch. Setting out to understand the enduring power of Munch's painting, Knausgaard reflects on the essence of creativity, on choosing to be an artist, experiencing the world through art and its influence on his own writing.

As co-curator of a major new exhibition of Munch's work in Oslo, Knausgaard visits the landscapes that inspired him, and speaks with contemporary artists, including Vanessa Baird and Anselm Kiefer.

Bringing together art history, biography and memoir, and drawing on ideas of truth, originality and memory, So Much Longing in So Little Space is a brilliant and personal examination of the legacy of one of the world's most iconic painters, and a meditation on art itself.

Robert A. Caro, 'one of the great reporters of our time and probably the greatest biographer' (Sunday Times), is one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation, whose biographies are widely considered to be masterpieces.

In Working he offers a captivating account of his life as a writer, describing the sometimes staggering lengths to which he has gone in order to produce his books and offering priceless insights into the art and craft of non-fiction writing.

Anyone interested in investigative journalism and the pursuit of truth, in the writer's process and the creation of literature, in the art of interviewing or simply the psychology of excellence will find a masterclass in all these subjects within these pages. Readers already familiar with Caro's work, meanwhile, will be thrilled at the revelations on offer, including how he discovered the fiercely guarded secrets of his subjects, how he constructed the pivotal scenes in his books and the fullest description yet of his forthcoming final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.

Including several of Caro's most famous speeches and interviews alongside the new material, Working is the self-portrait of a man who knows the meaning and importance of great story-telling. It is, like all his books, an utterly riveting example of that too.

An unflinchingly raw and lyrical exploration of loss, poetry and love.

'"I raise my glass to my eldest son. His pregnant wife and daughter are sleeping above us. Outside, the March evening is cold and clear. "To life!" I say as the glasses clink with a delicate and pleasing sound. My mother says something to the dog. Then the phone rings. We don't answer it. Who could be calling so late on a Saturday evening?'

In March 2015, Naja Marie Aidt's 25-year-old son, Carl, died in a tragic accident.

When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back is about losing a child. It is about formulating a vocabulary to express the deepest kind of pain. And it's about finding a way to write about a reality invaded by grief, lessened by loss.

Faced with the sudden emptiness of language, Naja finds solace in the anguish of Joan Didion, Nick Cave, C.S. Lewis, Mallarme, Plato and other writers who have suffered the deadening impact of loss. Their torment suffuses with her own as Naja wrestles with words and contests their capacity to speak for the depths of her sorrow.

This palimpsest of mourning enables Naja to turn over the pathetic, precious transience of existence and articulates her greatest fear: to forget. The insistent compulsion to reconstruct the harrowing aftermath of Carl's death keeps him painfully present, while fragmented memories, journal entries and poetry inch her closer to piecing Carl's life together.

Intensely moving and quietly devastating, this is what is it to be a family, what it is to love and lose, and what it is to treasure life in spite of death's indomitable resolve.

The irresistible story of Japanese cherry blossoms, threatened by political ideology and saved by an unknown Englishman Collingwood Ingram, known as 'Cherry' for his defining obsession, was born in 1880 and lived until he was a hundred, witnessing a fraught century of conflict and change.

After visiting Japan in 1902 and 1907 and discovering two magnificent cherry trees in the garden of his family home in Kent in 1919, Ingram fell in love with cherry blossoms, or sakura, and dedicated much of his life to their cultivation and preservation.

On a 1926 trip to Japan to search for new specimens, Ingram was shocked to see the loss of local cherry diversity, driven by modernisation, neglect and a dangerous and creeping ideology. A cloned cherry, the Somei-yoshino, was taking over the landscape and becoming the symbol of Japan's expansionist ambitions.

The most striking absence from the Japanese cherry scene, for Ingram, was that of Taihaku, a brilliant 'great white' cherry tree. A proud example of this tree grew in his English garden and he swore to return it to its native home. Multiple attempts to send Taihaku scions back to Japan ended in failure, but Ingram persisted.

Over decades, Ingram became one of the world's leading cherry experts and shared the joy of sakura both nationally and internationally. Every spring we enjoy his legacy. 'Cherry' Ingram is a portrait of this little-known Englishman, a story of Britain and Japan in the twentieth century and an exploration of the delicate blossoms whose beauty is admired around the world.

An exceptionally accessible history of the Roman Empire...

Much of Ten Caesars reads like a script for Game of Thrones...

This superb summation of four centuries of Roman history, a masterpiece of compression, confirms Barry Strauss as the foremost academic classicist writing for the general reader today. -Andrew Roberts, The Wall Street Journal Bestselling classical historian Barry Strauss tells the story of three and a half centuries of the Roman Empire through the lives of ten of the most important emperors, from Augustus to Constantine.

Barry Strauss's Ten Caesars is the story of the Roman Empire from rise to reinvention, from Augustus, who founded the empire, to Constantine, who made it Christian and moved the capital east to Constantinople.

During these centuries Rome gained in splendor and territory, then lost both. The empire reached from modern-day Britain to Iraq, and gradually emperors came not from the old families of the first century but from men born in the provinces, some of whom had never even seen Rome. By the fourth century, the time of Constantine, the Roman Empire had changed so dramatically in geography, ethnicity, religion, and culture that it would have been virtually unrecognizable to Augustus.

In the imperial era Roman women-mothers, wives, mistresses-had substantial influence over the emperors, and Strauss also profiles the most important among them, from Livia, Augustus's wife, to Helena, Constantine's mother. But even women in the imperial family faced limits and the emperors often forced them to marry or divorce for purely political reasons.

Rome's legacy remains today in so many ways, from language, law, and architecture to the seat of the Roman Catholic Church. Strauss examines this enduring heritage through the lives of the men who shaped it: Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Vespasian, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, Diocletian and Constantine. Over the ages, they learned to maintain the family business-the government of an empire-by adapting when necessary and always persevering no matter the cost. Ten Caesars is essential history as well as fascinating biography.

'This book should be read by anyone interested in the way myths become accepted as history.' - Peter Edwards, author of Australia and the Vietnam War Why everything you think you know about Australia's Vietnam War is wrong.

When journalist and historian Mark Dapin first interviewed Vietnam veterans and wrote about the war, he swallowed (and regurgitated) every popular misconception. He wasn't alone. In Australia's Vietnam, Dapin argues that every stage of Australia's Vietnam War has been misremembered and obscured by myth. He disproves claims that every national serviceman was a volunteer; questions the idea that Australian troops committed atrocities; debunks the fallacy that there were no welcome home parades until 1987; and rebuts the fable that returned soldiers were met by spitting protesters at Australian airports.

Australia's Vietnam is a major contribution to the understanding of Australia's experience of the war and will change the way we think about memory and military history.

Esther only just escaped the hangman in London. Aged 16, she stood trial at the Old Bailey for stealing 24 yards of black silk lace. Her sentence was transportation to the other side of the world.

She embarked on the perilous journey on the First Fleet as a convict, with no idea of what lay ahead. Once on shore, she became the servant and, in time, the lover of the dashing young first lieutenant George Johnston. But life in the fledgling colony could be gruelling, with starvation looming and lashings for convicts who stepped out of line.

Esther was one of the first Jewish women to arrive in the new land. Through her we meet some of the key people who helped shape the nation. Her life is an extraordinary rags-to-riches story. As leader of the Rum Rebellion against Governor Bligh, George Johnston became Lieutenant-Governor of NSW, making Esther First Lady of the colony, a remarkable rise in society for a former convict.

'North skilfully weaves together one woman's fascinating saga with an equally fascinating history of the early colonial period of Australia. The resulting true story is sometimes as strange and thrilling as a fairytale.' - Lee Kofman, author of The Dangerous Bride

At the outbreak of World War I, 129 women were registered as medical practitioners in Australia, and many of them were eager to contribute their skills and expertise to the war effort. For the military establishment, however, the notion of women doctors serving on the battlefield was unthinkable. Undaunted, at least twenty-four Australian women doctors ignored official military policy and headed to the frontlines.

This book explores the stories of the Australian women who served as surgeons, pathologists, anaesthetists and medical officers between 1914 and 1919. Despite saving hundreds of lives, their experiences are almost totally absent from official military records, both in Australia and Great Britain, and many of their achievements have remained invisible for over a century. Until now.

Heather Sheard and Ruth Lee have compiled a fascinating and meticulously researched account of the Great War, seen through the eyes of these women and their essential work. From the Eastern to the Western Fronts, to Malta, and to London, we bear witness to the terrible conditions, the horrific injuries, the constant danger, and above all, the skill and courage displayed by this group of remarkable Australians. Women to the Front is a war story unlike any other.

The AIF and the Hundred Days Battlefields such as Gallipoli, Fromelles, Pozieres, Bullecourt and Passchendaele are burnt into the Australian Great War psyche. Unfortunately the sheer guts, fortitude and sacrifice of the diggers in those battles had often been wasted by poor leadership and planning. From an Australian perspective, such sacrifice engendered bitterness and frustration, which resulted in an emergent sense of Australian nationalism. The AIF now sought a unification of its five divisions to fight under its own command and administration.

By mid-1918, after the calamitous German March offensive in which 1200 square miles of hard-won territory had been lost, the BEF (British Expeditionary Force) had begun to learn its lessons. In just 100 action-packed days Germany was brought to its knees. And Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash and his Australian Corps played a critical role in that stunning victory.

In this authoritative account of the 100 days, Peter Brune traces the painstaking BEF acquisition of its tactical doctrine with regard to its artillery, tanks and its air force. And the consequence of this knowledge was a sophisticated inter-locking all arms approach to war: incorporating coordinated firepower rather than the futile expenditure of manpower. However, it is Brune's use of participants' diaries that brings an immediacy to his story. The reader will be taken to the bloody interface of battle, hear the voices of some of the Australians involved, and gain a sense of the cost of ultimate victory.

Virginal, chaste, humble, patiently waiting for rescue by brave knights and handsome princes: this idealized - and largely mythical - notion of the medieval noblewoman still lingers. Yet the reality was very different, as Kelcey Wilson-Lee shows in this vibrant account of the five daughters of the great English king, Edward I.

The lives of these sisters - Eleanora, Joanna, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth - ran the full gamut of experiences open to royal women in the Middle Ages. Living as they did in a courtly culture founded on romantic longing and brilliant pageantry, they knew that a princess was to be chaste yet a mother to many children, preferably sons, meek yet able to influence a recalcitrant husband or even command a host of men-at-arms. Edward's daughters were of course expected to cement alliances and secure lands and territory by making great dynastic marriages, or endow religious houses with royal favour. But they also skilfully managed enormous households, navigated choppy diplomatic waters and promoted their family's cause throughout Europe - and had the courage to defy their royal father. They might never wear the crown in their own right, but they were utterly confident of their crucial role in the spectacle of medieval kingship.

Drawing on a wide range of contemporary sources, Daughters of Chivalry offers a rich portrait of these spirited Plantagenet women. With their libraries of beautifully illustrated psalters and tales of romance, their rich silks and gleaming jewels, we follow these formidable women throughout their lives and see them - at long last - shine from out of the shadows, revealing what it was to be a princess in the Age of Chivalry.

Cousin to Elizabeth I - and very likely also Henry VIII's illegitimate granddaughter - Lettice Knollys had a life of dizzying highs and pitiful lows. Darling of the court, entangled in a love triangle with Robert Dudley and Elizabeth I, banished from court, plagued by scandals of affairs and murder, embroiled in treason, Lettice would go on to lose a husband and beloved son to the executioner's axe. Living to the astonishing age of ninetyone, Lettice's tale gives us a remarkable, personal lens on to the grand sweep of the Tudor Age, with those closest to her often at the heart of the events that defined it.

In the first ever biography of this extraordinary woman, Nicola Tallis's dramatic narrative takes us through those events, including the religious turmoil, plots and intrigues of Mary, Queen of Scots, attempted coups, and bloody Irish conflicts, among others. Surviving well into the reign of Charles I, Lettice truly was the last of the great Elizabethans.

A witty history of 2000 years of French history and the last book from legendary popular historian John Julius Norwich.

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's last book is 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.

'Appeasing Hitler is an astonishingly accomplished debut. Bouverie writes with a wonderful clarity and we will no doubt hear a lot more of his voice in future' ANTONY BEEVOR On a wet afternoon in September 1938, Neville Chamberlain stepped off an aeroplane and announced that his visit to Hitler had averted the greatest crisis in recent memory. It was, he later assured the crowd in Downing Street, 'peace for our time'. Less than a year later, Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began.

Appeasing Hitler is a compelling new narrative history of the disastrous years of indecision, failed diplomacy and parliamentary infighting that enabled Nazi domination of Europe. Beginning with the advent of Hitler in 1933, it sweeps from the early days of the Third Reich to the beaches of Dunkirk. Bouverie takes us into the backrooms of 10 Downing Street and Parliament, where a small group of rebellious MPs, including the indomitable Winston Churchill, were among the few to realise that the only choice was between 'war now or war later'. And we enter the drawing rooms and dining clubs of fading imperial Britain, where Hitler enjoyed surprising support among the ruling class and even some members of the Royal Family.

Drawing on deep archival research, including previously unseen sources, this is an unforgettable portrait of the ministers, aristocrats and amateur diplomats who, through their actions and inaction, shaped their country's policy and determined the fate of Europe.

Both sweeping and intimate, Appeasing Hitler is not only eye-opening history but a timeless lesson on the challenges of standing up to aggression and authoritarianism - and the calamity that results from failing to do so.

'James Holland is a master' BBC History It was to be the battle to end the air war once and for all.

During the third week of February 1944, the combined Allied air forces launched their first-ever round-the-clock bomber offensive against Germany.

The aim was to smash the main factories and production centres of the Luftwaffe and at the same time draw the German fighter force up into the air and into battle.

Big Week is the knife-edge story of bomber against flak gun and fighter, but also, crucially, fighter against fighter. Following the fortunes of pilots and aircrew from both sides, this is a blistering narrative of one of the most critical periods of the entire war. Big Week was the largest air battle ever witnessed, but it has been largely forgotten - until now.

'Java is heaven, Burma is hell, but you never come back alive from New Guinea' - Japanese military saying The capture of Lae was the most complex operation for the Australian army in the Second World War. In many ways it was also a rehearsal for the D-Day invasion of France, with an amphibious landing combined with the first successful large-scale Allied airborne operation of the war. D-Day New Guinea brings together the extraordinary stories of the Australian, American and Japanese participants in this battle, and of the fight against the cloying jungle, the raging rivers and the soaring mountain ranges that made New Guinea such a daunting battlefield.

Phillip Bradley brings a compelling clarity, humanity and new insight into a little known but crucial Australian battle of the Pacific War.

Antipater was a key figure in the rise of Macedon under Philip II and instrumental in the succession of Alexander III (the Great). Alexander entrusted Antipater with ruling Macedon in his long absence and he defeated the Spartans in 331 BC. After Alexander's death he crushed a Greek uprising and became regent of the co-kings, Alexander's mentally impaired half-brother (Philip III Arrhideus) and infant son (Alexander IV). He brokered a settlement between the contending Successors but died in 319 BC, having first appointed Polyperchon to succeed as regent in preference to his own sons.

Antipater's eldest son Cassander later became regent of Macedon but eventually had Alexander IV killed and made himself king. Three of his sons in turn briefly succeeded him but could not retain the throne. Antipater's female heirs are shown to be just as important, both as pawns and surprisingly independent players in this Macedonian game of thrones. The saga ends with the failed bid by Nikaia, the widow of Antipater's great grandson Alexander of Corinth, to become independent ruler of Macedon.

Attila the Hun is a household name. Rising to the Hunnic kingship around 434, he dominated European history for the next two decades. Attila bullied and manipulated both halves of the Roman empire, forcing successive emperors to make tribute payments or face invasion. Ian Hughes recounts Attila's rise to power, attempting to untangle his character and motivations so far as the imperfect sources allow. A major theme is how the two halves of the empire finally united against Attila, prompting his fateful decision to invade Gaul and his subsequent defeat at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plain in 451.

Integral to the narrative is analysis of the history of the rise of the Hunnic Empire; the reasons for the Huns' military success; relations between the Huns and the two halves of the Roman Empire; Attila's rise to sole power; and Attila's doomed attempt to bring both halves of the Roman Empire under his dominion.

Rome: Republic into Empire looks at the political and social reasons why Rome repeatedly descended into civil war in the early 1st century BCE and why these conflicts continued for most of the century; it describes and examines the protagonists, their military skills, their political aims and the battles they fought and lost; it discusses the consequences of each battle and how the final conflict led to a seismic change in the Roman political system with the establishment of an autocratic empire.

This is not just another arid chronological list of battles, their winners and their losers. Using a wide range of literary and archaeological evidence, Paul Chrystal offers a rare insight into the wars, battles and politics of this most turbulent and consequential of ancient world centuries; in so doing, it gives us an eloquent and exciting political, military and social history of ancient Rome during one of its most cataclysmic and crucial periods, explaining why and how the civil wars led to the establishment of one of the greatest empires the world has known.

In the year AD 9, three Roman legions were crushed by the German warlord Arminius in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. This event is well-known, but there was another uprising that Rome faced shortly before, which lasted from AD 6 to 9, and was just as intense. This rebellion occurred in the western Balkans (an area roughly corresponding to modern Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Montenegro and parts of Serbia and Albania) and it tested the Roman Empire to its limits.

For three years, fifteen legions fought in the narrow valleys and forest-covered crags of the Dinaric Mountains in a ruthless war of attrition against an equally ruthless and determined foe, and yet this conflict is largely unknown today. The Great Illyrian Revolt is believed to be the first book ever devoted to this forgotten war of the Roman Empire.

Within its pages, we examine the history and culture of the mysterious Illyrian people, the story of how Rome became involved in this volatile region, and what the Roman army had to face during those harrowing three years in the Balkans.

The book features 10 b/w illustrations, 4 maps.

Australia is wreaking devastation on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Whatever the policy- from protection to assimilation, self-determination to intervention, reconciliation to recognition- government has done little to improve the quality of life of Indigenous people. In far too many instances, interaction with governments has only made Indigenous lives worse.

Despite this, many Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders and commentators still believe that working with the state is the only viable option. The result is constant churn and reinvention in Indigenous affairs, as politicians battle over the 'right' approach to solving Indigenous problems.

The Colonial Fantasy considers why Australia persists in the face of such obvious failure. It argues that white Australia can't solve black problems because white Australia is the problem. Australia has resisted the one thing that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people want, and the one thing that has made a difference elsewhere: the ability to control and manage their own lives. It calls for a radical restructuring of the relationship between black and white Australia.

Sydney, Australia 1800s.

Thomas O'Neil, an Irish convict and tailor, arrives in Sydney having left his two daughters on the shores of Dublin. Appointed as Governor King's tailor, O'Neil establishes a successful business in Upper Pitts Row and soon finds a wife, Anne Kennedy. They are to be among the first settlers of Mosman, along with their daughter.

Two years later, 12-year-old William Foster disembarks from an eight-month journey from Portsmouth after avoiding his death sentence. Governor King, horrified that young boys are being transported, offers William the position of shipwright apprentice. He quickly moves up the ranks and starts a successful business in The Rocks. Eventually, William falls for O'Neil's young daughter, Anastasia and the two begin a life together.

Inspired by extensive research into his own ancestry of the O'Neil and Foster families, Robert Westphal gives a unique historical account of convict history and early Sydney. The Tailor and the Shipwright is a compelling read of resilience that depicts the strength of generational ties.

Philip Owen Ayton was working on the Sydney tramways when the call to join the fight against Germany came. Keen for action, he found himself in the First Field Company Engineers in the First Division of the Australian Imperial Forces.

Shipped to Egypt, Ayton soon after took part in the Gallipoli landing. 'I would not have missed this for anything,' he wrote to a friend. Badly injured, he was sent to England to convalesce and from there joined the campaign in France, where he saw out the war.

From the start, Ayton kept notes of his experiences, which he would write up in a diary. Plucky, charming and self-deprecating, this son of the new nation records the horrors of trench warfare and his off-duty adventures in Cairo, London and Paris.

This remarkable story is now published for the first time, a century after the war's end. Accompanied by a postscript by one of Ayton's sons and Ayton's poem about the Gallipoli campaign, A Hell of a Time is a vital and compelling account of the Great War.

The book documents the production of each toy with beautiful colour photographs accompanied by relevant text about the toy and manufacturer.

Luke Jones' carefully structured collection has been assembled with passion and commitment over a period of more than thirty years and is unrivalled for its breadth and quality. It provides an ideal platform to illustrate a history of twentieth century Australian manufactured toys, a history which has yet to be substantially documented in any form.

This book will make an important contribution to the recorded history of Australian society, childhood, family and manufacturing.

A Free Country- Australians' Search for Utopia 1861-1901 tells how Australians, inspired by their new democracy, attempted to use their freedom to build a society without social and economic conflict.

As the second book in a landmark five-volume Australian Liberalism series, A Free Country shows the successes and missteps in the attempt to establish the legal and moral foundations for a liberal society in Australia, examining the ideological battles of the period.

The national politics of twentieth-century Australia had their roots during this time, as utopian dreams of 'social reconstruction' opposed liberal ideals of individual freedom, fostering the concept of 'class wars' and leading to the ongoing involvement of trade unions in politics.

As emerging collective ideas of nationalism, empire, race and class challenged individual rights and threatened to seed domestic and international conflict, liberals succeeded in bringing the six colonies into one Australian nation founded on liberal principles, writing a constitution hailed as the most democratic in the world.

The 3rd Field Company Engineers holds a distinguished place in the history of the Australian Army, being the first unit of the AIF to deploy on active service and to come under enemy fire, in defence of the Suez Canal against a Turkish attack in February 1915, almost three months before the Gallipoli landing. This book, the result of many years of research, details the work of the Company from its raising in August 1914 until the end of the war in November 1918.

Drawing on both official records and personal papers, it explores the varied activities of an engineering unit, ranging from the taxing work of building bridges and other vital infrastructure in and behind battle zones to the highly dangerous task of extending trenches and barbed wire obstructions on the front line.

From senior command levels down to the rank-and-file Sappers, the book combines a careful account with personal experiences and observations to present a compelling portrait of the unsung heroes of the AIF. As an example of the role of engineers in the First World War, Purple Patch offers an authoritative examination of the achievements of this most notable unit.

'Fresh, gripping and vivid' Simon Sebag Montefiore 'A portrait that chills you to the bone' Leanda de Lisle, The Times A dedicated brother and loyal stalwart to the Yorkist dynasty for most of his early life, Richard's personality was forged in the tribulation of exile and the brutality of combat. An ambitious nobleman and successful general with a loyal following, he could claim to have achieved every ambition in life except one: the crown.

By stripping back the legends that surround England's most controversial king and returning to original manuscript evidence, Chris Skidmore's compelling biography reveals Richard III (1452-1485) as contemporaries saw him.

The Tudors retained only a precarious grip on the crown of England, founded on a title that was both tenuous and legally flimsy. This left them preoccupied by two major obsessions: the necessity for a crop of lusty male heirs to continue their bloodline, and the elimination of threats from those who had strong, if not superior, claims to the throne than them.

None was cursed more by this rampant insecurity than Henry VIII. The king embodied not only the power and imperial majesty of the monarchy, but also England's stature and military might. His health always had huge political consequences at home and overseas - hence his unbridled hypochondria.

Henry's last six years saw him embark on two marriages, brutal wars against Scotland and France and the devastating collapse of England's economy. Terror stalked his court, as factions plotted in the shadows behind the throne to snatch ascendancy in religion and political influence.

Drawing on the latest historical and medical research, Robert Hutchinson reveals the extent to which the king also grappled with accelerating geriatric decay, made more acute by medical conditions that were not only painful but transformed the monarch into a 28-stone psychotic monster, suspicious of everyone around him, including those most dear to him.

'Rich and funny' Julian Barnes, Guardian 'Poirier's hugely enjoyable, quick-witted and richly anecdotal book is magnifique' The Times 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.

After the horrors of the Second World War, 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, these pioneers hoped to find an alternative to the Capitalist and Communist models for life, art and politics - a Third Way.

Agnes Poirier transports us to a time when Paris was at the heart of all that was new and brave and controversial, skilfully weaving together a collage of images and destinies.

A charming narrative and "pop historical" look into how Italy has shaped the Western world's most vibrant passions, from literature to love, music to art, food to wine.

What makes Italian passion so undeniably unique? Dianne Hales unspools the answer to this question with gusto in La Passione: How Italy Seduced the World, her ambitious follow-up to La Bella Lingua: My Love Affair with Italian, the World's Most Enchanting Language. Whether they built aqueducts, chiseled arches, conducted choirs, directed movies, raced cars, or designed fashion and furniture, Italians have done so with a full-hearted zest that transforms everything they touched. What didn't exist, they invented: the first universities, public libraries, and law and medical schools; the first modern histories, satires, and sonnets; the battery, barometer, radio, and thermometer--even the gift of music.

Dante and Petrarch, titans of the Italian language, translated their fervid love for idealized muses into literary landmarks. Michelangelo carved a Bacchus so sinuously delectable that a Florentine sniped, "Buonarotti could not have sinned more with a chisel." Puccini swept listeners, in a biographer's words, "into that place where erotic passion, sensuality, tenderness, pathos, and despair meet and fuse." La Passione traces this earthly, earthy drive back to its roots, follows its course through the centuries, and chronicles its impact on the realms of literature, art, music, cuisine, and style, as its people came to embrace, fully and deeply, a passion for life itself.

Combining her adroit journalist's eye with extensive research, Hales delves into passions of the heart, senses, and soul across the ages in this perfect read for the casual Italophile, inquisitive tourist, or history buff in your life. 

In this original and meticulously-researched narrative history, Gareth Russell utilises the sinking of the Titanic , the ship of dreams, as a prism through which to look at the end of the Edwardian era and the seismic shift of modernity the 1910s have come to mark in the West.

Had she survived her first voyage, The Titanic probably would have dated like other ocean liners. Instead, within a week of setting sail on 10th April 1912, the disaster of her sinking had turned her into one of the biggest news stories of the century. Writing in his signature prose, Gareth Russell peers through the portholes of six first-class travellers to immerse us into the Edwardian era while demonstrating how modernity shook up the class system of the age.

Lucy Leslie, Countess of Rothes; son of the British Empire, Tommy Andrews; captain of the industry John Thayer and his son Jack; Jewish immigrant Ida Straus; and model and movie star Dorothy Gibson. Each subject's unique story offers insights into the established hierarchy during the fin de siecle of pre-war Britain and America, the Titanic's respective spiritual and economic homelands. Through these entwining lives, Russell investigates social class - its mores, its foibles, its accents, its etiquette, its benefits, its casual or intentional cruelties, its potential nobility. Those nuances also invite analyses of the shipping trade, the birth of the movie industry, the aristocracy, the American Gilded Age, the Irish Home Rule crisis, and Jewish-American communities.

The Titanic is the vessel in which we can extrapolate lessons on hubris, folly, greed, love, class, magnificent courage and pitiable weakness. She carried thousands of people and, in that way, she still has thousands of stories to tell. Drawing on brand new and unpublished materials, journal entries and film archives from the time, The Darksome Bounds of a Failing World focuses on the symbolism of the Titanic as the floating symbol of Anglo-American success, its clientele an apt illustration of the limitless - technological, financial - possibilities of its time.

Like every era, the Renaissance brims with stories. In this book, Robert Davis and Beth Lindsmith highlight dozens of notable lives from between 1400 and 1600. They bring to life wily politicians, eccentric scientists, fiery rebels and stolid reactionaries, as well as a pornographer, an acrobat, an actress, a poetic prostitute, a star comedian and a least one very fretful mother. Some names - Leonardo, Luther, Medici and Machiavelli - are famous, but many others will be new to general readers. Their stories, ninety-four in all, remind us that history is more than dates and abstract concepts: it also arises from the lives of countless individual men and women.

`Wonderfully researched and beautifully written' Philip Hoare, author of Leviathan `Succeeds in conjuring a lost world' Dava Sobel, author of Longitude For more than a millennium, Polynesians occupied the remotest islands in the Pacific Ocean, an enormous triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island. Polynesians today can trace their roots back to a group of epic voyagers who first explored this vast expanse Sailing in large, double-hulled canoes, they were the first and, until the era of European discovery, the only people ever to have reached this part of the globe. Today, they are widely acknowledged as the world's greatest navigators.

But how did these ancient mariners find all these islands? How did they reach them? Diving deep into the history of the Pacific, Christina Thompson uncovers who these voyagers were, where they came from, and how they managed to colonise every habitable island in Remote Oceania. A thrilling intellectual detective story, Sea People combines the thrill of exploration, the wonder of pursuit, and the drama of a gripping historical puzzle.

'Europe where the sun dares scarce appear For freezing meteors and congealed cold.' Christopher Marlowe In this innovative and compelling work of environmental history, Philipp Blom chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, a crisis that would transform the entire social and political fabric of Europe.

While hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, by the end of the sixteenth century the temperature plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbours were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and 'frost fairs' were erected on a frozen Thames - with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city.

Recounting the deep legacy and sweeping consequences of this 'Little Ice Age', acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had ineradicably changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, Blom brilliantly shows how they also gave rise to the growth of European cities, the appearance of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment.

A sweeping examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature's Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond.

In Chapters extending from the ancient world to the Second World War, Gaddis assesses grand strategic theory and practice in Herodotus, Thucydides, Sun Tzu, Octavian/Augustus, Saint Augustine, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, Philip II, the American Founding Fathers, Clausewitz, Tolstoy, Lincoln, Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Isaiah Berlin. For anyone involved or interested in the art of leadership, On Grand Strategy is, in every way, a master class.

Chocolate - `the food of the Gods' - has had a long and eventful history. Its story is expertly told here by the doyen of Maya studies, Michael Coe, and his late wife, Sophie. The book begins 3,000 years ago in the Mexican jungles and goes on to draw on aspects of archaeology, botany and socio-economics. Used as currency and traded by the Aztecs, chocolate arrived in Europe via the conquistadors, and was soon a favourite drink with aristocrats. By the 19th century and industrialization, chocolate became a food for the masses - until its revival in our own time as a luxury item. Chocolate has also been giving up some of its secrets to modern neuroscientists, who have been investigating how flavour perception is mediated by the human brain. And, finally, the book closes with two contemporary accounts of how chocolate manufacturers have (or have not) been dealing with the ethical side of the industry.

Asserting that religious creeds and philosophical questions can be reduced to purely genetic and evolutionary components, and that the human body and mind have a physical base obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry, Genesis demonstrates that the only way for us to fully understand human behaviour is to study the evolutionary histories of nonhuman species. Of these, Wilson demonstrates that at least seventeen - among them the African naked mole rat and the sponge-dwelling shrimp - have been found to have advanced societies based on altruism and cooperation. Whether writing about midges who 'dance about like acrobats' or schools of anchovies who protectively huddle 'to appear like a gigantic fish, or proposing that human society owes a debt of gratitude to 'postmenopausal grandmothers' and 'childless homosexuals,' Genesis is a pithy yet pathbreaking work of evolutionary theory filled with the lyrical biological and humanistic observations for which Wilson is known.

Time is a mystery that does not cease to puzzle us. Philosophers, artists and poets have long explored its meaning while scientists have found that its structure is different from the simple intuition we have of it. From Boltzmann to quantum theory, from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, our understanding of time has been undergoing radical transformations. Time flows at a different speed in different places, the past and the future differ far less than we might think, and the very notion of the present evaporates in the vast universe.

Quantum physics has been, ever since its inception, the golden child of science. It is the basis of our understanding of everything from elemental particles to the behaviour of materials. Yet is has also been a troubled child, beset by controversy and raging disagreement over which formulation best describes our world. It has helped physicists agree that atoms and radiation behave differently to rocks and cats, but often not on much else. The simple reason quantum physics is unsolvable, Lee Smolin argues, is that the theory is incomplete.

In this radical new theory of reality, he aims to go beyond quantum mechanics to find a description of the world that makes sense to everyone- an alternative theory, based on the one that nature uses. In doing so, he takes away the mystery and confusion, and presents the quantum world in a way that is accessible to all - specialist and non-specialist alike. Einstein's Unfinished Revolution is a fresh take on the big questions of our universe.

Going boldly forth as a pioneer in the fledgling field of space archaeology, Dr Alice Gorman (aka Dr Space Junk) turns the common perception of archaeology as an exploration of the ancient on its head. Her captivating inquiry into the most modern and daring of technologies spanning some 60 years - a mere speck in cosmic terms - takes the reader on a journey which captures the relics of space forays and uncovers the cultural value of detritus all too readily dismissed as junk.

In this book, she takes a physical journey through the solar system and beyond, and a conceptual journey into human interactions with space. Her tools are artefacts, historical explorations, the occasional cocktail recipe, and the archaeologist's eye applied not only to the past, but the present and future as well.

Erudite and playful, Dr Space Junk reveals that space is not as empty as we might think. And that by looking up and studying space artefacts, we learn an awful lot about our own culture on earth. She makes us realise that objects from the past - the material culture produced by the Space Age and beyond - are so significant to us now because they remind us of what we might want to hold onto into the future.

`As charming as it is expert, as gripping as it is surprising, Dr Space Junk vs The Universe deftly threads together the cosmic and the personal, the stupendousness of space with the lived experience of human beings down here.' - Adam Roberts, author of Gradisil

For 20 years Australia has been in political denial about the seismic changes occurring in the way we power our country. Successive governments continue to tell people that power prices will fall while the lights stay on.

Debate is reduced to two equally preposterous narratives: coal-fired, climate change indifference versus an impossibly utopian renewable energy future. This nonsense swirls around an incredulous public while power prices rise, the grid is stretched, energy becomes political poison and the earth warms. How did it come to this and how can we find our way out of this mess?

Matthew Warren has worked for all sides of the energy industry, is regularly attacked for being too pro-coal and too pro-renewables, and writes without fear or favour. He has been lobbying for a national climate and electricity policy for over a decade. With an entertaining and fascinating narrative, Blackout cuts through the waffle to chart the disintegration of Australia's energy security, call out what is holding us back, and plot the way for a brighter future.

The compelling story of vaccination.

We may fear terrorist attacks, but in truth humans have always had far more to fear from infections. In 1919, Spanish flu killed over 50 million people, more than died in both world wars combined. In 1950, an estimated 50 million people caught smallpox worldwide, of whom 10 million died. In 1980, before measles vaccine was widely used, an estimated 2.6 million children died of measles every year.

Less than 100 years ago, losing a child to an infection like diphtheria or polio was a dreaded but almost inevitable sorrow faced by all parents, from the richest to the poorest. Today, these killer diseases are almost never seen in industrialised countries, thanks to the development of vaccines. Immunisation has given modern parents peace of mind their ancestors could not imagine.

The history of vaccination is rich with trial, error, sabotage and success. It encompasses the tragedy of lives lost, the drama of competition and discovery, the culpability of botched testing, and the triumph of effective, lifelong immunity. Yet with the eradication in the first world of some of humanity's deadliest foes, complacency has set in. We forget the power of these diseases at our peril.

This is a book for everyone who wants to understand our past - and cares about our future.

PRAISE 'Isaacs explores the understanding of immunity as it develops from the fifth century BC to the present day and thrills us with the progressive successes of each of the 14 vaccines which a child routinely receives today ... The work is authoritative, beguiling, amusing, instructive and inspirational.

It deserves a wide readership, including infectious disease experts, other health professionals and, most assuredly, a diversity of lay people' Sir Gustav Nossal, immunologist and director of The Walter and Eliza Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, 1965-1996 'A rollicking story of human endeavour, error, misinformation, success and failure ... and more than a glimpse of why we need to continue to research, evaluate, educate and fund vaccines to prevent disease' Fiona Stanley, Distinguished Research Professor, University of Western Australia 'Effortlessly accessible, Defeating the Ministers of Death brilliantly reveals the people behind the most important public health intervention in history' Professor Andrew J pollard, Department of Paediatrics, University of Oxford 'This book is an unflinching look at the triumphs and inevitable tragedies in the war against infectious diseases. Nonfiction is at its best when it reads like fiction. And David Isaacs has written a page turner' Paul A. Offit, MD, author of Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren't Your Best Source of Health Information

Mama's Last Hug is a whirlwind tour of new ideas and findings about animal emotions, based on Frans de Waal's renowned studies of the social and emotional lives of chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates.

It opens with the moving farewell between Mama, a dying 59-year-old chimpanzee matriarch, and Jan Van Hoof, who was Frans de Waal's mentor and thesis advisor. The filmed event has since gone viral (over 9.5 million views on YouTube).

De Waal discusses facial expressions, animal sentience and consciousness, the emotional side of human politics, and the illusion of free will. He distinguishes between emotions and feelings, all the while emphasising the continuity between our species and other species. And he makes the radical proposal that emotions are like organs: we haven't a single organ that other animals don't have, and the same is true for our emotions.

How can statistics help us understand the world? Can we come to reliable conclusions when data is imperfect? How is statistics changing in the age of data science?

Statistics has played a leading role in our scientific understanding of the world for centuries, yet we are all familiar with the way statistical claims can be sensationalised, particularly in the media. In the age of big data, as data science becomes established as a discipline, a basic grasp of statistical literacy is more important than ever.

In The Art of Statistics, David Spiegelhalter guides the reader through the essential principles we need in order to derive knowledge from data. Drawing on real world problems to introduce conceptual issues, he shows us how statistics can help us determine the luckiest passenger on the Titanic, whether serial killer Harold Shipman could have been caught earlier, and if screening for ovarian cancer is beneficial.

How many trees are there on the planet? Do busier hospitals have higher survival rates? Why do old men have big ears? Spiegelhalter reveals the answers to these and many other questions - questions that can only be addressed using statistical science.

`If you want to know how we know what we know about dinosaurs, read this book!' Steve Brusatte Over the past twenty years, the study of dinosaurs has changed from natural history to a true scientific discipline. New technologies have revealed secrets locked in the prehistoric bones in ways that nobody predicted - we can now work out the colour of dinosaurs, their bite forces, top speeds, and even how they cared for their young. Remarkable new fossil finds, such as giant sauropod dinosaur skeletons from Patagonia, dinosaurs with feathers from China, and even a tiny dinosaur tail in Burmese amber - complete down to every detail of its filament-like feathers, skin, bones, and mummified tail muscles - have caused media sensations. New fossils are the lifeblood of modern palaeobiology of course, but it is the advances in technologies and methods that have allowed the revolution in the scope and confidence of the field.

Dinosaurs Rediscovered gathers together all the latest palaeontological evidence and takes us behind the scenes on the expeditions and in museum laboratories, tracing the transformation of dinosaur study from its roots in antiquated natural history to a highly technical, computational, and indisputably scientific field today. Benton explores what we know of the world of the dinosaurs, how dinosaur remains are found and excavated, and especially how palaeontologists read the details of the life of the dinosaurs from the fossils - their colours, their growth, feeding and locomotion, how they grew from egg to adult, how they sensed the world, and even whether we will ever be able to bring them back to life. Dinosaurs are still very much a part of our world.

When we think of climate change, we often picture human-made global warming, caused by greenhouse gas emissions. But natural climate change has occurred throughout human history, and populations have had to adapt to the climate's vicissitudes. Anthony J. McMichael, a renowned epidemiologist and a pioneer in the field of how human health relates to climate change, is the ideal person to tell this story.

In Climate Change and the Health of Nations, McMichael shows how the natural environment has vast direct and indirect repercussions for human health and welfare. He takes us on a tour of human history through the lens of major transformations in climate. From the very beginning of our species some five million years ago, human biology has evolved in response to cooling temperatures, new food sources, and changing geography. As societies began to form, they too adapted in relation to their environments, most notably with the development of agriculture eleven thousand years ago. Agricultural civilization was a Faustian bargain, however: the prosperity and comfort that an agrarian society provides relies on the assumption that the environment will largely remain stable. Indeed, for agriculture to succeed, environmental conditions must be just right, which McMichael refers to as the Goldilocks phenomenon. Global warming is disrupting this balance, just as other climate-related upheavals have tested human societies throughout history. As McMichael shows, the break-up of the Roman Empire, the bubonic Plague of Justinian, and the mysterious collapse of Mayan civilization all have roots in climate change.

Why devote so much analysis to the past, when the daunting future of climate change is already here? Because the story of humankind as previous survival in the face of an unpredictable and unstable climate, and of the terrible toll that climate change can take, could not be more important as we face the realities of a warming planet. This sweeping magnum opus is not only a rigorous, innovative, and fascinating exploration of how the climate affects the human condition, but also an urgent call to recognize our species' utter reliance on the earth as it is.

People of African descent have been in Australia for at least 200 years, yet their stories are largely missing from Australian writing. Australians of the African diaspora have arrived here in many different ways- directly from the continent; via the Caribbean, the Americas and the United Kingdom; making the journey to Australia over one generation, or several.

What is it like to grow up African in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Maxine Beneba Clarke with curatorial assistance from writers Ahmed Yussuf and Magan Magan, showcases diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question. Accounts from well-known authors and high-profile cultural and sporting identities sit alongside newly discovered voices of all ages, with experiences spanning regions, cities and generations. All of the pieces call for understanding, oftentimes challenging stereotypes, always demanding respect.

Growing Up African aims to defy, question or shed light on the many stereotypes that currently exist about the vibrant extended African community in Australia.

Contributors include Faustina Agolley, Santilla Chingaipe, Carly Findlay, Khalid Warsame, Nyadol Nyuon, Tariro Mavondo, Magan Magan and many, many more.

The banking royal commission has put the financial sector on trial and exposed its self-interest, corruption and excess. The People vs The Banks reveals what happens when businesses put profit before punters, reward bad behaviour and assume they are beyond the law. The day of reckoning for liars and thieves in pin-striped suits has arrived.

Politics in Australia is in a dire state. The Coalition government is led by its third prime minister in four years, two of whom were toppled by their own party. Before that, the Labor government ousted two prime ministers. Voters' trust in politicians is at an all-time low, there is policy inertia on key issues, and ideology and internal politics too often trump good government.

We have the diagnosis, but what's the cure? In this collection of essays, the country's best academic minds look at the key issues and chart a way forward. They examine how Australia's taxation system could be fairer; the priorities in progressing Indigenous Australians' rights; the absurdity of the constant 'left versus right' debate; how to fix private health insurance; and how to settle the conflict between population and migration policies.

Here are innovative and bold ideas to advance Australia.

What is a democracy sausage? Where is Antony Green? Why is a prime minister? And what on earth is that big, shiny golden club on the table in the House of Reps? Discover the answers to all these and more as Jon Kudelka and James Jeffrey take the definitive journey through Australian democracy from A to Z.

From Australia's most trusted non-fiction researcher and author comes the book that every parent needs to read.

With their labile and rapidly developing brains, adolescents are particularly susceptible to addiction, and addiction leads to anxiety and depression. What few parents will know is that what we think of as the most typical addictions and problematic teen behaviours - smoking, drinking, drug-taking, sex leading to teenage pregnancy - are on the decline.

The bad news is that a whole raft of addictions has taken their place. Whereas once the dopamine-hungry brain of a teenager got its fix from smoking a joint or sculling a Bundy and coke, it is now turning to electronic devices for the pleasure jolt that typically comes from playing online games (if you're a boy) and engaging with social media (if you're a girl).

What is even more troubling is that, unlike drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, electronic devices are not illicit. Quite the contrary. They are liberally distributed by schools and parents, with few restrictions placed on their use.

However, all is not lost. In Teen Brain, David sets out clear, reasonable and effective rules to help you confidently manage your kids' use of screens at this critical point in their lives.

Every two minutes, police are called to a family violence matter. Every week, a woman is killed by a current or former partner.

This is Australia's national emergency.

Violence against women is preventable. It is not an inevitable part of the human condition. It's time to create a new normal. It is time to stop the slaughter in our suburbs.

Some kids refuse to read, others won't stop - not even at the dinner table! Either way, many parents question the best way to support their child's literacy journey. When can you start reading to your child? How do you find that special book to inspire a reluctant reader? How can you tell if a book is age appropriate? What can you do to keep your tween reading into their adolescent years?

Award-winning teacher librarian Megan Daley has the answers to all these questions and more. She unpacks her fifteen years of experience into this personable and accessible guide, enhanced with up-to-date research and first-hand accounts from well-known Australian children's authors. It also contains practical tips, such as suggested reading lists and instructions on how to run book-themed activities.

Raising Readers is a must-have guide for parents and educators to help the children in their lives fall in love with books.

The world is messing with our minds. What if there was something we could do about it?

Looking at sleep, news, social media, addiction, work and play, Matt Haig invites us to feel calmer, happier and to question the habits of the digital age. This book might even change the way you spend your precious time on earth.

How do we step outside our own echo chamber to understand others? What are we losing when we share fewer and fewer national moments?

The new media is enabling despots and disempowering democracy. So when every opinion seems to matter equally, On Us offers a few more on choice in a concentrated media world and asks why more information often means less insight.

Endorsed by Barack Obama, Bill and Melinda Gates and Tom Harford, and Longlisted for the 2018 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year

Timely, short and essential, Factfulness reveals the power of facts in a post-truth world, by late international sensation Hans Rosling ('a true inspiration' - Bill Gates) and his long-term collaborators Ola and Anna.

The international bestseller by legendary statisticians Hans, Ola and Anna Rosling: inspiring and revelatory, filled with lively anecdotes and moving stories, Factfulness is an urgent and essential book that will change the way you see the world, and make you realise things are better than you thought.

Who really creates wealth in our world? And how do we decide the value of what they do? In modern capitalism, value-extraction - the siphoning off of profits, from shareholders' dividends to bankers' bonuses - is rewarded more highly than value-creation - the productive process that drives a healthy economy and society. We misidentify takers as makers, and have lost sight of what value really means. Yet, argues Mariana Mazzucato in this penetrating and passionate new book, if we are to reform capitalism we urgently need to rethink where wealth comes from. Who is creating it, who is extracting it, and who is destroying it?

Our world order is under pressure as never before. From new authoritarian regimes in the US, Turkey and Russia, to the imminent break-up of the European Union and a social media awash with intolerance, things look set to fall apart just as abruptly as the Soviet Union did some thirty years ago. How did we get here, and what do we do now?

In this searching new exploration of our crisis, Paul Mason argues that at its heart lies an attack on the idea of humanity itself. As the free-market system reduced us to two-dimensional consumers, genetics has stripped us of our belief in humans as agents of change. And now the dystopian forces of the authoritarian right are pushing the world towards a pre-modern understanding of the human being - one that aims to destroy the very concept of universal human rights, and create a new world in which we are biologically destined to form hierarchies based on ethnicity and gender, and to obey the demands of religious conformity.

If these forces are not stopped, Mason warns, we will relive something even worse than the 1930s. In response, he demands a radical defence of the human being - a reinvention of humanism; a re-assertion of the universality of human rights; and a struggle for a society where biologically determined hierarchies are abolished. We have the power to imagine and design a better system. We must, Mason concludes, reach deep into the history and experience of resistance in order to be our own saviours.

The Sunday Times bestseller.

'Eye-opening, damning and hilarious' Tim Shipman, author of All Out War and Fall Out.

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.

Britain's best-known classicist Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit, she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from the classical world to the modern day, from Medusa and Athena to Theresa May and Hillary Clinton. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template.

A year on since the advent of #metoo, Beard looks at how the discussions have moved on during this time, and how that intersects with issues of rape and consent, and the stories men tell themselves to support their actions. In trademark Beardian style, using examples ancient and modern, Beard argues, 'it's time for change - and now!' From the author of international bestseller SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.

The Rip Curl Story is the remarkable tale of two young surfers - Doug 'Claw' Warbrick and Brian Singer - who pursued an audacious dream to make a living in pursuit of the ultimate ride.

The brand they built, Rip Curl, not only satisfied their own surf wanderlust, but also inspired countless others, riding the wave of the global youth revolution of the late '60s.

Rip Curl's mantra became 'the Search'- the pursuit of new waves on distant shores, new thrills - skiing, snowboarding, windsurfing - and better equipment to elevate the experience. Along the way they supported the careers of many of the world's great surfers - from Midget Farrelly to Michael Peterson, Tom Curren to Damien Hardman, Pam Burridge to Stephanie Gilmore, and of course Tyler Wright and Mick Fanning.

Bestselling surf writer Tim Baker tells this implausible story in an irresistible series of ripping yarns, offering rich life lessons, a maverick business primer and a wild ride of adventure, good times and outlandish ambitions spectacularly realised.

The Rip Curl Story will make you want to surf more, travel further, follow through on that great business idea and pursue your own Search.

Professor Jennifer Eberhardt is a Stanford Social Psychologist and one of the world's leading experts on racial bias. In Biased, she draws on groundbreaking research to demonstrate that even without explicit racism, our unconscious biases powerfully shape our behaviour leading to racial disparities in all sectors of society.

In a global society of increased migration and social movement, Biased highlights the social problems that arise when different races meet, and demonstrates the stubbornly persistent role of racial bias in a world where economic and geographic realities are rapidly changing.

Perhaps more importantly, Biased not only describes one of the most fundamental problems of our age, but puts forward solutions. Unconscious bias is a common human condition to be recognised and managed, not a sin to be punished. Only through understanding comes change.

David Koch, online entrepreneur, finance journalist and trusted Australian media personality knows a thing or two about the family finances.

Father of four kids, sole breadwinner, ad a man not afraid to admit to his own odd money mistake, David has also spent hour after hour in the Sunrise studio tuning in to the way the average Australian thinks about money. He knows the extent to which we all:

* spend too much on silly stuff * avoid keeping track of our expenses * get overwhelmed by the cost of raising a family * settle for less in terms of salary * do without the things that would bring a bit of pleasure to our lives * pay the banks too much in fees and interest.

David is here to help. In 11 easy steps he shows us everything we need to do to:

* pay less on the mortgage * put up to $14,000 extra back in the average family budget * get those finances sorted in 15 minutes a month * develop a side hustle or get a salary increase (or why not both?) * learn a little about investing for the future * tackle debt once and for all.

Friendly, clear and easy to use, this is the guide you need to reset your money habits so you can learn more, worry less, breathe easier and enjoy of the fruits of your labour.

Kochie's 11-Step Money Plan will never be out of date as it comes with a weekly email newsletter from Kochie covering the important things you need to know.

Kishore Mahbubani's timely polemic argues passionately for the West to cease imposing its ideology on the world and intervening in the affairs of other nations. Mahbubani examines the West's greatest follies of recent times- the humiliation of Russia at the end of the Cold War, which led to the rise of Putin; and the invasion of Iraq after 9/11, which destabilised the Middle East. For the West to maintain a key international role, Mahbubani warns, it must recognise its changing status and seek to influence rather than dominate. Has The West Lost It? examines the myths and self-delusions of Western power with an outsider's critical eye.

What moral values do we hold in common? As globalization draws us together economically, are the things we value converging or diverging? These twin questions led Michael Ignatieff to embark on a three-year, eight-nation journey in search of an answer. What we share, he found, are what he calls ordinary virtues : tolerance, forgiveness, trust, and resilience. When conflicts break out, these virtues are easily exploited by the politics of fear and exclusion, reserved for one's own group but denied to others. Yet these ordinary virtues are the key to healing and reconciliation on both a local and global scale.

In this clear and evocative account, John Gaskin unfolds the thinking about nature, life, death and other worlds that informed the culture and society of the Classical world, drawing out its interest for modern readers. Witty sketches and diagrams enliven the story, which runs from Homeric Greece to the banning of pagan religions in ad 391. The book concludes with a gazetteer describing notable sites and the people and ideas connected with them, making it an ideal companion for visitors to Classical ruins and for all armchair travellers curious to explore life's big questions.

One of the age-old questions of philosophy is what does it mean to live a good life? In this extraordinary book, scholar and writer, Julienne van Loon, applies a range of philosophical ideas to her own experience. Van Loon engages with the work of six leading contemporary thinkers and writers - Rosi Braidotti, Nancy Holmstrom, Siri Hustvedt, Laura Kipnis, Julia Kristeva and Marina Warner - through interrogating and enlivening their ideas on love, play, fear, work, wonder and friendship.

Her journey is intellectual and deeply personal, political and intimate at once. It introduces readers to six extraordinary women whose own deeply thoughtful work has much to offer all of us. They may transform our own views of what it means to live a good life.

Philosophers look beyond the sea of red dresses to reveal insights about gender inequality, religious oppression, power, and violence.

In The Handmaid's Tale and Philosophy, philosophers give their insights into the blockbuster best-selling novel and record-breaking TV series, The Handmaid's Tale. The story involves a future breakaway state in New England, beset by environmental disaster and a plummeting birth rate, in which the few remaining fertile women are conscripted to have sex and bear children to the most powerful men, all justified and rationalized by religious fundamentalism.

We might think we are through with the past, but the past isn't through with us. Tragedy permits us to come face to face with the things we don't want to know about ourselves, but which still make us who we are. It articulates the conflicts and contradictions that we need to address in order to better understand the world we live in.

A work honed from a decade's teaching at the New School, where 'Critchley on Tragedy' is one of the most popular courses, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us is a compelling examination of the history of tragedy. Simon Critchley demolishes our common misconceptions about the poets, dramatists and philosophers of Ancient Greece - then presents these writers to us in an unfamiliar and original light.

The Bible is the central book in Western culture, yet extraordinarily there is no proper history of it. This exceptional work, by one of the world's leading Biblical scholars, provides a full account of how the different parts of the Bible came to be written; how some writings which were regarded as holy became canonical and were included in the Bible, and others were not; what the relationship is of the different parts of the Bible to each other; and how, once it became a stable text, the Bible has been disseminated and interpreted around the world. It gives full weight to discussion of the importance of the Tanakh (Old Testament) in Judaism as in Christianity. It also demonstrates the degree to which, contrary to widespread belief, both Judaism and Christianity are not faiths drawn from the Bible texts but from other sources and traditions. It shows that if we are to regard the Bible as 'authoritative' it cannot be as believers have so often done in the past.

'When you explore older atheisms, you will find some of your firmest convictions - secular or religious - are highly questionable. If this prospect disturbs you, what you are looking for may be freedom from thought.' For a generation now, public debate has been corroded by a shrill, narrow derision of religion in the name of an often very vaguely understood 'science'. John Gray's stimulating and extremely enjoyable new book describes the rich, complex world of the atheist tradition, a tradition which he sees as in many ways as rich as that of religion itself, as well as being deeply intertwined with what is so often crudely viewed as its 'opposite'.

The result is a book that sheds an extraordinary and varied light on what it is to be human and on the thinkers who have, at different times and places, battled to understand this issue.

'We've seen Milo the troll, the stand-up comedian, the political operative and the snappy dresser. This is Milo the scholar and Catholic. It's his best incarnation yet.' Roger Stone.

In Diabolical, Milo Yiannopoulos levels his critical eye and legendary caustic wit at the Catholic Church, an institution he reveres but which, under the leadership of a `Lavender Mafia' of left-wing gay bishops, has become shambolic and depraved. Yes, there really is a gay mafia. And yes, their outfits are fabulous.

Who is the real Pope Francis? And can the Church survive him? Milo Yiannopoulos traces the origins of the Church's descent into sin and shame, pointing the finger at left-wing reformers, trendy progressive bishops, gay clergy, and ultimately, Francis himself. The Catholic Church hasn't had a crisis like this since the Reformation. It won't survive unless it learns how to talk to men again, sets aside transitory political nostrums like environmentalism and identity politics, and gets back to worshipping Almighty God.

In the Closet of the Vatican exposes the rot at the heart of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church today. This brilliant piece of investigative writing is based on four years' authoritative research, including extensive interviews with those in power.

The celibacy of priests, the condemnation of the use of contraceptives, the cover up of countless cases of sexual abuse, the resignation of Benedict XVI, misogyny among the clergy, the dramatic fall in Europe of the number of vocations to the priesthood, the plotting against Pope Francis - all these issues are clouded in mystery and secrecy.

In the Closet of the Vatican is a book that reveals these secrets and penetrates this enigma. It derives from a system founded on a clerical culture of secrecy which starts in junior seminaries and continues right up to the Vatican itself. It is based on the double lives of priests and on extreme homophobia. The resulting schizophrenia in the Church is hard to fathom. But the more a prelate is homophobic, the more likely it is that he is himself gay.

`Behind rigidity there is always something hidden, in many cases a double life'. These are the words of Pope Francis himself and with them the Pope has unlocked the Closet.

No one can claim to really understand the Catholic Church today until they have read this book. It reveals a truth that is extraordinary and disturbing.

How do we take in the beauty of our planet while processing the losses? What trees can survive in the city? Which animals can survive in the wild? How do any of us-humans, animals, trees-find a forest we can call home?

In these moving, thought-provoking essays Sophie Cunningham considers the meaning of trees and our love of them. She chronicles the deaths of both her fathers, and the survival of P-22, a mountain lion in Griffith Park, Los Angeles; contemplates the loneliness of Ranee, the first elephant in Australia; celebrates the iconic eucalyptus and explores its international status as an invasive species.

City of Trees is a powerful collection of nature, travel and memoir writing set in the context of global climate change. It meanders through, circles around and sometimes faces head on the most pressing issues of the day. It never loses sight of the trees.

The poems collected in apparently appear like visions, intensely experienced but barely real. Where does a poem come from? Over four sections this question is considered. The first section gathers poems spring-boarding from the clues and solutions to crossword puzzles; the second recounts unsettling dreams in the form of prose poems or microfictions; `dial', the longest section, acknowledges the bewildering sense of daily time and the dizzying spectacle of social and worldly matters contained within. Finally, from a more restful or relaxed vantage, `the random couch' presents a number of drifting poems, written while the poet was lounging on the sofa.

The era of the LP began in 1967, with 'Sgt Pepper'; The Beatles didn't just collect together a bunch of songs, they Made An Album. Henceforth, everybody else wanted to Make An Album.

The end came only fifteen years later, coinciding with the release of Michael Jackson's 'Thriller'. By then the Walkman had taken music out of the home and into the streets and the record business had begun trying to reverse-engineer the creative process in order to make big money. Nobody would play music or listen to it in quite the same way ever again.

It was a short but transformative time. Musicians became 'artists' and we, the people, patrons of the arts. The LP itself had been a mark of sophistication, a measure of wealth, an instrument of education, a poster saying things you dare not say yourself, a means of attracting the opposite sex, and, for many, the single most desirable object in their lives.

This is the story of that time; it takes us from recording studios where musicians were doing things that had never been done before to the sparsely furnished apartments where their efforts would be received like visitations from a higher power. This is the story of how LPs saved our lives.

A Sunday Times Book of the Year `A memoir as soulful, wryly witty, and lyrical as it is candid and courageous' - Booklist, starred review `Impressive, candid and vivid' The Times `Beautifully written' Sunday Times Sally Field is one of the most celebrated, beloved and enduring actors of our time, and now she tells her story for the first time in this intimate and haunting literary memoir. In her own words, she writes about a challenging and lonely childhood, the craft that helped her find her voice, and a powerful emotional legacy that shaped her journey as a daughter and a mother.

Sally Field has an infectious charm that has captivated audiences for more than five decades, beginning with her first television role at the age of 17. From Gidget's sweet-faced `girl next door' to the dazzling complexity of Sybil to the Academy Award-winning ferocity and depth of her role in Norma Rae and Mary Todd Lincoln, Field has stunned audiences time and time again with her artistic range and emotional acuity. Yet there is one character who always remained hidden: the shy and anxious little girl within.

With raw honesty and the fresh, pitch-perfect prose of a natural-born writer, and with all the humility and authenticity her fans have come to expect, Field brings readers behind the scenes for not only the highs and lows of her star-studded early career in Hollywood, but deep into the truth of her lifelong relationships including, most importantly, her complicated love for her own mother.

Powerful and unforgettable, In Pieces is an inspiring and important account of life as a woman in the second half of the twentieth century.

Hahndorf artist Nora Heysen was the first woman to win the Archibald Prize, and Australia's first female painter to be appointed as an official war artist. A portraitist and a flower painter, Nora Heysen's life was defined by an all-consuming drive to draw and paint. In 1989, aged 78, Nora re-emerged on the Australian art scene as the nation's major art institutions restored her position after years of artistic obscurity. Extensively researched by the author, Nora Heysen- a portrait is the first biography of the artist, and it has been enthusiastically embraced by the Heysen family.

In an engaging personal narrative interwoven with historical research, Martin Kemp discusses a life spent immersed in the world of Leonardo, and his encounters with great and lesser academics, collectors and curators, devious dealers and unctuous auctioneers, major scholars and authors, pseudo-historians and fantasists. He shares how he has grappled with swelling legions of `Leonardo loonies', walked on the eggshells of vested interests in academia and museums, and fended off fusillades of non-Leonardos, sometimes more than one a week. Examining the greatest masterpieces, from the Last Supper to Salvator Mundi, through the expert's eye, we learn first-hand of the thorny questions that surround attribution, the scientific analyses that support the experts' interpretations, and the continuing importance of connoisseurship.

Throughout, from the most scholarly interpretations to the popularity of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, we are reminded of Leonardo's unique genius and wonder at how an artist from 500 years ago continues to make such compelling posthumous demands on all those who engage with him.

Explore the grand gardens and forests of Europe and Britain with esteemed landscape designer William Guilfoyle, as he did with his wife on their honeymoon.

The Guilfoyles took their Grand Tour honeymoon in 1890, at the height of William's reputation as the architect of one of the world's great botanical masterpieces, Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens. His visits to impressive landscapes-as diverse as Kew Gardens, Versailles and the wild gardens of England-inspired a series of illustrated articles, which were published to great acclaim on his return to Australia.

Moving stories. Delicious recipes. The power of food to bring family together.

When a child cooks with their grandmother they learn much more than a recipe - they absorb culture and family history, and start to discover their place in the world.

This book contains the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, their extraordinary stories - and also their recipes - captured while they cook traditional meals with their grandchildren.

Just Add Love is a work of history and photography, a cookbook and a testament to the last generation of survivors in Australia, as they transmit history, culture, sustenance and love through the powerful ritual of food. This unique and moving combination of stories and recipes will touch your heart and inspire you to cook for the people you love, and to gather around the table together. Like grandma encouraged you to.

'We lolled in the sea until it was time to return for tea, another of Mother's gastronomic triumphs. Tottering mounds of hot scones; crisp paper-thin biscuits; cakes like snowdrifts, oozing jam; cakes dark, rich and moist, crammed with fruit; brandy snaps brittle as coral and overflowing with honey. Conversation was almost at a standstill; all that could be heard was the gentle tinkle of cups, and the heartfelt sigh of some guest, accepting another slice of cake.' MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMLAS, Gerald Durrell

In DINING WITH THE DURRELLS, David Shimwell has delved into the Durrell family archives to uncover Louisa Durrell's original recipes for the scones, cakes, jams, tarts, sandwiches and more that are so deliciously described by the Durrell family.

From her recipe for 'Gerry's Favourite Chicken Curry' to 'Dixie-Durrell Scones with Fig and Ginger Jam', and including the family stories and photos that accompany them, this book will transport you to long lunches enjoyed on the terrace of a strawberry-pink villa, sunshine filled picnics among the Corfu olive groves and candlelit dinners overlooking the Ionian Sea.

Everything moves more slowly when I walk, the world seems softer . . . ' From the bestselling author of Silence comes an illuminating exploration of the joy of walking. From those perilous first steps to great expeditions, from walking to work to walking to the North Pole, Erling Kagge explains that he who walks lives longer, and better.

'After having put my shoes on and let my thoughts wander, I am sure of one thing - to put one foot in front of the other is one of the most important things we do.

The Roman Forum, the Leaning Tower, the Piazza San Marco- these are the sights synonymous with Italy. But such landmarks only scratch the surface of this magical country's offerings. In See You in the Piazza, Frances Mayes introduces us to the Italy only the locals know, as she and her husband, Ed, eat and drink their way through fifteen regions - from Friuli to Sardinia. Along the way, she seeks out the cultural and historic gems not found in traditional guidebooks.

Frances conjures the enchantment of the backstreets, the hubbub of the markets, the dreamlike wonder of that space between lunch and dinner when a city cracks open to those who would wander or when a mind is drawn into the pages of a delicious book - and discloses to us the secrets that only someone who is on intimate terms with a place could find.

Taking us nearly from pole to pole - from modern megacities to some of the earth's most remote regions -- and across decades of lived experience, Barry Lopez gives us his most far-ranging yet personal work to date, in a book that describes his travels to six regions of the world- from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galapagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica.

Lopez also probes the long history of humanity's quests and explorations, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today's ecotourists in the tropics.

Throughout his journeys - to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe - and via friendships with scientists, archaeologists, artists and local residents, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.

Horizon is a revelatory, epic work that voices concern but also hope - a book that makes you see the world differently, and that is the crowning achievement by one of America's great voices.

Rowley's best friend Greg Heffley has been chronicling his middle-school years in thirteen Diary of a Wimpy Kid journals... and counting. But it's finally time for readers to hear directly from Rowley in a journal of his own. In Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid, Rowley writes about his experiences and agrees to play the role of biographer for Greg along the way. (After all, one day Greg will be rich and famous, and everyone will want to know his life's story.) But Rowley is a poor choice for the job, and his biography of Greg is a hilarious mess. Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid- Rowley Jefferson's Journal offers readers a new way to look at the Wimpy world - one fans won't want to miss!

All of the seven tales in this collection have one thing in common. They are stories of young women who face darkness and danger, but who prevail against the odds because of the brightness of their spirit and the strength of their resolve.

The Moon is saved from the bog by the courage of those who love her bright light ...
Fenella stays silent for seven years and weaves cloth from nettles to save her brothers ...
Nastia must learn to survive alone in the land of the midnight sun ...
Jiayang, daughter of the Emperor of China, devises an impossible quest for her unwanted suitors ...
Jennet holds fast to her beloved, despite the cruel enchantments the Faery Queen casts upon him ...
Sofiya outwits the Tsar and so wins his love and respect ...
Molly Whuppie outwits a giant and saves her sisters ...

These stories of bright young women will remind readers of their own inner radiance, which gives them power to illuminate the whole world.

This is a story of a plastic bag and a bird - a cautionary tale about taking care of our environment as well as being a wonderful showcase of some of the famous sights of Sydney.

'One day, a long time ago when I lived in Kirribilli, Sydney, I packed a lunch and set out to walk to the Botanic Gardens...

I crossed the harbour bridge then climbed down to Circular Quay. I walked beside the sea wall, past the Opera House until I reached the Botanic Gardens.

Deep in the heart of the Red Centre lived a mob of red kangaroos. During a long, hot drought, the thirsty roos went searching for water.

When three different groups of kangaroos - red, blue and yellow - all come to the same watering hole, they aren't sure what to make each of other at first. But they soon they discover that they aren't so different after all. As the three groups become one, new colours appear, and soon the roos have created a beautiful rainbow!

On the surface, this is a fun, light-hearted story about the colour spectrum, but on deeper level it is a beautiful celebration of diversity.

A tender, moving story of a child waiting at home for the return of his father from serving in WWI.

During World War I, Australian and New Zealand soldiers on the front were sent Christmas care packages in a tin billy. The Anzac Billy is the heartwarming story of a little boy packing a billy with all his father's favourite things - added to by mum and grandma - even though he realises there is no way that the billy can actually go to a particular soldier.

Perfectly researched, exquisitely rendered, no reader could fail to be moved by this story of Australian and New Zealand soldiers.

Wilam: A Birrarung Story is one day on a vital, flourishing river.

As ngua rises, Bunjil soars over mountain ash, flying higher and higher as the wind warms. Below, Birrarung begins its long winding path down to palem warreen. Wilam - home.

Yarra Riverkeeper Andrew Kelly joins award-winning picture book duo Aunty Joy Murphy and Lisa Kennedy to tell the Indigenous and geographical story of Melbourne's beautiful Yarra River, from its source to its mouth; from its pre-history to the present day.

Trim was a cat born for adventure ...

This is the true story of a courageous, mischievous and fearless cat called Trim, who sailed with Matthew Flinders on his voyages to map the coastline of Australia and beyond.

From best-selling creators Corinne Fenton and Craig Smith, this charming picture book brings Trim's story to life.

Age range 3 to 6 A simple, universal story of a day in the life of Little Bird as she sings the world alive, flies with Cloud, travels with Wind, nestles with Moon and dreams of flying among the stars. Sally Morgan's beautiful words and Johnny Warrkatja Malibirr's sensitive artwork combine to make this a beautiful, distinctive publication with global appeal. Johnny infuses his illustrations with his fine-art aesthetic, his traditional motifs and a quirky sense of humour.

The exquisite first outcome of Magabala's Kestin Indigenous Illustrator Award. Funded by the Kestin Family Foundation, the aim of the award is to mentor Indigenous artists or emerging illustrators in the production of children's picture books.

Teacher's notes available here.

Sam Waver's life has always been pretty quiet. A bit of a loner, he struggles to make friends, and his busy parents often make him feel invisible. Luckily for Sam, his older brother, Jason, has always been there for him. Sam idolises Jason, who seems to have life sorted - he's kind, popular, amazing at football, and girls are falling over themselves to date him.

But then one evening Jason calls his family together to tell them that he's been struggling with a secret for a long time. A secret which quickly threatens to tear them all apart. His parents don't want to know and Sam simply doesn't understand.

Because what do you do when your brother says he's not your brother at all? That he thinks he's actually . . . your sister?

Mums got a cool new job at the animal hospital... but now Weirs house is like a ZOO!  How can Bella and Weir help look after all the animals AND finish their school project?! It wont be easy... but it will be FUNNY!