Abbey's Advocate

Conjuring a dark future for Australia, Closing Down gives us a glimpse into a world fractured by a financial crisis and the effects of global climate change. The inaugural winner of The Richell Prize for Emerging Writers.

No matter how strange, difficult and absurd the world becomes, some things never change. The importance of home. Of love. Of kindness to strangers. Of memories and dreams.

Australia's rural towns and communities are closing down, much of Australia is being sold to overseas interests, states and countries and regions are being realigned worldwide. Town matriarch Granna Adams, her grandson Roberto, the lonely and thoughtful Clare - all try in their own way to hold on to their sense of self, even as the world around them fractures.

What would you do if all you held to be familiar was lost? More importantly, where do you belong?

An extraordinary debut novel from an exciting new Australian voice.

Hideaway Self Storage, located just off Brisbane’s M1, is in decline. But manager Ken Guy and his assistant Bruce carry on with their daily rituals even as the facility falls apart around them. Lately, however, certain tenants have been disappearing off the face of the earth, leaving behind units full of valuable items. Ken has no idea where these rent defaulters have gone but he thinks he might be able to turn their abandoned 'things' into a nice little earner that could help save his business.

But the disappearances are accompanied by strange occurrences such as Bruce's inexplicable late-night excursions, Ken's intensifying aversion to fluorescent lights, and Ken's girlfriend's intensifying aversion to Ken. While further along the motorway, construction of a rival facility – Pharoah's Tomb Self Storage, part of a nationwide franchise – hints at a mysterious past and a precarious future.

A surprisingly funny study of physical and mental deterioration, David Cohen's second novel is never quite what it seems. Sharply attuned to the absurdities of contemporary urban life, it is that rare literary beast, a comic drama that is at once intelligent and suspenseful, humorous and deep.

Life can be tricky when you're a girl in between relationships, careers and cities ... and sometimes you have to face some uncomfortable truths. The sparkling debut from comic TV and radio presenter, Anna Daniels.

Lucy Crighton has just moved in with some gregarious housemates called Brian and Denise... who are her parents. She's also the proud mother of Glenda, her beloved 10-year-old... kelpie. And she has absolutely no interest in the dashing son of her parents' new next-door neighbour... well, maybe just a little.

When you're the girl in between relationships, careers and cities, you sometimes have to face some uncomfortable truths... like your Mum's obsession with Cher, your father's unsolicited advice, and the fact there's probably more cash on the floor of your parents' car than in your own bank account.

Thank goodness Lucy's crazy but wonderful best friend, Rosie, is around to cushion reality, with wild nights at the local Whipcrack hotel, escapades in Japanese mud baths, and double dating under the Christmas lights in London.

But will Lucy work out what she really wants to do in life and who she wants to share it with?

Girl in Between is a warm, upbeat and often hilarious story about life at the crossroads. Featuring an endearing and irrepressible cast of characters, it will have you chuckling from start to finish.

The settlement of Wahrheit, founded in exile to await the return of the Messiah, has been waiting longer than expected. Pastor Helfgott has begun to feel the subtle fraying of the community's faith. Then Matthias Orion shoots his wife and himself, on the very day their son Benedict returns home from boarding school. Benedict is unmoored by shock, severed from his past and his future. Unable to be inside the house, unable to speak, he moves into the barn with the horses and chooks, relying on the animals' strength and the rhythm of the working day to hold his shattered self together. The pastor watches over Benedict through the year of his crazy grief: man and boy growing, each according to his own capacity, as they come to terms with the unknowable past and the frailties of being human.

If someone asked me who should write a satirical novel about the advertising business - someone with inside knowledge who could write well and was extremely clever and amusing - I'd say, 'See if Hugh Mackay is available.' John Clarke Lincoln The Hunter is living the dream. Universally admired and terrifically charming, he has a formidable reputation in the world of advertising, and is the jewel in the crown of agency KK&C. When Linc is handed the reins of the high-budget, high-profile campaign for the groundbreaking new snack 'The Ripper', he knows it's his chance to leverage his way to greater success and greener, more glamourous pastures. No matter that it will leave KK&C floundering in his wake ...Ruthless in his pursuit of professional success, it doesn't occur to Linc that he himself might be the pawn in this great game of advertising, where no method - be it a calculated office affair or 'disruptive skydiving' - is off limits to aid in selling the dream. In this laugh-out-loud funny and frighteningly believable satire, Hugh Mackay lays bare the machinations of this multi-million-dollar industry, and leaves you wondering just where the line between parody and reality falls.

'Maria knew about guilt. It was a stubborn, pervasive and toxic emotion, and incredibly difficult to shake. Especially if really, deep down, you didn't think you deserved to let it go.' Maria Lindsey is content. She spends her solitary days tending her bees and creating delicious honey products to fund orphaned children. A former nun, her life at Honeybee Haven has long been shaped by her self-imposed penance for terrible past events. But the arrival of two letters heralds the shattering of Maria's peaceful existence. Pushing aside the misgivings of her family and friends, Tansy Butterfield, on the eve of her marriage, made a serious deal with her adored husband, Dougal. A deal she'd intended to honour. But, seven years on, Tansy is finding her current feelings difficult to ignore. And on top of those not-really-there feelings, Dougal wants to move to Canada! With captivating characters and an intriguingly tangled mystery, The Beekeeper's Secret celebrates families in all their joys and complications.

Winner of the 2016 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction, a gripping and beautifully written novel for fans of Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout.

'I have no use for forgiveness, not yet. But other ideas like that, kindness, for example, I think that is fundamental. Resurrection; I like that too. And love, of course, love, love, love.'

Alice Murray learns to play the piano aged three on an orange orchard in rural Australia. Recognising her daughter’s gift, her mother sends Alice to boarding school in the bleak north of England, and there Alice stays for the rest of her childhood. Then she’s offered a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, and on a summer school in Oxford she meets Edward, an economics professor who sweeps her off her feet.

Alice soon finds that Edwards is damaged, and she’s trapped. She clings to her playing and to her dream of becoming a concert pianist, until disaster strikes. Increasingly isolated as the years unravel, eventually Alice can’t find it in herself to carry on. Then she hears the most beautiful music from the walls of her house …

This novel’s love story is that of a woman who must embrace life again if she is to survive. Inspiring and compelling, it explores the dark terrain of violence and the transformative powers of music and love.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MILES FRANKLIN AWARD 2017
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDIE AWARD FOR FICTION 2017

'All in?' Kieran pulled me up, and the others followed. We gathered around the bigger tree. No one asked Matty - he just reached up and put his right hand on the trunk with ours.

Kieran cleared his throat. 'We swear, on these trees, to always be friends. To protect each other - and this place.'

Finding those carved trees forged a bond between Jay and her four childhood friends and opened their eyes to a wider world. But their attempt to protect the grove ends in disaster, and that one day on the river changes their lives forever.

Seventeen years later, Jay finally has her chance to make amends. But at what cost? Not every wrong can be put right, but sometimes looking the other way is no longer an option.

When a whale washes up on the shore of a beach there is only one surety: it must explode. Sometimes a bystander, anticipating the inevitable, pokes the gaseous figure; the skin rips, and it is done. Our world can feel like the brimming belly of a beached whale, the pressure building, an indeterminate force compelling us to take an explosive action, even when it makes little to no sense. A girl takes a pair of shears to a black-dashed line on her skin; a woman tries to stem the flow of snake venom in the blood of a man who is already dead; an epileptic wears a crash helmet 'round the clock; a man with only one good arm cuts it off with a chainsaw, and how? After every explosion, a throng of people approach the beach cautiously, collecting the debris together. Introduced by celebrated Australian essayist, poet and critic, Fiona Wright, And Watch the Whale Explode is the 31st edition of the UTS Writers' Anthology.

Evie Pleasant, nee Bouvier, is back in town. In a figure-hugging skirt, high heels and a pin-up hairdo, she's unrecognisable from the wild child who waged war on Sweet Meadow in her youth. She's made a promise to herself: 'No swearing. No drinking. No stealing. No fires.' Trailing a reluctant 16-year-old daughter and armed with cake making equipment, Evie's divorce and impending poverty has made her desperate enough to return to Sweet Meadow to seduce her former partner-in-crime and start again. But the townsfolk have long memories and the renegade ex-boyfriend is now the highly-respected pastor. Evie's cakes have a job to do.

The natural world, in Tim Winton's novels, is as much a living presence as any character, and what is true of his work is true of his life. From boyhood, his relationship with sea, scrub and swamp has been as vital as blood relations. The country has seeped into him, with its rhythms, its dangers, its strange sustenance. This is the story of how that relationship came to be, and also a passionate exhortation for all of us to feel the ground beneath our feet. Much more so than any political idea, the physical entity of Australia defines us, in ways we too often forget. Wise, rhapsodic, exalted, Island Home is a beautiful, evocative, sometimes provocative, investigation of how the land makes us who we are.

1874: Only days before she is to leave the foundling home where she grew up, Agnes Resolute discovers that, as a baby, she had been abandoned with a small token of her mother: a unicorn button.

Agnes always believed her mother had been too poor to keep her, but after working as a laundress in the home she recognises the button as belonging to Genevieve Breckby, the beautiful and headstrong daughter of a local noble family. Agnes had seen Genevieve once, in the local village, and had never forgotten her.

Despite having no money, Agnes will risk everything in a quest that will take her from the bleak moors of northern England to the harsh streets of London, then on to Paris and Ceylon. As Agnes follows her mother's trail, she makes choices that could cost her dearly. Finally, in Australia, she tracks Genevieve down. But is Genevieve capable of being the mother Agnes hopes she will be?

An enthralling story about love, motherhood and choosing who you belong to in the world by the bestselling author of Lighthouse Bay and Ember Island.

On the third day of Ramadan, the village wakes to find the severed heads of nine of its sons stacked in banana crates by the bus stop. One of them belonged to one of the most wanted men in Iraq, known to his friends as Ibrahim the Fated. How did this good and humble man earn the enmity of so many? What did he do to deserve such a death? The answer lies in his lifelong friendship with Abdullah Kafka and Tariq the Befuddled, who each have their own remarkable stories to tell. It lies on the scarred, irradiated battlefields of the Gulf War and in the ashes of a revolution strangled in its cradle. It lies in the steadfast love of his wife and the festering scorn of his daughter. And, above all, it lies behind the locked gates of The President's Gardens, buried alongside the countless victims of a pitiless reign of terror. Translated from the Arabic by Luke Leafgren

If you're lost, they'll find you... Evie Boyd is fourteen and desperate to be noticed. It's the summer of 1969 and restless, empty days stretch ahead of her. Until she sees them. The girls. Hair long and uncombed, jewelry catching the sun. And at their centre, Suzanne black-haired and beautiful. If not for Suzanne, she might not have gone. But, intoxicated by her and the life she promises, Evie follows the girls back to the decaying ranch where they live. Was there a warning? A sign of what was coming? Or did Evie know already that there was no way back?

One Parisian summerA building of separate livesAll that divides them will soon collapse...In a forgotten corner of Paris stands a building.Within its walls, people talk and kiss, laugh and cry; some are glad to sit alone, while others wish they did not. A woman with silver-blonde hair opens her bookshop downstairs, an old man feeds the sparrows on his windowsill, and a young mother wills the morning to hold itself at bay. Though each of their walls touches someone else's, the neighbours they pass in the courtyard remain strangers. Into this courtyard arrives Edward. Still bearing the sweat of a channel crossing, he takes his place in an attic room to wait out his grief.But in distant corners of the city, as Paris is pulled taut with summer heat, there are those who meet with a darker purpose. As the feverish metropolis is brought to boiling point, secrets will rise and walls will crumble both within and without Number 37...

What would you do if your closest friend tried to steal your life?

Today I know that L. is the sole reason for my powerlessness. And that the two years that we were friends almost made me stop writing for ever.

Overwhelmed by the huge success of her latest novel, exhausted and unable to begin writing her next book, Delphine meets L.

L. is the kind of impeccable, sophisticated woman who fascinates Delphine; a woman with smooth hair and perfectly filed nails, and a gift for saying the right thing. Delphine finds herself irresistibly drawn to her, their friendship growing as their meetings, notes and texts increase. But as L. begins to dress like Delphine, and, in the face of Delphine's crippling inability to write, L. even offers to answer her emails, and their relationship rapidly intensifies. L. becomes more and more involved in Delphine's life until she patiently takes control and turns it upside down: slowly, surely, insidiously.

Based on a True Story is a chilling novel of suspense that will leave you questioning the truth and its significance long after you have turned the final page.

**THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER** I'd Die for You is a collection of the last remaining unpublished short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, iconic author of The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night. All eighteen short fictions collected here were lost in one sense or another: physically lost, coming to light only recently; lost in the turbulence of Fitzgerald's later life; lost to readers because his editors sometimes did not understand what he was trying to write. These fascinating stories offer a new insight into the arc of Fitzgerald's career, and demonstrate his stylistic agility and imaginative power as a writer at the forefront of Modern literature. 'There are ostensibly bleak currents running through these stories ...but what really makes an impression is the humour ...In the period he was writing these stories he talked of his desire to open up a new vein in his writing. He was happy when he died, [the editor Anne Margaret] Daniel notes, and working hard - a somewhat shock revelation. It's a tantalising thought' Independent

Jacob and Julia Bloch are about to be tested... By Jacob's grandfather, who won't go quietly into a retirement home. By the family reunion, that everyone is dreading. By their son's heroic attempts to get expelled. And by the sexting affair that will rock their marriage. A typical modern American family, the Blochs cling together even as they are torn apart. Which is when catastrophe decides to strike... Confronting the enduring question of what it means to be human with inventiveness, playfulness and compassion, Here I Am is a great American family novel for our times, a masterpiece about how we live now.

The Pope is dead. Behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel, one hundred and eighteen cardinals from all over the globe will cast their votes in the world's most secretive election. They are holy men. But they have ambition. And they have rivals. Over the next seventy-two hours one of them will become the most powerful spiritual figure on earth.

When you have grown up as I have, there is no security in not knowing things, in avoiding the ugliest truths because they can't be faced... Because that is what happened the last time, and that is why my siblings and I have grown up in a cursed house, children of cursed parents... Jocasta is just fifteen when she is told that she must marry the King of Thebes, an old man she has never met. Her life has never been her own, and nor will it be, unless she outlives her strange, absent husband. Ismene is the same age when she is attacked in the palace she calls home. Since the day of her parents' tragic deaths a decade earlier, she has always longed to feel safe with the family she still has. But with a single act of violence, all that is about to change. With the turn of these two events, a tragedy is set in motion. But not as you know it. In Children of Jocasta, Natalie Haynes reimagines the Oedipus and Antigone stories from the perspectives of two of the women who have often been overlooked; retelling the myth to reveal a new side of an ancient story.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2016 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2016 

Plunge into this hypnotic tale of female sexuality and power - from the Man Booker shortlisted author of Swimming Home  Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast.  Rose is suffering from a strange illness andher doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the infamous and controversial Dr Gomez - a man of questionable methods and motives. Intoxicated by thick heat and the seductive people who move through it, both women begin to see their lives clearly for the first time in years.  Through the opposing figures of mother and daughter, Deborah Levy explores the strange and monstrous nature of womanhood. Dreamlike and utterly compulsive, Hot Milk is a delirious fairy tale of feminine potency, a story both modern and timeless.

'Lively remains a sublime storyteller' Guardian on How It All Began 'More stylish than many writers half her age ...Lively knows a thing of two about storytelling.' The Times on How It All Began A dream house that is hiding something sinister; two women having lunch who share a husband; an old woman doing her weekly supermarket shop with a secret past that no one could guess; a couple who don't know each other at all even after fifteen years together; and, in the story from which this collection takes its name, a bird and a servant girl in ancient Pompeii who cannot converse, but share a perfect understanding. In this new and varied collection of short stories, Penelope Lively shows that she remains a master of her craft, and one of our finest English writers.

I find writing novels a challenge, writing stories a joy. If writing novels is like planting a forest, then writing short stories is more like planting a garden. Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.

The brilliantly gripping new novel from the New York Times best-selling author of The Pilot's Wife (an Oprah's Book Club selection). Hot breath on Grace's face. Claire is screaming, and Grace is on her feet. As she lifts her daughter, a wall of fire fills the window. Perhaps a quarter of a mile back, if even that. Where's Gene? Didn't he come home? 1947. After a summer-long drought, fires are racing along the coast of Maine, ravaging two hundred thousand acres - the largest fire in the state's history. Five months pregnant, Grace Holland is left alone to protect her two toddlers when her husband Gene joins the volunteers fighting to bring the fire under control. Along with her best friend, Rosie, and Rosie's two young children, the women watch in horror as their houses go up in flames, then walk into the ocean as a last resort. They spend the night frantically trying to save their children. When dawn comes, they have miraculously survived, but their lives are forever changed: homeless, penniless, and left to face an uncertain future in a town that no longer exists. As Grace awaits news of her husband's fate, she is thrust into a new world in which she must make a life on her own, beginning with absolutely nothing - she must find work, a home, a way to provide for her children. In the midst of devastating loss, Grace discovers glorious new freedoms - joys and triumphs she could never have expected her narrow life with Gene could contain - and her spirit soars. And then the unthinkable happens, and Grace's bravery is tested as never before.

An unforgettable cast of small-town characters copes with love and loss from the No. 1 New York Times bestselling and Man Booker long-listed author of My Name is Lucy Barton Anything is Possible tells the story of the inhabitants of rural, dusty Amgash, Illinois, the hometown of Lucy Barton, a successful New York writer who finally returns, after seventeen years of absence, to visit the siblings she left behind. Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout's place as one of America's most respected and cherished authors.

This Was a Man is the captivating final instalment of the Clifton Chronicles, a series of seven novels that has topped the bestseller lists around the world, and enhanced Jeffrey Archer's reputation as a master storyteller.

This Was a Man opens with a shot being fired, but who pulled the trigger, and who lives and who dies?

In Whitehall, Giles Barrington discovers the truth about his wife Karin from the Cabinet Secretary. Is she a spy or a pawn in a larger game?

Harry Clifton sets out to write his magnum opus, while his wife Emma completes her ten years as Chairman of the Bristol Royal Infirmary, and receives an unexpected call from Margaret Thatcher offering her a job.

Sebastian Clifton becomes chairman of Farthings Kaufman bank, but only after Hakim Bishara has to resign for personal reasons. Sebastian and Samantha's talented daughter, Jessica, is expelled from the Slade School of Fine Art, but her aunt Grace comes to her rescue.

Meanwhile, Lady Virginia is about to flee the country to avoid her creditors when the Duchess of Hertford dies, and she sees another opportunity to clear her debts and finally trump the Cliftons and Barringtons.

In a devastating twist, tragedy engulfs the Clifton family when one of them receives a shocking diagnosis that will throw all their lives into turmoil.

From the day it was stolen from me I had dreamed of recapturing Bebbanburg. The great fort was built on a rock that was almost an island, it was massive, it could only be approached on land by a single narrow track – and it was mine. Britain is in a state of uneasy peace. Northumbria’s Viking ruler, Sigtryggr, and Mercia’s Saxon Queen Aethelflaed have agreed a truce. And so England’s greatest warrior, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, at last has the chance to take back the home his traitorous uncle stole from him so many years ago – and which his scheming cousin still occupies.

But fate is inexorable and the enemies Uhtred has made and the oaths he has sworn combine to distract him from his dream of recapturing Bebbanburg. New enemies enter into the fight for England’s kingdoms: the redoubtable Constantin of Scotland seizes an opportunity for conquest and leads his armies south. Britain’s precarious peace threatens to turn into a war of annihilation. But Uhtred is determined that nothing, neither the new enemies nor the old foes who combine against him, will keep him from his birthright. He is the Lord of Bebbanburg, but he will need all the skills he has learned in a lifetime of war to make his dream come true.

There is only one bond that I trust: between a woman and her sisters. We never take our eyes off each other. In love and in rivalry, we always think of each other. When Katherine of Aragon is brought to the Tudor court as a young bride, the oldest princess, Margaret, takes her measure. With one look, each knows the other for a rival, an ally, a pawn, destined - with Margaret's younger sister Mary - to a sisterhood unique in all the world. The three sisters will become the queens of England, Scotland and France. United by family loyalties and affections, the three queens find themselves set against each other. Katherine commands an army against Margaret and kills her husband James IV of Scotland. But Margaret's boy becomes heir to the Tudor throne when Katherine loses her son. Mary steals the widowed Margaret's proposed husband, but when Mary is widowed it is her secret marriage for love that is the envy of the others. As they experience betrayals, dangers, loss and passion, the three sisters find that the only constant in their perilous lives is their special bond, more powerful than any man, even a king.

A girl as beautiful as Simonetta Cattaneo never wants for marriage proposals in 15th Century Italy, but she jumps at the chance to marry Marco Vespucci. Marco is young, handsome and well-educated. Not to mention he is one of the powerful Medici family's favoured circle.

Even before her marriage with Marco is set, Simonetta is swept up into Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici's glittering circle of politicians, poets, artists, and philosophers. The men of Florence-most notably the rakish Giuliano de' Medici - become enthralled with her beauty. That she is educated and an ardent reader of poetry makes her more desirable still.

But it is her acquaintance with a young painter, Sandro Botticelli, which strikes her heart most. Botticelli immediately invites Simonetta, newly proclaimed the most beautiful woman in Florence, to pose for him. As Simonetta learns to navigate her marriage, her place in Florentine society, and the politics of beauty and desire, she and Botticelli develop a passionate intimacy, one that leads to her immortalisation in his masterpiece, The Birth of Venus.

Alyssa Palombo's The Most Beautiful Woman in Florence vividly captures the dangerous allure of the artist and muse bond with candour and unforgettable passion.

In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a “seigneur,” for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters – barkskins. René suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi’kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures. But Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business.

Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years – their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand, under stunningly brutal conditions; the revenge of rivals; accidents; pestilence; Indian attacks; and cultural annihilation. Over and over again, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse.

Proulx’s inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid – in their greed, lust, vengefulness, or their simple compassion and hope – that we follow them with fierce attention. Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable and compelling American writers, and Barkskins is her greatest novel, a magnificent marriage of history and imagination.

From the Booker-shortlisted author comes a sensuous, evocative novel exploring the lives of women in Victorian London, for fans of Sarah Waters, Emma Donoghue and Kate Atkinson

2011: When Madeleine loses her job as a lecturer, she decides to leave her riverside flat in cobbled Stew Lane, where history never feels far away, and move to Apricot Place. Yet here too, in this quiet Walworth cul-de-sac, she senses the past encroaching: a shifting in the atmosphere, a current of unseen life.

1851: and Joseph Benson has been employed by Henry Mayhew to help research his articles on the working classes. A family man with mouths to feed, Joseph is tasked with coaxing testimony from prostitutes. Roaming the Southwark streets, he is tempted by brothels' promises of pleasure – and as he struggles with his assignment, he seeks answers in Apricot Place, where the enigmatic Mrs Dulcimer runs a boarding house.

As these entwined stories unfold, alive with the sensations of London past and present, the two eras brush against each other – a breath at Madeleine's neck, a voice in her head – the murmurs of ghosts echoing through time. Rendered in immediate, intoxicating prose, The Walworth Beauty is a haunting tale of desire and exploitation, isolation and loss, and the faltering search for human connection; this is Michèle Roberts at her masterful best.

An atmospheric and brilliant novel of Paris, love, madness and photography by the bestselling writer of The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, Dominic Smith.

When the vision came, he was in the bathtub. So begins the madness of Louis Daguerre. In 1847, after a decade of using poisonous mercury vapours to cure his daguerreotype images, his mind is plagued by delusions. Believing the world will end in a year, Daguerre creates his 'Doomsday List': ten items he must photograph before the final day. The list includes a portrait of Isobel Le Fournier, a woman he has always loved but not spoken to in half a century.

In this luminous novel, Dominic Smith reinvents the life of one of photography's founding fathers. Louis Daguerre's story is set against the backdrop of a Paris prone to bohemian excess and social unrest. It is here, amid this strange and beguiling setting, that Louis Daguerre sets off to capture his doomsday subjects.

Louis enlists the help of the womanising poet Charles Baudelaire, and a jaded and beautiful prostitute named Pigeon. Together they scour the Paris underworld for images worthy of Daguerre's list. But Louis is also confronted by a chance to reunite with the only woman he's ever loved. Half a lifetime ago, Isobel Le Fournier kissed Louis Daguerre in a wine cave outside of Orleans. The result was a proposal, a rejection, and a misunderstanding that outlasted three kings and an emperor. Now, in the countdown to his apocalypse, Louis wants to understand why he has carried the memory of that kiss for so long.

Anne Boleyn: A King's Obsession by bestselling historian Alison Weir, author of Katherine Of Aragon: The True Queen, is the second captivating novel in the Six Tudor Queens series. An unforgettable portrait of the ambitious woman whose fate we know all too well, but whose true motivations may surprise you. Essential reading for fans of Philippa Gregory and Elizabeth Chadwick.

The young woman who changed the course of history.

Fresh from the palaces of Burgundy and France, Anne draws attention at the English court, embracing the play of courtly love.

But when the King commands, nothing is ever a game.

Anne has a spirit worthy of a crown - and the crown is what she seeks. At any price.

Anne Boleyn. The second of Henry's Queens. Her story. History tells us why she died. This powerful novel shows her as she lived.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER FOR FICTION 2017
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER FOR FICTION 2016

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and she is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.

In Whitehead's razor-sharp imagining of the antebellum South, the Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora and Caesar's first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But its placid surface masks an infernal scheme designed for its unknowing black inhabitants. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher sent to find Cora, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.

At each stop on her journey, Cora encounters a different world. As Whitehead brilliantly recreates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once the story of one woman's ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shatteringly powerful meditation on history.

A true story of cultural clash and hedonism gone awry as a good girl from a conservative Chinese-Australian family becomes a Shanghai showgirl.

From Sydney suburbia to the grey clouds of London, Jenevieve Chang has been running away for as long as she can remember. Now – along with other Westerners trying to escape the 2008 GFC – she has arrived in Shanghai, a city from her family’s past. But this glittering metropolis once known as the ‘Whore of the Orient’ throws up more hurdles than she bargains for.

As her marriage collapses and she struggles to fit in with this over-the-top new world, Jenevieve searches for a place to call home. And then she finds it: Chinatown, Shanghai’s first Vaudeville, Variety and Burlesque Club. She will remake herself as one of the Chinatown Dolls, the most sought-after showgirls in town.

When the club begins to spectacularly derail, though, and with memories of the past pressing in, Jenevieve finds herself more lost than ever. Struggling with her identity amid the hedonism and history of Shanghai, she realises that she’s following in the footsteps of her parents and her grandparents in unexpected ways she hadn’t realised. Now she must decide between the pleasure of propping up illusions or the possible redemption of facing up to her past.

Vibrant, bold and raw, The Good Girl of Chinatown is a memoir weaving multiple narratives across three generations and continents. It is a story about the boundaries we choose to cross and the roles we choose to play. And it is a story about family and the ways we try – but sometimes fail – to be good for them.

This book is for every woman who's been told success is as simple as Lean In, Say Yes, Live Your Best Life, Beat Your Fear, Follow Your Dream... and then feel #soblessed.

It's for guilty friends, bad mums, crap wives, imperfect feminists, rebellious daughters and any girl with a big mouth and at least one foot in it.

It's for any woman who's ever asked: 'Am I the only one who isn't quite coping?'

Here is Mia Freedman's low road to the top - a fearless, hilarious, inspiring and surprising collection of modern misadventures to read, relate to and rejoice in, then share with all the women in your life.

All it took for a tiny, no-name pup from the pound was someone to believe in him - and save him from death row - and an internet sensation was born. With his extremely good looks and pawfect cheekbones, Pikelet now lives the charmed life in inner-city Sydney, a foster brother to an extraordinary number of other pooches and pups, as well as an unexpected pair of ducklings and one larger-than-life pig. With his signature style and good humour, Pikelet shares the highs and lows of pet rescue and foster care, and will show you that a dog's life is the only life, after all. Illustrated throughout with iconic photos from his social media as well as never-before-seen snapshots from Life of Pikelet HQ, Pikelet's memoir is as unique as the dog himself. 'Go grab yourself a cuppa, find a comfy spot on your couch and settle in. The story that I'm about to share with you is the very extraordinary life of me, Pikelet Butterwiggle Stoll.'

‘I’m awake again, shaking, sweating. My heart is racing and I stare into the dark. I can’t close my eyes. I fear the images – too many to count. They swim behind my eyelids; I am drowning in their terror. Suicides, heart attacks, murders, car crashes. The images come again and again. All the dead people... I have to touch their legs, their arms, reach into their pockets, look into their unseeing eyes for clues.’

From the moment two police officers walked into his primary school to give a talk, Simon Gillard knew he wanted to be a policeman. It was a dream that stayed with him right through high school, and as soon as he was old enough he applied to join the force.

He began as an optimistic young probationary constable with a great sense of humour and passion for the job. But as his career began to build, so too did the number of cases he worked on, from high-profile murder investigations to paedophile rings, suicides to the investigation even of a fellow officer.

As the cases mounted, Simon started to suffer panic attacks and to drink heavily. Nights were the most difficult: he would shut his eyes only to be tormented by nightmares about missing young women, and schoolboys not much older than his own son, whose lives had been devastated. He sought help but was encouraged to just ‘go back to work’ and ended up making four attempts on his own life. He was later formally diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and invalided out of the force.

In this powerful memoir, Simon reveals the details of the cases he worked on, how the police force operates, and how one man’s life can spiral so out of control. He is now working to create awareness about PTSD and has written this book to help other sufferers.

I am by nature a private person. Secrets are different from privacy. They are things you are forced to keep to yourself, by family, friends, by your own shame. Secrets like these come to the surface one day and demand an airing.Emerging from an unconventional, boisterously happy childhood, Mary-Rose MacColl was a rebellious teenager. And when, at the age of fifteen, her high-school teacher and her husband started inviting Mary-Rose to spend time with them, her parents were pleased that she now had the guidance she needed to take her safely into young adulthood.It wasn't too long, though, before the teacher and her husband changed the nature of the relationship with overwhelming consequences for Mary-Rose. Consequences that kept her silent and ashamed through much of her adult life. Many years later, safe within a loving relationship, all of the long-hidden secrets and betrayals crashed down upon her and she came close to losing everything.In this poignant and brave true story, Mary-Rose brings these secrets to the surface and, in doing so, is finally able to watch them float away.

From bogan to boned and beyond - a full-frontal 'femoir' by one of Australia's best-loved journalists From bogan to boned and beyond - a full-frontal femoir Tracey Spicer was always the good girl. Inspired by Jana Wendt, this bogan from the Brisbane backwaters waded through the 'cruel and shallow money trench' of television to land a dream role: national news anchor for a commercial network. But the journalist found that, for women, TV was less about news and more about helmet hair, masses of makeup and fatuous fashion, in an era when bosses told you to 'stick your tits out', 'lose two inches off your arse', and 'quit before you're too long in the tooth'. Still, Tracey plastered on a smile and did what she was told. But when she was sacked by email after having a baby, this good girl turned 'bad', taking legal action against the network for pregnancy discrimination. In this frank and funny 'femoir' - part memoir, part manifesto - Tracey 'sheconstructs' the structural barriers facing women in the workplace and encourages us all to shake off the shackles of the good girl.

The recent TV award winning adaption The Durrells left its 7 million fans with questions: What happened to the family - and what took them to Corfu in the first place? This book has the answers.

Simon Nye's TV series, The Durrells, is based loosely on Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy and in particular his much-loved bestseller, My Family and Other Animals. These books in turn are based somewhat loosely on actual events. The real-life Durrells went to Corfu at the urging of Lawrence Durrell, who was already living on the island with his wife, Nancy Myers. Their intent was to keep the family together as his mother, Louisa, was drinking heavily and recovering from a breakdown; 'We can be proud of the way we brought her up,' Larry said, only half-jokingly, of the family's subsequent Corfu sojourn.

Michael Haag's book covers the background to the Durrell family's years in Corfu, including their time in India, where all the children were born, and where their father, a brilliant civil engineer, had died. It recalls the real life characters the Durrells encountered on Corfu, notably the biologist and poet Theodore Stephanides, and the taxi driver, Spiros Halikiopoulos. And Haag tells the story of how the Durrells left Corfu, including Margo's return intent on joining the Greek resistance, and Leslie's romance in England with the family's Corfite maid and friend, Maria Kondos. Further chapters cover what happened to the family in later life; here, Lawrence and Gerald Durrell's biographies are well known, but little has previously been written of Margo, Leslie and Louisa. Haag has fascinating stories to tell of them all.

'Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I'm sitting now.'

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion, to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carre has always written from the heart of modern times.

In this, his first memoir, le Carre is as funny as he is incisive - reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels.  Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire, or visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, or celebrating New Year's Eve with Yasser Arafat, or interviewing a German terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in his The Constant Gardener, le Carre endows each happening with vividness and humour, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood.

Best of all, le Carre gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.

Henry Marsh has spent a lifetime operating on the surgical frontline. There have been exhilarating highs and devastating lows, but his love for the practice of neurosurgery has never wavered. Prompted by his retirement from his full-time job in the NHS, and through his continuing work in Nepal and Ukraine, Henry has been forced to reflect more deeply about what forty years spent handling the human brain has taught him.

Moving between encounters with patients in his London hospital, to those he treats in the more extreme circumstances of his work abroad, Henry faces up to the overwhelming burden of responsibility that can come with trying to reduce human suffering. Unearthing memories of his early days as a medical student, and the experiences that shaped him as a young surgeon, he explores the difficulties of a profession that deals in probabilities rather than certainties, and where the consequences of your decisions alter not just the life of a patient but also of those around them. The overpowering human urge to prolong life can often come at a great cost to those who are living it, and to those who love them.

In this searing, provocative and deeply personal memoir, the bestselling author of Do No Harm finds new purpose in his own life as he approaches the end of his professional career and a fresh understanding of what matters to us all in the end.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sportswriter comes a deeply personal account of his parents – an intimate portrait of American mid-twentieth century life, and a celebration of family love

Richard Ford's parents volunteered little about their early lives – and he rarely asked. Later, he pieced their stories together from anecdote, history and the occasional photograph, frozen moments linking him to another time.

Edna Akin, a dark-eyed Arkansas beauty whose convent education was cut short by her itinerant parents, fell in love aged only seventeen. Parker Ford was a tall country boy with a warm, hesitant smile, who was working at a grocery in Hot Springs. They married and began a life on the road in the American South, as Parker followed his travelling salesman's job. The 1930s were like one long weekend, a swirl of miles traversed, cocktails drunk and hotel rooms vacated: New Orleans, Memphis, Texarkana. Then a single, late child was born, changing everything.

In this book, Richard Ford evokes a vivid panorama of mid-twentieth century America, and an intimate portrait of family life. Exploring children's changing perception of their parents, he also reflects on the impact of loss and devotion. Written with the intelligence, precision and humanity for which Ford is renowned, Between Them is both a son's great act of love and a redeeming meditation on family.

The Only Girl in the World is an inspiring testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

Maude Julien’s childhood was defined by the iron grip of her father, who was convinced his daughter was destined for great deeds. His plan began when he adopted Maude’s mother and indoctrinated her with his esoteric ideals. Her mission was to give him a daughter as blonde as she was, and then to take charge of the child’s education. That child was Maude, on whom her father conducted his outrageous experiment to raise the perfect ‘super-human’ being.

The three lived in an isolated mansion in northern France, where her father made her undergo endless horrifying endurance tests. Maude had to hold an electric fence without flinching. Her parents locked her in a cellar overnight and ordered her to sit still on a stool in the dark, contemplating death, while rats scurried at her feet.

How did this girl, with her loveless and lonely childhood, emerge so unscathed, so full of the empathy that was absent in her childhood? How did she manage to escape?

Maude was sustained by her love of nature and animals and her passion for literature. In writing this memoir, Maude Julien shows that it is possible to overcome severe trauma. She recounts her chilling and deeply moving story in a compelling and compassionate voice.

From storytelling phenomenon The Moth: a collection about risk, courage, and facing the unknown, drawn from the best stories ever told on their stages. All These Wonders features voices both familiar and new. Storytellers include writer Jung Chang and comedian Louis C.K, as well as a hip hop 'one hit wonder', an astronomer gazing at the surface of Pluto for the first time, and a young female spy risking everything as part of Churchill's secret army during World War II. They share their ventures into uncharted territory - and how their lives were changed forever by what they found there. These true stories have been carefully selected and adapted to the page by the creative minds at The Moth, and encompass the very best of the 17,000+ stories performed in live Moth shows around the world. Filled with a variety of humourous, moving, and gripping tales from all walks of life, it is timed to celebrate the Moth's 20th anniversary year.

Exploring the origins of Christianity, this book looks at why it was that people first in Judea and then in the Roman and Greek Mediterranean world became susceptible to the new religion. Robert Knapp looks for answers in a wide-ranging exploration of religion and everyday life from 200 BC to the end of the first century. Survival, honour and wellbeing were the chief preoccupations of Jews and polytheists alike. In both cases, the author shows, people turned first to supernatural powers. According to need, season and place polytheists consulted and placated vast constellations of gods, while the Jews worshipped and contended with one almighty and jealous deity. Professor Knapp considers why any Jew or polytheist would voluntarily dispense with a well-tried way of dealing with the supernatural and trade it in for a new model. What was it about the new religion that led people to change beliefs they had held for millennia and which in turn, within four centuries of the birth of its messiah, led it to transform the western world? His conclusions are as convincing as they are sometimes surprising.

The only historic figure outside the early Christian tradition to whom the Gospels ascribe a dialogue with Jesus is the first-century Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. Presiding over the trial and execution of Jesus, Pilate is a figure who has straddled history and legend for over two thousand years. Now, Aldo Schiavone presents a comprehensive, revisionist biography of Pilate that meticulously reconstructs the social, religious and political context in which his fateful encounter with Jesus took place. Drawing on a wealth of original research, Schiavone weaves together the sources, from epigraphs to the Gospels, from Josephus to Tacitus and Philon, to create a portrait that approaches its subject as if for the first time, without any other intent than to try to explain what happened.

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

The Roman conquests of Macedonia in the 2nd century BC led directly to the extension of their authority over the troublesome tribes of Thrace to the south of the Danube. But their new neighbour on the other side of the mighty river, the kingdom of the Dacians, was to pose an increasing threat to the Roman empire. Inevitably this eventually provoked Roman attempts at invasion and conquest. 

It is a measure of Dacian prowess and resilience that several tough campaigns were required over more than a century before their kingdom was added to the Roman Empire. It was one of the Empire's last major acquisitions (and a short-lived one at that). Dr Michael Schmitz traces Roman involvement in the Danube region from first contact with the Thracians after the Third Macedonian War in the 2nd century BC to the ultimate conquest of Dacia by Trajan in the early years of the 2nd Century AD.

Like the other volumes in this series, this book gives a clear narrative of the course of these wars, explaining how the Roman war machine coped with formidable new foes and the challenges of unfamiliar terrain and climate.  Specially-commissioned colour plates bring the main troop types vividly to life in meticulously-researched detail.

The inside account of Australia's national intelligence organisation as it grappled with continuing espionage from foreign agents and the rise of terrorist attacks on Australian soil during the years of the Fraser and Hawke governments. This is the third and final volume of the Official History of ASIO.

The Cold War between the West and the Soviet Bloc didn't end with detente in 1975: it just went underground. Until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, tensions between the superpowers continued to play out across the world.

Until now, few would have known of the surprising extent of clandestine operations in Australia by foreign intelligence operatives and the violence-prone activities of local extremist groups from the Middle East, Armenia and Croatia in the 1970s and 1980s. Meanwhile, prompted by probing royal commissions and reviews, ASIO was being systematically transformed into a modern intelligence organisation.

The Secret Cold War uncovers behind the scenes stories of the Hilton bombing in Sydney, assassinations of diplomats, the Combe-Ivanov affair, and the new threat from China. It reveals that KGB officers were able to recruit and run agents in Australia for many years, and it follows ASIO's own investigations into persistent allegations of penetration by Soviet moles.

The Secret Cold War is the third and final volume of The Official History of ASIO.

The unknown story of a unique RAAF squadron, its men and its mission to halt the Japanese advance in the Pacific.

March 1942. Java is about to fall. An Australian military dispatch rider and a Dutch air force transport pilot embark on a frightening escape from the advancing Japanese that takes them from Bandung to a crash landing just north of Darwin. Both would later join a unique band of flyers determined to strike back at the enemy.

Bomber Boys is the extraordinary and little known story of more than 100 Dutch airmen, stranded in Australia with no country to return to, who were joined by a contingent of Australians to make up the RAAF's No. 18 (Netherlands East Indies) Squadron. Formed in Canberra in April 1942, the squadron flew operational coastal patrols before eventually being relocated to the secret MacDonald Airfield, north of Pine Creek in the Northern Territory, and eventually Batchelor, near Darwin.

This is, however, more than a story about the 900 bombing raids, reconnaissance missions and attacks on Japanese shipping that the squadron flew in its three years of existence under Australian control. At its heart, is a powerful and compelling story of a group of very different men, thrown together for a common purpose, and the strange and sometimes difficult friendships they formed.

English, Dutch, French, American and Russian ships anhjored alongside convict vessels in Sydneys peaceful harbour. they carried Matthew Flinders and other famous navigators; political prisoners, daring escapees, Aborigines and Maoris making their first international journeys, and governors to and from their difficult postings. The South Head Lookout Post which recorded these arrivals and departures has been manned since January 1790, making it the longest permanently manned site in Australia. This illustrated book reveals the first years and the various voyages that began and ended on the shores of the bright young Sydney colony.

'Consistently illuminating ...Like all the best stories, it is about the timeless tides of power and influence ...trade deals can sometimes be sexy, thrilling and epic' Sinclair McKay, Spectator Life in Europe was fundamentally changed in the 16th century by the astonishing discoveries of the New World and of direct sea routes to Asia. To start with England was hardly involved and London remained a gloomy, introverted medieval city. But as the century progressed something extraordinary happened. Stephen Alford's evocative, original and fascinating new book uses the same skills that made his widely praised The Watchers so successful, bringing to life the network of merchants, visionaries, crooks and sailors who changed London forever. In a sudden explosion of energy English ships were suddenly found all over the world - trading with Russia and the Levant, exploring Virginia and the Arctic, and fanning out across the Indian Ocean. London's Triumph is above all about the people who made this possible - the families, the guild members, the money-men who were willing to risk huge sums and sometimes their own lives in pursuit of the rare, exotic and desirable. Their ambitions fuelled a new view of the world - initiating a long era of trade and empire, the consequences of which we still live with today.

Sometime heir to the English throne, courtier in danger of losing her head, spy-mistress and would-be architect of a united Catholic Britain: Lady Margaret Douglas is the Tudor whose life demands a wider telling.

As niece to Henry VIII and half-sister to James V of Scotland, the beautiful and Catholic Margaret held a unique and precarious position in the English court. Throughout her life, she was to navigate treacherous waters: survival necessitated it. Yet Margaret was no passive pawn or bit-part player. As the Protestant Reformations unfolded across the British Isles and the Tudor monarchs struggled to produce heirs, she had ambitions of her own. She wanted to see her family ruling a united, Catholic Britain. When her niece Mary, Queen of Scots was left a widow, Margaret saw her chance. Through a thoroughly Machiavellian combination of timing, networking and family connections, she set in motion a chain of shattering events that would one day see her descendants succeed to the crowns of England, Ireland and Scotland.

Morgan Ring has revived the story of Lady Margaret Douglas to vivid and captivating effect. From a richly detailed backdrop of political and religious turbulence Margaret emerges, full of resilience, grace and intelligence. Drawing on previously unexamined archival sources, So High a Blood presents a fascinating and authoritative portrait of a woman with the greatest of ambitions for her family, her faith and her countries.

The human story of the vast changes now transforming China, with religion sweeping up millions of people in ways which are a profound threat to the Communist Party.

In no society on Earth was there such a ferocious attempt to eradicate all trace of religion as in modern China. But now, following a century of violent antireligious campaigns, China is awash with new temples, churches, and mosques - as well as cults, sects, and politicians trying to harness religion for their own ends. Driving this explosion of faith is uncertainty - over what it means to be Chinese, and how to live an ethical life in a country that discarded traditional morality and is still searching for new guideposts.

The Souls of China is the result of some fifteen years of studying and travelling around China. The message of Ian Johnson's extraordinary book is that China is now experiencing a 'Great Awakening' on a vast scale. Everywhere long-suppressed religions are rebuilding, often in new forms, and reshaping the values and behaviours of entire communities.

Ian Johnson is as happy explaining the wonders of the lunar calendar as talking to the yinyang man who ensures proper burials. He visits meditation masters and the charismatic head of a Chengdu church. The result is a rich and funny work that challenges conventional wisdom about China. Xi Jinping, China's current leader, has put a return to morality and Chinese tradition at the heart of his ideas for his country - but, Johnson asks, at what point will the rapid spread of belief form an unmanageable challenge to the Party's monopoly on power?

An extraordinary story of one woman's attempt to survive the horrors of Vichy France.

The French sensation, now in English translation.

Françoise Frenkel was a Jewish woman born in Poland and enamoured of all things literary and French. In 1921 she set up the first French-language bookshop in Berlin, recognising the craving for French culture in that city in the wake of the First World War. Her business was a success – attracting diplomats and celebrities, authors and artists. But life in Berlin for a Jewish woman and a foreigner soon became untenable.

Frenkel was forced to flee to Paris and compelled to keep moving as she attempted to survive in a world disintegrating around her. Her observations of and interactions with the French people, both those who would give her up to the Nazi authorities and those who risked their own lives and families by offering her refuge, show how humanity strives to assert itself even in the darkest times.

Frenkel's book, written with piercing clarity and sensibility in the immediate aftermath of her escape to Switzerland, was originally published in 1945 in Geneva. But only recently was a copy of this forgotten work discovered and a decision made at French publisher Gallimard to republish it, seventy years later.

Very little is known of Françoise Frenkel's subsequent life, except that she returned to live in Nice where she had spent much of her time during the war, and where she died in 1975.

No Place to Lay One's Head is the story of refugees, those fleeing terror, the world over.

The sensational account of the overwhelming role of drug-taking in the Third Reich - from Hitler and his entourage to ordinary troops.

The Nazis styled themselves as warriors against moral degeneracy. Yet, as Norman Ohler's gripping bestseller reveals, the entire Third Reich was permeated with drugs: cocaine, heroin, morphine and, most of all, methamphetamines, or crystal meth, used by everyone from factory workers to housewives, and crucial to troops' resilience - even partly explaining German victory in 1940.

The promiscuous use of drugs at the very highest levels also impaired and confused decision-making, with Hitler and his entourage taking refuge in potentially lethal cocktails of stimulants administered by the physician Dr Morell as the war turned against Germany. Blitzed forms a crucial missing piece of the story of WW2.

In 2011, a series of anti-government uprisings shook the Middle East and North Africa in what would become known as the Arab Spring. Few could predict that these convulsions, initially hailed in the West as a triumph of democracy, would give way to brutal civil war, the terrors of the Islamic State, and a global refugee crisis. But, as New York Times bestselling author Scott Anderson shows, the seeds of catastrophe had been sown long before. In this gripping account, Anderson examines the myriad complex causes of the region's profound unraveling, tracing the ideological conflicts of the present to their origins in the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003 and beyond. From this investigation emerges a rare view into a land in upheaval through the eyes of six individuals-the matriarch of a dissident Egyptian family; a Libyan Air Force cadet with divided loyalties; a Kurdish physician from a prominent warrior clan; a Syrian university student caught in civil war; an Iraqi activist for women's rights; and an Iraqi day laborer-turned-ISIS fighter. A probing and insightful work of reportage, Fractured Lands offers a penetrating portrait of the contemporary Arab world and brings the stunning realities of an unprecedented geopolitical tragedy into crystalline focus.

From 1979 to 1989 Soviet troops engaged in a devastating war in Afghanistan that claimed thousands of casualties on both sides. While the Soviet Union talked about a 'peace-keeping' mission, the dead were shipped back in sealed zinc coffins. Boys in Zinc presents the honest testimonies of soldiers, doctors and nurses, mothers, wives and siblings who describe the lasting effects of war. Weaving together their stories, Svetlana Alexievich shows us the truth of the Soviet-Afghan conflict: the killing and the beauty of small everyday moments, the shame of returned veterans, the worries of all those left behind. When it was first published in the USSR in 1991, Boys in Zinc sparked huge controversy for its unflinching, harrowing insight into the realities of war.

In the second volume of his acclaimed new history of the Second World War, James Holland examines the momentous turning points of 1941–1943: Hitler’s invasion of Russia; America’s entry into the conflict; the devastating Thousand Bomber Raids over Germany; the long struggle in the deserts of North Africa; and the defeat of the U-boats in the crucial Battle of the Atlantic.

As in his first volume, Germany Ascendant , he interweaves his account of the well-known events of the period with the personal stories of individuals caught up in them - on all sides. Through interviews, letters, diaries and reports, he allows us to see the war not just from the perspective of politicians, military commanders and strategists, but also through the eyes of civilians bombed out of their homes, resistance members stranded in the frozen Norwegian winter, sailors risking their lives in the Atlantic convoys, German aces striving for supremacy in the air, and ordinary soldiers battling for survival in the scorching sands of Libya.

He also looks behind the scenes at the all-important ‘machinery’ of war: the manufacturing, farming and vital supply lines that underpinned the entire conflict and ultimately determined its course. From the battle fronts on land, sea and air, to the streets, fields and factories of Britain, America and Germany, he paints a dramatic and compelling portrait of these pivotal years when the tide began to turn.

Combining his own research with only recently accessible archive material, Holland looks afresh at this cataclysmic conflict, reassessing long-held views and challenging conventional assumptions. The result is ground-breaking history that redefines the war in the West and makes us think again about the events that shaped our modern world.

As Hitler’s Blitzkrieg vanquished one European country after another in the chaos-filled spring of 1940, and the United States and the Soviet Union were still on the sidelines, London suddenly found itself the de facto capital of Europe, a haven for Europe’s struggling governments in exile: Holland, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Belgium, Poland and France.

Last Hope Island is the stirring story of these conquered states and citizens as they pooled their efforts to help Britain survive the German onslaught, joining the RAF, bolstering their home countries’ resistance movements with British help, and using their considerable talents as code breakers, weapon designers and double agents. It will be the first book to focus on the extensive contributions made by all the captive nations of Europe to the Allied victory.

New York Times–bestselling author Olson will highlight this untold WWII story with a cast of colourful international characters, much as she did to such great effect in her 2010 book, Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in its Darkest, Finest Hour. Last Hope Island is, in many ways, the natural follow-up to Citizens, which told the story of the Anglo-American partnership in World War II from the viewpoint of three prominent Americans in London.

A notable success, Citizens has sold 115,000 copies in all formats and continues to sell well four years after its publication. In addition to being a book club favorite, it’s been touted by a number of prominent figures in the public eye, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tom Brokaw, and Madeleine Albright, who has described Olson as ‘our era’s foremost chronicler of World War II politics and diplomacy.’ Sir Peter Westmacott, British ambassador to the U.S., and Matthew Barzun, American ambassador to Britain, both have written about Citizens and have made speeches recommending it.

WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE AND THE JQ-WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE

When he receives an invitation to deliver a lecture in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, international lawyer Philippe Sands begins a journey on the trail of his family's secret history. In doing so, he uncovers an astonishing series of coincidences that lead him halfway across the world, to the origins of international law at the Nuremberg trial.

Interweaving the stories of the two Nuremberg prosecutors (Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin) who invented the crimes or genocide and crimes against humanity, the Nazi governor responsible for the murder of thousands in and around Lviv (Hans Frank), and incredible acts of wartime bravery, East West Street is an unforgettable blend of memoir and historical detective story, and a powerful meditation on the way memory, crime and guilt leave scars across generations.

A brilliant historical narrative of London, Paris and New York in the Age of Revolution, just as they were transforming into the great global cities we know them to be today.

London, Paris and New York in the eighteenth century, as today, were places where political authority, commerce and money, art and intellectual life intersected. They straddled an Atlantic world where ships powered by nothing more than wind, currents and human muscle criss-crossed the sea, carrying with them goods, ideas and above all people: men and women, bewigged aristocrats and lawyers, rough-handed craftworkers, quill-wielding bluestockings and doughty fishwives. But the cities were also home to dangerous criminals, corrupt politicians - and slaves.

Rebel Cities explores the stormy debate about the nature of cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: were they places of enlightenment, sparkling wells of progress and civilisation, or were they dens of vice, degeneracy and disorder? Against a backdrop of accelerating urban expansion and revolution in both Europe and North America, revolutionary burghers of these extraordinary cities expended ink, paint, breath and, sometimes, blood in their struggle to understand, control and master the urban world.

Drawing on hundreds of letters, travelogues and eye-witness accounts, Mike Rapport vividly evokes the sights, sounds and smells of these cities, masterfully weaving their history with the politics of revolution.

When New Yorkers and Parisians experienced their revolution, when their cities went to war, and when Londoners engaged in political protest, they underwent the whole torrent and exhilaration of human emotions. Determining the character of the cities through their inhabitants, as well as their architecture, topography and the events that shaped them, this magnificent book evokes what it was like for all parts of society to live in London, Paris and New York in one of the most transformative periods in the history of civilisation.

Native Lands is Norman Davies's account of a global circumnavigation, of the places he visited and the history he found there, from Abu Dhabi to Singapore, the settlement of Tasmania to the short-lived Republic of Texas. As in Vanished Kingdoms, Davies's historical gaze penetrates behind the present to see how things became as they are, and how peoples came to tell themselves the stories which make up their identities. Everywhere, it seems, human beings have been travelling - pushing out others or arriving in terra nullius - since the beginning of recorded time. To whom is a land truly native? As always, Norman Davies has his eye on the historical horizon as well as on what is close at hand, and brilliantly complicates our view of the past.

Juicy, crunchy, tart: with its multitude of seeds and juice akin to blood, it's not hard to see why the pomegranate has so appealed to the imagination. After being held in high esteem in the rituals of the polytheistic religions of the ancient world, the pom - egranate came to be revered in Christianity, Islam and Judaism. This book explores how people throughout history interacted with pomegranates, featuring a cast of well-known characters from the Ashurnasirpal to Anne Boleyn, from Sandro Botticelli to Salvador Dali. It is a cornucopia of strange and fascinating anecdotes about this very special fruit whose health benefits are so highly regarded today.

There's no better guide through mind-expanding questions such as what the nature of space and time is, how we fit within the universe, and how the universe fits within us than Neil deGrasse Tyson. But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in digestible chapters consumable any time and anywhere in the busy day. Astrophysics for People in a Hurry reveals just what you need to be fluent and ready for the next cosmic headlines: from the Big Bang to black holes, from quarks to quantum mechanics and from the search for planets to the search for life in the universe.

110 times wider than Earth; 15 million degrees at its core; an atmosphere so huge that Earth is actually within it: come and meet the star of our solar system Light takes eight minutes to reach Earth from the surface of the Sun. But its journey within the Sun takes hundreds of thousands of years. What is going on in there? What are light and heat? How does the Sun produce them and how on earth did scientists discover this? In this astonishing and enlightening adventure, you'll travel millions of miles from inside the Sun to its surface and to Earth, where the light at the end of its journey is allowing you to read right now. You'll discover how the Sun works (including what it sounds like), the latest research in solar physics and how a solar storm could threaten everything we know. And you'll meet the groundbreaking scientists, including the author, who pieced this extraordinary story together.

Humans have become so powerful that we are disrupting the functioning of the earth, to the point where scientists now consider we have entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. Clive Hamilton argues this forces us to rethink what kind of creature we humans are, and to acknowledge the power we still have to change the world for good.

Forget everything you know. Nature is no longer nature. Humans are no longer humans. We have entered a new era - the Anthropocene. Everything has changed.

Humans have become so powerful that we have disrupted the functioning of the Earth, bringing on a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The stable environmental conditions that allowed civilisation to flourish are disappearing.

What does it mean to have arrived at this point, where human history and Earth history collide? Clive Hamilton argues we need to rethink everything. The modern belief that we are free beings making our own future by taking control of our environment is now indefensible. We have rendered the Earth more unpredictable and less controllable; a disobedient planet. And it's too late to turn back the geological clock.

We must face the fact that humans are at the centre of the world, even if we must give up the idea we can control the planet. These truths call for a new kind of anthropocentrism, a philosophy by which we might use our power responsibly and find a way to live on a defiant Earth.

Leading political and environmental commentator on where we have gone wrong, and what to do about it

“Without countervailing voices, naming and challenging power, political freedom withers and dies. Without countervailing voices, a better world can never materialise. Without countervailing voices, wells will still be dug and bridges will still be built, but only for the few. Food will still be grown, but it will not reach the mouths of the poor. New medicines will be developed, but they will be inaccessible to many of those in need.”

George Monbiot is one of the most vocal, and eloquent, critics of the current consensus. How Did We Get into this Mess?, based on his powerful journalism, assesses the state we are now in: the devastation of the natural world, the crisis of inequality, the corporate takeover of nature, our obsessions with growth and profit and the decline of the political debate over what to do.

While his diagnosis of the problems in front of us is clear-sighted and reasonable, he also develops solutions to challenge the politics of fear. How do we stand up to the powerful when they seem to have all the weapons? What can we do to prepare our children for an uncertain future? Controversial, clear but always rigorously argued, How Did We Get into this Mess? makes a persuasive case for change in our everyday lives, our politics and economics, the ways we treat each other and the natural world.

Why is it that despite overwhelming evidence and fundamental science, some people still don't accept that climate change is real and that human activity is contributing to it? Is it because the science is not being understood? Is it because it is difficult to accept that humans are capable of changing the climate? Is there a link between climate change scepticism and ideology? Is there a link between the belief in the science and belief in God? If you know anyone who challenges the science of climate change - or completely denies it's happening at all - then this book is for you, and for them. Don't worry, your friend is human after all, and such behaviour can be explained. A Climate for Denial gives a summary of the reasons your friend is a sceptic.

Geoffrey West's research centres on a quest to find unifying principles and patterns connecting everything from cells and ecosystems to cities, social networks and businesses. SCALE addresses big, urgent questions about global sustainability, population explosion, urbanization, ageing, cancer, human lifespans and the increasing pace of life, but also encourages us to question the world around us. Why can we live for 120 years but not for a thousand? Why does the pace of life continually increase? Why do mice live for just two or three years and elephants for up to 75? Why do companies behave like mice, and are they all destined to die? Do cities, companies and human beings have natural, pre-determined lifespans? Why, in fact, do we die? Are we just a fascinating experiment in natural selection that is ultimately doomed to fail? And what is the origin of the magic number 4 that seems to determine much of physiology and life-history from birth to death? SCALE is a seminal book of breathtaking originality and scope.

The Plant Hunters tells the story of our fascination with plants and the discovery of new species. From ancient times, when Alexander the Great included naturalists in his entourage, this intriguing story moves across the world, as plants such as coconut trees, roses and numerous fruits and vegetables were introduced from one country to another. The book traces the establishment of botanical gardens and the discovery through exploration of plants that made or broke economies, for instance tulips, tea and rubber. Travelling right around the world and throughout history, this is the tale of the botanical pioneers who changed the face of landscapes.

A rigorous, sceptical, deeply reported look at the new science behind the mind's extraordinary ability to heal the body.

Have you ever felt a surge of adrenaline after narrowly avoiding an accident? Salivated at the sight (or thought) of a sour lemon? Felt turned on just from hearing your partner's voice? If so, then you've experienced how dramatically the workings of your mind can affect your body.

Yet while we accept that stress or anxiety can damage our health, the idea of 'healing thoughts' was long ago hijacked by New Age gurus and spiritual healers. Recently, however, serious scientists from a range of fields have been uncovering evidence that our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs can ease pain, heal wounds, fend off infection and heart disease, even slow the progression of AIDS and some cancers.

In Cure, award-winning science writer Jo Marchant travels the world to meet the physicians, patients and researchers on the cutting edge of this new world of medicine. We learn how meditation protects against depression and dementia, how social connections increase life expectancy, and how patients who feel cared for recover from surgery faster. We meet Iraq war veterans who are using a virtual arctic world to treat their burns and children whose ADHD is kept under control with half the normal dose of medication.

We watch as a transplant patient uses the smell of lavender to calm his hostile immune system and an Olympic runner shaves vital seconds off his time through mind-power alone. Drawing on the very latest research, Marchant explores the vast potential of the mind's ability to heal, acknowledges its limitations, and explains how we can make use of the findings in our own lives.

When you feel anxious, angry, happy, or surprised, what's really going on inside you? Most scientists would agree that emotions come from specific parts of the brain, and that we feel them whenever they're triggered by the world around us. The thrill of seeing an old friend, the sadness of a tear-jerker movie, the fear of losing someone you love - each of these sensations arises automatically and uncontrollably within us, finding expression on our faces and in our behaviour, and carrying us away with the experience.

This understanding of emotion has been around since Aristotle. But what if it's wrong? In How Your Emotions Are Made, pioneering psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett draws on the latest scientific evidence to reveal that our ideas about emotion are dramatically, even dangerously, out of date - and that we have been paying the price. Emotions don't exist objectively in nature, Barrett explains, and they aren't pre-programmed in our brains and bodies; rather, they are psychological experiences that each of us constructs based on our unique personal history, physiology and environment.

This new view of emotions has serious implications: when judges issue lesser sentences for crimes of passion, when police officers fire at threatening suspects, or when doctors choose between one diagnosis and another, they're all, in some way, relying on the ancient assumption that emotions are hardwired into our brains and bodies. Revising that conception of emotion isn't just good science, Barrett shows; it's vital to our wellbeing and the health of society itself.

50 Great Myths of Human Evolution uses common misconceptions to explore basic theory and research in human evolution and strengthen critical thinking skills for lay readers and students.

     * Examines intriguing yet widely misunderstood topics, from general ideas about evolution and human origins to the evolution of modern humans and recent trends in the field
     * Describes what fossils, archaeology, and genetics can tell us about human origins
     * Demonstrates the ways in which science adapts and changes over time to incorporate new evidence and better explanations
     * Includes myths such as Humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs; Lucy was so small because she was a child; Our ancestors have always made fire; and There is a strong relationship between brain size and intelligence
     * Comprised of stand-alone essays that are perfect for casual reading, as well as footnotes and references that allow readers to delve more deeply into topics

Quantum physics has turned our commonsense notion of reality on its head. This accessible book describes in layperson's terms the strange phenomena that exist at the quantum level a world of tiny dimensions where nothing is absolutely predictable, where we rethink causality, and information seemingly travels faster than light.

The author, a veteran physicist, uses illuminating analogies and jargon-free language to illustrate the basic principles of the subatomic world and show how they explain everything from the chemistry around us to the formation of galaxies. He also explains how scientists and engineers interact with this nebulous reality and, despite its mysteries, achieve results of great precision.

Up front is a brief history of the early 20th-century "quantum revolution," focusing on some of the brilliant individuals whose contributions changed our view of the world Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, and others. The work concludes with a discussion of the many amazing inventions that have resulted from quantum theory, including lasers, semiconductors, and the myriad of electronic devices that use them.

Lucidly written, this book conveys the excitement of discovery while expanding the reader's appreciation for a science that explores the basis of everything we know.

Australia's avifauna is large, diverse and spectacular, reflecting the continent's impressive range of habitats and evolutionary history. With specially commissioned paintings of over 900 species, The Australian Bird Guide is the most comprehensive field guide to Australian birds ever seen. The guide features close to 250 stunning colour plates, with particular emphasis on providing the fine detail required to identify difficult groups and distinctive plumages. Comprehensive species accounts have been written by a dedicated team of ornithologists to ensure identification details, distribution and status are current and accurate. The Australian Bird Guide sets a new standard in field guides, providing an indispensable reference for all birders and naturalists looking to explore Australia's magnificent and unique birdlife.

With the politics of rage and resentment dominating many Western nations, including Australia, Laura Tingle's calm, perceptive analysis is more relevant than ever. What has happened to good government? Can Malcolm Turnbull apply the lessons of the past to put things right? When leaders surf the wave of discontentment all the way to power, how do they deal with our great expectations? In her crisp, profound and witty essays, Laura Tingle seeks answers to these questions. In Political Amnesia, she ranges from ancient Rome to the demoralised state of the once-great Australian public service, from the jingoism of the past to the tabloid scandals of the internet age. In Great Expectations, Tingle argues that governments can do less since deregulating the economy, but they still talk like they can do more, and we still expect them to do more - leading to anger, frustration and disengagement. In Search of Good Government also contains a major new essay that analyses Turnbull's leadership and brings the story up to date.

Millennials have had bad press for a long time. Now they are fighting back, making their mark on a world that is profoundly different from the one their parents knew. The oldest were in primary school when the Soviet Union collapsed and deregulation swept the west. As they entered adulthood they witnessed 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq and, more recently, watched as Chinese capitalism revived consumerism, the global financial crisis pushed capitalism to the brink, and Facebook was born. This is the best educated, most connected generation ever, but the world they live in does not offer easy pathways. Some millennials are detached and disillusioned, but others are coming up with innovative ideas, experimenting with new ways to live and work. Their vision and energy will shape the future. This special edition of Griffith Review is devoted to the challenges and opportunities this generation is facing and embracing-political uncertainty, climate change, globalisation and economic stagnation.

Australian Lives: An Intimate History illuminates Australian life across the 20th and into the 21st century: how Australian people have been shaped by the forces and expectations of contemporary history and how, in turn, they have made their lives and created Australian society. From oral history interviews with Australians born between 1920 and 1989, fifty narrators reflect on their diverse experiences as children and teenagers, in midlife and in old age, about faith, migration, work and play, aspiration and activism, memory and identity, pain and happiness.

In Australian Lives you can read and in the e-version of the book listen to the comedy, heartache and drama of ordinary Australians’ extraordinary lives. As our interviewee Kim Bear (born 1959) explains, ‘Stories are a great way to inform people about what it is to be human. Even if you say one thing that resonates... there’s that connection made.’

A much-loved cultural institution facing a cost-cutting government, a board dominated by the big end of town, and a management fixated on an ambitious building project. It’s a true story. Culture Heist lifts the veil on what goes on at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Judith White worked there for 12 years and gives an insider’s account, with implications for art lovers and museum-goers everywhere. Culture Heist invites the broadest discussion to address the issues facing the arts in Australia and explore ways to protect its great public institutions.

TO YOU, IDLER. UP! Though your limbs may be corpulent and weary from your sedentary repose, your head a-thunder from an evening of indulgence, your spirit weary from the wretched nine-to-five - fret not, dear man, for within these pages are strategies to replenish and rejuvenate your manly health and well-being. Heed not those who would have you join a house of muscled exertion and toss your technological flim-flam into the long grass. Attend instead to the most gentlemanly of guides, esteemed man of letters Walt Whitman, who will advise on the most vital qualities of health and training for fellows of all ages and inclinations. Undiscovered and unutilized for more than 150 years, here are the choice extracts from Mr Whitman's manifesto, which will provide you with a complete and exact science of manly virtue and vigour.

The astonishing story of autism as it has been discovered and felt by parents, children and doctors.

Nearly seventy-five years ago, Donald Triplett of Forest, Mississippi became the first child diagnosed with autism. In a Different Key tells the extraordinary story of the world his diagnosis created - a riveting human drama that takes us across continents and through some of the great social movements of the twentieth century.

The history of autism is, above all, the story of families fighting for a place in the world for their children. It is the story of women like Ruth Sullivan, who rebelled against a medical establishment that blamed "refrigerator mothers" for causing autism, of fathers who pushed scientists to dig harder for treatments, of parents who forced schools to accept their children. But many others played starring roles too: doctors like Leo Kanner, who pioneered our understanding of autism, scientists who sparred over how to treat autism, and those with autism, like Temple Grandin and Ari Ne'eman, who explained their inner worlds and championed a philosophy of 'neurodiversity'.

This is also a story of fierce controversy: from the question of whether there is truly an autism 'epidemic', and whether vaccines played a part in it, to scandals involving 'facilitated communication', one of many treatments that have proved to be blind alleys. And there are dark turns too: we learn about experimenters feeding LSD to children with autism, or shocking them with electricity to change their behaviour; and the authors reveal, for the first time, that Hans Asperger, discoverer of the syndrome named after him, may have cooperated with the Nazis in sending disabled children to their deaths.

By turns intimate and panoramic, In a Different Key takes us on a journey from an era when families were shamed and children were condemned to institutions, to one in which parents and people with autism push not simply for inclusion, but for a new understanding of autism: as difference rather than disability.

From Facebook's COO and Wharton’s top-rated professor, the #1 New York Times best-selling authors of Lean In and Originals: a powerful, inspiring, and practical book about building resilience and moving forward after life’s inevitable setbacks.

After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. “I was in ‘the void,’” she writes, “a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe.” Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build.

Option B combines Sheryl’s personal insights with Adam’s eye-opening research on finding strength in the face of adversity. Beginning with the gut-wrenching moment when she finds her husband, Dave Goldberg, collapsed on a gym floor, Sheryl opens up her heart and her journal to describe the acute grief and isolation she felt in the wake of his death. But Option B goes beyond Sheryl’s loss to explore how a broad range of people have overcome hardships including illness, job loss, sexual assault, natural disasters, and the violence of war. Their stories reveal the capacity of the human spirit to persevere . . . and to rediscover joy.

Resilience comes from deep within us and from support outside us. Even after the most devastating events, it is possible to grow by finding deeper meaning and gaining greater appreciation in our lives. Option B illuminates how to help others in crisis, develop compassion for ourselves, raise strong children, and create resilient families, communities, and workplaces. Many of these lessons can be applied to everyday struggles, allowing us to brave whatever lies ahead. Two weeks after losing her husband, Sheryl was preparing for a father-child activity. “I want Dave,” she cried. Her friend replied, “Option A is not available,” and then promised to help her make the most of Option B.

We all live some form of Option B. This book will help us all make the most of it.

This book was shortlisted for the Goodreads Best Science & Technology Book Award. Motion sickness. Nightmares. Forgetting people's names. Why did I walk into this room? For something supposedly so brilliant and evolutionarily advanced, the human brain is pretty messy, fallible and disorganised. In The Idiot Brain neuroscientist Dean Burnett celebrates the imperfections of the human brain in all their glory, and the impact of these quirks on our daily lives. Expertly researched and entertainingly written, this book is for anyone who has wondered why their brain seems to be sabotaging their life, and what on earth it is really up to.

Imagine you are a hunter-gatherer some 15,000 years ago. You've got a choice – carry on foraging, or plant a few seeds and move to one of those new-fangled settlements down the valley. What you won't know is that urban life is short and riddled with dozens of new diseases; your children will be shorter and sicklier than you are, they'll be plagued with gum disease, and stand a decent chance of a violent death at the point of a spear.

Why would anyone choose this? This is one of the many intriguing questions tackled by Brenna Hassett in Built on Bones. Using research on skeletal remains from around the world, this book explores the history of humanity's experiment with the metropolis, and looks at why our ancestors chose city life, and why they have largely stuck to it. It explains the diseases, the deaths and the many other misadventures that we have unwittingly unleashed upon ourselves throughout the metropolitan past, and as the world becomes increasingly urbanised, what we can look forward to in the future.

Telling the tale of shifts in human growth and health that have occurred as we transitioned from a mobile to a largely settled species. Built on Bones offers an accessible insight into a critical but relatively unheralded aspect of the human story: our recent evolution.

The Muslim community that is portrayed to the West is a misogynist's playground; within the Muslim community, feminism is often regarded with sneering hostility. Yet between those two views there is a group of Muslim women many do not believe exists- a diverse bunch who fight sexism from within, as committed to the fight as they are to their faith. Hemmed in by Islamophobia and sexism, they fight against sexism with their minds, words and bodies. Often, their biggest weapon is their religion. Here, Carland talks with Muslim women about how they are making a stand for their sex, while holding fast to their faith. At a time when the media trumpets scandalous revelations about life for women from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, Muslim women are always spoken about and over, never with. In Fighting Hislam, that ends.

An explosive, headline-making account from the world-famous economist of what happens when you take on the EU establishment.

What happens when you take on the establishment? In this blistering, personal account, world-famous economist Yanis Varoufakis blows the lid on Europe's hidden agenda and exposes what actually goes on in its corridors of power.

Varoufakis sparked one of the most spectacular and controversial battles in recent political history when, as finance minister of Greece, he attempted to re-negotiate his country’s relationship with the EU. Despite the mass support of the Greek people and the simple logic of his arguments, he succeeded only in provoking the fury of Europe’s political, financial and media elite. But the true story of what happened is almost entirely unknown – not least because so much of the EU’s real business takes place behind closed doors.

In this fearless account, Varoufakis reveals all: an extraordinary tale of brinkmanship, hypocrisy, collusion and betrayal that will shake the deep establishment to its foundations.

As is now clear, the same policies that required the tragic and brutal suppression of Greece’s democratic uprising have led directly to authoritarianism, populist revolt and instability throughout the Western world.

Adults In The Room is an urgent wake-up call to renew European democracy before it is too late.

Public school was literally designed by and for wealthy industrialists at the dawn of the industrial revolution. The first free public schools were even funded by them and designed for them. The core objective of school was to train illiterate farmers sons and daughters the three R’s (Writing Reading & Arithmetic) so that they could become compliant industrial factory workers

Now that we have exited the Industrial age and entered the digital age, what we are learning, or learned at school leaves us entirely unprepared. The lessons school forget will drop some truth bombs about life, the stuff they didn’t tell you because, let’s be honest school wasn’t really designed for you. It will show you how our minds have been shaped from a young age to be ‘followers’ at a time when we need leadership and creativty. It will teach readers the truth about the economic system we live in, in very simple terms. Terms that everyone can understand – regardless of education levels. It will introduce the readers to The new three R’s

Revolution – how we got here, what’s next and why the new skills you need are more human and creative. Things you can learn if you make the effort. A motivational reminder that this revolution is for everyone who can be bothered to participate.

Revenue – The truth about money. This section will go through the different types of money and how to get. Specifically there are 3 types of money: Earned, Invested & Invented.

Reinvention – Now we know what’s needed, this section will teach the techniques to become a modern day expert in X. And all it takes is a personal investment of time. I’ll go through the myriad of tools at our disposable to become more valuable to the market place. I’ll look at the skill bases needed in the future, all of which reside on a higher human level.

There are many books on business planning, and many more on management and entrepreneurship. They tell you what their authors think should be included in a plan.

Planning to Win is different: it explains exactly how to prepare a business plan - it illustrates the elements of a good plan and how they fit together to produce a professional and compelling document. It also includes practical examples: stories from the author's clients that show what happens in the real world.

You may need to raise equity capital and/or a bank loan. You may be planning a new venture (if you are very brave). You may want to win a competitive government grant (if you are very patient). You may be planning a joint venture or a new export business. Perhaps you need to show your parents you can take over the family empire - and succeed. Or you may want to write the best business plan in your management course or business planning competition.

Whatever your situation, one thing is certain: you will understand your business much better if you plan it well. Ultimately, your prosperity is at stake. You are risking your valuable time, your job, perhaps your whole business. Professional business planning will help safeguard your own interests first. If you want to prepare the best business plan and succeed, Planning to Win is for you.

If you would like to control your financial destiny? Do you think you could do a better job with your retirement savings than your super fund, then anything is possible if you Keep It Super Simple (KISS). But, this can seem 'easier said than done'. The government is making far-reaching changes to superannuation rules that come into force - most of them at least - from 1 July 2017. Self managed super fund (SMSF) trustees, need to know about these changes to ensure they are compliant with the often-complex government rules around this area of personal finance. Keep Your SMSF Simple is essential reading for every trustee and member of an SMFS, or anyone contemplating setting up a self managed super fund. Smith and Koken's well-known plain-English, KISS approach provides you with information on changes relating to: * the caps on concessional superannuation contributions and non-concessional superannuation contributions; * the introduction of a cap of $1.6 million on the amount that can continue to be held, or transferred into the pension phase; * the income test relating eligibility to a tax offset for spouse superannuation contributions; * a low income superannuation tax offset for concessional contributions; * more flexibility to the deductibility of personal contributions rule; * catch-up concessional contributions; * removal of tax exempt income for transition to retirement (TTR) pensions; * a reduction of the income and superannuation contributions level where a member pays 30%. As well as explaining these changes, Keep Your SMSF Simple, explains what you need to consider before setting up an SMSF right through to closing it down, and virtually everything in between. This is a 'must have' practical book, which is a 'how to' manual for the 1 million people who are already members on an SMSF and for everyone who has thought about self managing their super.

In the last few years the world has changed in unexpected ways. The power of radical ideas and groups is growing. What was once considered extreme is now the mainstream. But what is life like on the political fringes? What is the real power of radicals?

Radicals is an exploration of the individuals, groups and movements who are rejecting the way we live now, and attempting to find alternatives. In it, Jamie Bartlett, one of the world’s leading thinkers on radical politics and technology, takes us inside the strange and exciting worlds of the innovators, disruptors, idealists and extremists who think society is broken, and believe they know how to fix it.

From dawn raids into open mines to the darkest recesses of the internet, Radicals introduces us to some of the most secretive and influential movements today: techno-futurists questing for immortality, far-right groups seeking to close borders, militant environmentalists striving to save the planet's natural reserves by any means possible, libertarian movements founding new countries, autonomous cooperatives in self-sustaining micro-societies, and psychedelic pioneers attempting to heal society with the help of powerful hallucinogens.

As well as providing a fascinating glimpse at the people and ideas driving these groups, Radicals also presents a startling argument: radicals are not only the symptoms of a deep unrest within the world today, but might also offer the most plausible models for our future.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan created one of the most stupid talking points of all time: "I'm not a scientist, but..." Since then, politicians have repeatedly committed egregious transgressions against scientific knowledge prefaced by this seemingly innocuous phrase.

Yet, as science journalist Dave Levitan reveals, that line is just the tip of the melting iceberg when it comes to rhetorical tools wielded to attack scientific findings that don't cooperate with political agendas. Just listen to Mike Huckabee dismiss climate change as "a sunburn", Donald Trump suggest that vaccines cause autism or Todd Akin's infamous invention of "legitimate rape". With a taxonomer's eye, Levitan captures and categorises these deceptions by chapter, assigning delightful names like "The Butter-Up and Undercut", "The Literal Nitpick", "The Straight-Up Fabrication" and many more.

His sharp humour dismantles America's leaders' deceptive arguments while illuminating the real science behind the worst soundbites from these elected non-scientists.

In these troubled times, even the most pessimistic diagnosis of our future ends with an uplifting hint that things might not be as bad as all that, that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yet, argues Slavoj Zizek, it is only when we have admit to ourselves that our situation is completely hopeless - that the light at the end of the tunnel is in fact the headlight of a train approaching us from the opposite direction - that fundamental change can be brought about. Surveying the various challenges in the world today, from mass migration and geopolitical tensions to terrorism, the explosion of rightist populism and the emergence of new radical politics - all of which, in their own way, express the impasses of global capitalism - Zizek explores whether there still remains the possibility for genuine change. Today, he proposes, the only true question is, or should be, this: do we endorse the predominant acceptance of capitalism as a fact of human nature, or does today's capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms to prevent its infinite reproduction? Can we, he asks, move beyond the failure of socialism, and beyond the current wave of populist rage, and initiate radical change before the train hits?

Michel Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge was published in March 1969; Discipline and Punish in February 1975. Although only six years apart, the difference in tone is stark: the former is a methodological treatise, the latter a call to arms. What accounts for the radical shift in Foucault's approach? Foucault's time in Tunisia had been a political awakening for him, and he returned to a France much changed by the turmoil of 1968. He taught at the experimental University of Vincennes and then moved to a prestigious position at the College de France. He quickly became involved in activist work concerning prisons and health issues such as abortion rights, and in his seminars he built research teams to conduct collaborative work, often around issues related to his lectures and activism. Foucault: The Birth of Power makes use of a range of archival material, including newly available documents at the Bibliotheque nationale de France, to provide a detailed intellectual history of Foucault as writer, researcher, lecturer and activist. Through a careful reconstruction of Foucault's work and preoccupations, Elden shows that, while Discipline and Punish may be the major published output of this period, it rests on a much wider range of concerns and projects.

A leading contrarian thinker explores the ethical paradox at the heart of history's wounds

The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana's celebrated phrase, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right?

David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. He poses hard questions about whether remembrance ever truly has, or indeed ever could, "inoculate" the present against repeating the crimes of the past. He argues that rubbing raw historical wounds-whether self-inflicted or imposed by outside forces-neither remedies injustice nor confers reconciliation. If he is right, then historical memory is not a moral imperative but rather a moral option-sometimes called for, sometimes not. Collective remembrance can be toxic. Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget.
 
Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times-the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11-Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.

For many of us it is the ultimate fear: to die alone. Loneliness is a difficult subject to address because it has such negative connotations in our intensely social world.

But the truth is that wherever there are people, there is loneliness. You can be lonely sitting in the quiet of your home, in the still of an afternoon park, or even when surrounded by throngs of people on a busy street. One need only turn on the radio to hear a crooner telling us just how lonesome we can be. In this groundbreaking book, philosopher Lars Svendsen confronts loneliness head on, investigating both the negative and positive sides of this most human of emotions.
          
Drawing on the latest research in philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences, A Philosophy of Loneliness explores the different kinds of loneliness and examines the psychological and social characteristics that dispose people to them. Svendsen looks at the importance of friendship and love, and he examines how loneliness can impact our quality of life and affect our physical and mental health.

In a provocative move, he also argues that the main problem in our modern society is not that we have too much loneliness but rather too little solitude, and he looks to those moments when our loneliness can actually tell us profound things about ourselves and our place in the world.

The result is a fascinating book about a complex and deeply meaningful part of our very being.

Mary Magdalene is a larger figure than any text, larger than the Bible or the Church; she has taken on a life of her own. She has been portrayed as a penitent whore, a wealthy woman, Christ's wife, an adulteress, a symbol of the frailty of women and an object of veneration. And, to this day, she remains a potent and mysterious figure. In the manner of a quest, this book follows Mary Magdalene through the centuries, explores how she has been reinterpreted for every age, and examines what she herself reveals about woman and man and the divine. It seeks the real Mary Magdalene in the New Testament and in the Gnostic gospels where she is extolled as the chief disciple of Christ. It investigates how and why the Church recast her as a fallen woman, it traces her story through the Renaissance when she became a goddess of beauty and love, and it looks at Mary Magdalene as the feminist icon she has become today.

A new appraisal of theological firebrand Martin Luther, on the 500th anniversary of the religious revolution he triggered - the Protestant Reformation.

The 31st of October 2017 marks the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther pinning his 95 'Theses' - or reform proposals - to the door of his local university church in Wittenberg. Most scholars now agree that the details of this eye-catching gesture are more legend than hammer and nails, but what is certainly true is that on this day (probably in a letter to his local Archbishop in Mainz), the Augustinian Friar and theologian issued an outspokenly blunt challenge to his own Catholic Church to reform itself from within - especially over the sale of 'indulgences' - which ultimately precipitated a huge religious and political upheaval right across Europe and divided mainstream Christianity ever after.

A new, popular biography from journalist Peter Stanford, looking at Martin Luther from within his Catholic context, examining his actual aims for Catholicism as well as his enduring legacy - and where he might fit within the church today.   

Exploring the origins of Christianity, this book looks at why it was that people first in Judea and then in the Roman and Greek Mediterranean world became susceptible to the new religion. Robert Knapp looks for answers in a wide-ranging exploration of religion and everyday life from 200 BC to the end of the first century. Survival, honour and wellbeing were the chief preoccupations of Jews and polytheists alike. In both cases, the author shows, people turned first to supernatural powers. According to need, season and place polytheists consulted and placated vast constellations of gods, while the Jews worshipped and contended with one almighty and jealous deity. Professor Knapp considers why any Jew or polytheist would voluntarily dispense with a well-tried way of dealing with the supernatural and trade it in for a new model. What was it about the new religion that led people to change beliefs they had held for millennia and which in turn, within four centuries of the birth of its messiah, led it to transform the western world? His conclusions are as convincing as they are sometimes surprising.

The Muslim community that is portrayed to the West is a misogynist's playground; within the Muslim community, feminism is often regarded with sneering hostility. Yet between those two views there is a group of Muslim women many do not believe exists- a diverse bunch who fight sexism from within, as committed to the fight as they are to their faith. Hemmed in by Islamophobia and sexism, they fight against sexism with their minds, words and bodies. Often, their biggest weapon is their religion. Here, Carland talks with Muslim women about how they are making a stand for their sex, while holding fast to their faith. At a time when the media trumpets scandalous revelations about life for women from Saudi Arabia to Indonesia, Muslim women are always spoken about and over, never with. In Fighting Hislam, that ends.

The publication of Clive James's Sentenced to Life was a major literary event. Facing the end, James looked back over his life with a clear-eyed and unflinching honesty to produce his finest work: poems of extraordinary power that spoke to our most elemental human emotions.

Injury Time finds James in a similar mood. Keen to capture and cherish moments of beauty and love; thinking about how best to live in his remaining days; and casting his mind forward to when he will be gone and how he might be remembered. A series of intimate poems reveals family as one of life's true treasures. The poet captures tender childhood memories of his mother, has his spirits lifted by the wonderful vision of his granddaughter in graceful acrobatic movement, and addresses the haunting loss of his father in World War Two. He writes beautifully of his early years in Australia, where he began and where he hopes to 'reach the end'. James also reflects on the wisdom and consolation to be found in art, music and literature, which have become even more precious to him in his later years.

The poems in this deeply moving, inspirational and wholly unsentimental book are even more accomplished than those that came before. Injury Time shows Clive James the poet in the form of his life.

'This is my kind of history: carefully researched but so vivid that you are convinced Lucy Worsley was actually there at the party - or the parsonage.' Antonia Fraser'A refreshingly unique perspective on Austen and her work and a beautifully nuanced exploration of gender, creativity, and domesticity.' Amanda Foreman'Brilliant and very moving, this book is a fascinating and original exploration of Jane Austen with lots of new material - Worsley brings Austen to life superbly, through her pages she is a flesh and blood woman, intelligent, powerful, contradictory, loving, loved. A magnificent book.' Kate WilliamsOn the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, historian Lucy Worsley leads us into the rooms from which our best-loved novelist quietly changed the world.This new telling of the story of Jane's life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the places and spaces that mattered to her. It wasn't all country houses and ballrooms, but a life that was often a painful struggle. Jane famously lived a 'life without incident', but with new research and insights Lucy Worsley reveals a passionate woman who fought for her freedom. A woman who far from being a lonely spinster in fact had at least five marriage prospects, but who in the end refused to settle for anything less than Mr Darcy.

It's the most simple, unassuming, innocent-looking verb: 'to be'. Yet it is jam-packed with more different meanings, forms, and uses than any other English word. As he reveals be's multiple incarnations, David Crystal takes us to the heart of our flexible and changing language. He tells the intriguing story in 26 chapters, each linked to a particular usage. We meet circumstantial be ('how are you?'), numerical be ('two and two is four'), quotative be ('so I was like, wow '), and ludic be ('oh no he isn't!'), and a whole swarm of other meanings. Bringing the ideas to life are a host of examples from sources as varied as Beowulf, Jane Austen, pantomime, Hamlet (of course), and Star Wars, with cartoons from Ed McLachlan and Punch peppered throughout. Full of fascinating nuggets of information, it is a book to delight any lover of words and language.

Garry Kasparov gives his first public account of his landmark 1997 chess match with the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, and explains why, twenty years later, he's become convinced that artificial intelligence is good for humans.

In May 1997, the world watched as Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player in the world, was defeated for the first time by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. It was a watershed moment in the history of technology: machine intelligence had arrived at the point where it could best human intellect.

It wasn't a coincidence that Kasparov became the symbol of man's fight against the machines. Chess has long been the fulcrum in development of machine intelligence; the hoax automaton 'The Turk' in the 18th century and Alan Turing's first chess program in 1952 were two early examples of the quest for machines to think like humans - a talent we measured by their ability to beat their creators at chess.

As the pre-eminent chessmaster of the 80s and 90s, it was Kasparov's blessing and his curse to play against each generation's strongest computer champions, contributing to their development and advancing the field. Like all passionate competitors, Kasparov has taken his defeat and learned from it. He has devoted much energy to devising ways in which humans can partner with machines in order to produce results better than either can achieve alone.

During the twenty years since playing Deep Blue, he's played both with and against machines, learning a great deal about our vital relationship with our most remarkable creations. Ultimately, he's become convinced that by embracing the competition between human and machine intelligence, we can spend less time worrying about being replaced and more thinking of new challenges to conquer.

In this breakthrough book, Kasparov tells his side of the story of Deep Blue for the first time - what it was like to strategize against an implacable, untiring opponent - the mistakes he made and the reasons the odds were against him. But more than that, he tells his story of AI more generally, and how he's evolved to embrace it, taking part in an urgent debate with philosophers worried about human values, programmers creating self-learning neural networks, and engineers of cutting edge robotics.

He surveys the serious questions facing a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on AI, creating an essential guide for the business readers and educators he speaks to by the thousands every year.

The age of the rock star, like the age of the cowboy, has passed. Like the cowboy, the idea of the rock star lives on in our imaginations. What did we see in them? Swagger. Recklessness. Sexual charisma. Damn-the-torpedoes self-belief. A certain way of carrying themselves. Good hair. Interesting shoes. Talent we wished we had. What did we want of them? To be larger than life but also like us. To live out their songs. To stay young forever. No wonder many didn't stay the course. In Uncommon People, David Hepworth zeroes in on defining moments and turning points in the lives of forty rock stars from 1955 to 1995, taking us on a journey to burst a hundred myths and create a hundred more. As this tribe of uniquely motivated nobodies went about turning themselves into the ultimate somebodies, they also shaped us, our real lives and our fantasies. Uncommon People isn't just their story. It's ours as well.

We are all instinctively musical. Why? And how does music work? Indeed, what is (or isn't) music? Adam Ockelford has the answers.

A tap of the foot, a rush of emotion, the urge to hum a tune; without instruction or training we all respond intuitively to music. Comparing Notes explores what music is, why we are all musical, and how abstract patterns of sound that don't actually mean anything can in fact be so meaningful.

Taking the reader on a clear and compelling tour of major twentieth century musical theories, Professor Adam Ockelford arrives at his own important psychologically grounded theory of how music works. From pitch and rhythm to dynamics and timbre, he shows how all the elements of music cohere through the principle of imitation to create an abstract narrative in sound that we instinctively grasp, whether listening to Bach or the Beatles.

Based on three decades of innovative work with blind children and those on the autism spectrum, the book draws lessons from neurodiversity to show how we all develop musically, and to explore the experience of music from composer and performer to listener.

Authoritative, engaging and full of wonderful examples from across the musical spectrum, Comparing Notes is essential reading for anyone who's ever loved a song, sonata or symphony, and wondered why.

The first biography written with Paul McCartney's approval and with access to family members and friends closest to him.

Superbly evoking half a century of popular music and culture, Paul McCartney is the definitive life of a long-misunderstood genius.

In this masterly biography, history's most successful songwriter, a man of seemingly effortless talent, beauty and charm, is revealed as a complex, insecure workaholic who still feels as great a need to prove himself in his seventies as when he was a teenager.

We learn how his boyhood was blighted by the death of his mother, Mary - later the inspiration for 'Let It Be' - but redeemed by his remarkable father, Jim, a Liverpool cotton-salesman who was his only music-teacher and whose influence has permeated his career.

We understand as never before the creative symbiosis between John Lennon and himself that unlocked the extraordinary treasury of their songs for the Beatles when they were barely into their twenties, and the fierce rivalry which lasted beyond the band's break-up to the end of John's life - and still haunts and inspires Paul to this day.

Here for the first time is the full story of Paul post-Beatles: his trauma after being brutally sidelined by John, George and Ringo over the appointment of their last manager, Allen Klein; his near-breakdown on his remote Scottish farm and dogged determination to build a new band, Wings, into as big a name in the 1970s as the Beatles had been in the 1960s.

Here too is the first inside story of his marriage to Linda Eastman, much criticised at the outset but destined to become the longest and strongest in rock until her death from cancer. Here are the traumatic post-Linda years when his charmed life seemed temporarily to crack up: his whirlwind romance with Heather Mills ending after four years' marriage in one of the most expensive and rancorous divorces in British legal history.

As richly fascinating and dramatic as its subject, Paul McCartney: The Biography is the last word on a man whose music has lit up the world.

A city, a movie star, and one magical year.

In November of 1954 a young woman dressed plainly in a white oxford, dark sunglasses and a black pageboy wig boards a midnight flight from Los Angeles to New York. As the plane's engines rev she breathes a sigh of relief, lights a cigarette and slips off her wig revealing a tangle of fluffy blonde curls. Marilyn Monroe was leaving Hollywood behind, and along with it a failed marriage and a frustrating career. She needed a break from the scrutiny and insanity of LA. She needed Manhattan.

In Manhattan, the most famous woman in the world can wander the streets unbothered, spend hours at the Met getting lost in art, and afternoons buried in the stacks of the Strand. Marilyn begins to live a life of the mind in New York; she dates Arthur Miller, dances with Truman Capote and drinks with Carson McCullers. Even though she had never lived there before, in New York, Marilyn is home.

In Marilyn in Manhattan, the iconic blonde bombshell is not only happy, but successful. She breaks her contract with Fox Studios to form her own production company, a groundbreaking move that makes her the highest paid actress in history and revolutionizes the entertainment industry. A true love letter to Marilyn, and a joyous portrait of a city bursting with life and art, Marilyn in Manhattan is a beautifully written, lively look at two American treasures: New York and Marilyn Monroe, and sheds new light on one of our most enduring icons.

Discovering Dobell offers an intimate glimpse of William Dobell, the artist whose heart remained anchored in the daily life of everyday people, from the streets of Depression-raked London to Sydney's Kings Cross. Christopher Heathcote demonstrates how Dobell developed ideas from sketches to paintings. In some instances the book identifies previously unknown relationships between drawings, gouaches and important oils. Discovering Dobell features the artist's controversial and recognisable portraits of Joshua Smith, Dame Mary Gilmore and Helena Rubinstein, alongside other vital strands of his output, including affectionate images of grinning ockers, struggling young mothers, cheeky street children at play, and haughty women intent on keeping-up-appearances. This overview is rounded out with Dobell's experimental drawings and paintings from New Guinea, as well as his little-known ventures into abstract form. This book introduces the creative achievements of this great Australian painter for a new generation of art lovers.

The American artist Gordon Samstag famously made one of the great cultural bequests benefitting the arts in this country, enabling Australian visual artists to develop their skills and abilities internationally - through the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships. Proudly published by the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art for the University of South Australia's 25th birthday celebrations - and the 25th anniversary of the Samstag Scholarships - this groundbreaking book charts the lives and careers of Anne and Gordon Samstag, and their sixteen years of living and working in Australia and eventual return to America. Who were the enigmatic Samstags? Intensely private, each boasting rich ancestral family trees, philanthropy was in their blood. This is their story.

While traditional dining will always have its place, the shared plate is casual and intimate, friendly and laid-back, encouraging conversation and interaction around the table - and a more relaxed cook! Whether it's a lazy weekend brunch, casual supper for friends at the kitchen table, special-occasion lunch, or drinks with nibbles, Luke Mangan has all your options covered for the most delicious sharing plates.Over 100 recipes take inspiration from around the world - Spain and Italy, Scandinavia, the Middle East and Asia - with a chapter of Luke's famously divine desserts to complete the feast.A little taste of everything, for just about everyone, for just about any occasion.

Why do we consume 35% more food when eating with one more person, and 75% more when with three? Why are 27% of drinks bought on aeroplanes tomato juice? How are chefs and companies planning to transform our dining experiences, and what can we learn from their cutting-edge insights to make memorable meals at home? These are just some of the ingredients of Gastrophysics, in which the pioneering Oxford professor Charles Spence shows how our senses link up in the most extraordinary ways, and reveals the importance of all the 'off-the-plate' elements of a meal: the weight of cutlery, the placing on the plate, the background music and much more. Whether dining alone or at a dinner party, on a plane or in front of the TV, he reveals how to understand what we're tasting and influence what others experience. Mealtimes will genuinely never be the same again.

We all crave warming comfort food when the weather starts to cool down - rich and fragrant curries, succulent braises and soups, and meat so tender you could cut it with a spoon. This is the time of year that we skip the salads and quick stir-fries and the art of slow cooking comes into its own. 'Low and slow' refers to the cooking method used throughout the book - low temperature cooking for a long period of time, either in the oven or on the stovetop, which helps to add a great depth of flavour and tenderness to dishes. All the classic slow-cooking recipes are included in this beautiful book - hearty beef bourguignon, braised lamb shanks, pulled pork, coq au vin, osso buco, lasagne - as well as hearty soups, slow-cooked barbecuing classics, Indian curries and tagines. Many of the recipes are one-pot dishes, so once you've popped it in the oven or on the stovetop, you can relax and let time do all the work for you.

The 5:2 diet changes lives, by making weight loss simple and sustainable. Now vegetarians, vegans - and anyone wanting to increase their intake of fresh, healthy produce - can see fantastic results with 5:2 Veggie and Vegan, the new plan from bestselling author Kate Harrison. Eating more veggie food is great news for our bodies, our wellbeing and the planet, and this book includes more than 80 simple and delicious fasting day recipes that make cutting down on meat and animal products a pleasure. Kate - a veggie for nearly three decades - offers advice on a healthy, balanced diet, along with inspiring stories from 5:2 dieters, and great meal plans, with dishes from all around the world. This complete guide includes: * How to start and maintain the 5:2 plan and achieve your weight loss and health goals. * Delicious and quick calorie-counted vegetarian and vegan recipes: from satisfying brunches, flavour-filled soups, and fresh salads, to lunchbox specials and dinners you'll want to share. * Easy to follow meal plans to make fast days stress-free. sustainable and exciting. Fuss-free, enjoyable, and packed full of the good stuff, these recipes make it easy to lose weight - for good.

Desserts tell a story. Even the daintiest macaron take the person eating it on a sensory journey from first look to last bite. For Caroline Khoo this story begins when an idea for a new dessert design is sparked. I'm Just Here for Dessert is generously packed with the recipes, techniques and clever styling tips behind some of her most popular creations: armies of pastel-hued meringues, unapologetically girly cupcakes, decadent tarts, statement cakes, mini cakes and tiny ice creams. Master the basic skills and recreate these stunning confections, or use the concept-building processes in each layer of this book to help you uncover your own unique style.

Australia's complex, beautiful and diverse flora is showcased in stunning botanic gardens across the continent. Through exquisite colour photographs taken at the Australian National Botanic Gardens (ANBG), Fanny Karouta-Manasse celebrates the minute and intriguing details of these plants. Discovering Australian Flora explains how plants are displayed in the ANBG according to themes and provides clear and simple geographical, historical and botanical information. It also describes the unique features of Australian flora, including their reliance on fire and ability to survive in poor soil, and looks in detail at the two dominant genera in the Australian landscape - Eucalyptus and Acacia. This fresh and intimate view of some of Australia's native flora will serve not only as a companion to visitors to the ANBG but will also allow others to explore the wonders of Australia's botanical treasures. This book will appeal to both local and overseas readers wishing to become more familiar with Australian native flora. The striking photographs will appeal to anyone with an appreciation and passion for nature's beauty.

In the second portrait of his series Great Parisian Neighborhoods, award-winning raconteur John Baxter leads us on a whirlwind tour of Montmartre, the hill-top village that fired the greatest achievements of modern art while also provoking bloody revolution and the sexual misbehavior that made Paris synonymous with sin.

High on the northern edge of Paris, Montmartre has always attracted bohemians, political radicals, the searchers for artistic inspiration as well as those hungry for pleasure. In its winding, windmill-shadowed streets, which, only fifty years before, saw the anarchist rising of the Commune, Renoir, Picasso and van Gogh seized a similar freedom to remake painting, while, in the tenderloin of Pigalle, Toulouse-Lautrec drew the cancan dancers of the Moulin Rouge, celebrating a hedonism that titillated the world,

In Montmartre, bestselling author and IACP Award winner John Baxter lifts the curtain on a district that visitors to Paris seldom see. From the tumbledown workshops of the Bateau Lavoir in which Picasso and Braque created Cubism to Clichy's Cabaret of Nothingness where guests dined at coffins under lamps of human bones, the whole of this mysterious enclave is ours to explore.

For visitors and armchair travelers alike, Montmartre captures the excitement and scandal of a fascinating quarter that condenses the elusive perfumes, colors and songs of Paris.

At the age of twenty-eight, Jessica Lee, who grew up in Canada and lived in London, finds herself in Berlin. Alone. Lonely, with lowered spirits thanks to some family history and a broken heart, she is there, ostensibly, to write a thesis. And though that is what she does daily, what increasingly occupies her is swimming. So she makes a decision that she believes will win her back her confidence and independence: she will swim fifty-two of the lakes around Berlin, no matter what the weather or season. She is aware that this particular landscape is not without its own ghosts and history.

This is the story of a beautiful obsession: of the thrill of a still, turquoise lake, of cracking the ice before submerging, of floating under blue skies, of tangled weeds and murkiness, of cool, fresh, spring swimming - of facing past fears of near drowning and of breaking free.

When she completes her year of swimming Jessica finds she has new strength, and she has also found friends and has gained some understanding of how the landscape both haunts and holds us.

This book is for everyone who loves swimming, who wishes they could push themselves beyond caution, who understands the deep pleasure of using their body's strength, who knows what it is to allow oneself to abandon all thought and float home to the surface.

Min is a microbe. She is small. Very small. In fact so small that you'd need to look through a microscope to see her. Or you can simply open this book and take Min on an adventure to amazing places she's never seen before - like the icy glaciers of your tooth or the twisted, tangled jungle that is your shirt.The perfect book for anyone who wants to take a closer look at the world.

When Mary Adams sees Millais' depiction of the tragic Ophelia, a whole new world opens up for her. Determined to find out more about the beautiful girl in the painting, she hears the story of Lizzie Siddal - a girl from a modest background, not unlike her own, who has found fame and fortune against the odds. Mary sets out to become a Pre-Raphaelite muse, too, and reinvents herself as Persephone Lavelle. But as she fights her way to become the new face of London's glittering art scene, 'Persephone' ends up mingling with some of the city's more nefarious types and is forced to make some impossible choices. Will Persephone be forced to betray those she loves, and even the person she once was, if she is to achieve her dreams?

The bad news? The world is ending. The good news? The Bad Guys are back to save it! Sure, they might have to borrow a rocket... And there might be something nasty in one of the spacesuits... And Mr Piranha might have eaten too many bean burritos... But seriously, how BAD can it be? How bad?! SUPER BAD. Its one small step for the Sort-Of-International-League-Of-Good-Guys-Guys. Its one giant leap for The Bad Guys.

Say goodbye to Ruby Redfort: every smart kid's smart kid. The mind-blowing conclusion to the thrilling series by award-winning author Lauren Child. Ruby Redfort: undercover agent, code-cracker and thirteen-year-old genius - you can count on her when the ice starts to crack. All good things come to an end... Ruby Redfort is running scared, a whole bunch of people want her dead and worst of all one of them is on her team. But just who is this agent of doom? You can run, Ruby, but you can't hide...

New York Times bestselling author Kate DiCamillo returns to her roots with a moving yet witty story of an unforgettable summer friendship. For fans of Jacqueline Wilson, David Almond and Katherine Rundell.

In her seventh novel, international bestselling author and twice winner of the prestigious Newbery Medal Kate DiCamillo tells a masterful story that blends pathos and humour. Raymie Clarke has come to realize that everything, absolutely everything, depends on her. And she has a plan. If Raymie can win the Little Miss Central Florida Tire competition, then her father - who has run away with a dental hygienist - will see Raymie's picture in the paper and (maybe) come home.

To win, not only does Raymie have to do good deeds and learn how to twirl a baton, but she has to compete with the wispy, frequently fainting Louisiana Elefante with her show-business background and the fiery, stubborn Beverly Tapinski, who's determined to sabotage the contest. But as the competition approaches, loneliness, loss and unanswerable questions draw the three girls into an unlikely friendship - and challenge them to come to each other's rescue in unexpected ways.

Meet the Lotterys: a unique and diverse family featuring four parents, seven kids and five pets - all living happily together in their big old house, Camelottery. Nine-year-old Sumac is the organizer of the family and is looking forward to a long summer of fun. But when their grumpy and intolerant grandad comes to stay, everything is turned upside down. How will Sumac and her family manage with another person to add to their hectic lives? The Lotterys Plus One, internationally bestselling author Emma Donoghue's first novel for children, features black-and-white illustrations throughout, and is funny, charming and full of heart.

Leo Lennox is in big trouble. Actually, every Turner on the planet is in big trouble: a deranged scientist is threatening to expose their secret world and destroy them all. With help from a pair of guerrilla gorillas (and their incredible inventions), his nerdy friend Ernie, and his annoying-but-sort-of-all-right older sister Abbie, Leo must criss-cross the world to stop the mad doctor before he serves up the full buffet of doom to Turners everywhere. If he can't, the planet won't be just a little bit doomed - it'll be fully doomed!

Mel Gordon loves running, and watching Seinfeld, but mostly she loves Cathy Freeman. It's 2000 and the Olympics are going to be held in Australia. In a year of surprises, Mel finds out that Cathy Freeman is coming to talk to her school. And her family is heading to Sydney! It becomes an unforgettable journey to Corroboree 2000, bringing together all Australians as they march and sing and celebrate Australia's Indigenous heritage and also acknowledge past wrongs.

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- This is the sort of book that brings to life a subject that for many of us was made to be dull and boring! To begin with, it is colourfully illustrated, with informative captions (on the very first page one explains how piles of pebbles were called calculi in Latin, thus giving us the word calculate). It clearly explains concepts in terms of numbers, for example fractions break up whole numbers, logarithms use addition for multiplication, numbers can be imaginary or solve problems or expain the world. It covers history, mathematicians and processes, all in an informative but accessible style. Ages 10+ (even the interested non-maths adult!) Lindy Jones

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The first book in a new series

One of the hardest questions that mathematics teachers have to answer is “Why?”. Schoolroom sums are crucial in learning the awesome power of mathematics, but they are often a world away from how the knowledge is applied and where it came from. Numbers: How Counting Changed the World is there to fill that gap.

The story of numbers begins with counting 1,2, 3… but it ends with a mind-boggling mass of numbers so densely packed that we can’t be sure where one number ends and another begins. Along the way we meet superhero numbers like π, e and googol; we learn that numbers can be perfect, irrational, even imaginary; and that modern mathematics still bears the hallmarks of many ancient civilizations.

Numbers: How Counting Changed the World introduces the amazing people who figured out what numbers are and what they can do. Written to engage, entertain, and enthuse young people, it shows readers how the ideas of long-dead geniuses ended up in their homework assignments: The Mayans of ancient Mexico were using zeros long before anyone else, and we count time and angles in multiples of 60 because that is what the people of Babylon did (for good reason). Meanwhile Pythagoras was a murderer, the shape of a credit card is defined by the golden ratio, and John Napier, the inventor of logarithms, seldom appeared in public without his pet rooster!

The forest is dense and dark. And the trail full of unexpected perils. The dog can't move. The boy can't talk. And you won't know why. Or where you are going. You will put this story down not wanting the journey to end. But it's from Paul Jennings so watch out for the ambush. One of the best. From one of the best.

'We all went down to the tar-pit, with mats to spread our weight.' So begins 'Singing My Sister Down', Margo Lanagan's internationally acclaimed, award-winning short story.Singing My Sister Down and Other Stories brings together ten celebrated short stories, along with three new ones, from the extraordinarily talented author of Tender Morsels and Sea Hearts.A bride accepts her devastating punishment. A piece of the moon is buried. A ferryman falls into the Styx. Wee Willie Winkie brings a waking nightmare. A new father dresses a fallen warrior princess. A sniper picks off clowns one by one. Margo Lanagan's stories will stay with you, haunting you with their quiet beauty and fine balance.

The YA event of the year. Bestsellers. Award-winners. Superstars. This anthology has them all. With brilliantly entertaining short stories from beloved young adult authors Amie Kaufman, Melissa Keil, Will Kostakis, Ellie Marney, Jaclyn Moriarty, Michael Pryor, Alice Pung, Gabrielle Tozer, Lili Wilkinson and Danielle Binks, this all-new collection will show the world exactly how much there is to love about Aussie YA. Ages 14+

Sometimes bees get too big to be up in the branches, sometimes they fall and break their bones. This week both happened and Foreman said, 'Tomorrow we'll find two new bees.'Peony lives with her sister and grandfather on a fruit farm outside the city. In a world where real bees are extinct, the quickest, bravest kids climb the fruit trees and pollinate the flowers by hand. All Peony really wants is to be a bee. Life on the farm is a scrabble, but there is enough to eat and a place to sleep, and there is love. Then Peony's mother arrives to take her away from everything she has ever known, and all Peony's grit and quick thinking might not be enough to keep her safe.How To Bee is a beautiful and fierce novel for younger readers, and the voice of Peony will stay with you long after you read the last page.

Meet the utterly irresistible Miss Petitfour (a name of unknown origin but possibly descended from bakers of tiny delicious cakes). She loves baking and making and dancing with her cats, but most of all she loves to fly. All she has to do is pick up a favourite tablecloth (preferably the one with the paisley print), catch the breeze and she swooshes off on an adventure - with her many cats (Minky, Misty, Taffy, Purrsia, Pirate, Mustard, Moutarde, Hemdala, Earring, Grigorovich, Clasby, Captain Captain, Captain Catkin, Captain Clothespin, Your Shyness and Sizzles) dangling paw-to-tail behind her. In five utterly captivating stories of gentle adventure, delicious edibles (with cheese for the cats), occasional peril and heart-zinging warmth, poet and novelist Anne Michaels (author of bestselling, award-winning Fugitive Pieces) makes a charming, purrfect debut as a children's author.

There's a hill out the back of Joey's house. Hardly anyone goes there-it's not a beautiful place, just a covered-over old rubbish tip. But Joey likes it up there. It's his hill-somewhere he likes to go to wonder about life. He longs to be the best at something, to be a famous astronaut, or mountain climber, to stand out. When Joey discovers a tree house in an old peppercorn tree on the hill, he is annoyed that someone has invaded his special place. But he is also curious about who the intruder could be. But making contact isn't easy. The tree-house girl is wild and hostile and full of secrets-Joey needs to work out a way to win her over. And as he does, he finds a way to shine. Marsh and Me is a story about friendship and trust and learning to believe in yourself and what makes you special. Martine Murray's beautifully rounded characters, with all their self-doubts, yearnings and wise insights, will delight readers young and old.

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- A day can change your life, and this novel is about the pivotal day in Adam's life. His life is complicated - while other people know, his deeply conservative Christian family don't realise he is gay. His first love is moving interstate, and his new possible love-interest is patiently waiting. There will be a farewell party, but it's possible Adam will be banned from going, and so miss out on seeing the one who broke his heart. His older, perfect, brother has a few bombshells to drop, and so does his best (female) friend. Then there's the sleazebag at work who goes a bit too far. And meanwhile there's an uneasy ghost of a murdered girl, a mysterious nature spirit trying to stop the world from ending, and a rose… One for older teens; Ness' many fans will devour this! Lindy Jones

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The most personal and tender novel yet from Patrick Ness, the twice Carnegie Medal-winning author of A Monster Calls.  The most personal and tender novel yet from Patrick Ness, the twice Carnegie Medal-winning author of A Monster Calls. It's Saturday, it's summer and, although he doesn't know it yet, everything in Adam Thorn's life is going to fall apart. But maybe, just maybe, he'll find freedom from the release. Time is running out though, because way across town, a ghost has risen from the lake...This uplifting coming-of-age novel will remind you what it's like to fall in love.

ABBEY'S BOOKSELLER PICK ----- A new adventure with one of my favourite young heroines. Tan is as feisty and as curious (or should that be imaginatively inquisitive?) as ever. She is also still very concerned with recording her observations with the correct pen whilst being properly accessorised! In this new story, the holidays are about to start, there is a mysterious boy (or is he a gypsy) and Tan has to look after her neighbour's yard while Mrs Topple is away. When a strange car and a shadowy figure keep appearing, Tan knows her Great Detective skills are called for, and with the help of her friends (and assorted animals) she is going to solve the mystery. Ages 7-10. Lindy Jones

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The next title in the best-selling and very popular Truly Tan series.  Way out in the country, Mrs Topple is Tan's closest neighbour. But Mrs Topple has gone on a cruise and Tan is in charge of security at the Topple cottage.  Tan is also looking after the garden and watering the plants. But mostly she's in charge of security. Which is just as well because something suspicious is going on.  A strange car has been coming and going and a shadowy figure has been spotted snooping around. And now Tan has noticed items moving around in the garden - on their own!  As tensions mount, Tan decides a stake-out is in order. Little does she know she is walking straight into a trap.  Ages: 8 years+

Crow has lived her whole life on a tiny, starkly beautiful island. Her only companions are Osh, the man who rescued her from a washed-up skiff as a baby and raised her, and Miss Maggie, their neighbour across the sandbar. But it is only when a mysterious fire appears across the water that an unspoken question of her own history forms in Crow's heart, and an unstoppable chain of events is triggered. Crow sets out to find her lost identity - and, ultimately, to learn what it means to be a family. Vivid and heartfelt, Beyond the Bright Sea is a gorgeously crafted, gripping tale of buried treasure and belonging.