Gleaner October 2016

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Vol. 23 No. 9 October 2016

New this month: The Boy Behind The Mirror At Gleebooks this month: Tim Winton 1

ILF Trivia Night

Thanks to everybody who supported Indigenous Literacy Day last month.

There are more fundraising projects coming up, but perhaps you might enjoy coming to the annual ILF Trivia night at Paddo RSL on Wednesday November 9th. Hosted by the fearless Richard Glover, this a fast-paced way to raise funds for our Literacy programs. Entertaining trivia (plenty of book questions!) and a fabulous range of prizes for silent auction.

Come as you are, or bring your friend’s or book group and book a table.

Tickets via Trybooking.com.

Meanwhile, we’re moving into that season in the book world best characterised as an embarrassment of riches. Publishers typically load their lists to point at Christmas sales and summer reading, and booksellers couldn’t be happier. Odd really, given that we’re transporting a northern hemisphere phenomenon of short days and long (reading) nights into our own daylight saving outdoors world, but it works. Here’s a foretaste of a few of this month’s bumper crop new releases.

A major event in the year’s fiction calendar is the eagerly awaited follow up to Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. Burial Rites, the story of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last person to be executed in Iceland, early in the 19th century, was an amazingly successful debut. Kent brings to The Good People the same seemingly effortless eye for historical detail and storytelling.

Like its predecessor, it draws on historical fact (this time it’s 1825, in a remote valley near the Flesk river of Killarney), to fashion a story around a widow and a ‘changeling’ grandson, now in her care after the death of her daughter. The Good People blends reality and the supernatural and the power of the natural world, with thematic echoes from Burial Rites in a tale where death, privation, women’s hard lot and folklore are interwoven.

Sunday Times writer Simon Garfield is the prolific chronicler of a range of a wide-ranging, quirky topics, from the significance of fonts (Just My Type) to the relationship between man and maps (On the Map) to the invention of artificial colours (Mauve), and more. What seem subjects fit for essay length examination are turned into entertaining explorations— lively and instructive. Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time might just be his best yet. How has the sense of time in our lives moved from being measured by the movement of the sun, to the current forensic government of our lives by time. Filled with marvellous facts (did you know the OED says that time is the most used noun in the English language, or that Beethoven enthusiastically welcome the invention of the metronome under the fond misapprehension that he could regain control over how his music was performed?), and an amazing array of stories and anecdotes, this is history to enjoy and share.

Don’t miss the new Quarterly Essay 63. Don Watson’s Enemy Within: American Politics in the Time of Trump is as eloquent as it is sharp-edged, as Watson looks at what the state of the union must be, to have an utterly unloved Clinton likely to win out of fear of the alternative. Has the American dream of exceptionalism evaporated. This QE is a splendid primer for the November election, the result of which could change the world.

I’ll out myself again, as a cricket lover, and a cricket book lover. Gideon Haigh’s Stroke of Genius: Victor Trumper and the Shot that Changed Cricket is the best cricket book I’ve read since, well, Haigh’s magnificent On Warne. Taking its cue from the most famous of cricket photographs (George Beldam’s Jumping Out, which captured Trumper in full flight in 1908), the book explores the iconography of a cricketer, and the relationship between fact and myth across, and since, Trumper’s life. More a social and sports history than a book about cricket as such, this is a bold and brilliant look at the symbiotic way in which a sportsman and the culture from which he sprung used each other.

And, of course, as though to bookend the publication early in the year of Helen Garner’s wonderful collection of short prose pieces Everywhere I Look, we have Tim Winton’s own essay collection The Boy Behind the Curtain, as fine an example of the power of imagination and commitment to truth as his writing could provide. Don’t miss it. David Gaunt

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Australian Literature The Good People by Hannah Kent ($33, PB)

The fires on the hills smouldered orange as the women left, pockets charged with ashes to guard them from the night. Watching them fade into the grey fall of snow, Nance thought she could hear Maggie’s voice. A whisper in the dark. ‘Some folk are born different, Nance. They are born on the outside of things, with a skin a little thinner, eyes a little keener to what goes unnoticed by most.

Their hearts swallow more blood than ordinary hearts; the river runs differently for them.’ Nóra Leahy has lost her daughter and her husband in the same year, and is now burdened with the care of her four-yearold grandson, Micheál. The boy cannot walk, or speak, and Nora, mistrustful of the tongues of gossips, has kept the child hidden from those who might see in his deformity as evidence of otherworldly interference. Unable to care for the child alone, Nóra hires a 14 year-old servant girl, Mary, who soon hears the whispers in the valley about the blasted creature causing grief to fall upon the widow’s house. Alone, hedged in by rumour, Mary and her mistress seek out the only person in the valley who might be able to help Micheál. For although her neighbours are wary of her, it is said that old Nance Roche has the knowledge. That she consorts with Them, the Good People. And that only she can return those whom they have taken.

Gleebooks’ special price $29.99

Goodwood by Holly Throsby ($30, PB) Goodwood is a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone. It’s a place where it’s impossible to keep a secret...In 1992, when Jean Brown is 17, a terrible thing happens. Two terrible things. Rosie White, the coolest girl in town, vanishes overnight.

One week later, Goodwood’s most popular resident, Bart McDonald, sets off on a fishing trip and never comes home. People die in Goodwood, of course, but never like this. They don’t just disappear. As the intensity of speculation about the fates of Rosie and Bart heightens, Jean, who is keeping secrets of her own, and the rest of Goodwood are left reeling. Rich in character and complexity, its humour both droll and tender, Goodwood is a compelling ride into a small community, torn apart by dark rumours and mystery.

On the Blue Train by Kristel Thornell ($30, PB) It was the work of a moment: On 4 December 1926, Agatha Christie became Teresa Neele, resident of the spa hotel, the Harrogate Hydro. With her wedding ring left behind, and her minimal belongings unpacked, the lost days begin. Lying to her fellow guests about the death of a husband and child, Teresa settles in to the anonymity she so fiercely desires. Until Harry McKenna, bruised from the end of his own marriage, asks her to dance. In this entrancing novel of creativity and grief, Kristel Thornell combines fact and fantasy to reconstruct Agatha Christie’s retreat from a life that had become too difficult.

Southerly Volume 76.1 Words & Music ($29.95, PB) This issue presents writing by musicians & writers who cross mediums to collaborate & experiment in the spaces between words &music, including Hilary Bell & Phillip Johnston. It includes curator John Murphy’s reflections on archiving Peter Sculthorpe’s house & Joseph Tolz writes of the experience of researching musical recollections from the Holocaust, and presents some of these memories from survivors. Michael Hooper compares Elliott Gyger’s operatic adaptation of David Malouf’s Fly Away Peter & Hannah Fink interviews Marie Bashir on her love of music. There is also the usual cornucopia of stories, poems & reviews.

Rule of Law: A novel by Winton Higgins ($29.95, PB) Winton Higgins creatively accounts for the drama of the first Nuremberg trial of 1945–6, where the atrocities of the Third Reich were uncovered for a world-wide audience for the first time. Concepts we take for granted now—crimes against humanity, a world court, an international criminal justice system—were born and nurtured in Nuremberg. Winton Higgins has used the medium of a novel to bring this history to life. ‘Across the pages walk historical characters...but interwoven with their lives are human tales of great power, added by the author to remind us that this was a raw human drama.

Once started, I could not put this book down.’ Michael Kirby

The Birdman’s Wife by Melissa Ashley ($33, HB) Eclipsed by the fame of her husband, Elizabeth Gould was a woman ahead of her time, juggling the demands of her artistic life with her roles as wife, lover, helpmate & mother to an ever-growing brood of children. In a golden age of discovery, her artistry breathed wondrous life into countless exotic new species, including Charles Darwin’s Galapagos finches. Melissa Ashley paints a portrait of a naïve young girl who falls in love with an ambitious genius, who comes into her own as a woman, an artist and a bold adventurer who defies convention by embarking on a trailblazing expedition to the colonies to discover Australia’s ‘curious’ birdlife.

NEW CRIME FICTION

from Scribe

The third book in the thrilling Leone Scamarcio series.

DEAD IN THE WAT E R

A LEONE SCAM ARCIO THRIL LER

‘Chand ler unsettl es with an all-too -imagin able homeg rown brand of suspen se.’

H O N E Y B R O W N , author of Through the Cracks

TA NI A CH AN DL ER

the hit

g hes up — with a ban whe n the past catc

NADIA DALBUONO

A psychological thriller following Chandler’s popular debut Please Don’t Leave Me Here.

Better Son by Katherine Johnson ($30, PB)

1952. Tasmania. The green, rolling hills of the dairy town Mole Creek have a dark underside—a labyrinthine underworld of tunnels that stretch for countless miles, caverns the size of cathedrals and underground rivers that flood after heavy rain. The caves are dangerous places, forbidden to children, but for two young brothers, a hidden cave a short walk from the family farm seems the perfect escape from their abusive, shell-shocked father—until the older brother goes missing. Fearful of his father, nine-year-old Kip lies about what happened. It is a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life. 50 years later, Kip—now an award-winning scientist—has a young son of his own, but cannot look at him without seeing his lost brother, Tommy. On a mission of atonement, he returns to the cave they called Kubla to discover if it’s ever too late to set things right. To have a second chance. To be the father he never had.

The Schooldays of Jesus by J. M. Coetzee ($35, HB)

In the sequel to The Childhood of Jesus, David is the small boy who is always asking questions. Simon and Ines take care of him in their new country. He is learning the language; he has begun to make friends. He has the big dog Bolivar to watch over him. But he’ll be seven soon. He should be at school. And so David is enrolled in the Academy of Dance in Estrella. It’s here, in his new golden dancing slippers, that he learns how to call down the numbers from the sky.

But it’s here too that he will make troubling discoveries about what grown-ups are capable of.

Moving On by Don Aitkin

On D’Hill

I’ve read two rather strange but wonderful books this month, both about immigrant women in America, both struggling to be an artist. In Forty Rooms by Olga Grushin, a young Russian émigré dreams of being a poet, but marries and has children instead. The novel is structured around the 40 rooms the woman— known only as Mrs Caldwell—passes through and resides in during her life. Although I can’t understand why she couldn’t have a family and write poetry, this is a beautifully rendered life of a woman both ordinary and extraordinary. Is it because she’s Russian that Grushin is able to embellish and not seem over-written?

In Harmless Like You by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, a young Japanese émigré to America, Yuki, abandons her loving husband and son to chase her dream of being an artist. When, many years later, her husband dies leaving her his house, her son must finally confront the absent mother. The novel interweaves Yuki’s life in New York in the 70s and her son Jay’s in the present as he struggles with becoming a father—just as Yuki had struggled with motherhood.

Like Olga Grushin, Buchanan writes from a deep understanding of the immigrant experience. Both are beautifully written novels about identity and desire and the choices women must make.

And now for something completely different—The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Jock Serong, winner of the Ned Kelly Award for First Fiction for his book Quota. Like Malcolm Knox’s The Life or The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach, it matters not if you know nothing about the sport in question. It’s the characters and the writing that keeps you turning the pages. Serong introduces us to brothers Darren and Wally, sons of a single mother, whose skill at backyard cricket ultimately propels them into the professional game.

The upstanding ‘good guy’ Wally eventually becomes captain of the Australian test team while Darren likes a drink, a smoke and a snort too much to realise his potential. The book opens with a literally kneecapped Darren tied up in the boot of a car travelling out of Melbourne.

As he is driven to his ignominious ending, Darren ruminates over the events that led to the unfortunate situation in which he now finds himself. Serong captures the vernacular, the atmosphere, and the blokiness of these quintessential Australian men with great mastery and humour.

These are the easy Saturdays, uncomplicated and pure. There are girls to watch…neighbourhood girls, girls from school. Unspoken, our shared strategy is to look the other way and try for a heroism of a kind we can’t yet identify. We’re cricketers. It’s terribly serious.

This is literary crime fiction of the highest order. The ending is a mindblowing surprise. The Rules of Backyard Cricket is fantastic. I loved it.

In more serendipity, the Booker prize winning author Aravind Adiga has also released Selection Day, a novel about two Indian cricketplaying brothers. I have no doubt it’s brilliant but one cricket novel is enough for me.

See you on D’hill, Morgan

Ever been told, ‘You need to move on!’ by a friend? It happens more than once in the lives of most of us. There’s been a disaster of some kind, a death, a divorce, a sacking, a great disappointment of some kind. Don Aitkin’s 5th novel introduces the reader to several people who, in the year before the Millennium, are doing their best to move on. It’s all very well to know that you need to move on. But where to, and how, and when, exactly? And what if your moving on will complicate the lives of others. But moving on is also a learning experience—even if the outcomes might not have been exactly what you wanted.

New Text Classics, $12.95 each The Beauties and Furies by Christina Stead (intr. Margaret Harris) The Puzzleheaded Girl by Christina Stead (intr. Fiona Wright) A Little Tea, a Little Chat by Christina Stead (intr. David Malouf) The Little Hotel by Christina Stead (intr. Lisa Gorton)

Stock up on classic Oz Lit from now until Xmas Buy 3 Text Classics for the price of 2!

3 for 2 OFFER ! ! !

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International Literature

Orphans of the Carnival by Carol Birch ($30, PB)

Julia Pastrana is the singing & dancing marvel from Mexico, heralded on tours across 19th century Europe as much for her talent as for her rather unusual appearance. Yet few can see past the thick hair that covers her: she is both the fascinating toast of a Governor’s ball & the shunned, revolting, unnatural beast, to be hidden from children & pregnant women. But what is her wonderful & terrible link to Rose, collector of lost treasures in an attic room in modern-day south London? In this haunting tale of identity, love & independence, these two lives will connect in unforgettable ways. Author of the Man Booker-shortlisted, Jamrach’s Menagerie captures the strange and thrilling world of the Victorian carnival.

Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra ($25, PB) Reader, your life is full of choices. Some will bring you joy and others will bring you heartache. Will you choose to cheat (in life, the examination that follows) or will you choose to copy?

Will you fall in love? If so, will you remember her name and the number of freckles on her back? Will you marry, divorce, annul?

Will you leave your run-down neighbourhood, your long-suffering country and your family? Will you honour your dead, those you loved and those you didn’t? Will you have a child, will you regret it? Will you tell them you regret it? Will you, when all’s said and done, deserve a kick in the balls? Will you find, here, in this slender book, fictions that entertain and puzzle you? Fictions that reflect yourself back to you?

Will you find yourself? Relax, concentrate, dispel any anxious thoughts. Let the world around you settle and fade. Are you ready? Now turn over your papers, and begin.

Hillstation by Robin Mukherjee ($17, PB)

Dreaming of escape from his remote village in the Himalayan foothills, Rabindra entreats the gods to send him an English bride. When a saucy English dance troupe arrives on the run from a Bombay crime boss, Rabindra believes that his prayers have been answered. Except that they have no interest in marrying anyone. As the village begins to unravel in the presence of these scandalous foreigners, surprising secrets emerge from the depths of its past.

Today Will be Different by Maria Semple

Eleanor Flood is going to clean up her act, only change into yoga clothes for yoga, which today she will actually attend, and be a better version of herself. But then, as it always does, life happens.

Eleanor’s husband is missing, and their son, Timby, is wearing eye shadow to school and getting into fashion battles on the playground. (It’s true that it’s Eleanor’s fault: She did put makeup in his Christmas stocking.) Just when it seems like things can’t get weirder or more in the way of Eleanor’s personal transformation, a graphic memoir called The Flood Sisters surfaces, and the dramatic story it tells reveals long-buried secrets and a sister to whom Eleanor never speaks. ($33, PB)

The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine

Set over the course of one night in the waiting room of a psych clinic, The Angel of History follows Yemeni-born poet Jacob as he revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco at the height of AIDS. Hovered over by the presence of alluring, sassy Satan who taunts Jacob to remember his painful past and dour, frigid Death who urges him to forget and give up on life, Jacob is also attended to by 14 saints. Set in Cairo and Beirut; Sana’a, Stockholm, and San Francisco; Alameddine gives a charged philosophical portrait of a brilliant mind in crisis. This is a profound, philosophical and hilarious story of the war between memory and oblivion we wrestle with every day of our lives. ($33, PB)

100th Birthday collections from Roald Dahl, $23 each Lust; Madness; Cruelty; Deception

A woman obsessed with punctuality makes a fateful decision, a wronged woman takes revenge on her dead husband, a cat’s curious behaviour comes between a husband and his wife. A wife pawns her lover’s parting gift with unexpected consequences, an unusual painting proves to be more valuable than anyone, especially its owner, could ever have predicted, a husband and wife, unable to get their new baby to feed, hit upon a disturbing solution; A man takes part in a very unusual bet, a wife serves up a dish that utterly baffles the police, a game of cards between two couples is the basis for some shocking deceit. Dark & delicious tales from behind the closed doors of coupledom.

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Pistache Returns by Sebastian Faulks ($33, HB) pistache (pis-tash): a friendly spoof or parody of another’s work.

[Deriv uncertain. Possibly a cross between pastiche and p**stake.]

From the writer of such brilliant parodies as Thomas Hardy’s football report and Dan Brown’s visit to the cash dispenser comes another collection of witty pastiches.

Gleebooks’ special price $29.95

Hag-Seed: The Tempest Retold

by Margaret Atwood ($30, PB)

Felix is at the top of his game as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded.

Now he’s staging a Tempest like no other: not only will it boost his reputation, it will heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan.

Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And also brewing revenge. After twelve years, revenge finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison.

Here, Felix and his inmate actors will put on his Tempest and snare the traitors who destroyed him. It’s magic! But will it remake Felix as his enemies fall?

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles ($30, PB)

June 21st 1922 Count Alexander Rostov is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol. Instead of being taken to his usual suite, he is led to an attic room with a window the size of a chessboard. Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely. While Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval, the Count, stripped of the trappings that defined his life, is forced to question what makes us who we are. And with the assistance of a glamorous actress, a cantankerous chef and a very serious child, Rostov unexpectedly discovers a new understanding of both pleasure and purpose.

Conclave by Robert Harris ($33, PB)

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

Autumn by Ali Smith ($30, PB)

Fusing Keatsian mists & mellow fruitfulness with the vitality, the immediacy & the colour-hit of Pop Art—via a bit of very contemporary skulduggery & skull-diggery—Autumn is a witty excavation of the present by the past. The novel is a stripped-branches take on popular culture, and a meditation, in a world growing ever more bordered & exclusive, on what richness & worth are, what harvest means. This is part of the quartet Seasonal: four stand-alone novels, separate yet interconnected & cyclical (as the seasons are), exploring what time is, how we experience it, and the recurring markers in the shapes our lives take & in our ways with narrative.

The Explosion Chronicles by Yan Lianke ($30, PB)

The village of Explosion was founded more than a millennium ago by refugees fleeing a volcanic eruption. But in the post-Mao era the name takes on a new significance as the community grows explosively. Three major families—linked by a complex web of loyalty, betrayal, desire and ambition—are the driving force behind their hometown’s transformation into an urban superpower. Master satirist, Yan Lianke considers the high stakes of corruption & greed, the polarising dynamics of love and hate between families, and the seemingly unstoppable excesses of capitalism.

The Legend of Jesse Smoke by Robert Bausch

When Skip Granger, the assistant coach for the Washington Redskins, first sees Jesse Smoke, she is on the beach in Belize. And she has just thrown a regulation football a mile. Granger knows that Smoke’s talent is unprecedented for a woman, and nearly unparalleled among men—and he decides to sign her to the Redskins, even as he faces losing his job & credibility. As the first woman on a major NFL team, Jesse Smoke is quickly faced with her own battles, including the clamours of the press, the violence of her teammates, and the institutional resistance that seeks to keep football in the hands of men. While a female quarterback in the NFL is currently a fantasy, Bausch makes it a highly engaging reality on the page. ($40, PB)

Miller’s Valley by Anna Quindlen ($33, PB)

In a small town on the verge of big change, a young woman unearths deep secrets about her family and unexpected truths about herself.

In the vein of Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, from the 60s to now, Mimi Miller eavesdrops on her parents and quietly observes the people around her, discovering more & more about the toxicity of family secrets, the dangers of gossip, the flaws of marriage, the inequalities of friendship & the risks of passion, loyalty and love.

Altitude Boo ks w i

A. N. Wilson’s new novel explores the life and times of one of the greatest British explorers, Captain Cook, and the golden age of Britain’s period of expansion and exploration through George Forster, who travelled with Cook as botanist on board the HMS Resolution, on Cook’s 2nd expedition to the southern hemisphere, and penned a famous account of the journey. Resolution moves back and forth across time, to depict Forster’s time with Cook, and his extraordinary later life, which ended with his death in Paris, during the French Revolution. Wilson draws together a remarkable cast of characters in order to look at human endeavour, ingenuity and valour.

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Resolution by A. N. Wilson ($30, PB)

OCTOBER EVENTS IN THE BLUE MOUNTAINS

ENEMY WITHIN American Politics in the Time of Trump

Weekend: A Novel by Jane Eaton Hamilton ($20, PB)

DON WATSON

2 lesbian couples living next door to each other one summer in cottage country find each of their relationships at a crossroads. One woman celebrates her 50th birthday, which causes her to reconsider what she wants out of life & her partner; the other couple are the parents of a new baby, which cannot conceal the turmoil of their relationship. Weekend is a plaintive, moving exploration of the true nature of love—about trust, negotiation & what’s worth keeping in the end.

In this Quarterly Essay - Enemy Within - Don Watson takes a memorable journey into the heart of the United States in the year 2016, and the strangest election campaign that country has seen.

‘If, as seems likely, Clinton wins, it will not be out of love, or even hope, but rather out of fear’ says Don Watson.

Don Watson is the author of many acclaimed books, including Caledonia Australis, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, American Journeys and The Bush.

When:

Echoland by Per Petterson ($35, HB)

In Per Petterson’s debut novel, published in English for the first time, 12 year-old Arvid & his family are on holiday, staying with his grandparents in Denmark. Confused by the underlying tension between his mother and grandmother, Arvid is grappling with his own sense of self. He’s on the cusp of becoming a teenager, feeling awkward in his own skin. Echoland is a subtle and truthful snapshot of growing up, with an emotional depth that lingers long after its final pages.

Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte ($27, PB)

Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the noughties, Tony Tulathimutte embraces the contradictions of our new century in an affectionate satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel’s four whip-smart narrators—idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik and vicious Linda—are torn between fixing the world and cannibalising it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humour and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the San Francisco Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again.

Travel Writing

Curiocity: In Pursuit of London (eds) Matt Lloyd-Rose & Henry Eliot ($65, HB)

This is a new A to Z exploring every aspect of life in London. Its 26 chapters weave together the city’s stories with striking reflections, practical ideas and itineraries, and contributions from London voices such as Monica Ali and Iain Sinclair. The book is illustrated by artists including Chris Riddell, Isabel Greenberg and Steven Appleby, and at the heart of each chapter is an original hand-drawn map, charting everything from the city’s international communities, underground spaces and children’s dreams, to its unrealised plans, erogenous zones and dystopian futures.

The Art of the Airport: The World’s Most Beautiful Terminals ($50, HB) For most of us, the experience of being in an airport is to be endured rather than appreciated, with little thought for the quality of the architecture. No matter how hard even the world’s best architects have tried, it is difficult to make a beautiful airport.

And yet such places do exist. Cathedrals of the jet age that offer something of the transcendence of flight even in an era of mass travel and budget fares. Here are 21 of the most beautiful airports in the world.

Psychogeography by Will Self illustrated by Ralph Steadman ($35, PB)

Will Self and Ralph Steadman join forces in this post-millennial meditation on the vexed relationship between psyche & place ranging from the Scottish Highlands to Istanbul, from Morocco to OhioThe introduction, Walking to New York, is both a prelude to the verbal & visual essays that make up this collaboration, and a revealing exploration of the split in Self’s Jewish-AmericanBritish psyche and its relationship to the political geography of the post-9/11 world.

White Mountain by Robert Twigger ($35, PB)

Home to mythical kingdoms, wars and expeditions, and strange and magical beasts, the Himalayas have always loomed tall in our imagination. Overrun at different times by Buddhism, Taoism, shamanism, Islam and Christianity, they are a grand central station of the world’s religions. They are also a plant hunter’s paradise, a climber’s challenge, and a traveller’s dream. Robert Twigger seeks out the Nagas, who helped his grandfather build a camp for Allied soldiers near Imphal during the WW2 and takes the most scenic bike ride in the world from Lhasa to Kathmandu.

FRIDAY 7TH OCTOBER, 2016

Where:

5.30pm for 6.00pm start The Carrington Hotel Ballroom, Katoomba

Cost:

$20 ($17 concession) includes drinks & nibbles

Brandl & Schlesinger and Gleebooks Blackheath Literary event & afternoon tea

In his novel, Rule of Law, Winton Higgins revives the drama surrounding the first Nuremberg trial over a 16 month period from August 1945.

The atrocities of the Third Reich are to be uncovered for a world-wide audience for the first time. Winton Higgins is a Sydney writer and senior academic. After an initial career in law, he has spent the rest of his working life as an academic in social science and history.

He will be in conversation with Professor Konrad Kwiet, the Resident Historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum and the former Chief Historian of the Australian War Crimes Commission When: Where: Cost:

SATURDAY 29TH OCTOBER, 2016

2.30pm for 3.00pm start Glenella Guest House, Govetts Leap Rd Blackheath $20 ($17 concession) includes afternoon tea

Bookings essential. Tickets available at Gleebooks Blackheath or phone Gleebooks on 4787 6340 or email victoria@gleebooks.com.au

Fear: Our Ultimate Challenge

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes ($35, PB)

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has climbed the Eiger & Mount Everest.

He’s crossed both Poles on foot. He’s been a member of the SAS & fought a bloody guerrilla war in Oman. And yet he confesses that his fear of heights is so great that he’d rather send his wife up a ladder to clean the gutters than do it himself. In Fear, this great explorer delves into his own experiences to try & explain what fear is, how it happens & how he’s overcome it so successfully. He examines key moments from history where fear played an important part in the outcome of a great event. Using a combination of story-telling, research & personal accounts of his own struggles to overcome fear he shows us how the brain perceives fear, how that manifests itself in us, and how we can transform our perceptions.

The Art of Cycling by Cadel Evans ($50, HB) A riveting and forensic account of his life on the bike­—from his beginnings as the youngest winner of a World Cup in mountain biking to the oldest post-War winner of the Tour de France. This book will put you on the bike alongside Cadel as he recounts the races and the moments that mattered—as he places in the top ten in six Tours de France and becomes Australia’s first, and only, Tour de France champion and first, and only Road World Champion; as he claims the points jersey at the Giro d’Italia; as he wins some of the world’s greatest races.

Gleebooks’ special price $44.99

The Road to Santiago: Walking the Way of St James by René Freund ($33.95, PB)

Each year, over 200,000 people pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Often called the Way of St James, this journey has been an important Christian tradition for centuries. This is René Freund’s incredible story of walking almost a thousand miles to experience it. As Freund learns, when you reach the edge of the European continent having walked along the Way of St James which pilgrims of former times thought to be the end of the world only then do you realize that the old pilgrim’s saying is true: ‘the journey does not end in Santiago. The journey begins in Santiago.’ In this vivid travelogue, Freund not only introduces the overwhelming natural beauty he encountered along the way, but also shares his experience of reaching his physical and psychological limits during the arduous journey.

5

THE WILDER AISLES

This month, it’s books and travel. I spent the month of August in Germany—mostly in Berlin with my son, daughter-in-law and my grandchildren, Matilda and Felix. It was lovely to be with them, especially Felix, now three, who was very loving and affectionate. Matilda, six, is looking forward to going to The Charles Dickens School, which is bilingual and close to home. They love all the books I send them and have special bookshelves for Sydney Oma’s presents. After my two week stint as nanny, I did a bit of travelling. I went to Potsdam, conveniently close to Berlin, to Hamberg and to Leipzig. If I go back next year, I will go to a few more places—I’d especially like to go to Dresden, just didn’t have time this trip.

As you can guess I read quite a lot and actually had to buy books. Of course, there are many bookshops in Berlin—both small and large.

A couple I visited were: Books in Berlin which was quite close to where I was staying; St George’s second-hand; and Do You Read Me in Mitte—which is wonderful for browsing, lots of great art books and magazines. Two more bookshops I must mention are Dussmann, Das Kulturkaufhaus, and Hugendubel bel Kardstadt. I knew about Dussmann, but had never made it there. This time I set out determined to find it, and (after a few wrong turns) I did. In contrast to the stores mentioned above, Dussman is a behemoth of a bookshop—five floors, with books, magazines, CDs and DVDs. I was there at five pm on a Saturday and the place was packed. Apart from books in German, there is a separate English bookshop on the ground floor. I spent quite a bit of time in there and while I didn’t buy anything, I did take note of some titles I would like to read. Although it is big, I found the staff very friendly and helpful. It had a really good atmosphere and it was great to see people buying books! The other shop Hugendubel has branches all over Berlin, but I only went to the branch in the KaDeWe, Berlin’s famous department store. The books are on the sixth floor. They fill a very large area, with a selection of fiction and non-fiction books in English. Again, I found the staff very friendly and very happy to help me with my purchases—and this is what I bought and read.

Being in Berlin I thought I should sample a German author so I picked up The Other Child ($20) by Charlotte Link, first published in German as Das andere Kind. I loved this book. I became totally involved, and actually saved the last bit for the plane trip home. With the evacuation of children to the country during the second world war as the background, the discovery of a young student’s body and later that of an elderly woman with no obvious connection leaves Detective Valerie Almond is at a loss as to what is going on.

I read the first volume of Louise Welsh’s Plague trilogy on the plane and was most happy to find the second volume, Death is a Welcome Guest ($20), in Hugendubel’s. They are quite gripping and I am really looking forward to the final book.

Next, A Manual for Cleaning Women ($20)—a book of inter-connected short stories by Lucia Berlin . This was published for the first time last year, a decade after her death. She has been called one of America’s best-kept secrets. This was recommended to me by one of the staff, and I thank her for it. It is quite an amazing collection. It tells of a world of beauty, pain, laughter and drink, in Mexico, Chile and the American South-west. In laundromats, hospitals, motels and bars. For lovers of Alice Munro and Raymond Carver, this is the kind of book that takes you to a place that is both real and yet unreal at the same time. Read it it for yourself.

Apparently, Fates and Furies ($23) by Lauren Groff was Obama’s favourite book of 2015, but it wasn’t as quite as good as the President’s recommendation had me hoping. The story of a modern marriage, I found the first part, the husband’s story interesting, but felt a bit let down by the wife’s story.

I also reread the wonderful Christopher Isherwood’s wonderful Berlin Stories ($32). I have loved Isherwood’s writing for what seems like for ever, and I felt it was almost compulsory to read then while visiting Germany. They never fail to entertain and it was very satisfying to read these Berlin stories while walking the very same streets Christopher and his kind walked.

Janice Wilder

6

Crime Fiction

Slaughter Park by Barry Maitland ($30, PB)

In the final book of the Belltree Trilogy, DS Harry Belltree has gone bush. His obsessive pursuit of justice has cost him everything—his job, his marriage & his newborn child—but then his estranged wife disappears, leaving their baby daughter behind, and he is dragged back to Sydney. The police think Jenny has murdered a man. Harry thinks she’s in danger. When body parts are found maimed & strewn around a suburban park, his former colleagues are distracted by this apparently unrelated case. Harry is left to track Jenny down on his own—and to lay bare, at last, the extraordinary conspiracy that led to his parents’ murder..

Death in Oslo by Anne Holt ($30, PB)

Helen Barclay becomes the first female US president, and the whole world takes notice. President Barclay chooses a high-profile visit to Norway for her first state visit. But when she goes missing from a locked, heavily secured bedroom, the FBI and Norwegian police are forced unwillingly to work together to find her. As Johanne Vik assists on the investigation, she learns that the President has a secret, dating back 20 years, which could destroy all she has worked for. And by helping on the case, Johanne’s own past may come back to haunt her.

The Mistletoe Murder & Other Stories by P. D. James

P. D. James was frequently commissioned by newspapers & magazines to write a special short story for Christmas. In these 4 stories from the archives she delights in the secrets that lurk beneath the surface at family gatherings, and provides tantalizing puzzles to keep you guessing.

From the title story about a strained country-house party on Christmas Eve, to another about an illicit affair that ends in murder, and 2 cases for James’s poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh, each treats the reader to James’s masterfully atmospheric storytelling, always with the lure of a mystery to be solved. ($25, PB)

Soho Sins by Richard Vine ($33, HB)

They were the New York art scene’s golden couple until Amanda Oliver was found murdered, and her husband Philip confessed to shooting her.

But was he a continent away when she died? Art dealer Jackson Wyeth sets out to learn the truth, and uncovers the secrets of Manhattan’s galleries and wild parties, a world of beautiful girls growing up too fast and men losing their minds. But even the worst the art world can imagine will seem tame when the final sin is revealed.

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz ($33, PB)

When editor Susan Ryeland is given the tattered manuscript of Alan Conway’s latest novel, she has little idea it will change her life. She’s worked with the revered crime writer for years and his detective, Atticus Pund, is renowned for solving crimes in the sleepy English villages of the 1950s.

As Susan knows only too well, vintage crime sells handsomely. It’s just a shame that it means dealing with an author like Alan Conway. But Conway’s latest tale of murder at Pye Hall is not quite what it seems. Yes, there are dead bodies and a host of intriguing suspects, but hidden in the pages of the manuscript there lies another story: a tale written between the lines, telling of real-life jealousy, greed, ruthless ambition & murder.

Thin Air: A Ghost Story by Michelle Paver ($30, PB)

The Himalayas, 1935. Kangchenjunga. Third-highest peak on earth.

Greatest killer of them all. Five Englishmen set off from Darjeeling, determined to conquer the sacred summit. But courage can only take them so far—and the mountain is not their only foe. As the wind dies, the dread grows. Mountain sickness. The horrors of extreme altitude. A past that will not stay buried. And sometimes, the truth does not set you free.

Blind Sight by Carol O’Connell ($30, PB)

There are 4 bodies on the mayor’s lawn. They’ve been killed at different times, in different places, and dumped there. There should be five—but the boy is missing. Jonah Quill, blind since birth, sits in a car driven by a killer and wonders where they are going. Though he is blind, Jonah sees more than most people do. It is his secret, and he is counting on that to save his life. Detective Kathy Mallory is counting on herself to save his life. It takes her a while to realise that the missing-person case she is pursuing is so intimately connected to the massacre on the mayor’s lawn.

But there’s something about the boy she is searching for that reminds her of herself, all those years ago. ‘O’Connell is a consummate storyteller— a unique talent who deserves to be a household name’—Val McDermid

The Travelling Companion by Ian Rankin ($10, HB)

For recent college graduate Ronald Hastie, a job at the legendary Shakespeare and Company bookshop offers the perfect occupation during a summer abroad in Paris. Working part-time in exchange for room and board leaves plenty of freedom to explore the city once visited by his literary hero, Robert Louis Stevenson, and things only get better when he meets a collector who claims to have the original manuscripts of both the first draft of Jekyll and Hyde and the never-published The Travelling Companion (both thought to have been destroyed). Then Ron meets the man’s mysterious assistant, and a reckless obsession stirs inside him. As the life he knew back home in Scotland fades from memory, he desperately seeks the secret lying within Stevenson’s long-lost pages....

The Four Legendary Kingdoms by Matthew Reilly

Jack West Jr and his family are living happily on their remote farm when Jack is brutally kidnapped and he awakes in an underground cell to find a masked attacker with a knife charging at him. Jack, it seems, has been chosen - along with a dozen other elite soldiers—to compete in a series of deadly challenges designed to fulfil an ancient ritual. With the fate of the Earth at stake, he will have to traverse diabolical mazes, fight cruel assassins and face unimaginable horrors that will test him like he has never been tested before. ($43, HB)

Gleebooks’ special price $35

The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost

From the co-creator of the landmark television series Twin Peaks comes a novel that deepens the mysteries of that iconic town in ways that not only enrich the original series but readies fans for the upcoming TV show. ($40, HB)

Gleebooks’ special price $35.99

The Last Days of Night by Graham Moore ($33, PB)

New York, 1888. Gas lamps still flicker in the city streets, but the miracle of electric light is in its infancy. The person who controls the means to turn night into day will make history—and a vast fortune. A young untested lawyer named Paul Cravath, fresh out of Columbia Law School, takes a case that seems impossible to win. Paul’s client, George Westinghouse, has been sued by Thomas Edison over a billion-dollar question: Who invented the light bulb and holds the right to power the country? As Paul takes greater & greater risks, he’ll find that everyone in his path is playing their own game, and no one is quite who they seem.

Dead in the Water by Tania Chandler ($30, PB)

When Brigitte and her family moved from the city, they were supposed to be happier. And safer. But soon her crime-writer ex-boyfriend turns up in town to promote his new novel, in which a murdered woman is found in a country lake. Hours later, Brigitte watches the police pull a body from the water near her Gippsland home. Her husband, a country cop now, is at the scene, though it’s not his investigation; he’s only helping the Melbourne Homicide Squad. But there’s something he’s not telling Brigitte. With her personal life spiralling out of control once more, and fearing her family is in danger, who can Brigitte turn to?

The Hit by Nadia Dalbuono ($30, PB)

When the family of Micky Proietti, a top television executive, goes missing, Leone Scamarcio is called to investigate. Everyone, it seems—from Premier League footballers to jilted starlets and cabinet ministers—has an axe to grind with Proietti. What starts out as an investigation into his countless affairs soon becomes an inquiry into how Proietti does business and the people he discarded along the way. Like a swimmer trying to escape a riptide, Scamarcio comes to realise that this new inquiry threatens to bring him head to head with his father’s old lieutenant, Piero Piocosta.

Reluctantly, he travels home to Calabria in an attempt to understand how powerful Piocosta has really become and whether he might ever be silenced.

A

manda Webster is a sixth generation Australian

descended from white settlers and the third generation to grow up in Kalgoorlie. When she turned five Amanda started school and became friends with Aboriginal children from the nearby Kurrawang Mission.

Forty years later, Webster meets Gregory Ugle, older brother of one of the “Mission kids” she remembers from school. He travels with her to her hometown and helps her reconnect with her former friends. Webster is forced to confront her racist blunders, her cultural ignorance and her family’s secret past. And so begins her journey of reconciliation, taking her into a world she hardly knew existed.

The Ice Beneath Her by Camilla Grebe ($30, PB)

A young woman is found beheaded in an infamous business tycoon’s marble-lined hallway. The businessman, scandal-ridden CEO of the retail chain Clothes & More, is missing without a trace. Rewind two months earlier to meet Emma Bohman, a sales assistant for Clothes & More, whose life is turned upside down by a chance encounter with Jesper Orre.

Insisting that their love affair is kept secret, he shakes Emma’s world a second time when he suddenly leaves her with no explanation. As frightening things begin to happen Emma suspects Jesper is responsible.

Triple Crown by Felix Francis ($30, PB)

Jeff Hinkley, a British Horseracing Authority investigator, has been seconded to the US Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency (FACSA) where he has been asked to find a mole in their organisation, an informant who is passing on confidential information to fix races. Jeff goes in search of answers, taking on an undercover role as a groom on the backstretch at Belmont Park racetrack in New York. But he discovers far more than he was bargaining for, finding himself as the meat in the sandwich between FACSA and corrupt individuals who will stop at nothing, including murder, to capture the most elusive and lucrative prize in the world—the Triple Crown.

The Twenty-Three by Linwood Barclay ($30, PB)

The day begins like any other Saturday—a shower, coffee, breakfast.

But suddenly, all hell breaks loose in the town of Promise Falls. People are dying in the street—the hospital and emergency services are overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Is it mass food poisoning, a virus, or something more sinister? Has someone, rather than something, caused this?

Detective Barry Duckworth is already investigating two murders and an explosion at the town’s drive-in. He starts to wonder if these crimes and the new attacks are connected to the mysterious incidents in Promise Falls involving the number twenty-three. But who is sending these deadly messages, and how can they be stopped?.

T

his gorgeous book, edited

by Tanya Evans, celebrates

not just an illustrious swimming club on one of the most beautiful spots on Sydney Harbour but also the joy to be found in swimming itself. Swimming with The Spit encourages readers and swimmers, young and old, to think about their ambles down to the beach, their invigorating morning swims and refreshing afternoon dips on sultry Sydneysummer days, with an eye on their history.

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

7

Biography

The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography

by Edmund Gordon ($35, PB)

Angela Carter’s work stands out for its bawdiness & linguistic zest, its hospitality to the fantastical & the absurd, and its extraordinary inventiveness & range. Her life was as rich with incident, as vigorously modern, as unconventional, and ultimately as tragic as anything in her fiction. This is the story of how she invented herself—as a new kind of woman and a new kind of writer—and how she came to write such subversive, seductive & distinctive masterworks as The Bloody Chamber, Nights at the Circus & Wise Children.

Who gave you permission? The Memoir of a Child Sexual-abuse Survivor Who Fought Back

by Manny Waks ($35, PB)

Manny Waks was raised in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family, the second oldest of 17 children. As an adolescent he was sexually abused at the religious school across the road from where he lived. In mid-2011 Manny went public about his experiences to bring justice to the abusers, and those who covered up their crimes. For his courage in speaking out, Manny and his family were intimidated and shunned by their community. Although he has been forced to leave Australia, Manny continues to advocate for survivors and hold those in power to account.

Soundscapes: A Musician’s Journey through Life and Death by Paul Robertson ($40, HB)

For nearly 40 years Paul Robertson performed throughout the world as First Violinist of the internationally renowned Medici String Quartet, of which he was a founder member. In 2008 the main artery to Paul’s heart ruptured, leading to him dying on the operating-table, and then being resuscitated. He then hovered in a deep coma for six weeks, close to death & experiencing visions, affording him profound insights into the relationship between music & the subconscious. Now 64 years-old, Paul has decided not to undergo any more surgery, facing a very uncertain future and living on borrowed time. In this book Paul reflects on his musical training, his insights into the difficult realities of ensemble playing, and about the possible meaning of his experiences in both life and near-death.

Poum and Alexandre: A Paris Memoir

by Catherine de Saint Phalle ($35, PB)

This is the story of two flawed eccentrics. Everything they do subverts their firm intention of keeping up appearances. They meet just after the war in liberated Paris but they cannot quite free themselves from the many strings attached to them—the old aunts, the sisters, the cousins, the nuns & the ominous concierges who dog their footsteps. Alexandre is a banker & a Resistant who lives in a world of numbers & Roman emperors. Poum resides in the Odyssey and in her bed, hiding from the mysterious disapproval of their relatives. Their daughter, Catherine, would like to help but she seems to be part of the problem. This is no ordinary childhood, and Catherine de Saint Phalle’s acceptance of her parents, despite their flaws, shines through, propelling us head first into their strange & beautiful, Parisian world.

The Word Detective: A Life in Words—From Serendipity to Selfie by John Simpson ($30, PB)

Language is always changing. No one knows where it is going but the best way to future-cast is to look at the past. John Simpson animates for his tradition of researching and editing, showing both the technical lexicography needed to understand a word, and the careful poetry needed to construct its definition.

He challenges both the idea that dictionaries are definitive, and the notion that language is falling apart. With a sense of humour, an ability to laugh at bureaucracy and an inclination to question the status quo, John Simpson gives life to the colourful characters at the OED & to the English language itself.

Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence

by Artemis Cooper ($50, HB)

Elizabeth Jane Howard grew up yearning to be an actress; but when that ambition was thwarted by marriage & the war, she turned to fiction. Her first novel, The Beautiful Visit, won the John Llewellyn Rhys prize—she went on to write 14 more, of which the best-loved were the five volumes of The Cazalet Chronicle. Following her divorce from her first husband, the celebrated naturalist Peter Scott, Howard embarked on a string of high-profile affairs with Cecil Day-Lewis, Arthur Koestler and Laurie Lee. Nearing the end of a disastrous second marriage when she met Kingsley Amis, and for a few years they were a brilliant and glamorous couple—until that marriage too disintegrated. And In her early 70s Howard fell for a conman. His unmasking was the final disillusion, and inspired one of her most powerful novels, Falling. Artemis Cooper interviewed Howard, and also talked extensively to her family, friends and contemporaries, and had access to all her papers.

Her biography explores a woman trying to make sense of her life& relationships through her writing, as well as illuminating the literary world in which she lived.

8

Working Class Boy by Jimmy Barnes ($45, HB) The time I have spent writing this book has caused me a lot of pain. Sometimes because of what I have remembered about my childhood and sometimes because of what I couldn’t remember. It is funny how your mind blocks things out when those things can hurt you. There are a lot of things I wish I didn’t remember... Long before Cold Chisel and Barnesy, long before the tall tales of success and excess, there was the true story of James Dixon Swan—a working class boy whose family made the journey from Scotland to Australia in search of a better life. Arriving in Australia in the Summer of 1962, things went from bad to worse for the Swan family - Dot, Jim and their six kids. The scramble to manage in the tough northern suburbs of Adelaide in the 60s would take its toll on the Swans as dwindling money, too much alcohol, and fraying tempers gave way to violence and despair. This is the story a family’s collapse, but also a young boy’s dream to escape the misery of the suburbs with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to join a rock’n’roll band and get out of town for good.

Gleebooks’ special price $39.95

The House on the Hill by Susan Duncan ($35, PB)

In her 3rd memoir Susan Duncan reaches an age where there’s no point in sweating long-term ramifications. There aren’t any. This, in turn, unleashes an overwhelming desire to confront her intractable 95 year-old mother with the dreadful secrets of the past before it is too late, no matter the consequences. It is the not-knowing, she says, that does untold damage. Interwoven with stories from the land—building a sustainable eco-house on the mid-coast of NSW with her engineer husband, Bob, and grappling with white-eyed roans, dogs, bawling cattle markets, droughts & flooding rains, not to mention blunt-speaking locals—this is a book about a mother & daughter coming to terms, however uneasy, with the awful forces that shaped their relationship.

Karl Marx by Gareth Stedman Jones ($80, HB) As the 19th century unfolded, its inhabitants had to come to terms with an unparalleled range of political, economic, religious & intellectual challenges. Distances shrank, new towns sprang up, and ingenious inventions transformed the industrial landscape. It was an era dominated by new ideas about God, human capacities, industry, revolution, empires & political systems—and above all, the shape of the future. One of the most distinctive & arresting contributions to this debate was made by Karl Marx, the son of a Jewish convert in the Rhineland and a man whose entire life was devoted to making sense of the hopes & fears of the 19th century world. Gareth Jones’s new biography explores how Marx came to his revolutionary ideas in an age of intellectual ferment, and the impact they had on his times.

My Early Years by Hugo Chavez ($64, HB)

One of the most important Latin American leaders of the 21st century, Hugo Chavez was a military officer who became a left-wing revolutionary. This book tells the story of his life until the moment he was elected President in 1998. His energy and charisma shine throughout this riveting & historically important story—describing how he slowly uncovered the reality of his country—hugely unequal, with the majority of its citizens living in indescribably impoverished conditions—and decided that he had to do something about it. He gives a fascinating account of his long-planned military conspiracy—the most significant in the history of Venezuela and perhaps of Latin America—that led up to his unsuccessful coup of 1992, and eventually to his popular electoral victory in 1998.

Dashing for the Post: The Letters of Patrick Leigh Fermor ($35, PB)

Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero and one the greatest travel writers of his generation. He was also a spectacularly gifted friend.

The letters in this collection span almost 70 years, the first written 10 days before Paddy’s 25th birthday, the last when he was 94. His correspondents include Deborah Devonshire, Ann Fleming, Nancy Mitford, Lawrence Durrell, Diana Cooper & his lifelong companion, Joan Rayner; he wrote his first letter to her in his cell at the monastery Saint Wandrille, the setting for his reflections on monastic life in A Time to Keep Silence. His letters exhibit his zest for life, his unending curiosity, his lyrical descriptive powers, his love of language, his exuberance and his tendency to get into scrapes - particularly when drinking and, quite separately, driving.

Forty Autumns by Nina Willner ($33, PB)

Shortly after the end of WW2, as the Soviets took control of the eastern part of Germany, Hanna, a schoolteacher’s daughter, escaped with nothing more than a small suitcase & the clothes on her back. As Hanna built a new life in the West, her mother, father & 8 siblings remained in the East. The construction of the Berlin Wall severed all hope of any future reunion. She moved to America, continuing to make many mostly unsuccessful attempts to establish contact with her family. Her daughter, Nina, grew up to become the first female US Army intelligence officer to lead sensitive intelligence collection operations in East Berlin at the height of the Cold War. When the Berlin Wall came down, Nina Willner discovered an extraordinary story of courage and survival, set against the backdrop of four decades that divided a nation and the world.

Wh ich one firs t?

Your to-read list just got a little longer.

Discover more at penguin.com.au 9

books for kids to young adults for the very young

Uh-Oh! by Shutta Crum (ill) Patrice Barton ($15, BD)

This has only two words of text throughout … uh-oh, but what expressive words they are. Two mothers take their children to the beach, a little boy and a little girl, and together they create the best kind of mayhem, next to the sea shore. Wonderful illustrations that are both soft and sweet yet extremely dynamic, capture all the fun of a day at the beach. Terrific use of textures and paint give this book an extra visual dimension.

got a non-reader?

compiled by Lynndy Bennett, our children's correspondent Peck Peck Peck by Lucy Cousins ($15, BD)

We always have a wonderful selection of baby board books, but at the moment we have some particularly good ones. Lucy Cousins’ excellent Peck Peck Peck ($15) has made the journey of picture book to board book very well; this charming story of a baby woodpecker being instructed to peck by his father is funnier by the page. The little bird really gets the hang of as he pecks his way through a gate, a door, a hall way and beyond. Bright cheerful illustrations, in the author’s inimitable style, have the added interest of holes die cut through all the pages. Louise

I’m Not Cute! by Jonathan Allen ($15, BD)

Jonathan Allen captures the frustration of childhood, when a baby owl is repeatedly being told how very cute and small he is. He really is ‘a huge and scary hunting machine with great big soft and silent wings’ ... in his own mind at least.

This so much fun to read aloud, and the pictures are warm and funny, which is just as well as it’s one that will have to be read again and again. Louise

If you think you have a non-reader, there are certainly options to explore with children who might not connect with reading.

Paradoxically, one is the wordless picture book, and in this excerpt from a Nerdy Book Club article, multi-award winning illustrator Aaron Becker discusses the value of wordless picture books. His wordless trilogy: Journey, Quest, and Return (all $17, PB & $28, HB) is internationally acclaimed. He has also worked on animated films, including The Polar Express: I was a good student. But reading was something I only did when someone made me. Not because I didn’t like stories or because I was lazy. I just found reading excruciatingly tough. I would get to the end of a paragraph only to realize that I had no idea what I had just read. I would start again with determined focus to grasp the words. Still, nothing. We all need a way ‘in’ to the stories that find us. For me it wasn’t words. Words were a source of stress, not escape. My mind couldn’t settle on a good book long enough to get there, but images… images were instantaneous. And my brain was wired for them. There’s a reason I make wordless picture books. I remember when I sat down to write Journey, I sketched out a series of small thumbnail ‘storyboards’ just as I had when I worked as an artist in the film industry. When I went to add the text, I was amazed to find that I’d already done the work. There weren’t any words left to put down – the pictures had written them all. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t like words. I really do. I wish I could like them even more, but perhaps my brain was built for something else. My hope in sharing all of this is that if you have a child in your life that has been labeled ‘a reluctant reader’ that you understand this: we are all a bit different when it comes to how we find the stories that will come to define our understanding of the world. I would stress that what’s most important is not that a child learns to love to read, but that a child learns to love story itself. It’s about developing empathy by means of immersion in story. By placing ourselves in a character’s clothing we find common threads between ourselves and the world. These tales mirror and give us access to our deepest, inner aspirations. We all need a way in. For children like the one I was a long time ago, it’s not words but pictures that can take them to that place—a place full of wonder and enchantment in a galaxy not so very far away.

picture books

Du Iz Tak? By Carson Ellis ($25, HB)

I love this book! An increasing cast of insects ponders a new arrival in the microcosm of their world. Using an invented language that seems more logical to us as the story progresses, the denizens of the garden marvel, firstly over the tiny green shoot and then at each stage as a magnificent flower blooms. Passing seasons are evinced by changes in the dapper and idiosyncratic clothing and pursuits of the tiny characters. Ellis’s extensive use of white space throughout the book focusses our attention on the minute details of the insects’ lives which are rendered in gouache and ink along the bottom of the page, suggesting the physical geography of the story. Did I mention I love this book? I love the language, and it matters not if the reader can’t decipher it, because the flow and heart of the book shine through regardless. I love the wee characters, their curiosity and imagination; the depiction of Nature, and I love the intoxicating originality of the entire book. Expect to see Carson Ellis’s debut as picture book author/illustrator nominated for future awards. Lynndy

for independent readers

Artie & the Grime Wave by Richard Roxburgh

Artie and the Grime Wave is a book about two kids who set off on an amazing adventure to get proof of some robbers stealing stuff from other people and hiding it in a cave. But luckily an old lady has an invention called the fartex 120y which helps Artie and his best friend Bumshoe escape from the robbers’ house by making a giant fart that makes the robbers really disgusted. My favourite part was when Artie’s friend stole his brother’s camera so they could get proof.

Read this if you like funny books and farts. Theo Bird (aged 9). (Also recommended for readers who enjoy escalating droll mishaps and want to embark on the first children’s book written and illustrated by Richard Roxburgh – yes, that Richard Roxburgh! LB) ($17, PB)

10

Graphic novels are another way to encourage the association of images and words...

Brobot by James Foley ($15, PB)

The world’s foremost inventor under the age of twelve, Sally is so frustrated by her baby brother’s ubiquitous mess and smelliness that she undertakes building an ‘ideal’ brother. Unlike little Joe, who has many design faults such as leaking toxic waste from his nappy, and perpetual stickiness, Brobot is obedient, hygienic and not at all destructive. Done: A helpful, controllable brother with superior features! All is grand until Brobot’s remote control breaks, chaos reigns, and Sally recognises that there are some advantages to a human brother. Witty humour abounds in this short graphic novel—may there be many more! Lynndy

nonfiction

Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World by Kate Pankhurst ($15, PB)

With her pedigree as a descendant of suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, Kate Pankhurst has found the right niche to present to us some of the hugely influential women who’ve shaped our world during the past three centuries. Against the difficulties of their respective eras, these women contributed in fields such as literature, social activism, science, exploration, sport, fashion design, art and medicine. Whether as an overview, or as an introduction prompting further reading, this is a lively start. Lynndy

novelty

Tales from Outer Suburbia Book & Jigsaw Puzzle by Shaun Tan ($35, BOX)

Shaun Tan’s work is internationally acclaimed, and in this book his imagination is translated into both art and stories, all distinguished by his otherworldly whimsy. (Move over, Leunig.)

This presentation box contains a paperback copy of Tales from Outer Suburbia—remember Eric the shy exchange student; and the buffalo at the end of the street? - plus a 750-piece jigsaw puzzle of The Tuesday Afternoon Reading Group. Suitable for children, adults, and reading groups everywhere. Lynndy

Food & Health Margaret Preston: Recipes for Food and Art

by Lesley Harding ($45, PB)

Celebrated for her vibrant, distinctive pictures of indigenous flowers, Margaret Preston was an equally colourful and outspoken personality. Less well known is her legacy as a generous and insightful teacher and keen cook, and her deep sense of civic duty. Maintaining that art should be within everyone’s reach, she published widely on the methods and techniques of a host of creative pursuits—from pottery, printmaking and basket weaving, to the gentle art of flower arranging. She devoted much of her career to the genre of still life, depicting humble domestic objects and flowers from her garden, and often painting in the kitchen while keeping ‘one eye on the stew’. Richly illustrated with Preston’s art, photographs and her recipes—for food, art and interior décor—this book sheds new light on the private life of much-loved public figure.

Gleebooks’ special price $39.95

Mindfulness in Knitting: Meditations on Craft and Calm by Rachael Matthews ($20, HB)

Everyone can pick up a pair of needles and a ball of yarn. And everyone can be mindful. Mindfulness in Knitting casts fresh light on this famously calming craft, and reveals how the simple repetition of plain and purl can in itself nurture wellbeing.

Art of Mindful Singing: Notes on Finding Your Voice

by Jeremy Dion ($20, HB)

Through personal anecdote and expert insight, Jeremy Dion reveals how mindful singing provides a pathway to experiencing flow, a pure psychological state of bliss. Alongside practical meditations, we realize how releasing our voices is a universal, healing chord to promoting harmony and meaning in modern life.

The River Cottage A to Z: Our Favourite Ingredients, & How to Cook Them ($85, HB)

This huge and beautiful book is a River Cottage Larousse of ingredients. With entries on vegetables, fruits, herbs, spices, meat, fish, fungi, foraged foods, dairy, oils, vinegar and much more, it celebrates more than 300 ingredients that the modern cook might come across. Each ingredient is described by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall or an expert contributor from his River Cottage team. They explain which varieties to look for, how best to prepare them, and provide detailed information on seasonality, habitat, alternative names, Latin names, landing sizes (for fish), & easy growing instructions (for vegetables & herbs). There is also a delicious recipe for every entry.

AWW Celebrating Christmas ($50, HB)

Over 100 new recipes to show off on Christmas Day and over the holidays make this a standout book to have and use for years to come or to give as a gift. Themed by celebration opportunity—Christmas Eve, Brunch, Family Lunch, Christmas Night & Boxing Day this book has everything for the festive season home cook.

Hygge: A Celebration of Simple Pleasures. Living the Danish Way by Charlotte Abrahams ($33, PB)

Hygge, pronounced ‘hoo-ga’, is a Danish philosophy that roughly translates to ‘cosiness’. Is it a philosophy we can all embrace? In a society where lifestyle trends tend to centre on deprivation—be it no sugar, no gluten, no possessions—what does cherishing yourself actually mean? Charlotte Abrahams weaves the history of hygge and its role in Danish culture with her own attempts, as an English woman, to embrace a more hygge life. She examines the impact this has on her home, her health, her relationships and, of course, her happiness.

Light a candle, pour yourself a glass of wine, and get ready to enjoy your more hygge life.

Salads & Vegetables by Karen Martini ($40, PB) Karen Martini uses a wide range of ingredients—such as anchovies, miso, bacon, blue cheese and toasted nuts—to make her vegetable dishes truly sing. Try her whole roasted cauliflower with hot honey and feta dressing; mushroom, walnut & cheese pie; fried eggplant with savoury caramel & toasted peanuts; tagliatelle with shaved zucchini & hazelnut pesto; or tomato & haloumi scrolls.

Samarkand: Recipes & stories from Central Asia & the Caucasus by Caroline Eden & Eleanor Ford ($50, HB)

This book is a love letter to Central Asia & the Caucasus, containing personal travel essays & recipes little known in the West that have been expertly adapted for the home cook. An array of delicious dishes introduce the region & its different ethnic groups— Uzbek, Tajik, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Caucasian & Jewish—along with a detailed introduction on the Silk Road & a useful store cupboard of essential ingredients.

Jamie Oliver’s Christmas Cookbook ($40, PB)

Along with all the classics for the big day and beyond, Jamie Oliver supplies recipes for edible gifts, party food and new ways to love those leftovers. Chapters include The Main Event: Meat, The Wonderful World of Potatoes, Vegetarian Mains and Scrumptious Veggie Sides, Cute Edible Gifts and Festive Puddings.

Eataly: Contemporary Italian Cooking ($59.95, HB)

Created in collaboration with Eataly, one of the greatest Italian food brands, features 300 landmark recipes highlighting the best of contemporary Italian home cooking. Gone are heavy pasta dishes and over-rich sauces—Eataly takes a modern approach to Italian cooking and eating. With recipes that are fresh and delicious, clear instructions, helpful tips, and a visual produce guide, this book will allow you to eat like Italians do today.

The Grain Bowl by Nik Williamson ($45, HB) Grain bowls and porridge are hitting the headlines with their nutritious properties. Restaurants worldwide are adding grainbased dishes to their menus—and not just for breakfast. These recipes are guaranteed to surprise and inspire, built around quinoa, oats, rye, chia, spelt, buckwheat, barley, amaranth, black rice, and millet. This is a collection of 90 hearty recipes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—delicious, satisfying, easy, and heart-healthy—made with a variety of grains, seeds, rice, and superfoods, plus fresh fruits, slow-cooked meats, roasted vegetables, and sweet treats.

Australian Fish and Seafood Cookbook ($80, HB)

Written by the most respected authorities on seafood in the country, this publication contains all you need to know about selecting and preparing over 60 types of fish and seafood, including catching methods, notes on sustainability, flavour profiles and cooking guidelines. More than 130 recipes showcase the delicious potential of the vast array of seafood available, and clear step-by-step photography illustrating the key techniques takes all the guesswork out of cooking seafood at home. ‘The bible for seafood. The only book you’ll ever need on the topic.’ Neil Perry.

Quay: Food inspired by nature by Peter Gilmore

Quay, one of the top 50 restaurants in the world, is a showcase for Peter Gilmore’s culinary genius. Peter’s nature-based philosophy and the organic presentation that is synonymous with the fine dining experience at Quay is reflected in the stunning photography and illustration of this eagerly anticipated book. Quay’s recipes, including the irresistible eight-texture chocolate cake and signature ‘sea pearls’, will take you on an inspirational adventure, exploring flavour, texture and technique. Start with a single component, build to a show-stopping dish, or simply enjoy the visual and culinary journey. ($95, HB)

New this month The SMH Good Food Guide 2017, $25

Win three nights’ accommodation at the Shangri La Hotel in Hong Kong, a dinner at the hotel and a $1800 voucher towards airfares.

The China Cookbook ($59.95, HB) The Phaidon editors have gathered more than 650 regional recipes for delicious, authentic Chinese dishes for the home kitchen in this authoritative book which showcases the culinary diversity of the world’s richest & oldest cuisines.

We will be offering the opportunity to go into the draw for this prize in our Summer Reading Guide, released in November—so keep your receipt to attach to the entry form which will be on the back page.

Basics to Brilliance by Donna Hay ($55, HB)

Donna Hay believes that, just like anything you want to be good at, mastering the basics is how you build confidence. So, in this book, she’s sharing all her favourite, tried and true recipes—think the perfect tender steak, golden roast chicken, crispy pork belly, her nan’s sponge cake, and of course the fudgiest brownies! Each basic recipe is followed by clever variations and simple flavour change-ups, so one recipe becomes many and your repertoire naturally grows. Take Hay’s ‘no-fail meringue mixture’—once mastered, this basic recipe can be tweaked to be turned into the perfect pavlova; divinely flavoured salted caramel, chocolate, rosewater and pistachio, and raspberry meringues for an elegant afternoon tea; or a silky smooth and tangy lemon meringue pie for a divine dessert for a dinner party. Featuring beautiful photography and over 200 recipes.

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Sign up for gleem y kl James Ross’ wee te. email events upda m co .au asims@gleebooks.

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Launch—3.30 for 4 John Williams

Deutschland über Allah! Germany, Gallipoli and the Great War Launcher: Vrasidis Karalis Speakers: Duncan Waterson & Sir Nicholas Laurantus John Williams’ examination of the German perspective brings into relief the place of the Gallipoli campaign in WW1 as a whole.

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The Goo in conv. with In the year 1825, ley lying between south-west Irelan river of Killarney brought together troublin

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Tim Winton Author Talk 5 for 5.30

The Boy Behind the Curtain The remarkable true stories in his new book reveal an intimate and rare view of Tim Winton’s imagination at work and play. $45 (no concession) Ticket price includes entry to the event, drinks on arrival & a copy of the book

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The Curious Story bull, the Incredib in the T in conv. with R How did the gov election when it a sure if it wanted to Andrew P. Street take on politics A

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Finding In 1948, an Austr cently returned pr about an experime one of the scourg manic depression, der. This is the st who discovered th logical treatment

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23 Launch—3.30 for 4 Don Aitkin

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Moving On Launcher: Wendy McCarthy Ever been told, ‘You need to move on!’ by a friend? In his 5th novel Don Aitkin introduces us to several people who, in the year before the Millennium, are doing their best to move on, in the hope that the new era will hold the right outcome for them.

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Victoria: The Wom Modern in conv. with A Julia Baird tells story of one of the fluential, intriguin ruler, Quee

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Sheridan Palmer

Hegel’s Owl: The Life of Bernard Smith Author Talk—6 for 6.30 This lecture will look at some of Smith’s celebrated and contentious qualities that made him one of the most original and brilliant cultural historians of the twentieth century, a man who fearlessly helped steer Australia’s art and cultural identity to where it stands today.

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

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Event—6 for 6.30 Nick Brodie

od People Cath Keenan , in a remote valn the mountains of nd, near the Flesk y, three women are r by strange and ng events.

1787 By charting the encounters with Australia, and its original people by several major groups of visitors, 1787 reveals the stories of first encounters between Indigenous Australians and foreigners, placing Indigenous Australians back into our known history rather than prehistory.

—6 for 6.30 P. Street

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Event—6 for 6.30

Larry Writer y of Malcolm Turnble Shrinking Man Pitched Battle: In the frontline of the 1971 Springbok tour of Australia Top Hat in conv. with Meredith Burgmann Rebecca Huntley and Jim Boyce vernment win an apparently wasn’t This is the vivid story of the men and o govern anymore? women who took a stand when sport t offers a unique mixed with politics.

Australian style.

—6 for 6.30 e Moore

g Sanity ralian doctor—rerisoner of war, set ental treatment for ges of mankind— , or bipolar disortory of John Cade he first pharmacofor mental illness.

—6 for 6.30 Baird

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THURSDAY 6

Event—6 for 6.30 Clementine Ford

FRIDAY 7

Launch—6 for 6.30 K J Taylor

The Last Guard Fight Like a Girl In the 1st book of Cymrian Saga, in conv. with Amelia Lester Southerner Sergeant Kearney ‘Red’ Demand and fight for a world in Redguard is the last of a disgraced which women have real equality and family—with a murderer stalking not merely the illusion of it. the streets, the city guard is his city’s Everest Theatre, Seymour Centre best defense. But in the North, King Caedmon Taranisäii is gathering his $20/$17, no gleeclub concession Bookings through Seymour Centre army, and the cruel Night God prepares for the downfall of the South.

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Andrew McMillen

Skeleton School: Dissecting the Gift of Body Donation in conv. with Stephen Romei Would you donate your body to science? Andrew McMillen gains unprecedented access to the anatomy facilities of one of Australia’s leading medical schools to report on this closely guarded world.

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CD Launch —6 for 6.30 Guilhangtar

Dawn of the Mountain Forest Guihangtar comprises guitarist LeTuyen Nguyen (Australia) and percussionist Salil Sachdev (USA). They perform compositions & arrangements inspired by nature & traditional music not bound by cultural confines, in an expression of tradition, innovation & global interaction.

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Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies

& David Ruccio

Development and Globalisation: A Marxian Class Analysis Introduced by: Adam Morton

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Event—6 for 6.30 Barry Jones

Dictionary of World Biography in conv. with Phillip Adams man who made the Barry Jones’ Dictionary of World Bin World ography weaves historical facts with Annabel Crabb perspective on the subjects and the the extraordinary influence they had on theirs and on e world’s most in- modern times. Gain a unique insight ng and surprising into the life and times of important en Victoria. identities, cultural icons and controversial characters.

27 Launch—6 for 6.30 June Ankers

Feisty, Fabulous & Fifty+ Launcher: Damien Beaumont This is a collection of 21 ‘warts and all’ autobiographical stories of women navigating their way through their 50s and beyond— all recounted with humour, insight and self-deprecation, demonstrating the understated strength & resilience of these fabulous women.

Remember! b and get free Join the Gleeclu ld at our shops, entry to events he with every pur10%credit accrued aner delivered to chase, and the Gle onth. your door every m

28 Launch—6 for 6.30 Andrew Taylor

Impossible Preludes: Poems 2008–2014 Launcher: David Brooks Reflecting a life spread across two continents, Impossible Preludes continues Andrew Taylor’s restless probing of the contradictions of life and language.

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Granny’s Good Reads with Sonia Lee

Grief is the Thing With Feathers ($20) by Max Porter is an exquisitely written novella about a man whose wife has died suddenly, leaving him with two little boys to care for. It’s part story, part poetry and part play-for-voices, the voices being those of Dad, Boys and Crow. Dad has been writing a book called Ted Hughes’s Crow on a Couch: A Wild Analysis, and grief turns up in the guise of Crow, arriving in the middle of the night with ‘a rich smell of decay, a sweet furry stink of just-beyond-edible food, and moss and leather and yeast’. Crow is the bereft family’s analyst, adviser, story-teller and caretaker. He listens, bullies and consoles. When an intrusive demon tries to come in, Crow chases it from the door and makes short work of it. In Emily Dickinson’s poem Hope, hope is ‘the thing with feathers’, and Porter uses Love, another Dickinson poem, as his epigraph. The boys are real boys: they squabble, flick toothpaste on the bathroom mirror, say they don’t need a bath, and throw wet toilet paper on the bathroom ceiling because that way they won’t forget Mum. Crow tells them ‘I won’t leave until you don’t need me any more’. Eventually tiny green shoots of Hope emerge, but it is Love which sustains them and brings lasting benediction. One day Dad says it’s time to scatter Mum’s ashes, so he phones the school and says the boys are ill. They go to a place their mother loved, fall asleep in the grass, then scatter the ashes in the water. I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU the boys call and the father hears in his sons’ voices ‘the life and song of their mother. Unfinished. Beautiful. Everything’. (Max Porter lost his father at age six. Ted Hughes wrote his Crow poems after the death of his wife Sylvia Plath.)

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World ($25) by Peter Frankopan is a history of trade from antiquity to the present, written in an engaging style with plenty of striking anecdotes. The ‘Roads’ are the ‘central nervous system of the world’—where East meets West trading silk bales, pottery, furs, horses, spices, slaves and religion. Invaders use them, but also faiths: Buddhism, Christianity and Islam are familiar travellers, as is the Black Death, spread by fleas on camels as well as rats. There is a brilliant chapter on the Mongols and another on the rise of Russia. This is a book worth reading for the chapters on oil alone. These tell succinctly and dispassionately a sorry tale of greed, callousness and folly.

For instance, did Roosevelt and Churchill let Stalin get hold of Eastern Europe in return for the safety of their oil concessions? The very last chapter is about the new silk road with its centres of wealth in China and the ‘stans’ of the former USSR. A work of dazzling range and achievement.

My bedside book this month is Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen ($25), but since one can never have too much by or about Austen, I’m also reading Paula Byrne’s The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things ($20). Byrne devotes a chapter each to some of the ‘small things’ in Jane’s life, such as the tiny vellum books containing her juvenilia, a shawl, some topaz crosses, and a family likeness in silhouettes. By setting these objects in the context of the novels and letters Byrne builds up a detailed portrait of Austen’s life, and especially of her happy childhood and love of family. We’re told that all the Austen infants were fed by their mother for three months, then farmed out for a year or two to local families; surprisingly they all survived this regimen and grew up healthy. Jane’s brother Edward was adopted by the wealthy Knight family and it was he who gave the family a house at Chawton when her father died. There is a full treatment of cousin Eliza de Feuillide who lost her husband to the guillotine and later married Henry Austen. (Charming, worldly Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park is said to be based on Eliza.) Byrne also tells us that Captain Harville in Persuasion is modelled on sailor brother Frank who was nifty at knocking up shelves and once made a fringe for curtains. A scrap of lace heads the chapter about Aunt Leigh–Perrot who was imprisoned for shoplifting a card of lace worth twentyone shillings—a capital crime which could have seen her sentenced to hanging or transportation to Port Jackson. Fortunately she was acquitted but it was an anxious time for the family. A very enjoyable read. Sonia

Swallowed by the Sea: The Story of Australia’s Shipwrecks by Graeme Henderson

Swallowed by the Sea tells the stories of Australia’s greatest and most tragic shipwrecks, lost in raging storms, on jagged reefs, under enemy fire, or through human error, treachery or incompetence. Read about the oldest known wreck in Australian waters, the Tryal, driven into a maze of sunken rocks by the inept and reluctant Captain Brookes, and about Australia’s worst civil disaster at sea, the loss of emigrant barque Cataraqui, which struck a reef off King Island. Maritime archaeologist Graeme Henderson has personally located and dived many of the shipwrecks in this book, and alongside historical paintings & photographs of original objects, the book includes colour underwater photographs of the dive sites with specially written recollections by members of the diving crew. ($45, PB)

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Australian Studies

What a Time to be Alive by Mark Di Stefano

This is the ugly and un-sanitised diary behind the curtain of the 2016 double dissolution election campaign. A poll fought between two wildly ambitious men who want to win their first election, whatever it takes. Mark Di Stefano looks at how the two campaigns manufacture, massage & manipulate their parties, policies & principles. He documents the daily ride of the election campaign, week by long week, taking you into the bizarre world of staged photo ops, boozedrenched regrets & dirty direct messages. The exposure of the unscripted moments with political leaders, their over-worked staff and secretive minders, shows how the sausage that is this Australian election, is made and reveals what is really inside. ($28, PB)

The Story of Australia’s People V 2: The Rise and Rise of a New Australia by Geoffrey Blainey When Europeans crossed the world to plant a new society in an unknown land, traditional life for Australia’s first inhabitants changed forever. For the new arrivals, Australia was a land that rewarded, tricked, tantalised and often defeated. This 2nd volume Geoffrey Blainey’s history of Australia’s people starts with the Gold Rush and contines on to Land Rights and the Digital Age—bringing to life the key events of more recent times that have shaped us into the nation and people we are today. ($44.99, HB)

The Turnbull Gamble

by Wayne Errington & Peter van Onselen ($30, PB)

The Liberal party took a risk replacing Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull. They had seen voters turn against the ALP when it took down a first term Prime Minister. By the time he called the election it was still unclear what Turnbull wanted to achieve as prime minister.

He was strangely underprepared for a job that he had fought so long to win. Turnbull leads a party whose culture he doesn’t share. He is interested in policy but is not passionate about any policy in particular. While the narrow win may have justified the gamble to place him in office, does Turnbull have the leadership qualities to break the cycle of division and instability of the last decade?

Bob Ellis: In His Own Words ($35, PB)

In His Own Words showcases the best of Bob Ellis’s celebrated and much-loved essays, speeches, diaries and scripts, in addition to previously unpublished work, archival photos, and reflections from close friends and family. Compiled by Anne Brooksbank, this collection contains all the wit, acuity and forthrightness that we have come to expect from this inimitable wordsmith.

Pitched Battle: In the frontline of the 1971 Springbok tour of Australia by Larry Writer ($35, PB)

In 1971, when the racially selected all-white Springbok rugby team toured Australia, we became a nation at war with ourselves. There was bloodshed as tens of thousands of anti-Apartheid campaigners clashed with governments, police & rugby fans—who were given free reign to assault protestors. QLD premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen declared a State of Emergency. Prime minister William McMahon called the Wallabies who refused to play ‘national disgraces’.

Barbed wire ringed the great rugby grounds to stop protestors invading the field. Larry Writer recreates what became one of the most rancourous periods in modern Australian history—a time of courage, pain, faith, fanaticism, and political opportunism—which made heroes of the Wallabies who refused to play, played a key role in the later political careers of Peter Beattie, Meredith Burgmann, and Peter Hain, and ultimately contributed to the abandonment of Apartheid..

The Curious Story of Malcolm Turnbull, the Incredible Shrinking Man in the Top Hat

by Andrew P. Street ($30, PB)

This is a tale of a muddling & middling prime minister and his attempts to steer his inertia-heavy government away from electoral disaster. It details the litany of gaffes, blunders & questionable calls that followed from the bold promise of mature politics offered by Malcolm Turnbull on the day he did Tony Abbott out of the top job.

With a whimsical cast of Delusional Conservatives & Mal-contents & the ever-present ghost of the ex-PM rattling his chains, Street attempts to answer the question, ‘How did the government win an election when it apparently wasn’t sure if it wanted to govern anymore?’ Who would have thought Mr Harbourside McMansion would come to this?

Nauru Burning: An Uprising and Its Aftermath

by Mark Isaacs ($17, PB)

Mark Isaacs goes behind the veil of secrecy around Australia’s offshore immigration detention centres to reveal a climate of fear & hopelessness, culminating in the riot & fire which destroyed much of the Nauru processing centre in July 2013. He reveals how the tinderbox ignited & examines the investigation into who was responsible. It is the story of the fight of the men in detention to prove their innocence, and of the workers who tried to help them. Ultimately, it is a comment on the lack of accountability and oversight for service providers in the deliberately remote and closed environment of Australia’s offshore detention centres.

The Conscription Conflict and the Great War (eds) Robin Archer et al ($34.95, PB)

While the Great War raged, Australians were twice asked to vote on the question of military conscription for overseas service. The recourse to popular referendum on such an issue at such a time was without precedent anywhere in the world. The campaigns precipitated mass mobilisation, bitter argument, a split in the Labor Party, and the fall of a government. The defeat of the proposals was hailed by some as a victory of democracy over militarism, mourned by others as an expression of political disloyalty or a symptom of failed self-government. Across nine chapters, distinguished scholars consider the origins, unfolding, and consequences of the conscription campaigns, comparing local events with experiences in Britain, the US & other countries. A corrective to the ‘militarisation’ of Australian history, it is also a major new exploration of a unique and defining episode in Australia’s past.

From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories

by Mark McKenna ($35 PB)

In March 1797, five British sailors & 12 Bengali seamen struggled ashore after their longboat broke apart in a storm. Their fellow-survivors from the wreck of the Sydney Cove were stranded more than 500 km southeast in Bass Strait. To rescue their mates & to save themselves the 19 men had to walk 700 km north to Sydney. That remarkable walk is a story of endurance but also of unexpected Aboriginal help. Mark McKenna recounts four extraordinary & largely forgotten stories: the walk of shipwreck survivors; the founding of a ‘new Singapore’ in western Arnhem Land in the 1840s; Australia’s largest industrial development project nestled amongst outstanding Indigenous rock art in the Pilbara; and the ever-changing story of James Cook’s time in Cooktown in 1770. This new telling of the central drama of Australian history—the encounter between Aboriginal and nonAboriginal Australians—holds a key to understanding this land and its people.

A Tear in the Soul by Amanda Webster ($30, PB) A foreigner’s criticism provides the impetus for Amanda Webster to embark on a long-intended search for two former school friends— Aboriginal kids from the Kurrawang Mission near where she grew up in Kalgoorlie. As a child, Webster supposed Mission kids were well-cared for orphans, but over the years her questions accumulated: were her friends members of the Stolen Generations? What was life at Kurrawang really like? For an institution that existed for over two decades, Webster finds that Kurrawang was strangely undocumented. In 2012, Webster meets Gregory Ugle, an older brother of her former friend Tony. After a 4 decade absence, she returns to her hometown with Ugle to piece together Kurrawang’s story through oral histories and local newspaper archives. Over several trips, a sometimes uneasy tension emerges with Ugle as both he and Webster inch towards a fragile reconciliation.

Politics

Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours

by Slavoj Žižek ($25, HB)

Today, hundreds of thousands of refugees are crossing the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. Our response, argues Žižek, offers two versions of ideological blackmail: either we open our doors as widely as possible; or we try to pull up the drawbridge. Both solutions states Žižek, are bad. They merely prolong the problem, rather than tackling it. We must also acknowledge that large migrations are our future. Only then can we commit to a carefully prepared process of change, one founded not on a community that sees the excluded as a threat, but one that insists on the global solidarity of the exploited and oppressed. Maybe such solidarity is a utopia. But, warns Žižek, if we don’t engage in it, then we are really lost.

The Mind of the Islamic State: Milestones Along the Road to Hell by Robert Manne ($23, PB)

How did the Islamic State arise? What are the ideas that define it?

How does this movement of apocalyptic violence justify its actions?

Robert Manne offers a condensed and gripping history of political jihadism—from its birth in the 1960s prison writings of Sayyid Qutb all the way to IS’s glossy magazine of horror, Dabiq. Along the way he considers such terrifying texts as The Management of Savagery and such diabolical figures as al-Zarqawi, who devised the strategy of pitting Sunni against Shia in Iraq, thereby helping to pull the country apart. Tracing the way ideas & events have intersected to produce IS, he shows that many in the West have failed to understand what we are dealing with.

The Panama Papers

by Bastian Obermayer & Frederik Obermaier

Late one evening, investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer receives an anonymous message offering him access to secret data.

Through encrypted channels, he then receives documents revealing how the president of Argentina has sequestered millions of dollars of state money for private use. This is just the beginning. Obermayer & fellow Suddeutsche journalist Frederik Obermaier find themselves immersed in the secret world where complex networks of letterbox companies help the super-rich to hide their money. This is an unputdownable account that proves there exists a small elite living by a different set of rules and blows their secret world wide open. ($27, PB)

History

Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts by de Hamel Christopher ($69.95, HB)

Coming face to face with an important illuminated manuscript in the original is rather like meeting a very famous person.

This book invites the reader into an intimate conversation with a selection of the most famous manuscripts in existence, and to let each of those manuscripts illuminate the Middle Ages and sometimes the modern world too. Christopher de Hamel visits a dozen very varied collections, in different parts of the world, to discover twelve great manuscripts and to explore their historical and intellectual significance.

Gleebooks’ special price $59.99

Blitzed by Norman Ohler ($50, HB) Norman Ohler investigates the murky, chaotic world of drug use in the Third Reich in the first to show how the entire Nazi regime was permeated with drugs—cocaine, heroin, morphine and methamphetamines, the last of these crucial to troops’ resilience and partly explaining German victory in 1940. Ohler is explicit that drugs cannot explain Third Reich ideology, but their promiscuous use impaired and confused decision-making, with drastic effects on Hitler and his entourage, who, as the war turned against Germany, took refuge in ever more poorly understood cocktails of stimulants.

Gleebooks’ special price $44.99

Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed With Time by Simon Garfield ($33, HB)

An Englishman arrives back from Calcutta but refuses to adjust his watch. Beethoven has his symphonic wishes ignored.

A moment of war is frozen forever. The timetable arrives by steam train. A woman designs a ten-hour clock and reinvents the calendar. Roger Bannister becomes stuck in the same four minutes forever. A British watchmaker competes with mighty Switzerland. And a prince attempts to stop time in its tracks. Timekeepers is a vivid exploration of the ways we have perceived, contained and saved time over the last 250 years.

Gleebooks’ special price $27.99

Pax Romana: War, Peace and Conquest in the Roman World by Adrian Goldsworthy ($55, HB)

Adrian Goldsworthy tells the story of the creation of the Empire, revealing how and why the Romans came to control so much of the world and asking whether the favourable image of the Roman peace is a true one. He chronicles the many rebellions by the conquered, and describes why these broke out and why most failed.

At the same time, he explains that hostility was only one reaction to the arrival of Rome, and from the start there was alliance, collaboration and even enthusiasm for joining the invaders, all of which increased as resistance movements faded away. A ground-breaking and comprehensive history of the Roman Peace, Pax Romana takes the reader on a journey from the bloody conquests of an aggressive Republic through the age of Caesar and Augustus to the golden age of peace and prosperity under diligent emperors like Marcus Aurelius, offering a reappraisal of life in the Roman Empire.

Viking Economics by George Lakey ($45, HB) In America, many Democrats invoke Scandinavia as a promised land of equality, while most Republicans fear it as a hotbed of liberty-threatening socialism. But the left & right agree that the Nordic system is impossible to replicate in the US. George Lakey has spent decades studying the economies of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland—and he reveals that Scandinavia’s deep commitment to the welfare state is much more recent than commonly believed. He ranges from 20th century Norwegian history to the details of Swedish childcare policies in a witty, expansive, generous vision of a better, more equal future—explaining that even Scandinavia’s grandest experiments in social equality are rooted in recent political struggles, and showing how the US (and Australia) can do it, too—conventional wisdom be damned.

Gleebooks’ special price $39.95

Merchants of Men by Loretta Napoleoni ($30, PB)

Every day, a powerful and sophisticated underground business delivers thousands of refugees along the Mediterranean coasts of Europe. A new breed of criminals, risen from the political chaos of post-9/11 Western foreign policy and the fiasco of the Arab Spring, controls it. Merchants of Men is based on exclusive access to former hostages, counter-terrorism experts, members of security services, and hostage negotiators actively involved in ransom bargaining and rescue missions, among many others. In a gripping narrative, Loretta Napoleoni describes the brutal processes of kidnapping and human trafficking from a personal and global level, and uncovers the ruthless business models that lie behind them.

15

Science & Nature

A Day in the Life of the Brain: The Neuroscience of Consciousness from Dawn Till Dusk

by Susan Greenfield ($29.99, PB)

Each of us has a unique, subjective inner world, one that we can never share directly with anyone else. But how do our physical brains actually give rise to this rich and varied experience of consciousness? Neuroscientist Susan Greenfield brings together a series of astonishing new, empirically based insights into consciousness as she traces a single day in the life of your brain. From waking to walking the dog, working to dreaming, Greenfield explores how our daily experiences are translated into a tangle of cells, molecules and chemical blips, thereby probing the enduring mystery of how our brains create our individual selves.

Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli

What are time and space made of? Where does matter come from?

And what exactly is reality? Carlo Rovelli has spent his life exploring these questions and pushing the boundaries of what we know. Here he explains how our image of the world has changed throughout centuries. From Aristotle to Albert Einstein, Michael Faraday to the Higgs boson, he takes us on a wondrous journey to show us that beyond our ever-changing idea of reality is a whole new world that has yet to be discovered. ($40, HB)

Why the Wheel is Round: Muscles, Technology, & How We Make Things Move by Steven Vogel

There is no part of our bodies that fully rotates, we are made to twist only so far. And yet, there is no more fundamental human invention than the wheel—a rotational mechanism that accomplishes what our physical form cannot. Throughout history, humans have developed technologies powered by human strength, complementing the physical abilities we have while overcoming our weaknesses. Providing a unique history of the wheel & other rotational devices, like cranks, cranes, carts & capstans, Vogel examines the contraptions & tricks we have devised in order to more efficiently move through the physical world. ($72, HB)

Owls: A Guide to Every Species

by Anna Claybourne ($60, HB)

From ancient myth & superstition to the most popular modern children’s stories, owls are harbingers of good & bad news, icons of fear & wisdom, and powerful sidekicks of magic-makers.

Most are nocturnal & many extremely secretive—new species are still being discovered, as are new insights into the habits of even the most familiar species. Illustrated with colour photos, with full descriptions & distribution maps for all 225 owl species.

2017 Australasian Sky Guide by Nick Lomb

Dr Nick Lomb has been providing stargazers with everything they need to know about the southern night sky for over 25 years. The 2017 guide contains monthly astronomy maps, viewing tips & highlights, and details of the year’s exciting celestial events. 2017 highlights are: Mars passes close to Uranus in February; Partial eclipse of the Moon in August; Venus & Mars conjunction in October; Venus & Jupiter close in November. Wherever you are in Australia or NZ, easy calculations allow you to estimate local rise and set times for the Sun, Moon and planets. The guide also provides information on the solar system, updated with the latest findings from space probes. ($16.95, PB)

Einstein’s Greatest Mistake: The Life of a Flawed Genius by David Bodanis ($35, PB)

Albert Einstein revolutionised our understanding of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity and helped to lead us into the atomic age. Yet in the final decades of his life he was also ignored by most working scientists, his ideas opposed by even his closest friends. This stunning downfall can be traced to Einstein’s earliest successes and to personal qualities that were at first his best assets. Einstein’s imagination and self-confidence served him well as he sought to reveal the universe’s structure, but when it came to newer revelations in the field of quantum mechanics, these same traits undermined his quest for the ultimate truth. David Bodanis traces the arc of Einstein’s intellectual development across his professional and personal life, showing how Einstein’s confidence in his own powers of intuition proved to be both his greatest strength and his ultimate undoing.

New Scientist: The Origin of (Almost) Everything —From the Big Bang to Belly-Button Fluff

New Scientist does & illustrator Jennifer Daniel take the reader on a whistlestop journey from the start of our universe (through the history of stars, galaxies, meteorites, the Moon and dark energy) to our planet (through oceans and weather to oil) and life (through dinosaurs to emotions and sex) to civilisation (from cities to alcohol and cooking), knowledge (from alphabets to alchemy) ending up with technology (computers to rocket science). ($45, HB)

Being a Dog: Following the Dog into a World of Smell by Alexandra Horowitz ($33, PB)

What the dog sees and knows comes mostly through his nose, and the information that every dog has about the world based on smell is unthinkably rich. Under the tutelage of her family dogs, Finnegan and Upton, Alexandra Horowitz takes a tour through the cutting edge and improbable science behind the olfactory abilities of the dog—from revealing the spectacular biology of the dog nose, to following a tracking dog being put through his paces and trying herself to become a better smeller.

‘A passionate and urgently needed call to arms ... It’ll change lives.’

Emily Maguire, author of An Isolated Incident

Online sensation, fearless feminist heroine and scourge of trolls and misogynists everywhere, Clementine Ford is a beacon of hope and inspiration to thousands of Australian women and girls.

Her incendiary debut is an essential manifesto for feminists new, old and soon-to-be, and exposes just how unequal the world continues to be for women. Crucially, it is a call to arms for all women to rediscover the fury that has been suppressed by a society that still considers feminism a threat.

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16

Philosophy & Religon

The Bible for Grown-Ups: A New Look at the Good Book by Simon Loveday ($30, HB)

This book neither requires, nor rejects, belief. It sets out to help intelligent adults make sense of the Bible—a book that is too large to swallow whole, yet too important in our history and culture to spit out. Why do the creation stories in Genesis contradict each other?

Did the Exodus really happen? Was King David a historical figure?

Why is Matthew’s account of the birth of Jesus so different from Luke’s? Why was St Paul so rude about St Peter? Every Biblical author wrote for their own time, and their own audience—nothing in the Bible is quite what it seems. Literary critic Simon Loveday’s book—a labour of love that has taken over a decade to write—is a thrilling read, for Christians and anyone else, which will overturn everything you thought you knew about the Good Book.

State and Politics: Deleuze and Guattari on Marx

Guillaume Sibertin-Blanc measures how Deleuze & Guattari engage with the upheavals of their time by confronting their thought with its main interlocutor, Marxism, with its epistemological field (historical materialism), with its critical program (the critique of political economy), and with its political grammar (class struggle). Three new hypotheses emerge from these encounters: the hypothesis of the Urstaat, embodying an excess of sovereign violence over the State apparatus and over its political investments; the hypothesis of a power of the ‘war machine’ that States can only ever appropriate partially, and to which they can be subordinated; and the hypothesis of an excess of ‘destructivism’ in capitalist accumulation over its productive organization. These three excesses betray the haunting presence of the period between the wars in the political thought of Deleuze and Guattari, but they also allow Deleuze & Guattari’s ideas to communicate with contemporary thinkers of the impolitical. ($41.95, PB)

Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality

by Catherine Malabou ($39.95, PB)

Psychology The Man Who Wasn’t There: Tales from the Edge of the Self by Anil Ananthaswamy ($27, PB)

Anil Ananthaswamy explores the concept of self by way of several mental conditions that eat away at patients’ identities, showing we learn a lot about being human from people with a fragmented or altered sense of self. Ananthaswamy travelled the world to meet those who suffer from ‘maladies of the self’ interviewing patients, psychiatrists, philosophers and neuroscientists along the way. He charts how the self is affected by Asperger’s, autism, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, schizophrenia, and several less­familiar conditions, such as Cotard’s syndrome, in which patients believe they are dead, and those with body integrity identity disorder, where the patient seeks to have a body part amputated because it ‘doesn’t belong to them’, revealing how the brain constructs our sense of self.

Triumph of the Heart: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World by Megan F. Bettencourt

This is the story of Megan Bettencourt’s quest to understand the complex concept of forgiveness—from both a scientific perspective and a human one. She draws on cutting-edge research showing that forgiveness can provide a range of health benefits, from relieving depression to decreasing high blood pressure. She examines situations as mundane as road rage, as painful as cheating spouses, and as unthinkable as war crimes.

Through stories of people and even communities who have forgiven in the toughest of circumstances, she shows us how they’re able to do it, the profound sense of freedom they feel afterward, and the evocative implications for peacemaking worldwide. ($27, PB)

The Emotional Compass: How to Think Better About Your Feelings by Ilse Sand ($19.95, PB)

The structures of knowledge, taken for granted since Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, are now being called into question: the finitude of the subject, the phenomenal given, a priori synthesis. Relinquish the transcendental: such is the imperative of postcritical thinking in the 21st century. Questions that we no longer thought it possible to ask now reemerge with renewed vigour: can Kant really maintain the difference between a priori and innate? Can he deduce, rather than impose, the categories, or justify the necessity of nature? Catherine Malabou lays out Kant’s response to his posterity. True to its subject, the book evolves as an epigenesis the differentiated growth of the embryo for, as those who know how to read critical philosophy affirm, this is the very life of the transcendental and contains the promise of its transformation.

Revealing the complexity of emotions such as happiness, anger, fear, and jealousy, and how these are based on our perception of other people, Ilse Sand offers her professional wisdom on the psychology of feelings. Establishing that emotions are not always as appropriate as they first appear to be, the book encourages you to take a closer look at why you are feeling certain things, and how you can change how you feel. Especially written for highly sensitive people, guidance is included on how to identify the vulnerable feelings that often underlie our more volatile emotional states, and practical activities are suggested to help to embrace or reject sadness, delay impulsive actions, and allow yourself to be happy.

Adrienne Martin presents a novel account of hope, the motivational resources it presupposes, and its function in our practical lives. She contends that hoping for an outcome means treating certain feelings, plans, and imaginings as justified, and that hope thereby involves sophisticated reflective and conceptual capacities. She develops what she calls the ‘incorporation analysis’, in contrast to the two dominant philosophical conceptions of hope: the orthodox definition, where hoping for an outcome is simply desiring it while thinking it possible, and agent-centred views, where hoping for an outcome is setting oneself to pursue it.

She also examines the relationship between hope and faith, both religious and secular, and identifies a previously unnoted form of hope: normative or interpersonal hope— all demonstrating that hope merits rigorous philosophical investigation, both in its own right and in virtue of what it reveals about the nature of human emotion and motivation.

Does the fact that as much as fifty percent of our waking hours find us failing to focus on the task at hand represent a problem? Michael Corballis doesn’t think so, and with The Wandering Mind, he shows us why, rehabilitating woolgathering and revealing its incredibly useful effects. Drawing on the latest research from cognitive science and evolutionary biology, Corballis shows us how mind-wandering not only frees us from moment-to-moment drudgery, but also from the limitations of our immediate selves. Mind-wandering strengthens our imagination, fuelling the flights of invention, storytelling, and empathy that underlie our shared humanity; furthermore, he explains, our tendency to wander back and forth through the timeline of our lives is fundamental to our very sense of ourselves as coherent, continuing personalities.

How We Hope: A Moral Psychology

by Adrienne Martin ($38.95, PB)

Metaphilosophy by Henri Lefebvre ($43, PB)

In Metaphilosophy, Henri Lefebvre works through the implications of Marx’s revolutionary thought for philosophy. Metaphilosophy is conceived as a transformation of philosophy, developing it into a programme of radical worldwide change. This book demonstrates Lefebvre’s debt to Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, but it also brings a number of other figures into the conversation including Sartre, Heidegger and Axelos. This is a key text in Lefebvre’s wide-ranging oeuvre, the foundation for his work on everyday life, the city and the production of space. It is also a key moment in contemporary thinking about philosophy’s relation to the world.

Animals in Religion: Devotion, Symbol and Ritual Barbara Allen ($100, HB)

This book explores the role and presence of animals within a wide range of religious traditions, from the principle of ahimsa (nonviolence) in Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism, to the laws which relate to ts’ar ba’alei chayim (avoiding the suffering/pain of living creatures) in Judaism, we encounter the interdependence of life. The Jainist notion of ‘reverence for life’, the pronouncement in Genesis that ‘it was good’ and the Islamic belief that all species are Muslim allow us to come to a realization, or a deeper appreciation, that non-human animals have value in our religious traditions, as well as in our hearts and homes.

The Wandering Mind: What the Brain Does When You’re Not Looking

by Michael Corballis ($33.95, PB)

Future of the Brain: Essays by the World’s Leading Neuroscientists ($38.95, PB) (eds) Gary Marcus & Jeremy Freeman

This is an unprecedented look at the quest to unravel the mysteries of the human brain. Original essays by leading researchers such as Christof Koch, George Church, Olaf Sporns, and May-Britt & Edvard Moser describe the spectacular technological advances that will enable us to map the more than 85 billion neurons in the brain, as well as the challenges that lie ahead in understanding the anticipated deluge of data & the prospects for building working simulations of the human brain. A must-read for anyone trying to understand ambitious new research programs such as the European Union’s Human Brain Project, the book sheds light on the breathtaking implications of brain science for medicine, psychiatry & even human consciousness itself.

8 Keys to Mental Health Through Exercise

by Christina Hibbert ($28.95, PB)

Routine exercise alleviates stress and anxiety, moderates depression, relieves chronic pain, and improves self-esteem.

Christina G. Hibbert, an expert on women’s mental health, grief and self-esteem issues, offers readers step-by-step strategies for sticking to fitness goals, overcoming motivation challenges and roadblocks to working out, and maintaining a physically and emotionally healthy exercise regimen.

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Just outside the frame Cultural Studies & Criticism

William Boyd’s latest book, Sweet Caress, is a ripping yarn—a tale with a wide sweep across the twentieth century, and one with a complex central character, Amory Clay, a female photographer who has a knack for being in the worst places, at the best time. Two world wars, and the Vietnam war, are the backdrops to the novel, and the catalysts for most of the action. Clay’s father was a victim of WW1, his PTS caused him to nearly kill himself and Amory as a schoolgirl on an outing from boarding school; as a an adult she finds herself going back and forth from Europe to America in the Second World War, and goes to Vietnam as war photographer. Some of the most vivid descriptions are set in the Weimar Republic in Berlin, where Amory goes in search of causing a scandal—which she does most successfully—back in London.

Black and white photographs placed throughout the book lend a strange veracity to the story—it is fiction, but the photographs are real, inverting the normal order of a family album, and creating a kind of meta fiction complicity. Boyd isn’t completely convincing writing as a woman (comparisons are odious but no one can write as the opposite sex as well as Iris Murdoch, or Cólm Toibín), and this book is not as good as Any Human Heart ( William Boyd’s 2002 marvellous book about a fictitious writer whose life, like Amory Clay’s, spans the twentieth century). However it is an extremely entertaining book—I read it on a plane and found it most diverting, transporting me out of the confines of modern air travel.

Geoff Dyer’s White Sands is transporting on another level. Ostensibly a travel book, although it really defies a category, the author writes about places and things that most people don’t often think about—Utah, New Mexico, the Arctic fringe of Norway, Theodor Adorno’s house near Muscle Beach, and most hauntingly, a beheaded sculpture in Luxor. Like Sweet Caress, White Sands is littered with black and white photographs (and some in saturated Kodachrome colour). But they aren’t just for decoration—the writing hangs from the observation of the subjects and invites closer inspection of the photographs.

Geoff Dyer has a most distinctive voice. He can be absolutely hilarious (his essay on the journey to see the Northern Lights at his wife’s insistence is the funniest thing I’ve read for years), highly informative (especially when writing about art, literature or music), and compellingly human. There is a sobering essay he wrote about having stroke in 2014, and a less than edifying piece about picking up a hitch hiker on Highway 54, en route to El Paso. He is an excellent writer about nothingness, and abstract thought, and particularly vivid writing about what is just out of the frame—any frame. White Sands is a book that needs to be read more than once—Geoff Dyer’s humour and light touch belie the depth of his insights. Louise

The Sorrows of Mexico by Lydia Cacho et al

The so-called ‘war on drugs’ in Mexico has been a brutal and chaotic failure, yet people in all walks of life have refused to give up. Diego Enrique Osorno & Juan Villoro tell stories of teenage prostitution & Mexico’s street children. Anabel Hernandez & Emiliano Ruiz Parra give chilling accounts of the ‘disappearance’ of 43 students and the murder of a self-educated land lawyer. Sergio Gonzalez Rodriguez & Marcela Turati dissect the impact of the violence on the victims and those left behind, while Lydia Cacho contributes a journal of what it is like to live every day of your life under threat of death.

These accounts offer a way of understanding the true nature of the meltdown of democracy, obscured by lurid headlines, and the sheer physical and intellectual courage needed to oppose it. ($35, PB)

Windows into the Soul: Surveillance & Society in an Age of High Technology by Gary T. Marx

Gary Marx sums up a lifetime of work on issues of surveillance & social control by disentangling & parsing the empirical richness of watching & being watched. Using fictional narratives as well as the findings of social science, drawing on decades of studies of covert policing, computer profiling, location & work monitoring, drug testing, caller identification, and much more Marx provides a conceptual language to understand the new realities—clearly emphasizing the paradoxes, trade-offs & confusion enveloping the field. Windows into the Soul shows how surveillance can penetrate our social & personal lives in profound, and sometimes harrowing, ways—and Marx argues that asking the right questions is essential to bringing light and accountability to the darker, more iniquitous corners of our emerging surveillance society. ($68, PB)

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The Boy Behind the Curtain by Tim Winton ($45, HB)

In Tim Winton’s fiction, chaos waits in the wings and ordinary people are ambushed by events & emotions beyond their control. Winton’s own life has also been shaped by havoc. These powerful true stories take us behind the scenes, revealing the accidents, both serendipitous & traumatic, that have influenced his view of life and fuelled his distinctive artistic vision. They show the unexpected links between car crashes and religious faith, between surfing and writing, and how going to the wrong movie at the age of eight opened him up to a life of the imagination. And in writing about class, fundamentalism, asylum seekers, guns and the natural world, he presents not only the concerns that have made him the much-loved writer he is, but some of what unites the life and the work.

Gleebooks’ special price $39.95

The Voyeur’s Motel by Gay Talese ($30, PB)

On January 7, 1980, in the run-up to the publication of Thy Neighbor’s Wife, Gay Talese received an anonymous letter from a man in Colorado. ‘Since learning of your long awaited study of coast-tocoast sex in America,’ the letter began, ‘I feel I have important information that I could contribute to its contents or to contents of a future book.’ The man went on to tell Talese a remarkable, shocking secret, so compelling that Talese travelled to Colorado to verify it in person. But because the letter-writer insisted on remaining anonymous, Talese filed his reporting away, certain the story would remain untold. Over the next thirty-five years, the man occasionally reached out to Talese to fill him in on the latest developments in his life, but he continued to insist on anonymity. Finally, after thirty-five years, he’s ready to go public

The Promise of Things by Ruth Quibell ($28, PB)

Some of our strongest, most lasting relationships are hidden in plain view—those we have with objects. What do our possessions do for us? And how do they do it? In The Promise of Things, Ruth Quibell explores what our possessions say about us: who we think we are, what we long for and struggle against. It invites us to think about how we use things, what makes them precious, and why we find it so hard to throw these objects away.

The People’s Bard: How China Made Shakespeare its Own by Nancy Pellegrini ($10, PB)

The story of Shakespeare in China is one of cultural blending and reinvention. Peopled by devoted evangelists, theatre directors and dogged interpreters intent on bridging divisions of language and politics, it tracks the trajectory of modern Chinese history and the development of theatre arts. Four hundred years after Shakespeare’s death, Nancy Pellegrini pulls back the curtain on how the Bard of Avon rose from inauspicious Chinese beginnings to become the People’s Bard, exploring traditional opera-style Shakespeare productions, decades of Marxist interpretations, revolutionary translation methods and more.

Fight Like A Girl by Clementine Ford ($30, PB) A friend recently told me that the things I write are powerful for her because they have the effect of making her feel angry instead of just empty. I want to do this for all women and young girls - to take the emptiness and numbness they feel about being a girl in this world and turn it into rage and power. I want to teach all of them how to FIGHT LIKE A GIRL. Scourge of trolls and misogynists everywhere, Clementine Ford is a beacon of hope and inspiration to thousands of Australian women and girls. Her incendiary debut is an essential manifesto for feminists new, old and soon-to-be—a call to arms for all women to rediscover the fury that has been suppressed by a society that still considers feminism a threat.

Television: A Biography by David Thomson

In just a few years, what used to be an immobile piece of living room furniture, which one had to sit in front of at appointed times in order to watch sponsored programming on a finite number of channels, morphed into a glowing cloud of screens with access to a near-endless supply of content available when and how viewers want it. In a critical biography of the six-decade television era, critic and film historian David Thomson has turned eye to the medium that has swallowed film whole to survey a Boschian landscape, illuminated by that singular glow always on and peopled by everyone from Donna Reed to Dennis Potter. ($45, HB)

Queer: A Graphic History by Meg-John Barker

From identity politics & gender roles to privilege & exclusion, Queer explores how we came to view sex, gender & sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangled up with our culture & our understanding of biology, psychology & sexology; and how these views have been disputed. Along the way we look at key landmarks which shift our perspective of what’s ‘normal’—Alfred Kinsey’s view of sexuality as a spectrum, Judith Butler’s view of gendered behaviour as a performance. ($25, PB)

Long before Cold Chisel, long before 'Barnesy', there was the true story of James Dixon Swan

s d d w n n a o 2 H R A Sleuth’s Quartet

A flood of Folio Society volumes continues to flow into the shop. This month, a second selection of these elegantly produced works.

Henry Mayhew - London Characters and Crooks London, 1996. Third printing. Quarto. Hardcover. Edited and Introduced by Christopher Hibbert. Illustrated upper board, silver-gilt spine and upper board titles. Top edge dyed green. 535pp., 19pp. of plates. Index. Near Fine condition in lightly scuffed slipcase. $50.00.

Henry Mayhew (1812–1887) a journalist and social reformer, described himself as a ‘traveller in the undiscovered country of the poor’ who through extensive personal interviews, brought back stories about people ‘of whom the public has less knowledge than of the most distant tribes of the earth’. This Folio edition reprints extracts from the four volumes of Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851–1862). The work—over two million words—was an astonishing compendium of information.

From Syria to Germany in a wheelchair: the story of our times told through one remarkable girl

The Incredible Untold Story of Scientology in Australia

Data & Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data & Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

Data is everywhere. We create it every time we go online, turn our phone on (or off) or pay with a credit card. This data is stored, studied, bought and sold by companies & governments for surveillance and for control. Security expert (Wired) Bruce Schneier shows how this data has led to a double-edged Internet—a Web that gives power to the people but is abused by the institutions on which those people depend. Schneier reveals the full extent of surveillance, censorship & propaganda in society today, examining the risks of cybercrime, cyberterrorism & cyberwar. He shares technological, legal & social solutions that can help shape a more equal, private & secure world. ($25.95, PB)

Communal Nude: Collected Essays

by Robert Glück ($44.95, PB)

For any body—or text—to know itself, it must first see how it sees the world, and understand itself as writing. Robert Glück’s essays affirm this radical narratorial precept in rich spirals of reading, selfreflection, anecdote, escapade & ‘metatext’. These texts span the author’s career & his creative affinities—from lost manifestos theorizing the poetics of New Narrative; to encomia for literary & philosophic muses (Kathy Acker, the HOW(ever) poets, Frank O’Hara, Georges Bataille & others); to narrative journalism, book reviews, criticism & public talks. Many of the texts are culled from obscure little magazines and ephemeral online sources; others have never been published. As lucid as story, as lush as theory, and as irresistible as gossip, Glück’s essays are the quintessence of New Narrative theory in practice..

Dispatches from Moments of Calm

by Alexander Kluge & Gerhard Richter ($47.95, HB)

On October 5, 2012, the German national newspaper Die Welt published its daily issue but things looked different. Quieter. The sensations of the day, forgotten as soon as they’re read, were missing, replaced with an unprecedented calm, extracted with care from the chaos of the contemporary. Gerhard Richter had been granted control over Die Welt for that single day—imprinting all 30 pages of the newspaper with images from quiet moments amid unquiet times, the demotion of politics from its primary position, the privileging of the private & personal over the public, and, above all, artful, moving contrasts between sharpness & softness.

Among the many people to praise the work was writer Alexander Kluge, who instantly began writing stories to accompany Richter’s images. This second collaboration between Kluge & Richter, brings their stories & images together, along with new words & artworks created specifically for this volume. The result is a beautiful, meditative interval in the otherwise unremitting press of everyday life, a masterpiece by two acclaimed artists working at the height of their powers.

In this work there is to be found information on crossing-sweepers, street hawkers, dustmen, bird-sellers, river dredgers, pickpockets. The voices and scenes of Victorian London return to life: Haymarket prostitutes, Negro Beggars, and Lucifer Droppers: The artfulness of this device trades not alone upon deception, but exciting sympathy with the guilty at the expense of the innocent. A boy or a girl -it is generally a girl - takes up position on the pavement of a busy street such as the Strand. She carries a box or two of lucifer matches which she offers for sale. She artfully contrives to get in the way of some gentleman who is hurrying along. He knocks against her and upsets the matches which fall in the mud. The girl begins to cry and howl.

The bystanders exclaim in indignation and the result is that the gentleman, to escape being hooted, or the ignorant passers-by, in false compassion, gives the girl money.

Charles Darwin—The Voyage of the Beagle London, 2003. Second printing.

Quarto. Hardcover. Introduction by Richard Keynes.518pp. Decorative green cloth, black and gold illustrations on the spine and front cover. Top edge dyed green. Map end papers front and back. The maps are from a track chart of the BEAGLE’s voyage. Frontispiece full-colour portrait of Darwin by George Richmond, 1840. 518pp., 24 pp. of full-colour reproductions, 12 pp., of b/w reproductions and b/w drawings throughout the text. Index. This Folio edition reprints the 1860, third edition text, with some minor emendations. Near Fine condition in lightly scuffed slipcase. $70.00.

17 January 1836—Charles Darwin is underwhelmed by his first sight of the Blue Mountains: From so grand a title as Blue Mountains, I expected to see to have seen a bold chain of mountains crossing the country; but instead of this, a sloping plain presents merely an inconsiderable front to the low land near the coast…once on the sandstone plateau the scenery becomes exceedingly monotonous; each side of the road is bordered by scrubby trees of the never-failing eucalyptus family; and with the exception of two or three small inns , there are no houses or cultivated land; the road, moreover is solitary; the most frequent object being a bullock wagon, piled up with bales of wool.

Hans Christian Andersen—The Complete Tales London 2005. Two volume set. Quarto. Hardcover. cloth stamped & decorated in gilt. Illustrated by numerous artists. Fine condition in slipcase. $125.00.

Even by the sumptuous standards of all Folio books, this is a truly beautiful set. It contains all 168 stories from the Danish master. “ROUND about the garden ran a hedge of hazel-bushes; beyond the hedge were fields and meadows with cows and sheep; but in the middle of the garden stood a Rose-tree in bloom, under which sat a Snail, whose shell contained a great deal—that is, himself. ‘Only wait till my time comes’, he said; ‘I shall do more than grow roses, bear nuts, or give milk, like the hazel-bush, the cows and the sheep.’

‘I expect a great deal from you’, said the rose-tree. ‘‘May I ask when it will appear?’ ‘I take my time’, said the snail. ‘You’re always in such a hurry. That does not excite expectation.’ – from The Snail and the Rose Tree. Stephen

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Still ‘Tricky Dick’ ... four decades later

The Last of the President’s Men

by Bob Woodward ($26.99, PB) With a mere 39 days left (as you read this) until voting day in US Presidential Election campaign I am certain that famed political journalist Bob Woodward—along with Carl Bernstein, famed for exposing the Watergate political scandal in the 1970s in their book All the President’s Men—is by now near completion of a first draft of a 700 page plus book describing this utterly surreal campaign.

It will be chock full of Woodward-style, fly-on thewall scenes related by hundreds of individuals in ‘Deep Background—Not for Attribution’ interviews: ‘Whaddaya mean the polls show that Blacks, Hispanics and Latinos dislike me!’ shouted Trump down the phone, to his nervous aides, ‘You’re fired!’ etc, etc.

Yet, I often think that the smaller and more focused Woodward’s subject is, the better and more readable the book. This is the case with his 18th outing—a mere 182 pages of text—chronicling the White House experience of Alexander Butterfield, Deputy Assistant to President Richard Nixon, between 1969 to 1973.

In February 1971, Butterfield received an unusual order from Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman: ‘The President wants a taping system. He wants it in the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room telephones, the Lincoln Sitting Room telephones...’

When Butterfield suggested the White House Communications military unit could do the job, Haldeman dismissed that idea: ‘They’re all dumb bastards.

They’d find a way to f.. k it up. The President doesn’t want the military to have anything to do with this.’

The Secret Service Technical Division was tasked with installation over two days, during Nixon’s absence from the White House. The system was to be secret. It was to be voice activated. Nothing would be missed. ‘We’ve done this before’, says a Secret Service technical officer, ‘These things don’t always work out as planned.’

Only four people knew of the taping system’s existence. Nixon, in his omissionfilled memoirs —published in 1978—wrote that he believed the secret ‘would never be revealed’. On 16 July 1973 Butterfield publicly announced its existence to the Senate Watergate Committee. This changed history. The tapes revealed Nixon ordering the CIA to block further FBI investigation into the White House organized break-in of the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in The Watergate Hotel, Washington, DC in June 1972. These recorded revelations—including the notorious ‘smoking gun’ conversation—doomed the President, implicating him in obstruction of justice. Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency on 9 August 1974.

Woodward’s book is based on 40 hours of interviews with Butterfield, a voluminous unpublished memoir written by him and also the contents of 20 boxes of papers, files, memos and handwritten notes from Nixon that Butterfield had taken with him when he left the White House four decades earlier. Some are significant. One note has Nixon confessing that years of heavy US bombing in Southeast Asia was accomplishing ‘zilch’, even as he was lauding its effectiveness in public. Others, more minor, simply reinforce the existing portrait of Nixon’s mendacity, paranoia and petty vindictiveness. One instance was his order that private portraits of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, were to be removed from all White House staff offices. This book contains a 75-page appendix that reproduces 31 other choice examples.

After Nixon’s death in 1994, I recall hearing some of his defenders’ state that the entire historical record, viewed decades hence, would provide a more ‘balanced’, favourable portrait of a ‘flawed giant’. No such luck. Butterfield saw the President almost daily and simply confirms the view of the Nixon as a moody, vindictive, isolated tyrant and the White House as ‘cesspool’. An atmosphere of retribution reigned against anyone on Nixon’s ‘Enemies List’—the media, antiwar opponents, Democrats. As Woodward concludes, writing about an earlier book by White House counsel John Dean: ‘a White House full of lies, chaos, distrust, speculation, self-protection, maneuver and counter-maneuver, with a crookedness that makes Netflix’s ‘House of Cards’ look unsophisticated.’

HISTORICAL FOOTNOTE: In early 1974 a 26-year-old female lawyer, while undertaking postgraduate study, was hired as one of the impeachment inquiry staff in Washington, DC, advising the House Committee on the Judiciary during the Watergate scandal. Her name? Hillary Rodham (Clinton). Stephen Reid

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Language & Writing

The Jane Austen Writers’ Club

by Rebecca Smith ($33, PB)

Bursting with useful exercises, beautiful illustrations and enlightening quotations from Jane Austen’s novels and letters—and written by none other than Austen’s five-times-greatniece—this book will teach you her methods, tips and tricks, from techniques of plotting and characterisation through to dialogue and suspense. Whether you’re a creative writing enthusiast looking to publish your first novel, a teacher searching for further inspiration for students, or fan seeking insight into Austen’s daily rituals, this is an essential companion

Selected Poems 1968–2014

by Paul Muldoon ($35, HB)

Poetry

This volume offers 45 years of work drawn from twelve individual collections by a poet who ‘began as a prodigy and has gone on to become a virtuoso’. Hailed by Seamus Heaney as ‘one of the era’s true originals’, Paul Muldoon seems determined to escape definition. Yet this volume, chosen by the poet himself, serves as an indispensable introduction to his trademark combination of intellectual high jinx and emotional honesty.

Border Security by Bruce Dawe ($23, PB)

‘Bruce Dawe is that rare phenomenon, a natural poet with a superlative feeling for language.’—Geoffrey Lehmann, The Bulletin. ‘…in him we have an individual and passionately perceptive writer whose work has already assumed its proper territory and whose terms are directed from the heart as well as the mind.’—Judith Wright, Poetry No. 4

Melbourne Journal: Notebooks 1998–2003

by Alan Loney ($23, PB)

This is the third instalment in Alan Loney’s notebooks, covering the period in between his previous publications (Sidetracks: Notebooks 1976–1991 and Crankhandle: Notebooks June 2010–November 2013). Allowing observations and ideas to fall on to the page half formed, poems to shimmer into and out of existence like apparitions, Loney’s Melbourne Journal celebrates the reflexive muscle of the poet’s mind, heightened by the stimuli of a new place: Melbourne.

Star Struck by David McCooey ($23, PB) This book of poems by the award-winning poet David McCooey is made up of four sections. The first documents an alienating encounter with a life-threatening illness. The 2nd plays out an unforgettable obsession with darkness & light.

The 3rd brings together popular music & the ancient literary mode of the pastoral—Bob Dylan singing Virgil, Joni Mitchell reflecting on life in Laurel Canyon, a lab monkey pondering the sound of music. In the final section, narrative poetry is cast in an intensely new & uncanny light.

Impossible Preludes: Poems 2008–2014

by Andrew Taylor ($23, PB)

Reflecting a life spread across two continents, Andrew Taylor continues a restless probing of the contradictions of life and language. Here are love poems, poems about language and silence, an elegy for a cat and an interview with a querulous musician.

Poems of Hiromi Ito, Toshiko Hirata & Takako Arai: Asia Pacific Series 9 ($20, PB)

During the 1980s, Itō and Hirata quickly emerged as major new poetic voices, breaking taboos & writing about sexual desire, marital strife, pregnancy, childbirth & motherhood in such direct and powerful ways that they sent shockwaves through the literary establishment. In recent years, Arai has emerged as a leader of the next generation of poets, writing about workingclass women & their fates within the world of global capital.

Our Lady of the Fence Post

by J. H. Crone

One year after 9/11, terrorists had bombed Paddy’s Irish Pub and the Sari Club in Kuta, Bali, killing 202 people, including 88 Australians. Within days of the report of the Marian apparition huge crowds started visiting the site, dubbed ‘Our Lady of the Fence Post’ by the press. This is an imaginative response to news reports of the appearance of this apparition, telling the story of the ‘war on terror’, from the Bali bombing to ISIS suicide bombing in 2015, from the point of view of locals in the fictional setting of Sunshine Bay, in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs. ($23, PB)

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Seveneves Neal Stephenson, HB

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Death in Florence: The Medici, Savonarola & the Battle for the Soul of a Renaissance City Paul Strathern, HB

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Now $18.95 Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism & Violence Between Servants and Masters in 18th century Britain Kristina Straub, HB

Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World Daniel Hannan, HB

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A Dictionary of Idiocy Stephen Bayley, PB

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The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli & the World That He Made Philip Bobbitt, HB

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Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris Edmund White, HB

The Nile: A Journey Downriver Through Egypt’s Past & Present Toby Wilkinson, HB

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Brain Storms: The Race to Unlock Kidding Ourselves: The Hidden Capturing the Light: the Mysteries of Parkinson’s Disease Power of Self-Deception The Birth of Photography Jungian Psychoanalysis: Jon Palfreman, HB Joseph T Hallinan, HB Watson & Rappaport, HB Working in the Spirit of Carl Jung (ed) Murray Stein, PB

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Measuring the Immeasurable: The Scientific Case Numericon: A Journey Through for Spirituality the Hidden Lives of Numbers Daniel P Goleman, HB Thomas & Freiberger, HB Was $42

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Magna Carta : The Medieval Roots of Modern Politics David Starkey, HB

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Augustine: Conversions to Confessions The Many Faces of Christ : The Robin Lane Fox, HB Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels Philip Jenkins, HB

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Atlas of Human Anatomy, PB

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The Secret World of Sleep Penelope A. Lewis, HB

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Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum Gavin Francis, HB 21

The Arts

Factory: Andy Warhol by Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore was 17 years old when he began hanging out at The Factory – Andy Warhol’s legendary studio in Manhattan. Between 1965 and 1967, Shore spent nearly every day there, taking pictures of its diverse cast of characters, from musicians to actors, artists to writers, and including Edie Sedgwick, Lou Reed, and Nico—not to mention Warhol himself. This book presents a personal selection of photographs from Shore’s collection, providing an insider’s view of this extraordinary moment and place. ($85, HB)

Art is the Highest Form of Hope & Other Quotes by Artists ($29.95 HB)

As painters, sculptors, photographers, and other visual artists see and experience the world through a unique lens, this book shows that their life lessons, private revelations, and frank, often irreverent, opinions can guide us all—it is a go-to resource for revealing thoughts and personal advice on subjects as diverse as beauty, colour, light, sex, chance, discipline, money troubles, originality, fear of failure, danger of success, the creative process, and more—all transmitted from the artistic trenches.

Dada Africa: Dialogue with the Other (eds) Ralf Burmeister et al ($71, HB)

This book closely examines the Dadaists’ exploration of nonEuropean art & culture. Richly illustrated essays shed light on the cultural background of artefacts from Africa, Asia & Oceania from an ethnological perspective. Other contributions investigate how Dada is reflected in the post-colonial discourse & understood in the context of culture transfer.

Notebooks, Volume 1, 1998–99 by Anselm Kiefer

The power in Anselm Kiefer’s images is rivaled by his writings on nature & history, literature & antiquity, and mysticism and mythology. The first volume of Notebooks Kiefer returns constantly to his touchstones: 16th century alchemist Robert Fludd, German romantic poet Novalis, Martin Heidegger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Robert Musil, and many other writers and thinkers. Translated into English for the first time

by Tess Lewis, the diaries reveal Kiefer’s strong affinity for language and let readers witness the process of thoughts, experiences, and adventures slowly transcending the limits of art, achieving meaning in and beyond their medium. The entries reveal the process by which his artworks are informed by his reading-and vice versa-and track the development of the works he created in the late 1990s. ($65, PB)

DVDs With Scott Donovan Aferim! Dir. Radu Jude ($32.95, Region 2) Radu Jude won the Best Director award at the 2015 Berlin Film Festival for this grim depiction of Romania in the early 19th century.

Policeman Costandin and his son Ionita travel the country in search of a fugitive Gypsy slave, revealing along the way a primitive and brutal society ruled by ruthless landowners and petty functionaries.

Conditions are harsh and injustice routine in this barbarous world of arbitrary killings and cruel punishments in stark contrast to the picturesque beauty of the countryside through which the pair pass. Aferim! powerfully evokes this nightmare world and the attitudes and prejudices which shaped it. Not to be missed!

Aim High in Creation: Dir Alison Broinowski ($32.95) A unique, sideways step into one of the most secretive nations on earth: North Korea. With a personal mission to make her own protest film against plans for fracking in her neighbourhood, acclaimed film maker, Anna Broinowski, gains unprecedented access into the notorious communist country to learn the principles of movie making as taught by late ‘Dear Leader’, film fanatic & master propagandist, Kim Jong Il. Her experiences gradually reveal a surprising warmth & shared humanity that transcend political differences.

Putuparri & the Rainmakers ($26.95)

This film spans ten transformative years in the life of Tom ‘Putuparri’ Lawford as he navigates the deep chasm between his Western upbringing and his growing determination to fight for his family’s homeland. Putuparri is a man caught between two worlds: the deeply spiritual universe of his people’s traditional culture and his life in modern society where he struggles with alcoholism and domestic violence. As he reconnects with his ancestral lands and learns about his traditional culture he begins to accept his future as a leader of his people and shoulders his responsibility to pass this knowledge onto the next generation.

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Drawing Funny: A Guide to Making Your Terrible Little Cartoons Funnier by Oslo Davis ($15, PB) ‘I hate to be the bearer of bad news but you can’t learn cartooning, and it can’t be taught.’And so begins Oslo Davis’ illustrated book on how to draw gag cartoons. Talk about shoot yourself in the foot! But he’s kidding, kind of. There are reasons why your terrible cartoons are not funny, and Oslo is very happy to point them out.

He’s also prepared to give you some advice, for what it’s worth, using examples selected from more than twenty years’ drawing for newspapers and magazines worldwide.

Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross Kings ($45, HB)

Claude Monet’s water lily paintings are among the most iconic and beloved works of art of the past century. Yet these entrancing images were created at a time of terrible private turmoil and sadness for the artist. By the outbreak of war in 1914, Monet, then in his mid-seventies, was one of the world’s most famous and successful painters, with a large house in the country, a fleet of automobiles and a colossal reputation. However, he had virtually given up painting following the death of his wife Alice in 1911 and the onset of blindness a year later.

Nonetheless, it was during this period of sorrow, ill health and creative uncertainty that - as the guns roared on the Western Front—he began the most demanding & innovative paintings he had ever attempted. Drawing on letters & memoirs Ross King gives an intimate portrayal of Claude Monet in all his tumultuous complexity.

John Olsen: A Recipe For Art ($40, HB) John Olsen made a life-changing discovery as a young man: Mediterranean cuisine, ‘the cuisine of the sun’. Fresh, seasonal produce & its preparation has been central to his life & a key ingredient in his creativity and his art—from his famous paella paintings to lively sketches in his diaries. This book features 40 recipes by or loved by Olsen, 30 related paintings, over 50 sketches & drawings & over 65 photograph.

Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity by Troy Thomas

Troy Thomas examines Caravaggio’s life and art in relation to his most profound achievement: the creation of modernity. Structured thematically and chronologically, the book begins with an in-depth look at the artist’s early life and works, which establish and refine his realism, his dark settings and his subtle and clever ambiguity of genre and meaning.

It describes his mature religious works that eschew the theatrical stock poses and expressions of previous art. ($38, HB)

Gift Shop

Magic Motion Globes ($29.95) Revolve around the world in 18 seconds on one AA battery! These globes will rotate on virtually any flat surface. You can even change the spinning direction simply by gently pressing down on the top of the sphere.

Available as Blue Ocean or Antique. 20cm in diameter.

Versailles: Series One ($59.95, Region 2) George Blagden plays French monarch Louis XIV in this 10 episode series.

In a bid to strengthen his weakening position among the country’s elite, Louis decides to move the French court from Paris to Versailles. However, with the Parisian nobility deeply opposed to the move, Louis is faced with negotiating a dangerous cycle of lies, deceit and vicious political manoeuvrings as he attempts to exert his authority.

The Big Short ($32.95, Region 2) This film follows eccentric financial analyst Michael Burry (Bale) as he uncovers an impending crash in the housing market and puts together a plan to profit from it. As Burry’s predictions are spread by those who believe he is mad, a small number of people, including Jared Vennett (Gosling), Ben Rickert (Pitt) and Mark Baum (Carell), get on board with his idea in the hope of saving their assets. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Bale), winning for Best Adapted Screenplay, and won the BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Stephen Fry:Today’s Russia—A Literary Landscape

‘I think I was about 14 years old when I first read Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin & Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. It was the beginning of a life-long love affair with great Russian literature’. Like many youthful infatuations, Stephen Fry moved on to other interests, and lost touch with Russian writing. He was not alone. After the collapse of the USSR in 1990, we in the West stopped reading Russian literature. But that does not mean that the Russians stopped writing. This programme introduces six of the biggest stars of Russian literature—with new works, including original English translations, read by Fry, who is inserted into award-winning original animations of these fictional worlds. ($21.95)

Wonderlands: The Illustration Art of Robert Ingpen ($35, HB)

Using his own autobiographical tales, illustrator’s notes, original sketches and illustrations from his award-winning publications Robert Ingpen journeys into the wondrous landscapes of the classics he has so famously illustrated (Neverland, the Riverbank, Oz and Alice’s Wonderland) as well as into the magical landscapes of his own imagination and the more real but no less magical scenery of his own beloved Australia, and reveals the places, stories and people that inspired him along the way.

EMMA DONOGHUE

HANNAH KENT THE GOOD PEOPLE

THE WONDER

Patterns: Inside the Design Library

by Peter Koepke ($100, HB)

The remarkable new novel from the bestselling author of Burial Rites.

‘A thoroughly engrossing entrée into the macabre nature of a vanished society, its virtues and its follies and its lethal impulses.’

TOM KENEALLY

From the bestselling author of Room, The Wonder is a psychological thriller about a child’s murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes. It is a searing examination of what nourishes us, body and soul.

Every season, designers from fashion, home furnishings, textiles, graphic arts, and paper product industries seek inspiration from patterns to bring their collections to life. Many of these designers—including Beacon Hill, Boden, Calvin Klein, Clinique, Colefax & Fowler, Lululemon, Nike, Oscar de la Renta, Pottery Barn & Target—look to the Design Library, the world’s largest archive of surface design. Dawn from the Design Library’s archive, this is an exclusive & ultimate source book of pattern and ornament.

Gleebooks’ special price $89.95

MATT & LENTIL PUBRICK GROWN & GATHERED

HELEN GARNER

Diane Arbus by Arthur Lubow ($60, HB) Diane Arbus’ portraiture of freaks, circus performers, twins, nudists and others on the social margins connected with a wide public at a deep psychological level, however her suicide in New York in 1971 overshadowed the reception to her work. Her posthumous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art a year later drew lines around the block. She was born into a RussianJewish family, the Nemerovs, who owned a department store on Fifth Avenue. They were family friends with the Avedons.

Richard Avedon later championed Arbus’s work. Avedon rose to greater and greater commercial success through the magazine world, but Arbus died in a rent-protected apartment scrambling to earn her keep with odd teaching assignments.

Arthur Lubow’s biography begins at the moment Arbus quit the world of commercial photography to be an artist. She was uncompromising in that ambition.

JOE CINQUE’S

CONSOLATION

The masterwork from one of Australia’s greatest writers, now released as a film.

‘A truly gripping drama.

She reminds us all over again of the tangled complexity of being human.’ SUN-HERALD

An inspiring guide to real food and life’s fundamentals, with recipes, advice and projects to help you grow, cook, preserve, trade without money and live well.

www.panmacmillan.com.au

Now in paperback Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton & John Armstrong, $24.95

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Bestsellers—Non-Fiction 1. Albanese: Telling It Straight

Karen Middleton

2. Ghost Empire

Richard Fidler

3. Planet Jackson: Power, Greed & Unions

Brad Norington

4. Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes and Memories

Kim Mahood

5. Signals: How Everyday Signs Can Help Us

Navigate the World’s Turbulent Economy

Pippa Malmgren

6. Grant & I: Inside & Outside the Go-Betweens

Robert Forster

7. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Carlo Rovelli

8. The House That Jack Built: Jack Mundey,

Green Bans Hero

James Colman

9. 1787: The Lost Chapters of Australia’s Beginnings

Nick Brodie

10. In Other Words: Forty Years of Essays

Goenawan Mohamad

Bestsellers—Fiction 1. Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil

Melina Marchetta

2. Letter to Pessoa

Michelle Cahill

3. Truly Madly Guilty

Liane Moriarty

4. Nutshell

Ian McEwan

5. The Safest Place in London

Maggie Joel

6. Black Rock White City 7. The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

A S Patric Dominic Smith

8. Barkskins

Annie Proulx

9. The Rules of Backyard Cricket

Jock Serong

10. The North Water

Ian McGuire

and another thing.....

As David says on page 2 it’s a bumper crop for readers in October. For myself it’s that time of year I start writing lists of books for the fantasy reading holiday. I’ve just finished Robert Forster’s account of his song writing ‘love affair’ with Grant McLennan. A charming snapshot of that just south of the Boomer late seventies generation—free tertiary education, cinephilia, music and art for all, and of the ontinuing Forster/McLennan drive to create despite The Go-Between’s history of almost but never quite making top 40 status (I could have sworn Cattle and Cane made it to the Countdown top 10). Speaking of which, I was even more surprised, on digging in Wikipedia, to find that that other great melancholic anthem to looking back, Cold Chisel’s Flame Trees, only made it to 26 on the charts. I just heard Jimmy Barnes (née James Dixon Swan) talking about his memoir on RN—a very different tale to Forster’s—one that focuses on the excesses of a brutal childhood rather than the excesses of life in a band.

I’ll be at Gleebooks tomorrow evening to get my copy signed. Another biography I’m in the middle of at the moment is Edmund Gordon’s The Invention of Angela Carter. This is the first biography of Angela Carter and I’m happy to say Gordon has steered clear of hagiography. He uses her journals to give a warts and all account, and Carter is all the more admirable for it. She was a cat lover, so I am going to lean naturally towards her. This quote from her journal made me smile: she complains of a lover who has possessed her so that he has ‘displaced almost completely my usual preoccupations, such as, for example, the weather and watching my cat put back its ears like spoons to listen behind her.’

This month Vintage Classics is publishing a hard cover edition of The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories—her retellings of Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast and other fairy tales—which I will definitely be rereading (Gordon’s book inspires a reread of all her work). But I’m hoping someone has also slated the journals for publication. Viki

For more October new releases go to:

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

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