Gleaner July 2016 by Gleebooks

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Vol. 23 No. 6 July 2016

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new this month A. S. Byatt on William Morris & Mariano Fortuny in

Peacock & Vine 1

(ir)rational thinking

First, politics. No, not the Federal election, although I imagine my preferred outcome would be well known. Instead, just another note to add to the decades-long saga that is the future of the book industry, in the light of the Productivity Commission’s recent report about (among other things) an open market for books in Australia. I don’t pretend to an understanding of economic theory, but that doesn’t stop me having a deep suspicion of whatever ‘pure’ economic thinking about supply and demand produced the PC’s draft recommendations. I do believe I know the book industry well. We have ongoing ‘supply chain’ issues: your local booksellers need price parity and speed of delivery to be able to compete in a globalised market. And the Government must levy GST for international internet retailers; it’s simply not fair, and bad taxation policy, that they currently do not. However, the cornerstone of our industry is copyright, and any ‘reform’ which fails to enshrine the rights of authors to full earnings from their endeavours is an insult and threat to our cultural integrity. In our 40+ years as booksellers, we’ve seen a wonderful growth and maturation in Australian writing and publishing. It can’t be jeopardised by some economic (ir)rationalist thinking. A word, well after the event, on May’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. It was exceptionally well curated by Artistic Director, Gemma Birrell, and her team—and wonderfully organised on every level. We worked our bums off, but it was exciting and invigorating to be involved, and I can only marvel at how far the event has come in the public view, in less than twenty years. People often tell me it’s too crowded, or too hard to get in. Don’t worry about it, just come next year, it’s a blast. And so to books. I’m thoroughly enjoying The Last Painting of Sara De Vos, by ex-pat Australian novelist, Dominic Smith. It’s not his first book, but he’s new to me. This is an elegantly constructed mystery as well as a sensitive and intelligent enquiry into art and identity. It’s a complex plot, interweaving the life and work of the title character in 17th century Holland, with theft and forgery of her work in mid 20th century New York, and further intrigue in Sydney on the brink of the 2000 Olympics. Dominic has a deft and confident mastery of his material, and the result is a richly satisfying story. Full marks. The Toymaker ($30) is a departure for Melbourne writer Liam Pieper after his lively memoir from 2014, The Feel Good Hit of the Year ($30). It’s back cover lead, ‘A person is defined by the secrets they keep’, is a solid clue to the content. Survival instinct, moral choice, hidden truths and crushing memories all feature in the lives and relationships of the principal characters, spoilt, rich (grown up) Melbourne businessman, Adam Kulakov, and his Grandfather Arkady, an Auschwitz survivor with a shocking secret. It’s dark and compelling stuff. Kieran Finnane has lived in Alice Springs for 25 years. She brings the breadth and depth of that experience and her journalist’s insight (she cofounded and has written for the Alice Springs News since 1994) to her remarkable new book, Trouble: On Trial in Central Australia ($29.95) It’s a clear-eyed, but compassionate, detailing of the dysfunction and violence besetting Central Australia, as evidenced through these courthouse accounts. Finnane isn’t Territory-born, but her love of the Centre, and burning desire to tell it as she sees it see, informs and infuses these stories, which might otherwise wear any reader down. Order prevails in the Court, but these troubling stories of disorder in the community should be required reading for all Australians. David Gaunt

Australian Literature The Toymaker by Liam Pieper ($30, PB)

Adam Kulakov likes his life. He’s on the right side of middle age; the toy company he owns brightens the lives of children around the world; and he has more money than he can ever spend, a wife and child he adores, and as many mistresses as he can reasonably hide from them. And he is not the only one with secrets. In 1944, Adam’s grandfather, Arkady, was imprisoned in Auschwitz and given an impossible choice. Now, as he’s coming to the end of his life, he has to keep the truth from his family, and hold back the crushing memories of his time with one of history’s greatest monsters. As a mistake threatens to bring Adam’s world tumbling down around him, the past reaches for Arkady. Everything he’s spent a lifetime building will be threatened, as will everything Adam and his family think they know of the world.

Ruins by Rajith Savanadasa ($28, PB) A country picking up the pieces, a family among the ruins. In the restless streets, crowded waiting rooms and glittering nightclubs of Colombo, five family members find their bonds stretched to breaking point in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war. Latha wants a home. Anoushka wants an iPod. Mano hopes to win his wife back. Lakshmi dreams of rescuing a lost boy. And Niranjan needs big money so he can leave them all behind. ‘A rich and colourful story of family and country, its complexity revealed in layers . . . Only through the eyes of others can we begin to see a place.’ Inga Simpson Music and Freedom by Zoë Morrison ($33, PB)

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. But Edwards is damaged, and Alice is 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.

Letter to Pessoa by Michelle Cahill ($24.95, PB)

This is the first collection of short stories by award-winning Goan-Australian poet Michelle Cahill. An imaginative tour de force, the stories portray the experiences of a whole range of characters, including a scientist, a cat and a young Indian female version of Joseph Conrad, in settings across the world, from Barcelona to Capetown, Boston to Chiang Mai, Kathmandu to Kraków. Like the poet Fernando Pessoa, who gives the collection its title, and who created as many as seventy versions of himself, Cahill displays a remarkable inventiveness, making distant landscapes and situations come alive, in compelling detail, as they express the fear and longing, obsession and outrage, of the people caught up in them. The collection also includes a number of fictions in letter form, to Jacques Derrida, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet and Margaret Atwood—and to J. M. Coetzee, from his character Melanie Isaacs.

Landscape with Landscape by Gerald Murnane

This is Gerald Murnane’s 4th book, after The Plains, and his 1st collection of short fiction. When it was first published, 30 years ago, it was cruelly reviewed. ‘I feel sorry for my fourth-eldest, which of all my book-children was the most brutally treated in its early years,’ Murnane writes in his foreword to this new edition. In hindsight it offers a wide-ranging exploration of the different landscapes which make up the imagination of this extraordinary Australian writer. 5 of the 6 loosely connected stories trace a journey through the suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s, as the writer negotiates the conflicting demands of Catholicism & sex, self-consciousness and intimacy, alcohol and literature. The 6th story, The Battle of Acosta Nu, is remarkable for its depth of emotion, as it imagines a Paraguayan man imagining a country called Australia, while his son sickens and dies before his eyes. ($26.95, PB)

Fine by Michelle Wright ($30, PB) The stories in this debut collection range from a vivid moment of a young girl counting the ‘water hours’, to a scorching tale of schoolyard bullying; a sleep-deprived mother; grandparents of a child at risk deciding where their loyalties lie; a young boy searching for his parents after the Sri Lanka tsunami; a widow walking the beach, and a woman secretly listening to the weather reports on radio: all trying with courage and fragility to present a face to the world that is ‘fine’. By shining her light on these quiet moments in ordinary lives, Wright follows in a tradition which includes Olga Masters, Amy Witting and Alice Munro.

A Chinese Affair by Isabelle Li ($27, PB)

Isabelle Li has written 16 exquisite stories exploring recent Chinese migration to Australia and elsewhere, exploring intergenerational and interracial relationships, the search for meaning, and the effects of isolation and the inability to express oneself in a second language. What does it take to master a second language, to be so skilled in that language that you’re published in it? Chinese/Australian writer and translator Isabelle Li reminds us that learning to love an adopted language does not come without its struggles. Li’s prose is powerful, exquisite and finely tuned, and each story draws us deeper into the complex emotional and cultural dilemmas of characters who are solitary, sensitive, perceptive and powerless, sometimes all at once.—Debra Adelaide

Vancouver: Wisdom Tree 3 by Nick Earls

Five complex and distinct stories set in New York, Brisbane, Vancouver, Alaska and L.A. that somehow magically meet. Vancouver is the story Paul would tell if he were living in plague times—a story that comforts, a story that wards of evil. His story is about the giant that influenced his life, it’s about the day the world changed, and it’s about what happens when our giants come tumbling down. Think, any one of Giovanni Boccaccio’s stories from, Decameron. ($20, PB)

The Sound by Sarah Drummond ($28, PB) In the 1820s seal hunters from many nations made their way across the southern waters of Australia, plundering seal colonies, and stealing women & children from indigenous communities as they went. Otago man Wiremu Heke, bent on avenging the destruction of his village and the death of his father, finds himself aboard the sealer Governor Brisbane on a voyage from Tasmania to Western Australia. However, he soon finds himself a part of the violent and lawless world that has claimed the lives of those he’s known.

Blame by Nicole Trope ($30, PB) Caro and Anna are best friends... they were best friends. Over a decade, Caro and Anna have bonded while raising their daughters, two little girls the same age but living two very different lives. The women have supported each other as they have shared the joys and trials of motherhood, but now everything has changed. Now there’s been a terrible car accident that leaves both families devastated. Over two days, as Caro and Anna each detail their own versions of events, they are forced to reveal hidden truths and closely guarded secrets. The complicated lives of wives and mothers are laid bare as both women come to realise that even best friends don’t tell each other everything. And when hearts are broken, even best friends need someone to blame. This is a hard-hitting, provocative and gripping read from the queen of white-knuckle suspense and searing family drama.

Where the Light Falls by Gretchen Shirm

Andrew is a photographer in his 30s. He returns to Australia when he hears that his former girlfriend has disappeared. By the time he gets back, her body has been found, and everything points to suicide, though the coroner’s findings are left open. As Andrew unravels the mystery of her death, he puts his current relationship at risk for reasons he barely understands. At the same time he meets a damaged teenage girl whom he knows will be a riveting subject for his new series of photos. As he struggles to understand why his ex’s death has affected him so viscerally, Andrew realises that photography has become an obsession predicated on his need to hold on to the things he has lost in his life. He finds himself re- evaluating his past, his art, and what he wants his life to mean. ($28, PB)

Australian Poetry

Year of the Wasp by Joel Deane ($19.95, PB) In 2012 Joel Deane suffered a stroke. Suddenly he was a poet without language. This, his third poetry collection, tracks his battle to rediscover his poetic voice. Confronting the realities of politics & culture, language & love in contemporary Australia. It is a journey of poetic transfiguration that produces a work of unrivalled power, emotional intensity, and insight.

Headwaters by Anthony Lawrence ($28, PB) ‘Headwaters marries an extraordinary gift for observation of the natural world and an exquisite appreciation of human creatureliness with marvellous linguistic precision to create a singular, life-affirming music’.—John Burnside Anthony Lawrence’s stature as one of Australia’s leading poets was recognised in 2015 with the coveted Philip Hodgins medal, and is regularly reinforced by his many victories in poetry competitions: the inaugural Judith Wright Calanthe Award, the Gwen Harwood, the Blake, the Kenneth Slessor, the Peter Porter, and most recently the prestigious 2015 Newcastle Poetry Prize, his third.

On D’Hill

I was stunned this month to actually enjoy a work conference. Several of us went to Canberra to attend the annual Australian Book Industry Association talkfest. First up was Anna Funder who spoke brilliantly about the repercussions for Australian authors if the Government adopts the recommendations of the Productivity Commission which would see massive imports of cheap books, inevitably damaging local production. The advocates argue that this sort of free-for-all would make books cheaper but at what cost, Funder asked, to our culture, our voices, our stories? There has also been talk, (which the govt. has said won’t happen) of reducing copyright to 15 years. That would mean Funder’s book Stasiland would be out of copyright next year—and anyone could use the book, make a film of it, quote it at length and even publish a new edition without Anna receiving a cent. The Labor Party has said outright that they will not go down the path of parallel importation of books and have also said they will disband the Coalition’s stupid Catalyst arts funding body and give the money back to the Australia Council where it belongs. At the conference dinner on Sunday night Magda Szubanski received her award for the ABIA book of the year for her wonderful memoir Reckoning. And Jimmy Barnes brought the house down with an incredibly moving talk about his upcoming autobiography (due in October). He and daughter Mahalia did a few songs, with the highlight being Barnesy doing an unplugged Flame Trees. Written himself, I think Working Class Boy (what else would he call it?) will be as popular this year as Magda’s was last year. Barnes had an awful childhood, and he had everyone in tears as he spoke of it. Then to top it all off, Stan Grant gave the final keynote about his book Talking to My Country. More tears.

I came away from the conference laden down with books from publishers and there is much to look forward to for the rest of the year. A new Ann Patchett and Liane Moriarty, Anne Tyler rewriting The Taming of the Shrew (Vinegar Girl released this month), and very excitingly, a book of personal essays from Tim Winton—which, I suspect, is as close as we’ll get to an autobiography from him.

I’ve been reading a book by English writer Jill Dawson, based on the life of Patricia Highsmith—aptly named The Crime Writer ($30, PB) In it, she inverts the story of Highsmith’s famous lesbian novel Carol, originally published under a pseudonym as The Price of Salt in which a married woman has an affair with a younger woman. In Dawson’s book Patricia Highsmith is having an affair with a married woman with devastating consequences. Very enjoyable if not great literature, Dawson riffs on the day-to-day work of the writer and the difference between suspense and crime writing. Anyone, gay or straight, who enjoyed the recent Cate Blanchett movie, Carol, will enjoy this passionate book. See you on D’Hill, Morgan

A Vicious Example: SYDNEY: 1934 1392K – 1811 1682K2 and other poems by Michael Aiken ($24.95, PB)

The nature of Sydney & the nature in Sydney, these are the foundations for much of Michael Aiken’s plain-speaking poetry, a verse that can be spare or lush as the city itself or as the city requires. This collection is held together by the recurrent trope of ‘the security man’, constantly vigilant, alert to all that passes, finding potential threat in the fragments (detritus) of city existence, and yet open to glimpses of beauty & wonder which occur: so many unexpected epiphanies.

Morton by Lorne Johnson ($15, ST) Lorne Johnson’s close visceral connection to the flora and fauna of the Morton National Park, south of Sydney near his home in Bundanoon, gives breath to every page of this elegant chapbook. His poetry touches the ground lightly, in fleeting avian fashion, while his keen, bird-like senses miss little, whether with the photographers eye or the poet’s ear.

Altitude

BlackBooks

Boo ks w ith

I have had a month of reading memoirs. I was compelled and inspired to read The Odd Woman and The City by Vivian Gornick and The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks after hearing both authors speak at the SWF. Although these books are completely different in their locality and subject—they are quite similar in some ways. Both authors are very direct and honest in describing their lives—one in New York and the other in the Lake District in the UK, and both engage you in their observations of their everyday lives in such a way that is quite profound. It is not surprising that both were best sellers at the writer’s festival. As I write this, we haven’t actually had the event yet, but we have been overwhelmed with the terrific response to our June literary event—Speaking Out with Tara Moss—which was completely sold out of tickets weeks beforehand. I probably shouldn’t be surprised by the response, it’s currently a hot topic and Tara is a great speaker and advocate for the rights of women and girls. Really looking forward to it! Blackheath is feeling pretty special to be getting a visit from one of Australia’s most prolific authors. Jackie French is spending three days in Blackheath from the 29th to the 31st July where she will be speaking with the kids at Blackheath Public School and again at Pinerolo—The Children’s Book Cottage. Adults will also benefit from her visit as she is guest speaker at the Blackheath History Forum on 30th July. See below for details and hope to see you at one or more of the events. Victoria Jefferys

International Literature The Girls by Emma Cline ($33, PB)

Evie Boyd is desperate to be noticed. In the summer of 1969, empty days stretch out under the California sun. The smell of honeysuckle thickens the air and the sidewalks radiate heat. Until she sees them. The snatch of cold laughter. Hair, long and uncombed. Dirty dresses skimming the tops of thighs. Cheap rings like a second set of knuckles. The girls. And at the centre, Russell. Russell and the ranch, down a long dirt track and deep in the hills. Incense and clumsily strummed chords. Rumours of sex, frenzied gatherings, teen runaways. Was there a warning, a sign of things to come? Or is Evie already too enthralled by The Girls to see that her life is about to be changed forever?

The Death of All Things Seen by Michael Collins

Helen Price, a woman in her sixties, drives off a highway into a lake, setting in chain a tragic series of events—some weeks before, she had been diagnosed with cancer. When she decides to take her life, the real nature of her marriage is uncovered. Hidden in her past is the evidence of a long secret affair with the man who used to be her boss, Chicago businessman and pillar of the community Theodore Feldman. It’s left to the sons of both families, Norman Price and Nate Feldman, to search for the truth about the puzzling relationship between the two, unaware of the devastating effect their search will have upon themselves. Set in Chicago, in the midst of the financial crisis of 2008, The Death of All Things Seen is a deeply moving novel about complex identities and the fragility of humanity. ($30, PB)

The Many Selves of Katherine North by Emma Geen ($28, PB)

Since she was 12, Kit has been a phenomenaut, her consciousness projected into the bodies of lab-grown animals for the purpose of research. Kit experiences a multitude of other lives—fighting and fleeing, predator and prey—always hoping, but never quite believing, that her work will help humans better understand the other species living alongside them. But after a jump as an urban fox ends in disaster, Kit begins to suspect that those she has trusted for her entire working life may be out to cause her harm. And, as she delves deeper into the events of that night, her world begins to shift in ways she had never thought possible.

Love & Friendship: In Which Jane Austen’s Lady Susan Vernon is Entirely Vindicated by Whit Stillman ($30, PB)

Jackie French comes to Blackheath

Friday 29th July

Talking with the kids from schools in the area at Blackheath Public School

saturday 30th July History Forum at Blackheath Public School

sunday 31st July Open Day at Pinerolo

Jackie will also be at the Norman Lindsay Gallery, Faulconbridge on Friday 29th afternoon for a workshop.

Impossibly beautiful, disarmingly witty, and completely self-absorbed: meet Lady Susan Vernon, both the heart & the thorn of Love & Friendship. Recently widowed with a daughter who’s coming of age as quickly as their funds are dwindling, Lady Susan makes it her mission to find them wealthy husbands—and fast. But when her attempts to secure their futures result only in the wrath of a prominent conquest’s wife and the title of ‘most accomplished coquette in England’, Lady Susan must rethink her strategy. Unannounced, she arrives at her brother-in-law’s country estate. Here she intends to take refuge—in no less than luxury, of course—from the colourful rumours trailing her, while finding another avenue to ‘I do’. Before the scandalizing gossip can run its course, though, romantic triangles ensue.

Conrad & Eleanor by Jane Rogers ($28, PB)

When Conrad fails to return home from a conference one evening, Eleanor’s first thought is one of relief. Their marriage has been a sham for over a decade, held together only for their children and by their separate lives in Cambridge. But when she is unable to contact him over the following days, Eleanor begins to worry. Conrad hasn’t used his credit card, has left no message; he has just disappeared. As her investigation mounts, secrets from one summer, twenty-five years before, start to reveal themselves, as does Conrad’s covert work as a whistleblower, unravelling both of their lives.

Miss Jane by Brad Watson ($30, PB)

Inspired by the true story of his own great-aunt, Brad Watson explores the life of Miss Jane Chisolm, born in rural, early-20th century Mississippi with a genital birth defect that would stand in the way of the central ‘uses’—namely, sex and marriage. From the country doctor who adopts Jane to the hard tactile labour of farm life, from the sensual & erotic world of nature around her to the boy who loved but was forced to leave her, the world of Miss Jane Chisolm is anything but barren. Free to satisfy only herself, she mesmerizes those around her, exerting an unearthly fascination that lives beyond her still.

The Girl in Green by Derek Miller ($33, PB)

Now in B Format Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee, $23 I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, 20 Undermajordomo Minor by Patrick deWitt, $20

British journalist Thomas Benton hasn’t seen disgraced US army soldier Arwood Hobbes since they were both caught in Saddam Hussein’s merciless suppression of rebels after Desert Storm. It was in the Shia village of Samawah that a girl in a green dress was shot in the back and died in Arwood’s arms. 22 years later Arwood has called Benton because of a viral video of a mortar attack in Kurdistan that, astonishingly, may have killed the girl in green again.

Vinegar Girl: The Taming of the Shrew Retold by Anne Tyler ($30, PB)

Kate Battista is feeling stuck. How did she end up running house and home for her eccentric scientist father and uppity, pretty younger sister Bunny? Plus, she’s always in trouble at work—her preschool charges adore her, but the adults don’t always appreciate her unusual opinions and forthright manner. Dr Battista has other problems. After years out in the academic wilderness, he is on the verge of a breakthrough. His research could help millions. There’s only one problem: his brilliant young lab assistant, Pyotr, is about to be deported. And without Pyotr… When Dr Battista cooks up an outrageous plan that will enable Pyotr to stay in the country, he’s relying—as usual—on Kate to help him. Kate is furious: this time he’s really asking too much. But will she be able to resist the two men’s touchingly ludicrous campaign to win her round?

Catch up on the 21st century bard with the previous Shakespeare retellings: The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold by Jeanette Winterson— new in B format this month, $23 or Shylock is My Name: The Merchant of Venice Retold by Howard Jacobson, $30 Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett ($33, PB)

When Margaret’s handsome English fiancé is hospitalized for depression, she faces a choice: go ahead with their planned marriage or back away. She decides to marry him. The newlyweds move back to Boston to start a family: first Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic, then savvy, responsible Celia, and finally sensitive, meticulous Alec. But over the span of decades, the golden haze of early childhood recedes and Michael spirals down an increasingly troubled and precarious existence. How much can any family give to save one of its own? Weaving together the voices of its five central characters, Imagine Me Gone captures the ferocious love that binds parent to child, brother to sister, and asks what this love does to those who give or receive it.

Paradise Lodge by Nina Stibbe ($33, PB)

15 year old Lizzie Vogel finds herself working in an old people’s home in the 1970s. The place is in chaos and it’s not really a suitable job for a schoolgirl: she’d only gone for the job because it seemed too exhausting to commit to being a full-time girlfriend or a punk, and she doesn’t realise there is a right and a wrong way to get someone out of a bath. Through a cast of wonderful characters, from the assertively shy Nurse who only communicates via little grunts to the very attractive son of the Chinese take away manager, Paradise Lodge is the story of being very young, and very old, and the laughter, and the tears, in between.

he legend of Kate Leigh, Sydney’s famed brothel

madam, sly grog seller and drug dealer, has loomed large in TV’s Underbelly and Sydney’s criminal history from the 1920s to the 1960s. Despite having more than 100 criminal convictions to her name, Kate Leigh is also remembered as a local hero, giving money to needy families and supporting her local community through

the Depression and war. Here, novelist and historian Leigh Straw teases out the full story of how this wayward Reformatory girl from Dubbo made a fortune in eastern Sydney and defied the gender stereotyping of the time to become a leading underworld figure.

War and Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans

Shortly before his death in 1981, Stefan Hertmans’ grandfather gave him a couple of filled exercise books. Stories he’d heard as a child had led Hertmans to suspect that their contents might be disturbing, and for years he didn’t dare to open them. When he finally did, he discovered unexpected secrets. His grandfather’s life was marked by years of childhood poverty in late-19th-century Belgium, by horrific experiences on the frontlines during WW1 and by the loss of the young love of his life. He sublimated his grief in the silence of painting. Drawing on these diary entries, his childhood memories and the stories told within Urbain’s paintings, Hertmans has produced a poetic novelisation of his grandfather’s story, brought to life with great imaginative power and vivid detail. ($30, PB)

Three-Martini Lunch by Suzanne Rindell

Cliff Nelson is the privileged son of an editor at a New York publishing house. Having dropped out of college he’s slumming it around Greenwich village, enjoying the nightlife, booze, drugs & the idea that he’s the next Kerouac. Eden Katz arrives in New York fresh-faced & filled with ambition to realise her dream of becoming an editor. She has to develop a thicker skin & adopt an imposture of her own in order to succeed. Finally Miles Tillman, a black soonto-be Columbia graduate & publishing house bike messenger, is an aspiring writer who feels he straddles various worlds & belongs to none. Their choices, concealments & betrayals as they reach for their goals ripple outwards leaving none of them unchanged. ($28, PB)

The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray ($30, PB)

Haunted by a failed love affair and the darkest of family secrets, Waldemar ‘Waldy’ Tolliver wakes one morning to discover that he has been exiled from the flow of time. The world continues to turn, and Waldy is desperate to find his way back. In this ambitious, inventive new novel, John Wray takes the reader from turn-of-thecentury Viennese salons buzzing with rumours about Einstein’s radical new theory to the death camps of the Second World War, from the golden age of post-war pulp science fiction to a startling discovery in a modern-day Manhattan apartment packed to the ceiling with artefacts of contemporary life.

ot Just For This Life is a salute and tribute to

Gough Whitlam, commemorating what would have been his 100th birthday. Upon his death in October 2014 there was a national outpouring of grief and affectionate remembrances across the nation. This book includes condolences from politicians of all political stripes; eulogies from the State Memorial Service and a selection of messages of condolence from the men and women of Australia. It also includes a foreword by Graham Freudenberg and short introductions by Laurie Oakes, Anita Heiss, Geraldine Doogue, Don Watson, Patricia Hewitt, Nick Whitlam and Tim Soutphommasane.

w w w. n ews o u t h p u b l i s h i n g .co m

THE WILDER AISLES

When the Music is Over ($33, PB) is the 23rd book in Peter Robinson’s crime series featuring Alan Banks. Banks, now promoted to Detective Superintendent, is called upon to investigate a cold case involving sexual abuse from some fifty years ago. The accused, a famous celebrity entertainer, Danny Caxton, had friends in high places—including the police force—and at the time of the report of the attack, no investigation took place. Now the complainant has come forward to tell her story. Linda Palmer, a poet, is an intelligent, articulate woman, and she has little trouble in convincing Banks the the abuse really happened. As more women come forward with accounts of Caxton’s past sexual activities, Banks must look to the past to find justice for the victims. Caxton, a man convinced of his status and resting on his past glory, still has people on his side who are willing to support him, so Banks has to overcome strong resistance to the opening of the old cases. Danny Caxton is truly a vile creature, and one hopes as the story progresses that he will get what he thoroughly deserves. Shades of Rolf Harris and Jimmy Saville hover in the background, but Danny Caxton is an entirely fictitious character. Banks is one of my favourite policemen and I am very pleased to see him promoted. Along with Bank’s investigation, Annie Cabbot, his one time offsider, has a case of her own to investigate and, to my mind, it is worse. A young girl, naked, badly beaten and bleeding stumbles down a lonely back road outside the town. Seeing car lights coming toward her she tries to run towards the car, hoping that she will be saved, but no such luck. The next day, Annie and her partner, Geraldine Masterson are called to the place where her abused and broken body is lying. The girl is Mimosa (known as Mimsy)— so named because her mother loved the flower. She had become involved with the local gang, men mixed up in prostitution, drugs , the usual horrors. Mimsy was one of their favourites, very pretty & attractive—useful in their business, especially for recruiting other girls.When one of the girls escapes the gang and calls Gerry to tell her story and what happened to Mimsy, the two detectives are drawn into an terrible world of teenage prostitution, drugs and murder. As the local Muslim community is involved, the two detectives have to tread very carefully. Robinson is very keen on music and all his books have a soundtrack. I must confess to not knowing the music in this one as it is mostly, if not all, English bands I have never heard—maybe you can fill me in. I have read all of Robinson’s Banks books and I will say that this is up to his usual high standard. I want to finish with two books by Joan Chittister, an American writer who also happens to be a Benedictine nun. These books have nothing to do with crime, unless growing old is one .Joan is the author of many books on spirituality, but I just want to talk about The Gift of Years: Growing old Gracefully ($18, PB) and Two Dogs and a Parrot ($34, HB). The Gift of Years is a lovely book about ageing. It looks at such things as regret (a big one for me), meaning, fear, relationships and letting go. She says life is not about the number of years that we manage to stay alive, it is about valuing every day and becoming grateful that we have come this far. Every chapter starts with a quote from people as diverse as Seneca & Swift, Cicero, James Thurber, Agatha Christie & Emily Dickinson. Chittister maintains the gift of years is not merely being alive, but becoming more alive than ever. I loved this book. It spoke to me on a very personal level as I am now officially into old age, whether I like it or not. The other title, Two Dogs & a Parrot is equally wonderful. The subtitle is What Our Animal Friends Can Teach Us About Life. In the introduction Joan says as an only child she always wanted a dog, but her mother insisted that there apartment was not suitable—the landlord agreed, and that was that. The first to dog to appear at Joan’s monastery was Danny, the Irish Setter, a gift from a friend. Joan thought that a dog was a dog, but soon found out how wrong she was. Danny lived life on his own terms and Joan was forced to adjust. There are wonderful stories of Danny’s interaction with the various people, in all states of need—it seems that Danny’s very presence was enough to start the healing process. The next dog, Duffy the Golden Retriever, arrived when everyone was in mourning for Danny, and undecided about getting another dog. But a woman came to the monastery reporting that she had heard that a pedigree Golden Retriever was to be euthanased as he had grown too big, and they couldn’t say no. I forgot to mention that when Joan was a child she was allowed to have a bird so she got Billy, a blue parakeet, the best Easter present she ever received. So after the death of Duffy, instead of a dog, a caique, native to South America, with the most beautiful colours came to stay. Lady Hildegard was her name, and she became a great joy to the whole community. These are two wise and wonderful books. Chittister’s other books are all well worth reading—she appeals to people interested in matters of the spirit not just organised religion. The afterword contains a quote from Gandhi, with which you are probably familiar: ‘The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animal are treated’. Both books are among my most loved books and as such they are most highly recommended to all. Janice Wilder

Crime Fiction

Breaking Cover by Stella Rimington ($28, PB)

Liz Carlyle has been posted to MI5’s counter-espionage desk. Her bosses hope the new position will give her some breathing space, but they haven’t counted on the fallout from Putin’s incursions into the Ukraine. Discovering that an elusive Russian spy has entered the UK, Liz needs to track him down before he completes his fatal mission. Meanwhile, in response to the debate raging around privacy & security, MI5 hires civil rights lawyer Jasminder Kapoor—but in this new world of shadowy motives & secret identities, Jasminder must be extra-careful about whom she can trust.

Black Teeth by Zane Lovitt ($30, PB)

Jason Ginaff doesn’t get out much. Partly because of the anxiety, mainly because he works at home. Researching people on the internet. Job candidates doing bucket bongs on Instagram accounts they thought they’d deleted; the prospective new head of sales stripping for a hens’ night… He’s been searching for something on his own time, too. Now he’s found it: the phone number of the man he believes to be his father. Which is how he gets mixed up with Rudy Alamein. They’ve been looking for the same man. Difference being, Rudy wants to kill him.

Black Water by Louise Doughty ($30, PB)

Harper wakes every night, terrified of the sounds outside his hut halfway up a mountain in Bali. He is afraid that his past as a mercenary has caught up with him—and that his life may now been in danger. As he waits to discover his fate, he meets Rita, a woman with her own past tragedy, and begins a passionate affair. Moving between Indonesia, the Netherlands and California, from the 1960s to the 1990s, Black Water turns around the 1965 Indonesian massacres, one of the great untold tragedies of the twentieth century.

Sidney Chambers and The Dangers of Temptation by James Runcie ($33, HB)

Archdeacon Sidney Chambers is beginning to think that the life of a fulltime priest & part-time detective is not easy. So when a bewitching divorcee in a mink coat interrupts Sidney’s family lunch asking him to help locate her missing son, he hopes it will be an open & shut case. The last thing he expects is to be dragged into the mysterious workings of a sinister cult, or to find himself tangled up in another murder investigation.

I Am Behind You by John Ajvide Lindqvist ($33, PB)

Four families wake up one morning in their caravans, next to their cars, on an ordinary campsite in southern Sweden. However, during the night something strange has happened. Everything else has disappeared, and the world has been transformed into an endless expanse of grass. The sky is blue, but there is no sign of the sun; there are no trees, no flowers, no birds. And every radio plays nothing but the songs of sixties pop icon Peter Himmelstrand. As the holiday-makers try to come to terms with what has happened, they are forced to confront their deepest fears and secret desires, and in many cases expose the less appealing aspects of their character. Past events that they have tried to bury rise to the surface and take on a terrifying physical form.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid ($28, PB) Jake and his girlfriend are on a drive to visit his parents at their remote farm. After dinner at the family home, things begin to get worryingly strange. And when he leaves her stranded in a snowstorm at an abandoned high school later that night, what follows is a chilling exploration of psychological frailty and the limitations of reality. Iain Reid’s intense, suspenseful debut novel will have your nerves jangling. A series of tiny clues sprinkled through the relentlessly paced narrative culminate in a haunting twist on the final page. Moskva by Jack Grimwood ($33, PB)

Christmas Eve 1985. The naked body of a young man is found in Red Square; frozen solid—like marble to the touch—missing the little finger from his right hand. A week later, Alex Marston, the 15 year old daughter of the British Ambassador disappears. Army Intelligence Officer, Tom Fox, posted to Moscow following the death of his own daughter, is asked to help find her. It’s a shot at redemption. But as Fox’s investigation drags him deeper towards the dark heart of a Soviet establishment determined to protect its own his fears grow, with those of the girl’s father, for her safety.

The Rat Stone Serenade by Denzil Meyrick ($22, PB) It’s December, and the Shannon family are returning home to their clifftop mansion near Kinloch for their annual AGM. Shannon International is one of the world’s biggest private companies, with tendrils reaching around the globe in computing, banking & mineral resourcing, and it has brought untold wealth & privilege to the family. However, a century ago Archibald Shannon stole the land upon which he built their home—and his descendants have been cursed ever since. When heavy snow cuts off Kintyre, DCI Jim Daley & DS Brian Scott are assigned to protect their illustrious visitors. As an ancient society emerges from the blizzards, and its creation, the Rat Stone, reveals grisly secrets, ghosts of the past come to haunt the Shannons. As the curse decrees, death is coming—but for whom and from what?

A Climate of Fear by Fred Vargas ($33, PB) A woman is found murdered in her bathtub, and the murder made to look like a suicide. But a strange symbol found at the crime scene leads the local police to call Commissaire Adamsberg & his team. When the symbol is found near the body of a second disguised suicide, a pattern begins to emerge: both victims were part of a disastrous expedition to Iceland over ten years ago. A group of tourists found themselves trapped on a deserted island for two weeks, surrounded by a thick, impenetrable fog rumoured to be summoned by an ancient local demon, and two of them didn’t make it back alive. But how are the deaths linked to the secretive Association for the Study of the Writings of Maximilien Robespierre? And what does the mysterious symbol signify?

3 for 2 offer

Blood Wedding by Pierre Lemaitre ($30, PB)

Sophie is haunted by the things she can’t remember—and visions from the past she will never forget. One morning, she wakes to find that the little boy in her care is dead. She has no memory of what happened. And whatever the truth, her side of the story is no match for the evidence piled against her. Her only hiding place is in a new identity. A new life, with a man she has met online. But Sophie is not the only one keeping secrets.

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When the Music’s Over by Peter Robinson ($33, PB) When the body of a young girl is found in a remote countryside lane, evidence suggests she was drugged, abused and thrown from a moving van—before being beaten to death. While DI Annie Cabbot investigates the circumstances in which a 14-year-old could possibly fall victim to such a crime, newly promoted DS Alan Banks must do the same—but the crime Banks is investigating is the coldest of cases. 50 years ago Linda Palmer was attacked by entertainer Danny Caxton, yet no investigation ever took place. Now Caxton is at the centre of an historical abuse investigation and as more women step forward Banks must piece together decades-old evidence—to be led down a path even darker than the one he set out to investigate. Shadow of the Serpent by David Ashton ($20, PB)

1880, Edinburgh. Election fever grips the city. But while the rich and educated argue about politics, in the dank wynds of the docks it’s a struggle just to stay alive. When a prostitute is brutally murdered, disturbing memories from thirty years ago are stirred in Inspector McLevy who is soon lured into a murky world of politics, perversion and deception—and the shadow of the serpent.

Deadly Secrets by Britta Bolt ($30, PB) Pieter Posthumus wouldn’t live anywhere but Amsterdam...even though the big Earth 2050 conference, with its crowds of delegates and protestors, has left him feeling somewhat under siege. At least his work at the Lonely Funerals team is quiet. Then one of the delegates is left for dead under a bypass. Ever curious, Posthumus agrees to look into the case, which sparks memories of his own time as a student radical. Amsterdam has always attracted people with fierce views...but is someone willing to kill for their principles? Or did the attack have a much more personal motive? The Twisted Knot by J. M. Peace ($30, PB)

After her abduction and near death at the hands of a sadistic killer, Constable Samantha Willis is back in the uniform. Despite being on desk duty, rumours reach Sammi that someone in Angel’s Crossing (QLD) has been hurting little girls, and before long a mob is gathering to make sure justice is served. So when a man is found hanging in his shed, the locals assume the paedophile has finally given in to his guilt. That is, until Sammi delves further into the death and uncovers a dark family secret, an unsolved crime and a town desperate for vengeance.

The Wrong Hand by Jane Jago ($33, PB) When two-year-old Benjamin is lured away from his mother at a shopping centre and brutally murdered, the last people anyone would suspect are two little boys. Ten years later the perpetrators are released under new identities, living within the community they tore apart. With a hostile media determined to expose them and a grieving father vowing to avenge his child, just how long can their secret remain hidden?. Quarry’s Vote by Max Allan Collins ($15, PB)

Now retired and happily married, Quarry turns down a million-dollar contract to assassinate a presidential candidate. It’s not the sort of assignment you can just walk away from without consequences—but coming after Quarry has consequences, too.

Saturday Requiem by Nicci French ($33, PB)

13 years ago 18 year old Hannah Docherty was arrested for the brutal murder of her family. It was an open & shut case & Hannah’s been incarcerated in a secure hospital ever since. When psychotherapist Frieda Klein is asked to meet Hannah & assess her she reluctantly agrees. What she finds horrifies her. Frieda is haunted by the thought that Hannah might be as much of a victim as her family; that something wasn’t right all those years ago. And as Hannah’s case takes hold of her, Frieda soon begins to realise that she’s up against someone who’ll go to any lengths to protect themselves.

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True Crime

Famous Detective Stories: True Tales of Australian Crime ($25, PB)

From the notorious Louisa Collins in 1880s NSW, who murdered two husbands with rat poison, to a blazing shootout featuring prominent underworld figure Antonio Martini at Taronga Zoo in the 1940s, this book features stories of true crimes that shocked and thrilled the Australian public. In this new book, stories of love triangles, murders, great escapes, slave trading and robberies are paired with newspaper cuttings of the crimes, allowing the reader to delve deeper into each case. The crimes aren’t always bloody—a brawl over a church pew between a badtempered archdeacon and a newspaper editor in the 1820s involved church invasions and retaliatory libel suits and kept the public entertained for months— but the victims and perpetrators are always memorable.

The Worst Woman in Sydney: The Life and Crimes of Kate Leigh by Leigh Straw ($30, PB)

Matriarch of the criminal underworld … or the Robin Hood of inner Sydney? Despite having more than 100 criminal convictions to her name, legendary Kate Leigh, Sydney’s famed brothel madam, sly grog seller & drug dealer, is also remembered as a local hero, giving money to needy families & supporting her local community through the hard times of Depression & war. Novelist & historian Leigh Straw teases out the full story of how this wayward Reformatory girl from Dubbo made a fortune in eastern Sydney & defied the gender stereotyping of the time to become a leading underworld figure.

Busted by Keith Moor ($35, PB)

In 2007, Melbourne customs officials intercepted 15 million ecstasy tablets hidden in 3000 tomato tins arriving from Naples, Italy—the largest haul of ecstasy in the world. The seized pills had a street value of $440 million. After getting a lucky break from the actions of a diligent customs officer, the Australian Federal Police swooped on the traffickers. As they brought in the suspects, the powerful Calabrian mafia was exposed as being at the heart of it all. Drawing on years of research and never-before-revealed detail, Busted details this extraordinary case—one of the largest AFP operations ever—and how it fits into the murky history of Australian organised crime.

The right book will always be good company

Dementia is the #2 killer of Australians. Cut your risk with practical strategies from neuropsychologist Dr Nicola Gates.

‘The so-called war on drugs has been a colossal failure, and this book offers further proof that we must treat drug use as a public health issue, not as a crime’ Sir Richard Branson

Two families living the dream in small town America are forced to confront their guilty secrets in the aftermath of a shocking death.

Eve of a Hundred Midnights by Bill Lascher

New Year’s Eve, 1941. Inside Manila’s Bay View Hotel, journalists Mel and Annalee Jacoby heard the bombs and wondered if this would be their final night alive. Pearl Harbor had been attacked a few short weeks before, and the US had decided not to defend the Philippine capital, leaving Mel and Annalee trapped in the city where they’d been married just a month earlier. The couple had worked closely with the Chinese government; if captured by Japanese troops, they were certain to be executed. Racing down to the docks just before midnight, they barely escaped onto a freighter as the city behind them burned. But this was only the beginning of their tumultuous journey, which would take them from one island outpost to another as they kept a step ahead of the Japanese, all the while serving as two of the only journalists reporting from the region. ($30, PB)

Biography

The Fall of the House of Wilde: Oscar Wilde and His Family by Emer O’Sullivan ($50, HB)

Oscar Wilde’s mother, Lady Jane Wilde, rose to prominence as a political journalist, advocating in 1848 a rebellion against colonialism. Proud, involved and challenging, she became a salon hostess and opened the Wilde’s Dublin home at No. 1 Merrion Square to the public. His father, Sir William Wilde, was acutely conscious of injustices in the social order. He laid the foundations for the Celtic renaissance in the belief that culture would establish a common ground between the privileged and the poor, Protestant and Catholic. But Sir William was also a philanderer, and when he stood accused of sexually assaulting a young female patient, the scandal and trial sent shock waves through Dublin society. This book places Oscar Wilde as a member of one of the most dazzling Anglo-Irish families of Victorian times, and also in the broader social, political and religious context.

Negroland: A Memoir by Margo Jefferson ($30, PB) The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson was for years a theatre and book critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago’s black elite. She calls this society ‘Negroland’: ‘a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty’. With privilege came expectation. Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments—the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of postracial America—Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions. Cast Away: Stories of Survival from Europe’s Refugee Crisis by Charlotte McDonald-Gibson ($33, PB)

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson has spent years reporting on every aspect of Europe’s refugee crisis, and she offers a vivid glimpse into the personal dilemmas, pressures, choices and hopes that lie beneath the headlines. Here, we meet five people forced from their homelands, including Nart, a Syrian lawyer who becomes an underground activist fighting the Assad regime until the risk of imprisonment and torture becomes too great. Sina is newly married and heavily pregnant when she finds herself travelling alone across three continents to escape the Eritrean dictatorship. And Hanan watches in horror as the safe world she built for her four children in Damascus collapses, and she has to entrust their lives to people smugglers. Cast Away brings to life the human consequences of the most urgent humanitarian issue of our time.

Finding A Way by Graeme Innes ($29.95, PB) Blind from birth, Graeme Innes was blessed. Blessed because he had a family who refused to view his blindness as a handicap and who instilled in him a belief in his own abilities. Blessed because he had the determination to persevere when obstacles were put in his way. And now, after a long and successful career – from lawyer to company director to Human Rights Commissioner – he has written his story. Finding a Way shares his memories of love and support, of challenges and failures, and of overcoming the discrimination so many people with disabilities face. Alongside his life story, Innes shares ideas on advocacy for people with disabilities and outlines what remains to be done to fully include people with disabilities in Australian society.

In 1979, Jeremy Thorpe, the rising star of the Liberal Party, stood trial for conspiracy to murder. It was the first time that a leading British politician had stood trial on a murder charge. It was the first time that a murder plot had been hatched in the House of Commons. And it was the first time that a prominent public figure had been exposed as a philandering homosexual. With all the pace and drama of a thriller, A Very English Scandal is an extraordinary story of hypocrisy, deceit and betrayal at the heart of the British Establishment.

Smuggler by Richard Stratton ($30, PB) Richard Stratton was the unlikeliest of drug kingpins. After the adrenaline high of bringing two kilos of marijuana across the US border from a trip to Mexico he became a member of the hippie mafia, living the underground life while embracing the hippie credo, rejecting hard drugs in favour of marijuana and hashish, which he brought into the US by the ton. As an anti-establishment outlaw he was friends with Norman Mailer. As a major drug importer he worked with Whitey Bulger and some of the most notorious American crime figures. From Lebanon to the Caribbean, from improvised airstrips in the backwoods of New England to the badlands of the US-Mexican border, and from five-star Manhattan hotels to the brutal reality of federal prison and a 25-year sentence, we follow his story as his fortunes rise and fall.

Richard Savage (1697–1743) was a poet, playwright, and satirist who claimed to be the illegitimate son of a late earl and to have been denied his inheritance and viciously persecuted by his mother. He was urbane, charming, a brilliant conversationalist, but also irresponsible and impulsive. His role in a tavern brawl almost led him to the gallows, though his life was saved by an eleventh-hour pardon by the King. Over time he attracted many supporters, practically all of whom he managed to alienate by the time of his death in a debtors’ prison in Bristol. Johnson, who had been friends with Savage for a little over a year, drew on published documents and his own memories of Savage to produce one of the first great English biographies. The edition is supplemented by other writings by Johnson, a selection of Savage’s prose and verse, contemporary and posthumous responses to Savage and to Johnson’s biography , and selections by Johnson’s first two major biographers, John Hawkins and James Boswell.

Baba Schwartz’s story began 15 years before the Holocaust could have been imagined. It is the story of a spirited girl in a warm and loving Jewish family, living a normal life in a small town in eastern Hungary. She describes the innocence and excitement of her childhood, remembering her early years with verve and emotion, remarkably unaffected by what took place after the Nazis arrived. What did happen was unspeakable horror. Baba describes the shattering of her family and their community from 1944, when the Germans transported the 3000 Jews of her town to Auschwitz. She lost her father to the gas chambers, yet she and her two sisters survived this concentration camp and several others to which they were transported as slave labour. They eventually escaped the final death march and were liberated by the advancing Russian army. Baba writes about this period of horror with the same directness, freshness and honesty as she writes about her childhood. Baba wrote this book in 1991 but only revealed the manuscript last year, when she was eighty-eight. This volume was prepared with the assistance of Robert Hillman.

A Very English Scandal: Sex, Lies and a Murder Plot at the Heart of the Establishment by John Preston ($35, PB)

An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage by Samuel Johnson ($36.95, PB)

The May Beetles: My First Twenty Years by Baba Schwartz ($35, HB)

In Gratitude by Jenny Diski ($28, PB) In August 2014, Jenny Diski was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer & given ‘two or three years’ to live. Being a writer, she decided to write about it (grappling with the unoriginality even of this), and also to tell a story she has not yet told: that of being taken in, aged 15, by the author Doris Lessing, and the subsequent 50 years of their complex relationship. Swooping from one memory to the next—alighting on the hysterical battlefield of her parental home, her expulsion from school, stacking shelves in Banbury & the drug-taking 20-something in & out of psychiatric hospitals, Diski paints a portrait of two extraordinary writers—Lessing & herself. Joe Gould’s Teeth by Jill Lepore ($45, HB)

When Joseph Mitchell published his profile of Joseph Gould in the December 1942 issue of The New Yorker, he deemed Gould’s purportedly masterful but rarely seen Oral History project, which allegedly consisted of nine million words detailing everything anyone ever said to him, ‘the longest unpublished work in existence.’ But Mitchell, in fact, hadn’t read more than a few pages of the Oral History. The manuscript seemed to have gone missing, along with other of Gould’s possessions—his hair, his sight, his teeth—as he began to sink deeper into poverty, drink & destitution. And as Gould neared the end of his life, lying pathologically, begging for money from friends & strangers alike, and deflecting publishers’ requests to read his work, Mitchell couldn’t help but wonder: Had the Oral History ever existed? Complete with appearances from the likes of E. E. Cummings, Ezra Pound, and Augusta Savage and set against the backdrop of inter-war and post-war New York’s glamour and grime, Jill Lepore carefully unravels the riddle of Joe Gould and his missing manuscript.

Tom Hughes QC: A Cab on the Rank by Ian Hancock ($59.95, HB)

An icon of the Sydney and Australian Bar, Tom Hughes appeared in a raft of celebrated cases, became the subject of many media profiles and was, from the 1970s to the 1990s, the country’s most expensive advocate. Hughes has also been a wartime pilot, a politician, an activist federal Attorney-General, a grazier, and a racehorse owner. He survived a broken marriage, a spiteful sacking from ministerial office and a prolonged though not permanent loss of an inherited Catholic faith. Using a huge trove of personal records, including fee books, intimate diaries, autobiographical jottings & private correspondence, plus interviews with Hughes, his family, friends and colleagues this book offers a personal perspective on several decades of Australian political, social and legal history The new novel from the author of the million-copy international bestseller The Miniaturist. Seductive, exhilarating and suspenseful, The Muse is an addictive novel about art, identity and the hidden power within us all… THE MUSE Jessie Burton The 1916 Australian Rules Exhibition Match in London was the first time the world saw our national game. But for footy-loving ANZACS bound for the Western Front, it became The Game of Their Lives. THE GAME OF THEIR LIVES Nick Richardson From Alan Brough – broadcaster, comedian, singer and professional music nerd (most notably from ABC TV’s Spicks and Specks) – comes a hilarious debut novel for children. I didn’t mean for Mrs Cyclopolos to blow up. I just wanted a paper round. CHARLIE AND THE WAR AGAINST THE GRANNIES Alan Brough From the award-winning author of Does My Head Look Big in This? When Michael Met Mina is a novel for everyone who wants to fight for love, and against injustice. A boy. A girl. Two families. One great divide. WHEN MICHAEL MET MINA Randa Abdel-Fattah

www.panmacmillan.com.au

Travel Writing

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World by Geoff Dyer ($33, PB)

Geoff Dyer explores why we travel. From a trip to the Lightning Field in New Mexico to chasing Gauguin’s ghost in French Polynesia, from falling for someone who may or may not be a tour guide in Beijing’s Forbidden City to tracking down the house of an intellectual hero in Los Angeles, Dyer pursues all permutations of the peak experience–– including the trough experience. Dyer blends travel writing, essay, criticism and fiction with a smart and cantankerous wit that is unmatched. This is a book for armchair travellers and procrastinating philosophers everywhere.

The Red Wake: A Hybrid of Travel, History and Journalism by Kurt Johnson ($35, PB)

In the West, the Soviet universe has long been consigned to the dustbin of history, no longer relevant to a world where the Golden Arches have supplanted the Hammer & Sickle—but after travels to the Balkans, Romania and Bulgaria, Kurt Johnson begins to suspect that for some the Soviet language & symbols have retained their former sanctity. From frozen corners of Kyrgyzstan still rocked by ethnic riots, to the ex-KGB headquarters in Moscow; from a rocket launch on the Kazakh Steppe, to an unrecognised gangster state in Moldova; through the irradiated ruins of Chernobyl, to a gulag in Siberia, Johnson meets the people cast adrift by the collapse of the Soviet system, and the disappearance of the only world they knew. Far from lying dormant, he discovers the legacy of the Soviet Union is alive—and shaped to serve the political ends of the Kremlin in this new Cold War.

Birds of Passage: Henrietta Clive’s Travels in South India 1798–1801 (ed) Nancy Shields ($25, PB) Henrietta Clive was a true original. Clever, vivacious and interested in everything, she balanced the demands of high profile public life with that of a caring mother. The home-schooled daughter of a bankrupt Earl, in thrall to her handsome wayward brother, but married off to a plump pudding of a man—the nabob Edward Clive, governor of Madras—her partial escape was to ride across southern India, in a vast tented caravan propelled by dozens of elephants, camels and a hundred bullock carts and write home.

Finding The Plot: 100 Graves to Visit Before You Die by Ann Treneman ($25, PB)

Meet the real War Horse, the best ‘funambulist’ ever, Byron and his dog Boatswain, prime ministers, queens and kings, Florence Nightingale and her pet baby owl Athena, highwaymen, scientists, mistresses, the real James Bond and, of course, his boss ‘M’. Then there are writers, painters, poets, rakes and rogues, victims, the meek and mild and the just plain mad. This unique travelogue is made up of 100 entries, each telling the story of one or more graves—some chosen for who resides in them, others for the grave itself. Some entries are humorous, some are poignant, but all tell us something about the British way of death.

Liquid City: Photographs by Marc Atkins, Text by Iain Sinclair ($38, PB)

Liquid City documents the collaboration between Iain Sinclair and photographer Marc Atkins & their eccentric, manic, often moving explorations of London’s hidden streets, cemeteries, canals, parks, pubs & personalities. Focusing on London’s eastern & southeastern quadrants Aitkins’ striking, atmospheric photographs, with many new additions, accompany text and a new introduction by Sinclair. An array of famous & lesser-known writers, booksellers & film-makers slip in & out of Sinclair’s annotations, as do memories & remnants of the East End’s criminal mobs, as well as physical landmarks as diverse as the Thames Barrier & Karl Marx’s grave in Highgate Cemetery.

Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden & Louis MacNeice ($35, PB)

In the summer of 1936, W. H. Auden & Louis MacNeice visited Iceland on commission to write a travel book, but found themselves capturing concerns on a scale that were far more international. Though writing in a ‘holiday’ spirit, commented Auden, its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment, Hitler growing everyday more powerful and a world-war more inevitable. The result is the remarkable Letters from Iceland, a collaboration in poetry and prose, reportage and correspondence, published in 1937 with the Spanish Civil War newly in progress, beneath the shadow of looming world war.

Under the Tump: Sketches of Real Life on the Welsh Borders by Oliver Balch ($33, PB)

Hay-on-Wye is world famous as the Town of Books. But when travel writer Oliver Balch moved there, it was not just the books he was keen to read, but the people too. After living in London & Buenos Aires, what was he to make of this tiny, quirky town on the Welsh-English border? He turns to Francis Kilvert, a Victorian diarist who captured the bucolic rural life of his day. Does anything of Kilvert’s world still exist? And could a newcomer ever feel they truly belong? Balch meets with a king and his courtiers, publicans, hippies, mayors, old widows and young farmers as he joins in the daily routines and lives of his fellow residents to paint a captivating, personal picture of country life in the 21st century.

books for kids to young adults

compiled by Lynndy Bennett, our children's correspondent Reading Picture Books with Children by Megan Dowd Lambert ($40, HB)

If you really want to know how to read a picture book, to a child, or to yourself, this will be the most useful book you’ve ever read. Written primarily for educators, it shows a most immersive approach to really reading a picture book. All aspects of a book are discussed—its shape, its size, the structure of the pages, the covers, the endpapers, this book will show you how to enjoy them all, and in the process, heighten your visual intelligence and understanding. Written by a lecturer in children’s literature, who had the privilege of working at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Megan Dowd Lambert has truly shared her knowledge and enthusiasm. This is an important and intelligent book, but it’s also accessible and very engaging, and very visually appealing—most fitting given its subject matter. Louise

Picture Books

Blocks by Irene Dickson ($20, HB)

On one hand this is the simplest of picture books, about a little girl named Ruby playing with her red blocks, and a little boy, Benji, who is playing with his blue blocks. They are each playing peacefully until one of them decides to take a block that isn’t his, and chaos ensues. The bright simple pictures are dynamic and full of expression, and the limited palette is highly effective. More than a book about cooperative play and sharing, this would be an excellent springboard for all kinds of discussions, but in a most playful way. With a very amusing resolution, Blocks is a truly satisfying book, for ages 1-3. Louise

graphic novels

The Hobbit: The Graphic Novel by J.R.R. Tolkien edited by Charles Dixon & Sean Deming, (ill) David Wenzel ($27, PB)

I’m really enjoying reading The Hobbit in graphics—I feel like I’m in the book with the characters. I like that the story is broken down into quick cartoon scenes as it gives you a bit more information with what’s happening in that moment. I am also slowly co-reading the novel The Hobbit together with my friend Karen, which is fantastic! Aidan

Einstein by Corinne Maier (ill) Anne Simon ($28, PB) Distilling the thoughts and life of one of the world’s greatest ever thinkers into smart witty dialogue and caricature-like illustrations, the collaborators lend Einstein an accessibility that many may have struggled with until now. Uncontained thoughts and images explode out of the contained boxes, representing the chaos and creative exploration of Einstein’s genius and the influences upon him. For teens interested in science, or Einstein, this is an informative visual approach to the giant of C20th physics. Lynndy

Fiction

And I Darken by Kiersten White ($20, PB) I loved this first book in a trilogy set in the Ottoman Empire! With a strong, happily violent kick-ass female protagonist offset by a timid gentle brother, the beginning of The Conqueror’s Trilogy depicts a brutal C15th life, fraught with geopolitical machinations, religious conflict and dark twists. Acknowledged as ugly and feral, Lada Dracul is ignored by her father until he sends her and her sensitive young brother Radu (Radu the Handsome) to their enemy as political hostages, allowing him to flee safely and their country to be overrun. Thus begins Lada’s campaign of revenge and determination to regain the greatness due her family and their own country’s might. With an atypical heroine, a love triangle, secrets and conspiracies galore, and historical detail, And I Darken has been compared with Game of Thrones for older teens. It’s great to see White venturing away from the paranormal, and I for one will be clamouring for the next volume in this captivating trilogy that switches Vlad the Impaler to the stronger gender. (No correspondence re this statement, please.) Lynndy For Keeps: A Treasury of Stories, Poems and Plays Celebrating 100 Years of School Magazine by the NSW Department of Education

I remember avidly seizing upon each new issue of the The School Magazine when I was in primary school, eagerly paging through, deciding which entry to start with and looking forward to reading the entire booklet, especially if any of my favourite contributors was in that particular issue. It’s only now, as an adult, that I know that The School Magazine is the longest running children’s magazine in the world, having been published continuously for just over a century, regardless of local or international events. It has also launched the careers of many of the exceptionally talented Australians we are so proud of today. Amongst the luminaries in this selection are Patricia Wrightson, Allan Baillie, Tohby Riddle, Sue Walker, Colin Thiele, Stephen Axelsen and Kim Gamble; all of whom developed distinctive ‘voices’ of communication. Reflecting interests of its time, the magazine has featured changing styles of writing and illustration; For Keeps is both a nostalgic microcosm of Australian childhood and an anthology to treasure. ($30, Flexibound) Lynndy

Non fiction

Worms For Breakfast: How to Feed a Zoo! by Helaine Becker (ill) Kathy Boake ($25, HB)

If you encountered a dish of crayfish, earthworms, mealworms, and fly pupae, all live and wriggling, would you immediately think ‘Ah, platypus party mix!’ Most of us wouldn’t, but those entrusted with preparing food for zoo animals are familiar with this and many other recipes for food specific to their charges. The lighthearted approach of Worms for Breakfast renders palatable this introduction to the very serious business of optimal care for animals in captivity—whether that is daily feeding, treats for invalids, or catering to highly specialised diets for animals from other regions. Amongst the facts, recipes, and interviews with zoo keepers around the world are puzzles, bright photo-collage artwork, and an emphasis on the importance of conservation. Whatever your standpoint on animals in zoos, this book presents some of the behind-the-scenes methods of nourishing and stimulating them. Gross factor is fairly high if you are squeamish about mashed larvae, or fresh intestines; interest factor is extremely high. For all sorts of readers: thoughtful, reluctant, lovers of odd facts, or those with an interest in nature—compelling! Lynndy

Other-Wordly: Words Both Strange and Lovely from Around the World by Yee-Lum Mak, (ill) Kelsey Garrity-Riley

For many reasons this book will grace my bookshelves at home, not least because it is a joyful presentation of expressions to hoard, to savour, to produce with relish in conversation in the perfect context. Who could resist the Icelandic verb ‘hoppipolla’, and how much more descriptive is it than the mundane English ‘jumping into puddles’? The particular sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees is contained in Japanese in the word ‘komorebi’. Each page offers a single word with its origin, part of speech and English description, amidst gentle illustrations that betray the illustrator’s European heritage and Asian interest. Languages around the world have been plumbed for words for traits, phrases and qualities you’ve long searched for, or maybe didn’t know you needed. As a miscellaneous gift or a serious addition to lexicography, Other-Wordly is a charming collection to enrich your life. ($28, HB) Lynndy

Food & Health

Mammissima: Family Cooking from a Modern Italian Mamma by Elisabetta Minervini

The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly ($33, PB)

In the past, the elders had encyclopaedic memories. They could name all the animals and plants across the landscape, and the stars in the sky too. Yet most of us struggle to memorise more than a short poem. Using traditional Aboriginal Australian songlines as the key, Lynne Kelly has identified the powerful memory technique used by indigenous people around the world. The stone circles across Britain & northern Europe, the elaborate stone houses of New Mexico, the huge animal shapes at Nasca in Peru, and the statues of Easter Island all serve as the most effective memory system ever invented by humans. They allowed people in non-literate cultures to memorise the vast amounts of practical information they needed to survive. In this book Lynne Kelly shows us how we can use this ancient technique to train our memories today.

Bordering iridescent seas, Puglia sits at the heel of Italy’s ‘boot’. Puglian Elisabetta Minervini has tried and tested the best traditional recipes for children and adults alike. These include orecchiette (‘little-ear’ pasta) with broccoli, stuffed peppers, octopus salad and the ultimate homemade pizza—as well as a host of delicious sweet treats. ($40, HB)

Chocolate by Kirsten Tibballs ($40, HB)

Whether you’re after a knockout chocolate mousse cake, sticky chocolate doughnut or the best brownie you’ve ever tasted, world-renowned chocolatier and pastry chef Kirsten Tibbals has you covered. Her favourite chocolate recipes, road-tested at her cooking school, and detailed explanations of steps and techniques will instil confidence in the most kitchen-shy of chocolate lovers.

Ten Leadership Lessons You Must Teach Your Teenager by Tim Hawkes ($33, PB)

Indian Made Easy by Amandip Uppal ($40, PB) This collection of over 140 recipes presents a fresh approach to cooking Indian food, taking you on an amazing spice journey that fits a fast-paced lifestyle. You’ll find quick, uncomplicated recipes for Butter Chicken & Prawn Curry, tempting vegetarian dishes, as well as Lamb Kofta with Saffron Crème Fraiche & slowly simmered Beef & Potato Curry. Complete your meal with homemade chutneys, pickles & infused rice, then finish off with a decadent dessert or spiced chai. Special features guide you through making paneer, yoghurt & flatbreads, plus there’s a fabulous menu planner & information on pantry staples, must-have spices & alternative ingredients.

Dr Tim Hawkes is the author of several books, and has taught in England and Australia for over 35 years—having been a headmaster for much of that time. He has taught thousands of students on the subject of leadership. He has learnt what’s effective—and what’s not—when talking to young people about leadership. This book includes chapters on: Making the right choices; Following the right examples; Finding a calling; Working with a team; Formulating strategies; Learning discipline.

The Puberty Book by Wendy Darvill & Kelsey Powell ($25, PB)

Updated to include new information about social media, cyber-bullying, online safety and dieting trends, the sixth edition of The Puberty Book answers all of those direct (pre) teenage questions: What’s a wet dream? How do you ask a girl on a date? How are sperm made? After sex do you get sick? What do you do if your penis is small? How does milk get into breasts? When should you start shaving your legs? With simple language and honest answers, the authors discuss the changes that happen at puberty—sex and sexuality, health and mental health, relationships, pregnancy and birth.

Super Food Family Classics by Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver freshens up your family favourites and expands your recipe repertoire with new nutritious, tasty meals. Sneak in extra veg with Squash Mac ‘N’ Cheese and enjoy a no-arguments family dinner with Chicken Fajitas, Smoky Dressed Aubergines & Peppers. When you need a no-fuss meal on the table fast try Chicken Goujons or Pasta Pesto, or get ahead with freezer-friendly Jumbo Fish Fingers or Proper Chicken Nuggets. Use ingredients you know the family already love— Sweet Potato Fish Cakes or Chocolate Porridge. ($55, HB)

Beautiful Failures by Lucy Clark ($35, PB) When Lucy Clark’s daughter graduated from school a ‘failure’, she started asking questions about the way we measure success. Why is there so much pressure on kids today? Where does it come from? Most importantly, as we seem to be in the grip of an epidemic of anxiety, how can we reduce that pressure? Beautiful Failures explores, through personal experience and journalistic investigation, a broken education system that fails too many kids and puts terrible pressure on all kids, including those who ‘succeed’. It challenges accepted wisdoms about schooling, calls on parents to examine their own expectations, and questions the purpose of education, and indeed the purpose of childhood.

Naturally Lean: 125 Nourishing Gluten-Free, Plant-Based Recipes—All Under 300 Calories by Allyson Kramer ($35, PB)

While gluten-free & plant-based eating are popular, these cuisines can be loaded with sneaky fillers & not-so-nutritious ingredients. Allyson Kramer brings whole foods into the mix with 125 recipes that pack in nutrients without loading up on calories. Each chapter focuses on a different food category—greens and crucifers; grains; beans and legumes; fruits; nuts & seeds: roots & tubers— and demonstrates how to use them in tasty meals that are filling without fillers, refined sugars, or sketchy processed ingredients.

The End of Memory: A natural history of aging and Alzheimer’s by Jay Ingram ($35, PB)

It has been called ‘the plague of the 21st century’ for its dramatic increase in numbers and the challenge it poses to health care. Jay Ingram charts the history of the disease, explaining the fascinating science behind it, recounting the efforts to understand and combat it, and introduces us to the passionate researchers who are working to find a cure. This is an important book for the millions of people around the world who are affected by Alzheimer’s, as well as those who are intrigued by both the ageing process and the brain, and wish to understand them better.

Restorative Yoga: Reduce Stress, Gain Energy, and Find Balance by Ulrica Norberg ($23, PB)

Restorative yoga is a gentle but powerful practice that is desperately needed in today’s crazy-busy culture. Ulrica Norberg shows the simple poses that will help you release anxiety, promote digestion, relieve headaches, recover from injuries, and more.

A Brain for Life by Nicola Gates ($30, PB)

Neuropsychologist Nicola Gates draws on cutting-edge research to explain the amazing roles our health and fitness, as well as mental activity, play in brain health. And she shares the simple steps you can take to keep your brains fit and active. Discover: Why being mindful is essential for brain health; Why a healthy gut means a healthy brain; The heart-brain connection; The critical link between exercise and brain fitness; Why your brain wants you to stay social. Don’t wait for a crisis—start making changes today.

AWW Food for the Soul

There are slow-cooked recipes of all types done in the oven, on the stove-top and in the alltime favourite electric slow cooker, delicious soups and stews, easy to prepare casseroles, great curries from many cuisines and so much more. Don’t go through a winter without this book. ($35, PB)

Snowball in a Blizzard: The Tricky Problem of Uncertainty in Medicine by Steven Hatch ($30, PB)

There’s a running joke among radiologists: finding a possible tumour in a mammogram, they say, is akin to finding a snowball in a blizzard. The result? Up to 30% of breast cancer surgeries are done on those who have no cancer at all. CAT scans, MRIs, Mammograms, and blood tests provide a wall of data where false positives are rife. Thus, to be a good doctor, surgeon, or psychiatrist, it is just as important to know what one doesn’t know, as what one does. Covering everything from the efficacy of Prozac to the regular barrage of health advice by the media (eg. bacon causing cancer), Hatch shows why it’s essential that doctors and their patients know how to interpret data— a captivating discussion of why our overconfidence in medicine can be more deadly than any disease.

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change & Thrive in Work & Life by Susan David

Raising Your Child in a Digital World by Kristy Goodwin ($30, PB)

Shaped around the 7 essential building blocks for young children’s development: Attachment & Relationships, Language, Sleep, Play, Physical movement, Nutrition & Executive function skills, Dr Kristy Goodwin provides concrete advice on how to develop healthy digital habits in your children and protect their emotional and mental health.

patterns. ($35, PB)

Every day we speak around 16,000 words—but the voice in our head creates thousands more. Thoughts such as ‘I’m not spending enough time with my children’ or ‘I don’t have the confidence to do this presentation’ are taken as unshakable facts when it reality they are the judgemental opinions of our inner voice. Susan David gives you the ability to make peace with that voice in your head, achieve your goals, and live your life to the fullest using techniques that enable you to unhook yourself from your negative emotional

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Serious Whitefella Stuff: When Rattling Spears: A History of solutions become the problem in Indigenous Australian Art Indigenous affairs In conv. with Terry Smith Superbly illustrated, and rich in de- Panel: Mick Gooda, Mark Moran & Cath Brokenborough tail and critical analysis, this book provides the first full historical acChair: Shane Houston count of Indigenous Australian art How does Indigenous policy signed off in Canberra work—or not— and shows that there is much when implemented in remote Abomore to the art than large, riginal communities? colourful canvasses.

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A Bird on M In conv. with Sa Over a decade ag beloved husband J cer, leaving her t south of Sydney three young child and beautifully w plores her experie single parenting a

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Trouble: O Wendy Guest & Gary Gray Central A Not Just for This Life: In conv. with S Gough Whitlam Remembered Journalist and A Panel Not Just For This Life is a salute and dent Kieran Finn tribute to Gough Whitlam, com- ordered environm memorating what would have been Springs courthou ries through witn his 100th birthday. brings a fresh ins on well-kn

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On Trial in Australia Suzanne Smith Alice Springs resinane goes into the ment of the Alice use, following stoness accounts, and sider’s perspective nown cases.

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Launch—3.30 for 4 Luke Kendall

The Leeth Dossier: Vols 1 & 2 In 2036, magic returned to a world which neither needed nor wanted it. Some years later, an unusual young child is acquired by Dr Alex Harmon for his magic research at the Institute for Paranormal Dysfunction. He sets Sara to hunting an imaginary creature, unaware it is both real & far more dangerous than he knows

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Launch—3.30 for 4 Sacha Jones

The Grass Was Always Browner Launcher: Rex Finch Girls born in suburban Sydney in the 1960s were rarely called Sacha, particularly girls who aspired to be Russian. when the suppositories she was given to cure her asthma made her vomit, the doctors recommended ballet instead—and an unlikely star was born in this lol memoir.

10 Launch—3.30 for 4 Isabelle Li

A Chinese Affair Launcher: Debra Adelaide These 16 exquisite stories explore recent Chinese migration to Australia & elsewhere—intergenerational and interracial relationships, the weight of history the search for meaning, and the muteness peculiar to cultural dislocation and the inexpressibility of self in a second language.

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Aboriginal Children, History & Health:Beyond Social Determinants Launcher: Prof. Ngaire Brown This volume traces the complex reasons behind the disturbing discrepancy between the health and well-being of children in mainstream Australia and those in remote Indigenous communities.

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My Shoulder arah Macdonald go, Lucy Palmer’s Julian died of canto manage a farm and to raise their dren. This moving written memoir exences of death, loss, and growing older.

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Granny’s Good Reads with Sonia Lee

I always enjoy Philip Kerr’s ‘Bernie Gunther’ thrillers and his latest, The Other Side of Silence ($30), is one of the best. It’s 1956 and Bernie is working under an assumed name as concierge of a hotel in the South of France. An intruder from Bernie’s past appears in the person of Harold Hennig, the one-time SS captain responsible for the death of Bernie’s girlfriend and their unborn baby. Hennig now supports himself by blackmailing the well-off, his latest victim being none other than Somerset Maugham, who has sought Bernie’s help. Bernie reluctantly agrees, hoping that this might also enable him to settle his personal score with Hennig. Before he can do this, a femme fatale precipitates him out of the Nazi frying pan into the Stasi fire, with MI5 adding fuel to the flames. Kerr writes intelligent, well-researched thrillers and I look forward to the next in the series, Prussian Blue, due out in 2017.

Julia Claiborne Johnson’s Be Frank With Me ($28) is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in ages. Frank is a nine-year-old savant with an IQ off the charts and a phenomenal memory. He is accident-prone, talks like an encyclopaedia, wears outlandish outfits and doesn’t sleep much. Not surprisingly, he hates school because he has no friends there and his teachers don’t like it when he corrects their mistakes. Frank’s mum Mimi is a novelist who wrote a bestseller years ago, has since lost all her money in a Ponzi scheme, and is trying to write another book. Mimi’s publisher kindly sends her an assistant named Alice. So Frank, Mimi and Alice end up living in a glass-walled Bel Air mansion, where Alice becomes Frank’s full-time carer and friend. Also on the scene is Xander, piano teacher and handyman, who mends the all-toofrequent glass breakages with primitive tools, since it would be impossible to have an electric saw anywhere near Frank. The book is full of ‘only in Hollywood’ moments and I loved every minute of it. I’d thought I was the only person in the universe who disliked Eligible ($30) by Curtis Sittenfeld because of how my Lizzie and my Darcy are portrayed in it, but an SMH review by Mark McGinness with the verdict ‘It sucks’ reassures me that there is at least one other curmudgeon who takes exception to there being reality shows, hens’ nights and hate-sex in Austenland. I’ve quite enjoyed all the other modern Austens but found nothing to like in Eligible. Sorry, folks.

I did, however, find a lot to like in Rosetta ($30) by Alexandra Joel. Joel’s book reconstructs the life of her great-grandmother, who in 1905 scandalously left her respectable Melbourne husband and five-year-old daughter Frances to run away with Zeno the Magnificent, a half-Chinese fortune teller and magician extraordinaire. After working at Tamarama’s Wonderland, Rosetta and Zeno moved to London, where she somehow became an American and he reinvented himself as a charismatic Japanese professor. Dr Carl Zeno’s magnetic personality was to enchant much of fashionable London, the Kaiser’s sister Princess Charlotte and ex-Empress Eugenie being two of his more eminent customers. Well-born ladies seemingly couldn’t get enough of Zeno’s massages, pills and potions, and Rosetta cannily invested the profits in real estate. Foreseeing the coming conflagration in Europe, in 1914 the couple returned to Sydney, where Rosetta at one stage became landlady to Tilly Devine, the well-known brothel owner. One can’t but feel sorry for Rosetta’s abandoned child Frances, Alexandra’s grandmother, whom her mother never contacted, despite living only a short distance from her at Rose Bay. A fascinating read, and for more revelations about Rosetta and Zeno, don’t miss Alexandra Joel’s interview with Phillip Adams on ABC RN’s Late Night Live. Sonia

The Intervention: An anthology (eds) Rosie Scott, Anita Heiss ($30, PB)

In compelling fiction, memoir, essays, poetry and communiqués, the dramatic story of the Intervention and the despair, anguish and anger of the First Nations people of the Territory comes alive. Deeply moving, impassioned, spiritual, angry and authoritative, this is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand what the Intervention is all about, and why it prompts such passionate opposition. ‘An indispensable contribution to the debate.’ Anna Funder. ‘The key message in essay after essay in this collection is that the intervention failed. It was a heavy-handed, political quick fix that has fixed almost nothing.’ Fiona Capp, SMH and The Age. With a new preface.

Australian Studies

Denny Day: The Life & Times of Australia’s Greatest Lawman—the Forgotten Hero of the Myall Creek Massacre by Terry Smyth ($35, PB)

Denny Day was a vicar’s son from Ireland. A member of the AngloIrish ruling class, as a young man Day joined the British Army before resigning to seek his fortune in NSW. There he accepted the most challenging role in the young colony: keeping the peace on the frontier. His abiding legacy is the capture of the perpetrators of the Myall Creek Massacre—the first time white men were convicted of the murder of Aborigines. For this he was fiercely attacked by the press, by powerful landowners who hired the colony’s top lawyers to defend the killers, and by the general public. There are many colourful characters, heroes & villains, in Denny Day’s story: inspirational frontier women; outlaws captured in a desperate firefight; brave and wily Aboriginal resistance leaders; gormless colonial officials; privileged English nobles and persecuted Irish immigrants; convicts and freemen; and, for good measure, an American pirate.

How to Vote Progressive in Australia: Labor or Green? (eds) Dennis Altman & Sean Scalmer

Red or Green? Traditionally, Australian progressives have supported the Australian Labor Party; increasingly, The Greens appeal. What are the key differences between the parties? Is greater collaboration desirable? Is it likely? Some progressives remain strongly committed to Labor or The Greens. Others have abandoned one or other of the parties from bitter experience. Others still are genuinely undecided, or seek to promote greater understanding and cooperation. What is the best way forward? This volume brings together a range of party leaders, veterans, & academic experts to tackle these important questions. Deliberately pluralistic, it encompasses strongly divergent views. Dedicated to progressive change, it aims both to capture & to advance a vital public debate. ($29.95, PB)

Altered States: The American Dream & the Australian Way by Guy Rundle ($23, PB)

America—land of the free. Free to work till you drop, to die on the street, to get shot by the cops … Australia—country of the fair go. Where true blue has become Beyond Blue, and safety warnings are everywhere … America and Australia. Twin countries, settler nations, which took different paths, the small differences magnifying into contrasting civilisations. Guy Rundle has spent many years observing these contrasts—on the streets, in the culture and on the campaign trail. In Altered States, he argues that Australia succeeded in creating a ‘good society’, while the US failed—but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from America’s dynamism and independence. Perceptive & often hilarious, this is a strikingly original take on the challenges facing Australia in the 21st century.

The Last Fifty Miles by Adam Wakeling ($35, PB)

March, 1918. The young Australian nation is struggling to cope with the Great War, now in its fifth year—the strain of maintaining huge armies halfway across the globe, the bitter divisions over conscription, anxiety from the rise of communism in Russia, and the creeping influence of the War Precautions Act. The five Australian divisions have recently been combined into an all-Australian Corps, fighting as one unit in France. They need a commander and MajorGeneral John Monash is a leading candidate. Before the issue can be settled, German supreme commander Erich Ludendorff resolves to launch a massive offensive, seize Paris and win the War. The Last Fifty Miles is the riveting account of how, when it mattered most, Australia stood up to play a critical role in one of the most decisive victories of World War One.

A Voyage to New Holland and Round the World by James Colnett RN ($19.95, PB)

No mariner knew the wide Pacific better than James Colnett, RN. He had sailed with Cook; he had filibustered in the north-west Pacific fur trade (nearly starting a war with Spain in the process); he had made a whaling reconnaissance to the Galapagos Islands. Although the journal is an important record of a short-lived experiment using warships as convict transports, its wider interest lies in Colnett’s observations on NSW as he found it in 1803. Sensitive to criticism but with unconventionally liberal views about the administration of justice, he is probably unique in his inability to discern any redeeming feature in Sydney, not even its harbour. In fact he believed New Zealand a better prospect for a colony in the region. His description of NSW as mutinous was prophetic. Colnett was instrumental in having King recalled—only to be replaced by a man who already had a bad record with mutineers: Captain Bligh of the Bounty would become Governor Bligh of the Rum Rebellion.

Not Just For this Life: Gough Whitlam Remembered (eds) Wendy Guest & Gary Gray ($30, PB)

This is a salute and tribute to Gough Whitlam, commemorating what would have been his 100th birthday. Upon his death in October 2014 there was a national outpouring of grief and affectionate remembrances across the nation. The book includes a foreword by Graham Freudenberg & short introductions by Laurie Oakes, Anita Heiss, Geraldine Doogue, Don Watson, Patricia Hewitt, Nick Whitlam & Tim Soutphommasane where they tell their stories of the period following Gough’s death and their experiences with Gough.

History

Zero Hour: 100 Years On: Views from the Parapet of the Somme by Jolyon Fenwick

The first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, was the most devastating event of the WW1 for the British army. Jolyon Fenwick presents 14 haunting photographed panoramas (each one a four-page gatefold, opening to nearly 1 metre wide) showing the Somme’s major sites as they look today—taken from the exact viewpoints of the front-line British troops as they began their advance towards the German trenches at 7.30 am Fenwick’s compelling photographs are accompanied by detailed maps and vivid descriptions of the day’s events, detailing their awful human loss: out of 116,000 British and Empire troops committed to the assault, by nightfall 57,470 had become casualties, and 19,240 were dead. This book is simultaneously a celebration of the renewing power of nature, and a powerful and unconventional reminder of the horrors of the past. ($60, HB)

Jutland 1916: Twelve Hours That Decided The Great War by Angus Konstam Using a narrative approach, Jutland 1916 tells the story of the Battle of Jutland, the greatest naval clash of WW1. Drawing on a wealth of first-hand accounts, some of which were previously unknown, Angus Konstam weaves a highly original narrative, which intertwines original research, into a fast-paced account of the fighting. This is the only book on the battle to use a narrative thread to tell the story from both the British and German perspectives—providing a fresh perspective on this decisive battle. ($45, HB)

The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia by James Bradley ($35, PB)

James Bradley introduces the prominent Americans—including FDR’s grandfather, Warren Delano—who made their fortunes in the 1800s in the China opium trade. Meanwhile, American missionaries sought a myth: noble Chinese peasants eager to Westernize. The media propagated this mirage, and FDR believed that supporting Chiang Kai-shek would make China America’s best friend in Asia. But Chiang was on his way out and when Mao Zedong instead came to power, Americans were shocked, wondering how they had ‘lost China.’ From the 1850s to the origins of the Vietnam War, Bradley reveals how American misconceptions about China have distorted US policies and led to the avoidable deaths of millions.

Politics

Dark Money by Jane Mayer ($35, PB)

Why is America living in an age of profound economic inequality? Why, despite the desperate need to address climate change, have even modest environmental efforts been defeated again and again? Why have protections for employees been decimated? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middleclass workers? The conventional answer is that a popular uprising against ‘big government’ led to the rise of a broad-based conservative movement. But as Jane Mayer shows in this powerful, meticulously reported history, a network of exceedingly wealthy people with extreme libertarian views also played a key role by bankrolling a systematic, step-by-step plan to fundamentally alter the American political system.

Comrade Corbyn: A Very Unlikely Coup—How Jeremy Corbyn Stormed to the Labour Leadership by Rosa Prince ($40, HB)

Jeremy Corbyn is the most unlikely revolutionary: a middle-aged, middle-class former grammar schoolboy, who honed his radicalism on the mean streets of rural Shropshire. Until recently, he was barely known outside political circles, yet today he is the leader of the Labour Party having won by a landslide, riding a wave of popular enthusiasm. When he was first persuaded to run, not even Corbyn himself dreamed he would somehow tap into a summer 2015 zeitgeist, an unforeseen populist fervour for change. From Corbyn’s cosy rural upbringing, through three marriages—including his decision to divorce one wife for sending their son to grammar school—and his long espousal of contentious causes, including Irish republicanism and a free Palestine, Comrade Jeremy is the story of the most unexpected leadership contest ever to take place in modern British politics.

For The True Believers: Great Labor Speeches that Shaped History (ed) Troy Bramston ($39.95, PB)

This book brings together great Labor speeches which give voice to the party’s enduring values and achievements, and place it and its principal figures at the centre of historic events. There are speeches that stir the imagination and inspire, speeches that appeal to humanity, speeches of sorrow and redemption, speeches that urge moderation and caution, speeches that call for courage in the face of adversity, speeches that seek to mute the trumpet sound of war, speeches that attack the forces of conservatism, and speeches which celebrate and mourn the party’s fallen. Chris Watson ‘a light upon a mountain’; Ben Chifley’s famed ‘light on the hill’; John Curtin tells a hushed parliament that ‘a great naval battle is proceeding’; Gough Whitlam declares ‘It’s time’ and much more.

The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft by Tom Griffiths ($35, PB)

Writing good history is a high-wire act of balance & grace. Historians scour their own societies for vestiges of past worlds, for cracks & fissures in the pavement of the present, and for the shimmers & hauntings of history in everyday action. Eminent historian Tom Griffiths explores the craft of discipline & imagination that is history. Through portraits of 15 historians at work, including Inga Clendinnen, Judith Wright, Geoffrey Blainey & Henry Reynolds, he observes how a body of work is constructed out of a life-long dialogue between past evidence & present experience. Elegantly written, this book conjures fresh insights into the history of Australia and revitalises our sense of the historian’s craft— what Tom Griffiths calls ‘the art of time travel’.

Elizabeth: The Forgotten Years by John Guy

History has pictured Elizabeth I as Gloriana, an icon of strength and power—and has focused on the early years of her reign. But in 1583, when Elizabeth is fifty, there is relentless plotting among her courtiers—and still to come is the Spanish Armada and the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. This gripping and vivid portrait of her life and times—often told in her own words (and including details such as her love of chess and marzipan)—reveals a woman who was insecure, human (‘You know I am no morning woman’), and unpopular even with the men who fought for her. ($55, HB)

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: Churchill’s Mavericks by Giles Milton

In the spring of 1939, a top secret organisation was founded in London: its purpose was to plot the destruction of Hitler’s war machine through spectacular acts of sabotage. The guerrilla campaign that followed was to prove every bit as extraordinary as the six gentlemen who directed it. Cecil Clark, maverick engineer & maker of the dirty bomb that killed Reinhard Heyrdich, portly pensioner William Fairbairn—specialist in silent killing, dapper Scotsman Colin Gubbins along with three others formed a secret inner circle that planned the most audacious sabotage attacks of the Second World War. Winston Churchill called it his Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. The six ‘ministers’, aided by a group of formidable ladies, were so effective that they singlehandedly changed the course of the war. ($35, PB)

The Less You Know, the Better You Sleep: Russia’s Road to Terror and Dictatorship Under Yeltsin and Putin by David Satter ($47.95, HB)

In December 2013, David Satter became the first American journalist to be expelled from Russia since the Cold War. Satter is known in Russia for having written that the apartment bombings in 1999, which were blamed on Chechens & brought Putin to power, were actually carried out by the Russian FSB security police. Satter tells the story of the apartment bombings and how Boris Yeltsin presided over the criminalization of Russia, why Vladimir Putin was chosen as his successor, and how Putin has suppressed all opposition while retaining the appearance of a pluralist state. Satter’s description of where Russia is and how it got there will be of vital interest to anyone concerned about the dangers facing the world today.

The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis by Patrick Kingsley ($30, PB)

Europe is facing a wave of migration unmatched since the end of World War II. Throughout 2015, Guardian correspondent, Patrick Kingsley, travelled to 17 countries along the migrant trail, meeting hundreds of refugees making epic odysseys across deserts, seas and mountains to reach the holy grail of Europe. This is the definitive book on the refugee crisis: why they keep coming, and how they do it; the smugglers who help them on their way, and the coastguards who rescue them at the other end; the volunteers that feed them, the hoteliers that house them, and the border guards trying to keep them out—and the politicians looking the other way.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash ($45, HB)

Never in human history was there such a chance for freedom of expression—and never was there a time when the evils of unlimited speech flowed so easily across frontiers: violent intimidation, gross violations of privacy, tidal waves of abuse. A pastor burns a Koran in Florida & UN officials die in Afghanistan. Drawing on a lifetime of writing about dictatorships and dissidents, Timothy Garton Ash argues that in this connected world that he calls cosmopolis, the way to combine freedom and diversity is to have more but also better free speech. Across all cultural divides we must strive to agree on how we disagree. With vivid examples, from his personal experience of China’s Orwellian censorship apparatus to the controversy around Charlie Hebdo to a very English court case involving food writer Nigella Lawson, he proposes a framework for civilized conflict in a world where we are all becoming neighbours.

Science & Nature

Rise of the Machines: The Lost History of Cybernetics by Thomas Rid ($35, PB)

As lives offline and online merge even more, it is easy to forget how we got here. Thomas Rid reclaims the spectacular story of cybernetics, a control theory of man-and-machine and one of the 20th century’s pivotal ideas. Springing from the febrile mind of mathematician Norbert Wiener amid the devastation of World War II, the cybernetic vision underpinned a host of seductive myths of cyborgs, cyberculture & cyberspace. Wiener’s scheme slowly transformed computers from machines of assured destruction to engines of brilliant utopias. Cybernetics, in turn, triggered blissful cults & martial gizmos, The Whole Earth Catalog, and the US Air Force’s foray into virtual space. It continues to fuel anarchists & cyberwarriors today. Drawing on unpublished sources including interviews with hippies, anarchists, sleuths & spies, Rid offers an unparalleled perspective into our anxious embrace of technology.

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli

In this mind-bending introduction to modern physics, Carlo Rovelli explains Einstein’s theory of general relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, elementary particles, gravity, and the nature of the mind. Not since Richard Feynman’s celebrated best-seller Six Easy Pieces has physics been so vividly, intelligently and entertainingly revealed. ($13, PB)

The Search for Earth’s Twin: ExtraSolar Planets and Strange New Worlds by Stuart Clark ($45, HB)

In 1995 two Swiss astronomers discovered a planet circling a star other than our Sun. This changed our perception of the Universe forever, proving that Earth & the other celestial bodies in our Solar System are not alone in outer space. After two decades of exploration, more than 860 planets have been discovered. Some are blacker than coal; some are bathed in molten lava; others are perpetually scoured by hurricane-force winds; some have not one sun but two that rise in the morning, and others are perpetually drowned in global oceans. But as well as strange, uninhabitable lands, some of these alien worlds are strikingly similar to planets in our Solar System. Astronomers now know of planets just like Jupiter, Neptune, Mars & Mercury orbiting stars similar to our Sun, both nearby & deep into space. Stuart Clarke takes a fully up to date journey through the cosmos via frozen wastelands, slow-moving globes and fiery volcanic bodies, to planets that can—and just might—sustain complex life. The prospect of discovering the Earth’s twin is now tantalisingly close.

In the Bonesetter’s Waiting Room: Travels Through Indian Medicine by Aarathi Prasad

To tell the story of Indian medicine Aarathi Prasad’s travels take her to bonesetter clinics in Jaipur & Hyderabad and the waitingrooms of Bollywood’s best plastic surgeons, and introduce her to traditional healers as well as the world-beating heart surgeon who is revolutionising treatment of the poor around the globe. From the asthma treatment ‘cure’ that involves swallowing a live fish, to ground-breaking mental health initiatives in Mumbai’s Dharavi mega-slum & ground-breaking neuroscience happening inside the Mughal walls of old Delhi, she tells the story of the Indian people, in sickness and in health, and provides a unique perspective on the most diverse and fascinating country in the world. ($35, HB)

The Call Of The Primes by Owen O’Shea ($30, PB)

This sampler of entertaining mathematical diversions reveals the elegance and extraordinary usefulness of mathematics for readers who think they have no aptitude for the subject. If you like any kind of game at all, you’ll enjoy the amazing mathematical puzzles and patterns presented here in straightforward terms that any layperson can understand. From magic squares and the mysterious qualities of prime numbers to Pythagorean triples, probability theory, the Fibonacci sequence, and more, Owen O’Shea shows that math can be fun while having some profound implications. This is the perfect book for people who were turned off by math in school but now as adults wonder what they may have missed.

Tide: The Science and Lore of the Greatest Force on Earth by Hugh Aldersey-Williams ($35, PB)

Half of the world’s population today lives in coastal regions lapped by tidal waters. On our island, we live surrounded by water and love to be beside the seaside. But it rises and falls according to rules that to almost all of us are a mystery. To fully grasp the influence of the tide, we must bring together centuries of science but also the literary history and folklore it has inspired: mistaken by Caesar, captured in the art of Turner and now puzzled over by the world’s leading researchers. Hugh Aldersey-Williams chases the most feared and celebrated tides around the world, from the original maelstrom in Scandinavia and today’s danger-zone in Venice to the 15-metre beasts in Canada, for the first time its effects on our civilization become startlingly clear.

Now in B Format The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos by Leonard Mlodinow, $25

Philosophy & Religon

The Bible For Unbelievers: The Beginning-Genesis by Guus Kuijer ($55, HB)

Guus Kuijer was fascinated with the Bible from an early age, but was never able to believe it, no matter how hard he tried. Now, in prose that is humorous and sometimes irreverent, Kuijer reinterprets the most popular book in the world, making it new again for the 21st century. Kuijer explores the nagging loneliness of the universe before creation. He asks if man and woman are indeed God’s handiwork or vice versa. The entire cast of characters in this Bible is imperfect, a little lawless, and at times fumbling and jealous—God included. Kuijer’s afterword tells us that no story can ‘come to life unless the storyteller makes it his or her own.’ There’s a charming invitation in these pages for us all to dare to revisit our founding myths and the roles we play in them.

Blood: A Critique of Christianity by Gil Anidjar

Blood, according to Gil Anidjar, maps the singular history of Christianity. As a category for historical analysis, blood can be seen through its literal and metaphorical uses as determining, sometimes even defining Western culture, politics, and social practices and their wide-ranging incarnations in nationalism, capitalism, and law. Engaging with a variety of sources, Anidjar explores the presence and the absence, the making and unmaking of blood in philosophy and medicine, law and literature, and economic and political thought from ancient Greece to medieval Spain, from the Bible to Shakespeare and Melville. Flowing across multiple boundaries, infusing them with violent precepts that we must address, blood undoes the presumed oppositions between religion and politics, economy and theology, and kinship and race. It demonstrates that what we think of as modern is in fact imbued with Christianity. Christianity, Anidjar fiercely argues, must be reconsidered beyond the boundaries of religion alone. ($61, PB)

Reality and its Dreams by Raymond Geuss ($69, HB) Raymond Geuss Geuss ranges widely, exploring past and present ideas about envy, love, satire, and evil in the work of figures as diverse as John Rawls, St. Augustine, Rabelais & Russell Brand to challenge the ‘normative turn’—the idea that the right approach to politics is to start from thinking abstractly about our normative views and then, when they have been clarified & systematized, apply them to judging political structures, decisions & events. Rather, Geuss claims, the study of politics should focus on the sphere of real politics, not least because normative judgments always arise from concrete configurations of power, including ideological power. It is possible to do this without succumbing to a numbing or toxic form of relativism or abandoning utopianism, if utopianism is understood as the impulse to think the impossible in politics, to articulate deep-seated desires that cannot be realized under current conditions, and to imagine how conditions that seem invariant can be changed.

Selected Exaggerations: Conversations and Interviews 1993–2012 by Peter Sloterdijk ($39.95, PB)

In these wide-ranging dialogues Peter Sloterdijk gives his views on a variety of topics, from doping to doxa, design to dogma, media to mobility and the financial crisis to football. Here we encounter Sloterdijk from every angle: as he expounds his ideas on the philosophical tradition and the latest strands of contemporary thought, as he analyses the problems of our age and as he provides a new and startling perspective on everyday events. Equally at home in ancient Babylon, in the channels of the mass media and on the ethical and moral terrain of religion, education or genetic engineering, these conversations also give glimpses of Sloterdijk’s own life story, from his early passionate love of reading and writing to his journeys in East and West, his commitment to Europe and his acceptance and enjoyment of the role of a public intellectual and philosopher in the 21st century.

The History of Beyng by Martin Heidegger

The History of Beyng belongs to a series of Martin Heidegger’s reflections from the 1930s that concern how to think about being not merely as a series of occurrences, but as essentially historical or fundamentally as an event. Beginning with Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), these texts are important for their meditations on the oblivion and abandonment of being, politics, and race, and for their incisive critique of power, force, and violence. Originally published in 1998 as volume 69 of Heidegger’s Complete Works, this English translation opens new avenues for understanding the trajectory of Heidegger’s thinking during this crucial time. ($66.95, HB)

Ultimate Questions by Bryan Magee ($31.95, HB)

We human beings had no say in existing—we just opened our eyes and found ourselves here. We have a fundamental need to understand who we are and the world we live in. Reason takes us a long way, but mystery remains. When our minds and senses are baffled, faith can seem justified—but faith is not knowledge. Bryan Magee argues that we have no way of fathoming our own natures or finding definitive answers to the big questions we all face. With eloquence and grace, Magee urges us to be the mapmakers of what is intelligible, and to identify the boundaries of meaningfulness.

Psychology The Power Paradox: A Radical New Vision of Success by Dacher Keltner ($30, PB)

It shapes every interaction we have, whether we’re trying to get a two-year-old to eat green vegetables or ask for a promotion at work. But how do we really gain power? And what does it do to us? Psychologist Dacher Keltner reveals that the new science of power shows that our Machiavellian view of status is wrong. Influence comes not to those who are ruthless, but to those with social intelligence & empathy. Yet, ironically, the seductions of success lead us to lose those very qualities that made us powerful in the first place. Keltner draws on fascinating case studies to illuminate this ‘power paradox’, revealing how it shapes not just companies and elections but everyday relationships. As his myth-busting research shows, power—and powerlessness—distorts our behaviour, affecting whether or not we will have an affair, break the law, drive recklessly or find our purpose in life.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth ($35, PB)

Why do naturally talented people frequently fail to reach their potential while other far less gifted individuals go on to achieve amazing things? The secret to outstanding achievement is not talent, but a passionate persistence. In other words, grit. MacArthur Genius Award-winning psychologist Angela Duckworth shares fascinating new revelations about who succeeds in life and why. Based on her cutting-edge research, Duckworth shows how many people achieve remarkable things not just by relying on innate natural talent, but by practising what she calls grit. She then offers a Grit Formula to help anyone to become more gritty, focusing on six key factors: hope, effort, precision, passion, ritual and prioritisation.

The Sexual Abuse of Children: Recognition and Redress (eds) Smaal etal ($39.95, PB)

How can we seek justice and redress for the sexual abuse of children and better prevent the occurrence of such abuse? This work brings together the thoughts on this question advanced by leading scholars, from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, from around the world. These thinkers—some also professional practitioners—provide new perspectives on sanctioned and informal responses to abuse in religious, educational and total institutions, as well as to abuse carried out in non-institutional settings.

Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals by Joel Dimsdale ($47.95, HB)

When the ashes had settled after World War II and the Allies convened an international war crimes trial in Nuremberg, a psychiatrist, Douglas Kelley, and a psychologist, Gustave Gilbert, tried to fathom the psychology of the Nazi leaders, using extensive psychiatric interviews, IQ tests, and Rorschach inkblot tests. Never before nor since has there been such a detailed study of governmental leaders who orchestrated mass killings. Drawing on his decades of experience as a psychiatrist and the dramatic advances within psychiatry, psychology, and neuroscience since Nuremberg, Joel E. Dimsdale looks anew at the findings and examines in detail four of the war criminals, Robert Ley, Hermann Goering, Julius Streicher, and Rudolf Hess.

Sitting Together: Essential Skills for Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy by Susan Pollak, Thomas Pedulla & Ronald Siegel ($49.95, PB)

This practical guide helps therapists from virtually any specialty or theoretical orientation choose and adapt mindfulness practices most likely to be effective with particular patients, while avoiding those that are contraindicated. The authors provide a wide range of meditations that build the core skills of focused attention, mindfulness, and compassionate acceptance. Vivid clinical examples show how to weave the practices into therapy, tailor them to each patient’s needs, and overcome obstacles. Therapists also learn how developing their own mindfulness practice can enhance therapeutic relationships and personal well-being.

Helping Children and Adolescents Think about Death, Dying and Bereavement by Marian Carter ($38.95, PB)

How can children begin to understand death & cope with bereavement? And how can we, as adults, support & engage with children as they encounter this complex subject? This comprehensive guide looks at how children comprehend the death of a pet or someone close to them, their own dying, bereavement & grieving. It covers how you should discuss death with children, with a particular emphasis on the importance of listening to the child & adapting your approach based on their responses.

Art Book Art

Cultural Studies & Criticism Criminal: The Hidden Truth About Why People Do Bad Things by Tom Gash ($35, PB)

I like books about art—the history of art, the practice of art, books about art theory, glossaries of art terms—they’re all fascinating to me. But nothing is as compelling as fiction about art, the imagination of an author creates another kind of art by writing about it, and there are quite a lot of books that fit this category. I enjoy them all—Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch ($20) (but more of the painting and less drugs and alcohol would have been good); Headlong by Michael Frayn ($23) (one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, and it captures the frenzied greed that valuable paintings can engender brilliantly); and Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier ($20)—a wonderful evocation of time and place. Two more that I’ve just read, and loved, are Patrick Gale’s Notes From an Exhibition ($25), and The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith ($33).

There are two myths about crime. In one, the criminal act is a selfish choice, and tough punishment the only solution. In the other, the system is at fault, and perpetrators will change only when society reforms. Both these narratives are wrong. Interweaving conversations and stories of crime with findings from the latest research, Tom Gash dispels the myths that inform our views of crime, from the widespread misconception that poverty causes crime, to the belief that tough sentencing reduces it. He examines the origins of criminal behaviour, the ebb & flow of crime across the last century, & the effectiveness of various government crack-downs—and in doing so reveals that crime is both less rational & much easier to reduce than many believe.

Notes From an Exhibition is just that. Each chapter of the book is headed by a curator’s note from an exhibition of a fictitious artist—Rachel Kelly from Penzance. Through the detailed descriptions of the artwork the story of the artist is slowly revealed, and the incredible havoc that her artistic life wreaked on her family and herself. There is a wonderfully funny interlude when fictional artist confronts real life artist Barbara Hepworth, and very vivid descriptions of that part of England that was once a thriving hub of the arts; but the book is most memorable for the way Patrick Gale has captured the fervour and devotion that an artist must maintain, and the fallout of that as well.

So Sad Today: Personal Essays by Melissa Broder

Dominic Smith’s latest book, The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, is about a fictional artist in the seventeenth century, in Holland. It was a time when artists had to belong to a guild, and obey its many regulations. To transgress meant punishment, and that meant the end of a career, and more importantly, livelihood. The book follows the lives of three people, in different times and places, the artist Sara de Vos, Marty de Groot, a New York solicitor, and Ellie Shipley, an Australian art conservator. There is a link between all three, and the link is of course the painting of Sara de Vos—a link most elastic and surprising. It is thrilling to read how an artist from so long ago created her art, and equally thrilling to learn about how modern conservation, and shall we say, copying methods, are employed. Marty de Groot is the caretaker of the painting, or appears to be, and it is both amusing and touching to see the effect of this inheritance on his life. The author’s descriptions of the environment are beautiful, even painterly, and the characters are all very real and likeable, even when they do silly things. This is a very literary, informative book, but so accessible, it’s terrific. Louise

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger ($25, PB)

Why do why men miss war? Why did Londoners missed the Blitz? Sebastian Junger takes a look at post-traumatic stress disorder & the challenges veterans face returning to society, arguing that the problem lies not with vets or with the trauma they’ve suffered, but with the society to which they are trying to return. One of the most puzzling things about veterans who experience PTSD is that the majority never even saw combat—and yet they feel deeply alienated and out of place back home. The reason may lie in our natural inclination, as a species, to live in groups of thirty to fifty people who are entirely reliant on one another for safety, comfort and a sense of meaning: in short, the life of a soldier. In a wealthy society people don’t need to cooperate with one another, so they often lead much lonelier lives that lead to psychological distress. There is a way for modern society to reverse this trend, however, and studying how veterans react to coming home may provide a clue to how to do it.

We are All Cannibals: And Other Essays by Claude Lévi-Strauss ($52.95, HB)

On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. Claude Lévi-Strauss explores practices of incest and patriarchy, nature worship versus man-made material obsessions, the perceived threat of art in various cultures, and the innovations and limitations of secular thought—measuring the short distance between ‘complex’ and ‘primitive’ societies and finds a shared madness in the ways we enact myth, ritual, and custom.

On Bowie by Simon Critchley ($17, PB) Growing up in working-class suburban England, the young Critchley was instantly drawn to this creature from another planet, ‘so sexual, so knowing, so strange’. Now a celebrated philosopher who Jonathan Lethem has called ‘a figure of quite startling brilliance’, Critchley draws on a plethora of cultural and philosophical touchpoints, as well as his own intensely personal response to the music, to paint an essential portrait of Bowie as songwriter, poet, performer and icon.

Sexually confused, a recovering addict, suffering from an eating disorder and marked by one very strange sex fetish: Broder’s life is full of extremes. But from her days working for a Tantric nonprofit in San Francisco to caring for a severely ill husband, there’s no subject that Broder is afraid to write about. In its treatment of anxiety, depression, illness and instability; by its fearless exploration of the author’s romantic relationships (romantic is an expanded term in her hands); and with its inventive imagery and deadpan humour, So Sad Today is a radical, unapologetic, unblinkingly intimate book which splays out a soul and a prose of unusual beauty. ($28, PB)

Now in B Format 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro, $25 Move UP: Why Some Cultures Advance While Others Don’t by Clotaire Rapaille & Andres Roemer, $25 The Road to Character by David Brooks, $25 Little Labors by Rivka Galchen ($31, HB)

Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book a key inspiration for Rivka Galchen’s new book contains a list of Things That Make One Nervous. And wouldn’t the blessed event top almost anyone’s list? Varying in length from just a sentence or paragraph to a several-page story or essay—anecdotal or analytic, each part opens up an odd & tender world of wonder. The 47 Ronin; the black magic of maternal love; babies morphing from pumas to chickens; the quasi-repellent concept of women writers; origami-ophilia in Oklahoma as a gateway drug to a lifelong obsession with Japan; discussions of favourite passages from the Heian masterpieces Genji and The Pillow Book; the frightening prevalence of orange as today’s new chic colour for baby gifts; Frankenstein as a sort of baby; babies as tiny Godzillas Little Labors atomised & exploratory, conceptually byzantine & freshly forthright delights.

Sweet Theft: A Poet’s Commonplace Book by J. D. McClatchy ($47, HB)

Centuries ago, when books were rare, those who owned them would lend them to friends, who in turn would copy out passages they especially liked before returning the precious book to its owner. These anthologies came to be known as Commonplace Books, and modern writers as different as W. H. Auden & Alec Guinness have also kept them—the result is as much the self-portrait of a sensibility as it is a collection of miscellaneous delights. Poet J. D. McClatchy has been keeping such a book for 3 decades now. This selection offers a unique look into what strange facts, what turns of mind or phrase, what glorious feats of language and nature can attract the attention of a poet. Groucho Marx, Nietzsche and Flaubert, Dizzy Gillespie and Marianne Moore, plus many of McClatchy’s own observations about the art of writing are included as well. This is a book meant to be read at leisure & pondered on at length.

Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating by Moira Weigel ($47, HB)

It seems as though every week there’s a new app available on your smartphone promising dates a plenty—just swipe right. A mate, on the other hand, is becoming harder and harder to find. The age old quest for true love requires more effort than ever before. Let’s face it: dating is work. Which, as it happens, is exactly where it began, in the 19th century as prostitution. In Labor of Love, Moira Weigel dives into the secret history of dating while holding up a mirror to the contemporary dating landscape, revealing why we date the way we do and explaining why it feels so much like work. This isn’t a guide to ‘getting the guy’; there are no ridiculous ‘rules’ to follow—this is a fresh, and utterly original approach to help understand how dating was invented and, hopefully, lead us closer to the happy ending that it promises.

Pistols and Petticoats: 175 Years of Lady Detectives in Fact and Fiction by Erika Janik ($30, PB)

In 1910 Alice Wells took the oath to join the all-male Los Angeles Police Department. She wore no uniform, carried no weapon, and kept her badge stuffed in her pocketbook. Police work from its very beginning was considered a male domain, far too dangerous and rough for a woman to even contemplate much less take on as a profession. Yet within the covers of popular fiction, women not only wrote mysteries but also created female characters who handily solved crimes. These 19th- & early-20th-century female sleuths set the stage for Miss Marple, V.I. Warshawski, Kay Scarpetta, TV’s Jane Tennison. These authors were not amateurs dabbling in detection but professional writers who helped define the genre & competed with men to often greater success. Pistols and Petticoats tells the story of women’s very early place in crime fiction & their public crusade to transform policing. Women investigators, whether real or fictional, were nearly always at odds with society.

Studs Terkel: Politics, Culture, but Mostly Conversation by Alan Wieder ($36.95, PB)

Drawing from over 50 interviews of people who knew a& worked with Studs Terkel, Alan Wieder creates a multi-dimensional portrait of a run-of-the-mill guy from Chicago who, in public life, became an acclaimed author and raconteur, while managing, in his private life, to remain a mensch. We see Studs, the eminent oral historian, the inveterate and selfless supporter of radical causes, especially civil rights. We see the actor, the writer, the radio host, the jazz lover, whose early work in television earned him a notorious place on the McCarthy blacklist. We also see Studs the family man and devoted husband to his adored wife, Ida.

s d d w n n a o 2 H R

‘H M’

Few crime novelists were as prolific as John Dickson Carr (1906–1977). Under his own name—and three other pseudonyms—he wrote over 70 crime novels, as well as historical biographies (including one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and half a dozen radio plays and essays. American born, son of a Democrat Congressman, Dickson moved to England in the 1930s, married and began a 40 year writing career. As Carter Dickson, he wrote 23 novels featuring his literary sleuth, Sir Henry Merrivale—‘H.M.’ One time director of the British Secret service, a qualified barrister and doctor, corpulent, balding, ‘ebullient, majestic and rollicking’—although given to regular ill-tempered outbursts—the character was supposedly based on Winston Churchill. Often accompanied by his long time associate, Scotland Yard’s Chief Inspector Humphrey Masters, ‘H.M.’ uses his unique sleuthing ability to solve seemingly ‘unsolvable’ crimes. All these paperbacks are in Very Good condition.

Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales by Jack Zipes ($49.95, PB)

Folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm sought to discover & preserve a rich abundance of stories emanating from an oral tradition, and encouraged friends, colleagues & strangers to gather & share these tales. As a result, hundreds of thousands of wonderful folk & fairy tales poured into books throughout Europe & have kept coming. Jack Zipes looks at the transformation of the Grimms’ tales into children’s literature, the Americanisation of the tales, the ‘Grimm’ aspects of contemporary tales, and the tales’ utopian impulses. He shows that the Grimms were not the first scholars to turn their attention to folk tales, but were vital in expanding readership & setting the high standards for folk-tale collecting that continue through the current era. Zipes concludes with a look at contemporary adaptations of the tales & raises questions about authenticity, target audience & consumerism.

American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz ($47.95, PB)

Published in vast numbers of titles, available everywhere, and sometimes selling in the millions, pulps were throwaway objects accessible to anyone with a quarter. Conventionally associated with romance, crime, and science fiction, the pulps in fact came in every genre and subject. Drawing on extensive original research, Paula Rabinowitz unearths the far-reaching political, social, and aesthetic impact of the pulps between the late 1930s and early 1960s: pulps prompted important censorship and First Amendment cases; how some gay women read pulp lesbian novels as how-to-dress manuals; the unlikely appearance in pulp science fiction of early representations of the Holocaust; how writers and artists appropriated pulp as a literary and visual style. Examining their often-lurid packaging as well as their content, American Pulp is richly illustrated with reproductions of dozens of pulp paperback covers.

We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to Covergirl(R), the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement by Andi Zeisler ($49, HB)

Feminism has hit the big time. Once a dirty word brushed away with a grimace, ‘feminist’ has been rebranded as a shiny label sported by movie and pop stars, fashion designers & multi-hyphenate powerhouses like Beyonce. What does it mean when social change becomes a brand identity? Andi Zeisler, a founding editor of Bitch Media, draws on more than twenty years’ experience interpreting popular culture in this biting history of how feminism has been coopted, watered down, and turned into a gyratory media trend. Surveying movies, television, advertising, fashion, and more, Zeisler reveals a media landscape brimming with the language of empowerment, but offering little in the way of transformational change.

The Prose Factory: Literary Life in Britain Since 1918 by D. J. Taylor ($63, HB)

What do we mean when we talk about ‘taste’? There is the exclusive taste of highbrow critics such as T.S. Eliot & F.R. Leavis. There is the taste of ordinary book lovers persuaded to buy the best-sellers of the day. And there is the taste of Virginia Woolf’s elusive ‘common reader’. From the pitched battles fought between Eliot-era modernists and Georgian traditionalists to the impact of creative writing degrees & the media don D. J. Taylor explores the myriad influences on English literary life in the past century & the way in which they have shaped our preferences. It is also a tale of ‘star reviewers’, sniping critics, caballing editors, crusading ideologues, megalomaniac professors, Arts Council functionaries dazzling successes & embittered failures in which gossip & intrigue are as important as intellectual zeal.

Skeleton in the Clock (1949). Paperback reprint 1958. $15.00. In which ‘H.M.’ investigates murder past and present. How is the ‘accidental death’ of Sir George Fleet—falling off his roof while watching the local hunt—two decades earlier, linked to the body of a young woman found beneath the gallows at deserted Pentecost Prison? Night at the Mocking Widow (1951). Paperback reprint 1959. $15.00. A flood of mysterious poison-pen letters shatters the ‘intense respectability’ of sleepy English village Stoke Druid and leads to vicious gossip, madness and death. ‘H.M.’ is offered an extremely rare volume of Napoleonic memoirs by the local antiquarian bookseller as an inducement to solve the mystery. Behind the Crimson Blind (1952). Paperback reprint 1960. $15.00. While on vacation in exotic Tangier, ‘H.M.’ is given a red carpet welcome by the local constabulary and drawn into solving—within forty eight hours—the identity of an infamous master jewel thief, known as ‘Iron Chest’, who always carries an ornate iron chest during his thefts. Much boisterous sleuthing through the Kasbah ensues. The Cavalier’s Cup (1954). Paperback reprint 1960. $15.00. The ghost of 17th Century Cavalier, Sir Byng Rawdon still haunts the ancestral home of Telford Old Hall...or does it? Is a ghostly apparition responsible for the mysterious happenings regarding the richly bejewelled Cavalier Cup? A skeptical ‘H.M.’ and Masters investigate. Stephen Reid

The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World by William Egginton ($49, HB)

In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain’s wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from reading too many books of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible—but Cervantes did more than just publish a bestseller. He invented a way of writing. Willian Egginton explores Cervantes’s life and the world he lived in, showing how his influences converged in his work, and how his work—especially Don Quixote—radically changed the nature of literature creating a new way of viewing the world, and how that world view went on to infiltrate art, politics, and science.

Great William: Writers Reading Shakespeare by Theodore Leinwand ($63, HB)

This book explores how 7 renowned writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg & Ted Hughes wrestled with Shakespeare in the very moments when they were reading his work. What emerges is Using their marginalia, lectures, letters, journals, and reading notes Theodore Leinwand constructs a constellation of remarkable intellectual and emotional encounters.

SOMME 1916

Between 1 July and mid-November 1916, the Somme battlefield claimed 432,000 casualties—some 3,600 for every day of battle. On 30 June 1916, British troops marched the remaining few kilometres to their trenches before tomorrow’s attack. Some were heard to cheerfully sing: We beat them on the Marne, We beat them on the Aisne, We gave them hell at Neuve Chapelle, And here we are again! Others were more sober. Fifty years later, Private William Slater from Baildon, Yorkshire, recalled the mood: The feeling of comradeship seemed to grow as we marched toward common danger. I have a lasting memory of a man who was closest to me as we marched. I was only eighteen, having joined the army under age. He was some years older than I. He spoke to me as though he sensed my fears. ‘Don’t worry, Bill’, he said. ‘We’ll be all right.’ And he spoke as gently as a mother trying to soothe a frightened child.

Shortly before Zero Hour—7.30am on Saturday, 1 July 1916, and the commencement of the largest British offensive on the Western Front, known as the Battle of the Somme—Brigadier-General Hubert Rees addressed men of the 15th West Yorkshire Regiment (The Leeds Pals): ‘You are about to fight one of the greatest battles in the world, and the most just cause. Remember the British Empire will anxiously watch your every move. The honour of the North Country rests in your hands. Keep your heads, do your duty and you will utterly defeat the enemy.’ The Somme River, in northern France, runs alternately north to Péronne and then west to Amiens. It meanders sluggishly through a peat valley above which chalk uplands rise to some 330 feet (90m). The attack—planned to ease the pressure on their French allies at Verdun, and to achieve a large enough breakthrough of the German lines to enable a war of manoeuvre to resume—was to be along a 25 mile (40km) front. The assault was preceded by a five day artillery barrage designed to destroy both the enemy barbed wire and the main German trench line itself. The Germans called it Trommelfeuer (literally, ‘Drum fire’). It reached a crescendo on 1 July when a quarter of a million shells were fired at German positions in an hour—3,500 a minute. The noise of the barrage was heard 300 miles (480kms) away in Hampstead Heath, north of London. At 7.28am ten mines were exploded under the German trenches. At zero hour, officers blew their whistles, men climbed ladders and the trenches began to empty. As they clambered up, they were weighed down by a rifle, ammunition, grenades, rations, a steel helmet, a waterproof cape, two gas helmets, a pair of goggles against tear gas, a shovel or pick, a field dressing and a mess tin—some 66lbs (30 kgs) of equipment. Such a weight of equipment ‘made it impossible to move quicker than a slow walk or to rise and lie down quickly ... many thousands of men offering so bulky and slow-moving a target would crumple to the ground quickly enough but not rise at all...’ There had been no serious fighting of any kind in the Somme region since 1914. The Germans had taken advantage of this: ‘They dug better and harder than their opponents and they kept on digging.’ The chalk soil of the region enabled them to create large, elaborate dug-outs—some were 30 to 40 feet deep (9 to 12m) and were equipped with both electric lights and washing equipment. They could shelter a whole company of men in safety against the heaviest bombardment. The Germans may have been dazed by the barrage but they were alive. The machine guns had not been silenced.

The Yorkshire men had to group together to pass through their own barbed wire defences before they could form lines and begin their advance. They were easy targets. Private William Carter from Bradford: ‘The machine gun fire was terrible. I had just got to full height from the trench when a machine gun bullet smacked into my steel helmet. It felt like a sledge hammer had hit me.’ They formed into line and began their slow advance. Private William Slater: ‘We were in the midst of a storm of machine gun bullets!...Down they all went. I could see them dropping as the gun swept along them. I saw men twirl around and fall in all kinds of curious ways as they were hit.’ Private Arthur Howard: ‘A few of the Germans came out to clear away the Leeds Pals from their wire, but once this was done they soon returned to their own trenches.’ In less than ten minutes, the majority of the four battalions were decimated by German machine gun fire. The 15th West Yorkshire Regiment suffered 539 casualties from an attacking strength of 750 men. Of these 230 were killed. They had gained not one yard of ground. The destruction of the Pals Battalions is the most poignant aspect of the Battle of the Somme. These were over 200 volunteer units—citizen soldiers—uniquely raised in 1914 from local communities: ‘those that join together should serve together’. A man enlisted along with his friends, chums - his ‘pals.’ They came from Grimsby (a North Sea fishing port); Accrington (an East Lancashire cotton town); the London districts of Shoreditch, West Ham, Islington. Llandudno (a Welsh holiday resort); the Tyneside Irish and Scottish. Tottenham, Barnsley, Cambridge, Ripon, Wearside, Camberwell—to name but a few. The impact of their destruction on hundreds of local communities and individual towns was immense and long lasting. After the Somme battle most Pals units were disbanded or amalgamated and with the introduction of military conscription in 1916, Pals recruitment was discontinued.

The British casualties on the first day of this five month battle totalled nearly 60,000 with 20,000 of those killed. Never was a battle more meticulously planned only to result in such stupendous carnage. The reasons why are to be found in deficiencies of weaponry, ordnance and antiquated infantry tactics. In the centenary year of the Somme battle I recommend these three books in explanation.

The Face of Battle by John Keegan ($31, PB) Published in 1976, this study of three battles: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the Somme, viewed from the direct experience of the ordinary soldiers revolutionised the research and writing of military history. His vividly readable analysis of the Somme planning, battle tactics, weaponry and the responses of ordinary infantry ‘at the point of maximum danger’ remains unsurpassed four decades later.

The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916 by Martin Middlebrook ($27, PB) In 1967, Martin Middlebrook, a Lincolnshire farmer, visited First World War military cemeteries in France and Belgium, and was so moved by the sight he decided to write an account of just one day of the conflict. He embarked on a quest to discover survivors of July 1st and in an astonishing effort of historical fieldwork, located and interviewed 546 of them. The youngest of them by then, seventy or over. This book is based on their testimony. Published to wide acclaim in 1971 this compelling and intensely moving work is doubly valuable now that World War I has passed from living memory—the last participant having died in 2012. The Somme by Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson ($33, PB) First published in 2005, two Australian historians now provide an updated 2016 edition of their impressive work. Refreshingly revisionist, it clearly reconstructs the Somme battle on a day-by-day perspective and casts a clear eye on the deficiencies of British High Command—particularly Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig—who lacked a coherent military plan and was deficient in areas of strategy, tactics, organisation and command. Stephen Reid

Poetry

Faber Nature Poets $23 each, gift hardcovers John Keats selected by Andrew Motion William Wordsworth selected by Seamus Heaney Thomas Hardy selected by Tom Paulin Samuel Taylor Coleridge selected by James Fenton John Clare selected by Paul Farley Edward Thomas selected by Matthew Hollis The Dead Queen of Bohemia: New & Collected Poems by Jenni Fagan ($23, PB)

This book documents the progression of a voice & a life written over the last 20 years. It opens with Jenni Fagan’s most recent work & includes her previous two collections, both now out of print. With a poetic style influenced by Gertrude Stein & William Burroughs, this collection is woven with surrealistic imagery that is both unflinching & dislocating. Fagan’s poetry is raw & tough yet beautiful & tender—with themes of loss & recovery, hope & defiance, it represents a clarion call from a self-taught poet who started writing at the age of seven and so far has not stopped.

Whosoever Has Let a Minotaur Enter Them, or a Sonnet by Emily Carr ($35, HB)

How does a love poet fall out of her marriage and back in love with the world? These fairytales are for the heartbreakers as much as the heartbroken, for those smitten with wanderlust, for those who believe in loving this world through art. A singular flow of bewildered brilliance, Emily Carr’s swiftly flowing sequence of love poems—divorce poems, really—engages the very real problem of falling out of love because (admit it!) you never think you will. No matter how many times it’s happened before. Imagine it: not limiting love to the erotic but embracing endeavour, struggle, social change & political action. Love as consciousness, inventiveness & intention. Carr’s swell of gorgeous psychedelia is presented in a lavish book-object befitting the work’s interconnected, page-defying sweep of line upon line: between her thighs, the buffalo holding sky. saucers of mountain sway. deities spill, shining & suffering ... not forgetting we can’t ever—whose fury sings like eagles—skeletons unlean from fruit trees, falling like white gunsmoke, we want/ to be here. listen. the wind has blown all the birds from our hair.

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The Venetians: A New History from Marco Polo to Casanova Paul Strathern, HB

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Journey to the Centre of the The Discovery of Jeanne Baret: Earth: The Remarkable Voyage A Story of Science, the High Seas, A Child of Christian Blood: of Scientific Discovery into the and the First Woman to Murder and Conspiracy in Tsarist Heart of Our World Circumnavigate the Globe Russia—the Beilis Blood Libel David Whitehouse, HB Glynis Ridley, HB Levin Edmund, HB

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The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson John Gray, HB and Robert Hass, HB

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The Heart of the Plate: Vegetarian Recipes for a New Generation Mollie Katzen, HB

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The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us Diane Ackerman, HB

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Dead Certainties: Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren Unwarranted Speculations Jacques Rancière, HB Simon Schama, PB

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The Italian Vegetable Cookbook Michele Scicolone, HB

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Why I Read Wendy Lesser, HB

Empress Dowager CIXI: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China Jung Chang, HB

Europe in the Looking Glass Robert Byron, PB

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Yes Please Amy Poehler, HB

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Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic PilMidnight in Peking: How grim Walks the Way of Saint James the Murder of a Young EnglishDavid Downie, HB woman Haunted the Last Days of Old China Paul French, HB

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Cooking with an Asian Accent Ying Chang Compestine, HB 21

The Arts

Painters’ Paintings: From Freud to van Dyck by Anne Robbins ($33.95, PB)

In this intriguing book, Anne Robbins explores the littleknown history of artists collecting paintings. Focusing on the collections of Freud, Matisse, Degas, Leighton, Watts, and Van Dyck, she assesses the ways painters benefitted from owning someone else’s work, their motivations for collecting, and how the history of a painting’s ownership influences our own view of both the artist and the work.

Alice Neel: Retrospective ($78, HB) by Jeremy Lewison & Susanna Pettersson

Alice Neel (1900–1984) is renowned for her visual acuity and psychological depth, and her portraits and nude paintings of friends, family, strangers, and prominent cultural figures alike convey an incredibly consistent intimacy regardless of the relationship to her subject. Featuring around 70 paintings spanning the entire length of her career, this handsome book accompanies a major retrospective of her work, and reveals her underlying interest in the history of photography, German painting of the 1920s, and other artists, such as Van Gogh & Cezanne, all of which provided an important precedent for the veracity and raw emotional intensity of her figurative works.

Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art by Ian W. McLean ($60, HB)

Large, bold and colourful, Indigenous Australian art has impressed itself on the contemporary imagination. But it is controversial, dividing the stakeholders from those who smell a scam. Whether the artists are victims or victors, there is no denying their impact in the media and on the art world and collectors worldwide. How did it become the most successful Indigenous art in the world? How did its artists escape the ethnographic and souvenir markets to become players in an art world from which they had been barred? Superbly illustrated, and rich in detail and critical analysis, this book provides the first full historical account of Indigenous Australian art and shows that there is much more to the art than large colourful canvasses.

Gleebooks’ special price $49.95

Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed by Elizabeth Hallam ($88, HB)

Anatomy museums contain some of the most compelling & challenging displays of the human body. This innovative book focusing on one such museum—in Scotland’s northeast—opens up a wide-ranging history of deceased bodies on display, from medieval relics, to 19th century mega-collections of human remains, to the controversial Body Worlds exhibition that is touring the globe.

DVDs With Scott Donovan Youth: Dir. Paolo Sorrentino $32.95, region 2

Youth is Academy Award Winner Paolo Sorrentino’s second Englishlanguage film. Septuagenarian best friends conductor, Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) and film maker, Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) are on vacation in the Swiss Alps—both at the end of their careers looking back. With dazzling visuals, a great soundtrack and a stellar supporting cast that includes Paul Dano, Rachel Weisz and Jane Fonda.

The Dressmaker: Dir. Jocelyn Moorhouse $24.95

Tilly Dunnage (Kate Winslet), a beautiful and talented misfit, after many years working as a dressmaker in exclusive Parisian fashion houses, returns home to the tiny middle-of-nowhere town of Dungatar to right the wrongs of the past. Not only does she reconcile with her ailing, eccentric mother Molly (Judy Davis) and unexpectedly falls in love with the pure-hearted Teddy (Liam Hemsworth), but armed with her sewing machine and incredible sense of style, she transforms the women of the town and in doing so gets sweet revenge on those who did her wrong.

Shakespeare Live! From The RSC $33.95, region 2

On Shakespeare’s birthday, the BBC and the Royal Shakespeare Company come together in an extravaganza, celebrating Shakespeare’s words and his enduring influence on all performance art forms—from Berlioz and Bernstein, to hip-hop and jazz, from ballet to Broadway to blues and back. On stage at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratfordupon-Avon a once-in-a-lifetime cast, including Judi Dench, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, English National Opera, The Royal Ballet, Meera Syal, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Rufus Wainwright, John Lithgow, Alexandra Gilbreath, Tim Minchin, Anne-Marie Duff, Pippa Nixon, Alison Moyet, the cast of Horrible Histories and many more

Peacock and Vine: Fortuny and Morris in Life and at Work by A.S. Byatt ($35, HB)

Born a generation apart, they were seeming opposites: Mariano Fortuny, a Spanish aristocrat thrilled by the sun-baked cultures of Crete and Knossos; William Morris, a British craftsman, in thrall to the myths of the North. Yet through their revolutionary inventions and textiles, both men inspired a new variety of art, as vibrant today as when it was first conceived. The Palazzo Pesaro Orfei in Venice is a warren of dark spaces leading to a workshop where Fortuny created his designs for pleated silks and shining velvets. Morris’s Red House, outside London, with its Gothic turrets and secret gardens, helped inspire his stunning floral and geometric patterns. Generously illustrated with the artists’ beautiful designs – pomegranates and acanthus, peacock and vine—A.S. Byatt brings the visions and ideas of Fortuny and Morris dazzlingly to life.

Gleebooks’ special price $32

Type is Beautiful: The Story of Fifty Remarkable Fonts by Simon Loxley ($44.95, HB)

This book explores fifty of the most remarkable typefaces, dating from the birth of European printing in the fifteenth century (and the type used in the Gutenberg Bible—the first significant book to be printed in Europe) to the present day. It features key examples in the aesthetic development of typography (Caslon, Baskerville, Bodoni) and those fonts which have made a significant impact on the wider world. Through the fonts this book also examines the often colourful lives of the key designers in the evolution of typography: Johannes Gutenberg, William Caslon, Nicolas Jenson, Stanley Morison and William Morris, among others—including one who threw his unique set of metal type into the Thames to prevent others from misusing it.

The Artist & His Critic Stripped Bare: The Correspondence of Marcel Duchamp & Robert Lebel

Robert Lebel, French art critic & collector, was instrumental in rendering Marcel Duchamp’s often hermetic life, art & ideas accessible to a wider public across Europe & the US, principally with his 1959 publication Sur Marcel Duchamp, the first monograph and catalogue raisonné devoted to the artist. Duchamp was a willing partner in the book’s creation. In fact, his active participation in both its conception & layout was so substantial that the book is considered part of the artist’s oeuvre. The trials, tribulations, quarrels & machinations that plagued the production, publication & publicity of Sur Marcel Duchamp are the focus of this correspondence between two lifelong friends. Translated and printed in full together for the first time, and including the original French texts, these letters, postcards & telegrams offer uncensored access to the evolution of the relationship between Lebel & Duchamp from December 1946 to April 1967. ($83, HB)

Gift Shop

These Home Guard Book ends will keep the spines straight and the books alphabetical. Sir! Yes Sir! $59.95 each Or, for or a more relaxed philosophical bookshelf, try the Pug Couple Bookends ($39.95) or a Skull Bookend ($39.95)

Carol: Dir. Todd Haynes $32.95, region 2

Youth When Carol (Cate Blanchett) walks into a New York City department store and meets Therese (Rooney Mara) sparks fly. The somewhat vampiric Carol is an elegant socialite going through a bitter divorce, while Therese is just starting out in life; unsure of who she wants to be. Mesmerized by each other, they face a choice: deny their hearts desires or defy society’s conventions but in doing so, risk life as they know it.

Hinterland: Season 2 $49.95 region 2

In season two of this moody Welsh procedural (shot in both Welsh & English) four-parter there’s murder a-plenty for newly arrived DCI Tom Mathias to investigate— both in the Welsh coastal town of Aberystwyth and it’s brooding hinterlands. Which is a welcome relief as he is he’s under investigation by the IPCC, and his ex-wife Meg has turned up in Aberystwyth.

Vinyl: Season 1 $59.95

From Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger and Terence Winter, Vinyl explores the drug-and sex-fuelled music business of the 1970’s. A dizzying ride through America’s music-business landscape at the dawn of punk, disco, and hip-hop, the story is seen through the eyes of Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), a NYC record executive trying to revive his label and keep his personal life from spiralling out of control.

Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan by David Dalton ($33, PB)

For almost half a century, Bob Dylan has been a primary catalyst in rock’s shifting sensibilities. He has starred in and been the subject of major films; his work is taught in over 200 college courses. David Dalton, author, screenwriter, journalist, and founding editor of Rolling Stone follow Dylan’s imaginative life, integrating actual events from his life, Dylan’s words, and those of the people who know him most intimately. Drawing upon extensive interviews with Dylan’s friends, family, and fellow eyewitnesses to the zeitgeist-including Joan Baez, Keith Richards, Bobby Neuwirth, Kris Kristofferson, Suze Rotolo, Clive Davis, Tom Petty, and othersthis book will provide a new perspective on the man, the myth, and the musical era that forged them both.

I’m Not with the Band: A Writer’s Life Lost in Music by Sylvia Patterson ($50, HB)

In 1986, Sylvia Patterson boarded a train to London armed with a tea-chest full of vinyl records, a peroxide quiff and a dream: to write about music, forever. ‘This is a three-decade survivor’s tale of music, magazines, silly jokes, stupid shoes, useless blokes, hopeless homes, booze, drugs, love, loss, police cells, A&E, disillusionment, redemption and trying to make Prince laugh, cheer up Eminem and finish off Westlife forever (with varying degrees of success)’. This is both a wild, hilarious, sometimes devastating memoir and a joyful compendium of Patterson’s encounters with some of pop’s biggest names.

Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts by Holly Willis ($53.95, PB)

Cinema, the primary vehicle for storytelling in the twentieth century, is being reconfigured by new media in the twenty-first. Terms such as ‘worldbuilding’, ‘virtual reality’, and ‘transmedia’ introduce new methods for constructing a screenplay and experiencing and sharing a story. Similarly, 3D cinematography, hypercinema, and visual effects require different modes for composing an image, and virtual technology, motion capture, and previsualization completely rearrange the traditional flow of cinematic production. What does this mean for telling stories? Holly Willis answers this question by investigating a full range of contemporary creative practices dedicated to the future of mediated storytelling and by connecting with a new generation of filmmakers, screenwriters, technologists, media artists, and designers to discover how they work now, and toward what end. From Chris Milk and Aaron Koblin’s exploration of VR spherical filmmaking to Rebeca Mendez’s projection and installation work exploring climate change to the richly mediated interactive live performances of the collective Cloud Eye Control, this volume captures a moment of creative evolution and sets the stage for imagining the future of the cinematic arts.

what we're reading

Judy: I finished Amy Liptrot’s autobiographical The Outrun ($35) feeling glad to have met her. Extremes are what she knows growing up in the dramatic landscape of the Orkney Isles with a bipolar father and a mother who takes to evangelical Christianity. In London, alcohol becomes an addiction and she goes way down and out of control. The rest of the story is of her return to the Orkneys and her painstaking determination to live without the alcohol which has been her necessity for so many years. She explores, she walks, she links herself to the land, to the birds, to the skies, to the community—online, as well as islanders, and to the present moment. She provides herself with the sensations and excitements and discoveries that her vitality so needs. She places herself by means of maps and cross-references, she anchors herself to the planet. She is lively, intelligent and courageous. This, of her winter sea-bathing: ‘The cold water is cathartic. It’s refreshing like the first drink; it offers transformation and escape, like drowning. I am so thirsty and full of desire.’ Janis: I have just read Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident ($33)—’ a psycho-

logical thriller about everyday violence, the media’s obsession with pretty dead girls, the grip of grief and the myth of closure’. I found it very interesting—especially the relationship between the sister of the dead girl and the journalist who is desperate to get the full story at whatever cost.

John: A Hero in France by Alan Furst ($33): Mathieu is the leader of a Resistance cell that smuggles British airmen from occupied France into Spain. The streets of wartime Paris are full of Germans and collaborators—who are perhaps an even greater threat. His life and those of his comrades is precarious. There is a little time for every day life and every relationship brings risk. It seems unlikely that Mathieu will survive. Alan Furst is the master of espionage fiction set around the World Wars. Andrew: All praise to Louise, my colleague in the children’s department. As I rushed out of the shop on a Friday recently, I asked her, on the spot, for a bedtime picture book for a toddler who was going to spend a first night away from his own bed. She handed me Owl Babies ($17). ‘It’s really good for controlled anxiety’, she proffered nonchalantly, ‘and the illustrations are magnificent’. That Saturday night, as the east coast low raged around my house, and Sydney flooded, we got tucked in to Owl Babies, and I was instantly transported to a childhood world lit only by moonlight. One moment vast, luminous, and frightening, but in a revelatory instant, warm and safe and protected. No wonder, published only in 1992 it is now considered a classic. In truth, the text by Martin Waddell is a tad cute; but Patrick Benson’s illustrations could sustain a person of any age through their own long dark night of the soul.

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Paula Hawkins

and another thing.....

I am deeply saddened to report that Coopes is considering retirement from ‘tooning’ on the Gleaner’s back page—so here’s one of my personal favourites from the vaults. If there were to be a write-in campaign from readers (I hope for a flood of emails to vikid@gleebooks.com.au) in support of my own pleas for her return, I’d make sure they were forwarded. This month I’m looking forward to catching up with Fred Vargas’ newest Commissaire Adamsberg outing—with a mix of locked-room mystery (in this case fogged in Icelandic island), ancient demons, strange symbols and a secretive association devoted to Robespierre’s writings it’s looking promising. If you haven’t yet made the acquaintance of the philosophical Commissaire and his quirky crew (including the office cat, Snowball) I recommend you take this month’s opportunity of picking up 3 books in the series for the price of two. Viki

MAMMOTH WINTER SALE

17 TO 31 JULY UPSTAIRS AT 49 GLEBE POINT RD Gleeclubber’s preview Friday 16th, from 6pm

Anna Funder Hanya Yanagihara Marlon James

For more July new releases go to:

10. Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay

Wlliam Boyd

Main shop—49 Glebe Pt Rd; Ph: (02) 9660 2333, Fax: (02) 9660 3597. Open 7 days, 9am to 9m Thur–Sat; 9am to 7pm Sun–Wed Gleebooks 2nd Hand—191 Glebe Pt Rd; Ph: (02) 9552 2526. Open 7 days, 10am to 7pm Sydney Theatre Shop—22 Hickson Rd Walsh Bay; Open two hours before and until after every performance Blackheath—Shop 1 Collier’s Arcade, Govetts Leap Rd; Ph: (02) 4787 6340. Open 7 days, 9am to 6pm Dulwich Hill—536 Marrickville Rd Dulwich Hill; Ph: (02) 8080 0098. Open 7 days, 9am to 7pm, Sunday 9 to 5 www.gleebooks.com.au. Email: books@gleebooks.com.au; oldbooks@gleebooks.com.au