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gleaner Vol. 27 No. 4 June/July 2020
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new this month: Kate Grenville ‘discovers’ Elizabeth Macarthur’s secret memoir in A Room Made of Leaves 1
keeping on keeping on... So, the Editor said what about another missive from the trenches, and I never disobey. But then, we’re not really in the trenches now are we (a possible second COVID wave as notwithstanding)—and you could hardly describe our expeI’m on holidays you read this, travelling, relaxing and recuperating rience the lastSydney three months as war participants anyway. It has nevertheless after aofhectic Writers’ Festival. The outstanding memory most been an extraordinary time, for you, and it deserves reflection.for compelling in every aspect of us herand account, especially in some her sympathy
the bereaved family. There’s little question that this is yet another death In last gleaner I speculated a fewhave things (unusually) some of the a mentally ill person whichondidn’t to which happen, but Wilddrew covers so pretty sharp, even anxious responses from readers. First, I should allay alarms much, with such care and deep sensitivity, that we are left in no doubt that about our imminent demise. Yes, it’s been very difficult (we made well over everyone, us included, is a victim of a an imperfect health and policing 1000 home deliveries across six weeks!)—but sustained support from our system. beleaguered customers and the amazing dedication from gleebooks staff has David helped us manage across weeks of store closures, inevitable staff absences,
A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville
What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it? In this playful dance of possibilities between the real & the invented, Elizabeth Macarthur manages her complicated life with spirit and passion, cunning and sly wit—marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power in a society that gave women none. Her memoir lets us hear what one of those seemingly demure women from history might really have thought. ($40, HB)
Gleebooks’ special price $34.99
reduced hours since reopening, and a badly mangled supply chain. But Jobkeeper (and yes, I know it was a Labor initiative) has been the gamechanger for survival, as it has for many businesses. It’s manifestly unfair that for so many parts of the Arts Industry, Jobkeeper wasn’t made available. We can only hope that those workers somehow survive, and thrive. And spare a thought for the writers whose books have been released in an environment of great uncertainty, or delayed for months—or indefinitely—because of this climate of economic uncertainty. Meanwhile, can I reassure the many people who took umbrage at my remark in the last gleaner that ‘after all, when it’s all said and done, we just sell books for a living’. It wasn’t said tongue in cheek, we’re proud of what we do—no doubt—and happily acknowledge there is more to working in a bookshop than just selling stuff. I was just striving for the right note in a world where so much was at stake.
The Spill by Imbi Neeme ($33, PB)
I also want to use this opportunity to mention some personal milestones in our journey. At Christmas we farewelled Lynndy Bennett, long standing manager of our Children’s shop, who is now enjoying the bracing clean air of Orange. Our much loved Glebe manager, John Walsh, was forced by ill health (get well John) to take his leave in March. And Scott Vance, who has worked with great commitment and enthusiasm in the Glebe store, is relocating to Perth. On the plus side, it’s a pleasure to note that our Dulwich Hill shop celebrated its 10th anniversary in June. Hats off to Morgan Smith, the now veteran-class Gleebooks bookseller whose idea it was in the first place, and who has managed the shop with her customary warmth, flair and intelligence. Her deep knowledge of books is only matched by her enthusiasm for selling them. It’s a rare gift, believe me.
In this alternate retelling of Captain James Cook’s story sees Cook’s storm ravaged Endeavour lying splintered on a coral reef off the coast of far north Australia. A small disparate band of survivors, fracturing already, huddle on the shore of this strange land—their pitiful salvage scant protection from the dangers of the unknown creatures & natives that live here. Watching these mysterious white beings, the Guugu Yimidhirr people cannot decide if they are ancestor spirits to be welcomed—or hostile spirits to be speared. One headstrong young boy, Garrgiil, determines to do more than watch & to be the one to find out what exactly they are. The Tour by Andrew Mackie ($33, PB) 19-year-old identical twins Violet & Daisie Chettle can hardly believe their luck when they are recruited as maids to accompany the Queen’s Lady-in-Waiting on the royal tour to Australia in 1954. However, life on board the SS Gothic & in the colony is far from the glamorous adventure they expected. As they travel from the bustling streets of Sydney to the remote sheep stations of Dubbo, they try to make the best of it. Diligent Violet is juggling commands from her superiors with the attentions of handsome Aussie driver Jack, while ambitious Daisie seeks love in all the wrong places while clawing her way to top deck. An opportunity to meet their estranged aunt living in the vast outback promises hope for a new future—but have these girls ventured too far from home to ever find their way back?
And what about books? Two months ago I said I was too stressed, for perhaps the first time in my memory, to read. I’m happy to declare that I’m in recovery and hope to tout many of the really good books I’ve missed over the rest of the year. And very pleased to report that the book I broke my fast with was A Room Made of Leaves—Kate Grenville’s first work of historical fiction in about a decade. It’s a cleverly wrought re-imagining of the life of Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of notorious wool baron, John Macatthur, in early colonial Sydney. It is written as a rediscovered secret memoir. Thanks Kate, as ever, for bringing our history to light and life in such original and memorable ways. David Gaunt
After Australia (ed) Michael Ahmad ($25, PB)
Climate catastrophe, police brutality, white genocide, totalitarian rule & the erasure of black history provide the backdrop for stories of love, courage & hope. In this unflinching new anthology, 11 Indigenous writers & writers of colour provide a glimpse of Australia as we head toward the year 2050. Featuring Ambelin Kwaymullina, Claire G. Coleman, Omar Sakr, Future D. Fidel, Karen Wyld, Khalid Warsame, Kaya Lattimore, Sarah Ross, Zoya Patel, Michelle Law & Hannah Donnelly.
Smart Ovens for Lonely People by Elizabeth Tan Conspiracies, memes & therapies of various efficacy underpin this beguiling short-story collection from Elizabeth Tan. In the titular story, a cat-shaped oven tells a depressed woman she doesn’t have to be sorry anymore. A Yourtopia Bespoke Terraria employee becomes paranoid about the mounting coincidences in her life. Four girls gather to celebrate their underwear in Happy Smiling Underwear Girls Party, a hilarious take-down of saccharine advertisements. With her trademark wit and slicing social commentary, Elizabeth Tan’s short stories are as funny as they are insightful ($30, PB) Return to Dust by Dani Powell ($27, PB) When Amber returns to her home in the Australian desert one year after her brother’s death, she is invited to do some work in a remote Aboriginal community and begins a 3-day road trip on unsealed roads that link a constellation of Aboriginal communities—it is as if she has been picked up by a willy willy, in motion until the wind decides to drop. Her composure is undone by a series of encounters, observations, the country itself, and she learns that grief takes its own time. Told like memoir, spun like myth, this is a philosophical tale about coming to terms with the death of a loved one.
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Australian Literature Literature
In 1982, a car overturns on a remote West Australian road. Nobody is hurt, but the impact is felt for decades. Nicole & Samantha Cooper both remember the summer day when their mother, Tina, lost control of their car—but not in quite the same way. It is only after Tina’s death, almost 4 decades later, that the sisters are forced to reckon with the repercussions of the crash. Nicole, after years of aimless drifting, has finally found love, and yet can’t quite commit. And Samantha is hiding something that might just tear apart the life she’s worked so hard to build for herself. Winner of the 2019 Penguin Literary Prize.
On a Barbarous Coast by Craig Cormick & Harold Ludwick ($30, PB)
The Last Convict by Anthony Hill ($33, PB)
Oxford 1863—Young Samuel Speed sets a barley stack alight in the hope it will earn him a bed in prison for the night. What he receives is 7 years’ servitude in the penal colony of Fremantle, WA. Stripped of his clothing and even his name, on arrival at Fremantle Prison, hard labour is added to the mix. The only solace he finds is a love of reading, which allows the likes of Tom Sawyer & Oliver Twist to become his lifelong friends. Samuel is granted a ticket of leave in 1867 and full freedom in 1871, but what sort of life can a man forge for himself in the colony, with no skills, no money and no family? Will it be the beginning of the life he has always dreamed of, or do some sentences truly never end?
The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott ($30, PB)
Ren lives alone on the remote frontier of a country devastated by a coup. High on the forested slopes, she survives by hunting and trading—and forgetting. But when a young soldier comes to the mountains in search of a local myth, Ren is inexorably drawn into her impossible mission. As their lives entwine, unravel and erupt—as myths merge with reality—both Ren & the soldier are forced to confront what they regret, what they love, and what they fear.
Rise and Shine by Patrick Allington ($27, PB)
Each morning, the last humans start their day with graphic footage from the front. This is what sustains them—literally. In a world where eight billion souls have perished, the survivors huddle together apart, perpetually at war, in the city—states of Rise and Shine. Yet this war, far from representing their doom, is their means of survival. For their leaders have found the key to life when crops, livestock, and the very future have been blighted—a key that turns on each citizen being moved by human suffering. Yet is this small hope, this compassion, enough to sustain them against the despair born of all the friends they’ve lost, all the experiences they’ll never know? Or must they succumb to, or even embrace, darker desires?
WHAT IF THERE WAS AN ALTERNATIVE ENDING TO CAPTAIN COOK'S STORY? Fierce, intriguing and thoughtful, this is the story of a past and future that might have been.
A NEW AUSTRALIAN HISTORY CLASSIC that uncovers the bloody struggle on Australia’s early frontier and the fascinating stories that have long been forgotten.
THIS IS A STORY OF TRIUMPH OVER ADVERSITY, the strength that can be found in kindness and the power of one couple to effect positive change in the world.
At the Edge of the Solid World by Daniel Davis Wood ($33, PB)
In a snowbound village in the heart of the Alps, a husband and wife find their lives breaking apart in the days and months following the death of their firstborn. On the far side of the world, in their hometown of Sydney, a man on the margins of Australian society commits an act of shocking violence that galvanises international attention. As the husband recognises signs of his own grief in both the survivors and the perpetrator, his fixation on the details of the case feeds into insomnia, trauma, and an obsession with the terms on which we give value to human lives.
Factory 19 by Dennis Glover ($33, PB)
l l i H ’ D On
Happy 10th Birthday, Gleebooks at Dulwich Hill. Who can believe it? We opened at 4pm on Thursday, June 6th 2010. A gaggle of excited locals, friends and book industry people gathered on the footpath waiting for the doors to open. And what a swell party we had that night. So many of the people there, as well as many more of you, have become regular friends and customers. I am seeing teenagers finish high school who were 7 or 8 when we opened, children who have been coming to the shop since they were babies (and in-utero). You’ve shared your joys and your sorrows. Much has changed in those 10 years. Our landlords Con and his mother Soula (oh, how I miss her Spanakopita) had the Last Drop Cafe next door and when they closed several years later, it became a Campos coffee shop. Lots of apartments have gone up, the light-rail opened (with no Greenway), shops closed and others opened in our little strip—we love The Larder, Urban Cachet and the fabulous butcher. In food, we now have a choice of Korean, Mexican, and Japanese as well as the naughty/delicious Kieran’s bakery. While I have worked here the entire 10 years, other staff members have come and gone. I have been privileged to work with some great booksellers—Liesel established our fantastic children’s section and Mandy then improved on it. I’ve had Jodie (now teaching in a remote community in Cape York), and way too briefly Elissa, who’s gone back to work at the mother-ship in Glebe. Isabel has worked with me for nearly 7 years (but she’ll soon qualify as a lawyer), and the hilarious Tim has deserted us to be a firey. Not to forget the Saturday juniors—Jess, Geri and now Sofia. Also new are Uni students Eve and Dasha. Last but not least, is Chris Cyril who has held the fort on Sunday and Monday for some years. And here we are, 10 years later, emerging bleary-eyed from this horrific pandemic. Needless to say, all the plans to celebrate this momentous birthday have been shelved. I wanted to have a party, which may yet happen towards the end of the year, and to do something big around the children’s book section—but that can stay under wraps until next year. A special thank-you for supporting us through the last few months by ordering online, but nothing beats seeing you in person. It’s so good to be back. This Sydney village of Dulwich Hill, Marrickville and surrounds, is a wonderfully warm and well-read community and it’s a pleasure and honour to live and work here, and to serve you. See you on D’Hill, Morgan
The Funny Thing about Norman Foreman by Julietta Henderson ($33, PB)
Norman & Jax are a legendary comedy duo in the making, with a five-year plan to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe by the time they’re 15. But then Jax dies before they even turn 12. Norman’s mum Sadie doesn’t know, or care, who Norman’s father is. But her heart is broken when she discovers her grieving son’s revised plan- ‘Find Dad’ & ‘Get to the Edinburgh Fringe’. If these two things will help Norman through this devastating time, then Sadie is going to make them happen. So mother & son set off from Cornwall, with their friend Leonard in his vintage Austin Maxi, on a pilgrimage to Edinburgh—to honour Jax & to track down a few maybe-fathers on the way
Hobart, 2022—a city with declining population, in the grip of a dark recession. A rusty ship sails into the harbour, unloading its cargo on the site of the once famous but now abandoned Gallery of Future Art, known to the world as GoFA. One day the city’s residents are awoken by a high-pitched sound no one has heard for two generations—a factory whistle. GoFA’s owner, tycoon Dundas Faussett, plans to defeat the internet’s dominance over our lives by establishing a new Year Zero—1948. Those whose jobs & lives A Most Peculiar Act by Marie Munkara have been destroyed by Amazon & Uber & Airbnb are invited to fight back in the only Marie Munkara makes merciless fun of the characters inway that can possibly succeed—by living as if the internet & the smartphone had never volved in the ludicrous Aboriginal Protection Acts of the early been invented.The revolutionary example of Factory 19 spreads. Can the little people 20th century by following the trials & tribulations of Sugar, win back the world? The Fogging by Luke Horton ($30, PB) a 16 year-old fringe-camp dweller. Set in Darwin, just before Tom & Clara are 2 struggling academics in their mid-thirties, who the Japanese bombing raids, we meet characters like: Horatio decide to take their first holiday in 10 years. On the flight over Humphris, chief protector of Aboriginals; Ralphie Brown, who to Indonesia, Tom experiences a debilitating panic attack, which has the unedifying honour of being the only public servant to he keeps hidden from Clara. At the resort, they meet Madeleine, ever be sacked; Drew Hepplewaite, redneck racist & female a charismatic French woman, her Australian partner, Jeremy, and patrol officer; and the Administrator’s wife, Penelope, who five-year-old son, Ollie. The two couples strike up an easy friend- has a fetish for anything oriental. Sugar’s resistance to assimilation becomes a proship & the holiday starts to look up, even to Tom. But when Clara tracted battle that culminates in the Christmas party from Hell where Sugar and her & Madeleine become trapped in the maze-like grounds of the hotel oppressors finally face off in a way none ever expected. ($20, PB) during ‘the fogging’—a routine spraying of pesticide—the dynamSmokehouse by Melissa Manning ($30, PB) ics suddenly shift between Tom & Clara, and the atmosphere of the A man watches a boy in a playground and pictures him in holiday darkens. the grey wooden shed he’s turned into a home. A woman’s Meanjin No 79 Vol 2 ($25, PB) adopted mother dies, reawakening childhood memories and Lucia Osborne-Crowley examines the cost of intimacy for women in a world where men grief. A couple’s decision to move to an isolated location may demand exclusive access to the closeness of their female partners; Toby Miller looks at just be their undoing. A young woman forms an unexpected the state of the world and concludes the problem can be summed up in one word—capiconnection at a summer school in Hungary. Set in southern talism. Emmett Stinson writes on the sad gap between the content provided by the news Tasmania, these interlinked stories bring into focus the inhabitsources that inform us and, well, reality. Claire G. Coleman writes on the long shadow ants of small communities, and capture the moments when life of the Stolen Generations. Eleanor Gordon-Smith considers the irresistible rise of popturns and one person becomes another. ulism; Toby Fitch details Australian animal & bird extinction from 1788 to the present. And lots more. 3
International Inte rnational Literature
Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell ($33, PB)
Faber Writing Academy at Allen & Unwin is excited to offer two new scholarship opportunities for 2021. Faber Writing Scholarship for a First Nations Writer Faber Writing Scholarship for an Ecologically Themed Novel The scholarship winner in each category may take classes in person in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, or online. Applications now open. For more information: Talk to us: (02) 8425 0171 Email us: faberwritingacademy@allenandunwin.com Visit us: www.faberwritingacademy.com.au
Utopia Avenue might be the most curious British band you’ve never heard of. Emerging from London’s psychedelic scene in 1967, folksinger Elf Holloway, blues bassist Dean Moss, guitar virtuoso Jasper de Zoet & jazz drummer Griff Griffin created a unique sound, with lyrics that captured their turbulent lives & times. This is the story of the band’s brief, blazing journey from Soho clubs & draughty ballrooms to the promised land of America, just when the Summer of Love was receding into something much darker—a multi-faceted tale of dreams, drugs, love, sexuality, madness & grief; of stardom’s wobbly ladder & fame’s Faustian pact; and of the collision between youthful idealism & jaded reality as the Sixties drew to a close.
A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi ($28, PB)
Edmond Charlot, founded Les Vraies Richesses (Our True Wealth), the famous Algerian bookstore/publishing house/lending library at the age of 20. He more than fulfilled its motto ‘by the young, for the young’, discovering the 24 year-old Albert Camus in 1937. His entire archive was twice destroyed by the French colonial forces, but despite financial difficulties & the vicissitudes of wars & revolutions, Charlot carried forward Les Vraies Richesses as a cultural hub of Algiers. Kaouther Adimi interweaves Charlot’s story with that of another 20 year-old, Ryad, who is dispatched to the old shop in 2017 to empty it of books & repaint it. Ryad’s no booklover, but old Abdallah, the bookshop’s self-appointed, nearly illiterate guardian, opens the young man’s mind. Cutting from Charlot to Ryad, from the 1930s to current times, from WWII to the bloody 1961 Free Algeria demonstrations in Paris, Adimi delicately packs a monumental history of intense political drama into her novel.
Miss Benson’s Beetle by Rachel Joyce ($33, PB)
Margery Benson’s life ended the day her father walked out of his study and never came back. Forty years later, abandoning a dull job, she advertises for an assistant. The successful candidate is to accompany Margery on an expedition to the other side of the world to search for a beetle that may or may not exist. Enid Pretty is not who she had in mind. But together they will find themselves drawn into an adventure that exceeds all Margery’s expectations, eventually finding new life at the top of a red mountain.
The Cat and The City by Nick Bradley ($28, PB)
The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-Eun ($28, PB)
Yona has been stuck behind a desk for years working as a programming coordinator for Jungle, a travel company specialising in package holidays to destinations ravaged by disaster. When a senior colleague touches her inappropriately she complains, and to bury her allegations the company make her an attractive proposition: a free ticket for one of their most sought-after trips, to the desert island of Mui. She accepts the offer and travels the remote island, where the major attraction is a supposedly-dramatic sinkhole. When the customers who’ve paid a premium for the trip begin to get frustrated, Yona realises that the company has dangerous plans to fabricate an environmental catastrophe to make the trip more interesting, but when she tries to raise the alarm, she discovers she has put her own life in danger.
One Day I’ll Tell You Everything by Emmanuelle Pagano ($30, PB)
Adèle and her younger brother Axel grew up in a hamlet in the spectacular mountains of the Ardèche region in south-east France. Ten years later, they have returned to their childhood home and Adèle now drives the school bus. She is desperate to keep the secret of her past—of when she was a boy. No one recognises her now, but teenagers have a way of getting to the truth. When a terrifying snowstorm strands the bus on the mountain, Adèle and her passengers take shelter in a cave, and that’s when the stories come out. Just like the landscape around her, Adèle has been reshaped, inside and out-to become a woman. Winner of the 2009 European Prize for Literature—translated into English for the first time.
A stray cat winds her way through the back alleys of Tokyo. With each detour, she brushes up against the seemingly disparate lives of the citydwellers, connecting them in unexpected ways. But the city is changing. As it does, it pushes her to the margins where she chances upon a series of apparent strangers—from a homeless man squatting in an abandoned hotel, to a shut-in hermit afraid to leave his house, to a convenience store worker searching for love. In a series of spellbinding, interlocking narratives—with styles ranging from manga to footnotes —Nick Bradley has hewn a novel of interplay & estrangement; of survival & self-destruction; of the desire to belong & the need to escape.
Sorry For Your Trouble: Stories by Richard Ford
A woman & man, parted a quarter of a century, reunite in a bar in New Orleans as the St Patrick’s Day parade goes by. A divorced suburban dad helps his daughter pick out a card for her friend who’s moving away. A group of friends in late middle age, reunite for dinner when one of their number loses her husband, but the gathering splinters when bitter revelations about their shared past emerge. Two teenage boys sit in a drive-in, the air thick with the scent of gin & popcorn & longing. Great moments in small lives, people we carry with us long after they are gone, Richard Ford takes disappointment, ageing, grief, love & marriage & silhouettes them against the heady backdrop of Irish America in the past & present. ($30, PB)
The Vanishing Sky by L. Annette Binder ($30, PB)
Germany, 1945, and the bombs are falling. In Heidenfeld, Etta & her husband Josef roam an empty nest—their eldest son Max is fighting on the frontlines, while 15 year-old Georg has swapped books for guns at a Nürnberg school for the Hitler Youth. At home, news of the war provokes daily doses of fear as the planes grow closer, taking one city after the next. When Max is unexpectedly discharged, Etta is relieved to have her eldest home & safe. But soon after he arrives, it’s clear that the boy who left is not the same returned. With Georg 100 miles away & a husband confronting his own feelings toward patriotic duty, Etta alone must gather the pieces of a splintering family, in the face of an uncertain future.
Antkind by Charlie Kaufman ($33, PB)
B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film by an enigmatic outsider – a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur ninety years to complete. Convinced that the film will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core, that it might possibly be the greatest movie ever made, B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: the film is destroyed, leaving him with a single frame from which he must somehow attempt to recall the work of art that just might be the last great hope of civilization.
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Now in B Format The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, $20 The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, $23
The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai
Born in 1920, Tran Dieu Lan’s family lost everything after the Communist government came to power in North Vietnam. Forced to flee with her six children, she knows she must do whatever it takes to keep her family together. Many years later, her country is again at war, and her young granddaughter Huong watches her parents disappear down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to fight. With echoes of Homegoing and Pachinko, celebrated Vietnamese poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai brings to life the true human cost of a devastating war, and the improbable power of hope to sustain us when all seems lost. ($30, PB)
Pilgrims by Matthew Kneale ($35, HB)
The year 1289. A rich farmer fears he’ll go to hell for cheating his neighbours. His wife wants pilgrim badges to sew into her hat & show off at church. A poor, ragged villager is convinced his beloved cat is suffering in the fires of purgatory & must be rescued. A mother is convinced her son’s dangerous illness is punishment for her own adultery & seeks forgiveness so he may be cured. A landlord is in trouble with the church after he punched an abbot on the nose. A sexually driven noblewoman seeks a divorce so she can marry her new young beau. These are among a group of pilgrims journeying from England to Rome, where they hope all their troubles will be answered. Matthew Kneale’s new novel is a sweeping narrative that shows medieval society in a new light, as a highly rule-bound, legalistic world, though religious fervour & the threat of violence are never far below the surface.
The Phone Box at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina ($30, PB)
Yui loses her mother & daughter in the tsunami, and, in the face of this unthinkable loss, life must somehow continue. One day she hears about a widower who has an old telephone box in his garden. There the old man finds the strength to speak to his late wife and begin to come to terms with his grief. As news of the phone box spreads, people from miles around travel there to connect with their own lost loved ones. When Yui makes a pilgrimage to the phone box she cannot bring herself to speak into the receiver. Then she finds Takeshi, a bereaved husband whose daughter has stopped talking in the wake of their loss.
When We Fall by Carolyn Kirby ($30, PB)
England, 1943 Lost in fog, pilot Vee Katchatourian is forced to make an emergency landing where she meets enigmatic RAF airman Stefan Bergel, and then can’t get him out of her mind. In occupied Poland, Ewa Hartman hosts German officers in her father’s guest house, while secretly gathering intelligence for the Polish resistance. Mourning her lover, Stefan, who was captured by the Soviets at the start of the war, Ewa is shocked to see him on the street one day. Haunted by a terrible choice he made in captivity, Stefan asks Vee & Ewa to help him expose one of the darkest secrets of the war—the Katyn Massacre.
Sex and Vanity by Kevin Kwan ($33, PB)
On her very first morning on the jewel-like island of Capri, Lucie Churchill sets eyes on George Zao & she instantly can’t stand him. She can’t stand it when he gallantly offers to trade hotel rooms with her so that she can have a view of the Tyrrhenian Sea, she can’t stand that he knows more about Casa Malaparte than she does, and she really can’t stand it when he kisses her. The daughter of an Americanborn Chinese mother & a blue-blooded New York father, Lucie has always sublimated the Asian side of herself, and she adamantly denies having feelings for George. But several years later, when George unexpectedly appears in East Hampton, where Lucie is weekending with her new fiancé, she is drawn to him again—and is soon spinning a web of deceit that involves her family, her fiancé and ultimately herself, as she tries to deny George entry into her world—and heart.
Fracture by Andrés Neuman ($30, HB)
In 2011, Mr Watanabe, a Japanese electronics executive, is in Tokyo when the earthquake that precedes the Fukushima nuclear disaster strikes. In the aftermath, he fins himself on a journey to Fukushima, a tourist of the current day tragedy that mimics his own experiences of WWII. For Mr Watanabe is one of the few double hibakusha, a survivor of the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima & Nagasaki in 1945. The earthquake shifts his & others memories of those events. Meanwhile, 4 women based in Paris, New York, Buenos Aires & Madrid tell their own stories of knowing & loving Mr Watanabe, a victim of one of the largest collective traumas of the last century.
This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger ($27, PB)
In the summer of 1932, on the banks of Minnesota’s Gilead River, Odie O’Banion is an orphan confined to the Lincoln Indian Training School, a pitiless place where his lively nature earns him the superintendent’s wrath. Forced to flee after committing a terrible crime, he and his brother, Albert, their best friend, Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own. Over the course of one summer, these four orphans journey into the unknown and cross paths with others who are adrift, from struggling farmers and travelling faith healers to displaced families and lost souls of all kinds.
This Happy by Niamh Campbell ($33, PB)
When Alannah was 23, she met a man who was older than her—a married man—and fell in love. Things happened suddenly. They met in April, in the first bit of mild weather; and in August, they went to stay in rural Ireland, overseen by the cottage’s landlady. Six years later, when Alannah is newly married to another man, she sees the landlady from afar. Memories of those days spent in bliss, then torture, return to her. And the realisation that she has been waiting—all this time—to be rediscovered.
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld ($33, PB) ‘Awfully opinionated for a girl’ is what they call Hillary as she grows up in her Chicago suburb. Smart, diligent, and a bit plain, that’s the general consensus. Then Hillary goes to college, and her star rises. At Yale Law School, she continues to be a leader—and catches the eye of driven, handsome and charismatic Bill. But when he asks her to marry him, Hillary gives him a firm No. The rest, as they say, isn’t history. How might things have turned out for them, for America, for the world itself, if Hillary Rodham had really turned down Bill Clinton? Alligator and Other Stories by Dima Alzayat
Told through the lens everyday scenarios, each story in this collection is a snapshot of those moments when unusual circumstances suddenly distinguish us from our neighbours, throw into relief the fact that we are ‘other’. Alligator, the centrepiece that connects the thematic threads running through the book, is a compilation of first-person accounts, newspaper clippings, letters, real & fictionalised historical & legal documents, scripts & social-media posts, which tell the story of a Syrian-American couple killed by their town’s police department and a vigilante lynch mob. As a Syrian, as an Arab, as an immigrant, as a woman, Dima Alzayat captures the many ways of feeling displaced ($35, HB)
The Disoriented by Amin Maalouf ($30, PB)
One night, a phone rings in Paris. Adam learns that Mourad, once his closest friend, is dying. He quickly throws some clothes in a suitcase and takes the first flight out, to the homeland he fled 25 years ago. Exiled in France, Adam has been leading a peaceful life as a respected historian, but back among the milk-white mountains of the East his past soon catches up with him. His childhood friends have all taken different paths in life—and some now have blood on their hands. Loyalty, identity & the clash of cultures & beliefs are at the core French-Lebanese Amin Maalouf’s novel.
The Harpy by Megan Hunter ($33, PB)
Daisy Johnson Lucy and Jake live in a house by a field where the sun burns like a ball of fire. Lucy works from home but devotes her life to the children, to their finely tuned routine, and to the house itself, which comforts her like an old, sly friend. But then a man calls one afternoon with a shattering message: his wife has been having an affair with Lucy’s husband. Lucy & Jake decide to stay together, but in a special arrangement designed to even the score & save their marriage, she will hurt him 3 times. Jake will not know when the hurt is coming, nor what form it will take. As the couple submit to a delicate game of crime & punishment, Lucy herself surrenders to a transformation of both mind & body from which there is no return.
A Lover’s Discourse by Xiaolu Guo ($28, PB)
A Chinese woman comes to London to start a new life, away from her old world. She knew she would be lonely, adrift in the city, but will her new relationship bring her closer to this land she has chosen, will their love give her a home? told through fragments of conversations between the two lovers—playing with language & the cultural differences that her narrator encounters as she settles into life in a post-Brexit Britain, Xiaolu Guo shows us how this couple navigate these differences, and their romance, whether on their unmoored houseboat or in a stifling flatshare in east London, or journeying through other continents together.
Love by Roddy Doyle ($30, PB)
One summer’s evening, two men meet up in a Dublin restaurant. Old friends, now married & with grown-up children, their lives have taken seemingly similar paths. But Joe has a secret he has to tell Davy, and Davy, a grief he wants to keep from Joe. Both are not the men they used to be. Neither Davy nor Joe know what the night has in store, but as 2 pints turns to 3, then 5, and the men set out to revisit the haunts of their youth, the ghosts of Dublin entwine around them. Their first buoyant forays into adulthood, the pubs, the parties, broken hearts & bungled affairs, as well as the memories of what eventually drove them apart. As the two friends try to reconcile their versions of the past over the course of one night, Roddy Doyle offers up a delightfully comic, yet moving portrait of the many forms love can take throughout our lives.
Burning by Megha Majumdar ($30, PB)
This is the story of 3 characters, whose lives are changed for ever when they become caught up in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. Jivan—a poor, young, Muslim girl, who dreams of going to college, accused of collaborating with the terrorists. Lovely—an exuberant hijra who longs to be a Bollywood star, who holds Jivan’s alibi. PT Sir—an opportunistic gym teacher who once taught Jivan—his involvement in Hindu nationalist politics inextricably linked to Jivan’s fall. A propulsive read that confronts issues of class, fate, prejudice & corruption with a Dickensian sense of injustice
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THE WILDER AISLES
Faber & Faber, have reprinted the crime novels of P D James, a name which will be known by many readers. I’ve read them all over the years, but couldn’t resist the great new covers. Phyllis Dorothy James was born in 1920, and went to Cambridge High school—up until the time of her death, she divided her time between Oxford and London. Apart from her writing, she worked for some time in criminal justice and for a hospital board in London. Her first novel was Cover her Face, published in 1962. Her last, Death Comes to Pemberley, in 2011. Fourteen of the books feature Adam Dalgleish, and two, Cordelia Gray. The Adam Dalgleish stories are my favourites—although the Cordelia Gray excursions are good. These are three of my favourites. Cover Her Face tells the story of Sally Jupp, who works as a maid in the home of a Mrs Maxie. Mrs Maxie’s son, Stephen, and daughter, Dorothy live with her. Sally causes a sensation when she enters the house dressed exactly as Dorothy and announces that Stephen has asked her to marry him. The mother and daughter are horrified at the idea, declaring the marriage will happen when hell freezes over. It is not, then, so surprising when Sally is found the next morning, dead in her room, having been strangled. Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgleish is called in to solve the murder. The plot, like all of James’s books, is quite complicated, with many different characters—one of the most interesting being Sally, who’s story, although she is not actually around in person for most of the action, is the one that causes so much of the trouble erupting chez Maxie. I think The Lighthouse, which I am reading at the moment, is one of her best. It’s set on the fictitious island of Combe, off the Cornish coast. This island offers a peaceful and secure rest for over-stressed professionals. The Island is managed by a trust, and anyone born on the island is granted leave to stay whenever and for however long they might like. Successful novelist, Nathan Oliver, is a native of the island who stays for two weeks every year—often with his daughter Miranda. He is a most unpleasant character, not at all welcomed on Combe. Most people think he comes to gather material for his books, and that is particularly the case with one of the other guests. A rather spectacular murder occurs, involving the lighthouse, and Dalgleish along with his partner, Detective-Inspector Kate Miskin, is sent to Combe to investigate. What he finds is resentment, hatred—and someone with an old score to settle. The Black Tower is another favourite. Set, once again, in a remote and lonely place—this time on the Dorset Coast. Dalgleish is surprised to receive a note from an old friend—Father Baddesley, a retired priest who works as chaplain at Toynton Lodge, a home for the disabled— asking him to come and stay. On arrival, he finds that his friend is dead, whatever Baddesley needed to tell him taken to the grave. Baddesley has supposedly died of a heart attack, but Dalgleish begins to suspect things are not all they seem in Toynton Lodge. Another death occurs, and an investigation is launched. One of the many things James is good at is invoking a sense of place. I could hear the wild sea of the Dorset Coast, the wind and the rain, and see the dangerous, rough cliff faces—falling down to the rocks below. Also, her characters are very real people you might know, or meet in the street. Reading her books, especially the older ones, shows how writing has changed. These books are generally lengthy tales, and quite dense—requiring a focussed attention. I have really enjoyed this little expedition into the past—a sort of double pleasure of the present reading, and the memory of how much I enjoyed them on my first reading (so many) years ago—when I took for granted the dense way they were written, demanding close reading—as most of the books I read at that time were. I feel that, alas, I have become slightly lazy, looking for books I can read quickly, not in it for the hard work of actually reading every word. As well as the novels, James also wrote short story collections, a fragment of an autobiography—A Time To Be In Earnest, and a true crime book The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders 1811. The only book of hers I actively disliked was Death Comes to Pemberley—a post Pride and Prejudice novel that sees crime come to the married Elizabeth and Darcy’s estate. It just didn’t work, and is so off the mark, short of being desperate for the money, I don’t really know why she wrote the book. PD James won numerous awards, received honorary degrees from English universities and was created a life peer as Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991. I was fortunate to hear her speak, some time ago,when she was visiting Sydney. It was a great pleasure to listen to her, having been a fan for so long. Janice Wilder
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Crime Fiction
Sticks and Stones by Katherine Firkin ($33, PB)
A Melbourne winter, Detective Emmett Corban is starting to regret his promotion to head of the Missing Persons Unit. So when Natale Gibson goes missing, he’s convinced this is the big case he’s been waiting for. But things aren’t all they seem. Her close-knit Italian family is keeping secrets—none bigger than the one Natale has been hiding. Then, the body of another woman is found—what had seemed like a standard missing person’s case has turned into a hunt for a serial killer. And to really understand these shocking crimes, Emmett & his team need to look back through decades of neglect to a squalid inner-city flat, where a young boy is left huddling over his mother’s body.
The Geometry of Holding Hands by Alexander McCall Smith ($30, PB)
In Edinburgh, rumours and gossip abound. But Isabel knows that such things can’t be taken at face value. Still, the latest whispers hint at mysterious goings—on, and who but Isabel can be trusted to get to the bottom of them? At the same time, she must deal with the demands of her two small children, her husband and her rather tempestuous niece, Cat, whose latest romantic entanglement comes—to no one’s surprise—with complications.
A Private Cathedral by James Lee Burke ($33, PB)
Isolde and Johnny—the star-crossed teenage heirs to New Iberia’s criminal empires—have run away together, and Robicheaux is tasked with finding them. But when his investigation brings him too close to both Isolde’s mother and her father’s mistress, the venomous mafioso orders a hit on Robicheaux and his partner, Clete Purcel. In order to rescue the young lovers, and save hi self, Robicheaux must face a terrifying timetravelling superhuman hitman capable of inflicting horrifying hallucinations on his victims, and overcome the demons that have tormented him his whole life.
The Last Trial by Scott Turow ($33, PB)
85 years old, and in precarious health, Kindle County’s most revered courtroom advocate Sandy Stern has been persuaded to defend an old friend, Pavel Pafko. A former Nobel Prize-winner who has been charged in a federal racketeering indictment with fraud, insider trading & murder. Despite Pafko’s many failings, is he innocent of the terrible charges laid against him? How far will Stern go to save his friend, and—no matter the trial’s outcome—will he ever know the truth? Stern’s duty to defend his client & his belief in the power of the judicial system both face a final, terrible test in the courtroom.
Winter Grave by Helene Tursten ($30, PB)
2 young kids are missing. A police officer has been found dead. DI Embla Nystrom must quickly solve the mystery & find the children before the small town takes matters into their own hands. As she hunts for the missing children, Embla can’t help but think of the case that has been haunting her for years—the disappearance of her childhood best friend. Could the cases be linked? With each passing dark winter day, the odds of finding the children alive shrink, while desperation mounts. Their fathers want answers and will stop at nothing-including murder-to get them.
The Shadow Friend by Alex North ($33, PB)
25 years ago, troubled teenager Charlie Crabtree committed a shocking & unprovoked murder. On the darkest corners of the internet Charlie’s crime has attracted a dark infamy, inspiring more than one copycat. Paul Adams can remember the case too—Charlie and his victims were his friends. Paul left town as soon as he could, and he’s never gone back. But then his mother, old & senile, takes a turn for the worse, & it’s time to come home. Another copycat strikes. His mother insists that there’s something in the house. Someone is following him. Which reminds him that the most unsettling thing about that awful day 25 years ago is that afterwards, Charlie Crabtree was never seen again
The Corpse in the Garden of Perfect Brightness by Malcolm Pryce ($33, PB)
1948, the railways have been nationalised. Jack Wenlock, the last of a fabled cadre of railway detectives, is jobless, penniless, with new bride Jenny to support, when a letter arrives from a mysterious Cornish Countess saying that Jack’s mother may have survived a shipwreck off the coast of Java, so he & Jenny board a boat to the East. In a run-down Siamese hotel a spy, an assassin, a deserter, an old soldier & a fading Hollywood movie star all await the arrival of a missing part for a flying boat & a journey that will take them into the realm of myth. But if Jack is ever to see his mother again, he has to stop them.
The Broken Ones by Ren Richards ($30, PB)
There is one story bestselling true crime writer, Nell Way won’t tell. Ten years ago and with a different name, she was a teenage mother with a four-year-old she found desperately hard to love. Then the little girl disappeared, and Nell has never shaken off the shadow of suspicion. As she begins to interview the subject of her next book—a woman convicted of murdering her twin sister—it becomes clear that someone has uncovered her true identity. And they know that Nell didn’t tell the truth about the day her daughter disappeared
The Bluffs by Kyle Perry ($33, PB)
When a school group of teenage girls goes missing in the remote wilderness of Tasmania’s Great Western Tiers, the people of Limestone Creek are immediately on alert. 3 decades ago, 5 young girls disappeared in the area of those dangerous bluffs, and the legend of ‘the Hungry Man’ still haunts locals to this day. Local dealer Jordan Murphy is instantly the prime suspect. When a body is found, mauled, at the bottom of a cliff, suspicion turns to a wild animal—but that can’t explain why she was discovered barefoot, her shoes at the top of the cliff, laces neatly tied.
A Shooting at Chateau Rock by Martin Walker
Following the funeral of a local farmer, Bruno finds out that just before his sudden death, the farmer had signed over his property to an insurance company in return for a subscription to a luxury retirement home. Both the retirement home & the insurance company are scams with links to a Russian oligarch. Meanwhile, an aging British rock star is selling his home, Chateau Rock. The star’s son returns for the summer with his Russian girlfriend. As Bruno pursues his inquiries he learns that the oligarch is none other than the girlfriend’s father, and he’s tested to the limit as he untangles a Gordian Knot of criminality that reaches as far as the Kremlin. ($33, PB)
The Inner Darkness by Jorn Lier Horst ($33, PB)
After 4 years behind bars notorious serial killer, Thomas Kerr, is ready to talk. He has agreed to lead the police to his final victim’s grave. But the expedition goes horribly wrong after his escape deep into the Norwegian forest. CI Wisting launches a frantic search to find this cold-blooded killer before he strikes again. But the body of another woman, killed weeks before, has been found. Murdered in the same way as Kerr’s victims. Is there a copycat killer on the loose? And what will happen once Kerr and his apprentice are reunited?
The Cleaner by Mark Dawson ($30, PB)
After a botched job leaves a bloody trail, government assassin John Milton goes into hiding. Disappearing into London’s bustling East End and holing up in a vacant flat, Milton becomes involved with single mother Sharon & her troubled son Elijah, who are caught in an increasingly bloody turf war between two rival gangs. Unable to ignore the threat, Milton sets about protecting mother & son, meeting violence with violence. But his involvement puts him in the sights of the government’s next best killer, and before long Milton is not just fighting to save a family and a home - he’s fighting to stay alive.
The Sandpit by Nicholas Shakespeare ($33, PB)
When John Dyer returns to Oxford from Brazil with his son, Leandro, he assumes his time living on the edge as a foreign correspondent in Rio is over. But Leandro’s schoolmates are the children of influential people, among them an international banker, a Russian oligarch, an American CIA operative & a British spook—the network of alliances & covert interests that spreads between these power brokers soon becomes clear to Dyer. But when Iranian nuclear scientist, Rustum Marvar & his son disappear, several sinister factions seem acutely interested in Marvar’s groundbreaking research at the Physics Faculty, & what he might have told Dyer about it, given Dyer was the last person to see Marvar alive.
Tokyo Redux by David Peace ($30, PB)
Tokyo, July 1949, in the midst of the US Occupation President Shimoyama, Head of the National Railways of Japan, goes missing just a day after serving notice of 30,000 job losses. American Detective Harry Sweeney leads the missing person’s investigation for General MacArthur’s GHQ. Some men go mad, some men go missing. Fifteen years later and Tokyo is booming. As the city prepares for the 1964 Olympics and the global spotlight, Hideki Murota, a former policeman during the Occupation period, and now a PI is given a case which forces him to go back to confront a time, a place and a crime he’s been hiding from for the past 15 years.
Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook by Celia Rees ($30, PB)
Sent to Germany in the chaotic aftermath of World War II, Edith Graham is finally getting the chance to do her bit. Having taught at a girls’ school during the conflict, she leaps at the opportunity to escape an ordinary life—but Edith is not everything she seems to be. Under the guise of her innocent cover story, Edith has been recruited to root out Nazis who are trying to escape prosecution. Secretly, she is sending coding messages back to the UK, hidden inside innocuous recipes sent to a friend—after all, who would expect notes on sauerkraut to contain the clues that would crack a criminal underground network? But the closer she gets to the truth, the muddier the line becomes between good and evil. In a dangerous world of shifting loyalties, when the enemy wears the face of a friend, who do you trust?
True Crime
My Father the Murderer: A Reckoning with the Past by Nina Young ($35, PB)
Nina Young was in her mid-twenties, when she found out from online court records that her estranged father, Allan Ladd, had strangled a woman to death decades before. In prison he’d met Denise, Nina’s mother, who was his tutor. By the time Denise found out the extent of Alan’s crime, she was in too deep. She had to flee from him before Nina turned two. A decade after reading the court records, Nina, now a journalist, decided to release a podcast to tackle the questions she’d been asking herself ever since. How did her mother fall in love with a murderer? What happened to Conan, Nina’s estranged half-brother, who spent his formative years in Allan’s care? How much do your origins determine your destiny?
Flash Crash by Liam Vaughan ($33, PB)
Raised in a working-class neighbourhood in West London, Navinder Singh Sarao was a preternaturally gifted trader who played the markets like a computer game. By the age of 30, he had left behind London’s trading arcades, working instead out of his childhood home. For years the money poured in. But when lightning-fast electronic traders infiltrated markets & started eating into his profits, Nav built a system of his own to fight back. It worked-until 2015, when the FBI arrived at his door. Depending on whom you ask, Sarao was a scourge, a symbol of a financial system run horribly amok, or a folk hero—an outsider who took on the Gallows Rock by Yrsa Sigurdardottir ($33, PB) tyranny of Wall Street & the high-frequency traders. A real-life financial thriller, On a jagged, bleak lava field just outside Reykjavik stands the Gal- Flash Crash uncovers the remarkable, behind-the-scenes narrative of a mystifying lows Rock. Once a place of execution, it is now a tourist attraction. market crash, a globe-spanning investigation into international fraud, and the man Until this morning, when a man was found hanging from it. The nail at the centre of them both. embedded in his chest proves it wasn’t suicide. But when the police go Searching for Spiderman by Ally Chumley to his flat, a further puzzle awaits: a 4-year-old boy who doesn’t seem 3-year-old William Tyrrell made headlines across Australia to have any link with the victim, his parents cannot be found, and his in 2014 after he disappeared while playing outside his foster drawings show he witnessed something terrible. As detective Huldar grandmother’s house in Kendall on the Mid North Coast of hunts the killer, and child psychologist Freyja looks for the boy’s parNSW. Ally Chumley hunts through state forests, waterways & ents, a story of violence, entitlement & revenge unfolds old bush camps. Solid clues, gossamer leads and red herrings Dark Waters by G. R. Halliday ($33, PB) abound. Everyone’s a suspect. There are anonymous foster Annabelle has come to the Scottish Highlands to escape. But she is parents veiled in secrecy, neighbours who distrust each other, suddenly forced to swerve. The next thing she remembers is waking local paedophiles and a parade of persons of interest. Instead up in a dark, damp room, a voice saying ‘The Doctor will be here of having too few suspects, detectives have too many. Among it all is William’s soon’. Scott is camping alone in the Scottish woodlands when he hears own birth family, who once hid the toddler from authorities. This bizarre cast of a scream. He starts to run in fear of his life. Scott is never seen again. characters keeps everyone guessing, particularly when a veteran lead detective is Meanwhile DI Monica Kennedy has been called to her first Serious sensationally removed from the case and subsequently quits the force. ($33, PB) Crimes case in 6 months—a dismembered body has been discovered, abandoned in a dam. Days later, when another victim surfaces, Moni- Drugs, Guns & Lies: My life as an undercover cop by Keith Banks & Ben Smith ($30, PB) ca knows she is on the hunt for a ruthless killer. Banks, one of Queensland’s most decorated police The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope by C. W. Grafton Keith officers, tells his story of being undercover in the world of First published in 1943, this hard-boiled whodunit from the father of drugs in the 1980s. In an era of corruption, often alone & with MWA Grand Master Sue Grafton, introduces Kentucky attorney Gil no backup, he and other undercover cops quickly learned to Henry. When Ruth McClure approaches Gil & asks him to investigate blend into the drug scene, smoking dope & drinking with the stock she inherited from her father, he reluctantly agrees, never targets, buying drugs & then having dealers arrested. Very expecting to be embroiled in scandal, subterfuge & murder. But the quickly, the lines between his identity as a police officer & the more he digs the deeper the manipulation scheme goes, and it becomes life he pretended to be part of became blurred. This is a raw & unclear whether Gil will find a way out. This portrait of pre-WWII confronting story of undercover cops who all became casualties of that era, some America, combines fast-paced plotting, a breezy writing style and more than others, when not everyone with a badge could be trusted. C.W. Grafton’s thorough knowledge of the law. ($28, PB)
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Biography
Fury by Kathryn Heyman ($30, PB)
DR KATE GREGOREVIC Dr Kate Gregorevic helps you discover how to thrive and live better for longer.
From the author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
At the age of 20, after a traumatic sexual assault trial, writer Kathryn Heyman ran away from her life & became a deckhand on a fishing trawler in the Timor Sea. Coming from a family life of poverty & violence, she had no real role models, no example of how to create a decent life, how to have hope, how to have expectations. But she was a reader—and this was her salvation. After one wild season on board the Ocean Thief, the only girl among tough working men, facing storms, treachery & harder physical labour than she had ever known, Heyman was transformed, able to face the abuses that she thought had broken her, able to see ‘all that she had been blind to, simply to survive’.
Father of the Lost Boys by Yuot A Alaak ($30, PB)
During the Second Sudanese Civil war, thousands of South Sudanese boys were displaced from their villages or orphaned in attacks from northern government troops. Many became refugees in Ethiopia. There, in 1989, teacher & community leader Mecak Ajang Alaak assumed care of the Lost Boys in a bid to protect them from becoming child soldiers. So began a 4-year journey from Ethiopia to Sudan & on to the safety of a Kenyan refugee camp. Together they endured starvation, animal attacks & the horrors of land mines & aerial bombardments. This eyewitness account by Mecak Ajang Alaak’s son, Yuot, is the extraordinary true story of a man who never ceased to believe that the pen is mightier than the gun.
Darkfall by Indigo Perry ($28, PB)
Darkfall is a potent memoir about an adolescence lived in an Australian country town in the 1980s: desolate, dusty & bleak. Indigo Perry’s narrative is a journey of grief, arranged around a score of music from alternative & post-punk sources, music unavailable outside cities in an age before the internet—an imagined soundtrack, a ballast, for her isolation. Darkfall identifies a legacy of extreme toxic masculinity and gendered violence, containing little in the way of justice. Perry’s deep retrospective unstitching of her reality is presented to us with a poetic strength, uncovering the power that resilience can unleash on an adult body. Her book is an act of recovery and reclamation.
MARIE KONDO Find your focus – wherever you’re working – with Joy at Work. Marie Kondo believes the key is creating a healthy environment, having a consistent routine, taking time to recharge and accepting that, yes, sometimes things are going to be chaotic.
Love talking about books? Find us online at Pan Macmillan Australia
The Last Lighthouse Keeper: A memoir by John Cook & Jon Bauer ($33, PB)
In Tasmania, John Cook is known as: ‘The Keeper of the Flame’. He is renowned as one of the last of the kerosene keepers’, spending a good part of his 26-year career in Tasmanian lighthouses tending kerosene, not electrical, lamps. He joined the lighthouse service in 1969, after a spell in the merchant marine. Far from reviling work on isolated islands such as Tasman & Maatsuyker, Australia’s southernmost lighthouse, he discovered that he loved the solitude & delighted in the sense of purpose that light keeping gave him. He did two stints on Tasman, in 1969-71 & 1977, and was the head keeper on Maatsuyker for 8 years. His story is one of madness & wilderness, shining a light onto the vicissitudes of love & nature.
Becoming Dr Seuss by Brian Jay Jones ($32, PB)
Whimsical and wonderful, Dr Seuss’s work has defined our childhoods and the childhoods of our children. But Theodor Geisel had a second, more radical side. He had a successful career as an advertising man & then as a political cartoonist, his personal convictions appearing, not always subtly, throughout his books—remember the environmentalist of The Lorax? Geisel introduced generations to the wonders of reading while teaching young people about empathy and how to treat others well. Agonizing over word choices & rhymes, touching up drawings sometimes for years, he upheld a rigorous standard of perfection for his work—taking his responsibility as a writer for children seriously, talking down to no reader, no matter how small.
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls by Nina Renata Aron ($30, PB)
Nina Aron’s story of her intense, toxic affair with drug addict K is gripping and darkly amusing. But alongside the late nights & broken promises of her own life, Aron builds a bigger picture: the untold story of those who have loved and supported addicts through the ages. From prohibition, which grew out of the (mainly women-led) temperance movement, to the emergence of Al Anon, a fellowship for family members of addicts, to the invention of co-dependency, the story of addiction has never been about one person. Exploring her own journey of descent and recovery, Aron asks painful and rarely discussed questions. When does helping become harmful? Whose suffering counts? And are our narratives about love as broken as our drug laws?
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Now in paperback - a staff favourite! Faber & Faber: The Untold Story by Toby Faber, $23
Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell by John Preston ($35, PB)
In February 1991, Robert Maxwell made a triumphant entrance into Manhattan harbour on board his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. He had come to complete his purchase of the ailing New York Daily News. Crowds lined the quayside to watch his arrival. Taxi drivers stopped their cabs to shake his hand, children asked for his autograph & when Maxwell went to dine in the most fashionable Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, all the diners gave him a standing ovation. 10 months later, he disappeared off the same yacht & was found dead in the water. Within a few days, Maxwell was being reviled as the embodiment of greed & unscrupulousness. What went so wrong? How did a man who had once laid such store on the importance of ethics & good behaviour become reduced to a bloated, amoral wreck?
The Powerbroker: Mark Leibler, an Australian Jewish Life by Michael Gawenda ($39.95, HB)
From the ashes of the darkest event in human history, Australian Jews built a thriving community, one with proportionally more Holocaust survivors than anywhere else in the world bar Israel. Mark Leibler grew up in this community, and in time became a leader of it. Michael Gawenda shows how Leibler rose to a position of immense influence in Australian public life by entwining his roles as a Zionist leader & a tax lawyer to some of the country’s richest people. Gawenda vividly paints a cast of Australian characters—among them Paul Keating, John Howard, Julia Gillard & Noel Pearson—who came to know Leibler & to call him a friend, along with people like Kevin Rudd & Bob Carr, who see Leibler as no friend at all. Finally, he charts the surprise turn in Leibler’s life, when a social & political conservative became a committed advocate for radical reform on behalf of Australia’s Indigenous people.
Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War 1930-1949 ($49.95, PB)
Martha Gellhorn was a strong-willed woman whose journalism & life cleared a path for women who came after her. An ardent antifascist, she abhorred ‘objectivity shit’ & wrote about real people doing real things. These letters between Gellhorn & her correspondents (among them, Sylvia Beach, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Capa, Charlie Chaplin, Chiang Kai-shek, Colette, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Maxwell Perkins, Eleanor & Franklin D. Roosevelt, Antoine de Saint-Exupory, Orson Welles, H.G. Wells) reveal her passionate advocacy of social justice & her need to tell the stories of ‘the people who were the sufferers of history.’
David Campbell by Jonathan Persse ($44, PB)
David Campbell is remembered as one of Australia’s finest lyric poets. Born into a landed family, he was a grazier in the Monaro for most of his life & a decorated airman during WW2. He published 11 books of poems & 2 of short stories—his poetry was inspired by his love of the land & by his belief in the unity of all things in nature. A true pantheist. In his words: ‘The cosmos dances’
Travel Writing
The Age of Islands: In Search of New and Disappearing Islands by Alastair Bonnett ($30, PB)
New islands are being built at an unprecedented rate whether for tourism or territorial ambition, while many islands are disappearing because of rising sea levels or fragmenting due to shrinking ice. It is a strange planetary spectacle, an ever-changing map which even Google Earth struggles to keep pace with. But it is also, Alastair Bonnett believes, a spectacle which is imprinting itself on our hopes & anxieties. From a ‘crannog’, an ancient artificial island in a Scottish loch, to the militarized artificial islands China is building in the South China Sea, he sets out to explore some of the world’s newest, most fragile and beautiful islands to find out why they have such a hold on our imaginations.
READ
IN
2020
From famine to freedom, how a young boy fled Chairman Mao’s China to a new life in Australia.
The fairy tale of Sophie and Agatha comes to a dramatic conclusion in this sixth and final book of Soman Chainani’s bestselling fantasy series.
The stunning new thriller from the master of modern espionage.
Wild Ride: Epic cycling journeys through the heart of Australia by Daniel Oakman ($34.95, PB)
Daniel Oakman takes a rich ride through the 130 years of Australian cycling; from the overlanding heroes of Arthur Richardson & Francis Birtles, to the lesser known but no less amazing feats of Jerome Murif, Ted Ryko & Joe Pearson, through to modern-day backpacking trailblazers such as Kate Leeming, Tegan Streeter & Tom Richards. From the historic icons of Hubert ‘Oppy’ Opperman, Wendy Duncan & Shirley Law, to the more recent triumphs of actor Sam Johnson & his audacious quest to ride a unicycle 15,000 kilometres around the country.
Owls of the Eastern Ice by Jonathan Slaght ($40, HB) The fish owl is the world’s largest owl. It lives exclusively along the rivers of Eastern Russia, Northeastern China & Japan’s Hokkaido Island, and can best be tracked in the winter snows, so very little is known about it. Now Russia’s evolving fortunes, logging interests and climate change present new threats to the owl’s survival. Jonathan Slaght recounts his experiences pursuing the owl through its forbidding territory, during months-long journeys covering thousands of miles. Along the way he spends time with the Russians who inhabit the taiga & must survive in the harshest & most isolating of conditions. As much a portrait of this extraordinary owl as of the Russian Far East itself, Slaght gives a timely meditation on our relationship with the natural world and what it means to devote one’s life to a single pursuit.. Action Park by Andy Mulvihill & Jake Rossen
Often called ‘Accident Park’, ‘Class Action Park’, or ‘Traction Park’, Action Park was the New Jersey-based amusement playland was a monument to the anything-goes spirit of the 80s that left guests in control of their own adventures—sometimes with tragic results. An establishment completely anathema to our modern culture of rules & safety, it closed its doors in 1996 after nearly 20 years. This is the first-ever unvarnished look at the history of this DIY Disneyland, as seen through the eyes of Andy Mulvihill, the son of the park’s idiosyncratic founder, Gene Mulvihill. From his early days testing precarious rides to working his way up to chief lifeguard of the infamous Wave Pool to later helping run the whole park, Andy’s story chronicles the life & death of this uniquely American attraction, a wet & wild 1980s adolescence, and a son’s struggle to understand his father’s quixotic quest to become the Walt Disney of New Jersey. ($28, PB)
The Official Tour de France Road Cycling Training Guide by Paul Knott ($40, HB)
Paul Knott taps into the minds of the riders, coaches & experts who have experienced or raced the Tour de France first hand to give amateur cyclists the insider knowledge on how to adapt their training, nutrition & mental preparation for potentially their toughest day out on a bike. Alongside lifelong advice to improve your cycling performance, the book gives structured guidance on how to plan your season, incorporating some of the key training & nutrition strategies adopted by professional cyclists. This also includes unlocking & decoding training data, which has become a key aspect of cycling training, using training off the bike as well as on it & breaking down the psychological barriers that can hold some cyclists back.
Due North: An expedition through Australia from Outpost: A Journey to the Wild Ends of the Tasmania to the Gulf by James Viles ($40, HB) This is chef James Viles’ photographic journal of his road trip from Earth by Dan Richards ($23, PB)
Tassie to the Top End, from Flinders Island in the Tasman Sea to the Gulf of Carpentaria. His focus is real food, where it comes from, how it’s grown, tended & harvested & how it sometimes flourishes in the most hostile & breathtakingly beautiful parts of Australia. James describes the people he meets along the road & the conversations he has with foragers, food producers, fishermen, tribal elders, local farmers—all of whom are knowledgeable & passionate about Australia and Australian ingredients. Along the way he also discovers that sleeping in a swag under the stars reminds him about what matters & reconnects him to his creative self.
Through a series of personal journeys, Dan Richards explores the appeal of far-flung outposts in mountains, tundra, forests, oceans & deserts. Following a route from the Cairngorms of Scotland to the fire-watch lookouts of Washington State; from Iceland’s ‘Houses of Joy’ to the Utah desert; frozen ghost towns in Svalbard to shrines in Japan; Roald Dahl’s writing hut to a lighthouse in the North Atlantic, Richards explores landscapes which have inspired writers, artists & musicians, asking why are we drawn to wilderness? What can we do to protect them? And what does the future hold for outposts on the edge?
Patterns of India: A Journey Through Colors, Textiles, and the Vibrancy of Rajasthan Japan: The Passenger Volume 1 ($30, PB) by Christine Chitnis ($50, HB)
Color is the thread that binds India’s vastness together, defining every aspect of life from religion & politics to food & dress. Organised by the 5 dominant colours royal blue, sandstone, marigold, ivory & rose, Christine Chitnis explores how deeply colour & pattern exist in a symbiotic relationship & are woven into every part of the culture. For instance, the fuchsia found in the draping fabric of a sari is matched by the vibrant chains of roses offered at temple, and the burnt orange spices in the marketplaces are reflected in the henna tattoos given to brides & wedding guests—and while every colour is imbued with meaning, it is often within the details of patterns that the full story comes to light. Photographer & writer Chitnis spent over a decade traveling through, getting to know, and falling in love with the intricate patterns of everyday Rajasthani life. With history & culture-based essays woven throughout the more than 200 stunning photographs of architecture, markets, cuisine, art, textiles & everyday happenings, Patterns of India captures the beauty & essence of this unique part of the world.
Visitors from the West look with amazement, and sometimes concern, at Japan’s monolithic social structures & unique, complex culture industry; the gigantic scale of its tech corporations & the resilience of its traditions; the extraordinary diversity of the subcultures that flourish in its ‘post-human’ megacities—an impossibly complicated jig-saw puzzle whose overall design eludes us. This has made the country an inexhaustible source of inspiration for stories, reflections & re-portage. The subjects in this volume range from the Japanese veneration of the dead to the Tokyo music scene, from urban alienation to cinema, from sumo to machismo. Caught between an ageing population & extreme post-modernity, immobile yet futuristic, Japan is an ideal observation point from which to understand our age & the one to come.
Also in this series: Greece - The Passenger Volume 2 ($30, PB) This volume sets the negative opinions aside in order to give to the stories, facts, and people of Greece the dignity and centrality they deserve.
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books for kids to young adults
selected by Elissa
Bin Chicken by Kate & Jol Temple (ill) Ronojoy Ghosh
Mr Brown’s Bad Day ($25, HB) by Lou Peacock & Alison Friend
Diving in dumpsters, traipsing through trash! Rummaging through rubbish, making a splash! ‘Revolting!’ they snort, starting to sicken, ‘Trash Turkey! Dumpster Duck! BIN CHICKEN!’ One bird’s trash is another bird’s treasure-find out why the ibis is the queen of the rubbish pile! A charming rhyming tale of adaptation. ($18, HB)
Respect by Aunty Fay Muir & Sue Lawson (ill) Lisa Kennedy
Our Way is old. Older than the red earth. Older than flickering stars. Our way is respect. Aunty Fay Muir & Sue Lawson, collaborators on Nganga: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander words and phrases, have teamed up with artist Lisa Kennedy to deliver an exquisite picture book that reminds kids to respect others and respect ourselves. ($25, HB)
The Kingfisher Football Encyclopedia by Clive Gifford ($20, PB)
non fiction
More than a Kick: Footy, the Photo and Me by Jennifer Castles & Tayla Harris ($20, PB)
More reasons to get away from the screens. This is the inspiring story of AFLW star Tayla Harris’ stellar sporting career so far, and her hard-earned advice to young people navigating the ups and downs of social media (the kick!). ‘Tayla is showing young women that you can wear glitzy gowns and rock stilettos, and you can also be a hardcore athlete who sweats and spits and kicks the footy, as well as a total dag in trackydacks with foodstains on your front.’
under 8
The Bad Guys Episode 11: Dawn of the Underlord by Aaron Blabey
Chance is in Year 7 and thinks she has it all—a loving mother, dog Tiges, best friend & almost-sister next door. But when a reality TV team makes over her house, she discovers newspaper cuttings from the past that cause her to question the world as she knows it and everyone in it. Then she finds herself caught between two realities, identities and worlds—with a very difficult decision to make, which almost splits her in two. This powerful story explores what is true and what is fake in today’s world. And while Chance is all about the truth, she ponders whether ‘Maybe being truthful was really just a big lie’.
Her Perilous Mansion by Sean Williams ($17, PB)
In a strange mansion miles from anywhere, an orphan named Almanac and a 12th daughter named Etta find themselves working—and bickering—in the largely deserted rooms. But soon they realise that the house and its inhabitants are not quite what they seem, and there’s more at stake than just their jobs. Can they solve the puzzle of Her Perilous Mansion before it’s too late? ‘A funny, clever and joyous fantasy for children that zings with action, adventure, mystery & magic, the pages flying past as if by wizardry. Guaranteed to keep young readers hooked to the very last word.’—Kate Forsyth (Impossible Quest series).
activities
Great fun to be had giving 6 year old blue heeler pup Bluey colour to his big backyard world—inside or outside the lines!
How Cities Work Activity Book
Design your own futuristic building, untangle the cyclists, spot the missing spanners at the building site, use stickers to fill the zoo with animals and much more in this jam packed activity book. ($13, PB)
Leonardo da Vinci’s Flying Machines Kit
Renowned paper artist Andrew Dewar presents replicas of 13 of Leonardo’s most famous aviation inventions. The kit includes: Pre-cut paper pieces; A full-colour 64-page book with step-by-step instructions for assembling the models; A pre-assembled rubber band slingshot launcher to launch the planes into the sky ($23, BX)
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If sport is not your thing, get out and change the world! Human action over the next decade will totally shape the future of our planet, and our existence. Climate change is happening, now. These 25 hopeful stories include Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, Wangari Maathai—as well as lesserknown heroes, such as turtle-protector Len Peters, the guardians of the Amazon rainforest, and the poacher patrollers The Black Mambas.
Let’s Get Gardening: Australian Eco-gardening Projects for Children ($25, PL)
Dorling Kindersley offers a great start to building any child’s green thumb & encouraging them to do their bit for the environment. This book includes 3 simple chapters—kitchen gardening, wildlife gardening & recycled gardening—each with easy sustainability projects to inspire everyone’s inner eco-kid. Learn how to grow organic vegetables and herbs, how to attract awesome bees, butterflies and birds to your area, and how to make sustainable garden containers from household waste.
Scary Mary and the Stripe Spell: Monty’s Island 1 by Emily Rodda (ill) Lucinda Gifford ($15, PB)
A new series from Emily Rodda! On a tiny island far away, in a sea that ripples with magic, Monty never knows what he might find. Monty, Tawny & friends receive some startling news: Scary Mary and her pirate crew are on their way, looking for a new island to call home. What can they do? There’s no way they can hide—especially when Bunchy accidentally turns the whole island stripy with her new magic wand. It’s going to take one of Monty’s best ideas to save them!
The Book Of Chance by Sue Whiting ($18, PB)
Bluey Big Backyard Colouring book ($6, PB)
Mr Brown is a Very Important Tiger who works in a Very Important Office. He carries a Very Important Briefcase and does Very Important Things all day long. But when his Very Important Briefcase goes missing, Mr Brown’s world is turned upside down. He goes on a VERY wild chase all over town, but will he ever get his briefcase back? And what about the Very Important Things inside? You’ll laugh when you find out!
Climate Rebels by Ben Lerwill ($27, HB)
Inspire the kids out of lockdown and back on the field! Clive Gifford captures all the drama of the beautiful game—analysing it with dynamic full-spread photos and digital artworks that recreate famous moves & goals. Each chapter includes links to websites, providing a valuable access point to databases of players, international results, all the major tournaments, and club histories.
The Bad Guys, I mean, Shadow Squad-Ghave saved the world from butt-handed evil and now its time to party But Mr Snake doesn’t feel like partying. Ohhh, no. He’s too powerful for that—he would rather mess with things that could rip open a doorway into a whole new world of horror, mayhem and... BLOOD-CURDLING BADNESS. Better put your party pants on ice ($15, PB)
picture books
Robin Hood by Robert Muchamore ($15, PB)
8 to 12
In Robert Muchamore’s new series you can’t go far without a quick brain and some rule-bending in a place like Locksley. After its vast car plants shut down, the prosperous town has become a wasteland of empty homes, toxic land and families on the brink. And it doesn’t help that the authorities are in the clutches of profit-obsessed Sheriff of Nottingham, in cahoots with underworld boss Guy Gisborne. When his dad is framed for a robbery, Robin & his brother Little John are hounded out of Locksley and must learn to survive in the Sherwood forest, stretching 300 kilometres & sheltering the free spirits & outlaws. But Robin is determined to do more than survive. Small, fast & deadly with a bow, he hatches a plan to join forces with Marion Maid, harness his inimitable tech skills & strike a blow against Gisborne and the Sheriff.
teen fiction
Aurora Burning: The Aurora Cycle 2 by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff ($20, PB)
An ancient evil is about to be unleashed, but Squad 312 is standing by to save the day. First though, they have to deal with a clan of gremps, a cadre of illegit GIA agents with creepy flowers where their eyes used to be, and Kal’s long-lost sister, who has a Syldrathi army at her back. With half the known galaxy on their tails, Squad 312 has never felt so wanted. When they learn the Hadfield has been found, it’s time to come out of hiding. Two centuries ago the colony ship vanished, leaving Auri as its sole survivor. Now, its black box might be what saves them—but time is short, and if Auri can’t learn to master her powers as a Trigger, the squad and all their admirers are going to be deader than the Great Ultrasaur of Abraaxis IV.
Peta Lyre’s Rating Normal by Anna Whateley ($20, PB)
‘I’m Peta Lyre,’ I mumble. Look people in the eye if you can, at least when you greet them. I try, but it’s hard when she is smiling so big, and leaning in. Peta Lyre is far from typical. The world she lives in isn’t designed for the way her mind works, but when she follows her therapist’s rules for ‘normal’ behaviour, she can almost fit in without attracting attention. When a new girl, Sam, starts at school, Peta’s carefully structured routines start to crack. But on the school ski trip, with romance blooming and a newfound confidence, she starts to wonder if maybe she can have a normal life after all. When things fall apart, Peta must decide whether all the old rules still matter. Does she want a life less ordinary, or should she keep her rating normal? ‘I loved tuning into Peta’s world.’ - Emily Gale
Food, Health & Garden
The CBD Bible: Cannabis and the Wellness The Chicken Soup Manifesto by Jenn Louis With chapters broken down by region and country, The Revolution That Will Change Your Life Chicken Soup Manifesto’s more than 100 recipes includes by Dani Gordon ($33, PB)
Dr Dani Gordon is a double board certified medical doctor, integrative medicine physician & an expert in CBD, cannabis medicine, brain wellness & stress resilience. She developed the first medical cannabis training program for physicians in the UK. In this book she looks at the cannabis plant & its benefits, cutting through the hype, dispelling the myths, introducing the endocannabinoid system in our own bodies, and offering the most up to date evidence on the use of CBD for anxiety, depression, insomnia, joint pain & many other health concerns.
The Wine O’Clock Myth by Lotta Dann
everything from Algerian Chorba Bayda, Colombian and Panamanian Sancocho and Thai Kao Tom Gai to Spanish Sopa de Picadillo. Along with the recipes, Jenn Louis also covers essential chicken know-how, from selecting and storing, to stock 101 and brining. ($45, HB)
Vegan Fakeaway by Katy Beskow ($30, HB)
When hankering after a plant-based treat, the takeaway menu isn’t always the easiest thing to navigate. These 70 recipes offer American, Chinese, Indian, Italian & Middle Eastern classics from All-in-one biryani or Sesame spring rolls, to Sicilian-style pizza, Falafel flatbreads & Chilli burritos. Using readily available ingredients, standard kitchen equipment and with tips on freezing, cost-saving & ditching single-use plastics, you can enjoy a fuss-free fakeaway with minimal effort & maximum flavour—all without leaving the house.
In an in-depth look at women’s drinking habits, written through the lens of her own story & her work in the field of addiction & recovery, Lotta Dann explores the privileged position alcohol holds in our society, the way the liquor industry targets women & the damaging ‘Wine Mum’ social media culture. She reveals the damage alcohol is causing to women: Step-by-step Veg Patch by Lucy Chamberlain physically, emotionally & socially; and the potential reasons This book contains simple instructions on how to grow the why so many women are drinking at harmful levels. ($33, PB) most common vegetables, fruits & herbs (including 275 vaPeriod Queen: Life hack your cycle & own your rieties), especially designed for Australian climates. You just look up the crop you want to grow, then follow the photopower all month long by Lucy Peach ($30, PB) Lucy Peach urges woman to stop treating periods like nature’s graphic instructions and practical advice about starting, nurconsolation prize for being a woman, banishing the notion that turing, harvesting and pruning. This fully revised edition hormones reduce us to being random emotional rollercoasters. includes clear and helpful yearly planners for vegetables Every month, you have 4 hormonal phases that keep coming and fruit crops, as well as information on how to plan and around. Each phase bears its own gifts: a time to dream, a prepare your space. Whether you have a few pots inside, a time to do, a time to give & a time to take. Once you know small raised bed, a vegetable patch or a larger area, this is what these phases are, you can predict them, plan for them & use them over & over the one-stop shop for anyone wanting to grow & eat their own food. ($40, HB) again—harnessing your period superpowers will make you unstoppable
Worry-Proofing Your Anxious Child by Bev Aisbett ($23, PB)
If your child is too often: seeks reassurance, invents illnesses, avoids interactions, avoids trying new things, becomes emotional over minor upsets, or is clingy, afraid to sleep alone, reluctant to go to school or scared of numerous things ... then anxiety could be an issue for them. a calm, clear and, above all, reassuring book to help parents (and teachers) of anxious children. Filled with simple explanations and practical advice, this book will assist everyone who wants to help a child overcome their anxieties and learn to live more confidently.
A Gay Guy’s Guide to Life Love Food by Khanh Ong ($35, PB)
Khanh Ong shares more than 70 of his favourite family recipes—Vietnamese classics such as prawn & pork spring rolls or tamarind crab. Recipes to make for (and with!) your mates—lazy brunches, epic feasts, movie nights—as well as meals to help heal a broken heart, such as spaghetti for one & snickers tart. Meals to cook to impress a new date, from Vegemite dumplings & sriracha & coconut cauliflower to sticky date pudding. Or keep things simple with post-gym eggs, 3pm protein balls & the easiest fried chicken ever.
How to raise a loaf and fall in love with sour- Ultimate Slow Cooker by taste.com.au ($35, PB) Pile everything into the pot in the morning & come home dough by Roly Allen ($25, PB) Roly Allen makes the key techniques of traditional baking easy to understand, with step-by-step photo instructions and a simple overview of the magical processes that turn wild yeasts into a living baker’s starter, and a bowl of flour into a glowing crusty loaf. Recipes include rye loaves, sourdough pizza, grissini, rolls and more, as well as suggesting surprising flavours (think chocolate, tomato, olives and linseed) to incorporate into your sourdough bakes.
hungry after a busy day to find a delicious, aromatic & heartwarming meal waiting. The best bit? Slow cooking is also a way of bringing out the rich flavours & tender textures of your favourite meals. This book delivers the best of the best recipes from the team at taste.com.au. From falling-apart-atthe-bone stews, to curries & desserts, 100 recipes with cooks notes, secret hacks, nutritional information & reviews.
Heloïse Brion’s early life was rhythmed by mealtimes— from her childhood in Florida, where her mother proudly upheld the tradition of the French family dinner, to summers spent in the Pyrenees where her grandmother cooked over a wood-fire oven. In this book she shares more than 80 laid-back recipes for every occasion—her simple, authentic, & tasty cuisine includes sweet potato crostini, summer tomato pizza, veal stew, pistachio & clementine cake & lavender lemonade.
garden can be created, equipped to grow vegetables & fragrant herbs, gather with family & friends, or sit in peaceful contemplation. Encouraging the use of reclaimed materials, learning new skills & building confidence with tools, Kerry Allen’s step-by-step instructions make it simple to create practical & beautiful features for your garden, from a living herb wall to a pallet-wood seating area complete with fire pit.
Homemade Yogurt and Kefir by Gianaclis Caldwell ($26, PB)
Over 80 simple & delicious plant-based recipes. 100% vegetarian, 80% vegan. ACAI Bowls, Puddings, Curries, Pizzas, Carpaccio, Smashed Pavlova, Carrot Cake, Chocolate Torte, Watermelon Pops, The best Satay Sauce EVER!, Vegan Scones & Pancakes, Chow Mein, Veggie Burgers, Mexican Lasagne, Mushroom Risotto, Relishes / Sauces / Dressings—and all with just 4 ingredients or fewer.
Maker.Garden 15 Step-by-Step Projects for Miss Maggie’s Kitchen: Relaxed French En- Outdoor Living by Kerry Allen ($30, HB) Whether a window box, balcony or acres of land—a beautiful tertaining by Héloïse Brion ($40, HB)
Cheese maker & small-scale dairy producer Gianaclis Caldwell opens the door for fermentation enthusiasts & dairy devotees to make & use yogurt & kefir in the home kitchen. She explores the many culture choices and techniques for working with cow, goat, sheep, water buffalo, and even some plant milks. Along with foundational recipes, readers will find instructions for creating different styles of yogurt and kefir as well as other traditional milk ferments from around world, including Icelandic skyr, Asian koumiss, and Finish viili. Techniques for making simple cheeses, butter, whipped cream & other dairy products using yogurt & milk ferments broaden the possibilities of these probioticpacked cultures, and a recipe section goes beyond the expected pairing of yogurt with granola, offering creative ways to use fermented dairy products in sauces, soups, and even cocktails, while preserving their health benefits & flavour.
4 Ingredients Veggie and Vegan by Kim Mccosker ($25, PB)
Baking Without Sugar by Sophie Michell
Don’t giving up the treats & pastime you love—Chef Sophie Michell shows that it is possible to bake tasty treats without using sugar. From tasty titbits to cakes that will make any afternoon tea, Sophie shows how using no or very little sugar doesn’t have to make your baking any less delicious. Featuring over forty recipes, Baking Without Sugar is the perfect addition for any health conscious baker’s library. ($45, PB)
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Performing Arts
Remain in Love by Chris Frantz ($33, PB)
Chris Frantz met David Byrne at the Rhode Island School of Art & Design in the early 1970s. Together with Frantz’s future wife, Tina Weymouth they formed Talking Heads and took up residence in the grimy environs of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where their neighbours were Patti Smith, William Burroughs and a host of proto-punk artists. The Brian Eno produced masterpiece Remain in Light, saw them explode. When relations became strained as David Byrne started to take control, Chris & Tina started recording as Tom Tom Club in the early 80s—creating a hybrid of funk, disco, pop, electro & world music. This is a warm & candid memoir of the rise & fall of a band who combined the sensibility of artists with extraordinary songwriting vision.
Liberation Through Hearing by Richard Russell
For almost 30 years as label boss, producer & talent conductor at XL Recordings, Richard Russell has discovered, shaped & nurtured the artists who have rewritten the musical dictionary of the 21st century, artists like The Prodigy, The White Stripes, Adele, M.I.A., Dizzee Rascal & Giggs. Growing up in north London in thrall to the raw energy of 80s US hip hop, Russell emerged as one part of rave outfit Kicks Like a Mule in 1991 at a moment when new technology enabled a truly punk aesthetic on the fledgling free party scene. This is th story of XL Recordings & their 3 decades on the frontline of innovation in music; the eclectic chorus of artists who came to define the label’s unique aesthetic, and Russell’s highs & lows steering the fortunes of an independent label in a rapidly changing industry. ($33, PB)
Ray Harryhausen: Titan of Cinema by Vanessa Harryhausen ($57, PB)
Ray Harryhausen elevated stop-motion animation to an art during the 1950s to 1980s. His work included the films Jason and the Argonauts, the Sinbad films of the 50s & 70s, One Million Years BC & Mighty Joe Young, and he inspired a generation of film-makers such as Peter Jackson, Tim Burton, George Lucas & Steven Spielberg. With material drawn from his incredible archive, his daughter, Vanessa, selects 100 creatures & objects that meant the most to her as she watched her father make films that changed the course of cinema. The book includes many newly restored works & items that have never previously been seen, and.in addition to Vanessa’s reflections, many of those who worked with Harryhausen or were inspired by him add their own memories & comments.
The Lady from Arezzo: My Musical Life and Other Matters by Alfred Brendel ($28, HB)
Concert pianist Alfred Brendel was born in 1931. He has bidden farewell to the concert stage but continues to give master-classes and readings. The title of this collection of essays refers to a tailor’s mannequin that Brendel spotted in a shop window in the small Tuscan town of Arezzo. Who is this strange lady? What is she looking at? And why is she carrying an egg on her head? The mannequin now graces a room in the attic of Brendel’s house in Hampstead. Her features convey great artistic seriousness in combination with absurd comedy: the epitome of his own musical & literary preferences. And so, in his delightful new collection, great masters of nonsense meet great masters of music.
Sondheim: Lyrics ($26, HB)
Editor Peter Gethers, working with Stephen Sondheim, has selected for this volume lyrics from across Sondheim’s career, drawn from shows including West Side Story, Gypsy, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and Into the Woods—resulting in a delightful pocketsized treasury of the best of Sondheim.
Dance of Values: Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project by Elena Vogman ($94, PB)
Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic adaptation of Karl Marx’s Capital was never realized, yet it has haunted the imagination of many filmmakers, historians & philosophers to the present day. Elena Vogman aims to conjure the phantom of Eisenstein’s Capital, presenting for the first time material from the full scope of the film project’s archival body. This ‘visual instruction in the dialectical method’, as Eisenstein called it, comprises more than 500 pages of notes, drawings, press clippings, diagrams, negatives, theoretical reflections & extensive quotations. Vogman explores the internal formal necessity underlying Eisenstein’s artistic choices, and argues that its brilliant adaptation of Marx’s Capital relied on the fragmentary & nonlinear state of its material. Published for the first time, sequences from Eisenstein’s archival materials are presented not as mere illustrations but as arguments in their own right, a visual theorization of value.
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Now in B Format Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock’s Greatest Supergroup by David Browne, $27
Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia ($50, HB)
Traditional histories of music, Ted Gioia contends, downplay those elements of music that are considered disreputable or irrational— its deep connections to sexuality, magic, trance & alternative mind states, healing, social control, generational conflict, political unrest, even violence & murder. They suppress the stories of the outsiders & rebels who created musical revolutions & instead celebrate the mainstream assimilators who borrowed innovations, diluted their impact & disguised their sources. From humanity’s first instruments through early Christianity’s suppression of song to slaves and their descendants who have repeatedly reinvented music in America and elsewhere, Gioia attempts to reclaim music history for the riffraff, the insurgents & provocateurs—the real drivers of change & innovation.
Foreground Music: A Life in Fifteen Gigs by Graham Duff ($48, PB)
In this memoir Graham Duff describes music performances that range from a Cliff Richard gospel concert he attended at the age of 10, to his first rock show at 14, where the Jam played so loudly he blacks out, to a Joy Division gig that erupted into a full-scale riot. Duff goes on pub crawls with Mark E. Smith of the Fall, convinces Paul Weller to undertake his first acting role, and attempts to interview Genesis P. Orridge of Throbbing Gristle while tripping on LSD. Duff captures the energy & power of life-changing gigs, while tracing the evolution of 40 years of musical movements & subcultures in a touching, and very funny story of friendship, love, creativity, and mortality—a testimony to music’s ability to inspire and heal. Illustrated with photographs and ephemera from Duff’s private collection.
The Ripples Before the New Wave: Drama at the University of Sydney 1957-63 by Robyn Dalton and Laura Ginters ($40, PB)
Unlike much of the commercial and pro am theatre that dominated at this time in Sydney, the Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS) & rival group, the Sydney University Players were producing Australian & even world—premieres of a number of significant European plays between 1957-63. This was a time before professional theatre & Australian plays, before NIDA, before an Australian film industry, before the Nimrod & La Mama & all those things people think of as the beginning of modern Australian performance culture. And through a happy combination of circumstances (financial, political & cultural), the students there at the time included Clive James, Germaine Greer, Bruce Beresford, Robert Hughes, Mungo MacCallum, Madeleine St John, Les Murray, Bob Ellis, Richard Brennan, Jill Kitson, Ron Blair, John Bell, Richard Wherrett & Leo Schofield, to name a few. Dalton & Ginters chart the history, influence & artistic resonances of these two groups.
Dramatic Exchanges: Letters of the National Theatre ($33, PB)
There has been always as much drama offstage as on at the National Theatre, and much of it is to be found in the letters, telegrams, scribbled notes & colourful postcards of its main players. What drove Laurence Olivier to confess: ‘The foolishness of my position starts to obsess me’? Why did Maggie Smith write: ‘I am absolutely heartbroken by your decision’? What prompted Judi Dench to ask: ‘Can’t you write me a musical so that I can sit on a chair in a fur hat & nothing else & sing RUDE songs?’ Peter Hall’s combative memos, Helen Mirren’s impassioned defence of theatrical innovation, fantastical good luck missives & long conspiratorial letters—a rich collection of correspondence that offers a fascinating look at the world of theatre and beyond.
Adelaide Festival 60 Years: 1960–2020 by Catherine McKinnon ($70, HB)
The Adelaide Festival is as much shaped by people and place as it in turn shapes people and place; its identity is a weird and wild shifting thing. It is not owned by one individual, but belongs to everyone. ‘Adelaide Festival 60 Years’ is an astounding cacophony of images and tales that revel in the life of the Festival since its founding in 1960—remembering what it was, anticipating what it might be. The tales are told by the many—choreographers, actors, singers, artistic directors, audience members, writers, lighting designers, arts administrators, curators and more. Full-colour photography captures moments in time, both sweeping & intimate, woven together to form an important story of culture & ideas across 60 years of history & 35 iconic festivals.
Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan by J Hoberman ($58, HB)
The 3rd book in Hoberman’s ambitious trilogy, Make My Day chronicles the Reagan years, from the waning days of the Watergate scandal when disaster films like Earthquake ruled the box office to the nostalgia of feel-good movies like Rocky and Star Wars, and the delirium of the 1984 presidential campaign and beyond. His exploration of the synergy between American politics and popular culture is a mind-blowing look at the ‘silent hand’ of American influence over the ‘free world’, the lulling of the consumer into a sleep that ends in a nightmare called Trump.
events Hi everyone,
Eve Cale nts nda r
where to next?
It’s a strange feeling writing this column for the Gleaner. Things on the events front are somewhat settled at the time of writing this, but I’ve become so used to the status quo rapidly changing that I can’t help but wonder how different the landscape will look by the time the magazine reaches you. What I can say is that, on Tuesday 16th of June, things are looking up eventswise. We’ve been thrilled at the response we’ve seen to our online talks, and we’re incredibly grateful that we’ve been able to host so many wonderful authors on our virtual stage. And for those of you who have missed any, we’ve been loading them onto our YouTube channel for repeat viewings. Simply search Gleebooks Author Talks on YouTube and you should be able to find them quite easily. The virtual events have even added a silver lining to the social distancing restrictions. As we’ve been exploring the option of online talks in the past few months, I’ve heard from many of you about how wonderful it’s been to have the opportunity to participate in events that you couldn’t previously attend, whether due to geographical, physical, or temporal restrictions. It’s also allowed me to revisit some of my favourite moments from the author talks that we’ve had so far! Some highlights have included Dr Liz Allen putting to bed the idea that we’ll see an increase in ‘COVID babies’ due to couples lockdown, or Julie Janson reflecting on how her ‘poet voice’ helped her to incorporate Darug language into her novel Benevolence. The transition to online hasn’t been without its hiccups, but I think the end result has been great. Whether it was Margaret Simons and Gabrielle Chan discussing the tragedy of the Murray Darling Basin, or Michael Bennett and Michelle Aleksandrovics Lovegrove talking about the history of Aboriginal trackers in NSW, we’ve been hearing from Australia’s best and brightest— continuing the pre-pandemic high standard of Gleebooks events. We even managed to get Christina Ho and Jenna Price to live stream from the shop, which was a step back towards normalcy! So what next? Well, even when we’re back to in shop events, it seems pretty clear that we should be making the events more accessible for anyone who isn’t able to attend in person. Particularly as current corona virus restrictions mean that we won’t be able to host as many people in the events space as would be usual. I’ve dabbled with live streaming our talks pre-Covid, so I’ll post-Covid, I’ll be working on perfecting our method so that more of our inshop talks are available online. As far as events being held upstairs again, we’re tentatively looking at holding them in August with stringent social distancing and hygiene measures in place. We’re fortunate that the space is so large, as it means that we will still be able to host up to 40 people while ensuring that everyone sits 1.5 metres away from one another. We’ll ask that you hand sanitise at the door, and we’ll be disinfecting the chairs once the event is over. I’m also going to keep a hold of the roving microphone so that we aren’t spreading any germs that way either! Some of the in-shop events on the horizon include Melissa Davey’s coverage of the George Pell trials, and actor John Wood’s beguiling memoir How I Clawed My Way to the Middle. As I mentioned before, we’ll be operating on a significantly reduced capacity so please make sure to book in early to make sure you don’t miss out. Of course this is all predicated on the information/transmission rate that we currently have. Rest assured that your safety is the most important consideration for us, so if the risk becomes too high again we will switch back to online talks. Things move very fast in this COVID world, so we will do everything we can to keep you up to date with any changes to the plan that may occur. If I could use this as an excuse to quickly plug the events e-newsletter. The best way to keep up to speed with Gleebooks goings-on is to subscribe to the weekly Gleemail by visiting our website and signing up at the bottom of the home page. The dedicated events Gleemail comes out every two weeks, and is the most up-to-date breakdown of our upcoming talks. I apologise in advance for the puns. All the best, James Ross
13
Granny’s Good Reads
with Sonia Lee
Having so far dodged (fingers crossed) both the fires and the stalking Covid virus, I felt that now was the time to read a bit of poetry. I discovered A Little History of Poetry by John Carey—a brief but comprehensive history of poetry from Gilgamesh to Les Murray. I knew from Carey’s memoir The Unexpected Professor that I could expect him to have strong opinions about poets and I was not disappointed. Dante he thinks ‘vengeful and unforgiving’ and Baudelaire ‘full of self-pity’. My adolescent passion for Matthew Arnold still lingers, so I was pleased to see that he loves Dover Beach. His own favourite poet is Philip Larkin, with WH Auden a close second. While some of his sketches are better than others, I greatly enjoyed his chapter on Chaucer, and his discussions of WB Yeats and TS Eliot are superb. This is an excellent beginners’ guide and it sent me scurrying back to the Elizabethan poets, then to John Donne, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, GM Hopkins, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke, Dylan Thomas and AE Housman and, of course, Les Murray. All in all, I had a glorious time reading this book. While it’s a treat for young and old alike, it would make a nice present for a sensitive grandchild. It’s a well and sturdily produced book and has a striking cover. If you are still in lockdown you can’t do better than read these two new mysteries: The Lantern Men by Elly Griffiths and A Testament of Character by Sulari Gentill. The new Griffiths has spooky stuff about ‘lantern men’ luring girls, especially tall, blonde and beautiful girls, to their deaths in the fens. As a Griffiths fan, I am always interested in the suppressed passion between DCI Nelson and Ruth Galloway. Ruth now has a new job in Cambridge, where she is living with kind and loving Frank—so why does her errant heart beat faster at the prospect of working with Nelson again? And why does Nelson gnash his teeth when he thinks of Frank? Nelson has Ivor March in gaol for murdering two of the girls. March promises Nelson that he will tell him where two other girls are buried, but only if Ruth does the digging. You won’t be disappointed with this one, it will keep you on the edge of your seat right up to the suspenseful end. By the way, Katie, Ruth’s daughter, is now nine and she loves spending time with her half-brother George, who is Nelson’s new son. In Sulari Gentill’s A Testament of Character, Rowland Sinclair and his loyal friends Milton, Clyde and Edna, are preparing to return to Australia when Rowland hears of the death of Daniel Cartwright and learns that he is the executor of Cartwright’s will. Rowland and his friends go to Boston, New York, and many other places, pursued by Cartwright’s vengeful family plus numerous Italian and Irish gang members. Rowland is badly beaten up but persists in his perilous quest for Cartwright’s missing heir. Some of the story’s real-life characters are Joseph Kennedy and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The gang members are authentic and Gentill continues her custom of having snippets from newspapers of the period at the head of each chapter. In my opinion this is Gentill’s best yet. Ken Inglis (1929–2017) will be familiar to many readers as the author of the magisterial Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, and for his histories of Anzac and the ABC. ‘I Wonder’ The Life and Work of Ken Inglis is a collection of essays edited by Peter Browne and Seumas Spark celebrating the life of this acclaimed historian. Many of the book’s contributors remember Ken Inglis for his kindness when, as a professor at the ANU for more than thirty years, he took them under his wing and helped them find their feet. He, himself, thought that the nicest thing ever said to him came from a student in Papua New Guinea who said that one of his lectures was ‘clear but good’. Inglis is noted for his accessible style and this volume will give readers a heads-up to the rest of his work. He always had something of the journalist in him, and while in Adelaide in 1956 he contributed a number of articles to The Nation which helped save the life of Rupert Max Stuart, an Aborigine condemned to death on the basis of a suspect confession. Inglis later played a vital role in compiling for the 1988 Bicentenary the 10-volume ‘slice’ history Australians. His last work Dunera Lives: A Visual History, written in collaboration with Jay Winter and Seumas Spark, tells the story of the Austrian and German internees whom the UK government ‘exiled’ to Australia in 1940 on HMT Dunera. Inglis had first met some of the ‘Dunera Boys’ at Melbourne University, including his philosophy tutor Peter Herbst, who would later be one of his Canberra colleagues. Over the years Inglis had collected a vast amount of material on the lives and backgrounds of many Dunera Boys, which was the main source on which Dunera Lives was based. By the time of writing Inglis was seriously ill, so the book was co-authored with Winter and Spark. This last work is a fitting memorial not only to its subjects but also to the humaneness of its author. Sonia
14
Australian Studies
On Secrets by Annika Smethurst ($17, PB)
On June 4, Federal Police raided the home of Walkley award-winning journalist Annika Smethurst—claiming they were investigating the publication of classified information, her employer called it a ‘dangerous act of intimidation’, Smethurst believes she was simply doing her job. Smethurst became the accidental poster woman for press freedom as politicians debated the merits of police searching through her underwear drawer. In On Secrets she discusses the impact this invasion has had on her life, and examines the importance of press freedom.
The Convict Valley: The bloody struggle on Australia’s early frontier by Mark Dunn ($33, PB)
In 1790, five convicts escaped Sydney by boat & were swept ashore near present-day Newcastle. They were taken in by the Worimi people, given Aboriginal names & started families. Thus began a long & at times dramatic series of encounters between Aboriginal people & convicts in the second penal settlement in Australia. The fertile valley of the Hunter River was the first area outside the Sydney basin explored by the British, and it became one of the largest penal settlements. Today manicured lawns & prosperous vineyards hide the struggle, violence & toil of the thousands of convicts who laid its foundations. The Convict Valley uncovers this rich colonial past, as well as the story of the original Aboriginal landholders.
QE 78: The Coal Curse—Resources, Climate and Australia’s Future by Judith Brett ($23, PB)
Australia is a wealthy nation with the economic profile of a developing country—heavy on raw materials, low on innovation & skilled manufacturing. Once we rode on the sheep’s back for our overseas trade; today we rely on cartloads of coal & tankers of LNG. So must we double down on fossil fuels, now that Covid-19 has halted the flow of international students & tourists? Or is there a better way forward, which supports renewable energy & local manufacturing? Judith Brett traces the unusual history of Australia’s economy & the ‘resource curse’ that has shaped our politics. She shows how the mining industry learnt to run fear campaigns, and how the Coalition became dominated by fossil-fuel interests to the exclusion of other voices—looking at the costs of Australia’s coal addiction & asking, where will we be if the world stops buying it?
To Preserve and Protect: Policing Colonial Brisbane by Anastasia Dukova ($33, PB)
Early Australian policing had its roots on the streets of Dublin & London, where many of Australia’s first law & order enforcers hailed from. Intrigued by this connection, historian Anastasia Dukova has researched & recreated the lives of colonial police officers & criminals in her adopted home city of Brisbane. Through exploring their personal stories, Dukova highlights how biography & history are inextricably linked & reveals the differences between metropolitan aspirations & colonial reality. Dukova also exposes political power abuse, corruption, mismanagement, professional burnout & gendered justice, issues which continue to challenge police forces.
Becoming John Curtin and James Scullin: Their early political careers and the making of the modern Labor Party by Liam Byrne ($35, PB)
Before becoming the PMs who led Australia in moments of extraordinary crisis & transformation, John Curtin & James Scullin were two young working-class men who dreamt of changing their country for the better. Liam Byrne tells the tale of their intertwined early lives as both men became labour intellectuals & powerbrokers at the beginning of the 20th century. He reveals the underappreciated role each man played in the events that defined the modern ALP—its first experience of national government, the turmoil of war, the great conscription clash & party split of 1916, and the heated debates over the party’s socialist objective. He paints a portrait of two young men struggling to establish their identities & find their place in the world—their great friendships, loves & passions—revealing real men, with real weaknesses, desires & dreams, and explaining how their early political careers set the scene for their later prime ministerships as they honed the techniques of power that led them to the summit of Australian politics.
Unmasking the Racial Contract: Indigenous voices on racism in the Australian Public Service by Dr Debbie Bargallie ($39.95, PB)
Deabbie Bargallie shows that despite efforts to be a space of fairness, inclusion, opportunity, respect & racial equality, Indigenous employees in the APS continue to languish on the lower rungs of the institutional ladder. Bargallie provides an insiders perspective, privileging the voices of other Indigenous employees & applying critical auto-ethnography to unmask the ‘racial contract’ that underpins the ‘absent presence’ of racism in the APS. This racial contract is maintained through the everyday racism that faces Indigenous employees in the workplace. Bargallie provides a counter-narrative to the pervasive myth of meritocracy, encouraging readers to consider the effects of the racial contract in colonial–colonised relations in Australia more broadly.
AFA 9: Spy vs Spy—The New Age of Espionage: (ed) Jonathan Pearlman ($23, PB)
AFA9 explores the rapidly evolving espionage threat facing Australia as changes in technology enable malign actors to target individuals, officials, businesses & infrastructure. Included: Penny Wong on COVID-19 & foreign policy challenges in our postpandemic world; Kim McGrath on witness K & the uses of Australian Intelligence; Andrew Davies on the evolution of spycraft; Danielle Cave on cybertechnology & intelligence; Anne-Marie Brady on Chinese spy techniques and espionage; Max Walden on the shocking legacy of US involvement in Indonesia; Susan Harris Rimmer on how Australia can shape the G20 agenda; Richard Cooke dissects key foreign policy terms.
Convict-era Port Arthur: Misery of the deepest dye by David W. Cameron ($35, PB)
Detailing the development of the prison & its outlying stations, including its dreaded coal mines & providing an account of the changing views to convict rehabilitation, David Cameron focuses in on a number of individuals, telling the story through their eyes. Charles O’Hara Booth, a significant commandant of Port Arthur; Mark Jeffrey, a convict who became the grave digger on the Island of the Dead; and William Thompson, who arrived just as the new probation system started & who was forced to work in the treacherous coal mines. Using the experiences & words of the convicts, soldiers & administrators who spent time there Cameron provides a comprehensive history of Port Arthur, its horrors & its changing role over a 50-year period.
The Last Navigator by Paul Goodwin ($33, PB)
Gordon Goodwin was a decorated airman & an inspired leader. During WWII he served in probably the most dangerous occupation of all, flying with the Pathfinders as they led bombing raids into Germany. He undertook 32 Pathfinder missions, including 9 over Berlin, and 65 missions over enemy territory with Bomber Command. But to survive his childhood was perhaps a greater achievement. Raised in harsh & loveless circumstances outside Brisbane during the Depression, his accomplishments were remarkable. This is the powerful first-hand account of Gordon’s dangerous & brave war experiences as recalled for his son Paul.
Living on Stolen Land by Ambelin Kwaymullina
You are on Indigenous lands, swimming in Indigenous waters, looking up at Indigenous skies. This is a prose-styled look at our colonial-settler ‘present’. Ambelin Kwaymullina addresses the colonial contextual history of Australia in a highly original way. She pulls apart the myths at the heart of our nationhood, and challenges Australia to come to terms with its own past & its place within & on ‘Indigenous Countries’. In a thought-provoking & accessible read she speaks to many First Nations’ truths—stolen lands, sovereignties, time, decolonisation, First Nations perspectives, systemic bias & other constructs that inform our present discussions & ever-expanding understanding. ($23, PB)
Singing Bones: Ancestral Creativity and Collaboration by Samuel Curkpatrick ($45, PB)
Manikay are the ancestral songs of Arnhem Land, passed down over generations and containing vital cultural knowledge. Singing Bones foregrounds the voices of manikay singers from Ngukurr in southeastern Arnhem Land, and charts their critically acclaimed collaboration with jazz musicians from the Australian Art Orchestra, Crossing Roper Bar. It offers an overview of Wägilak manikay narratives and style, including their social, ceremonial and linguistic aspects, and explores the Crossing Roper Bar project as an example of creative intercultural collaboration and a continuation of the manikay tradition.
The Still-Burning Bush Updated Edition by Stephen Pyne ($25, PB)
Australia is one of the world’s fire powers. It not only has regular bushfires, but in no other country has fire made such an impact on the national culture. Over the past 2 decades, bushfires have reasserted themselves as an environmental, social & political presence. Stephen Pyne traces the ecological & social significance of the use of fire to shape the environment through Australian history— each transfer of use kindled public debate not only over suitable fire practices but also about how Australians should live on the land. The 2009 Black Saturday bushfires & the 2019–2020 season have heightened the sense of urgency behind this discussion. A new preface & epilogue updates the original, including the global changes that are affecting Australia. Especially pertinent is the concept of a Pyrocene—the idea that humanity’s cumulative fire practices are fashioning the fire equivalent of an ice age.
Now in B Format & Paperback Buckley’s Chance by Garry Linnell, $23 Speaking Up by Gillian Triggs, $35
Politics
Has China Won? The Chinese Challenge to American Primacy by Kishore Mahbubani
The 21st century’s great geopolitical contest has begun. A major trade war has broken out. American & Chinese naval vessels are having close encounters in the South China Sea. Kishore Mahbubani evaluates the two sides, and showing how behind China’s ambitious global initiatives under some of the world’s most pragmatic and competent leaders Chinese society is now infused with innovation and dynamism. Meanwhile, America has seen the power of its economic model badly damaged by the 2008 financial crisis. To many it is no longer the indispensable nation but an awkward interloper. American policy makers must shake off their complacency & launch a major strategic reboot of both domestic & foreign policies that have weakened the nation’s social foundations & global standing. Otherwise, the startup nation, barely 250 years old, with only a quarter of China’s population, cannot expect to defeat the world’s oldest continuous civilization. ($40, HB)
The Classical School by by Callum Williams
Opinions vary about who really counts as a classical economist: Marx thought it was everyone up to Ricardo. Keynes thought it was everyone up to Keynes. But there’s a general agreement about who belongs to the heroic early phase of the discipline. Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, Marx: scarcely a day goes by without their names being publicly invoked to celebrate or criticise the state of the world or the actions of governments. Callum Williams shows how the modern edifice of economics was built, brick by brick, from their ideas & quarrels. This is a breezy, bracingly irreverent introduction to those founding intellects—how they lived, what they thought, what they got wrong & which of their ideas we still need. ($33, PB)
The Double X Economy by Linda Scott
Linda Scott coined the paradigm-shifting concept of the ‘double X economy’ to describe both the shocking gender inequalities that are built into our global economy, and the collective power of women that could be harnessed to combat those inequalities. Scott reveals how economic subordination & exclusion are systemic for women in the developing & the developed worlds; and shows that by pulling women in as equal participants in the economy, we could address many of humankind’s most pressing problems. This is the feminist answer to Jeffrey Sach’s The End of Poverty: both a work of expert analysis and an urgent call to action. ($30, PB)
Plastic Free by Prince-Ruiz & Finn ($33, PB)
Plastic Free tells the incredible story of how a simple community initiative grew into one of the world’s most successful environmental movements. It also shares tips from people around the world who have taken on the Plastic Free July challenge & significantly reduced their waste. This is a book about positive change that reminds you that small actions can make a huge impact, one step at a time. ‘Not just an inspiring story & a practical resource, this is evidence that grassroots actions by ordinary individuals & communities can make a material difference to the most wicked of environmental and social problems. Hats off.’—Tim Winton
Shadow State by Luke Harding ($30, PB)
Based on years of investigations, Luke Harding reveals how Russian spies helped to sway the 2016 US presidential elections in favour of Trump and backed the campaign which resulted in Brexit, and how they lied, deceived, and murdered to do so. From Salisbury to Helsinki, Washington to the Ukraine, the Kremlin has attempted to reshape politics in their own mould; the future of Western democracy is at stake as a result.
The New Despotism by John Keane ($56, HB)
One day they’ll be like us. That was once the West’s complacent & self-regarding assumption about countries emerging from poverty, imperial rule, or communism. But many have hardened into something very different from liberal democracy: what John Keane describes as a new form of despotism. Drawing on extensive travels, interviews, and a lifetime of thinking about democracy & its enemies, Keane shows how governments from Russia & China through Central Asia to the Middle East & Europe have mastered a formidable combination of political tools that threaten the established ideals & practices of power-sharing democracy. They mobilize the rhetoric of democracy & win public support for workable forms of government based on patronage, dark money, steady economic growth, sophisticated media controls, strangled judiciaries, dragnet surveillance & selective violence against their opponents. Keane shows how these new despots cooperate regionally & globally & draw strength from each other’s resources while breeding global anxieties & threatening the values & institutions of democracy. Keane stresses the willing complicity of comfortable citizens in all these trends, and worries that the practices 15 of despotism are closer to home than we care to admit.
History
Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare by Thomas Rid ($35, PB)
Even before the 2016 election, Thomas Rid warned that Russian military intelligence was ‘carefully planning & timing a high-stakes political campaign’ to disrupt the democratic process. But as crafty as such so-called active measures have become, they are not new. In this journey through a century of secret psychological war, Rid reveals for the first time some of history’s most significant operations—many of them nearly beyond belief. A White Russian ploy backfires & brings down a New York police commissioner; a KGB-engineered, antiSemitic hate campaign creeps back across the Berlin Wall; the CIA backs a fake publishing empire, run by a former Wehrmacht U-boat commander that produces Germany’s best jazz magazine.
Science & Nature
What Do You Think You Are? The Science of What Makes You You by Brian Clegg
Brian Clegg explores how the billions of particles which make up you—your DNA, your skin, your memories— have come to be. He follows a number of trails to discover your origins: how the atoms in your body were created & how they got to you in space & time, the sources of things you consume, how the living cells of your body developed, where your brain & consciousness originated, how human beings evolved and, ultimately, what your personal genetic history reveals. ($33, HB)
Beyond Words by Carl Safina ($23, PB)
Weaving decades of field observations with new discoveries about the brain, Carl Safina’s book offers an intimate view of animal behaviour to challenge the fixed boundary British maritime history in the age of sail is full of the deeds of officbetween humans & animals. He travels to Kenya to witness ers like Nelson but has given little voice to plain, ‘illiterate’ seamen. struggling elephant families work out how to survive poachStephen Taylor draws on published & unpublished memoirs, letters & ing & drought, then on to Yellowstone National Park to obnaval records, including court-martials & petitions, to present these serve wolves sort out the aftermath of one pack’s personal men in their own words. In his exhilarating account, ordinary seamen are far from the hap- tragedy, & plunges into the peaceful society of killer whales less sufferers of the press gangs. Proud & spirited, learned in their own fashion, with robust living in the crystalline waters of the Pacific Northwest to opinions & the courage to challenge overweening authority, they stand out from their less offer insight into the unique personalities of animals. adventurous compatriots. Taylor demonstrates how the sailor was the engine of British prosperity & expansion up to the Industrial Revolution. From exploring the South Seas with Diary of a Young Naturalist Cook to establishing the East India Company as a global corporation, from the sea battles by Dara McAnulty ($30, HB) that made Britain a superpower to the crisis of the 1797 mutinies, these ‘sons of the waves’ 15-year-old Dara McAnulty chronicles the turning of his world from spring & through a year in his home patch in held the nation’s destiny in their calloused hands. Northern Ireland. These diary entries portray his intense Splash! 10, 000 Years of Swimming connection to the natural world, and his perspective as a by Howard Means ($30, PB) teenager juggling exams and friendships alongside a life of Howard Means weaves a 10,000-year-old tale that begins in a bonecampaigning. ‘In sharing this journey my hope is that peodry cave in the remote southwest corner of Egypt, winds its way ple of all generations will not only understand autism a little through ancient Greece & Rome, flows mostly underground through more but also appreciate a child’s eye view on our delicate the Dark & Middle Ages, and then reemerges in the wake of the Re& changing biosphere.’ naissance before ending on the runway of the Tokyo Olympics. But Pluses and Minuses by Stefan Buijsman swimming is also about more than feats of aquatic endurance or the Thousands of years ago, the inhabitants of Mesopotamia terror of the bottomless deep. Its history offers a multi-tiered tour became the first humans to use numbers. Mthematics is through religion, fashion low & high, architecture, sanitation & public behind almost everything, from search engines to cruise health, colonialism, segregation and integration, sexism, sexiness, control, from coffee-makers to timetables. But now that guts, glory and much, much more. we hardly ever need to do arithmetic, how relevant is mathRummage: A History of the Things We Have Reematics to everyday life? Drawing on examples within the used, Recycled & Refused to Let Go interconnected fields of philosophy, psychology & history, Stefan Buijsman explores the role mathematics plays in by Emily Cockayne ($35, HB) the modern world. ($33, PB) Emily Cockayne extracts glittering gems from the rubbish pile of centuries past & introduces you to the visionaries, crooks & everyday Nests, Eggs, Birds: An Illustrated Aviary do-gooders who have shaped the material world we live in today— by Kelsey Oseid ($30, HB) like the fancy ladies of WWI who turned dog hair into yarn, or the The tailorbird ‘sews’ leaves together to make its nest. Victorian gentlemen selling pianofortes made from papier-maché, or the hapless public servants coaxing people into giving up their railings for the greater good. Hummingbird eggs are the size of jellybeans. Birds’ nests In this original & fascinating new history, Cockayne illuminates our relationship to our & eggs display a huge diversity of shapes, sizes, funcrubbish: from the simple question of how we reuse & recycle things (and which is better), tions & materials. Kelsey Oseid explores the fascinating to all the weird & wonderful ways it’s been done in the past. She exposes the hidden work ins & outs of where & how dozens of avian species—rob(often done by women) that has gone into shaping the world for each future generation, ins, birds of paradise, crows, owls, penguins—make their & she shows what lessons can be drawn from the past to address urgent questions of our homes & lay their eggs. The Bird Way by Jennifer Ackerman waste today. New research upends the traditional view of how birds Mayday 1971: A White House at War, a Revolt in conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, the Streets and the Untold History of America’s Bigbreed & survive—revealing not only the remarkable intelligest Mass Arrest by Lawrence Roberts ($60, HB) gence underlying these activities like deception, manipulaIn the spring of 1971 fiery radicals, flower children & militant vets tion, cheating, kidnapping, and infanticide we once considgathered for the most audacious act in a years-long movement to end ered uniquely our own, but also ingenious communication America’s war in Vietnam: a blockade of the nation’s capital. The between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culWhite House, headed by an increasingly paranoid Richard Nixon, ture & play. Drawing on personal observations, the latest was determined to stop it. Drawing on dozens of interviews, unexscience, and her travel around the world, from the tropical plored public & private archives, and newfound White House tranrainforests of eastern Australia & the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the scripts, Lawrence Roberts recreates the intense events through the eyes of characters. To rolling hills of lower Austria & the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Jennifer prevent the Mayday Tribe’s guerrilla-style traffic blockade, the government mustered the Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. ($35, PB) army & marines. Riot squads swept through the city, arresting more Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake ($35, PB) than 12,000 people and Nixon & his men took their first steps down Neither plant nor animal, fungi are found throughout the the road to the Watergate scandal & the implosion of the presidency. earth, the air & our bodies. They can be microscopic, or Kings of Shanghai by Jonathan Kaufman ($33, PB) some of the largest organisms ever recorded. They enabled The Sassoons & the Kadoories immigrated to China in the mid 19th the first life on land, can survive unprotected in space & century & became dynasties standing astride Chinese business & thrive amidst nuclear radiation. In giving us bread, alcohol politics for more than 175 years. When forced to flee Baghdad in the & life-saving medicines, fungi have shaped human history, 19th century, 2 Sassoon sons went to Shanghai following the Opium and their psychedelic properties have recently been shown Wars to establish a business empire that would launch them into the to alleviate a number of mental illnesses. Their ability to upper echelons of the British establishment. The Kadoories followed digest plastic, explosives, pesticides & crude oil is being soon after, their patriarch Elly first working for the Sassoons , and then harnessed in break-through technologies, and the discovery establishing a rival & equally successful trading company of his own. Jonathan Kaufman that they connect plants in underground networks, the ‘Wood Wide Web’, is transtraces the intersecting stories of the two families as they gathered strength & influence forming the way we understand ecosystems. This is a mind-altering journey into through the Taiping & Boxer rebellions, weathered the fall of the emperor, resisted Japan & a spectacular & neglected world which shows that fungi provide a key to understanding both the planet on which we live, and life itself. 16 the Communist takeover—a sweeping account of how modern Shanghai was born.
Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail by Stephen Taylor ($54, HB)
Psychology Together: Loneliness, Health & What Happens When We Find Connection by Vivek Murthy
When Vivek Murthy became US Surgeon General he thought his main focus would be tackling the opioid crisis & obesity. Instead, he discovered a much larger health crisis, one that connects the sick & the seemingly well: loneliness. We live in an age steeped in disconnection, and Murthy often found loneliness at the core of addiction, disease & pain. How can we treat it, and what does it mean to live in this lonely age? Murthy’s journey to find the answers uncovers the global proportions of this epidemic. He explores the root causes & devastating effects of loneliness, and also finds good news. From social support groups in Okinawa, to mentoring circles in Chicago, he looks at community efforts to combat loneliness around the world & what they can teach us about doing so in our own lives. Part personal journey, part medical exploration, part social toolkit, this essential book shows how together we can learn to build a more connected, less lonely world. ($30, PB)
Acting with Power: Why We Are More Powerful than We Believe by Deborah Gruenfeld ($30, PB)
Social psychologist Deborah Gruenfeld using acting techniques to be successful and how to use the power that accompanies success. She shows how to read the power dynamics of room & understand where we fit in; techniques for getting ‘into character’ when thrust into a role that feels unnatural; why some people fear power, while others abuse theirs; strategies for overcoming ‘performance anxiety’ around stepping into a bigger role; why power doesn’t necessarily corrupt; it’s only when power meets insecurity that people & power get abused; how to use power as leaders to inspire others. Some people constantly crave a bigger role, while others feel like imposters in our current ones—Gruenfeld shows how to give a more powerful performance in any role, on any stage.
Strange Situation by Bethany Saltman ($35, PB)
After Bethany Saltman gave birth to her daughter, Azalea, she began to feel that there was something ‘off’ about her experience of motherhood. She worried that her own childhood had left her unable to properly bond. So she launched a broad inquiry into attachment theory, a field of developmental psychology that answers the question of why—from an evolutionary point of view—love exists between parents & children. Focusing on the data from a famous laboratory procedure, the ‘Strange Situation’, Saltman asks science to answer to love, giving readers the tools with which to interpret & understand their own connections with others, and to have better, healthier relationships, whatever their situation.
Everything That Makes Us Human: Case Notes of a Children’s Brain Surgeon by Jay Jayamohan
As a Consultant Paediatric Neurosurgeon in a busy Oxford hospital, every day, parents put all their faith in Jay Jayamohan to make their sick children well again. Though he is proud of his successes, he is haunted by every failure. Beginning with his struggles as an Asian growing up in 1970s Britain, he chronicles his early days as a medical student & spans decades of extraordinary activity, drawing on case studies from various aspects of his career: not all of which have happy endings. Jayamohan describes how he found the strength to keep going despite terrible setbacks. ($35, HB)
Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hook-ups, Love, Porn, Consent and Navigating the New Masculinity by Peggy Orenstein ($30, PB)
Peggy Orenstein broke ground with Girls & Sex, which explored young women’s right to pleasure & agency in sexual encounters. Now she turns her focus to boys with an examination of how young men are navigating sexual culture in these changing times—and what we need to do to help them. Drawing on comprehensive interviews with young men, psychologists and experts in the field, Peggy Orenstein dissects ‘locker room talk’; pornography as the new sex education; the role of empathy; boys’ understanding of hookup culture & consent; and their experience as both perpetrators & victims of sexual assault. By presenting young men’s experience in all its complexity, Orenstein unravels the hidden truths, hard lessons & important realities of young male sexuality in today’s world. The result is a provocative & paradigm-shifting work that offers a much-needed vision of how boys can truly move forward as better men.
Rapport by Emily & Laurence Alison ($35, PB)
Laurence & Emily Alison are world leaders in forensic psychology—specialising in criminal interrogations. After 30 years’ work—and unprecedented access to 2,000 hours of terrorist interrogations—they have developed a ground-breaking model of interpersonal communication. This deceptively simple approach to handling any encounter works as well for teenagers as it does for terrorists. every interaction follows 4 styles: Control (the lion), Capitulate (the mouse), Confront (the Tyrannosaur) & Co-operate (the monkey). Understand these styles & your own goals & you can shape any conversation at will, and know how to create instant rapport.
Philosophy & Religion
That One Should Disdain Hardships: The Teachings of a Roman Stoic by Musonius Rufus The Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus was one of the most influential teachers of his era, imperial Rome. Alongside Stoics like Seneca, Epictetus & Marcus Aurelius, he emphasized ethics in action, displayed in all aspects of life. Merely learning philosophical doctrine & listening to lectures, they believed, will not do one any good unless one manages to interiorize the teachings & apply them to daily life. In Musonius Rufus’s words, Philosophy is nothing else than to search out by reason what is right & proper & by deeds to put it into practice. This collection of his lectures & sayings, is translated by Cora E. Lutz & introduced by Gretchen Reydams-Schils. ($36, HB)
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life by Zena Hitz ($57, HB)
Few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless other subjects. Drawing on examples, from Socrates & Augustine to Malcolm X & Elena Ferrante, and from films to her own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfilment, Zena Hitz offers a passionate reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the personto-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us.
On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives by Andrew H. Miller ($66, HB)
We each live one life, formed by paths taken & untaken. Choosing a job, getting married, deciding on a place to live or whether to have children every decision precludes another. But what if you’d gone the other way? It can be a seductive thought, even a haunting one. From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, Jane Hirshfield to Carl Dennis, storytellers of every stripe write of the lives we didn’t have. What forces encourage us to think this way about ourselves, and to identify with fictional & poetic voices speaking from the shadows of what might have been? In an elegant & provocative rumination, Andrew Miller lingers with other selves, listening to what they say, and offering the balm that when we confront our imaginary selves, we discover who we are.
Moses: A Human Life by Avivah Zornberg
No figure looms larger in Jewish culture than Moses, and few have stories more enigmatic. Biblical scholar, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, turns her attention to Moses in this rich, evocative book. Drawing on a broad range of sources—literary as well as psychoanalytic, a wealth of classical Jewish texts alongside George Eliot, W. G. Sebald & Werner Herzog—Zornberg offers a vivid & original portrait of the biblical Moses. Moses’s vexing personality, his uncertain origins, and his turbulent relations with his own people are acutely explored by Zornberg, who sees this story, told & retold, as crucial not only to the biblical past but also to the future of Jewish history. ($30, PB)
The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno et al ($60, PB)
Are there character traits that make someone more likely to vote for the far right? Written in the shadow of Fascism & the Holocaust, this book looked to analyse the rise of Fascism in Europe through the specific psychological traits that make people prone to authoritarianism. Based on extensive empirical studies of Americans conducted the book ranks a range of character traits on what it called the ‘F scale’ (F for fascist). These included conventionalism, anti-intellectualism, superstition & occultism, power & toughness, destructiveness & cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated concerns over sex. Over half a century later with the rise of right-wing populism & the reemergence of the far-right, this hugely influential study remains as insightful and relevant as ever.
Politics and Negation: For an Affirmative Philosophy by Roberto Esposito ($37.95, PB)
Politics seems increasingly impotent in the face of threats like terrorism & the threat of environmental catastrophe. Roberto Esposito retraces the intensification of negation in the thought of various thinkers, from Schmitt & Freud to Heidegger, and examines the negative slant of some of our fundamental political categories, such as sovereignty, property & freedom. Against the centrality of negation, he proposes an affirmative philosophy that does not negate or repress negation but radically rethinks it in the positive cipher of difference, determination & opposition.
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Covid Salve In this time of restriction (globally), and poor concentration (my own), I have been so pleased to read books that have left an impact without being too demanding of my time, and quite frankly, of my emotion. Anne Tyler’s new book, Redhead by the Side of the Road, has fitted the bill perfectly. Micah is middle aged, an isolated man although he has plenty of family, and a job he excels at (he’s a tech geek with a business named Tech Hermit), and a girlfriend, who he refers to as a ladyfriend, given her age (late 30s). He lives in mainly self imposed isolation, a person of clean and regular housekeeping habits, with a rigid timetable and quite restricted ideas. Micah, thanks to his creator, does not lack charm, but you can definitely recognise a certain curmudgeonliness. Two events happen in the course of the book, that threaten to undermine Micah’s deeply organised life—will Micah recognise them as being catalysts or merely uncomfortable inconveniences? Anne Tyler’s books are always a joy to read. They are literary, but accessible, with very well drawn characters that stay with you. I have loved her books for decades, but I particularly enjoyed the recent Clock Dance, and A Spool of Blue Thread. For all you podcats, there’s a terrific interview with the author on the BBC’s Fortunately podcast of May 29, 2020. In this interview Anne Tyler reveals that she has given Micah her housecleaning schedule, a fact that I’ve been laughing about since I heard it. Louise
Gail Jones: Words, Image, Ethics by Tanya Dalziell ($45, PB)
Tany Dalziel offers an accessible guide to the writings of the award-winning Australian author Gail Jones, bringing together ideas from literature, art, politics, philosophy & photography to introduce a vibrant set of terms & concepts that highlight how & why we interpret literary texts & to recognise the contribution Jones’ writing makes to public debates, including Australian literary culture. This a timely, ambitious & essential contribution to the intersecting fields of Australian studies & international literature.
Cultural Sexism: The politics of feminist rage in the #metoo era by Heather Savigny ($48, HB)
How does gendered power work? How does it circulate? How does it become embedded? And most importantly, how can we challenge it? Heather Savigny highlights five key traits— iolence, silencing, disciplining, meritocracy and masculinity— prevalent across the media, entertainment and cultural industries that keep sexist and patriarchal values at the core of our everyday social and cultural landscape. She explores the deeper roots and assumptions of cultural sexism and analyses its embeddedness throughout contemporary media, films, music, games and politics. Arguing that #metoo isn’t enough, she shows what we can all do next to bring about lasting, structural change.
Had I Known: Collected Essays by Barbara Ehrenreich ($56, HB)
Cultural Studies & Criticism Details: On Love, Death and Reading by Tegan Bennett Daylight ($27, PB)
Tegan Bennett Daylight has led a life in books—as a writer, a teacher & a critic, but first & foremost as a reader. In this insightful & intimate work, Daylight describes how her reading has nourished her life, and how life has informed her reading. In both, she shows us that it’s the small points of connection—the details—that really matter: what we notice when someone close to us dies, when we give birth, when we make friends. In life’s disasters & delights, the details are what we can share & compare & carry with us. Daylight writes about her mother’s last days; her own experiences of childbearing and its aftermath; her long admiration of Helen Garner & George Saunders; and her great loves & friendships.
Dizzy Limits: Recent Experiments in Australian Nonfiction ($30, PB)
Like all nonfiction writing ‘experimental non-fiction is steeped in facts, in real events & in real people, with the aim of communicating information, argument & truth. It differs from traditional nonfiction in that it tries to convey its meaning using unorthodox form, or style, or voice, or point-of-view, or approach, or method—adding to the meaning & authenticity of the subject matter. Dizzy Limits collects the very best examples of the above mentioned experimental nonfiction from our most intellectually ambitious & creatively curious writers—including pieces that explore: the body & its relationship to the world; climate change; the connection of First Nations people to land; trans motherhood; leeches; computers pretending to be humans—and much more.
The Trials of Portnoy by Patrick Mullins ($35, PB)
For more than seventy years, a succession of politicians, judges, and government officials in Australia worked in the shadows to enforce one of the most pervasive and conservative regimes of censorship in the world. The goal was simple- to keep Australia free of the moral contamination of impure literature. Under the censorship regime, books that might damage the morals of the Australian public were banned, seized, and burned; bookstores were raided; publishers were fined; and writers were charged and even jailed. But in 1970, in great secrecy & at considerable risk, Penguin Books Australia resolved to publish Portnoy’s Complaint—Philip Roth’s profane bestseller about a boy hung up about his mother & his penis. This spurred a direct confrontation with the censorship authorities, culminating in criminal charges, police raids, and an unprecedented series of court trials across the country. Patrick Mullins draws on archival records & new interviews to show how Penguin & a band of writers, booksellers, academics & lawyers sought for Australians the freedom to read what they wished—and in doing so reshaped Australian literature and culture forever.
Why Women Read Fiction: The Stories of Our Lives by Helen Taylor ($30.95, HB)
Ian McEwan once said, ‘When women stop reading, the novel will be dead.’ Female readers are key to the future of fiction and—as parents, teachers & librarians—the glue for a literate society. Women treasure the chance to read alone, but have also gregariously shared reading experiences and memories with mothers, daughters, grandchildren & female friends. For so many, reading novels and short stories enables them to escape and to spread their wings intellectually and emotionally. Taylor analyses the special appeal & changing readership of the genres of romance, erotica & crime, illuminating the reasons for British women’s abiding love of two favourite novels, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, and offers a cornucopia of witty & wise women’s voices, of both readers themselves & also writers such as Hilary Mantel, Helen Dunmore, Katie Fforde & Sarah Dunant.
A self-proclaimed ‘myth buster by trade’, Barbara Ehrenreich has covered an extensive range of topics as a journalist & political activist, and is unafraid to dive into intellectual waters that others deem too murky. This collection of articles, excerpts, reviews & op-eds are from a career over 40 years—from Ehrenreich’s award-winning article Welcome to Aspiration and Anxiety: Asian Migrants and AustralCancerland, published shortly after she was diagnosed with ian Schooling by Christina Ho ($35, PB) breast cancer, to her undercover investigative journalism in The children of Asian migrants are often perceived to be perfect stuNickel and Dimed, to her exploration of death & mortality in dents—ambitious, studious & compliant. They routinely outperforming other students in exams, dominating selective school intakes, and the New York Times bestseller, Natural Causes. disproportionately winning places at prestigious universities. While The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight their hard work & success have been praised, their achievements have over the English Language by Peter Martin ignited fierce debates about whether their migrant parents are ‘pushing Peter Martin recounts the patriotic fervor in the early Ameritoo hard’, or whether they ought to be lauded for their commitment to can republic to produce a definitive national dictionary that education. Critics see a dark side, symbolised by the ‘tiger mother’ who would rival Samuel Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English is obsessed with producing overachieving ‘dragon children’. What is often missing in these Language. What began as a cultural war of independence debates is an understanding of what drives Asian migrant parents’ approaches to education. from Britain devolved into a battle among lexicographers, Christina Ho explores how aspirations for their children’s future reinforce their anxieties authors, scholars & publishers, all vying for dictionary suabout being newcomers in an unequal society. premacy & shattering forever the dream of a unified AmeriFallen Among Reformers: Miles Franklin, Modernity, can language. America’s first lexicographers, Noah Webster & Joseph Emerson Worcester, fought over who could best represent the soul & and the New Woman by Janet Lee ($45, PB) identity of American culture—Webster believed an American dictionary ought to This book focuses on Stella Miles Franklin’s New Woman protest litbe informed by the nation’s republican principles, but Worcester thought that such erature written during her time in Chicago with the National Women’s language reforms were reckless & went too far. Their conflict continued beyond Trade Union League (1906–1915). This time away from literary purWebster’s death, when the Merriam brothers acquired publishing rights to Web- suits enriched Franklin’s literary productivity & provided a feminist ster’s American Dictionary & launched their own language wars. Delving into social justice ethics, which shaped her writing. Lee gives close readthe personal stories & national debates that arose from the conflicts surrounding ings of Franklin’s (mostly unpublished) short stories, plays & novels America’s first dictionaries, Martin examines the linguistic struggles that under- to contextualise them in the personal politics of her everyday life & in the socio-economic & literary realities of early 20th century Australia pinned the founding & growth of a nation. ($54, HB) & the US: themes embedded in broader cultural patterns of socialism, pacifism &feminism.
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A Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick
As a young anthropologist, Don Kulick went to the tiny village of Gapun in New Guinea to document the death of the native language, Tayap. He arrived knowing that you can’t study a language without understanding the daily lives of the people who speak it: how they talk to their children, how they argue, how they gossip, how they joke. Over the course of thirty years, he found himself inexorably drawn into the lives and world of the Gapuners, and implicated in their destiny. Kulick takes us inside the village as he came to know it, revealing what it is like to live in a difficult-to-get-to village of 200 people—interrogating what it means to study a culture, looking at the impact of Western culture on the farthest reaches of the globe—and, ultimately, explaining his realisation that he had to give up his study of this language and this village. ($33, PB)
Sex Robots & Vegan Meat by Jenny Kleeman
What if we could have babies without having to bear children, eat meat without killing animals, have the perfect sexual relationship without compromise or choose the time of our painless death? Jenny Kleeman has interviewed a sex robot, eaten a priceless lab-grown chicken nugget, watched foetuses growing in plastic bags & attended members-only meetings where people learn how to kill themselves. Many of the people Kleeman has met say they are finding solutions to problems that have always defined & constricted humankind. But what truly motivates them? And who is campaigning against these advances, and how are they trying to stop them? And what about the many unintended consequences such inventions will inevitably unleash? ($35, PB)
We Are Family by Susan Golombok ($33, PB)
Susan Golombok visits lesbian mothers, gay fathers, single parents, co-parents, trans parents, surrogates & donors, and, more importantly, their children, to find out if they are as well-adjusted, happy & emotionally stable as children from traditional nuclear families. And she discovers that the answer is yes—and sometimes even more so.Golombok’s work at the Centre for Family Research at Cambridge proves that any family set-up can provide a loving, secure home for a child—although, inevitably, the children from these families will often face prejudiced attitudes from others. Golombok was first drawn to this area of research in the 1970s after reading about lesbian mothers whose children were being removed from their care, and has worked since then to challenge outdated attitudes & prevent families being split up. Her book tells the struggles & triumphs of those families, celebrating love & family in all its wonderful variations.
The Mystery of Charles Dickens by A N Wilson
AN Wilson looks back from Charles Dickens’ death to recall the key events in his life, seeking to understand Dickens’ creative genius & enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens’s fiction drew from his own experiences—a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. He knew firsthand the poverty & pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage. Going beyond standard narrative biography, Wilson revisits the wellspring of Dickens’s vast & wild imagination, to reveal why his novels captured the hearts of 19th century readers—and why they continue to resonate today. ($40, HB)
An Editor’s Burial (ed) Wes Anderson ($20, PB)
Director Wes Anderson gathers together the wonderful writing on the expatriate experience in Paris that inspired his latest film The French Dispatch, about an American who sets up a magazine in Paris. Featuring essays by luminaries of 20th century literature, the collection offers a unique look at both Parisian culture & a golden age in American journalism. Contributors include James Baldwin, Sam Behrman, Lillian Ross, Mavis Gallant, Janet Flanner & A. J. Liebling.
Now in B Format Doing Justice: A Prosecutor’s Thoughts on Crime by Preet Bharara, $23 How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right? by Pandora Sykes ($35, HB)
Modern life is full of choices. We’re told that happiness lies within and we can be whoever we want to be. But with endless possibility comes a feeling of restlessness; like we’re somehow failing to live our best life. What does doing it right even look like? And why do so many women feel like they’re getting it wrong? From faster-than-fast fashion to millennial burnout, the explosion of wellness to the rise of cancel culture, Pandora Sykes interrogates the stories we’ve been sold and the ones we tell ourselves, exploring the anxieties & myths that consume our lives and the tools we use to muddle through.
2nd2nd2ndHand Hand HandRows Rows Rows Travel in Mind Only
With physical world-wide travel anywhere now a fond memory and a virtual impossibility (as I write in May-June) I turn to travel writing chronicles of the past. The Diaries of Lord Louis Mountbatten 1920-1922: Tours with the Prince of Wales (ed) Philip Ziegler $20, HB On 8 August 1920, Wingadee Station a 19,000-acre (7,700 hectare) sheep property—near Gilgandra, NSW—played host to a Royal guest: After luncheon, the entire party mounted and rode six miles to a paddock where some kangaroos had been sighted. Two specially trained kangaroo hounds and some sheep dogs made up the pack…Kangaroo hounds are a cross breed between greyhounds and wolfhounds… very fast and fierce creatures. The kangaroos stated off in gigantic leaps…after a good three or four mile gallop the dogs became tired and the kangaroos got away. A quarter of an hour’s respite followed…when suddenly a flock of emus was sighted some twenty five strong. The emu is a ‘protected’ bird and permission had not been granted HRH to hunt them; but luckily none of the party knew this…One led the party a tremendous long run, he got into a clump of trees , where one of the kangaroo dogs caught him in the hind quarters…to speed his death the party broke branches off the trees and hit him over the head. After this they plucked feathers out and stuck them in their hats. Thus, the Prince of Wales, (and future King Edward VIII) enjoyed a Sunday afternoon hunting Australia’s national symbols. This scene was recorded by Louis Mountbatten, his 19-year-old cousin, appointed Flag Lieutenant—and unofficial minder and confidant—to accompany the moody and often tiresome Prince on a Royal Tour of New Zealand and Australia. To ‘jolly him along whenever he became particularly ill-tempered’. The visit was in part to offer official thanks for the support the Dominions had shown Great Britain during WWI. It was also designed to strengthen links between Australia and the Empire. An official tour diary was kept, but Mountbatten was instructed by Admiral Halsey to keep an unofficial one for the amusement of the inner circle of courtiers. Twenty copies were produced on the ship’s printing press. The diary is light hearted and indiscreet at times, repetitious also with descriptions of inspections, receptions and openings, which were the daily task of the tour. Drove to the Federal capital site, Canberra, apprehension the federal Capital site might be missed altogether. This fear was groundless as the champagne corks could be heard popping from miles off in the government tent. On 5 July, the Royal Train was derailed near Manjimup, some 300kms south of Perth. ‘At last we have done something not on the official programme’, remarked HRH. Brisbane was approached nervously, for Queensland was ‘bolshie or rather full of Sinn Feiners and the labour premier is a hot Irish RC.’ as HRH confided in a letter home. However, all went well, the Brisbane crowds as enthusiastic as elsewhere. The Prince departed our shores on 19 August, homeward bound—via a tour of India & Japan. A very contemporary scandal ended the tour when it was discovered at the end of the voyage that the ship’s doctor had absconded with one of the copies of the diary. He was eventually traced to Kettner’s Restaurant in Soho, London, where he was negotiating its sale to an American journalist for an asking price of £5,000 (over £500,000 today). Magnificent Voyage: An American Adventurer on Captain James Cook’s Final Expedition by Laurie Lawlor $30, HB The experiences of an American-born, British Naval Marine, John Ledyard (1751– 1789) serve as a focus for this compelling account of Captain James Cook’s last expedition (1776–1780). The voyage took the route to Cape Town, Teneriffe, New Zealand, the Hawaiian Islands and the North American coast to the Bering Strait. The expedition’s avowed purpose was to return Omai, a young native from Raiatea, Tahiti to his homeland. However, the secret mission was to discover the fabled Northwest Passage. Cook commanded HMS Resolution, and HMS Discovery was captained by Charles Clerke. Ledyard, 25 years old, indolent, prickly, and impecunious, saw this voyage as a golden opportunity to make his name and fortune. Following the four year expedition, Ledyard was posted to Canada to fight in the American revolution. Instead, he deserted, moved to Dartmouth, New Hampshire and wrote of the expedition in A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage (1783)— causing controversy, since it was published in America before the official Admiralty-approved account of the expedition appeared. It was also the first book to be protected by copyright in the United States. Laurie Lawlor uses extracts from Ledyard’s account, to place readers on deck as the expedition moves to the tropics, heads northwards to Alaska and Kamchatka Peninsula. They return, tragically, to Hawaii and at last retreat home, minus the two captains: Cook is murdered in Hawaii in February 1779 and Clerke dies six months later. Also interspersed are selections from Cook’s journals, as well as other sailors—with 19th-century grammar and spelling preserved. This book is profusely illustrated. Ledyard’s later life was equally adventurous. He led an exploration party into Russia and was briefly imprisoned there. Ledyard also lobbied President Thomas Jefferson to undertake exploration of the American west. His final journey was a proposed expedition from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. He had reached Alexandria when he died by accidently drinking sulphuric acid. He is buried somewhere on the banks of the Nile.
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QUARANTINE READING
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio ($25, PB) Some people formed themselves into groups and lived in isolation from everyone else. Having withdrawn to a comfortable abode, they locked themselves in and settled down, consuming modest quantities of delicate food and precious wines… They refrained from speaking to outsiders, refused to receive news of the dead or the sick, and entertained themselves with music and whatever other amusements they were able to devise....Others took the opposite view, and maintained that the way of warding off this appalling evil, was to drink heavily, enjoy life to the full and gratify all of one’s cravings whenever the opportunity offered…For people behaved as though their days were numbered, and treated their belongings and their own persons with equal abandon....But as the ferocity of the plague began to mount, a great number departed this life without anyone at all to witness their going.... One man shunned another…kinsfolk held aloof, brother was forsaken by brother, oftentimes husband by wife; nay what is more and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children to their fate....Such was the multitude of corpses, there was not sufficient consecrated ground, so when all the graves were full, huge trenches were excavated in the churchyards, into which new arrivals were placed in their hundreds, stowed tier upon tier, like ships’ cargo… Florence, Summer 1348: Glimpses of the Black Death recorded by the Italian writer and poet, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), which serve as an introduction to The Decameron (1353)—his masterpiece of imaginative literature. The tragedy was extraordinary. The population of Florence was reduced from 110,000 to 50,000— some 60 per cent in a few months. As the plague ravages their city, ten young Florentines—seven women and three men—take refuge in a deserted countryside villa at Fiesole. They amuse themselves by each telling a story a day for the ten days they are to remain there. One hundred stories of courtly (and erotic) love, humour, adventure, revenge, reconciliation, surprise and tragedy. Thus, a 14th Century masterpiece, born of one pandemic, now seems a memorable and—entertaining—aid for social distancing and self-isolation during our 21st century affliction.
Walden by Henry David Thoreau ($25, PB) I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. In July 1845, 27-year-old Henry David Thoreau built a cabin on the northern shore of Walden Pond, near his home town of Concord, Massachusetts. For the next two years he spent most of his time alone there. Walden (1854) is his autobiographical account of this sojourn. An experiment in solitary living, introspection and immersion in nature: ‘I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.’ Thoreau (1817–1862), was an aspiring writer and poet. He also wanted privacy and solitude to think: ‘You want room for your thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before they get into port.’ The writer John Updike regarded Thoreau as ‘a Sage for All Seasons’ but wondered if his work was actually still read: Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible. Well, it has been nearly four decades since I first read Walden. Rereading it now—as this ever-frenzied world has been temporarily stilled—I appreciate Thoreau’s polemical tone more than ever. Although, I smiled when I realised that Thoreau was not quite as isolated as I remembered. He was perhaps a twenty-minute walk from Concord. He met a land tax collector there once, who presented him with a notice for unpaid rates. He heard the town church bells chiming every Sunday.And he also had a steady stream of visitors. Still, it has been enjoyable—and moving—to revisit the ‘Hermit Sage’. The beauty and resonance such passages like these strike a chord that is undimmed with the passage of time: The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,—of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,—such health and cheer they afford forever! And such sympathy have they ever with our race that all Nature would be affected, and the sun’s brightness fade, and the winds would sigh humanely, and the clouds rain tears, and the woods shed their leaves and put on mourning in midsummer, if any man should ever for a just cause grieve. Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself? Stephen Reid
Poetry
Shorter Lives by John A. Scott ($25, PB)
Shorter Lives’ histories of notable creators (and notable enablers of the creative) drift away from conventional tellings to offer alternative facts & believable untruths. In our post-truth world of fake news and mythmaking, Scott’s revised biographies make a significant contribution to both speculative fiction & the developing field of non-fiction poetry. His distillations of the Woolfs, Rimbaud, Picasso contain a deep probing of Modernity itself, a looking backward to better understand our current aesthetic and the challenges it faces.
Thorn by Todd Turner ($25, PB)
Thorn is an expansive & intimate collection whose poems encompass a broad range of subject matter. There are odes & elegies, evocations of birds & animals, a sequence of elegant engagements with the work of influential poets, the rough & tumble of personal history & deep immersions in place. Todd Turner has a reverence for the power of language and engages the large and small particulars of the world with resounding clarity.
The Munchian O by Meredith Wattison ($25, PB) ‘Meredith Wattison choreographs language in a way that is distinctive, deftly filtering moods & complex emotions through her uncanny vision as she aligns a deeply aesthetic mode of perception with the habitual & quotidian. Her language is sculptural & muscular, elegant & biting. Her music is both intense & playful, she can use the seductive registers of her voice to persuade & beguile, move & unsettle, but above all her work is an enabling moral response to these complex times.’—Judith Beveridge.
A Happening in Hades by S. K. Kelen ($25, PB)
S. K. Kelen’s oeuvre covers a diverse range of styles & subjects, and includes pastorals, satires, sonnets, odes, narratives, haiku, epics, idylls, horror stories, sci-fi, allegories, philosophical musings, prophecies, politics, history, love poems, portraits, travel poems, memory, people & places, animals, trees, cars, meditations & ecstasies etcetera. The poems’ vision is encyclopedic & intimate, humorous yet deadly serious; bustling with imagery, voices, dreams, spirit, fun, adventure &serenity—a marvellous ear & restless eye, a gift for narrative that challenges as much as it reaffirms, and a willingness to tackle anything that takes his attention.— Anthony Lawrence
Change Machine by Jaya Savige ($25, PB)
Jaya Savige’s shapeshifting poems reflect the world in violent transformation. Bodies scarred by history collide in the ruckus of generations, geopolitics & technology. Elegies on the loss of a child appear alongside poems that set a pulse to new life, biomedical surveillance, leaf blowers, fatbergs, mechanical pets & military coups. A work of fiercely intelligent artistry, Change Machine is shaped, equally, by feeling—its wild originality comes from how it forces the two together.
Recipe for Risotto by Josephine Clarke ($23, PB)
From ancestral Italy, via the Karri forests, farms and small towns of southern WA to contemporary Perth, they record a transplanting of culture and acknowledge the importance of remembering who we are and where we’ve grown from. Rich with delights and griefs of several generations, as well as sometimes wry, sometimes exquisite observations of landscapes, birds, suburban gardening … social change and Instagram … a family history in indelible ink that is a joy to read, intensely moving and universally recognizable.—Jean Kent.
Scratchland by Noëlle Janaczewskae ($23, PB)
Poetry with a performative tilt—a topography of voices, of casual & perhaps not so casual encounters. A car park attendant, a neglected child, a crow with a mordant sense of humour...a possible crime. Creatures & plants scratching an existence (and occasionally flourishing) in the urban margins. People struggling to make their lives into stories & make those stories known to others. A collection in two parts, Scratchland is about wild frontiers—the wild frontiers of our cities (Scenarios & solos from a mixed landscape) and the wild frontiers of our TV viewing (True crimers).
Barefoot: The Collected Poems of Alastair Reid
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‘Unrecorded, spoken words soon dissolve, like smoke. Simply by being written down, however, even a fleeting thought can be moved instantly into the timeless dimension of language.’— Alastair Reid. Reid was a poet, essayist, translator and traveller, who was instrumental in bringing the poems of Borges and Neruda into English. He died in 2014. Reid started to write for the New Yorker in the late 50’s and contributed poetry and travel pieces for nearly 40 years. This collection includes poems and translations. ($30, PB)
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To Be a Machine: Adventures Eye for Detail: Images of Plants Trees, Woods and Forests: Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, A Social & Cultural History & Animals in Art and Science, &the Futurists Solving the Modest 1500-1630—Florike Egmond, HB Charles Watkins, PB Problem of Death Mark O’Connell, HB
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Earth-Shattering Events: Earthquakes, Nations & Civilization Andrew Robinson, HB
How to Behave Badly in Renaissance Britain Ruth Goodman, HB
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Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture Sander L. Gilman, HB
Smuggling: Seven Centuries of Contraband Simon Harvey HB
Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human Memento Mori: What the Romans Boisvert & Heldke, PB Can Tell Us About Old Age & Death Peter Jones, HB
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The Double Dangerous Book for Boys Conn Iggulden, HB
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Keepers of the Golden Shore: A History of the United Arab Emirates Michael Quentin Morton, HB
The Last Bushrangers Mike Munro, PB
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Frida Kahlo: Critical Lives Gannit Ankori, PB
Georgia O’Keeffe Nancy J. Scott, PB
Gifts of the Gods: A History of Food in Greece Andrew & Rachel Dalby, HB
A Rich and Fertile Land: A History of Food in America Bruce Kraig, HB
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Beyond the Battlefield: Women Artists of the Two World Wars Catherine Speck, HB
Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China Wu Hung, HB
Levitation: The Science, Myth & Magic of Suspension Peter Adey HB
Teatimes: A World Tour Helen Saberi, HB
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The Arts
Circles and Squares: 1930s Hampstead Modernists by Caroline Maclean ($50, HB)
Hampstead in the 1930s. In this peaceful, verdant London suburb, Barbara Hepworth & Ben Nicholson have embarked on a love affair—a passion that will launch an era-defining art movement. In her chronicle of the exhilarating rise & fall of British Modernism, Caroline Maclean captures the dazzling circle drawn into Hepworth & Nicholson’s wake—among them Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Herbert Read & famed émigrés Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, & Piet Mondrian. United in their belief in art’s power to change the world, Maclean’s cast of trailblazers radiate hope & ambition during one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century.
Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France by Kim Sichel ($123, HB)
France experienced a golden age of photobook production from the late 1920s through the 1950s. Avant-garde experiments in photography, text, design & printing, within the context of a growing modernist publishing scene, contributed to an outpouring of brilliantly designed books. Kim Sichel explores seminal publications by Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Pierre Jahan, William Klein & Germaine Krull, arguing that these books both held a mirror to their time & created an unprecedented modernist visual language. Sichel provides an engaging analysis through the lens of materiality, emphasizing the photobook as an object with which the viewer interacts haptically as well as visually.
René Burri: Explosions of Sight ($113, HB)
Swiss photographer Rene Burri (1933–2014) was member of the Magnum Photos cooperative since 1955, he photographed in the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, recording the SixDays & Yom Kippur Wars, as well as the Vietnam War during the 1960s. His many travels took him to Japan & China, across Europe & the Americas to report many of the 20th century’s major events. His extraordinary sense for people & their personalities helped him create portraits of celebrities such as architects Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, artists Alberto Giacometti &Pablo Picasso. His iconic picture of Che Guevara with cigar, is one of the world’s most famous and widely reproduced photographic portraits.
Pollock Confidential: A Graphic Novel by Onofrio Catacchio ($30, PB)
New York, 1948: The art world is ablaze with the pioneering brilliance of Jackson Pollock’s ‘action painting’. Despite this seismic creative output, Pollock’s demons are never far away. Forceful, intense & visionary—in an incredibly short & turbulent life Pollock changed painting forever. This graphic novel delves into his pioneering physical approach to making art, highlights the key characters surrounding the New York midcentury art scene & reveals the intriguing relationship between Pollock’s painting & the covert activities of the Cold War.
Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters ($60, HB)
Vincent van Gogh’s letters not only throw light on Van Gogh’s own complex & intriguing character, they enlighten the whole creative process as seen through his eyes. In these letters one can observe Van Gogh’s thoughts & opinions at first hand, as well as his close ties with his brother Theo, his sometimes troubled relationships with friends & fellow artists, his personal doubts & fears, and above all his overriding passion for his art. This is not only an immense treasure trove of biographical & art-historical information, it provides a lasting pleasure as a personal written testimony to a life consecrated to art.
3000 Color Mixing Recipes: Watercolor by Julie Collins ($30, SP)
A practical & inspirational manual that shows a huge range of colour mixes in watercolour to encourage you explore & experiment with colour. The book is a handy reference when you want to know how to mix a specific colour, or as a catalogue of inspiration when seeking ideas. The handy colour viewing card included can be used to view each colour swatch in isolation—helping to sharpen your perception of the colour or pinpoint a specific shade to use in your own work.
Magical Woodland Knits by Claire Garland
Knit wonderfully lifelike animals (realistic animals rather than cute or stylised toys) with this magical collection of 15 toy knitting patterns. Nature lover Claire Garland has studied animals and birds in the environment around her home in rural Cornwall and designed this delightful collection of patterns based on the wildlife she sees there. The patterns are interspersed with Garland’s sketches and notes. ($50, PB)
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Portraits Unmasked: The Stories Behind the Faces
Most scholars will look at a painting’s composition, style, and themes, often questions remain unanswered —but who were these people & why were they painted? This entertaining book reveals the identities & lives of some of the most famous characters that populate art history—from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Stories behind works by Picasso, Klimt, Rubens, Warhol & dozens of other artists show how portraiture remains one of the most enthralling genres, and these fascinating tales of power, lust, intrigue, jealousy, vengeance, and romance will help you understand masterpieces of art history in an entirely new light. ($65, HB)
Angelika Kauffmann by Bettina Baumgärtel
Angelika Kauffmann (1741–1807) was the first female member of the Royal Academy of Arts. Well educated & well connected, she enjoyed an international reputation—admired by Goethe & Herder with a clientele that included queens & emperors from across the continent. This book describes the Kauffmann myth, which arose even during her lifetime. Her life & work are presented in 100 of her best paintings & drawings, including many new discoveries—focussing on Kauffmann’s impact in England, as well as her work as a history painter, portraitist & champion of a new ideal of masculinity. ($70, HB)
Kara Walker by Clara Kim ($40, PB)
Walker is renowned for her candid explorations of race, gender, sexuality & violence, from drawings, prints, murals, shadow puppets & projections to large-scale sculptural installations. She is perhaps best known for her use of black cut-paper silhouetted figures, often referencing the history of slavery & the antebellum South in the US through provocative and elaborate installations. This book documents the conception & creation of Walker’s Hyundai Commission for the Tate Modern—including intriguing images of work in process in the artist’s studio as well as striking photographs of the final installation. In an eloquent text, Walker also introduces a personal selection of the archival images & artworks that have influenced her during the genesis of this work. Essays by the project’s curator, Clara Kim, and specially commissioned new writing by Zadie Smith look into Walker’s life & career leading up to this latest stunning installation.
Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett
Unfinished Business offers fresh insight into the work of Australian artist Gordon Bennett (1955–2014). The book includes works created from the 1980s to 2014 sourced from studio, public & private collections, including early installation works; Bennett’s ‘history’ paintings; mirror paintings, De Stijl works; his ‘Home décor’ series; ‘Notes to Basquiat’ works; abstract ‘Stripe’ paintings; and late works showing renewed engagement with political contexts. Pages from Bennett’s personal notebooks, as well as archival photographs provided by the his Estate, provide intimate insight into how the artist worked with images & text & used drawing as a generative tool, and show the connection with international artists in his work. ($54.95 HB)
FURY: Painting after the War by Hans Hofmann
Renowned as both an artist & teacher, Hans Hofmann established his first art school in Munich in 1915—built on the contemporary ideas regarding colour and form of Cézanne, the Cubists & Kandinsky. After relocating to the US in 1932, he opened schools in both New York & Provincetown, and immersed himself within America’s growing avantgarde art scene—his teaching had a significant influence on post-War American artists, including Helen Frankenthaler, Lee Krasner & Joan Mitchell. The works in this book were produced during WW2 and immediately afterwards. Hofmann’s angular abstractions (such as Fury No. 1) personify the insecurities of the period, but this was also the moment that he moved towards the soft ambiguous forms and gesture that would become the hallmark of the Abstract Expressionist movement. ($90, PB)
Now in paperback—$70 each The Louvre: All The Paintings Florence: The Paintings & Frescoes, 1250-1743
Experience every painting currently on display in the Louvre’s permanent collection in Paris (with discussions by art historians Anja Grebe and Vincent Pomarede), without ever having to step on a plane. Similarly take a protected walk through the masterpieces housed in Florence, 2000 beautifully reproduced artworks from the the Renaissance art capital of the world—including the art of Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, Correggio, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Titian, Rembrandt, van Dyck, El Greco and hundreds more.
2 new 1000 piece jigsaws Vincent van Gogh: Wheatfield with Cypress Annie Soudain: Midsummer Morning $35 each
what we're reading
Morgan: The Margot Affair by Sanae Lemoine—This French debut is a beguiling novel of love, secrets and betrayal. Margot is the 17 year old daughter of a well-known actress and a married politician. Her father has visited them regularly over the years but lives a double life. In an impetuous moment, Margot reveals this to a journalist and the ramifications are not quite what she expected. Beautifully written—and very Parisian. Also Daisy Johnson’s Sisters (due in August) is a searing portrayal of sibling love and envy, of the power one can have over another. Brilliantly written, this book will linger in the reader’s mind long after its completion. Steve: On 29 April 1986, the Los Angeles Public Library went up in flames. Arson or accident? Susan Orleans’s engaging The Library Book is part true crime investigation, part history of the Library, part memoir of her lifelong love of books and libraries, and a grace letter to their cultural importance—even in this internet age. Some 400,000 books were destroyed, over 700,000 were damaged—among the casualties of the inferno were over 12,000 cookbooks —‘Their covers burst like popcorn’, the entire Shakespeare collection; five million American patent drawings and listings; 90,000 books on engineering; leaves from a 1635 Coverdale Bible—the first complete translation in modern English. Orleans also re-examines the case of the suspected arsonist, 27-year-old Harry Peak, who died in 1993. He at first admitted the crime and then vehemently denied it. In an engaging interview with Peak’s sister, Debra, Harry—a part-time actor and drifter—comes across as a fondly remembered fantasist and attention seeker. Orleans leaves it open—the faulty and often antiquated electrical wiring of an institution that was six decades old, seems a more plausible culprit. The long history of torching libraries through the ages also intrigues Orleans, as does the replacement and restoration of the L.A. Library’s salvageable books: thousands of books were frozen in an effort to preserve them. She also looks into the intermittent—but ultimately successful—efforts to restore and expand the library as it is today. Stef: Jessie Traill, A Biography by Jo Oliver—Born in the 1880s at Blackrock, on the edge of Melbourne suburbia, Australian artist Jessie Traill was independent and free spirited, adventurous and well travelled, and an artist, not only accomplished but pioneering in her style, method and her medium of choice—etching. Considered at that time a masculine pursuit, Jessie Traill not only mastered etching, she pushed it to its limits and discovered new ways of expressing line, subject and emotion. Her prints are beautiful. I think Oliver draws too heavily from Traill’s own diary and personal papers, and I would have loved her to explore the narrative of Jessie’s artwork as it really has a story to tell (like the effect volunteering during WW1 had on her work)—but as there is so little known of Jessie Traill the book is worth reading. And Traill’s own writing is lovely to read. Her walk around Bruges brought back strong memories.
Scott V: Grant by Ron Chernow—Most biographies of Ulysses S. Grant concentrate almost exclusively on his Civil War exploits: his rise to Union Commander and his starring role in the ultimate victory over the Confederacy. Understandable: it’s the story of a man, considered to be a failure in every venture, who rises to become the saviour of the Union (in tandem with Lincoln), all the while fighting another epic battle—with alcoholism. But it’s Grant’s post Civil War life as a two term President during the period of Reconstruction that’s a revelation here. In many instances, he comes across as a naive leader who means well but who gets unwittingly embroiled in scandal after scandal—showing stubborn loyalty to those close to him, who turn out to be corrupt. The greatest tragedy, however, is that early and comprehensive gains in Civil Rights for former slaves (overseen by his administration and a Union military presence in the South,) are thwarted and rolled back by a bloody wave of domestic terrorism in the form of the KKK and other similar groups. The North, eager for reconciliation with the South, becomes weary of constant intervention, and so, it will be almost another hundred years before any further gains are made in Civil Rights for African Americans. Very interesting read.
Andrew: The Abstainer by Ian McGuire—What to read in a world post-Cromwell? I came blinking into the light in May after finishing the Hilary Mantel, and have struggled to gain traction with other novels since then. I’m very keen to read Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. It is an imagined life of Shakespeare’s son and getting high praise all over the place, but I think I will do her better justice if I leave the sixteenth century alone for a bit. So, instead I’m knee deep in 1860s Manchester with a rollicking noir thriller of Fenian agitators and undercover police. Ian McGuire’s earlier Victorian icebound whaler thriller The North Water was one of my favourite reads of a few years ago. It was a gobsmacking adventure, with its mise en scène so far out of my ken that it made for a transportive experience. The Abstainer lacks this extraordinary thrill-of-the-new element but Maguire has impeccable historical knowledge and enough of a knack for character and pacing, that I’m pleased enough to come along for the ride. Jack: Collected Essays by James Baldwin—From an essay, The American Dream & American Negro, published in 1965: ‘It comes as a great shock to discover that the country which is your birthplace and to which you owe your life and identity has not, in its whole system of reality, evolved a place for you.’ Fifty-five or four-hundred years later, is a change gonna come?
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Bestsellers—Nonfiction 1. Phosphorescence
Julia Baird
2. A Bigger Picture
Malcolm Turnbull
3. Dark Emu
Bruce Pascoe
4. The Ratline: Love, Lies & Justice on the Trail of a
Nazi Fugitive
Philippe Sands
5. The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company 6. Falastin: A Cookbook
William Dalrymple Sami Tamimi & Tara Wigley
7. Humankind: A Hopeful History
Rutger Bregman
8. See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and
Domestic Violence
Jess Hill
9. Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My
Hasidic Roots
Deborah Feldman
10. Fire Country: How Indigenous Fire Management
Could Help Save Australia
Victor Steffensen
Bestsellers—Fiction 1. The Mirror & the Light
Hilary Mantel
2. Normal People
Sally Rooney
3. Girl, Woman, Other 4. The Dictionary of Lost Words 5. Where the Crawdads Sing 6. The Yield 7. Hamnet 8. The Good Turn
Bernadine Evaristo Pip Williams Delia Owens Tara June Winch Maggie O’Farrell Dervla McTiernan
9. Conversations with Friends
Sally Rooney
10. The Dickens Boy
Tom Keneally
For more June/July new releases go to:
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and another thing..... ... is interrupted for a very important announcement GLEECLUBBERS TAKE NOTE!! From the 1st July we will be sending Gleeclub members their twiceyearly credit notes by email rather than by Australia Post. We will use the email address that we have on file for you, so if you are a current member & believe we don’t have an email address for you please provide one by emailing us at gleeclub@gleebooks.com.au with your name and gleeclub number so we can update our records. Never fear if you miss a Gleeclub voucher—we’ll still have a full record of any vouchers that we generate. ...and another thing, please let me apologise for promising a magazine a month in the April/May issue—a lot of books scheduled for June and July have been delayed to later in the year, or even a hopefully covid and bushfire free 2021, so I gave in to another double issue. Lots to look forward to after August! In the meantime, maintain your distances and keep well, Viki
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