Gleebooks Gleaner 2015

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Vol. 22 No. 9 October 2015

e h t n o s i n o s y r Bi l B tle Dribbling t i L o t d roa

Australian Literature ‘At some point, I gave up trying to play it safe.

I stopped trying to control the uncontrollable.’

The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood

2 women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property in the middle of nowhere. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be there with 8 other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious armed jailers & a 'nurse'.

The girls all have something in common, but what is it? What crime has brought them here from the city? Who is the mysterious security company responsible for this desolate place with its brutal rules, its total isolation from the contemporary world? Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man.

They pray for rescue—but when the food starts running out it becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. A gripping, starkly imaginative exploration of contemporary misogyny and corporate control, and of what it means to hunt and be hunted. Most of all, it is the story of two friends, their sisterly love and courage. ($30, PB)

Ghost River by Tony Birch ($29.95, PB) 'You find yourself down at the bottom of the river, for some it's time to give into her. But other times, young fellas like you two, you got to fight your way back. Show the river you got courage and is ready to live.' The river is a place of history & secrets. For Ren & Sonny, two unlikely friends, it's a place of freedom & adventure.

For a group of storytelling vagrants, it's a refuge. And for the isolated daughter of a cult reverend, it's an escape. Each time they visit, another secret slips into its ancient waters. But change & trouble are coming—to the river & to the lives of those who love it. Who will have the courage to fight & survive & what will be the cost?

Hope Farm by Peggy Frew ($29.99, PB) It is the winter of 1985. Hope Farm sticks out of the ragged landscape like a decaying tooth, its weatherboard walls sagging into the undergrowth. Silver's mother, Ishtar, has fallen for the charismatic Miller, and the three of them have moved to the rural hippie commune to make a new start. At Hope, Silver finds unexpected friendship and, at last, a place to call home. But it is also here that, at just thirteen, she is thrust into an unrelenting adult world—and the walls begin to come tumbling down, with deadly consequences. Hope Farm is the masterful second novel from award-winning author Peggy Frew, and is a devastatingly beautiful story about the broken bonds of childhood, and the enduring cost of holding back the truth.

Swimming Home by Mary-Rose MacColl

‘Reading about anxiety usually makes me anxious.

Not in this case though: only Jane Caro could convert anxiety into a triumph of the human condition.

An honest, funny and gripping read.

I could not love her more.’

ANNABEL CRABB, author of The Wife Drought ‘Jane has acquired insights and wisdom that she shares with candour and generous heart. She has confronted tough, testing times with courage and optimism.’

QUENTIN BRYCE AD CVO

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Now in B Format Barracuda by Christos Tsiolkas, $23

It's 1925 and 15 year-old Catherine Quick longs to feel once more the warm waters of her home, to strike out into the ocean off the Torres Strait Islands and swim, as she's done since she was a tiny child. But with her recent move to London where she lives with her aunt Louisa, Catherine feels that everything she values has been stripped away. Louisa, a busy, confident London surgeon who fought boldly for equality for women, holds definite views on the behaviour of her young niece. She wants Catherine to pursue an education, just as she did, to ensure her future freedom. It takes the influence of enig- matic American banker Manfred Lear Black to convince Louisa to come to New York where Catherine can test her mettle against the first women in the world to swim the English Channel. And where, unexpectedly, Louisa can finally listen to what her own heart tells her. ($30, PB)

The Diemenois: Being the correct and true account of the sensational escape, seclusion, and cruel demise of a most infamous man

by J. W. Clennett ($39.95, HB)

Little is known about the French Tasmanian colony of la Ville de Baudin. Less still about its most mysterious colonist, Henri Maurice Claudet. For the first time, The Diemenois presents the correct and true account of the sensational escape, seclusion, and cruel demise of one of history's most infamous men. A tale of intrigue, blackmail, conspiracy, and murder. In this brilliant stretch of the imagination, J. W. Clennett brings an alternative history of the early Australian colony to life as a stunning new graphic novel.

Cloudless: A novel in verse by Christine Evans

It’s a still, hot summer in Perth, only heat shimmying off the city’s glass buildings, and not much to do but surrender to the cool of Beatty Park pools. The locals are out in full force: teenagers flirting, even the ragtag kids from the refuge. But something is moving under all the stillness; something dark & untamed. It’s moving through lives & connecting them with its sonar trembles: Auntie, in town with Jerome to find his mum, who has run away; Kevin, tired of his lot, dealing with raucous kids & bottlenecks & a city that seems to be growing hostile; Karri & his other-worldly sister Bat Girl; Jackie & her sisters, sharing smokes by the pool. Playwright Christine Evans, invites the reader to witness the invisible ways people are drawn together & pulled apart—and to venture to the ultimate catastrophic release that might ultimately return them home. ($25, PB)

New Text Classic, $12.95 Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings (intr. by Gideon Haigh) New in UQP's Modern Classics Charades by Janet Turner Hospital, $19.95 The Perfumer's Secret by Fiona McIntosh

On the eve of the First World War, Fleurette, the only daughter of the wealthy Delacroix perfume dynasty, is being forced to marry a man she loathes, Aimery De Lasset, head of the pre-eminent perfume manufacturer in France. It is only the cathedral bells tolling the rally to the frontlines that save her from sharing his bed. When she receives an unexpected letter from Aimery's estranged brother, Fleurette is left holding a terrible secret, and the sparks of a powerful passion. Her discoveries risk shattering the two families and their perfume empires, bringing tragedy down on them all. ($32.99, PB)

On D'Hill

I am writing this the day after the Dulwich Hill Fair. What a success for us and the lovely Cornersmith owners, Alex and James. We had a special pre-release cache of their new book and sold out. Who knew pickling was so popular? I, for one, will be buying their gorgeous locally sourced pickles and chutneys rather than slaving over a hot stove myself. After the fair I went to Marrickville Bowlo and sold out of Peter Doyle’s fab new crime novel, The Big Whatever. All of that drugged to the eyeballs due to an abscess on my tooth!

The popularity of the Cornersmith book yesterday just seemed to prove what a close and supportive community we have here now. I remember when a friend moved to Dulwich Hill 20 years ago, we thought he’d moved to the boondocks— it seemed so far away. But now D’Hill and Marrickville are thriving with a slew of writers, artists and academics living in harmony with the Greeks and Vietnamese who originally settled here. And more and more apartment blocks are being built, about which I am ambivalent—on one hand I think we need higher density living near the city—on the other, there’s a lot of ugly, cheap-looking buildings going up.

Two debuts to talk about this month: Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar is set in the Coorong in South Australia in the mid-19th Century and tells of a family who have lost their fortune in Adelaide and moved to this hardscrabble land where the father continues to make bad choices in his efforts to restore the family’s wealth. The story of their lonely, isolated life is told by daughter, Hester, one among many beautifully drawn characters. This is a wonderful evocation of the life of settlers, their contact with the original inhabitants of the land, and their determination to succeed against all odds. Terrific.

Resurrection Bay is set in Melbourne and the Victorian coastal town of the title. The success of crime novels and what sets them apart from each other is, to my mind (not only mine), setting and character. Viskic has created a brilliant character in Caleb Zelic, a deaf man who runs a private detective agency with ex-cop Frankie who is—hooray—a woman in her late fifties. These two form an unlikely and volatile partnership; due to his deafness Caleb is an inhibited person who observes others rather than truly engaging with them, while Frankie is fighting her own demons. The plot itself is fastpaced and works well—but it is Caleb readers will find fascinating.

Next, I’m looking forward to Charlotte Wood’s new novel The Natural Way of Things and a debut by Melbourne bookseller Miles Allinson, Fever of Animals, about which a buzz is slowly building.

And of course, as it’s October, the Christmas books are starting to arrive. How exciting.

See you on D’Hill, Morgan.

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International Literature

As a single parent, Letty does everything for her children - apart from raise them. But when her mother ups and leaves, however, Letty has to confront her fears and become the parent she doesn’t think she can be.

Letty’s teenage son, Alex, struggles to forgive his mother for choices she made in the past.

But he and Letty are not so dissimilar, and both are prepared to risk everything for those they love.

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood ($32.99, PB) Charmaine and Stan are young and in love. Victims of a growing divide between the haves and the have-nots, they struggle to keep their relationship alive in the face of increasing poverty. Now living in their car, they survive on tips from Charmaine's job at filthy dive bar, until the day they see an advertisement for a social experiment offering security, community, and a break from the daily grind of their current existence.

Leaving behind the uncertainty of their former lives, they sign themselves up for the perfectly manicured lawns of Consilience, with its stable jobs and protection from the increasingly unruly and angry population outside its walls. All they have to do in return for this suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month—with a voluntary imprisonment. But what seems at first to be a balancing act worth investing in for the safety of a permanent roof over their heads, soon turns into a nightmare of conformity, mistrust, guilt and sexual desire.

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

Now in B Format The Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood, $20 Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford, $20 Mr Mac and Me by Esther Freud, $20 Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgaard, $23 Golden Age by Jane Smiley ($30, PB)

3rd in The Last Hundred Years Trilogy. 1987. A visit from a long-lost relative brings the Langdons together again on the family farm; a place almost unrecognisable from the remote Iowan farmland Walter and Rosanna once owned. The family have spread across the US, and whilst some have stayed reliably unchanged, others have evolved with the times. The eldest Langdon, Frank—always cold and distant—finally starts to break down the wall he has built between himself and his wife, but can a loving relationship be grasped in their twilight years? Their son, Richie, finally out from under his brother Michael's shadow, finds himself running for congress almost unintentionally, and completely underprepared. And Michael, on the brink of self-destruction, seems to make the biggest change of all, but could it be too good to be true?

Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins

Desert sands have laid waste to the south-west of America. Las Vegas is buried. California, and anyone still there, is stranded.

Luz and Ray survive on water rations, black market fruit and each other's need. The night of the raindance, Ig explodes into their fragile family like a miniature missile. Two years old, undernourished, wild—the toddler needs Luz, so they steal her.

Like Margaret Atwood, Claire Vaye Watkins uses dystopia to traverse the scarred frontier of the heart. In her bare prose, nature & human nature, conspiracy & cult, motherhood & manhood are played out across the vast, indifferent, inevitable desert. ($29.99, PB)

Now is the Time by Melvyn Bragg ($29.99, PB) At the end of May 1381, the 14 year-old King of England had reason to be fearful: the plague had returned, the royal coffers were empty & a draconian Poll Tax was being widely evaded.

Yet Richard, bolstered by his powerful, admired mother, felt secure in his God-given right to reign. Within two weeks, the unthinkable happened: a vast force of common people invaded London, led by a former soldier, Walter Tyler, & the radical preacher John Ball, demanding freedom, equality & the complete uprooting of the Church & State. They believed they were rescuing the King from his corrupt ministers, and that England had to be saved.

And for three intense, violent days, it looked as if they would sweep all before them. Melvyn Bragg brings an extraordinary episode in English history to life on both a grand and intimate scale.

The Night Stages by Jane Urquhart ($30, PB)

After a tragic accident leaves Tamara alone on the most westerly tip of Ireland, she begins an affair with a charismatic meteorologist named Niall. It’s the 1950s, and Tamara has settled into civilian life after working as an auxiliary pilot in WW II. At first her romance is filled with passionate secrecy, but when Niall’s younger brother, Kieran, disappears after a bicycle race, Niall, unable to shake the idea that he may be to blame, slowly falls into despondency. Distraught & abandoned after their decade-long relationship, Tamara decides she has no option but to leave. The novel opens as Tamara makes her way from Ireland to New York. During a layover in Gander, Newfoundland, a fog moves in, grounding her plane and stranding her in front of the airport’s mural. As she gazes at the nutcracker-like children, missileshaped birds, and fruit blossoms, she revisits the circumstances that brought her to Ireland & the family entanglement that has forced her into exile. Slowly she interweaves her life story with Kieran’s as she searches for the truth about Niall.

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This is the 4th volume in the Neapolitan Novels (My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay). The quartet traces the friendship between Elena and Lila, from their childhood in a poor neighbourhood in Naples, to their thirties, when both women are mothers but each has chosen a different path. Their lives are still inextricably linked, for better or worse, especially when it comes to the drama of a lost child. ($29.99, PB)

The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray ($33, PB)

What links the investment banking, art theft, www.myhotswaitress. com (yes, hots with an 's', don't ask), a four-year-old boy named after TV detective Remington Steele, a Pacific island and a pest control business run by an ex-KGB agent? Marooned in the damp and paradoxical realm known as Ireland, disillusioned banker Claude is approached by a down-on-his-luck author Paul, who's looking for his next great subject. Under Paul's fictionalising influence, Claude finds life getting steadily more exciting, especially when a beautiful Greek waitress called Ariadne enters the picture. But Paul's plan is not what it seems—and neither is the Bank of Torabundo, Claude's employer, which swells through dodgy takeovers and derivatives trading until—well, you can guess how that shakes out.

The Gap of Time: The Winter’s Tale Retold

by Jeanette Winterson ($29.99, PB)

I saw the strangest sight tonight.' New Bohemia. America. A storm. A black man finds a white baby abandoned in the night. He gathers her up—light as a star—and decides to take her home. London. England.

After the financial crash. Leo Kaiser knows how to make money but he doesn't know how to manage the jealousy he feels towards his best friend and his wife. Is the newborn baby even his? New Bohemia. 17 years later. A boy and a girl are falling in love but there's a lot they don't know about who they are and where they come from. Jeanette Winterson's cover version of The Winter's Tale vibrates with echoes of the original but tells a contemporary story where Time itself is a player in a game of high stakes that will either end in tragedy or forgiveness.

Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg ($33, PB)

On the morning of her daughter's wedding, June Reid's house goes up in flames, destroying her entire family—her present, her past and her future. Fleeing from the carnage, stricken and alone, June finds herself in a motel room by the ocean, hundreds of miles from her Connecticut home, held captive by memories and the mistakes she has made with her only child, Lolly, and her partner, Luke. In the turbulence of grief and gossip left in June's wake we slowly make sense of the unimaginable. Bill Clegg's novel is a gathering of voices—each testimony has a new revelation about what led to the catastrophe with everyone touched by the tragedy finding themselves caught in the undertow, as their secret histories finally come to light.

Among the Ten-Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont

Jack Shanley is a well-known New York artist, charming and vain, who doesn’t mean to plunge his family into crisis. His wife, Deb, gladly left behind a difficult career as a dancer to raise the two children she adores.

In the ensuing years, she has mostly avoided coming face-to-face with the weaknesses of the man she married. But then an anonymous package arrives in the mail: a cardboard box containing sheaves of printed emails chronicling Jack’s secret life. The package is addressed to Deb, but it’s delivered into the wrong hands: her children’s. A dazzling debut novel for fans of A. M. Homes, & Lorrie Moore. ($29.99, PB)

Bream Gives Me Hiccups by Jesse Eisenberg

The series of stories that gives the book its unusual title are written from the point of view of a 9 year-old boy whose mother brings him to expensive Los Angeles restaurants so that she can bill her ex-husband for the meals. In the tradition of Woody Allen, Simon Rich and David Sedaris Academy award nominated actor & New Yorker contributor, Jesse Eisenberg's hilarious short pieces imagine discussions in ancient Pompeii just before the volcanic eruption, explore the vagaries of post-gender-normative dating in New York City, and conjure up Alexander Graham Bell's first five phone calls. ($30, PB)

Fear of Dying by Erica Jong ($30, PB) Vanessa Wonderman is a former actress in her 60s who finds herself balancing between her dying parents, her aging husband and her beloved, pregnant daughter. Although Vanessa considers herself 'a happily married woman', the lack of sex in her life makes her feel as if she's losing something too valuable to ignore. So she places an ad for sex on a site called Zipless.com and the life she knew begins to unravel. With the help and counsel of her best friend, Isadora Wing, Vanessa weeds out the lovers from the losers and liars, and starts to question if what she's looking for might be close at hand after all.

Dictator by Robert Harris ($33, PB) ‘Laws are silent in times of war.'—Cicero. There was a time when Cicero held Caesar's life in the palm of his hand. But now Caesar is the dominant figure and Cicero's life is in ruins. Exiled, separated from his wife and children, his possessions confiscated, his life constantly in danger, Cicero is tormented by the knowledge that he has sacrificed power for the sake of his principles. His comeback requires wit, skill and courage—and for a brief and glorious period, the legendary orator is once more the supreme senator in Rome. But politics is never static and no statesman, however cunning, can safeguard against the ambition and corruption of others. Both epic & intimate, this is an unforgettable tour de force from a master storyteller.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms

by George R. R. Martin ($40, HB)

Before Tyrion Lannister and Podrick Payne there was Dunk and Egg. A young, naive but courageous hedge knight, Ser Duncan the Tall towers above his rivals—in stature if not experience. Tagging along with him is his diminutive squire, a boy called Egg—whose true identity must be hidden from all he and Dunk encounter: for in reality he is Aegon Targaryen, and one day he will be king. Improbable heroes though they be, great destinies lay ahead for Dunk and Egg; as do powerful foes, royal intrigue, and outrageous exploits. This volume compiles the first three official prequel novellas to George R. R. Martin's ongoing masterwork, A Song of Fire and Ice.

Beasts Royal: Twelve Tales of Adventure

by Patrick O'Brian ($30, HB)

On the indigo waters of the South Sea, the crew of a schooner are attacked by a man-eating tiger-shark. In the humid depths of the African jungle, a 30-foot python plots to rid himself of his rival, a wily old crocodile. Amid the heat & dust of the Punjab, the snake-charmer Hussein escapes into the forest on the elephant that he trained when a mahout in his youth. With the dry wit and unsentimental precision O'Brian would come to be loved for, dramas and tragedies of the natural world unfold for birds and beasts in these 12 tales of animal adventure that appeared together as O'Brian's second book—now available for the first time since 1934.

Ghost (ed) Louise Welsh ($40, HB) Haunted houses, mysterious Counts, weeping widows & restless souls, here is the definitive anthology of all that goes bump in the night. This beautiful collection of 100 ghost stories will delight, unnerve, and entertain any fiction lover brave enough... There are gothic classics, modern masters, Booker Prize-winners, ancient folk tales & stylish noirs, proving that every writer has a skeleton or two in their closet. The all-star cast of authors include: Hilary Mantel, William Faulkner, Kate Atkinson, Henry James, Kazuo Ishiguro, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Franz Kafka, Ruth Rendell, Edgar Allan Poe, William Trevor, Helen Simpson, Haruki Murakami, Dylan Thomas, Bram Stoker, H. P. Lovecraft, Lydia Davis, Sir Walter Scott, Annie Proulx, Bram Stoker, Angela Carter and Stephen King.

The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink ($25, PB)

Interlaken, Berne, 21st century. Several things happen after the car hits the rock. Tiff ceases to be pregnant. Stephen captures, like, the most wonderful bird—fleet, stealthy, and beautiful—a real 'lifer'.

And the wallcreeper, the wallcreeper says 'twee'. The Wallcreeper is nothing more than a portrait of marriage, complete with all its requisite highs and lows: drugs, dubstep, small chores, anal sex, eco-terrorism, birding, breeding and feeding.

Now it's Time to Say Goodbye by Dale Peck

When the 500th person they know dies of AIDS, Colin and Justin flee New York City. They end up in Galatia, a Kansas town founded by freed slaves in the wake of the Civil War whose population is now divided, evenly but uneasily, between African Americans descended from the town's founders and Caucasians who buy up more of the town's land with each passing year. But within weeks of relocating, they are implicated in a harrowing crime, and discover that they can't outrun their own tortured history, nor that of their new home. ($29.99, PB)

Swann's Way: A Graphic Novel Adaptation & Drawings by Stéphane Heuet

Proust was the greatest novelist of the 20th century, just as Tolstoy was in the 19th', wrote Graham Green. 'For those who began to write at the end of the 30s, there were two great inescapable influences: Proust & Freud, who are mutually complementary'.In what translator Arthur Goldhammer says might be 'likened to a piano reduction of an orchestral score', the French illustrator Stéphane Heuet re-presents Proust in graphic form for anyone who has always dreamed of reading him but was put off by the sheer magnitude of the undertaking. This graphic adaptation reveals the fundamental architecture of Proust's work while displaying a fidelity to his language as well as to the novel's themes of time, art & the elusiveness of memory. ($49, HB)

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THE WILDER AISLES

This month three new crime novels from three of my favourite writers and one from a writer I discovered while looking for a different book. First up the The Nature of the Beast by Louise Penny, The Dying Season by Martin Walker and The Moth Catcher by Ann Cleeves.

The new Louise Penny is I think one of her best. All writers can have their good & bad times, & not every one of their stories hit the mark, but this I think does. Based on a true story, the book centres around the small village of Three Pines. Set high in the mountains of Quebec it has very little access to the outside world. To this isolated place, former Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, late of the Sûreté, has retired with his wife, the wonderfully named Reine-Marie. He is intending to relax and enjoy his retirement, but this peaceful existence comes to an end with the disappearance of a small village boy, Laurent. The missing boy has always lived in a bit of a fantasy world, inventing stories with himself as the hero—so on this fateful day, no one believes his story, and all will live to regret it. During the search for Laurent, Gamache and his son-in-law Detective Jean-Guy Beauvoir, find something so huge, so monstrous that it confounds them. This 'thing' (I can't give too much away ) seems to be connected to someone from the past. Someone who is in jail doing life for acts so unspeakable that Gamache refuses to speak about them. A very complex story follows with many twists and turns. All the usual suspects are there—Myna from the bookstore, Ruth with Rosa under her arm, Clara who has been unable to paint since she lost husband, Gabri and Olivier who run the Bistro and B&B. This is one of Cleeves's best—highly recommended.

Martin Walker's The Dying Season, latest in the 'Bruno' series is another good one. A 90 year-old war-hero—a powerful local patriarch, who also happens to be one of Bruno's personal heroes—is celebrating his birthday. At this celebration Bruno meets the members of his family, a clan full of dark secrets.

On the morning after the party one of the guests is found dead, and Bruno knows he will have to dig into the family's past, even though they pressure him to stay away. Despite the family's insistence that the death was suicide, Bruno can't accept this—and so begins an investigation which uncovers secrets both within the family, and involving the family's connections to France, Russia and Israel. As Bruno keeps on digging he finds secrets that even he feels should be kept hidden. Of course, the normal business of St Denis goes on. The battles between hunters and the Greens—especially Imogene, who is devoted to the deer and doesn't want them killed. There's something of a surprise when Bruno is taken in by a pretty face with dire consequences. And of course there's lashings of food and wine of the Perigord region. You can buy The Bruno Chief of Police cookbook if you so desire. I thought I might.

I love Ann Cleeves' Vera Stanhope, and her latest offering doesn't disappoint.

The Moth Catcher takes place in Valley Farm, a quiet place in Northumberland. Once again, people have secrets they would rather stay hidden—but when murder is afoot, and Vera is on the case... Patrick, a young ecologist who is house-sitting on a country estate, is found dead in a quiet country lane and when Vera, Joe and Holly arrive on the scene they find the body of another man. A fascination with moths is the only connection that Vera can see between the two victims. Valley Farm is a strange place full of strange people—all of Ann Cleeves' books have a wonderful sense of place. I love her Shetland books for the same reason. An atmosphere of wildness fills them—a feeling that the scenery and the surrounds affect the behaviour of the people who live there. Sadly there aren't a lot of culinary delights in the Stanhope books. Vera drinks scotch, but her diet leaves a lot to be desired—despite Joe's desperate attempts to improve it. You get the feeling that clothes, food and lodgings are not of much importance to Vera—including cars, as she insists on driving her father's old jeep around. Catching criminals is the most important thing in her book. Lovely stuff.

Kate Charles is the author of A Drink of Deadly Wine, the first in the Book of Psalms series. I discovered this by happy accident when hunting for another book. Kate Charles is an American writer who moved to the UK in 1986 and, as she says, found in the Church of England fertile ground for a crime series.

The book centres around David Middleton-Brown and his friends—including Father Gabriel Neville, vicar of St Anne's Kensington Gardens, a high church parish with lots of incense, processions and the wearing of colourful vestments and lace. Father Gabriel is married with two young children, and lives in the delightful vicarage next to the church. His peace is suddenly shattered when he receives an anonymous letter threatening to reveal a secret that would destroy his marriage and career. What's more, it is a secret that no one else could possibly know. In desperation he turns to his old friend David Middleton-Brown, who is, for reasons that will be come clear, not the best person for the job. Blackmail, murder, thwarted love ensue. This was a fun read, in fact good enough for me to order the next two in the series.

Janice

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Crime Fiction

Ash Island by Barry Maitland ($30, PB)

Detective Sergeant Harry Belltree, back on the job after a near-fatal confrontation with corrupt colleagues, has become a departmental embarrassment—so he is posted away from Sydney to the quiet life in Newcastle. But a body's been found buried just offshore on Ash Island; there may be more. There's also Harry's unfinished business. The car crash that killed his parents and blinded his wife happened not far from Newcastle. And Harry knows it was no accident.

Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham ($33, PB)

Sebastian Rudd takes the cases no one else wants to take: the drugaddled punk accused of murdering two little girls; a crime lord on death row; a homeowner accused of shooting at a SWAT team. His last office was firebombed, either by drug dealers or cops. Arch Swanger is the prime suspect in the abduction and presumed murder of 21-year-old Jiliana Kemp, the daughter of the assistant chief of police. When Swanger asks Sebastian to represent him, he lets Sebastian in on a terrible secret —one that will threaten everything Sebastian holds dear.

A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George

When noted feminist writer Clare Abbott is poisoned after a debate at Cambridge University, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers has the chance she needs to redeem herself with her superior officers. Barbara desperately needs this chance after skipping out on her job to go to Italy in aid of friends—using a tabloid to manipulate New Scotland Yard & heading out on her own to hire a sly private investigator. She has been forced to 'request' a transfer, so needs a case to get herself back onto the right track. With DI Lynley working the case in London & DS Winston Nkata working with Barbara in Dorset, suspects emerge & a twisted personality behind a ruthless killing is revealed. ($29.99, PB)

The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine

by Alexander McCall Smith ($40, HB)

Mma Ramotswe, the proprietress of the No 1. Ladies' Detective Agency, is not one to sit about. Her busy life gives her little time for relaxation (apart from the drinking of tea, of course). Nonetheless, she is convinced by co-director Mma Makutsi to take a holiday. But Mma Ramotswe finds it impossible to resist the temptation to follow the cases taken on by Mma Makutsi. In her 16th outing Mma Ramotswe delves into the past of a famous man whose reputation has been called into question, and joins forces with a new assistant detective (and part-time science teacher), Mr Polopetsi. She also manages to help a young boy named Samuel in the search for his missing mother; and then of course there is the agency's arch-enemy Violet Sephotho, scheming to set up a rival secretarial college.

Ghostly: A Collection of Ghost Stories (ed) Audrey Niffenegger ($35, PB)

Audrey Niffenegger brings together her selection of the very creepiest, weirdest and wittiest ghost stories around. Scare yourself silly with old favourites by Edgar Allan Poe and M. R. James. Entertain the unnerving with tales from Neil Gaiman, Kelly Link and Audrey Niffenegger herself. And as bedtime nears, allay your fears with funny new writing from Amy Giacalone and the classic wit of Saki.

So Nude, So Dead by Ed McBain ($15, PB) He’d been a promising piano prodigy, once. Now he was just an addict, scraping to get by, letting his hunger for drugs consume him. But a man’s life can always get worse - as Ray Stone discovers when he wakes up beside a beautiful nightclub singer only to find her dead… and 16 ounces of pure heroin missing. On the run from the law, desperate to prove his innocence and find a killer, Ray also faces another foe, merciless and unforgiving: his growing craving for a fix. Ed McBain's first novel.

The Haunted Season by G. M. Malliet ($19.99, PB) Something sinister is stirring at Totleigh Hall, the imposing manor house dominating the village of Nether Monkslip. Max Tudor's own invitation to Totleigh comes as a welcome novelty; it will be his first time meeting the famous family that once held sway in the area. The fact that they were famous for their eccentricities only adds to their appeal for the Anglican priest. But before he has time to starch his clerical collar and organise a babysitter, a sudden and suspicious death intervenes, and the handsome vicar's talent for sorting through clues to solve a murder is once again called into play .

The Ploughmen by Kim Zupan ($20, PB)

John Gload is a 77 year-old murderer. He has been killing for over half a century before he is caught for the first time. Valentine Millimaki is the young man in the Copper County sheriff's department who draws the overnight shift after Gload's arrest. He is tasked with getting the killer to confess to a string of unsolved murders. Gload and Millimaki sit across from each other in the dark, swapping stories and secrets. As sheriff and criminal talk through the bars night after night, Millimaki's safety is threatened within his own department. Then a brazen act of violence leads to a manhunt and a stunning revelation that ensures Gload's past and Millimaki's future are forever entwined.

Recipes for Love and Murder by Sally Andrew

Tannie Maria used to write a recipe column for the Klein Karoo Gazette.

Then Head Office decided they wanted an advice column instead, so now she gives advice. In the form of recipes. Because she may not know much about love, but food—that's her life. Everything has been going well. A tongue-tied mechanic wins his girl with text messages & Welsh rarebit. A frightened teenager gets some much-needed sex ed with her chocolate-coated bananas. But then there is a letter from Martine, whose husband beats her, and Tannie Maria feels a pang of recognition and dread. This may be a problem that cooking can't solve. ($30, PB)

Journey Under the Midnight Sun By Keigo Higashino

When a man is found murdered in an abandoned building in Osaka in 1973, unflappable detective Sasagaki is assigned to the case. He begins to piece together the connection of two young people who are inextricably linked to the crime; the dark, taciturn son of the victim and the unexpectedly captivating daughter of the main suspect. Over the next twenty years we follow their lives as Sasagaki pursues the case—which remains unsolved—to the point of obsession. A classic mystery by the cult Japanese author of The Devotion of Suspect X. ($30, PB)

Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith ($33, PB) J. K. Rowling's alter ego Robert Galbraith returns with the 3rd in 'his' Cormoran Strike series. When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin Ellacott, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman's severed leg. Her boss, private detective Cormoran Strike, is less surprised but no less alarmed—he knows that any one of 4 people from his past is capable of sustained & unspeakable brutality. With the police focusing on the one suspect Strike is increasingly sure is not the perpetrator, he & Robin take matters into their own hands, and delve into the dark & twisted worlds of the other three men. But as more horrendous acts occur, time is running out for the two of them.

Rawblood by Catriona Ward ($30, PB) In 1910, 11 year-old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor. Iris and her father are the last of their name.

The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris believes it's because of a congenital disease, but in fact the Villarcas are haunted, through the generations, by her. She is white, skeletal and covered with scars. When a Villarca marries, when they love, when they have a child—she comes and death follows. When Iris is fifteen, she breaks her promise to remain alone all her life, and the consequences are immediate and horrific. A chilling ghost story for fans of Daphne du Maurier, Susan Hill and Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black, Romanzo Criminale by Giancarlo De Cataldo ($30, PB) It is 1977. A new force is terrorising Rome—a mob of reckless, ultraviolent youths known as La Banda della Magliana. As the gang ruthlessly take control of Rome's heroin trade, they begin an inexorable rise to power. Banda della Magliana intend to own the streets of Rome—unless their internal struggles tear them apart. Based on Rome's modern gangland history, Romanzo Criminale fearlessly confronts Italy's Age of Lead: war on the streets and terrorism, kidnappings and corruption at the highest levels of government.

The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty by Vendela Vida

While checking into her hotel, the woman is robbed of her wallet and passport—all of her money & identification. Though the police investigate, the woman senses an undercurrent of complicity between the hotel staff and the authorities. Stripped of her identity, she feels strangely liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone she chooses. A chance encounter with a movie producer leads to a job posing as a stand-in for a well-known film star, and soon she's inhabiting the actress's skin off set—going deeper into the Casablancan night and further from herself. Part literary mystery, part psychological thriller—an unforgettable novel that explores free will, power, and a woman's right to choose not her past, perhaps not her present, but certainly her future. ($28, PB)

The Scam by Janet Evanovich & Lee Goldberg

Nicolas Fox is a charming con man and master thief. Kate O'Hare is the FBI agent on his trail. At least that's what everyone thinks. In reality, they're secretly working together to bring down super-criminals.

Criminals like brutal casino magnate Evan Trace. The scam will take Fox and O'Hare from the Las Vegas strip, to the sun-soaked beaches of Hawaii, and into the dark back alleys of Macau. Their only backup—a self-absorbed actor, a Somali pirate, & an ex-soldier who believes a rocket launcher is the best way to solve every problem. ($29.99, PB)

For more than twenty years, artist Wendy Whiteley – Brett Whiteley’s muse, model and former wife – has worked to create an extraordinary public garden at the foot of her harbourside home in Sydney’s Lavender Bay. Written by one of Australia’s most acclaimed journalists, this is the story of how Whiteley slowly transformed an overgrown wasteland and, in the process, transformed herself.

From the streets of Liverpool to the pubs of London, from the punk explosion to his success with The Attractions and a solo career spanning four decades, Elvis Costello has left an indelible mark on the world of music. The drink, the drugs, the sex and the brilliant songwriting – this is Costello’s story in his own words.

Marooned in the damp and paradoxical realm known as Ireland, banker Claude is approached by a down-onhis-luck author Paul, who’s looking for his next subject. Under Paul’s fictionalising influence, Claude’s life gets steadily more exciting. But Paul’s plan is not what it seems…

Following his breakout hit Skippy Dies, Murray delivers a madcap examination of the deceptions carried out in the names of art, love and commerce.

Most nations don’t get a first chance to prosper. Australia is on its second.

The bestselling author of The Australian Moment asks the most important question confronting the country: how do we maintain our winning streak? Armed with new economic data and fresh interviews – including one of the last with Malcolm Fraser – Megalogenis explores history and crunches numbers to uncover who we are, and what we can become.

True?

They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper

by Bruce Robinson ($33, PB)

For over a hundred years, 'the mystery of Jack the Ripper' has been a source of unparalleled fascination and horror, spawning an army of obsessive theorists, and endless volumes purporting finally to reveal the identity of the brutal murderer who terrorised Victorian England. But what if there was never really any 'mystery' at all? What if the Ripper was always hiding in plain sight, deliberately leaving a trail of clues to his identity for anyone who cared to look, while cynically mocking those who were supposedly attempting to bring him to justice? 12 years in the writing, this is a literary high-wire act reminiscent of Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson, it is an expressionistic journey through the cesspools of late-Victorian society, a phantasmagoria of highly placed villains, hypocrites and institutionalised corruption.

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Biography

Second Half First by Drusilla Modjeska ($40, HB)

Beginning with the disastrous events of the night before her 40th birthday, Drusilla Modjeska looks back on her experiences of the past 30 years—what has shaped her writing, her reading & the way she has lived. A childhood in England, and her parents' difficult marriage. A young newlywed living with her husband in Papua New Guinea. A single woman arriving in Sydney in the 1970s, building close friendships with writers such as Helen Garner, with whom she lived in the bookish ‘house on the corner'. the lovers who would—sometimes briefly—derail her, and her return to Papua 30 years later to found a literacy program. In asking the candid questions about love and independence, the death of a partner, growing older, the bonds of friendship and family, Modjeska reassesses her life, her work, the importance to her of writers such as Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir, among many others. The result is a memoir that is at once intellectually provocative and deeply honest.

Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf

by Gerald Murnane ($29.99, PB)

T

here are few memorials to colonial businesswomen,

but if you know where to look you can find many traces of their presence as you wander the streets of Sydney. From milliners and dressmakers to ironmongers and booksellers; from publicans and boardinghouse keepers to butchers and taxidermists: these women have been hidden in the historical record but were visible to their

contemporaries. Catherine Bishop brings the stories of these entrepreneurial women to life, with fascinating details of their successes and failures, their determination and wilfulness, their achievements, their tragedies and the occasional juicy scandal.

P

atrick and Meg’s story is one of adventure; a road

trip with a difference. After building a happy sustainable life in regional Victoria they set off with Zephyr (10), Woody (1) and Zero their Jack Russell, on an epic 6,000km year-long cycling journey along Australia’s east coast. Their aim was to live as cheaply as possible – guerrilla camping, hunting, foraging

and bartering their permaculture skills, and living on a diet of free food, bush tucker, and the occasional fresh road kill.

They spent time in Aboriginal communities, joined an antifracking blockade, documented edible plants, and dodged speeding cars and trucks on the country’s most dangerous highways. The Art of Free Travel is the remarkable story of a rule-breaking year of ethical living.

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

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I never met anyone whose interest in racing matched my own. Both on and off the course, so to speak, I've enjoyed the company of many a racing acquaintance... I've read books, or parts of books, by persons who might have come close to being true racing friends of mine if ever we had met. For most of my long life, however, my enjoyment of racing has been a solitary thing: something I could never wholly explain to anyone else. As a boy, Gerald Murnane became obsessed with horse racing. He had never ridden a horse, nor seen a race. Yet he was fascinated by photos of horse races in the Sporting Globe, and by the incantation of horses' names in radio broadcasts of races. Murnane discovered in these races more than he could find in religion or philosophy: they were the gateway to a world of imagination..

Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink: Notes for a Memoir by Elvis Costello ($35, PB)

In a solo career spanning four decades, Elvis Costello has made himself a huge reputation through his catchy tunes, poetic lyrics and more than a few instances of bad behaviour. Now, having turned sixty, as one of music's elder statesmen, he is telling his story. From listening to his father singing The Beatles in their front room, to collaborating with hip-hop groups, Costello's memoir is a one-man history of British music. A warm, deep and genuine insight into life, it is rich with anecdotes about family, musicians, and the creation of his famous songs.

Reckoning: A Memoir by Magda Szubanski

In her biography Magda Szubanski describes her journey of self-discovery from a suburban childhood, haunted by the demons of her father's espionage activities in wartime Poland and by her secret awareness of her sexuality, to the complex dramas of adulthood and her need to find out the truth about herself and her family. With courage and compassion she addresses her own frailties and fears, and asks the big questions about life, about the shadows we inherit and the gifts we pass on. ($49.99, HB)

Henry and Banjo by James Knight

Both Henry Lawson & Andrew 'Banjo' Paterson were country born, just 3 years and 300 kilometres apart—Henry on the goldfields of Grenfell and Banjo on a property near Orange—but their paths to literary immortality took very different routes. Indeed at times their lives were ones of savage and all too tragic contrasts. Banjo, born into a life of comparative privilege, would rise from country boy to Sydney Grammar student, solicitor, journalist, war correspondent and revered man about town. Henry's formal education only began when his feminist mother finally won her battle for a local school, but illness and subsequent deafness would make continuing his lessons difficult, seeing him find work as a labourer, a coach painter and a journalist, all the while wrestling with poverty, alcoholism and mental illness. Both men would become household names during their lifetimes. Both would have regrets. ($45, HB)

Big Blue Sky: A Memoir by Peter Garrett ($49.99, HB)

From his idyllic childhood growing up in the northern suburbs of Sydney, to an early interest in equality and justice; from the height of 1960s culture shock at ANU to fronting iconic Australian band Midnight Oil; from his time as a galvanising activist for the environment to being the only unaligned Cabinet minister in two Labor governments, Peter Garrett has an extraordinary story to tell. He writes about his lifelong mission to protect the environment and his connection with Aboriginal people, about his love for his family and his passion for our country: what it means to him and what it can become.

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

by Jonathan Bate ($50, HB)

Described by Andrew Motion as, alongside Larkin, 'one of the two great poets of the last half of the last century', Ted Hughes towers among figures of recent world literature. A creative force of rare power and grace, Hughes's poetry engages with the mythical and natural worlds to reflect on the strength, vulnerability and beauty of being. Jonathan Bate's rich and compelling biography examines those 'places of high wonder' of which Hughes wrote as a teenager, and brings new depth and understanding to this most charismatic and fascinating of poets: his life, his poetry and of course, his relationships—most famously with iconic American poet Sylvia Plath, his wife, who committed suicide in 1963, and Assia Wevill, the woman he left Plath for, who herself committed suicide in 1969.

Interestingly Enough... The Life of Tom Keneally

by Stephany Evans Steggall ($49.99, HB)

For five decades Tom Keneally has been one of Australia's most loved literary figures. Celebrated as one of the world's finest writers and known especially for the Booker Prize–winning Schindler's Ark, he is also respected for his humanitarianism & commitment to republicanism and other causes. The breadth & richness of Keneally's life & work is explored in this engaging authorised biography. Beneath Keneally's warm and garrulous exterior is a complex man once intermittently troubled by depression and anxiety. The prolific author and popular raconteur has known many 'dark nights of the soul'. His commitment to Catholicism once led him to train for the priesthood, but serious doubts left him unable to fulfil that ambition. Instead, he became a haunted writer—and then an uninhibited storyteller.

Plain-Speaking Jane by Jane Caro ($35, PB) Jane Caro is known for saying what she thinks across the news and entertainment media. Unafraid to apply that razor-sharp insight to her own life, Caro reveals that she was not a model child or a faultless parent, and she's a better person for it; that asking for help is a skill worth mastering; and that in her long and successful career in advertising, she was bullied by some of the wittiest men in Australia In this memoir she talks frankly about her battle with anxiety, offering assurance and hope to the one-in-three Australian women affected by the condition—showing that anxiety is not a life sentence, and that on the other side lies the ultimate reward: the freedom to do as we please.

My Life with Wagner by Christian Thielemann

Over a distinguished career conducting some of the world's finest orchestras, Christian Thielemann has earned a reputation as the leading modern interpreter of Richard Wagner. In this memoir Thielemann retraces his journey with Wagner—from Berlin to Bayreuth via Venice, Hamburg and Chicago. The book combines reminiscence and analysis with revealing insights drawn from Thielemann's many years of experience as a Wagner conductor. Taking each opera in turn, his appraisal is illuminated by a deep affinity for the music, an intimate knowledge of the scores and the inside perspective of an outstanding practitioner.

And yet for all the adulation Wagner's art inspires in him, Thielemann does not shy away from unpalatable truths about the man himself, explaining why today he is venerated and reviled in equal measure. ($49.99, HB)

Now in B Format What Days Are For by Robert Dessaix, $20

Travel Writing

The Art of Free Travel: A frugal family adventure

by Patrick Jones & Meg Ulman ($30, PB)

Patrick, Meg and their family had built a happy, sustainable life in regional Victoria. But in late 2013, they found themselves craving an adventure: a road trip—so with Zephyr (10), Woody (1) & Zero their Jack Russell, they set off on a 6,000 km year-long cycling journey along Australia’s east coast, from Daylesford to Cape York & back. Guerrilla camping, hunting, foraging & bartering their permaculture skills, they lived on a diet of free food, bush tucker, and the occasional fresh road kill, spent time in Aboriginal communities, joined an anti-fracking blockade, documented edible plants & dodged speeding cars & trucks on the country’s most dangerous highways—this is the remarkable story of a rule-breaking year of ethical living.

An Improbable Friendship by Anthony David

The extraordinary true story of a secret 40 year friendship between two women who should have been bitter enemies—the beautiful Raymonda Tawil, the mother-in-law of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, & Ruth Dayan, widow of General Moshe Dayan, the most celebrated Jewish general since Joshua and the man who spent much of his military career hunting Arafat. The story of these two remarkable women's turbulent lives and their clandestine friendship, gives voice to Israelis and Palestinians caught up in the Middle East conflict. It also provides an insight into the Middle East's most influential leaders from two prominent women on either side of the conflict. Despite its danger, Ruth and Raymonda continue their friendship to this day—a testament not only to their affection for each other but also their joint commitment to seeing an end to the violence in the Middle East. ($35, PB)

Modern Love: The lives of John and Sunday Reed by Lesley Harding & Kendrah Morgan

Equal parts romance and tragedy, Modern Love explores the lives of John & Sunday Reed—champions of successive generations of Australian artists and writers, whose works and personalities they carefully curated to suit their artistic tastes and sexual passions. It is a story of rebellion against their privileged backgrounds and a bohemian existence marked by extraordinary achievements, intense heartbreak and enduring love, a remarkable partnership that changed all those who crossed the threshold into Heide and altered the course of art in Australia. ($45, HB)

A Mother's Story by Rosie Batty ($32.99, PB) Rosie Batty's 11 year old son was murdered by his father, Greg Anderson, in a violent incident in February 2014. Rosie had suffered years of family violence, and had had intervention and custody orders in place in an effort to protect herself and her son. She believes the killing was Greg's final act of control over her. Since the events of last February, Batty has become an outspoken crusader against domestic violence, and her advocacy work has forced an unprecedented national focus on family violence, with the Victorian Labor government establishing Australia's first royal commission into family violence, and committing a further $30 million over four years to protect women and children at high risk of family violence. A percentage of royalties from sales of this book are going to the Luke Batty Foundation.

The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson

SPECIAL PRICE! WAS $39.99, OUR PRICE $34.99. HB 20 years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to celebrate the green & kindly island that had become his adopted country. He now follows a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, by way of places that many people never get to, setting out to rediscover the wondrously beautiful, magnificently eccentric, endearingly unique country that he thought he knew but doesn't altogether recognise any more. Yet, despite Britain's occasional failings & more or less eternal bewilderments, Bill Bryson is still pleased to call this rainy island home. And not just because of the cream teas, a noble history & an extra day off at Christmas.

M Train by Patti Smith ($33, PB) M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafe where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is & the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past & present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations & inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York's Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud & Mishima. Braiding despair with hope & consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature and coffee.

Kissed By A Deer: A Tibetan Odyssey

by Margi Gibb ($29.95, PB)

Margi Gibb’s much-loved father dies and, with her immediate family largely gone, her life is changed irrevocably. Immersing herself more deeply in art and music, she travels to America to study the sacred art of the mandala, exploring the wisdom traditions of Indigenous Indian peoples in the process. Then after a serendipitous encounter back in Australia she travels to Dharamsala to care for children in an after school program at a Tibetan women's handicraft cooperative. Her underlying passion is to initiate guitar lessons for Tibetan refugees, but her developing bonds with two very different Tibetan men, Tenzin and Yonten, change her life in complex and enduring ways. Eventually she journeys to Tibet.

Paris in Style by Janelle McCulloch ($39.95, PB)

Janelle McCulloch thought she knew most of the best places in which to stay, wander and explore. But the more time she spent in Paris, the more she realised how much there was still to discover.

In Paris in Style she reveals this city's most surprising and fascinating fashion, design and style destinations.

The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe between the Wars by Joseph Roth ($35, HB)

In the 1920s and 30s, Joseph Roth travelled extensively in Europe, leading a peripatetic life living in hotels, and writing about the towns through which he passed. Incisive, nostalgic, curious and sharply observed his pieces paint a picture of a continent racked by change yet clinging to tradition. From the 'compulsive' exercise regime of the Albanian army, the rickety industry of the new oil capital of Galicia, and 'split and scalped' houses of Tirana forced into modernity, to the individual and idiosyncratic characters that Roth encounters in his hotel stays, these tender and quietly dazzling vignettes form a series of literary postcards written from a bygone world, creeping towards world war; introduced and translated by Michael Hofmann.

438 Days: An Incredible True Story of Survival at Sea by Jonathan Franklin ($33, PB)

studded island.

On 17 November 2012, Salvador Alvarenga left the coast of Mexico for a two-day fishing trip. A vicious storm killed his engine and the current dragged his boat deep out to sea. Alvarenga would not touch solid ground again for 14 months. When he was washed ashore on January 30 2014, he had drifted over 9,000 miles. He considered suicide on multiple occasions. But Alvarenga developed a method of survival that kept his body and mind intact long enough for the Pacific Ocean to spit him up onto a remote palm-

9

books for kids to young adults

compiled by Lynndy Bennett, our children's correspondent

for the very young

Hairy Maclary Treasury: The Complete Adventures of Hairy Maclary: Book & CD by Lynley Dodd ($40, HB) Alphabet Book by Elsa Beskow ($29.95 HB) All ten classic Hairy Maclary stories are now in a single volume of mischievous escapades: an ideal gift for fans of this perennial favourite, and a perfect introduction for future generations. Accompanying the book is a CD of the collection, with each story introduced by Lynley Dodd and narrated by Kyle Pryor. We expect this keepsake treasury to trot out of the gate and into people’s hearts. Lynndy

Born in 1874, Swedish illustrator Elsa Beskow inspired generations of illustrators, with her clear colourful pictures, full of whimsy, yet cheerfully robust and reassuringly real. Her books of flower children and fairies are magical, and her pastoral vision with realistic animals and beautiful flowers are unsurpassed (although imitated by many). We always stock her classic picture books in Gleebooks, and now there’s a new alphabet book, with single pictures taken from her many books. It’s a dear little square book, beautifully produced, a must for Beskow fans, and a great introduction to the work of this wonderful illustrator. Louise

Some Things I've Lost by Cybele Young ($36, HB)

fiction

The First Case: Book 1 Detective Gordon

by Ulf Nilsson (ill) Gitte Spee (tr) Julia Marshall

Swedish author Nilsson brings his distinctively gentle whimsy to this philosophical mystery about Detective Gordon, an ageing toad, who is trying to catch the thief who is stealing Squirrel’s nuts from his tree in the forest. But sleuthing can be a trying business, standing in the snow while keeping the tree under surveillance, and Detective Gordon takes on youthful assistant Buffy, an energetic, nimble little mouse. The interaction between them is absolutely delightful, the humour dry and understated as Detective Gordon imparts his wisdom to the enthusiastic Buffy. Oh, and there are lots of cakes and cups of tea! The lovely illustrations round off this engaging tale beautifully. Innocent as the Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel; likened to a collaboration between A A Milne and Agatha Christie, this is highly recommended for independent readers tackling longer stories. ($16, PB) Mandy & Lynndy

non fiction

The Epic Book of Epicness by Adam Frost

Check your worryometer! This book presents all the worrisome, astounding and weird trivia a fact hound of 7+ can handle. Did you know that you can see a red waterfall in Antarctica? Why is it red? What sort of sharks are harmless to humans? How long does it take to send a message home from each planet in our solar system? Read this humorous pictorial book and impress everyone with your epic knowledge. (15, PB) Lynndy

Shackleton’s Journey

by William Grill ($42, HB)

Using a rich assortment of visual lists, double page spreads, maps and vignettes, William Grill has created a most gripping account of Shackleton’s journey in picture book form. Using lots of the white page to create an icy backdrop, plus a deep Arctic blue, the pictures are highly involving, and despite the whimsicality of the style, the coloured pencil drawings completely capture the breadth and enormity of the journey and the landscape. The highly informative text is hugely extended by the brilliant illustrations, and the marvellous production of the book—the creamy stock, the fabric spine, and the extraordinary endpapers, all contribute to its sense of considered authenticity, while not being too worthy or overly earnest. The pictures of the ocean are without a doubt the best I’ve ever seen in a picture book. Louise (It’s little wonder this book is so highly acclaimed, winning multiple awards including the 2015 Kate Greenaway Medal for distinguished illustration in a children’s book. LB).

Multi-award winner Young’s latest picture book features her distinctive gorgeous Japanese paper sculptures in an exploration of metamorphosis. Twelve everyday inanimate objects, easily mislaid, are catalogued on the verso pages. Folding out the recto pages reveals each object transforming into an aquatic creature and escaping our mundane concerns into an ocean habitat. A messenger bag becomes a sea urchin; spectacles become a vivid yet delicate fish. With minimal text, the focus of the book is very much the art, in which older readers will recognise the philosophical aspect of change, nature and interconnectedness. I like her earlier books and this is in another realm; Young’s work deserves exposure beyond her native Canada. Lynndy

teen fiction

The Hunger Games: Book 1 by Susanne Collins (20, PB)

My dad and I have a rule. If we have something we want the other to read or watch, we must first read or watch the first part of whatever it may be. In this instance, dad got me to read the first chapter of The Hunger Games. Considering how long it has been out, I was surprised at myself that I had not read it already. But nevertheless, dad asked me to read the first chapter and I did… and got hooked. It was such a great book about a girl that comes from a poor family. About odds not going in her favour from a thousand to one. What can I say! It is a fantastic book as 99% of teenagers will tell you. So if you haven’t already, come down to Gleebooks and pick up a copy. Like you seriously won't put the book down. Taj (14)

Queen of Shadows: Book 4, Throne of Glass series

by Sarah J. Maas (16, PB)

This series just keeps on getting better and better! Sarah J. Maas doesn't disappoint with her latest addition to the Throne of Glass series, packed with more action, romance and mystery than ever before. Celaena Sardothien will take you on a wild ride right from page one....just don't forget to breathe! As far as epic fantasy heroes go, I'm sticking Celaena up there with the best and if you don't believe me, read the series and tell me otherwise. Book five—soon—Ms Maas, please don't keep us waiting too long! Hannah L

Zeroes: Book 1, Zeroes Trilogy

by Scott Westerfeld, Margot Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti (20, PB)

At just under 500 pages this is a fat and juicy beginning to a new fantasy series crammed with unpredictable suspense and drama. Oh, and superpowers. Superpowers that are enhanced abilities in the six teenagers who as a group are powerful enough to take on criminals: drug runners, Russian mobsters, and assorted minor offenders. Told from the viewpoints of each of the six, this first instalment showcases their particular skills. Scam has an omniscient voice, an entity of its own, getting him into or out of trouble. Crash can command electronic networks, although she prefers not to. Blind Flicker can ‘see’ through others’ eyes. Anon’s power has its tragic side—being completely forgettable has estranged him from his family who don’t remember him at all. Wealthy Nate perceives people’s true nature, and can manipulate them accordingly. Into this fractured group comes Kelsie, who can enhance crowd emotions. Uniting to extricate Scam from his latest disaster, the group discover they’ve greater control over their gifts when they collaborate. Unfortunately for their targets, this control also magnifies the teens’ power. Standby action! (And a bit of romance.) Lynndy

Craft Corner

Colour my world

We have long stocked a wide range of colour pencils, crayons, and watercolour paints. And now that the whole world seems to be colouring in, these are running out the door—well, rolling maybe. There are colour pencils, and there are colour pencils.

Cheaper ones are fine, they come in lots of different colours and they colour in. But you get what you pay for in a pencil, and a slightly more expensive pencil is an investment. The coloured lead won’t break so easily, making it easier to sharpen, it’s far smoother and creamier to use, and there is a depth of shade and patina that a cheaper pencil just can’t produce. We love German Lyra pencils, and stock several sizes and styles, in packets and separately, as well as the Koh-I-Noor Progresso pencils that don’t have a wooden casing, but are solid colour lead (these sometimes break if dropped, but are sensational to use, and can just be resharpened) $19.95 for a pack of 12, and the Tate colouring pencils in a smart tin of 12 (also made by Koh-I-Noor), $19.95. I’m also very taken with Micador’s new Aqua Painters—artist’s quality paint pens that come in an array of beautiful colours, perhaps not for the very young as a certain degree of dexterity is required to get the most from them, $16.95 for a pack of 6. Louise

10

Food, Health Garden

After Cancer by Dr Ranjana Srivastava ($10, PB)

As medical care improves, Australians are surviving cancer in increasing numbers. But there is little information about life post-treatment— what are some common themes and long-term side effects that people can expect to encounter? After Cancer demystifies the aftermath of treatment, delving into what survivorship really entails. Oncologist Dr Ranjana Srivastava also introduces a useful survivorship template. Using available evidence and a good dose of common sense, she outlines how survivors can seize control of their life. By asking the right questions of their providers, survivors can find their way back to clarity.

Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

by Elizabeth Gilbert ($29.99, PB)

Elizabeth Gilbert shares her wisdom & understanding of creativity, shattering the perceptions of mystery & suffering that surround the process—and showing just how easy it can be. By sharing stories from her own life, as well as those from her friends & the people that have inspired her, Gilbert challenges the reader to embrace their curiosity, tackle what they most love & face down what they most fear. Whether you long to write a book, create art, cope with challenges at work, embark on a long-held dream, or simply to make your everyday life more vivid and rewarding, Big Magic will take you on a journey of exploration filled with wonder & unexpected joys.

Cornersmith: Recipes from the cafe and picklery

by Alex Elliott-Howery & James Grant ($49.99, HB)

From the day Cornersmith cafe opened in Sydney's inner west the locals flocked in, and it has since grown to incorporate a picklery, cooking school & a produce-trading system where customers can swap home-grown produce for a coffee or a jar of pickles. This book brings together favourite dishes from the award-winning cafe, covering everything from breakfasts, lunches & dinners to desserts, as well as recipes for their most popular pickles, jams, compotes, chutneys, relishes & fermented foods.

Rome by Katie & Giancarlo Caldesi ($49.99, HB)

All roads lead to Rome, and all roads in the Eternal City itself lead to a delicious meal. Here, Katie and Giancarlo unearth the city's hidden gems - recipes that have been handed down through the generations, as well as new, exciting dishes inspired by Romans from all walks of life. The duo present their interpretations of classic dishes, like Katie's spicy cheese and pepper pasta, alongside family favorites like sea bass with parma ham and sage.

Wendy Whiteley and the Secret Garden

by Janet Hawley ($79.99, HB)

For more than twenty years Wendy Whiteley has worked to create a public garden at the foot of her harbourside home in Sydney's Lavender Bay. When her husband Brett Whitely died, followed by the death of their daughter nine years later, Wendy threw her grief and creativity into making an enchanting hidden oasis out of derelict land owned by the NSW Government. This glorious guerrilla garden is Wendy's living artwork, designed with daubs of colour, sinuous shapes and shafts of light..

Guillaume: Food for Family

by Guillaume Brahimi ($79.99, HB)

French–Australian chef Guillaume Brahimi prepares a laidback lunch for restaurateur Justin Hemmes at his harbourside home, cooks up a Greek feast at the heritage cottage of The Apprentice's Mark Bouris, and serves a hearty winter luncheon hosted by actor Cate Blanchett in an iconic country woolshed. He then shares his own family's favourite recipes, relaxed, easy meals designed to satisfy a household of hungry children, including Crispy potato cakes with speck, garlic & thyme. Chicken risotto with peas & lemon, & Pineapple crumble..

The Nordic Cookbook by Magnus Nilsson

This is the definitive guide to the rich and varied cooking of the Nordic countries: Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway & Sweden. It features 600 simple recipes—from the familiar (smoked salmon, meatballs & lingonberry jam) and less familiar (rose-hip soup, pork roasted with prunes, and juniper & honey beer) aspects of Nordic cuisine, collected & developed by chef Magnus Nilsson. ($59.95, HB)

Tacopedia: The Taco Encyclopedia ($39.99, PB)

by Deborah Holtz & Juan Carlos Mena

This book features 100 recipes for all of the components of the taco, from fillings and tortillas to salsas and sauces. Illustrated with 250 photographs, and accompanied by interviews, stories, illustrations, graphics, maps and more that bring the vibrancy of the taco, and its homeland, to life.

Preserving: Conserving, Salting, Smoking, Pickling by Mathiot & Dusoulier ($39.95, HB)

A beautifully illustrated comprehensive guide to preserving fruit, vegetables, meat & fish from France's favourite food author Ginette Mathiot. 350 classic French recipes that shows both home cooks & chefs the traditional techniques for sweet & savory preserving, as well as smoking, pickling & making charcuterie. Revised and updated by Clothilde Dusoullier, famed for her Chocolate & Zucchini website.

The Australian Beekeeping Manual

by Robert Owen ($50, HB)

The book is aimed at both the novice & experienced beekeeper in Australia and explains in detail the steps required to manage colonies of bees. Supported by over 350 photographs and drawings, each action to be performed is explained in detail with photographs showing the steps as well as the final result. This is a comprehensive manual that includes material not available in other Australian, North American or European books and is the ultimate Australian reference source.

Luke Nguyen's France ($59.95, HB)

From the bustling streets of Paris & the historic towns of St Malo & Strasbourg, to the coastal cities of Nice & Marseilles, Luke Nguyen meets the chefs & locals to hear their stories & passion for good food, and sample their regional specialities along the way. Alongside the French recipes he encounters, Luke shares his own interpretations of French-Vietnamese fusion food: from Vietnamese steak tartare & salt & pepper squid, to crispy skin chicken with master stock & pan-fried baby sole.

Adam Liaw's Asian Cookery School ($49.99, HB)

Adam Liaw explains the heart & soul of Asian cuisines through hundreds of tips and insights and the kind of small wisdoms passed down from generation to generation that you would never find in a recipe alone. With his help, it won't take long for homemade dumplings, pad thai, crispy skin chicken, lemongrass beef and green tea ice cream to become your new everyday family favourites.

The Little Veggie Patch Co: DIY Garden Projects ($45, PB)

Practical projects for small-space edible gardening and backyard fun from the much-loved Little Veggie Patch Co. DIY Garden Projects contains 38 projects of varied complexity, making this book the perfect gift for a gardening beginner or an experienced green-thumb.

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events

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Event—6 for 6.30

All Fall Down in conv. with Michael Robotham All Fall Down is the gripping epic finale to Mathew Condon’s galvanising true crime trilogy about crooked cops, bagmen and blackmail, and the muck and mire that has made Queensland what it is today.

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Event—6 for 6.30 Shirley Barrett

Rush Oh! in conv. with TBC When Mary Davidson, the eldest daughter of a whaling family in Eden, New South Wales, sets out to chronicle the particularly difficult season of 1908, the story she tells is poignant and hilarious, filled with drama and misadventure.

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Vivien Johnson—Talk

Streets of Papunya Vivien Johnson reveals the whole history of Papunya as a site of art production, from Albert Namatjira’s final paintings, executed in Papunya days before his death in 1959, through Papunya’s glory days of the 1970s & 80s, the dark time when it was known as ‘carpetbagging capital of the desert’ to its renaissance.

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Event—6 for 6.30 Charlotte Wood

The Natural Way of Things in conv. with Georgia Blain Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in an abandoned property in the middle of a desert in a story of 2 friends, sisterly love & courage—a gripping exploration of contemporary misogyny & corporate control, & of what it means to hunt & be hunted.

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Alex Elliott-Howery and James Grant

Cornersmith: Recipes From the Café and Picklery DINNER TO BE CONFIRMED

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Eat First, T in conv. with N Beth persuades he on a road trip aro home, Malaysia. S trace their honeym before, but their quite work out

Matthew Condon

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Event—6 for 6.30 Stephen Knight

The Politics of Myth in conv. with David Marr Stephen Knight studies 9 figures still vividly alive, all of them appearing in 21st century film & television.

Analysing how they relate to the major themes of Power, Resistance & Knowledge, he shows how fact & fiction mix to help us explore & understand the complexities of our world.

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Robin De

Antiquity Imagined legacy of Egypt Near Launcher: Ro Robin Derricourt' depth how ancien surrounding lands ously and seductiv Western im

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The Uncanny L Panagakos: A story of unrequ and finding our p which explores d those hidden plac hea

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Drusilla M

The Second in conv. with Su Beginning with the of the night before day, in Second H Modjeska looks b riences of the past have shaped her w and the way s

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All events listed are $12/$9 concession. Book Launches are free.

Gleeclub members free entry to events at 49 Glebe Pt Rd October Events are held upstairs at #49 Glebe Point Road unless otherwise noted.

Bookings—Phone: (02) 9660 2333, Email: events@gleebooks.com.au, Online: www.gleebooks.com.au/events 2015

RSDAY

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FRIDAY 2

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Talk Later Nicholas Jose er ageing parents ound their former She intends to remoon of 45 years r journey doesn't as she planned.

—6 for 6.30 erricourt

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In November

SUNDAY 4

Wednesday November 4th, 6 for 6.30 Annabel Crabb—Special Delivery Host of top-rating ABC TV show Kitchen Cabinet, Annabel Crabb, shares recipes for fabulous food that travels.

Thursday November 5th, 6 for 6.30

Mark Tedeschi

Kidnapped: The Crime That Shocked a Nation ark Tedeschi investigates Stephen Bradley, who perpetrated the 1960 kidnapping for ransom and murder of 8 year-old Sydney schoolboy, Graeme Thorne.

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Event—3.30 for 4

Orators Vagabond Press Bob Ellis, Bill Charlton, AnAnimal Property Rights: A Theory of Asia Pacific Series #7 & #8 d: The remarkable drew Sharp, Monroe Reimers Habitat Rights for Wild Animals 3-Poet volumes from Vietnam and the Ancient & Mark Connelly with Robbie Launcher: Penny Sharpe MLC East and the Philippines Murphy on keyboard This book is the first attempt to exobyn Williams

's book shows in nt Egypt and the s have so continuvely tantalised the magination.

—6 for 6.30 h Hill

Love of Jimmy : A Novella uited love, longing, place in the world, dark desires and ces of the human art.

—6 for 6.30

John Hadley

$28/$22 (concession & gleeclub) tend liberal property rights theory Poems of Lê Văn Tài, Nguyễn Tôn Hiệt & Phan Quỳnh Trâm Includes two glasses of wine across the species barrier to animals. and 90 minutes, plus 15 minute interval.

It broadens the traditional focus of Poems of Carlomar Arcangel An evening of immense, influential animal rights beyond basic rights to life & bodily integrity to rights to the Daoana, Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta utterance with attendant songs and underscored music. natural areas in which animal live. & Allan Justo Pastrana

16 Launch—6 for 6.30 Catherine Bishop

Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney Launcher: Kristina Keneally A history that populates the streets of colonial Sydney with entrepreneurial businesswomen earning their living in a variety of small—and sometimes surprising—enterprises.

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Event—6 for 6.30

An Evening Without Clive James d Half First Michael Kirby, Terry Clarke, usan Wyndham Bob Ellis, Andrew Sharp, and e disastrous events Kate Reid on keyboard her fortieth birth-

Modjeska

17 Launch—3.30 for 4 Rosa Fedele

The Red Door Launcher: Sekneh Beckett What would you do if you began to suspect one of your tenants could be the perpetrator of a vicious double murder committed over thirty years ago? A spellbinding tale, with an immigrant’s tragedy woven into its centre.

—3.30 for 4 24 Launch Flavia Ursino and

18 Launch—3.30 for 4

Vagabond Press The Noel Rowe Poetry Award presentation

This award is in memory of Australian poet and academic Noel Rowe— a celebration of his commitment to and support of Australian poetry.

This biennial award is for the publication of a first manuscript by an emerging poet of any age.

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Event—2.30

McCulloch’s Fundraising Kevin Coleman Art Parade for Indigenous Monkey Business: A Story of Literacy Soulmates and Primates Paintings, barks & ochres Launcher: TBC $28/$22 (concession & gleeclub) from 25 +Aboriginal art cen27 year old Estelle Goldstein is sent Half First Drusilla Includes two glasses of wine tres to raise funds for Indigon an assignment to investigate the back on the expe80 minutes, plus 20 minute interval. devastation of AIDS in South Africa. enous literacy t thirty years that

writing, her reading An evening of Clive James' verse and There she meets virologist Doctor song, with a sprinkling of memoir Mabunda who harbours the guilt of she has lived. and biography. a dark past.

30 Launch—6 for 6.30 Dinesh Wadiwel

The War Against Animals Launcher: TBC Dinesh Wadiwel argues that our mainstay relationships with billions of animals are essentially hostile. The War against Animals asks us to interrogate this sustained violence across its intersubjective, institutional and epistemic dimensions.

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10% of sales will go to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation

Event—6 for 6.30 Peter Garrett

Big Blue Sky: A Memoir in conv. with TBC The provocative, entertaining, impassioned and inspiring memoir of Midnight Oil frontman, environmental activist and politician—a truly remarkable Australian.

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Granny's Good Reads with Sonia Lee

I have been a Walking Granny this month. First I read Walking Away: Further Travels with a Troubadour on the South West Path by Simon Armitage, and then reread Walking Home, Armitage's account of his gruelling walk down the Pennine Way. He stops at prearranged places for poetry readings and pays for his travels by passing round a big woollen sock for coins, notes and the inevitable humorist’s offering of Elastoplast. In the latest book he starts at Porlock, where the 'Person' lived who interrupted Coleridge when he was writing Kubla Khan, and travels 250 miles on the South West Path to Lands End. He has a poet’s gift for vivid description of people, places and weather. A 4WD is 'Politburo black' and rooks 'come flapping and cronking like a pantomime funeral party'. His wife and young daughter, his Mum and Dad, and his college chum Slug have cameos, but my favourite walk-on is Josephine. She was living a 'chaotic life' on the Pennine Way with a boyfriend and a flock of geese, when one day the geese escaped and she was compelled to ask a bad-tempered farmer to help pen them up again. A week later she moved in with the farmer, and not long after they were married—he being 86 and she 42. The old boy weaned her from her chaotic substances and she started writing poetry. Sadly Armitage now has a new gig as Professor of Poetry at Oxford and says that this was his last Troubadour Tour. A shame, as these are books to cherish and dip into often.

While still in walking mode I reread two favourites by Robert Macfarlane: The Old Ways and The Wild Places. A friend of mine reads them with the help of Google Earth, but I prefer to let the words weave their magic around the wild places and Macfarlane’s emotional response to them. An occasional walking companion of Macfarlane's was Roger Deakin. He lived in a house with a moat and swam every waterway in England—which he wrote about in Waterlog— also well worth reading. Macfarlane’s latest book, Landmarks, is about the power of language to shape our sense of place––it's on my wish list for when I turn 80 at the end of the year.

Yet another walking book I meandered through is The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream by Katharine Norbury. After the miscarriage of a much wanted baby Katharine sets out—sometimes alone, sometimes with daughter Evie—to follow a river to its source, and then to find her birth mother by returning to the convent where she was abandoned as a baby. Both quests are full of surprises. This is a beautiful book, combining nature writing with personal history—with charming art work by both the author and her daughter. Philip Pullman says it is 'beautifully written, darting here and there like a kingfisher over a stream'. It will linger long in my memory.

I also enjoyed The Dust That Falls From Dreams by Louis de Bernières, a family saga set around World War 1 and––I can’t believe I read this but I did––17 Carnations by Andrew Morton, about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor ... and the horrible people they schmoozed with before and during World War 2. The photographs are a revelation.

Sonia

Country Women and the Colour Bar: Grassroots activism and the Country Women’s Association by Jennifer Jones ($39.95, PB)

In the 1950s and 1960s, in towns across NSW, Aboriginal women joined specially created Aboriginal branches of the CWA. This book offers insights into the experience of ordinary Aboriginal & white rural women as they participated in beauty contests, cookery, handicraft lessons & baby contests.

It reveals how Aboriginal assimilation policy met everyday reality as these rural women broke with the established segregation in an unprecedented fashion. Working together the women made significant gains for Aboriginal communities prior to Aboriginal people’s widespread access to citizen’s rights. Some prominent Australians feature in these extraordinary stories: Jessie Street, Charles Perkins, Rachel Mundine & Purth Moorhouse.

Respectable Radicals: A History of the National Council of Women in Australia, 1896–2006 Marion Quartly, Judith Smart ($39.95, PB)

For much of the 20th century, the National Council of Women of Australia was the peak body representing women to government in Australia, and through the International Council of Women, to the world. This history of NCWA tells the story of mainstream feminism in Australia, of the long struggle for equality at home and at work which is still far from achieved.

In these days when women can no longer be imagined as speaking with one voice, and women as a group have no ready access to government, we still need something of the optimistic vision of the leaders of NCWA. Respectable in hat and gloves to the 1970s and beyond, they politely persisted with the truly radical idea that women the world over should be equal with men.

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Australian Studies

Australia's Second Chance by George Megalogenis

Most nations don't get a 1st chance to prosper. Australia is on its 2nd. Showing that our future is in our foundation, Australia's Second Chance goes back to 1788, the first contact between locals & migrants, to bring us a unique & fascinating view of the key events of our past right through to the present day. With newly available economic data & fresh interviews with former leaders (including the last major interview with Malcolm Fraser), George Megalogenis crunches the numbers & weaves our history into a compelling thesis, chronicling our dialogue with the world and bringing fresh insight into the urgent question of who we are, and what we can become. ($34.99, PB)

Sit back with a short black, $6.99 each

The Australian Disease: On the Decline of Love and the Rise of Non-Freedom by Richard Flanagan Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice by Helen Garner Fat City by Karen Hitchcock; Booze Territory by Anna Krien The Brave Ones: East Timor, 1999 by John Birmingham The One Day by David Malouf; Killing the Black Dog by Les Murray Tradition, Truth & Tomorrow by Galarrwuy Yunupingu Prosper: A Voyage at Sea by Simon Leys The War of the Worlds by Noel Pearson

All Fall Down by Matthew Condon ($32.99, PB) In 1983, the soon-to-be-knighted Police Commissioner Terry Lewis continues to turn a blind eye to the operation of The Joke, a highly organised system of graft payments from illegal gambling, prostitution and illicit drugs. As the tentacles of this fraudulent vice network spread, the fabric holding together the police, judiciary and political system starts to unravel. All Fall Down offers an unprecedented insight into the Fitzgerald Inquiry and Lewis's subsequent years in prison, and explores the real story behind the dramatic exit of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Drawing from interviews with key players who have, until now, been afraid to speak publicly, this is the gripping finale to Three Crooked Kings and Jacks and Jokers.

Australia and the Monarchy by David Hill

Since Captain James Cook first claimed NSW for King George III in 1770, the pulse of the nation can be measured by the strength of its attachment to an aristocratic bloodline on the other side of the world. Queen Victoria was more revered in Australia the longer she reigned, even though she'd never seen the place & showed little interest in it. When her son Prince Alfred visited in 1867, on the first royal tour the country had seen, he was received rapturously, & nearly assassinated. In 1954 Australia was gripped by royal fever when newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II landed on its shores for the first time; the republican movement grew in the late 20th century alongside Australians' adoration for Princess Diana; and now, with the popularity of William, Kate, George and Charlotte, the monarchy looks set to enter the hearts and minds of a new generation of Australians. What is the magic the royals hold over Australians?—David Hill guides the reader through this most peculiar state of affairs. ($35, PB)

The Long Haul: Lessons from public life

by John Brumby ($35, PB)

The Long Haul distils a series of practical lessons on leadership and public life from John Brumby's thirty years in politics. It offers insights into the challenges and opportunities Australia currently faces and argues for real political reform, a different future for our federation and strong leadership in a world in transition.

Linda by Noel Beddoe ($29.95, PB)

In a small Riverina township of Whitton in the 1950s, an unmarried white woman entered hospital to give birth. Her baby was Aboriginal; the father's identity was unknown. The young mother checked herself out as soon as she could, leaving her newborn daughter behind. From these humble beginnings in country NSW, Linda grew to become a successful teacher, then a leader in a vital community organisation, an inspiring political leader, Director General of a state department, and was an outstandingly successful minister in NSW government while her party crumbled around her.

But while her professional life flourished, her personal world imploded, a victim of prolonged domestic violence, left unsupported to bring-up two children. This is the story of a woman who has overcome extraordinary adversity to become a great leader in the Australian community, described by her biographer as 'the most remarkable woman I've ever met'.

Now in Paperback Australians 3: Flappers to Vietnam by Thomas Keneally, $35

Politics

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People? by John Kay ($33, PB)

We all depend on the finance sector for our everyday affairs. But these roles comprise only a tiny sliver of the sector's activity: the vast majority of lending is within the finance sector. What is the purpose of this activity? And why is it so profitable? Industry insider John Kay argues that the finance world's perceived profitability is not the creation of new wealth, but the sector's appropriation of wealth—of other people's money. The financial sector, he shows, has grown too large, detached itself from ordinary business and everyday life, and has become an industry that mostly trades with itself, talks to itself, and judges itself by reference to standards which it has itself generated.

And the outside world has itself adopted those standards, bailing out financial institutions that have failed all of us through greed and mismanagement.

The Economist Pocket World in Figures 2016

The 25th annual edition of this perennial favourite has been completely updated, revised and expanded with many new features, including a section exploring the huge global changes since its inception in 1991.

Full of facts and figures about the world today - on subjects as diverse as geography, population and demographics, business, finance and the economy, transport, tourism and the environment, society, culture and crime - it is a mine of fascinating data that will both inform and entertain. ($25, HB)

Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio

by Misha Glenny ($35, PB)

His name was Antonio, but they would call him Nem. From the infamous favela of Rocinha in Rio, he was a hardworking young father forced to make a decision that would turn his world upside down.

Nemesis is the story of an ordinary man who became the king of the largest slum in Rio, the head of a drug cartel and perhaps Brazil's most wanted criminal. A man who tried to bring welfare and justice to a playground of gang culture and destitution, while everyone around him drew guns and partied. Spanning rainforests and high-security prisons, filthy slums and glittering shopping malls, this is the story of a country's journey into the global spotlight, and the battle for the beautiful but damned city of Rio, as it struggles to break free from a tangled web of corruption, violence, drugs and poverty.

Sustainability by Kent E. Portney ($36.95, PB) The word 'sustainability' has been connected to everything from a certain kind of economic development to corporate promises about improved supply sourcing. At its heart, Kent Portney explains, sustainability focuses on the use & depletion of natural resources. It is not the same as environmental protection or natural resource conservation; it is more about finding some sort of steady state so that the earth can support both human population & economic growth.

He looks at political opposition to the promotion of sustainability, which usually questions the need for sustainability or calls its costs unacceptable; collective & individual consumption of material goods & resources & to what extent they must be curtailed to achieve sustainability; the role of the private sector, & the co-opting of sustainability by corporations; government policy on sustainability at the international, national, & subnational levels; and how cities could become models for sustainability action.

Metadata by Jeffrey Pomerantz ($32.95, PB)

When 'metadata' became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was 'only' collecting metadata about phone calls—information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location—and not recordings of the conversations themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems? Pomerantz explains what metadata is, and why it exists. He distinguishes among different types of metadata—descriptive, administrative, structural, preservation, and use—and examines different users and uses of each type. He discusses the technologies that make modern metadata possible, and he speculates about metadata's future. By the end of the book, readers will see metadata everywhere. Because, Pomerantz warns us, it's metadata's world, and we are just living in it.

The Endtimes of Human Rights

by Stephen Hopgood ($42.95, PB)

We are living through the endtimes of the civilising mission. The ineffectual International Criminal Court & its disastrous first prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, along with the failure in Syria of the Responsibility to Protect are the latest pieces of evidence not of transient misfortunes but of fatal structural defects in international humanism.

Whether it is the increase in deadly attacks on aid workers, the torture & 'disappearing' of al-Qaeda suspects by American officials, the flouting of international law by states such as Sri Lanka & Sudan, or the shambles of the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Phnom Penh, the prospect of one world under secular human rights law is receding. What seemed like a dawn is in fact a sunset.

Stephen Hopgood makes a plea for a new understanding of where hope lies for human rights, a plea that mourns the promise but rejects the reality of universalism in favour of a less predictable encounter with the diverse realities of today's multipolar world.

History

The House by the Lake by Thomas Harding

In the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding travelled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a small house by a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. It had been her a holiday home for her and her family, but much more—a sanctuary, a refuge.

In the 1930s, she had been forced to leave the house, fleeing to England as the Nazis swept to power. Speaking to neighbours and villagers, visiting archives, unearthing secrets that had lain hidden for decades. Slowly he began to piece together the lives of the five families who had lived there – a wealthy landowner, a prosperous Jewish family, a renowned composer, a widower and her children, a Stasi informant. All had made the house their home, and all – bar one – had been forced out. The house had been the site of domestic bliss and of contentment, but also of terrible grief and tragedy.

It had weathered storms, fires and abandonment, witnessed violence, betrayals and murders, had withstood the trauma of a world war, and the dividing of a nation.

This is a groundbreaking and revelatory new history of Germany over a tumultuous century, told through the story of a small wooden house. ($35, PB)

Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler by Mark Riebling ($35, PB)

Intelligence expert Mark Riebling uses a wealth of recently uncovered documents to redraw the conventional image of wartime Pope Pius XII, who, in his account, was not Hitler's lackey, but an active anti-Nazi spymaster. Using documents recently released by the Vatican Secret Archives and the British Foreign Office, Riebling shows that the Church's wartime campaign against Hitler was far more extensive than ever thought — and that many actions were intended to undermine the Nazi regime, and were approved by Pius XII himself. In the end, Pius XII was neither a righteous gentile nor Hitler's Pope. He was a politician, at a time when the world needed a prophet.

Now in B Format The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are by Michael Pye, $25 World Without End: The Global Empire of Philip II

by Hugh Thomas, $27 The Making of Home: The 500-Year Story of How Our Houses Became Homes by Judith Flanders, $23 History's People: Personalities and the Past

by Margaret MacMillan ($33, PB)

Margaret MacMillan gives her own personal selection of the memorable figures of the past, women and men, who have changed the course of history and even directed the currents of their times. The actions of Hitler, Stalin and Thatcher had epic, resounding consequences, but there are other ways to shape the course of history: those like Samuel de Champlain, the dreamers, explorers or adventurers who stand out in history for who they were as much as for what they did; or observers like Michel de Montaigne, who kept the notes and diaries that bring the past to life for us.

The Lost Tudor Princess: A Life of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox by Alison Weir

Her mother was a queen, her father an earl, and she herself was the granddaughter, niece, cousin and grandmother of monarchs. Some thought she should be queen of England.

She ranked high at the court of her uncle, Henry VIII, and was lady of honour to five of his wives.Throughout her life her dynastic ties to two crowns proved hazardous. A born political intriguer, she was imprisoned in the Tower of London on three occasions, once under sentence of death. She helped to bring about one of the most notorious royal marriages of the 16th century, but it brought her only tragedy. Her son and her husband were brutally murdered, and there were rumours that she herself was poisoned. She warred with two queens, Mary of Scotland & Elizabeth of England, and she was instrumental in securing the Stuart succession to the throne of England for her grandson. ($35, PB)

Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth by Lee Jackson ($32.95, PB)

In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with 'night soil', graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. Lee Jackson travels through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing the men & women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution & dirt, & the forces that opposed them. Full of individuals & overlooked details—from the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet-—his riveting book gives a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life & the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital.

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Science & Nature

A stunning new memoir from one of Australia’s most highly acclaimed writers. Drusilla Modjeska looks back on the experiences of the past thirty years that have shaped her writing, her reading and the way she has lived. At once intellectually provocative and deeply honest, this is the memoir that lovers of Poppy, The Orchard and Stravinsky’s Lunch have been waiting for.

Bill Bryson’s 1995 travel memoir Notes from a Small Island was an uproarious and endearing valentine to his adopted country of England.

Two decades later, he has set out again to rediscover that country.

An acute and perceptive insight into the best and worst of Britain today, be prepared for multiple episodes of unseemly laughter.

How Dogs Work by Coppinger & Feinstein

People may enjoy thinking about dogs as 'man's best friend', but what actually drives the things they do? What is going on in their fur-covered heads as they look at us with their big, expressive eyes? This book accessibly synthesizes decades of research & field experiments to explain the evolutionary foundations behind dog behaviours. It explores such mysteries as: why dogs play; whether dogs have minds, and if so what kinds of things they might know; why dogs bark; how dogs feed and forage; and the influence of the early relationship between mother and pup. Going far beyond the cozy lap dog, Coppinger and Feinstein are equally fascinated by what we can learn from the adaptations of dogs, wolves, coyotes, jackals, dingoes, and even pumas in the wild, as well as the behaviour of working animals like guarding and herding dogs. ($49.95, HB)

Voyage of the Beagle: The Definitive Illustrated History of Charles Darwin's Travel Memoir and Field Journal

When the HMS Beagle sailed out of Devonport on December 27, 1831, Charles Darwin was only twentytwo and setting off on the voyage of a lifetime. His journal reveals him to be a naturalist making patient observations concerning geology & natural history as well as people, places, and events. He witnessed and visited volcanoes in the Galapagos, saw the Gossamer spider of Patagonia, sailed through the Australasian coral reefs & recorded the brilliance of the firefly. This volume is the first fully illustrated edition of Darwin's journal and includes excerpts of On the Origin of Species so the reader can connect the author's journey with his discovery that made him famous. ($49.99, HB)

Planet of the Bugs : Evolution and the Rise of Insects by Scott Richard Shaw ($34.95, PB)

Dinosaurs did not rule the earth—and neither do humans.

The true potentates of our planet are insects, says Scott Richard Shaw—millions and millions of insect species.

Starting in the shallow oceans of ancient Earth and ending in the far reaches of outer space-where, Shaw proposes, insect-like aliens may have achieved similar preeminence-Planet of the Bugs spins a sweeping account of insects' evolution from humble arthropod ancestors into the bugs we know and love (or fear and hate) today. Indeed, in his visits to hyperdiverse rain forests to highlight the current insect extinction crisis, Shaw reaffirms just how crucial

these tiny beings are to planetary health and human survival.

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A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie

by Kathryn Harkup ($29.99, PB)

Agatha Christie used poison to kill her characters more often than any other murder method, with the poison itself being a central part of the novel, and her choice of deadly substances was far from random; the chemical and physiological characteristics of each poison provide vital clues to discovery of the murderer. A is for Arsenic celebrates the use of science in Christie's work. Written by Christie fan and research chemist Kathryn Harkup, each chapter takes a different novel and investigates the poison (or poisons) the murderer used. Harkup looks at why certain chemicals kill, how they interact with the body, and the feasibility of obtaining, administering and detecting these poisons, both at the time the novel was written and today.

Southern Surveyor: Stories from onboard Australia's Ocean Research Vessel by Michael Veitch ($35, PB)

For ten years (2003–2013) CSIRO's research vessel, the Southern Surveyor, sailed over 190 voyages across the seas & oceans around Australia & contributed a wealth of knowledge to marine science. From the captain to the support staff, scientists and students, this book tells the stories of adventure and discovery onboard this great ship. Learn about: Pre-dawn fireworks from an undersea volcano; how First Mate Boysey had to sew a crew member’s cut-off finger back on at sea; the swirling vortex that forms off the Western Australian coast; how the WWII shipwreck of the MV Limerick was located; the ‘undiscovery’ of a Pacific Island.

Reaching for the Canopy: A Zoo-Born Orangutan's Journey Back to the Wild by Kylie Bullo ($23, PB)

In 2006, Kylie Bullo & her colleagues at Perth Zoo were part of a bold, experiment that many experts believed was doomed to failure—to return a zoo-born orangutan to the wild. The orangutan they chose was Temara, a fiery redhead with a will of her own. Temara had always been strong, intelligent & independent, but preparing for the return to the jungles of her ancestors would put all her best qualities—and those of her keepers—to the test. This is the story of that remarkable journey and of the remarkable woman who helped make it happen. It proves that the right blend of passion, compassion & hard work can achieve what many thought was impossible. And it brings new hope to those fighting to bring this magnificent creature back from the brink of extinction.

Cosmos: An Infographic Book of Space

by Stuart Lowe & Chris North ($50, HB)

The Universe is the ultimate in extremes & superlatives. The biggest.

The heaviest. The oldest. The most powerful explosions. This truly mind-blowing book, uses cutting edge infographics to illuminate the most amazing places & objects that modern science has laid bare.

Starting with the Big Bang the book explores the secret lives of galaxies & stars, and examines the thousand new planets now discovered beyond the Solar System—checking out their viability for alien life. It chronicles the incredible instruments & machines are that are discovering the hidden secrets of the Universe, from 'telescopes' deep under the Antarctic ice to robotic explorers on distant worlds, investigates the astounding technology used by human astronauts as they push out beyond the Moon to Mars—and on towards the stars.

Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks ($44.95, PB)

Magical Mathematics reveals the secrets of fun-to-perform card tricks—and the profound mathematical ideas behind them—that will astound even the most accomplished magician. Persi Diaconis & Ron Graham provide easy, step-by-step instructions for each trick, explaining how to set up the effect & offering tips on what to say & do while performing it. Each card trick introduces a new mathematical idea, and varying the tricks in turn takes readers to the very threshold of today's mathematical knowledge. Diaconis & Graham tell the stories—and reveal the best tricks—of the eccentric a& brilliant inventors of mathematical magic. The book exposes old gambling secrets through the mathematics of shuffling cards, explains the classic street-gambling scam of three-card Monte, traces the history of mathematical magic back to the oldest mathematical trick—and much more.

What Have Plants Ever Done for Us? Western Civilization in Fifty Plants by Stephen Harris ($47.95, HB)

What tree is frequently used to treat cancer? Which everyday condiment is the most widely traded spice on the planet? Plants are an indispensable part of our everyday life. From the coffee bush & grass for cattle which give us milk for our cappuccinos to the rubber tree which produces tyres for our cars, our lives are inextricably linked to the world of plants.

Stephen Harris takes a chronological journey, identifying 50 plants that have been key to the development of the Western world, discussing trade, politics, medicine, travel & chemistry along the way. Plants have provided paper & ink, chemicals that could kill or cure, vital sustenance & stimulants.

Some, such as barley, have been staples from earliest times; others, such as oil palm, are newcomers to Western industry. Moreover, with time, uses change: beets, which have been used variously as a treatment for leprosy, source of sugar & animal feed, are now showing potential as biofuels. What may the future hold for mandrake or woad? Their effects on our lives, as the stories in this engaging book demonstrate, continue to be profound, and often unpredictable.

Philosophy & Religion Nein. A Manifesto by Eric Jarosinski ($20, PB)

This is an irreverent philosophical investigation into the everyday that sounds the call to rediscover its strangeness. Inspired by the philosophical aphorisms of Nietzsche, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, Jarosinski's epigrammatic style reinvents short-form philosophy for a world doomed to distraction. As tenets of a rather unorthodox manifesto, Jarosinski's four-line compositions seek to illuminate our most urgent questions—and our most ephemeral. The result is a compelling and thought-provoking translation of digital into print. Theory into praxis. And tragedy into farce.

Hope Without Optimism by Terry Eagleton

Terry Eagleton distinguishes hope from simple optimism, cheeriness, desire, idealism or adherence to the doctrine of Progress, bringing into focus a standpoint that requires reflection & commitment, arises from clear-sighted rationality, can be cultivated by practice & selfdiscipline, and which acknowledges but refuses to capitulate to the realities of failure & defeat. Authentic hope is indubitably tragic, yet Eagleton also argues for its radical implications as ‘a species of permanent revolution, whose enemy is as much political complacency as metaphysical despair’. It is a means of facing the future without devaluing the moment or obviating the past. Traversing centuries of thought about the many modes of hoping—from Ernst Bloch’s monumental work through the Stoics, Aquinas, Marx and Kierkegaard, among others—this penetrating book throws new light on religious faith & political ideology as well as issues such as the problem of evil, the role of language & the meaning of the past. ($48.95, HB)

Martin Luther: The Man and His Vision

by Scott Hendrix ($69, HB)

The 16th century German friar whose public conflict with the medieval Roman Church triggered the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther was neither an unblemished saint nor a single-minded religious zealot. Scott Hendrix presents Luther as a man of his time: a highly educated scholar & teacher & a gifted yet flawed human being driven by an optimistic yet ultimately unrealised vision of 'true religion'. Hendrix provides a new perspective on this important religious figure, focusing on Luther's entire life, his personal relationships & political motivations, rather than on his theology alone. Quoting extensively from Luther's correspondence, Hendrix paints a richly detailed portrait of an extraordinary man who, while devout and courageous, had a dark side as well. No recent biography in English explores as fully the life and work of Martin Luther long before and far beyond the controversial posting of his 95 Theses in 1517.

A Hedonist Manifesto: The Power to Exist

by Michel Onfray ($67, HB)

Michael Onfray passionately defends the potential of hedonism to resolve the dislocations & disconnections of our melancholy age. In a sweeping survey of history's engagement with & rejection of the body, he exposes the sterile conventions that prevent us from realising a more immediate, ethical & embodied life. He then lays the groundwork for both a radical & constructive politics of the body that adds to debates over morality, equality, sexual relations & social engagement, demonstrating how philosophy, and not just modern scientism, can contribute to a humanistic ethics. Insisting that philosophy is a practice that operates in a real, material space, Onfray enlists Epicurus & Democritus to undermine idealist & theological metaphysics; Nietzsche, Bentham & Mill to dismantle idealist ethics; and Palante & Bourdieu to collapse crypto-fascist neoliberalism. In their place, he constructs a positive, hedonistic ethics that enlarges on the work of the New Atheists to promote a joyful approach to our lives in this, our only, world.

The Invention of God by Thomas Romer ($68, HB)

Who invented God? When, why, and where? In a masterpiece of detective work & exposition Thomas Romer draws on a long tradition of historical, philological & exegetical work & on recent discoveries in archaeology & epigraphy to locate the origins of Yhwh in the early Iron Age, when he emerged somewhere in Edom or in the northwest of the Arabian peninsula as a god of the wilderness and of storms and war. He became the sole god of Israel and Jerusalem in fits and starts as other gods, including the mother goddess Asherah, were gradually sidelined. But it was not until a major catastrophe—the destruction of Jerusalem & Judah that Israelites came to worship Yhwh as the one god of all, creator of heaven & earth, who nevertheless proclaimed a special relationship with Judaism.

Arendt and America by Richard H. King ($77, HB) German political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–75) fled from the Nazis to New York in 1941, and during the next 30 years in America she penned her best-known & most influential works, such as The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianism & On Revolution.

Richard H. King argues that while all of Arendt's work was haunted by her experience of totalitarianism, it was only in her adopted homeland that she was able to formulate the idea of the modern republic as an alternative to totalitarian rule. Situating Arendt within the context of US intellectual, political, and social history, King reveals how Arendt developed an extensive grasp of American constitutional history and how her idea of the American republic grew through her dialogue with the work of Alexis de Tocqueville.

Psychology The Strange Case of Thomas Quick

by Dan Josefsson ($33, PB)

In 1991 Sture Bergwall, a petty criminal & drug addict, botched an armed robbery so badly that he was deemed to be more in need of therapy than punishment. He was committed to Sater, Sweden's equivalent of Broadmoor, and began a course of psychotherapy & psychoactive drugs. During the therapy, he began to recover memories so vicious and traumatic that he had repressed them. He eventually confessed to raping, killing and even eating more than 30 victims. He was brought to trial and convicted of eight of the murders. In 2008, his confessions were proven to be entirely fabricated, and every single conviction was overturned. Psychoanalyst Margit Norell, hoped that her vast study of Thomas Quick would make history... And the more lies Quick told, the better he was treated: the supposedly most dangerous serial killer and sexual predator in Sweden was practically free to come and go as he wanted. This is a study of psychoanalytic ambition and delusion, and the scandalous miscarriage of justice that it led to.

Infectious Madness by Harriet A. Washington

Research Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School Harriet Washington presents the new germ theory, which posits not only that many instances of Alzheimer's, OCD & schizophrenia are caused by viruses, prions & bacteria, but also that with antibiotics, vaccinations, and other strategies, these cases can be easily prevented or treated. Packed with cutting-edge research and tantalising mysteries, Washington's book is rich in science, characters & practical advice on how to protect yourself and your children from exposure to infectious threats that could sabotage your mental & physical health. ($49.99, HB)

Mindware : Tools for Smart Thinking

by Richard Nisbett ($50, HB)

This is an enlightening & practical guide to the most powerful tools of reasoning ever developed. Many scientific & philosophical ideas are so powerful that they can be applied to our lives to help us think smarter & more effectively about our behaviour & the world around us. Surprisingly, many of these ideas remain unknown to most of us. Drawing on his own ground breaking research, psychologist Richard Nisbett presents these ideas in clear & accessible detail to offer a tool kit for better thinking & wiser decisions. Mindware shows how to reframe common problems—whether professional, business, or personal—in such a way that these powerful scientific and statistical concepts can be applied to them.

Anxious: The Moden Mind In The Age Of Anxiety by Joseph LeDoux ($30, PB)

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux explains both how fear & anxiety are natural, adaptive ways of dealing with challenges & opportunities, and how they become pathological states. Some people are cool cats, their feathers never seem to be ruffled, while others are nervous Nellies. Anxious people find threats where others don't, and their brains are different, as LeDoux shows. In order to survive and thrive, the brain has to marshal its resources & energies. It is when these resources are unevenly allocated that problems arise. There are methods that can be learned for regulating this process— LeDoux outlines them and explains the science behind them that makes them work.

Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing 5 ed

by Richard L. Gregory ($45.95, PB)

In this book, Gregory offers clear explanations of how we see brightness, movement, colour & objects, and he explores the phenomena of visual illusions to establish principles about how perception normally works & why it sometimes fails. Although successive editions have incorporated new discoveries & ideas, this is the first time since 1966 that Richard Gregory has completely revised & updated the text, adding more than 30 new illustrations. There are also new sections on what babies see & how they learn to see, on motion perception, and tantalising glimpses of the relationship between vision & consciousness & of the impact of new brain imaging techniques.

Termination Challenges in Child Psychotherapy by Eliana Gil & David A Crenshaw

Ending therapy in an appropriate and meaningful way is especially important in work with children and adolescents. From leading child clinicians, this much-needed book examines the termination process—both for brief and longer-term encounters—and offers practical guidance illustrated with vivid case material. Tools are provided for helping children and families understand termination and work through associated feelings of loss and grief. Challenges in creating positive endings to therapy with children who have experienced trauma and adversity are given particular attention. Several reproducible forms can be downloaded and printed in a convenient 8½" x 11" size. ($56.95, HB)

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Lost for Latest Words Lost For Words, by Edward St Aubyn is a cutting little book—a very contemporary satire about the lead up & judging of a fictional literary award— the Elysian Prize.

Clearly a lightly veiled jab at one of the many literary prizes that would really be worth winning—not only for the prize money and the royalties, but to keep a book in the bookshops for more than six months. Each of the judges has their own agenda when they accept the job of judging, none of them lacking self-interest. At least one of the characters is so obviously drawn from life that even I can identify them, which is always uncomfortable, no matter how amusingly they are written. My favourite judge by far is one who puts in the briefest appearance at the end of the book—the elusive Tobias Benedict— an actor and 'a fanatical reader since he was a little boy', and a godson of one of the Elysian Prize board members, the powerful and unlikeable Sir David Hampshire. Tobias never quite makes the judges' meetings, but sends charming handwritten notes of apology. The other judges are an academic, a well- known columnist, an ex-public servant now novelist, and a member of parliament, Malcolm Craig, who is the Chair of the prize committee. The funniest line in the book is when we learn that Malcolm favours a collegiate approach when running a committee: 'there was nothing like proving you're a team player to get your own way'.

The process of reading and judging for the prize is made to seem ridiculous—fatuous and inexpert to say the least. Which it may well be, but the creative process of writing and creating a book isn't exactly glorified either. Some of the secondary characters are amusing—particularly Didier, a French theorist who never stops talking, and Katherine, a lover of most of the male characters in the book—a novelist whose powers of seduction seem to far outweigh her literary ones. The eventual winning of the Elysian Prize is farcical, an amusing satire on the literary world in general (maybe).

But really, if Edwad St Aubyn had won the Man Booker for any of his Patrick Melrose books, would he have written this book? The Melrose novels are brilliant, an extraordinary mix of chilling elegance and disturbing biographical details, they are memorable and significant. This book is neither.

Clive James' new book Latest Readings is, I hope, not going to be his Last Book, but rather one of many more about the books he reads, and how he reads them. He is an author, a poet, a television enthusiast—a cheerful Renaissance Man of letters. But if he were nothing else but a reviewer, it would be enough—his connection and deep insight into books and what they mean to us, is great, often amusing and always affecting. He reminds me of books I've loved, and inspires me to read more. Anyone who can make a complete girly landlubber like me seriously consider reading Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series of sea novels set in the Napoleonic Wars, has serious powers of persuasion. Never dismissive, even when clearly he hasn't enjoyed a book, Clive James incorporates his vast knowledge of literature with his acute literary integrity, and makes every book seem worthwhile of consideration.

He describes Anthony Powell's wonderful Dance to the Music of Time as 'an intellectual feat. But it's more than that: it's consistently absorbing'. And what better way to describe Evelyn Waugh's prose than being 'designed to go down like a glass of water'. It's this willingness to be entertained, to be absorbed, that is so appealing. Of course, even though James is willing to give every book a chance, he doesn't love everything. When he describes CP Snow's books as being so 'traumatically boring' that he can't give them another go, one can only inwardly cheer—that's EXACTLY what they are, (or are to me at least). It's not only the fêted or the famous that are written about in this volume. Calvin Tompkin's 1971 biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy, Living Well is the Best Revenge is reviewed with startling clarity— this is a book I've read, but never seen reviewed before. The events leading to James calling this book Latest Readings are well known to most people reading this review, and there is certainly a slight wistfulness hovering over some of the text, but mainly this book is a celebration of books, and a love of reading. As Clive James says, 'being book crazy is an aspect of love, and therefore scarcely rational at all'. Perfect. Louise Pfanner

Cultural Studies & Criticism

The Health Gap by Michael Marmot ($30, PB) There are dramatic differences in health between countries and within countries. But this is not a simple matter of rich and poor. A poor man in Glasgow is rich compared to the average Indian, but the Glaswegian's life expectancy is 8 years shorter. The Indian is dying of infectious disease linked to his poverty; the Glaswegian of violent death, suicide, heart disease linked to a rich country's version of disadvantage. And in all countries, people at relative social disadvantage suffer health disadvantage. Conventional approaches to improving health have emphasised access to technical solutions, but these approaches only go so far. Michael Marmot says creating the conditions for people to lead flourishing lives, and thus empowering individuals and communities, is key to reduction of health inequalities.

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Chaucer : A London Life by Ardis Butterfield

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) is celebrated as the father of English. Yet there was more to Chaucer than national wordsmith. Clerk of the King's Works, and servant of the state, he lived in the seething streets and echoing alleyways of 14th century London. Through his works we hear the voices of everyday Londoners in a way that was not to be repeated until Pepys began his diary. Ardis Butterfield opens a window onto this pulsating city, placing the writer in vibrant context. She shows that Chaucer's major works, The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Crysede, were not written in isolation from but in response to international ideas. London was an innovative capital at the centre of cultural and political events, populated by communities who were now encountering the daring new work of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, written not in Latin but in these poets' own vernaculars. Far from being a narrowly national writer, Chaucer was cosmopolitan to the core, living, like modern-day Londoners, in one of the most exciting cities on earth. ($54.95, HB)

The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and ExCountries by Jessa Crispin ($36.95, PB)

When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Fascinated by exile, Crispin travels an itinerary of key locations in its literary map, of places that have drawn writers who needed to break free from their origins and start afresh. As she reflects on William James struggling through despair in Berlin, Nora Barnacle dependant on and dependable for James Joyce in Trieste, Maud Gonne fomenting revolution and fostering myth in Dublin, or Igor Stravinsky starting over from nothing in Switzerland, Crispin interweaves biography, incisive literary analysis, and personal experience into a rich meditation on the complicated interactions of place, personality, and society that can make escape and reinvention such an attractive, even intoxicating proposition.

Unfinished Business by Anne-Marie Slaughter

The reactions to Anne-Marie Slaughter's choice to leave Washington & her job dream job as the first female director of policy planning at the US State Department because of her kids led her to question the feminist narrative she grew up with. Her subsequent article for The Atlantic, Why Women Still Can't Have It All, created a firestorm, sparked intense national debate. Since then, Slaughter has pushed forward, breaking free of her long-standing assumptions about work, life & family. Though many solutions have been proposed for how women can continue to break the glass ceiling or rise above the 'motherhood penalty,' women at the top & the bottom of the income scale are further & further apart.

This is her vision for what true equality between women & men really means, and how we can get there. ($35, PB)

God Mocks: A History of Religious Satire from the Hebrew Prophets to Stephen Colbert

by Terry Lindvall ($69, PB)

Terry Lindvall chronicles the evolution of religious satire from the biblical wit & humour of the Hebrew prophets through the Roman Era & the Middle Ages to the present. He looks at Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Cervantes, Jonathan Swift & Mark Twain, and ending with the mediated entertainment of modern wags like Stephen Colbert. True satire, he argues, is at its heart moral outrage expressed in laughter— but the changing costumes of religious satirists fit their times. The earthy coarse language of Martin Luther & Sir Thomas More during the carnival spirit of the late medieval period was refined with the enlightened wit of Alexander Pope. The sacrilege of Monty Python does not translate well to the ironic voices of Soren Kierkegaard.

To follow the paths of the satirist, writes Lindvall, is to encounter the odd and peculiar treasures who are God's mouthpieces.

The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris

Soon enough, nobody will remember life before the Internet. What does this unavoidable fact mean? Those of us who have lived both with and without the crowded connectivity of online life can still recognize the difference between Before and After. Michael Harris argues that amid all the changes we're experiencing, the most interesting is the end of absence—the loss of lack. The daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished. There's no true 'free time' when you carry a smartphone. Today's rarest commodity is the chance to be alone with your thoughts. ($29.99, PB)

Show Me a Hero by Lisa Belkin ($20, PB)

Yonkers, New Jersey, 1987. Nicholas Wasicsko, the city's ambitious young mayor is given a court order demanding that the city build public housing on the white, middle-class side of town in order to right what the judge saw as intentional, decades-long pattern of segregation.

As these cosy neighbourhoods were faced with the reality of a truly diverse and accepting community, the city went into crisis. Show Me a Hero is the story of a city divided by fear, racism, politics and even murder. It is also the story of the individuals whose lives were shattered by the meltdown: the young mother, the activist, the ambitious politician.

s d d w n n a o 2 H R

Joy Ride: Lives of the Theatricals by John Lahr

'John Lahr manages to write better about the theatre than anybody in the English language,' says Richard Eyre. Joy Ride, which includes the best of his New Yorker profiles and reviews, makes his expertise and his exhilaration palpable. From modern greats, like Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Tony Kushner and August Wilson, through the work of directors like Nicholas Hytner and Ingmar Bergman, to Shakespeare himself, the depth of Lahr's understanding is extraordinary to read. He brings the reader up close and personal to the artists and their art. Lahr's book is a delight as both a celebration and a guide. ($60, HB)

They just keep turning up. From large libraries being 'downsized', clearouts of a collection kept by uncle in the garage 'for ages', deceased estates. From every nook and cranny arrive mass-market paperbacks from five to six decades ago.

Kept, read and re-read, in some cases, literally, for a lifetime. And their numbers are legion. I could easily fill an entire page of the Gleaner with nothing but ancient classics with eye-catching covers. Perhaps a project for 2016.

Meanwhile, in our penultimate Gleaner issue, a further trio of famed authors' works adorned with cover art designed to facilitate an 'impulse buy' at the bookshop/kiosk in respectively, London, Manchester and Sydney.

Becoming a Marihuana User

by Howard Saul Becker ($19.95, PB)

Marijuana has come a long way since its seedy days in the back parking lots of our culture. So has Howard S. Becker, the eminent sociologist, jazz musician, expert on 'deviant' culture, and founding NORML board member. When he published Becoming a Marihuana User more than sixty years ago, hardly anyone paid attention-because few people smoked pot. Becker doesn't judge, but neither does he holler for legalization, tell you how to grow it in a hollowed-out dresser, or anything else like that for which there are plenty of other books you can buy. Instead, he looks at marijuana with a clear sociological lens-as a substance that some people enjoy, and that some others have decided none of us should.

Proust: The Search by Benjamin Taylor ($45.95, HB)

Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy & Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became—against all expectations—one of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era. This insightful, beautifully written biography examines Proust's artistic struggles—the 'search' of the subtitle—and stunning metamorphosis in the context of his times. Taylor provides an in-depth study of the author's life while exploring how Proust's personal correspondence and published works were greatly informed by his mother's Judaism, his homosexuality, and such dramatic events as the Dreyfus Affair and, above all, World War I.

The Legendary Detective: The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction by John Walton ($52.95, HB)

John Walton offers a sweeping history of the American private detective in reality and myth, from the earliest agencies to the hard-boiled heights of the 1930s and 40s. Drawing on previously untapped archival accounts of actual detective work, Walton traces both the growth of major private detective agencies like Pinkerton, which became powerful bulwarks against social and labor unrest, and the motley, unglamorous work of small-time operatives. He then goes on to show how writers like Dashiell Hammett and editors of sensational pulp magazines like Black Mask embellished on actual experiences and fashioned an image of the PI as a compelling, even admirable, necessary evil, doing society’s dirty work while adhering to a self-imposed moral code.

Philip Sparrow Tells All: Lost Essays by Samuel Steward, Writer, Professor, Tattoo Artist

by Samuel Steward ($44.95, PB)

Samuel Steward (1909–93) was an English professor, a tattoo artist for the Hells Angels, and a sexual adventurer. Jeremy Mulderig has gathered 30 of Steward’s most playful and insightful columns, which together paint a vivid portrait of 1940s America. In these essays we spend time with Steward’s friends like Gertrude Stein, André Gide, and Thornton Wilder (who was also Steward’s occasional lover). We hear of his stint as a holiday sales clerk at Marshall Field’s (where he met and seduced Rock Hudson), his roles as an opera and ballet extra in hilariously shoddy costumes, his hoarding tendencies, his disappointment with the drabness of men’s fashions, and his dread of turning forty. Many decades later, Steward’s writing feels as stylistically fresh and charming as it did in his time.

Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi

by Victor Brombert ($29.95, PB)

'All art and the love of art', Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of Musings on Mortality, 'allow us to negate our nothingness'. As a young man returning from WWII, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immersed himself in literature. Death can be found everywhere in literature, he saw, but literature itself is on the side of life. He Brombert traces the theme of mortality in the work of Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Giorgio Bassani, J. M. Coetzee, and Primo Levi, teasing out & comparing their views of death as they emerged from vastly different cultural contexts.

Now in B Format or Paperback I Am Sorry To Think I Have Raised A Timid Son

by Kent Russell, $30 The Writing Life by David Malouf, $20

19

That Uncertain Feeling by Kingsley Amis Originally published 1955.

Novelist and poet, Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) followed his sensational literary debut, Lucky Jim (1954), with this second satire. Set in the small Welsh town of Aberdacy, it sees Assistant Librarian, John Lewis begin an affair with Elizabeth Gruffydd-Williams—bored, socialite wife of Vernon, the Chairman of the Library Committee. Here is the scene portrayed on the cover—where the couple have (finally) consummated their illicit passion: She sighed and shifted her position. 'That was good, wasn't it darling?' 'Yes, it was good all right.' 'You're quite a man, aren't you?' 'Oh, I don't know, it's just you love it.' 'Well, don't you love it?' 'Yes, as a rule, I did then, anyway.' 'It's not it that I love, I love you.' 'No, you'd better not say that.' 'Of course I love it, but I love you as well... Vernon knows all about me, don't worry... You must have guessed, that there have been other chaps before you?...You're not to mind, darling. None of them compared to you.' It's refreshing to be reminded just how funny and clever Amis' early works were. This is an entertaining novel of 'English Middle Class Mores'—Amis' standard comic fare over a writing career of 26 books.

The Cautious Amorist by Norman Lindsay Originally published in the United States in 1932 and Australia in 1934.

'The 23rd Printing of the Most Uproarious and Saucy Novel of Our Time'. proclaims the cover. A large claim, considering this book was originally published some 28 years earlier! Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) is more renowned for his 'daring' (in its day) artwork usually featuring full-figured females—many in partial undress or completely nude—often being pursued by rapacious satyrs. He is also loved as the author of The Magic Pudding (1918), the greatest Australian children's book ever written—IMHO. His ten 'adult' novels, written between 1913 and 1950, have all been out of print since the mid 1980s. Undeservedly so in the case of A Curate in Bohemia (1913), the still amusing account of a timid churchman falling in with a group of hard living rogues from the Melbourne art scene of around 1900. Redheap (1930) was a thinly disguised portrait of Lindsay's birthplace Creswick, Victoria. Set in the 1880s, and written in a jaunty, light-hearted style, it features his nineteen year old narrator's exploits about town in seducing working class girls, one of whom falls pregnant. The book details, with little sympathy, her desperate attempts to obtain an abortion.

The subject matter led to the novel being banned in Australia until 1958.

Which brings us to The Cautious Amorist: The liner S.S. Minorca is sunk in a mid-ocean collision. The beautiful and voluptuous Miss Sadie Patch, journalist James Carrol, stoker Patrick Plunkett and the Rev. Fletcher Gribble take to a lifeboat and drift ashore on a desert island. After landing Sophie loudly makes known her predicament: Look... the thing's impossible. Look at my dress.

It won't last a week! And my shoes; one of them's burst already. And no underwear! One pair of pants, a petticoat .... now with these rags falling off me I shall go mad! The trio of men eventually succumb to Sadie's abundant charms and by the end of the novel she is happily seduced by them all. The Cautious Amorist was banned in May 1934—an edict that lasted for nearly two decades. The book eventually re-surfaced in 1953 and was made into a British film His Girl Friday, featuring a 20 year old starlet named Joan Collins ('Britain's answer to Ava Gardner') as Sadie. Inspired casting I think.

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, Originally published 1938 A famed Graham Greene (1904–1991) 'Entertainment' gets the eye-catching cover treatment. Perhaps the creative team at Horwitz Publications—with offices in Sydney and Melbourne—thought that adding a 'respectable' English author's title to their list would lure a few sales from Penguin Books, whose standard orange and white jacket design—with the waddling Penguin at the bottom—had been available since 1945. If the cover illustration did not persuade you to purchase, the cover description certainly would: The terrifying story of a boy who was not just bad—he worshipped in the temple of evil... Torturing the girl who loved him so easily. Terrorising the men who followed him. Only the pleasure-loving barmaid could thwart his appalling plans... she persisted in probing behind the macabre terror he'd created behind the gay esplanade at Brighton. After that, even the murderous activities of Pinkie Brown, the novel's 17 year-old Brighton gang leader almost pale in comparison.

All three books have age browned and stained page edges but are in quite good condition considering their age. Price $10.00 each.

Stephen Reid

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Black Hills to Little Bighorn

Thieves' Road: The Black Hills Betrayal and Custer's Path to Little Bighorn by Terry Mort ($45, HB) In April 1868, at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, the United States government signed a treaty with the Lakota Sioux peoples, granting them permanent ownership of the Black Hills—a mountainous region of 13,000 square kms—covering parts of the South Dakota and Wyoming Territories. So named for the dense fir forests that gave a dark appearance from a distance, the Black Hills had been a sacred region and hunting ground to the Sioux for nearly a century. They had been skirted and briefly entered by white explorers and prospectors since the 1740s. In 1833, a seven man party led by Ezra Kind journeyed from Laramie, struck gold and perished. The expedition leader scrawled their epitaph on a sandstone bluff: 'Got all the gold we could carry our ponys all got by the Indians I have lost my gun and nothing to eat and Indians hunting me'.

Under the 1868 treaty, no whites 'other than officers, agents and employees of the government' were permitted to enter the Sioux land. The treaty also forbade white settlement within the Black Hills. This edict was reinforced—however reluctantly— by the US Army, who were also charged with intercepting and evicting any civilians that entered the region. The army did so, aided by the belief among most white settlers that the semi-arid land assigned to the Indians was of little interest. So, the pressure of westward movement toward the Black Hills was halted for a time. The Sioux enjoyed their domain in relative peace. By 1874 however, persistent rumours had spread and intensified that the Black Hills were rich in gold. Miners and newspapers wanted to organize prospecting parties. An editorial that year from The Dakotaian newspaper is typical: This abominable compact with the marauding bands is now placed as a barrier to the improvement and development of one of the richest and most fertile sections in America...What shall be done with these Indian dogs? They will not dig the gold or let others do it...They are too lazy to cultivate the fertile soil, mine the coal, bore the petroleum wells or wash the gold. They prefer to live as paupers, thieves and beggars...

The pressure of public opinion, spurred on by a financial crisis, the Panic of 1873, which triggered the worst economic depression the US had yet known, finally saw the Army authorize a military expedition into the Sioux lands. So, in the summer of 1874, Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer led some one thousand men on a two month long expedition into the Black Hills. These consisted of ten companies of the Seventh Cavalry, infantry, Indian scouts, civilian teamsters, scientists, miners and newspaper reporters. His official task was both exploration and to scout the location for a new fort. No one was deceived—Civil War hero Custer was off to find gold.

Terry Mort's well written book is much more than a mere narrative of the Custer Expedition. He sets in context the historical background of Whites-Indian conflict that led to the 1868 treaty. One Chapter, The Adversaries describes both the Plains Indians culture and society and the rather ramshackle state of the much-reduced postCivil war US Army—where virtually every aspect of maintaining the frontier against Indian raids was done on the cheap. Other chapters examine Westward expansion and threats to the Plains Indians in the building of the Northern Pacific Railroad; the corrupt and fraudulent nature of much of the US government's official 'Indian Policy'; the causes and national economic effects of the 1873 financial crash, of which it was hoped new gold discoveries would remedy; a chapter on Custer himself and another to portray the organisation of an army expedition in detail and the routines of daily frontier military life.

This leaves Mort only 75 pages in a 335 page book to recount Custer's actual Black Hills sojourn—although through his use of officers' diaries, enlisted men's accounts and glowing newspaper reports of 'the General'—this is colourful enough. Custer and his greyhounds, racing across the hot, dry desert prairie—far ahead of his men—in search of game; Custer shooting his first grizzly; Custer, the first known white man to climb the 2,000 metre high Inyan Kara (Lakota Sioux for 'Rock Gatherer') Mountain —and inscribe his name and the date on the sandstone summit; Custer discovering swathes of rich, verdant pastures, fresh running mountain streams, pristine woodland —all ideal for white settlement—and 'reluctantly consenting' that the whole area be named 'Custer Park'.

On 2 August 1874, one month into the expedition, the long hoped-for prospecting discovery was made at last. As Custer wrote in a long report (a classic of selfpromotion by modesty and indirection), to his superior, Lieutenant-General Philip Sheridan: ...Gold has been found at several places, in paying quantities...I have at my table fifty particles of pure gold, most of it obtained today from one panful of earth.

'Custer's nose for publicity was keenly developed', writes Mort. The day after this find, he sent his favourite scout Charley Reynolds on a four night ride of some 90 miles (145 kms) to Fort Laramie to telegraph the news.

It broke nationwide on 13 August 1874: Struck It At Last !...Prepare For Lively Times!...Rich Mines of Gold and Silver Reported Found by Custer...National Debt to be Paid When Custer Returns! shouted the headlines. All this based on a reported fifty grains of gold. No matter.

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Custer's expedition returned to Fort Abraham Lincoln, North Dakota on 30 August 1874. The frontier towns organised mining parties with extraordinary speed. The first such expeditions were making their way into the Black Hills as early as mid-September.

The peace treaty signed a mere six years previously was now broken in all but name. The Lakota chief Fast Bear called the trail cut by Custer into the Black Hills 'that thieves road'. In a thoughtful Epilogue, the author makes the point that although the Lakota were more sinned against then sinning, they were not blameless victims. They needed little excuse to wage war. The culture of the Sioux cried out for war and celebrated the successful warrior.

The victor would invariably mutilate his victim, leaving a shocking reminder to white men that they were dealing with a different kind of culture, one that rewarded savagery and brutality. Almost exactly two years later, and some 250 miles (400 kms) north-west, in Montana Territory—at Little Big Horn River—George Armstrong Custer and some 270 men of the Seventh Cavalry would discover this harsh truth at the hands of the Plains Indians. Stephen Reid

Poetry

On Bunyah by Les Murray ($33, HB)

Bunyah has been my refuge and home place all my life. This book concentrates on the smallest habitats of community, the scattered village and the lone house, where space makes the isolated dwelling into an illusory distant city ruled by its family and their laws.

On Bunyah tells a story of rural Australia in verse and photographs.

From blood and fence posts to broad beans and milk lorries, Les Murray evokes the life and landscape of his part of the country.

Prayers of a Secular World (eds) Jordie Albiston & Kevin Brophy ($25, PB)

Rising from a fresh modern spirituality, these meditations & contemplations from more than 80 contemporary Australian poets offer wisdom & consolation on today’s moral issues. They elaborate on everyday misgivings, the discovery & re-discovery of a mysteriously undeniable & often irresistible force; they include blessings, petitions & charms & prayers of transition. And most importantly they offer forgiveness for the innate cruelty of human nature, our complicity in climate change & our everyday sins.

The Subject of Feeling by Peter Rose ($25, PB) Peter Rose’s poems encapsulate a passionate vision of life, fusing sardonic wit, sophisticated irony and unsettling gestures. Through their innovative imagery the poems repristinate the mundane and the quotidian, transforming their experience into a unique revelation of the uncanny and the miraculous. It is the poetry of the ultimate sensations, crystallised in lucid formal transparency and imperceptible rhythmic patterns. It is finally the space where words show their love for the real, and besiege its secrets, with intensity and empathy.—Vrasidas Karalis Happiness by Martin Harrison ($25, PB)

Martin Harrison (1949–2014) prepared & delivered this final manuscript at the end of a prolific creative life. With the vulnerability of a lover, the poet peels back one cover of truth after another; reckless for the evidence of the senses, he sifts light, sound & smell. Poems like the skin of a world: breathing, walking, touching. Martin Harrison’s culminating poetic achievement is a crossing over, stylistically, thematically, emotionally. Mapping the tragic chiasmus of love & death, it finally asserts the transcendent power of poetry to bear witness, to join us in a greater communion. Cosmopolitan and local, these triumphs of a ‘late style’ remind us what poetry is when its mastery allows the irony of existence to walk naked & to exult.

40 Sonnets by Don Paterson ($33, HB) Addressed to children, friends and enemies, the living and the dead, musicians, poets and dogs, these poems display an ambition in their scope and tonal range matched by the breadth of their concerns. Here, voices call home from the blackout and the airlock, the storm cave and the seance, the coal shed, the war, the ring road, the forest and the sea. These are voices frustrated by distance, by shot glass and bar rail, by the dark, leaving the sound that fades up from the hiss, / like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing, / now full of its only note, its lonely call . . .

Falling and Flying: Poems on Ageing (eds) Judith Beveridge & Susan Ogle ($29.95, PB)

This collection explores the universal experience & effects of ageing. Whether the poets are witnessing themselves or their parents & friends succumb to the years, they speak with great precision & insight into illness, frailty, death, loss, grief & retirement as well as the joys & the wisdom that late maturity can bring. There is humour as well as sadness in a collection that includes the work of some of Australia’s best loved poets.

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After I'm Gone Laura Lippman, HB

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Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures Virginia Morell, HB

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The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's Secret FBI Betty Medsger, HB

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The Best of Rose Elliot: The Ultimate Vegetarian Collection, HB

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Design in Nature Bejan & Zane, HB

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Meeting the Devil: A Book of Memoir London Review of Books, HB

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Art and Music in Venice: From the Renaissance to Baroque (ed) Hilliard T. Goldfarb, HB

Renaissance Secrets: Recipes and Formulas Jo Wheeler, HB

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Hidden Harmonies: The Lives and Times of the Pythagorean Theorem Ellen & Robert Kaplan, HB

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Awakening the Spine Vanda Scaravelli, HB

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Barefoot in Babylon: The Creation of the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969 Bob Spitz, PB

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The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper Kate Ascher, HB

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The Genius of Dogs : How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think Brian Hare & Vanessa Woods, HB

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Mapping America: Exploring the Continent Fritz C. Kessler, HB

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Good Book: A Humanist Bible A C Grayling, HB

The Devil's Cave Martin Walker, HB

The Creation of Anne Boleyn: Catherine of Aragon: A New Look at England's The Spanish Queen of Henry VIII Most Notorious Queen Giles Tremlett, HB Susan Bordo, PB

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The Village: 400 Years Of Beats And Bohemians John Strausbaugh, HB

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Art as Therapy de Botton & Armstrong, HB

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The Arts

The White Road: A Pilgrimage of Sorts

by Edmund de Waal ($35, PB)

In The White Road, artist Edmund de Waal travels the globe to tell the story of his obsession with porcelain, or 'white gold', and the lure it held for the Europeans who encountered it: from Jesuit missionaries in 17th century China, via the palaces of Versailles and Dresden, to the chemist shops of 18th century Plymouth, the settlements of the Cherokee Indians in North Carolina, and the darkest moments of 20th century history. Within all this is an intimate memoir of the author's life as a potter, and his deepening understanding of the material he has worked with for over 45 years.

Art Workshops for Children by Hervé Tullet

Gilliamesque: A Pre-posthumous Memoir

by Terry Gilliam ($60, HB)

From his no-frills childhood in the icy wastes of Minnesota, to some of the hottest water Hollywood had to offer, via the cutting edge of 60s and 70s counter-culture in New York, LA and London, Terry Gilliam's life has been as vivid and unorthodox as one of his films.

Telling his story for the first time, the director of Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas—not to mention co-founder of Monty Python's Flying Circus—recalls his life so far. Packed with never-before-seen artwork, photographs and commentary, Gilliamesque blends the visual and the verbal with scabrous wit and fascinating insights.

Think Like an Artist: How to Live a Happier, Smarter, More Creative Life by Will Gompertz

This is a guide for adults (parents, teachers, etc) to organize & execute artistic workshops for children in the spirit of the workshops Hervé Tullet has run to great success all over the world. Each workshop offers a list of materials needed, a step-by-step guide & Tullet's special tips for running successful workshops, as well as illustrated examples of outcomes & a photo album showcasing these workshops in progress. Tullet's workshops are not about artistic ability as much as about the unexpected magic that can happen when people are given the freedom to be spontaneous and to create as a group. ($24.95, PB)

After spending years getting up close & personal with some of the world's greatest creative thinkers, the BBC's Arts Editor Will Gompertz has discovered a handful of traits common to them all.

Basic practices & processes that allow their talents to flourish, and which we can adopt—no matter what we do—to help us achieve extraordinary things too. Become Seriously Curious (Caravaggio's discovery of optical lenses changed art for ever.) Think Big Picture and Fine Detail (Turner transformed a masterpiece with a tiny dab of red paint.) And realize . . . It's Nearly Always Plan B (Mondrian spent years painting trees before becoming a master of abstraction.) ($25, PB)

Inspired by The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory by Carol J. Adams (who has written an afterword for this volume), Kathryn Eddy, Janell O'Rourke, L. A Watson, Nava Atlas, Sunaura Taylor, Yvette Watt, Angela Singer, Hester Jones, Suzy Gonzalez, Renee Lauzon, Olaitan Callender-Scott, Patricia Denys, Maria Lux, and Lynn Mowson explores how women and animals are depicted and treated. ($56.95, HB)

Michael Peppiatt first met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House where, as a young student, he persuaded the photograher John Deakin to introduce him to the famous artist. Whisked to Wheeler's, Peppiatt was immediately caught up in Bacon's whirl, and there, over oysters and white wine, the first of hundreds of conversations soared. From Bacon's first electrifying early exhibitions through the chaos of drink, drugs and gambling; predatory homosexuals, furtive clubs and East End criminals—Peppiatt was exhilarated by the freedom, vitality and artistic brilliance of the man who created such provocative, alarming work, the defining images of our times. ($40, HB)

Art of the Animal: Fourteen Women Artists Explore 'the Sexual Politics of Meat'

Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art

Eugene Delacroix (1789–1863), was a complex & contradictory painter whose legacy is deep & enduring. This book considers Delacroix in his own time, alongside contemporaries such as Courbet, Fromentin, and the poet Charles Baudelaire, as well as his significant influence on successive generations of artists. Delacroix's paintings and his posthumously published Journals laid crucial groundwork for immediate successors including Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet & Renoir. Later admirers including Seurat, Gauguin, Moreau, Redon, Van Gogh & Matisse renewed the obsession with his work. Through essays & catalogue entries, the authors demonstrate how Delacroix became mentor & archetype to younger generations who sought direction for their own creative experiments, and found inspiration in Delacroix's brilliant use of colour, audacious technique & rebellious nature. ($88, HB)

Make your own jewellery with Lafosse & Alexander's Origami Jewelry, $20

DVDs with Scott Donovan CitizenFour ($32.95)

I am continually surprised by the blasé attitude of many young people to the notion of online privacy, and their willingness to give up personal information with little regard to the possible risks to their own security. The chilling documentary Citizen Four about the wide spread surveillance programs of the American and British governments exposed by Edward Snowden should give them pause for thought. To quote Jacob Appelbaum, a young encryption software developer and journalist, who appears in the film lamenting the ambivalence of his generation: 'What used to be called liberty and freedom we now call privacy and we say, in the same breath, that privacy is dead. When we lose privacy, we lose agency, we lose liberty itself. We no longer feel free to express what we think... The myth of the passive surveillance machine is nonsense'. This remarkable film, shot in real time as Snowden revealed before the cameras the extent of the NSA surveillance, is a shocking indictment of political and corporate maleficence. No area of modern digital communication, it seems, is beyond reach. It is ironic that Snowden found asylum in Russia, a country in which the government and the free market enjoy unlimited power and further testament to his courage that he has, in recent weeks, exposed covert surveillance programs operating within Putin’s Russia. This Orwellian nightmare has come about, in part, due to our willing compliance to relinquish personal freedom in exchange for the convenience of modern technology. Snowden’s revelations have forced us to recognise the potential for misuse of this technology, both by governments and corporations, and the need for new strategies to manage the risks involved.

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Francis Bacon in Your Blood by Michael Peppiatt

Stitches in Time: The Story of the Clothes We Wear

by Lucy Adlington ($50, HB)

Starting with underwear—did you know Elizabeth I owned just one pair of drawers, worn only after her death?—Lucy Adlington moves garment by garment through Western attire, exploring both the items we still wear every day and those that have gone the way of the dodo (sugared petticoats, farthingales and spatterdashers).

The way we dress is inextricably bound up with considerations of aesthetics, sex, gender, class and lifestyle—and Adlington offers the chance to truly appreciate the extraordinary qualities of these, our most ordinary possessions.

The Knick: Season 1 ($45.95)

This medical drama, directed by Steven Soderbergh, is set in the early 20th century at the Knickerbocker Hospital in New York. The 'Knick' is facing a major upheaval due to poor finances and an exodus of wealthy patients. The one remaining star is the drug addicted Dr Thackery (played

by Golden Globe winner, Clive Owen) who along with the hospital staff of surgeons, nurses and other personnel must struggle to keep both themselves and the hospital going. Thackery's new colleague, assistant chief surgeon Dr Algernon Edwards (André Holland), struggles to earn the respect of those around him due to his race.

Wild Tales: Dir. Damián Szifrón ($32.95 Region 2)

A portmanteau film that crosses six stories, focusing on patience and what pushes people over the edge. Set in Argentina, each story stands alone: Pasternak takes place on a plane; The Rats in a restaurant; The Strongest sees road rage run rampant; in Little Bomb follows Ricardo Darin is ground down by petty bureaucracy; A father tries to persuade an employee to take the rap for his son's crime in The Deal; Till Death Do Us Part (pictured on the cover), takes place at a wedding. Nominated for Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award

White God: Dir. Kornél Mundruczó ($32.95 Region 2) Set in Budapest. When the teenaged Lilli (Zsofia Psotta) is forced to spend time with her estranged father, he is less than that she has brought her dog Hagen. When he abandons Hagen to the streets Lilli goes on an increasingly desperate search for her lost friend. At the same time the film follows Hagen's life as a stray—avoiding the dog wardens, only to be captured and forced into the terrible world of dog fighting.

The Eichmann Show: Dir. Paul Andrew Williams

The behind-the-scenes true life story of ground-breaking producer Milton Fruchtman and blacklisted TV director Leo Hurwitz (Martin Freeman & Anthony LaPaglia), who, overcoming enormous obstacles, set out to capture the testimony of one of the war's most notorious Nazis, Adolf Eichmann. Filmed at the trial in Jerusalem in 1961, the production became the world's first ever global TV documentary series, where, for the first time, the horror of the camps was heard directly from the mouths of its victims. It was edited daily and broadcast in Germany, America, Israel and 34 other countries. ($32.95, Region 2)

Winton's Paw Prints

It's time to start thinking about Christmas gifts, and for the crime novel aficionado in your acquaintance I can't recommend more highly the two newly published Library of America collections: Women Crime Writers of the 1940s, and of the 1950s. I've waxed lyrical before about the LofA volumes— acid-free paper, sewn bindings allowing the books to lie flat, binding boards covered in closely woven rayon, a ribbon marker, and in the case of these two books, the publisher has stepped away from the usual glossy black covers banded with with red, white and blue, sporting an author photo, for a couple of eye-catching dust jackets.

The 40s volume presents chronologically by pub. date: Laura by Vera Caspary, The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis, In A Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes and The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. 50s carries Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong, The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith (a non-Ripley outing), Beast in View

by Margaret Millar and Fools' Gold by Dolores Hitchens. As with Library of America's previously published collections of American Noir of the 30s, 40s and 50s (all male authors except for the talented Ms Highsmith) these depression, WW2 and Cold War books all reek of their period—the fashion, the language, the politics, and of course the battle of the sexes. 'I couldn't help looking in the mirror and asking myself if I looked like the kind of sucker who trusts a woman' says detective Mark Macpherson in Vera Caspary's Laura.

It's impossible not to picture Dana Andrews' beyond taciturn 'dick' in love with a dead woman from Otto Preminger's stylish 1944 noir.

I've just finished Caspary's Laura, and a comparison between print and celluloid has been one of its many pleasures. The novel is written in three voices, offering three versions of the murder of successful business gal Laura Hunt (get those working women back in the home where they belong!)—the charming hard boil of Mark Macpherson, the florid confessional of the 'dead' woman, and the marvellous, overblown blusterings of portly 'castrate' (his term), Waldo Lydecker. The Waldo of the book is not Clifton Webb's svelt and deliciously venomous closet queer typing in the tub, and doesn't get to say any of my favourite lines from the movie—for eg. I should be sincerely sorry to see my neighbour's children devoured by wolves or I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom. But Caspary wrote the dramatisation, so film Waldo's declaration: In my case, self-absorption is completely justified. I have never discovered any other subject quite so worthy of my attention, completes her perfect portrait of the narcissist Anne Manne talks about in The Life of I—overt, oblivious, grandiose ... and, if thwarted, murderous!

Edited by crime writing expert, Sarah Weinman, the books have biographies of all the authors—who just about all had novels picked up by the movies, and most of whom spent some time earning a crust cranking out B grade fare for the Hollywood machine.

There are also copious end notes explaining pop culture and historical references, and the idiom of the day. A great gift. Winton

what we're reading

Viki: Ok, so this is more a what we're drawing. There has been a mindboggling avalanche of mindfulness colouring books clogging up the self help display recently that have left me somewhat uninspired, but when Tamara waved Thomas Pavitte's join the 1000 dots books and his 'Querkle's' Masterpieces colour-by-numbers books, I didn't hesitate for a second. I don't know about mindfulness—but fun comes to mind. At only $20 each, these giant books are perfect time-wasters and stocking stuffers—and good lessons in drawing. I can see myself getting quite obsessive about lines between the dots, whilst following the originals. There's dot-to-dot masterpieces, animals, cityscapes & portraits. Querkles run to masterpieces & portraits.

John: I'm reading the new tome from Don Winslow—Cartel, the 600 page sequel to The Power of the Dog, Winslow's hit from a couple of years ago.

It spans a decade of the lives of a DEA agent Art Keller and his nemesis Adan Barrera. There is a personal vendetta between Keller and Barrera that complements the 'War on Drugs' in an era when the Cartels had become more than criminal organisations—they have armies, political connections and resources that rival those of the government. 600 bloody pages, lots of violence, torture, sex, more violence, politics—unputdownable.

Andrew: On Elizabeth Bishop by Cólm Toibín As well as the more substantial book that I am currently reading; I always like to have a book going in counterpoint, that I can take up every now and then. I will read anything Tóibín has to say and I also am really engaged by close readings and parsings of poetry. I wasn't particularly familiar with Bishop (other than her darkly luminous The Moose, which I recommend to anybody who thinks poetry is not for them), and this is a really thoughtful, gentle appreciation of her work.

His readings of individual poems are reverent, as well as a great insight into the concerns of Tóibín's own prose.

Performing Arts

How Can It Be? A Rock & Roll Diary: A Rock & Roll Diary by Ronnie Wood ($65, HB)

Ronnie Wood's original handwritten diary from 1965 gives a unique insight into his life and the period. Throughout the diary, Wood reflects on the words he wrote 50 years ago, in a new manuscript of over 12,000 words. Wood discusses memories of the Birds, The Jeff Beck Group, the Faces and the Rolling Stones, recounting stories of the breakups, breakdowns, cars and guitars that began his journey to super-stardom. The book features an introduction by Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones, an end-note from Ali MacKenzie of The Birds, and Wood shares original artworks inspired by his diary.

Punks, Poets, and Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys, 1977–1982 by Marcia Resnick ($45, HB)

In an offbeat and evocative look at one of New York's most creative periods, this is an incredible collection of photographs, taken by Marcia Resnick between 1977 and 1982, of New York City artists, including Johnny Thunders, Joey Ramone, Iggy Pop, David Byrne, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol, John Belushi, and many more.

The Unusual Suspects: 104 Films that Made World Cinema by Antony I. Ginnane ($50, HB)

The Unusual Suspects is a list of 104 feature films which Ginnane believes an awareness, and knowledge of, may alleviate much of the need for a conventional film school based curriculum for emergent producers, directors and writers. As David Stratton says in his foreword to the book: ‘... you can learn more about making movies by experiencing the great movies of the past than by any other method.’ Each film is given a page to itself (with a still from the film on the opposite page) and as well as an analysis of the film including plot lines or plot elements Ginnane also talks about the director and their place in film history.

Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV by Boyd McDonald ($42.95, PB)

The capstone of Boyd McDonald's prolific turn as a freelance film columnist for the magazine Christopher Street, Cruising the Movies collects the author's movie reviews of 1983–1985. Eschewing new theatrical releases for the "oldies" once common as cheap programing on independent television stations, and more interested in starlets and supporting players than leading actors, McDonald casts an acerbic, queer eye on the greats and not-so-greats of Hollywood's Golden Age. Writing against the bleak backdrop of Reagan-era America, McDonald never ceases to find subversive, arousing delights in the comically chaste aesthetics imposed by the censorious Motion Picture Production Code of 1930–1968. This new, expanded edition also includes previously uncollected articles and a new introduction by William E. Jones.

The 101 Greatest Plays: From Antiquity to the Present by Michael Billington ($40, HB)

Having surveyed post-war British drama in State of the Nation, Michael Billington now looks at the global picture. In this provocative new book, he offers his highly personal selection of the 101 greatest plays ranging from the Greeks to the present-day.

No mere list, Billington justifies his choices in extended essays —and even occasional dialogues—that put the plays in context, explain their significance and trace their performance history. In the end, it's a book that poses an infinite number of questions.

What makes a great play? Does the definition change with time and circumstance? Or are certain common factors visible down the ages? In revising the accepted canon, this book is bound to stimulate passionate argument and debate—these essays are the product of a lifetime spent watching and reading plays and record the adventures of a soul amongst masterpieces.

Matchbox Theatre: Thirty Short Entertainments by Michael Frayn ($25, PB)

Matchbox Theatre presents a sketch show in miniature: thirty short entertainments by Michael Frayn, author of Skios and Noises Off, 'the funniest farce ever written' These tiny plays are offered here for performance in the smallest theatre in the world: the theatre of your own imagination. The scripts are provided. Everything else—casting, set design, ice-cream sales—is up to you.

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Bestsellers Non-fiction

1. Flesh Wounds: For Anyone Whose Family Was Not

What They Ordered

Richard Glover

2. Cornersmith: Recipes From the Cafe & Picklery

Alex Elliott-Howery & James Grant

3. Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Under-

Rated Organ

Giulia Enders

4. Latest Readings

Clive James

5. The Intervention: An anthology

(eds) Rosie Scott & Anita Heiss

6. Two Futures: Australia at a Critical Moment

Clare O'Neill & Tim Watts

7. From Venice to Istanbul: Mediterranean Flavours

Rick Stein

8. Advanced Australia: The Politics of Ageing

Mark Butler

9. The Money Men: Australia's Twelve Most Notable Treasurers

Chris Bowen

10. Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory

(eds) Brad Buckley & John Conomos

Bestsellers Fiction 1. The Girl in the Spider's Web

David Lagercrantz

2. The World Without Us

Mireille Juchau

3. The Big Whatever

Peter Doyle

4. A Guide to Berlin

Gail Jones

5. Long Bay

Eleanor Limprecht

6. Purity

Jonathan Franzen

7.

Winton’s Paw The Dust That Falls From Prints Dreams

8. Bergstrom's Orange 9. My Brilliant Friend 10. Go Set a Watchman

Louis de Bernières Carolyn Little

....... and another thing

Another year, another PM. Will our Tony opt for the tried and true K Rudd method of white-anting or his own pugilistic preference for shirt-fronting? Hard to imagine him working quietly and steadily for his electorate from the back benches, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. However it's all so much of nothing as the timeline of one of the books I have open at the moment would suggest. Donald Prothero's The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution is a long glass of cool reality when depressed by humanity's posturings.

We may be a blight upon the earth, but unlike previous ice ages and warmings, probably not for much longer. It's a highly readable book—and if I was younger I'd be considering a career in the fascinating (and humbling) field of paleontology. A serendipitously concomitant read to Prothero's fossil record has been Anne Manne's The Life of I: The New Culture of Narcissism—her last chapter addressing climate change and Western self interest should be required reading. I'm planning David Brooks' The Road to Character next—and hopefully will have moved from opinion to action by the November issue. Meanwhile, I've started Gail Jones' A Guide to Berlin, and am having a great time. She really knows how to wield the dictionary—but for all the big words, her touch is light. I can see I'm going to have to head to Nabokov when I'm finished. And, if the next seven books from the Library of America women crime writers collection weren't enough, Ingrid just ambushed me with a recently arrived graphic novelised edition of Swann's Way. I think I've accepted that the fantasy of a retirement involving a leisurely reading of Proust is indeed a fantasy—so translator Arthur Goldhammer's 'fundamental architecture' of Proust's work accompanied by Stéphane Heuet's illustrations (especially for a graphic narrative addict) might be an acceptable compromise. Viki

For more October new releases go to:

Elena Ferrante Harper Lee

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