March16 gleaner

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Vol. 23 No. 2 March 2016

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First Dog on the Moon ‘Merch’ Now playing at Gleebooks!

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Recuperation Reading

The Light on the Water by Olga Lorenzo

Recently divorced & trying to make sense of her new life, Anne takes her daughter Aida on an overnight bushwalk in the moody wilderness of Wilson’s Promontory. In a split second, Aida disappears & a frantic Anne scrambles for help.

Some of the emergency trackers who search for Aida already doubt Anne’s story. Nearly 2 years later & still tormented by remorse & grief, Anne is charged with her daughter’s murder. Witnesses have come forward, offering evidence which points to her guilt. She is stalked by the media & shunned by friends, former colleagues & neighbours. On bail & awaiting trial, Anne works to reconstruct her last hours with Aida. She remembers the sun high in the sky, the bush noisy with insects, and her own anxiety, as oppressive as the heat haze. A provocative and unflinching literary novel of love, guilt & grief set against the wilderness of the Australian coast. (29.99, PB)

Dodge Rose by Jack Cox (29, PB) I’m still pretty much holed up after a recent operation. Apart from ordering some forward publications and researching for May’s Sydney Writers’ Festival (look out for a bumper crop this year, the line-up is terrific), that means I’ve lots of time to read. And friends in publishing have been deluging me with books.

To begin with, a couple that have been out and about a while. I was a pretty average surfer many decades ago. Gave up, but never lost the urge. It’s neither a sport nor a pastime, neither solitary nor social, but it’s also all of the above. William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life has given me a glorious perspective on how to make an obsession with the wonder that is surfing work as a lifetime activity (Finnegan is in his sixties, and still surfing off Manhattan, after decades of worldwide pilgrimage). I’ve a bugbear with ‘sports/pastime’ books written by the practitioner (they’re mostly bad or ghost-written), but Finnegan writes for a living (when he’s not surfing).

I’ve also been profoundly impressed by Alan Atkinson’s Nation, the third volume in his magisterial The Europeans in Australia. The trilogy is a work of twenty years’ immersion in immense detail and analysis. It is sweeping in scope, forensic in detail, and deeply thoughtful about the meaning of the historical experience. Give yourself some time to read and absorb; I’ve not read better Australian history writing.

Eliza travels to Sydney to deal with the estate of her Aunt Dodge, and finds Maxine, a hitherto unknown cousin, occupying Dodge’s apartment. When legal complications derail plans to live it up on their inheritance, the women’s lives become consumed by absurd attempts to deal with Australian tax law, as well their own mounting boredom and squalor. The most astonishing debut novel of the decade, Dodge Rose calls to mind Henry Green in its skewed use of colloquial speech, Joyce in its love of inventories, and William Gaddis in its virtuoso lampooning of law, high finance, and national myth.

Wildlight by Robyn Mundy (33, PB)

You spend your whole time on an island looking out to sea. Perhaps what you are facing is yourself. 16 year old Stephanie West has been dragged from Sydney to remote Maatsuyker Island off the coast of Tasmania by her parents—who are hoping to recapture a childhood idyll and come to terms with their grief over the death of Steph’s twin brother. Cut off from friends and the comforts of home, exiled to a lonely fortress and a lighthouse that bears the brunt of savage storms, the months ahead look to be filled with ghosts of the past. Steph’s saviour is Tom Forrest, a 19 year old deckhand aboard a crayfishing boat. When the weather allows, Tom visits the island, and he and Steph soon form an attraction. But Tom must conceal at all costs the illegal fishing he takes part in, orchestrated by his tyrannical brother. And he dare not dwell on his fear of the sea or his deep-worn premonition that the ocean will one day take him.

As for February’s books I’ll restrict myself to three novels. Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time is a slender, but masterful work. Barnes imagines three points in the life of Russian composer, Dmitri Shostakovich, across the decades. Using these three points he explores the relationship between Art and Power, as the artist wrestles with the implications of collaboration under Stalin. How does the artist not sell his soul to survive? Barnes is a brilliant writer and this slender novel is a big book. Read it.

In the latest in the series of novelists turning Shakespeare into contemporary fiction, Howard Jacobson has produced Shylock is My Name. Shakespeare’s Shylock resurfaces in 21st Century Cheshire’s famous ‘Golden Triangle’. It’s wonderfully clever and subversive, and asks some timeless and compelling questions while time-bending the complex Jewish/Christian relationship. And it’s a splendid critique of the play.

I was a huge fan of Fiona MacFarlane’s debut novel The Night Guest in 2014. Her new collection of stories The High Places displays the highly original intelligence and imagination she brought to the novel.

What seems simple in each of these thirteen stories (and they are of a pleasing length) is invariably not. But not through some trickery, rather through discomforting and thoughtful shifts in focus and emotion. She’s a wonderful writer.

Looking forward to April (and I’ll say more about the following books then) please look out for two more excellent Australian books.

Everywhere I Look is a collection of Helen Garner’s short non-fiction from the last fifteen years, and it’s great. And I loved Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog for its beautiful sensitivity, and hard-won, calm wisdom. I was devastated to read Blain’s column in the Saturday Paper in which she writes about her recent diagnosis of an inoperable brain tumour (Jan 30 edition, please find and read it). Our thoughts and hopes are with her.

David Gaunt

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FREE DOUBLE PASSES AN is an Un Certain Regard nominated film centreing around a small bakery serving pastries filled with red bean paste (‘an’) known as dorayakis. When an old lady named Tokue offers to help in the kitchen, bakery owner Sentaro hesitantly accepts. Tokue’s secret ‘an’ recipe leads the small business to success, and with this, the two characters’ new connection will lead both to open up and reveal old wounds.

Directed by renowned Japanese auteur Naomi Kawase, AN is a bittersweet tale of new beginnings, past mistakes and cherry blossom. It explores the beauty of the Japanese landscape as well as culinary diversity.

View the trailer: http://www.curiousdistribution.com/coming-soon/an.aspx Email vikid@gleebooks.com.au for one of 10 free double passes.

Australian Literature Hold by Kirsten Tranter

(28, PB) Three years ago, Shelley’s lover, Conrad, died in a surfing accident. Still in a state of subdued grief, Shelley is attempting a new beginning by moving into an old Victorian terrace in Paddington with David, her new partner. At home one morning, Shelley discovers a door to a small intriguing room, which is not on the plans. There is a window, a fireplace and a beautiful chandelier. But nothing else. When Shelley meets a man who seems to be Conrad’s uncanny double, the mysterious room begins to dominate her world, becoming a focus for her secret fantasies and fears, offering an escape which also threatens to become a trap. ‘I loved every gorgeous, spooky word of it, and was blown away by its poetry. An intimate, complex and gripping portrait of grief, it’s truly brilliant.’

Ceridwen Dovey

Gleebooks’ special price $24.95

Events On D’Hill At last! gleebooks at Dulwich Hill is proud to announce Ms Kennedy’s Storytime for 2-5 yr olds every Thursday at 10 am, commencing Thursday March 10th Ms Roberta Kennedy is an experienced primary school teacher who will be known to many, having taught for the last 20 years at both Dulwich Hill and Marrickville WestPrimary Schools. Now retired, she has kindly offered her wonderful reading and storytelling skills to delight our 2 to 5 year old toddler customers.

To secure a place, please call gleebooks at Dulwich Hill on our new number 9560 0660.

The Sick Bag Song by Nick Cave (25, HB) The Sick Bag Song is an exploration of love, inspiration and memory shaped around the events of Cave’s 2014 tour of North America. It began life scribbled on airline sick bags during the 22city tour, and soon grew into a restless full-length contemporary epic. Spurred by encounters with modern day North America, and racked by romantic longing and exhaustion, Cave teases out the significant moments, the people, the books and the music that have influenced and inspired him, and drops them into his Sick Bag.

Our Magic Hour by Jennifer Down (30, PB) Audrey, Katy & Adam have been friends since high school—a decade of sneaky cigarettes, drunken misadventures on Melbourne backstreets, heart-to-hearts, in-jokes. Now Katy has gone—and without her, Audrey is thrown off balance: everything she thought she knew, everything she believed was true, is bent out of shape. Her family—a neurotic mother, a wayward teenage brother, an uptight suburban sister—are likely to fall apart.

Her boyfriend, Nick, tries to hold their relationship together—but Audrey, caught in the middle, needs to find a reason to keep going when everything around her suddenly seems wrong. Jennifer Down’s debut novel captures that moment when being young and invincible gives way to being open and vulnerable, when one terrible act changes a life forever.

The Soldier’s Curse

by Meg Keneally & Tom Keneally (32.99, PB)

Trapped in a contract that paid him less than subsistence wages clerking for junior lawyers who ‘had merely attended the necessary number of dinners at their Inn of Court and had been able to afford to buy a £500 legal library’, Hugh Monsarrat forges a document admitting him to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn. For this crime he is sentenced to death by hanging—a sentence commuted to transportation for life. In NSW on receiving his ticket of leave he dares to step outside of the area to which he is restricted, and when caught, as a 2nd time offender he is incarcerated for another 7 years—this time in the ‘frontier’ Port Macquarie penal settlement. Here, as clerk to the Commandant, he meets Hannah Mulrooney—Government House housekeeper and tea-brewer extraordinaire. When the Commandant’s wife is poisoned, Mrs Mulrooney is accused of the deed and the unlikely duo must dig deep to save her from the hangman’s noose. The whodunnit and whydunnit of the murder sheds light on the ‘shadow selves’ caused by the British class system and its colonial rule, and the master/slave relationship inherent in convict labour. ‘The captain is the authority here. And there’s none to overrule him in the godless waste between here and Sydney. So he might as well be the ruler of the world.’ I really enjoyed this first of a projected ‘Monsarrat trilogy’. Soldier’s Curse ends setting the scene nicely for the next instalment, so I hope Keneally and his daughter Meg are hard at work—I am particularly looking forward to Monsarrat’s attempts to teach the oft curmudgeonly Hannah her letters. Viki

Gleebooks’ special price $29.99

A Loving, Faithful Animal by Josephine Rowe

It is New Year’s Eve, 1990, and Ru’s father, Jack, has disappeared in the wake of a savage incident. A Vietnam War veteran, he has long been an erratic presence at home, where Ru’s allegiances are divided amongst those she loves. Her sister, Lani, seeks to escape the claustrophobia of small-town life, while their mother, Evelyn, takes refuge in a more vibrant past. And then there’s Les, Jack’s inscrutable brother, whose loyalties are also torn. This is an incandescent portrait of one family searching for what may yet be redeemable from the ruins of war. (23.95, PB)

Also, this month gleebooks at Dulwich Hill is proud to support Women and Words: Saturday March 5, 3pm This a free International Women’s Day event featuring a panel of inner west women including author and presenter Zoe Norton-Lodge (Almost Sincerely), cartoonist and author Fiona Katauskas (The Amazing True Story of How Babies are Made), and award-winning author Mireille Juchau (The World Without Us). Together they will discuss how being women informs their work and powers social change.

The event is free, but bookings are essential: go to marrickvillelibrary.eventbrite.com.au or phone 9335 2173.

TTY available: 9335 2025.

See you on D’Hill, Morgan.

Now in B Format The Snow Kimono by Mark Henshaw, $24 A Short History of Richard Kline

by Amanda Lohrey, $23 The Midnight Watch by David Dyer (32.99, PB)

On a wretchedly cold night in the North Atlantic, a steamer stopped in an icefield sees the glow of another ship on the horizon. Just after midnight the first of eight distress rockets is fired. Why did the Californian look on while the Titanic sank? As soon as Boston American reporter John Steadman lays eyes on the man who stood the midnight watch on the Californian, he knows there’s another story lurking behind the official one. Herbert Stone must have seen something, and yet his ship did nothing while the calamity took place. Now Stone, under his captain’s orders, must carry his secret in silence, while Steadman is determined to find it out. So begins a strange dance around the truth by these three men. Haunted by the fifteen hundred who went to their deaths in those icy waters, and by the loss of his own baby son years earlier, Steadman must either find redemption in the Titanic’s tragedy or lose himself.

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The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery ($30, PB)

International Literature

NEW FROM THE AUTHOR OF 2009’S PUBLISHING PHENOMENON, ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG. Do two young girls have the power to change the world? Maria, raised by powerful older women, lives in a remote village in Burgundy, where she discovers her gift of clairvoyance, of healing and of communicating with nature. Hundreds of miles away in Italy, Clara discovers her musical genius and is sent from the countryside to Rome to nurture her extraordinary abilities. Who are the mysterious elves? Will they succeed in training the girls for their higher purpose in the face of an impending war? This is the story of two children whose amazing talents will bring them into contact with magical worlds and malevolent forces. If, against all odds, they can be brought together, their meeting may shape the course of history.

Gleebooks’ special price $26.95

Some Rain Must Fall: My Struggle Book 5

by Karl Ove Knausgaard ($33, PB)

Book 5 of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sees him move to Bergen. At 20 he is the youngest student to be admitted to the prestigious Writing Academy and he arrives full of excitement & writerly aspirations. Soon though, he is stripped of youthful illusions. His writing is revealed to be puerile and clichéd, and his social efforts are a dismal failure. Awkward in company and hopeless with women, he drowns his shame in drink and rock music. Then, little by little, things take a brighter turn. He falls in love, gives up writing in favour of the steady rewards of literary criticism, and the beginnings of an adult life take shape.

This Census-Taker by China Mieville ($33, HB)

In a remote house on a hilltop, a lonely boy witnesses a traumatic event. He tries—and fails—to flee. Left alone with his increasingly deranged parent, he dreams of safety, of joining the other children in the town below, of escape. When at last a stranger knocks at his door, the boy senses that his days of isolation might be over. But by what authority does this man keep the meticulous records he carries? What is the purpose behind his questions? Is he friend? Enemy? Or something else altogether? China Mieville’s new novel is a poignant and riveting exploration of memory and identity.

See You at Breakfast by Guillermo Fadanelli

Cristina is an optimistic prostitute managing work, police harassment and the demands of the men who fall in love with her—such as Ulises, a solitary office worker who obsesses over a promotion he will never receive. His longtime friend Adolfo, a part-trained veterinarian incapable of distinguishing between a dog and a coyote, is in turn consumed by his infatuation with his neighbour, the beautiful and sheltered Olivia. She is the daughter of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and leads a life of hermit-like seclusion, utterly oblivious to his persistent voyeurism. Set in modern-day Mexico City, See You at Breakfast is the story of four characters, leading lives of quiet desperation, who are thrown together by a despicably violent act. ($19.95, PB)

The Summer Before the War

by Helen Simonson ($33, PB)

East Sussex, 1914. It’s the end of an idyllic summer & Hugh Grange, down from his medical studies, is visiting his Aunt Agatha in the pretty coastal town of Rye. Casting aside the recent sabre rattling over the Balkans, Agatha has more immediate concerns; she has just risked her carefully built reputation by pushing for the appointment of a woman to replace the Latin master. When Beatrice Nash arrives, it is clear she is significantly more free thinking—and attractive—than anyone believes a Latin teacher should be. For her part, mourning the death of her beloved father who has left her penniless, Beatrice simply wants to be left alone to pursue her teaching & writing. But the unimaginable is coming, and everything will be tested as this small Sussex town & its inhabitants go to war.

The Chosen Ones by Steve Sem-Sandberg

The Am Spiegelgrund clinic, in glittering Vienna, masqueraded as a well-intentioned reform school for wayward boys and girls and a home for chronically ill children. The reality, however, was very different: in the wake of Germany’s annexation of Austria on the eve of World War Two, its doctors, nurses, and teachers created a monstrous parody of the institution’s benign-sounding brief. The Nazi regime’s euthanasia program would come to determine the fate of many of the clinic’s inhabitants. Through the eyes of a child inmate, Adrian Ziegler, and a nurse, Anna Katschenka, Steve Sem-Sandberg, the author of the award-winning The Emperor of Lies, explores the very meaning of survival. ($33, PB)

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When the Sky Fell Apart by Caroline Lea

Jersey, June 1940. It starts with the burning man on the beach just after the bombs land, obliterating the last shred of hope that Hitler will avert his attention from the Channel Islands. Within weeks, 12,000 German troops land on the Jersey beaches, heralding a new era of occupation. For 10 year old Claudine, it means a re-education under German rule, and as she befriends one of the soldiers, she inadvertently opens the gateway to a more sinister influence in her home with devastating consequences. For Maurice, a local fisherman, it means protecting his sick wife at all costs—even if it endangers his own life. Edith, the island’s unofficial homeopath, is a Jerriais through to her bones. But even she can’t save everyone, no matter how hard she tries. And as for English doctor Tim Carter—on the arrival of the brutal German Commandant, he becomes the subject of a terrifying regime that causes the locals to brand him a traitor, unaware of the torment he suffers in an effort to save them. ($30, PB)

At the Edge of the Orchard by Tracy Chevalier

What happens when you can’t run any further from your past?

Ohio, 1838. James and Sadie Goodenough have settled in the Black Swamp, planting apple trees to claim the land as their own.

Life is harsh in the swamp, and as fever picks off their children, husband and wife take solace in separate comforts. James patiently grows his sweet-tasting ‘eaters’ while Sadie gets drunk on applejack made fresh from ‘spitters’. Their fighting takes its toll on all of the Goodenoughs—a battle that will resonate over the years and across America. Fifteen years later their youngest son, Robert, is drifting through Goldrush California. Haunted by the broken family he fled years earlier, memories stick to him where mud once did. When he finds steady work for a plant collector, peace seems finally to be within reach. But the past is never really past, and one day Robert is forced to confront the brutal reason he left behind everything he loved. ($30, PB)

Now in B Format & paperback The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota, $20 The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, $19.99 The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan, $20 Love + Hate: Stories and Essays by Hanif Kureishi, $24 The Death’s Head Chess Club by John Donoghue, $19.99 Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee, $33 Atlantic Island by Tony Duvert ($42.95, PB)

Originally published in French in 1979, this novel is set in the soulcrushing suburbs of a remote island off the coast of France. The story is told through the shifting perspectives of a group of pubescent and prepubescent boys, ages 7 to 14, who gather together at night in secret to carry out a series of burglaries throughout their neighbourhood. The boys vandalise living rooms & kitchens & make off with, for the most part, petty objects of no value. Their exploits leave the adult community perplexed & outraged, especially when a death occurs & the stakes grow more serious. Savage to the point of satire, Duvert’s book explores the loneliness of childhood & the solitude induced by geographical space. It is also an empathetic & generous homage to youth, a crime novel without suspense, and an unsettling fairy tale for adults.

Sofia Khan is Not Obliged by Ayisha Malik

‘Brilliant idea! Excellent! Muslim dating? Well, I had no idea you were allowed to date.’ Then he leaned towards me and looked at me sympathetically. ‘Are your parents quite disappointed?’ Unlucky in love once again after her sort-of-boyfriend/possible-marriage-partner-to-be proves a little too close to his parents, Sofia Khan is ready to renounce men for good. Or at least she was, until her boss persuades her to write a tell-all expose about the Muslim dating scene. As her woes become her work, Sofia must lean on the support of her brilliant friends, baffled colleagues and baffling parents as she seeks stories for her book. But in amongst the marriage-crazy relatives, racist tube passengers and polygamy-inclined friends, could there be a lingering possibility that she might just be falling in love? ($20, PB)

Under the Visible Life by Kim Echlin ($28, PB)

Half Chinese and half Canadian, Katherine Goodnow struggles through a 1950s childhood hostile to all she represents. Then, as a teenager, she discovers jazz, and her life is transformed. Her talent for the piano brings her freedom, adventure, and a sense of purpose, helping her survive unexpected motherhood and her incurable love for the unreliable father of her children. Half American and half Afghani, Mahsa Weaver is only twelve when, after the death of her parents, she is sent to live with strict relatives in Karachi. Struggling to break free, she escapes to Montreal, but the threads of her past are not so easily severed, and she finds herself forced into an arranged marriage. For Mahsa, too, music becomes her solace and passion, allowing her to dare to dream of a life that is really her own. When these two women meet in New York, they begin a friendship that will change everything.

Surveys by Natasha Stagg ($34.95, PB) Wryly mirroring the classic, female coming-of-age narrative, Natasha Stagg’s debut traces a few months in the life of Colleen, a 23 year old woman with almost no attachments or aspirations for her life. Working at an unsatisfying mall job in Tucson, Colleen sleepwalks through depressing office politics and tiresome onenight stands in a desultory way, becoming fully alive only at night when she’s online. Colleen attains ambiguous Internet stardom when she’s discovered by Jim, a semi-famous icon of masculinity and reclusiveness. When Colleen quits her job and moves to meet Jim in Los Angeles, she immediately falls in love and begins a new life of whirlwind parties and sponsored events. The pair’s relationship, launched online, makes them the Scott and Zelda of their generation, and they tour the country, cashing in on the buzz surrounding their romance. But as their fame expands, Colleen’s jealousy grows obsessive.

Ice by Ulla-Lena Lundberg ($23, PB) In the summer of 1947, a young priest, Petter, his wife and baby daughter, arrive by mail boat at a tiny island. They are to take over its drafty homestead from where Petter is to minister to the scattered community. In this evocative tale, Ulla-Lena Lundberg draws us into the minutiae of an austere yet purposeful life where the demands of self-sufficiency—cows to milk & sheep to graze—are tempered by the kindness of neighbours. With each season, the family’s love of the island grows and when the winter brings ice a new and tentative link is created. Told through the eyes of Petter, the wholehearted if naive novice priest, and Mona, his toughminded wife, a story unfolds that is as immersive as it is heartrending. Winner of the Finlandia prize and nominated for the Nordic Critics Prize.

Don’t Think by Richard Burgin ($39.95, PB) In five-time Pushcart Prize winner Richard Burgin’s new collection of nine stories a divorced father struggles to cling to reality through his searing love for his highly imaginative son, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome; two young women meet to commemorate the death of a former college professor with whom they were both unusually close—though in very different ways; a charismatic drug dealer tries to gain control of a bizarre cult devoted to rethinking life’s meaning in relation to infinite time; an elderly art dealer befriends a homeless young woman who has been sleeping in his basement.

The Natashas by Yelena Moskovich ($28, PB) B.atrice, a solitary young jazz singer from a genteel Parisian suburb, meets a mysterious woman named Polina. Polina visits her at night & whispers in her ear: ‘There are people who leave their bodies & their bodies go on living without them. These people are named Natasha.’ C.sar, a lonely Mexican actor working in a call centre, receives the opportunity of a lifetime: a role as a serial killer on a French TV series. But as he prepares for the audition, he starts falling in love with the psychopath he is to play. B.atrice and C.sar are drawn deeper into a city populated with visions& warnings, taunted by the chorusing of a group of young women, trapped in a windowless room, who all share the same name ... Natasha. A debut novel that recalls writing of Angela Carter & Haruki Murakami.

Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta

One day in 1968, at the height of the Biafran civil war, Ijeoma’s father is killed and her world is transformed forever. Separated from her grief-stricken mother, she meets another young lost girl, Amina, and the two become inseparable. Chinelo Okparanta takes the reader from Ijeoma’s childhood in war-torn Biafra, through the perils and pleasures of her blossoming sexuality, her wrong turns, and into the everyday sorrows and joys of marriage and motherhood—asking the question: what is the value of love and what is the cost? ($28, PB)

New this month Granta 134: No Man’s Land (ed) Sigrid Rausing—$25

Altitude

BlackBooks

The sun shone down on Blackheath’s Doggy Day and it was a great community day and wonderful to see people (and dogs) enjoying Asia Upward’s books—A Dog’s World & Entertaining A Dog’s World.

This is what we have been reading up here…

Honeymooning on a tropic island with one’s husband for two weeks would usually set the scene for romantic days and nights.... but for me, it was the perfect chance to read a few of those books that have been piling up in the corner of the bedroom. Hats off to Robert Galbraith’s The Cuckoo’s Calling which kept me entertained and guessing up until the very end. Rachael Craw’s Spark was an action packed firecracker and a breath of fresh air for the young adult audience. And an oldie but a goodie, Lian Hearn’s Across the Nightingale Floor swept me away with the beauty, violence, passion and intrigue of feudal Japan. Hannah Ley A customer introduced the book, History of the Rain by Niall Williams, to me by saying it was the most beautifully written book she had ever read. High praise indeed—and enough for me to grab it from the shelf. First published in 2014, I was surprised that I had not come across this author before as I am a bit partial to Irish writers, and this one did not disappoint. Set on the wet, west coast of Ireland, it’s written from young bedridden Ruth Swain’s perspective as she tries to find out more about her father. It is a story of rain, salmon and references back to the 3,958 books piled high in her bedroom. This is literature to read slowly and enjoy. I loved it so much that I hunted down Niall Williams’ first book, Four Letters of Love, published in 1997, which is just as beautiful. I have also just read Carol by Patricia Highsmith. This book was first published in 1952 with the original title The Price of Salt and, at the time, Highsmith was a well-known crime writer. This has characteristics of a thriller, with Highsmith’s talent for writing tension, but it really is a beautiful love story between two women with a the backdrop of New York and America in the 1950s. Recently made into a movie with Cate Blanchett as Carol, this book has come into its own and found the readership it always wanted.

Victoria Jefferys

Boo ks w ith

Scary Old Sex by Arlene Heyman ($30, PB) A woman goes about certain rituals of sex with her second husband, sharing the bed with the ghosts of her sexual past. A beautiful young art student embarks on an affair with a much older, married, famous artist. A middle-aged woman struggles with the decline of her mother, once glamorous and still commanding; their fraught relationship causes unexpected feelings both shaming and brutal.

A man finds that his father has died while in the midst of extramarital sex and wonders what he should do with the body. And a boy sits in his Calculus class, fantasizing about a schoolmate’s breasts and worrying about his father lying in hospital, as outside his classroom window the Twin Towers begin to fall. Arlene Heyman, a practicing psychiatrist, gives us what really goes on in people’s minds, relationships, and beds.

The Roar of Morning by Tip Marugg

The Roar of Morning begins on a tropical Antilles night. A man drinks and awaits the coming dawn with his dogs, thinking he might well commit suicide in ‘the roar of morning’.

While contemplating his possible end, the events of his life on Curacao and on mainland Venezuela come rushing back to him. Some memories are recent, others distant; all are tormented by the politics of a colonialist ‘gone native’. He recalls sickness and sexual awakening as well as personal encounters with the extraordinary and unexplained. As the day breaks, he has an apocalyptic vision of a great fire engulfing the entire South American continent. The countdown to Armageddon has begun, in a brilliantly dissolute narrative akin to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and the writings of Charles Bukowski. ($29.95, PB)

The Essential Goethe ($72, HB)

In addition to the works for which Goethe is most famous, including Faust Part I and the lyric poems, this volume features important literary works that are rarely published in English—including the dramas Egmont, Iphigenia in Tauris, and Torquato Tasso and the bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, a foundational work in the history of the novel. This volume also offers a selection of Goethe’s essays on the arts, philosophy, and science, which give access to the thought of a polymath unrivalled in the modern world.

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Crime Fiction

The Drowned Detective by Neil Jordan ($29.99, PB)

An extraordinarily powerful and personal meditation on race, culture and national identity.

A haunting, hypnotic and enticing novel of grief and desire, by one of Australia’s finest, most assured novelists.

The Girl in the Ice by Lotte & Søren Hammer

Under the heartless vault of the Greenland’s artic sky the body of a girl is discovered. Half-naked and tied up, buried hundreds of miles from any signs of life, she has lain alone, hidden in the ice cap, for twenty-five years. DCS Konrad Simonsen’s investigation unearth truths that some of Denmark’s political figures would rather stayed forgotten—and powerful individuals are suddenly working against him. ($16.99, PB)

Tracy Chevalier is at her imaginative best, bringing to life the urge to wrestle with our roots, however deep and tangled they may be.

The Other Mrs Walker by Mary Paulson-Ellis ($30, PB)

True Crime

The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea

by Mark Douglas-Home ($32.99, PB)

Future Crimes: A journey to the dark side of technology – and how to survive it

by Marc Goodman ($25, PB)

Today’s criminals are stealing identities, draining online bank-accounts & wiping out computer servers. It’s disturbingly easy to activate baby cam monitors to spy on families, pacemakers can be hacked to deliver a lethal jolt, and thieves are analysing your social media in order to determine the best time for a home invasion. 3D printers produce AK-47s, terrorists can download the recipe for the Ebola virus, and drug cartels are building drones.

This is just the beginning of the tsunami of technological threats coming our way. Marc Goodman rips open his database of hundreds of real cases to give us front-row access to these impending perils.

The Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder

by Linda Stratmann ($54.95, PB)

Murder by poison alarmed, enthralled, and in many ways encapsulated the Victorian age. Linda Stratmann’s dark and splendid social history reveals the 19th century as a gruesome battleground where poisoners went head-to-head with authorities who strove to detect poisons, control their availability, and bring the guilty to justice. She corrects many misconceptions about particular poisons and documents how the evolution of issues such as marital rights and the legal protection of children impacted poisonings. Combining archival research with a novelist’s eye, Stratmann charts the era’s inexorable rise of poison cases both shocking and sad.

The Amazing Mrs Livesey

by Freda Marnie Nicholls ($29.99, PB)

Ethel Livesey was quite a gal...An attractive young woman from a respectable middle-class family in Manchester, she had over 40 aliases, eight official marriages, four children and five divorces. Her story stretches from industrial England to the French Riviera, from Ireland to New York, Shanghai, New Zealand, the Isle of Man and across Australia. Ethel claimed she was a cotton heiress, wartime nurse, casino hostess, stowaway, artist, opera singer, gambler, spy, close friend of the King, air raid warden, charity queen and even wife of Australian test cricketer Jack Fingleton. When her career imploded the story of the Amazing Mrs Livesey was blazoned across newspapers around the world. But what was fact and what was fiction?

6

Jonathan is a private detective in a decaying eastern European city. He is drowning in his work, his failing marriage & the corrupt landscape that surrounds him. He is approached by an elderly couple to investigate the disappearance of their daughter—missing for nearly two decades. Troubled by the faded photograph of a little girl the couple press on him—the same age as his own daughter—he feels compelled to find her. Then he encounters a young woman crouched at the foot of a stone angel on the bridge spanning the river that divides the city. When she jumps into the icy water below Jonathan plunges after her and finds himself dragged into her ghostly world of confusion, coincidence & intrigue.

Missing by Melanie Casey ($30, PB) Someone is targeting Adelaide’s homeless. Men are disappearing off the streets, and body parts are turning up in a local dump. Still haunted by her last run-in with a serial killer, Cass Lehman is trying hard to focus on the future. That’s not easy when she has the ‘gift’ of retrocognition the ability to spontaneously re-live the last minutes of a person’s life.

Meanwhile, Cass and Detective Ed Dyson are trying to make a normal home together, but when she gets entangled in Ed’s latest case things are far from normal.

Somehow she’d always known that she would end like this. In a small square room, in a small square flat. In a small square box, perhaps. Cardboard, with a sticker on the outside. And a name. An old lady dies alone and unheeded in a cold Edinburgh flat, on a snowy Christmas night. A faded emerald dress hangs in her wardrobe; a spilt glass of whisky pools on the carpet. A few days later a middle-aged woman arrives back to the city of her birth, her future uncertain, her past in tatters. But what Margaret Penny cannot yet know is that in investigating the death of one friendless old lady, her own life will become enriched beyond measure.

Cal McGill is a Scottish oceanographer and one-of-a-kind investigator who uses his knowledge of the waves to find where objects came from, or track where they’ve gone. His expertise could help solve the disappearance of Megan Bates who, 26 years ago, strode out into the ocean and let the waves take her away. Megan’s daughter, Violet Wells, was abandoned as a baby on the steps of a hospital, hours before the mother she never knew committed suicide. As McGill is drawn into Violet’s search, they must together navigate the jealousies, secrets and threats of this tight-knit coastal community.

The Marauders by Tom Cooper ($30, PB)

When the BP oil spill devastates the Gulf Coast, those who made a living by shrimping find themselves in dire straits—so the oddballs & lowlifes who inhabit the sleepy, working-class bayou town of Jeannette are pushed into whatever risky schemes might reverse their fortunes. Gus Lindquist is a pill-addicted, one-armed treasure hunter obsessed with finding the lost treasure of pirate Jean Lafitte. His quest brings him into contact with characters ranging from a couple of small-time criminal potheads prone to hysterical banter to the smooth-talking oil company middleman out to bamboozle his own mother to some drug-smuggling psychopath twins to a young man estranged from his father since his mother died in Hurricane Katrina.

Stasi Child by David Young ($30, PB) East Berlin, 1975. When Oberleutnant Karin Muller is called to investigate a teenage girl’s body at the foot of the Wall, she imagines she’s seen it all before. But when she arrives she realises this is a death like no other. It seems the girl was trying to escape—but from the West.

The Stasi want her to discover the identity of the girl, but assure her the case is otherwise closed—and strongly discourage her from asking questions. The evidence doesn’t add up, and it soon becomes clear the crime scene has been staged. But this is not a regime that tolerates a curious mind, and Muller doesn’t realise that the trail she’s following will lead her dangerously close to home.

The Ex by Alafair Burke ($30, PB) Widower Jack Harris has resisted the dating scene since the shooting of his wife by a 15 year old boy 3 years ago. On an early morning run along the Hudson River he spots a woman who eerily echoes his past. Eager to help Jack find love again, his best friend posts a Missed Moment item online & days later, a woman responds. Olivia Randall is one of New York City’s best criminal defence lawyers. When she gets the phone call informing her that her former fiancée, Jack Harris, has been arrested for a triple homicide there is no doubt in her mind as to his innocence. But who would go to such great lengths to frame him—and why?

Maestra by L. S. Hilton ($30, PB)

Judith Rashleigh works as an assistant in a prestigious London auction house, but to make ends meet she moonlights as a hostess in one of the West End’s less salubrious bars. When Judith stumbles across a conspiracy at her auction house, she is fired before she can expose the fraud. In desperation, she accepts an offer from one of the bar’s clients to accompany him to the French Riviera. But when an ill-advised attempt to slip him sedatives has momentous consequences, Judith has to flee for her life. Alone and in danger, she relies on her ability to fake it amongst the rich and famous—and the inside track on the hugely lucrative art fraud that triggered her dismissal.

Montalbano’s First Case and Other Stories

by Andrea Camilleri ($29.99, PB)

Inspector Montalbano’s very first case in Vigàta sees him stumble upon a young girl lurking outside a courthouse with a pistol in her handbag.

When she is taken in for questioning and won’t utter a single word, Montalbano must find another way to learn who she is trying to kill, and why. Other cases include a missing woman who has run away from the love of her life; an old married couple who appear to be rehearsing their suicides; and a crime so dark there’s only one person the inspector can call for help. With twists and turns aplenty, these stories are full of the usual Montabano wit, mystery & culinary gusto.

The Perfect Girl by Gilly Macmillan ($15, PB)

Several years ago, Zoe Maisey—child genius, musical sensation— caused the death of three teenagers. She served her time. And now she’s free. Her story begins with her giving the performance of her life. By midnight, her mother is dead. The Perfect Girl is an intricate exploration into the mind of a teenager burdened by brilliance.

Beloved Poison by E. S. Thomson ($29.99, PB)

Apothecary Jem Flockhart uncovers six tiny coffins—inside each a handful of dried flowers and a bundle of mouldering rags. When Jem comes across these strange relics hidden inside St Saviour’s infirmary’s old chapel, her quest to understand their meaning prises open a longforgotten past—with fatal consequences. In a trail that leads from the bloody world of the operating theatre and the dissecting table to the notorious squalor of Newgate and the gallows, Jem’s adversary proves to be both powerful and ruthless. As St Saviour’s destruction draws near, the dead are unearthed from their graves whilst the living are forced to make impossible choices. And murder is the price to be paid for the secrets to be kept.

Girl in the Dark by Marion Pauw ($30, PB)

A single mother and lawyer, Iris has a colourful caseload, a young son with behaviour issues, and a judgmental mother. She also has a brother—shocking news she uncovers by accident. Why did her mother hide this from her. Curious about a sibling she has never known, Iris begins to search for long-buried truths. What she discovers surprises and horrifies her. Her older brother is autistic—and in prison for brutally murdering his neighbour & her daughter. When she, visits Rae she finds a man who is devoted to his tropical fish and who loves baking bread. A man whose naiveté unnerves her. There is no question that Ray is odd and obsessive, unable to communicate like the rest of us. But is he really a killer?

Victim Without a Face by Stefan Ahnhem ($30, PB) Detective Fabian Risk returns to his hometown to resolve a string of hideously inventive murders. The first victim was a bully who liked using his fists. The second was a thug who favoured steel-capped boots.

Their bodies bear the marks of a killer who knew their sins. A single clue is left at the scene: a class photo from 1982, with two faces neatly crossed out. There are eighteen men and women in the photo who are still alive—including Fabian Risk who thought he’d left his school days behind. Now his classmates are dying for the sins of their childhood. Who is the faceless killer who’s come back to haunt them?

Quarry’s List by Max Allan Collins ($15, PB)

Once a Marine sniper, Quarry found a new home stateside with a group of contract killers. But some men aren’t made for taking orders—and when Quarry strikes off on his own, god help the man on the other side of his nine-millimetre. When the man he worked for abruptly exits the business, Quarry finds himself in the cross hairs as a rival tries to take over. But what does Quarry have that the new man wants? And how did the beautiful blonde in the swimming pool become a target?

Too Soon Dead: An Alexander Brass Mystery Michael Kurland ($17, PB)

It is March 1935. The Great Depression is at its peak; Prohibition was recently repealed; and for millions of people across the country, syndicated columnist and sophisticate Alexander Brass is the voice of Manhattan high society and nightlife. When a mysterious man tries to interest Brass in photos of prominent people engaged in questionable acts, Brass is intrigued and has the stranger followed. But the stringer who was following him is murdered, his body found in the offices of an anti-Nazi group in Yorkville, and Brass finds himself in the middle of something far more sinister than simple blackmail.

THE WILDER AISLES

Sometimes I take a different route on my walk home. It is a bit longer, but more interesting, and, more importantly, shady. I pass by many shops, including a Red Cross charity shop that I often drop in for a look—especially at the books.

Recently I came across a copy of Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music, which I’ve picked up and put down many times, but never read. Now that I have, I am even more surprised that I didn’t give it a chance—as it deals with music, my other great love (along side books, of course). Equal Music is imbued with music, it is the very soul of the story. Michael is the second violinist in a quartet based in London. Previously, he had spent time in Vienna, where he studied with Carl Kall at the music school. It is in Vienna that he meets Julia and falls in love. But when he collapses whilst playing in a concert, he blames his teacher and leaves both Vienna and Julia. Ten years later, back in London, he is still playing in a quartet, but bitterly regrets his past mistakes, especially leaving Julia. Despite having a sort of affair with Virginia, his pupil, he has never stopped loving Julia.

So his emotions are set in a whirl by a chance sighting of Julia on an adjacent London bus. He jumps off the bus before it has come to a complete stop and chases after her to no avail—and becomes obsessed with finding her. He is also obsessed with finding a rare Beethoven quintet that no one seems to have heard of, Opus 104 in C minor. The search for Julia and the music is successful with varying results. If you haven’t read this book I urge you to do so. It is really wonderful. The title comes from a poem by John Donne—look it up if you don’t know it. The other thing is, because it is about chamber music, it has sent me back to listening to it again. I sort of got out of the habit as I became more interested in early music.

Another book I recently picked up is Acts of God by Ellen Gilchrist. This is a book of short stories. I like the short story form. In this collection of 10 stories Gilchrist writes of people whose lives have been changed by forces beyond their control­­—although they bring a lot of it upon themselves. Gilchrist’s characters are sometimes strong but often flawed and apt to make mistakes. In the title story the deaths of Will and Amelie McKame, killed in a car accident when their heads went through the windscreen, changes their children’s lives forever.

In Miracle in Adkins Arkansas, a favourite, a group of teenagers from the local Methodist youth group travel to Adkins to see if they can help after a tornado has ripped through the town. They rescue a baby buried in mud because, as one of the girls says, ‘where there is a stroller, there is maybe a child’. The Dissolution of the Myelin Sheath tells the story of Philippa who decides that along with leading a good life it is important to have a good death—a death without pain. I didn’t realise when starting on this how hard it would be to write—short stories can be difficult to distil, to put their essence into words. Some don’t work as well as others but they are all entertaining and thought provoking. I first read Ellen Gilchrist a long time ago, and it was a delight to return and make her acquaintance again. Gilchrist has been writing for a long time and won the national book award in 1984.

Although Coffin Road is already on the shelves, I thought I would mention it as it’s by one of my favourite crime writers Peter May. May is the author of the Lewis trilogy which I loved, and he is also the author of the Enzo Files. I have long been fascinated by bees—particularly by the fact that if there are no bees, there is basically no us. This may be a bit simplistic, but it sounds good for the purposes of this review (although I never think of my pieces as reviews, rather more a chat between me and the reader). May’s new novel is set in the Hebrides (like the Lewis books). A man is washed up on a deserted beach on the Isle of Harris. He has no memory of who he is or how and why he finds himself on Harris. The only clue is a map with Coffin Road written on it. And so begins a search for his identity, and the reason why he has washed up on the Isle of Harris. The trouble with writing about crime novels is how much to give away. You want to get the reader intrigued, whilst not giving the plot away. That the story contains murder is a given, but the bees play a major part in what follows. Apart from the man on the beach there is a policeman from Lewis, and a teenage girl in Edinburgh. These three lives are travelling to the same place—the place of the bees. This is a story of the greed of multinational companies, the lure of wealth that causes people to betray others, and that to ignore what is before our eyes can kill us. Another great read from Mr May. The last book I want to write about is a small (and very attractive) hard cover— which is why I noticed it on the shelf. Stumbling Stones: A Path through Grief, Love & Loss by Airdre Grant is an account of a journey she took after the death of her twin brother, Angus. The book is full of stories about the people Grant talks to along the way, philosophical musings and the gifts of unexpected kindness she meets on her journey. This is a beautiful piece of writing about something we all go through sooner or later—no one misses out on losing loved ones and the ensuing grief. There are no easy answers, but having had my share of grief and loss I found this book strangely consoling. I think this little book can offer help—not only those suffering in the present, but people like me whose losses are in the past—but still part of our very being. Janice Wilder

7

Biography

Yassmin’s Story by Yassmin Abdel-Magied

Playing the Game: Life and Politics in Papua New Guinea by Julius Chan ($32.95, PB)

Enemy by Ruth Clare ($33, PB)

Whisperings in the Blood by Shelley Davidow

Born in the Sudan, Yassmin Abdel-Magied & her parents moved to Brisbane when she was 2, and she has been tackling barriers ever since. At 16 she founded Youth Without Borders, an organisation focused on helping young people to work for positive change in their communities. In 2007 she was named Young Australian Muslim of the Year & in 2010 Young Queenslander of the Year. At 21, she found herself working on a remote Australian oil & gas rig; she was the only woman & certainly the only Sudanese-Egyptian-Australian background Muslim woman. With her hijab quickly christened a ‘tea cosy’ there could not be a more unlikely place on earth for a young Muslim woman to want to be. This is the story of how she got there, where she is going, and how she wants the world to change. ($35, PB) Ruth Clare’s father came back from the Vietnam War a changed man: a violent, controlling parent and a dominating, aggressive husband. Through a childhood of being constantly on guard, with no one to protect her but herself, Ruth learned to be strong and fierce in the face of fear. After escaping her difficult upbringing, Ruth went on to have a family of her own.

Facing the challenges of parenting brought her past back to life, and she lived in fear that she was doomed to repeat her father’s behaviour. Wanting to understand the experiences that had damaged her father, she met with other veterans and began listening to their stories, of war, conscription, returning to civilian life. What Ruth uncovered left her with a surprising empathy for the man who caused her so much pain and heartache.

The Child Poet by Homero Aridjis

Homero Aridjis says that he was born twice. The first time was to his mother in April 1940 and the second time was as a poet, in January 1951. The youngest of five brothers growing up in the small Mexican village of Contepec, Michoacán, Aridjis’ life was cleaved in two by an accident— in which he nearly died on the operating table after shooting himself with a shotgun his brothers had left propped against the bedroom wall. After this accident he became a shy, introspective child who spent afternoons reading Homer & writing poems & stories at the dining room table instead of playing soccer with his classmates. But in 1971, when his wife became pregnant with their first daughter, the memories found a way out. Visions from this elusive period started coming back to him in astonishingly vivid dreams, giving shape to what would become The Child Poet. ($30, PB)

Outback Penguin: Richard Lane’s Barwell Diaries ($50, HB)

Richard Lane was one of the three brothers who founded Penguin Books in 1935. But before Penguin, he was a boy migrant in rural South Australia and NSW. From 1922 to 1926 he worked on the land and endured many hardships—deepening his appreciation for literature, and understood how important it was to make good writing widely accessible. During this time, Lane wrote a remarkable diary, which today stands as an important historical document. It is amongst the best descriptions, from the perspective of a boy migrant, of the ‘Barwell Boys’ migration scheme, which brought scores of young Englishmen to Australia. Lane’s diary vividly charts his life and loves, and his coming of age in a new land. With a foreword by Geoffrey Blainey.

Ink in Her Veins: the troubled life of Aileen Palmer by Sylvia Martin ($30, PB)

Aileen Palmer—poet, translator, political activist, adventurer —was the daughter of writers Vance and Nettie Palmer. Aileen certainly inherited her parents’ talents, publishing poetry, translating the work of Ho Chi Minh, and recording what she referred to as ‘semi-fictional bits of egocentric writing’. She also absorbed their interest in leftist politics, joining the Communist Party at university. This led to participation in the Spanish Civil War & the ambulance service in London during World War II. On her return to Australia Aileen never successfully reintegrated into civilian life.

Sylvia Martin paints an honest and moving portrait of a talented woman slowly brought down by war, family expectations, and psychiatric illness and the sometimes cruel ‘treatments’ common in the 20th century.

8

Now in B Format The Fictional Woman by Tara Moss, $20 On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks, $22.99 Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt

by Saul Friedlander, $29.95 Bad Behaviour: A Memoir of Bullying & Boarding School by Rebecca Starford, $23

Born on a remote island to a migrant Chinese father & an indigenous mother, Julius Chan overcame poverty, discrimination & family tragedy to become one of PNG’s longest-serving & most influential politicians. His 50-year career, including two terms as Prime Minister, spans a crucial period of the country’s history, particularly its coming of age from an Australian colony to a leading democratic nation in the South Pacific. This is Chan’s account of the role he played during these decades of political, economic and social change. It also explores the vexed issues of increasing corruption, government failure, and the unprecedented exploitation of PNG’s precious natural resources. This compelling memoir of Chan’s private & political lives offers a rare insight into the building of a nation & the extraordinary challenges facing Papua New Guinea.

Lithuania, 1913. Haunted by memories of the pogroms, Jacob Frank leaves his village in the hope of a better life, and boards a ship bound for New York. 25 years later, his daughter Bertha sets sail for South Africa to marry a man she has never met, unaware of the tumult that lies ahead. In time, her granddaughter Shelley, following those very steps in reverse, flees the violence of apartheid to live in America, before at last finding home in Australia.

Drawing on her grandmother’s diary & letters, Shelley Davidow recounts these immigrant voyages, repeated from one generation to the next—detailing their experiences of love & loss alongside her own. Spanning four continents and 100 years, Davidow explores the heartache & emotional legacies of those who leave their homelands forever. ($29.95, PB)

Until We Are Free by Shirin Ebadi ($35, PB)

Dr Shirin Ebadi, Iranian human rights lawyer & activist, tells of her fight for reform inside Iran, and the devastating backlash she faced after winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Having fought tirelessly for democracy, equality before the law and freedom of speech, Ebadi became a global voice of inspiration. Yet, inside her own country, her life has been plagued by surveillance, intimidation and violence. In this book she tells shocking stories of how the Iranian authorities eventually forced her into exile. Her sister & daughter were detained, her husband was enmeshed in an espionage plot with another woman, her Nobel medal was stolen from her safety deposit box, and her offices in Tehran were ransacked.

Leonard: A Life by William Shatner ($33, PB)

William Shatner & Leonard Nimoy first met as journeymen actors on the set of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Little did they know that their next roles, in a new science-fiction television series, would shape their lives in ways no one could have anticipated. In 79 TV episodes & 6 feature films, over the course of nearly half a century, Shatner & Nimoy saw each other through personal and professional highs and lows. Shatner tells the story of a man who was his friend for over 50 years, recounting anecdotes and untold stories of their lives on and off set, as well as gathering stories from Nimoy’s close friends and family to present a full picture of a rich life.

Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street by Norma Clarke ($76, HB)

Oliver Goldsmith arrived in England in 1756 a penniless Irishman. He toiled for years in the anonymity of Grub Street—already a synonym for impoverished hack writers—before he became one of literary London’s most celebrated authors. Norma Clarke tells the extraordinary story of this destitute scribbler turned gentleman of letters as it unfolds in the early days of commercial publishing, when writers’ livelihoods came to depend on the reading public, not aristocratic patrons. She examines a network of writers radiating outward from Goldsmith: the famous & celebrated authors of Dr Johnson’s ‘Club’ & those far less fortunate ‘brothers of the quill’ trapped in Grub Street.

Idle Talk: Gwen Harwood, Letters 1960–1964

This volume, edited and with invaluable notes by Alison Hoddinott, comprises Gwen Harwood’s fascinating, unexpurgated letters to Alison and Bill Hoddinott, during four crucial years, from 1960- 1964, a period which can be described as Harwood’s creative floreat. They are also years in which her life-long relationships with A.D. Hope, James McAuley and Vincent Buckley begin, her friendships with Vivian and Sybille Smith and others consolidate, and in which Harwood was briefly notorious for her scandalous Bulletin acrostics and her confounding publication under several male pseudonyms. Some of these letters appeared in A Steady Storm of Correspondence (2001), but these unedited letters reveal the complex and not always tactful Harwood (who more than once urges the Hoddinotts to ‘burn these letters’). Plus there are many previously unpublished letters which it might have been felt unwise to publish earlier, and from which not everyone—including Harwood —emerges unscathed. The collection is rich in insights not only into Harwood’s mind, working methods, and circle, but also into the literary politics of one of the key periods in modern Australian poetry. ($29.95, PB)

Travel Writing

Road Series by Hugo Race ($30, PB) In the spirit of Patti Smiths M Train, Road Series is both love story and elegy. Renowned musician Hugo Races evocations of Melbourne, Sydney, the USA, Europe and Mali, and the life of a rock musician on the road are revealing, incisive and exquisitely written. A cerebral road-poem of the musician-as-outlier, crossing decades and continents, from the Melbourne punk scene of the early 1980s to quite literally Timbuktu. —Luke Davies Walks, Tracks and Trails of Queensland’s Tropics

by Derrick Stone ($39.95, PB)

Queensland’s Tropics provide numerous environments for enjoyable walking: from lush rainforests, cloud-shrouded mountains & extinct volcanoes to drier savanna woodlands and magnificent beaches on the coast and Great Barrier Reef islands. This book brings together more than 150 of the best walks, tracks or trails located within the coastal strip between Rockhampton & Cooktown. Walks vary from short boardwalk strolls in the lowland rainforests of Daintree National Park to 4-6 day hiking & camping trips on Hinchinbrook Island. Other routes follow old gold miners & forestry tracks, coaching routes, historical sites & Aboriginal communication tracks where Dreamtime stories add a further dimension.

Wild by Nature: From Siberia to Australia, three Years Alone in the Wilderness on Foot

by Sarah Marquis ($29.99, PB)

Sarah Marquis, recounts her extraordinary solo hike of over 1000 days & nights when she journeyed through six countries, starting in Siberia and finishing up at a small tree standing alone in the vastness of the Nullarbor Plain in South Australia. Walking for three years, Sarah overcame almost insurmountable odds to reach her final goal, surviving Mongolian thieves on horseback, heavily armed drug smugglers in the Golden Triangle, temperatures from subzero to scorching, lethal wildlife, a dengue fever delirium in the Laos jungle, tropical ringworm in northern Thailand, dehydration & a life-threatening abscess.

Abandoned India: The Mansions of Shekhawati Photographs by Kip Scott

This is an evocative photographic portrait of India, focussing on Shekhawati’s ‘abandoned’ mansions, and its desert towns. This exquisitely produced book features a selection of Kip Scott’s work made throughout the region of Shekhawati in Rajasthan, India. Here we glimpse courtyards, living spaces, frescoes, vast interiors, both lovingly restored and bordering on ruin. Scott’s images capture the complex nature of change, of sublime beauty and decay, mirroring an India that will seduce the reader. ($60, HB)

Taking Flight: Lores Bonney’s Extraordinary Flying Career by Kristen Alexander

From her first taste of the air when she joined Bert Hinkler in the cockpit for a joy ride in 1928, Lores Bonney was hooked. With her aviation licence and the support of her husband, she took to the Australian and international skies and braved the challenge of long-distance flying. In 1931 she broke the Australian record for the longest one-day flight by a woman; the following year she became the first woman to circumnavigate mainland Australia by air. She was in the air again in 1933 in a bid to become the first woman to fly from Australia to England.

Four years later she undertook her last long distance expedition, the first solo flight from Australia to Cape Town, South Africa. Drawing on the National Library’s collection of diary extracts, published recollections, interviews, documents and newspaper accounts Taking Flight celebrates this audacious pilots aerial accomplishments. ($40, PB)

How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been On the Importance of Armchair Travel

by Pierre Bayard ($35, HB)

Pierre Bayard takes readers on a trip around the world, giving guidance on how to talk about all those fantastic places you’ve never been. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been will delight and inform The Odd Woman & the City by Vivian Gornick armchair globetrotters and jet-setters—all while never having Vivian Gornick loves to walk—to absorb the drama, humour, and huto leave the comfort of the living room. Bayard examines the manity of the New York City streets, to see ‘the fifty different ways art of the ‘non-journey’, a tradition that a succession of writpeople struggle to remain human.’ Her closest walking companion is ers and thinkers, unconcerned with moving away from their home turf, have emLeonard, a gay man with whom she has a long-standing relationship ployed in order to encounter the foreign cultures they wish to know and talk about. that is as gratifying as it is contentious. As her discussions with Leonard He describes concrete situations in which the reader might find themselves having play in her mind, she dismantles the idea of the anonymous city, finding solace on a crowded to speak about places they’ve never been, and he chronicles some of his own expebus, among the pundits in Times Square, and watching a bank of lights go on at dusk in an riences and offers practical advice. adjacent apartment building. ($23, PB)

9

books for kids to young adults Mother Bruce by Ryan T. Higgins ($29, HB) A very funny story, in which we meet Bruce the bear, a confirmed bachelor who is set in his ways. Bruce accidentally finds himself caring for four just-hatched goslings, a situation that doesn’t suit him in the least. Despite his best attempts to alienate his new brood, they remain attached. Told with great humour and with cheerful, robust illustrations, this would be a great book for five to eight year olds to read for themselves, and a fun one to read aloud to younger children. Louise

compiled by Lynndy Bennett, our children's correspondent

Picture Books

Something Wonderful

by Raewyn Caisley (ill) Karen Blair

‘Sam likes to pull things apart and put them back together, and think about how things work. But he is sometimes so busy doing this, he forgets his chores on the family farm. Then one day he creates something truly wonderful...

An inspirational story about discovery, invention and the importance of dreams.’ This book deserves longevity, with its gentle realism, likeable characters—Sam in particular, with his imaginative distraction—& Blair’s pencil illustrations that perfectly depict the palette & textures of the dusty Australian country setting. Something wonderful indeed! ($25, HB) Lynndy

fiction

My Life and Other Exploding Chickens

by Tristan Bancks (ill) Gus Gordon

Tom Weekly is back! In his fourth hilarious string of inadvertent disasters Tom faces such dilemmas as avoiding homework, Revenge of the Nits (Part One), and Worst. Dentist. Ever. ‘Homework is destroying my life. I think it should be banned. The worst part is that Mum hassles me about it all week, so I… tell her about new research that claims homework causes blindness… A new scientific study has revealed a disturbing link between homework and the bubonic plague. Also mad cow disease, irritable bowel syndrome, tinea and death.’ For readers who can relate to misunderstandings, family pressures, mishaps and mild mayhem, this will entertain and amuse you (and possibly give you some clues about escaping undesirable events in your own life). ($16, PB) Lynndy

Burning Midnight by Will McIntosh

Sully and his mum have no money and could be evicted any day now. In order to stay in New York, Sully must sell mysterious spheres at the flea markets. The Spheres are highly sought after. If you burn a pair of spheres they can make you a little taller, better looking, faster or smarter. Sully meets a girl called Hunter who enjoys finding spheres. The two of them set off to hunt for spheres and what they find will be AMAZING! As the world fights over the spheres, Sully and Hunter will be forced to investigate where the spheres come from and why they are here. I really enjoyed this gripping novel and I recommend it for audiences who like action and adventure stories.

Ryan O’Dempsey (age 11). ($17, PB)

Nonfiction

A Beginner’s Guide to Bearspotting

by Michelle Robinson (ill) David Roberts ($23, HB)

‘Bearspotting is a dangerous business—you ought to take it seriously, you know. So here’s what you need to know for starters—black bears are dangerous and black, brown bears are dangerous and brown. Although sometimes black bears can be a little brown, and brown bears can be a little black. Are you following? You really need to focus here. If you do, this guide will tell you all you need to know when walking in BEAR COUNTRY. Don’t leave home without it. Are you ready? Good! Let’s go ... A Beginner’s Guide to Bearspotting is the laugh-out-loud, essential guide for all would-be bearspotters. To be studied with due care and attention. Don’t say we didn’t warn you ... ‘The adventurous little protagonist (of indeterminate gender) adheres (mostly) to the advice offered, braving each situation accompanied by yet another, unmentioned, type of bear that plays an unexpected role. As in the best picture books, Roberts’ distinctive ink and mixed media art adds another layer to this subversively funny ursine exploration that’s sure to appeal to all ages. Adults, that means you too! Lynndy

Waiting by Kevin Henkes ($30, HB)

Lynndy reviewed this book briefly before Christmas, but I love it so much I want to add my 5 cents worth. A row of five toys live on a window ledge, each waiting for something different. The owl is waiting for the moon, the pig with an umbrella is waiting for rain, and so on. Many things change outside the window: the time of day, the weather and the seasons, and occasionally gifts may appear. One day a new toy arrives, and everything changes, in a most exciting way. From its beautiful dust jacket and its creamy stock, to the coloured font and the soft brown used for outline, this is a truly beautiful and considered book.

Kevin Henkes’ illustrations are elegant and restrained, with a limited palette of pinks, green and brown, and with a thoughtful use of the page—his pictures capture the quiet wistfulness and inherent playfulness that a book about toys should have. For a book with such a limited setting, he has created a whole world of emotions and experiences. A brilliant book for ages 3 and older. Louise

teen fiction

The Rig by Joe Ducie ($16.95, PB)

Joe Dulcie’s debut novel The Rig is a riveting sci-fi, prison-break ‘teen fic’ that you won’t put down until the end. Will Drake is a 15 year-old boy who has bounced around the world’s worst juvenile prisons, and effectively managed to escape from all of them. His actions have landed him on the Rig, an isolated oil rig turned prison in Arctic waters.

Its purpose? To house the worst of the worst. But Drake is an escape artist, and a creative one at that. He knows that there is always a weak link. But the Rig is a much more brutal prison than anything he has experienced, and he knows it’s going to take some serious smarts to make it out this time. Drawing on friendship, courage and daring, Drake fights off mobs of armed guards and jacked up, muscle bound prisoners all while plotting his escape. He is constantly monitored and tracked and it looks like escape from the Rig really is impossible. That is until he makes a discovery. The Rig hides secrets beneath the icy waters, ones which if delved into will put everyone in lethal danger. I blasted through this book in a single night, unable to put it down. Dulcie has written an excellent prison break story with many elements of the ‘teen fic’ genre, such as characters with superpowers struggling in a dystopian world run by an authoritarian private government. Some characters were fairly clichéd, but for the most part, especially in the case of Will Drake, they were realistic and well developed. The plot with its many twists just kept on building suspense until the thrilling climax. Anyone who wants an action-filled prison break / sci-fi book should pick this one up right away. It keeps you guessing how the main character will escape and always manages to throw you off. Definitely recommended. Kai Cook-Pedersen (14) (Crystal Force, the compelling sequel to The Rig, is also available, $16.95, PB. With degrees in Counterterrorism, Security and Intelligence as well as Creative and Professional Writing from Australian universities, Joe Ducie has a superior pedigree in this genre. LB)

Enormous Smallness: A Story of E. E. Cummings by Matthew Burgess (ill) Kris Di Giacomo ($23, HB)

The poetry of E. E. Cummings is still ‘alive with experimentation and surprise’, their aspect is painterly, and they break the form of many poems that came before, and certainly changed the shape of poetry afterwards. Hard to believe that he was in fact born not last century, but the one before. The creators of this picture book tell the life story of this wonderful American poet, in pictures and words, and have honoured him in every way. They explain the way he wrote simply and effectively, as well as describing his life. The illustrations are imaginative and incorporate the playful type used (if not for E. E. Cummings then for whom?) and there is a concise chronology and some of his poems in the back of the book. Louise So exciting! We finally have the beautiful Elsa Beskow puzzles in stock. Each set features the illustrations of the beloved Swedish children’s illustrator—we have a memory game ($22.95), cube puzzles, and a very handsome wooden box of four simple 12-piece jigsaw puzzles (all $26.95). We always keep a selection of her picture books in stock, and it’s such a pleasure to extend our collection with these well made puzzles. Louise

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Food, Health & Garden

The Australian Native Bee Book: Keeping Stingless Bee Hives for Pets, Pollination & Delectable Sugarbag Honey by Tim Heard ($35, PB)

Keeping native stingless bees is a hot topic in Australia for commercial, environmental and recreational reasons. You can do something about the decline of pollinators by conserving native bees. In this book you’ll find the complete guide to native stingless bees, written by an expert who has spent his lifetime intimately engaged with these unique creatures. Whether you keep a hive or two in your suburban garden, or want to use multiple hives on a commercial farm, this friendly guide has you covered.

March To-Read List

Veg Out!: Easy Modern Vegetarian Recipes

by The Australian Women’s Weekly ($30, PB)

Choosing to cook and eat plant-based foods is becoming increasingly popular either as a complete way of life, or as a way of reducing animal-based foods in a diet. The recipes in this book are easy to make, deliciously tempting, satiating and the food will be happily received by family and friends.

Brodo: A Bone Broth Cookbook

by Marco Canora ($35, HB)

Bone Broth is the new green juice. Since chef Marco Canora opened Brodo, a takeout window at his East Village restaurant Hearth, he has been unable to keep up with the demand for his amazingly restorative and delicious bone broths. A cookbook and guidebook, this small format book will offer a cleanse regimen utilizing these healthier meal replacements, recipes, and how they can be used in a variety of healthy dishes and drinks.

David Dyer’s astonishing novel is based on the true story of the SS Californian, the ship that saw the Titanic’s distress rockets and yet did nothing.

Frank, fearless, funny and articulate, Yassmin Abdel-Magied is a dynamo, offering a bracing breath of fresh air and hope.

We learn how to love through our parents. So how does a child process the world with a traumatised Vietnam veteran as their father?

A fast-paced, witty and gripping historical crime series from Tom Keneally and his eldest daughter Meg.

Whether you’re contemplating retirement or not, this is an indispensable guide to a slower, more contented life.

Now in trade paperback – the novel that had the whole world talking, from the author of To Kill A Mockingbird.

Pre-eminent theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg offers a rich and irreverent history of science from a unique perspective – that of a scientist.

The fifth instalment of the My Struggle cycle looks at Knausgaard’s battles with introversion, alcohol abuse, infidelity and artistic ambition.

Slow Fires: Mastering New Ways to Braise, Roast, and Grill by Justin Smillie ($70, HB)

Learn to understand the philosophy of heat. Justin Smillie learned Italian food from a Californian master, Jonathan Waxman, and honed his rustic flavours in stylish New York City kitchens. He’s also a seafood and vegetable fanatic whose signature dish is an armlength slow-roasted short rib with olives and walnuts. His food is just as complex as his story, but at its heart are simple techniques done well. He teaches us the difference between hard-searing a cut for roasting versus a modest browning for a delicate braise, and how to gently steam fish to tenderness or hard-grill it for firm, juicy flesh.

The Simple Home by Rhonda Hetzel ($45, HB) With a year of monthly projects that make household management easier, Rhonda encourages you to set up good systems, make what you need and appreciate what you have. Learn how to stretch money further, safely clean your home and cook from scratch with 40 favourite recipes, including step-by-step guides to baking bread and making cheese. This is an inspiring, indispensable guide to slowing down, taking stock of your life and finding pleasure and satisfaction at home.

Don’t Eat This If You’re Taking That: The Hidden Risks of Mixing Food and Medicine

by Madelyn & John Ferstrom ($25, PB)

This book takes the mystery out of food and medications, providing an easy-to-use guide for anyone taking a medication—short term or long term—that indicates foods to avoid that can interfere with the action of the medication. Readers can easily find a medication, see what foods to avoid, and make some smart swaps. An added bonus in each section is a Dietary Supplements Alert box, providing the most up-to-date information on interactions with vitamins, minerals, and other dietary supplements. Small diet changes learned from this book can have big health payoffs!

Surgery, The Ultimate Placebo by Ian Harris

Practising orthopaedic surgeon, Ian Harris (who performs many of these operations himself) makes the unsettling argument that some commonly performed operations can be found to be useless or even harmful when properly evaluated. Of course no surgeon is recommending invasive surgery in bad faith, but Harris argues that the evidence for the success for many common operations, including knee arthroscopies, back fusion or cardiac stenting, become current accepted practice without full examination of the evidence. The placebo effect may be real, but is it worth the recovery time, expense & discomfort? ($25, PB)

Pride and Pudding by Regula Ysewijn ($50, HB)

The great British pudding, versatile and wonderful in all its guises, has been a source of nourishment and delight since the days of the Roman occupation, and probably even before then. By recreating recipes from historical cookery texts & updating them for today’s kitchens & ingredients, Regula Ysewijn has revived over 80 beautiful puddings for the modern home cook—Scottish haggis, humble beef pudding, traditional sweet & savoury pies, pastries, jellies, ices, flummeries, junkets, jam roly-poly & the iconic Christmas pudding.

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Event—6 for 6.30 John Newton

The Oldest Foods on Earth: A History of Australian Native Foods with Recipes Panel: John Newton, Clayton Donovan & Jean Paul Bruneteau This is a book about Australian food, the flora and fauna that nourished the Aboriginal peoples for over 50,000 years.

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Event—6 for 6.30

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Aaron Patrick

Credlin & Co.: How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself This is the story of a relationship that determined the fate of a government. It shows in stunning detail the disastrous consequences of power abused, and the broken people left in its wake.

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Young Adult Fiction Now

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Event— Fiona Mc

The High

Virginia

Work Like Australian author (The Night Guest) tion of short storie ing with American Reeves about her d rural Al

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Event— Anna

Queer Wars: The New Global Polarization Over Gay Rights In conv. with Prof. Gillian Triggs This book asks why sexuality and gender identity have become so vexed an issue between and within nations, and how we can best advocate for change.

Private Lives, P In conv. with Dr Historian Anna C terviews with Aus communities arou and uncovers how the past in the co and intimate stor history plays

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Launch—6 for 6.30 Stuart Jackson

Event—

Robyn W

Panel discussion with: Melina Marchetta, Erin Gough, Will Kostakis and Chris Morphew, —chaired by Felicity Castagna Join some of Australia’s most popular, award-winning young adult (YA) authors for a panel discussion about their work and YA fiction more generally.

The Australian Greens: From Activism to Australia’s Third Party Stuart Jackson examines the people who make The Greens tick, and asks whether the Greens has made the transition from a home for tree-huggers and alternative lifestylers to a party ready to work in Government.

In Love with Bett First 40 Years of T In conv. with M Scientific issues, personalities, ex fraud, discoveries pranks—Robyn W why science matte of ABC RN’s Th

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On Track: Searching out the Bundian Way In conv. with Mark McKenna On Track tells the story of John Blay’s long-distance search for the Bundian Way, an important Aboriginal pathway between Mt Kosciuszko and Twofold Bay near Eden on the NSW far south coast.

QE 61: A Nation in Transition: The Politics of Recession and Renewal In conv. with Rebecca Huntley George Megalogenis investigates a nation in transition. What will a new Australia look like, economically and socially? What are the new politics of change and renewal?

John Blay

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Event—6 for 6.30 Richard Denniss

Econobabble: How to Decode Political Spin and Economic Nonsense This book is designed to expose the stupid arguments, bizarre contradictions & complete lack of evidence upon which much ‘common sense’ about the economy rests in Australia—empowering you to cut through the babble & reach the truth.

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Event—6 for 6.30 Dennis Altman and Jonathan Symons

THUR

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Event—6 for 6.30

George Megalogenis

Event—6 for 6.30

Suzanne Falkiner

Mick: A Life of Randolph Stow Suzanne Falkiner’s biography pieces together an intriguing story from Randolph Stow’s personal letters, diaries, and interviews to examine both his productive periods as well as his long periods of publishing silence, and quiet retreat from Australia and the wider literary world.

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

Gleeclub members free entry to events at 49 Glebe Pt Rd

March 2016

Events are held upstairs at #49 Glebe Point Road unless otherwise noted.

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

RSDAY

—6 for 6.30 cFarlane

h Places

a Reeves

Any Other r Fiona McFarlane has a new colleces. She will be talkn author Virginia debut novel, set in labama.

—6 for 6.30 Clark

FRIDAY Launch—6 for 6.30

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Keith Mascord

Faith Without Fear: Risky Choices Facing Contemporary Christians Launcher: Michael Kirby Keith Mascord asks whether Christianity has the wherewithal to meet the increasingly acute intellectual and moral challenges currently facing it, and whether it can shed the reactive fear which no grips its more conservative forms.

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Event—6 for 6.30 Marc Fennell

Public History rusilla Modjeska Clark draws on instralians from five und the country, w we think about ontext of our local ries, and the role s in our lives.

Planet According to the Movies: Awesome, Weird & Wonderful Flicks from Four Corners of the Globe Film critic, Marc Fennell), tells the hidden stories behind the movies you know and love. Who needs a plane to travel the world when you can do it all from your couch, you shameful slob!

—6 for 6.30 Williams

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ty the Crow: The The Science Show Merlin Crossley debates, events, xposing scientific and broadcasting Williams reflects on ers, after 40 years he Science Show.

Double Launch

SATURDAY Launch—3.30 for 4

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Kate Ramsay

Go With Love Launcher: Dr Janet Ramsay This is the story of a vibrant, courageous woman who lives life to the full, who strengthens as she builds a career while juggling her mothering, as well as living and learning from her loving partnership; and who then survives and goes on loving after his premature death.

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Elizab p for gleema eth A il! email e llen’s week asims@ vents upda ly te gleebo oks.co . m.au

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20 Launch—3.30 for 4 Jan Smith

—6 for 6.30 Angelos Koutsourakis & Mark Steven

Confessions Of A Homegrown Alien: An Australian Memoir Jan Smith is the author of two novels, & has worked as a journalist for magazines from Woman’s Day Day to The Bulletin & Australian Business. She now lives happily in King’s Cross, Sydney, with her cat.

The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos

George Kouvaros

Awakening the Eye: Robert Frank’s American Cinema

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FEE INCREASE

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Event—6 for 6.30 Martin McKenzie-Murray

A Murder Without Motive: The Killing of Rebecca Ryle In 2004 Rebecca Ryle was killed for no apparent reason. Martin McKenzie-Murray meditates on justice and suffering in a memoir that maps the Perth suburbs he grew up in, and looks at the dangerous underbelly of adolescent ennui.

This year marks the 18th anniversary of the gleeclub. We are very grateful and proud to have you all aboard as members, enjoying our member benefits: a 10% credit on all normal purchases, the gleaner mailed free to members, free post anywhere in Australia and free tickets to what must be one of the world’s busiest and best series of bookshop literary events.

Sadly costs have risen sharply in the last five years since our last fee increase, in particular just lately Australia Post has increased many of their charges. Therefore we have decided to increase our gleeclub fees.

As of March the 1st the new charges will be $40 for one year and $100 for three years.

Our committed and loyal customers are very important to us. We trust you will be understanding of the reasons for this increase and are sure you will see that the benefits still easily outweigh the fee. Roger & David

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Granny’s Good Reads with Sonia Lee

This month I’ve read three wonderful books, one dark and two light. The dark one is The Secret Chord by Geraldine Brooks, which brings vividly to life the biblical story of King David as told by Nathan the Prophet, who ‘interviews’ David’s mother, one of his brothers and Mikhal—King Saul’s daughter and David’s first wife. The times, as Brooks describes them, are thoroughly Hobbist: nasty, brutish and, for many of the cast, very short indeed. Young David joins Saul’s court after killing the Philistines’ bruiser Goliath; he and Jonathan, Saul’s son, then become lovers, after which David marries Mikhal, who helps him escape when he falls out of favour with Saul and is forced to live in the wilderness.

There he lives the life of a Semitic bushranger, acquires second wife Abigail and finally sees off Saul and takes the throne. Once he is king his flaws become all too obvious. He compulsorily acquires Bathsheba, the wife of one of his generals, and contrives her husband’s death by putting him in a hotspot in the front line. Then his ruinous over-indulgence of his sons results in the rape of Tamar by Amnon her brother, followed by Absolom’s vendetta and rebellion, all ending up in mayhem and slaughter. Shlomo (Solomon), David’s second son by Bathsheba, is the one bright spot. Nathan sees in Shlomo a lad of great potential, gives him an A-1 education and finally helps anoint him king of the united kingdom of Israel and Judah while David is lying on his deathbed. David’s bloodstained hands having disqualified him from building the temple, the task is left to Shlomo, who makes an excellent job of it. Brooks’s portrait of ‘the sweet singer of Israel’ was conceived when her son Nathaniel played the harp at his bar mitzvah. She and her younger son scrambled all over the terrain and her familiarity with the landscape is evident in the novel. I loved this book, in my opinion her best since Year of Wonders.

The first of the lighter reads is The Revolving Door of Life by Alexander McCall Smith. If you want a couple of hours of unadulterated pleasure do yourself the favour of reading one of his Scotland Street novels—preferably not in the quiet carriage, because you will laugh out loud for most of the book. In this latest one Bertie turns seven and his awful Mum is still abroad, mistakenly held captive in a harem, where she has started a book club for the sheikh’s wives. Meanwhile Grandma fills in as housekeeper for Bertie, Dad and baby Ulysses, and under her benign rule Bertie gets a longed-for kilt, eats contraband food and plays with forbidden friends. Next door the Nudists’ Association of Edinburgh have taken over the backyard and many of them end up in hospital with frostbite. For inspired silliness these books can’t be beaten.

The second lighter read is The Road to Little Dribbling, in which Bill Bryson reprises his Notes From a Small Island of twenty years ago—starting at Bognor Regis (of ‘bugger Bognor’ fame) and ending at Cape Wrath. In between he entertained me with interesting facts about the places he visits, grumbles about the fact that things in Britain are not as good as in ‘the old days’, and makes a strong plea for the preservation of England’s wonderful green spaces—a cause to which he has devoted much of his life. During the course of his travels his two daughters give birth to daughters and he writes lovingly of how he and his wife met, and his happy life with her in his adopted country. His last chapter is devoted to praising the things that he likes most about England. Bryson was chancellor of Durham University for six years and says that English universities, with their more limited resources, provide much better value than many of the over-endowed American ones.

For afters I read The Man With The Golden Typewriter, the late Ian Fleming’s letters, capably edited by his nephew Fergus. The creator of James Bond definitely did have a golden typewriter, smuggled in for him from America. His letters to Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, his long-suffering wife Ann and many others are wonderful and display his charm and the meticulous way in which he researched his books.

I am looking forward to reading The Best Australian Essays 2015 ed. Geordie Williamson and The Best Australian Science Writing 2015 ed. Bianca Nogrady.

2014’s Science anthology was so exciting that I couldn’t read it in bed as it kept me awake. At present my bedside book is Through The Children’s Gate, a collection of essays by Adam Gopnik. He has returned to New York after living in Paris and tells interesting stories about son Luke and daughter Olivia—who has an imaginary friend Charlie Ravioli, whose wife Kweeda has died of Bitterosity.

My favourite essay has a description of green parrots, originally from Argentina and domesticated in New York, chattering together while pecking for seeds in the snow. All the above are heartily recommended reads. Sonia

The Embarrassed Colonialist by Sean Dorney

Forty years after independence, Papua New Guinea is the largest single recipient of aid from Australia. Yet Australians seem to be largely ambivalent about the country. Few Australians know the history of our colonial rule in PNG and our long ties to the country are quickly being forgotten. PNG expert Sean Dorney examines PNG’s weaknesses and strengths since independence and argues that, for moral and practical reasons, Australia needs to reconnect with Papua New Guinea. It is time we shed our embarrassment about our colonial past and embrace our relationship with our nearest neighbour. ($10, PB)

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Australian Studies Talking To My Country by Stan Grant ($30, PB) In July 2015, as the debate over Adam Goodes being booed at AFL games raged and got ever more heated and ugly, Stan Grant wrote a short but powerful piece for The Guardian that went viral, not only in Australia but right around the world. His was a personal, passionate and powerful response to racism in Australian and the sorrow, shame, anger and hardship of being an indigenous man. ‘We are the detritus of the brutality of the Australian frontier’, he wrote, ‘We remained a reminder of what was lost, what was taken, what was destroyed to scaffold the building of this nation’s prosperity.’ Grant was lucky enough to find an escape route—spending many years outside Australia, working in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa, a time that liberated him and this is his very personal meditation on what it means to be Australian, what it means to be indigenous, and what racism really means in this country.

special price $26.95

The Forgotten People: Liberal & conservative approaches to recognising indigenous peoples (eds) Damien Freeman & Shireen Morris ($30, PB)

‘It is easy to assume that constitutional recognition of indigenous Australians is a project of the left in Australia, and something that the right staunchly opposes.’—from Noel Pearson’s introduction.

This collection challenges that assumption. It frames indigenous constitutional recognition in the context of conservative & liberal philosophical thought, & demonstrates that there may indeed be a set of reforms for constitutional recognition that can achieve the symbolic & substantive change sought by indigenous leaders, while at the same time addressing the critical concerns of constitutional conservatives & classical liberals. Contributors include Chris Kenny, Major General Michael Jeffery, Cardinal George Pell, Tim Wilson, Lyle Shelton, Graham Bradley & Julian Leeser.

Damned Whores and God’s Police

by Anne Summers ($39.99, PB)

Sexual harassment, domestic violence & date rape had not been named, although they certainly existed—it’s hard to imagine an Australia where these abuses were not yet fully understood as obstacles to women’s equality, yet that was Australia in 1975. And it was in this climate that Anne Summers identified ‘damned whores’ and ‘God’s police’, the stereotypes that characterised all women as being either virtuous mothers whose function was to civilise society or bad girls who refused, or were unable, to conform to that norm and who were thus spurned and rejected by mainstream Australia. These stereotypes persist to this day, argues Anne Summers in this updated version of her classic, and although sexual harassment, domestic violence and date rape are well understood today they are nevertheless still with us and seem to be increasing.

Quarterly Essays reissued: Blood Year: Islamic State and the Failures of the War on Terror

by David Kilcullen, $30 Faction Man: Bill Shorten’s Path to Power

by David Marr, $23 Stop at Nothing: The Life and Adventures of Malcolm Turnbull

by Annabel Crabb, $23

Gay Sydney: A History by Garry Wotherspoon

This is an updated version of Garry Wotherspoon 1991 classic, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-culture, written in the midst of the AIDS crisis. In this vivid book Wotherspoon traces the shifts that have occurred since then, including majority support for marriage equality and anti-discrimination legislation. He also ponders the parallel evaporation of a distinctly gay sensibility and the disappearance of once-packed gay bars that have now become cafes and gyms. He also tells the story of gay Sydney across a century, looking at secret, underground gay life, the never-ending debates about sex in society and the role of social movements in the 60s and 70s in effecting social change. ($30, PB)

The Bauhinia Tree: The Life of Kankawa Olive Knight ($23, PB)

With deep roots in the Kimberley region, Olive Knight shares her story of growing up with the Gooniyandi and Walmatjarri peoples of north-western Australia. As the daughter of a half-caste father, she was nearly killed on the day of her birth, as was customary for half-blood children in her community. Thankfully she was spared by an elder, and would follow her own path, full of hardship as she moved from mission to mission. She eventually found love and fulfilment, following her late husband Jim’s passion for Indigenous rights, becoming a respected translator and community leader. After Jim’s death, Olive’s singing and songwriting opened unexpected worlds of opportunity. From early days in mission gospel choirs to finding her true voice in the country western, blues and rock n’ roll music of the day, Olive’s talent as a singer eventually led to collaborations with other artists and performers, many of whom sought her unique voice and ability to translate songs into her traditional language.

High Seas and High Teas: Voyaging to Australia

by Roslyn Russell ($45, PB)

‘The rats I frighten away by throwing books or anything hard at the spot at which they commence their gnawing.’ Emigrant Janet Ronald wrote this in the journal she kept on board one of the ships transporting free settlers from Britain & Ireland to Australia in the 19th century. On journeys lasting more than 100 days, non-stop, our forebears endured raging seas, the dazzling heat of the tropics & freezing temperatures as ships journeyed far into the southerly latitudes. They also formed social communities—putting on plays, developing sometimes lasting relationships & taking part in wild nautical rituals. Using diary entries & shipboard newspapers, Roslyn Russell gives a vivid sense of what it was like to leave one life for another & sail across the world into the unknown. In the foreword, Kerry O’Brien writes about his Irish ancestors’ perilous voyages to Australia in the 19th century—as both free settlers and guests of Her Majesty.

Politics

The Lady & the Generals: Aung San Suu Kyi & Burma’s Struggle For Freedom by Peter Popham

Peter Popham’s biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, The Lady and the Peacock, concluded in November 2010, when she was finally released from seven & a half years of house arrest. But the greater drama was only just beginning: a wave of reforms that followed her meeting with the President, the release of most political prisoners, the partial lifting of censorship; then the re-registration of the National League for Democracy (NLD) as a political party, and Suu Kyi entering parliament for the first time.

However, progress slowed & the future seems not quite so bright. The racist expulsion of the Rohingyas was condemned round the globe & the military rulers are still very much in power. Using interviews and true stories Popham brings this fascinating country, and its contemporary reality, vividly to life. ($35, PB)

Hillary Rising: The Politics, Persona and Policies of a New American Dynasty by James D. Boys ($30, PB)

On 12th April 2015, Hillary Clinton announced that she would run for President in 2016, casting herself as the ‘champion of everyday Americans’. After three decades of public life and intense media scrutiny, what drives this most intriguing and polarising of political figures?

What kind of president will she make? James Boys’s political biography is a clear-sighted, non-partisan analysis of Hillary Clinton’s rise to power, tracing her path from Republican adolescent to First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State and Presidential candidate to uncover her core principles and her political ideology.

City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp by Ben Rawlence ($35, PB)

History

The New Yorker Book of the 50s ($70, HB)

The 1950s: the era of the Cold War, the division of Germany and the Cuban Revolution, but also the era that gave birth to television, Rock n Roll and Elvis, NASA and Pop Art. In this anthology the New Yorker looks back at this diverse decade that boomed after recovering from the devastating WWII. This collection features contributions from some of the greatest journalists, novelists and poets that graced the New Yorker’s pages in the 50s and will inform and entertain any history fan in your life.

Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889–1939

by Volker Ullrich ($59.99, PB)

To render Hitler as a political animal with no personality to speak of, as a man of limited intelligence & poor social skills, fails to explain the spell that he cast not only on those close to him but on the German people as a whole. In the first volume of this monumental new biography, Volker Ullrich sets out to correct this perception of the Führer. While charting in detail Hitler’s life from his childhood to the eve of WW2 against the politics of the times, Ullrich unveils the man behind the public persona: his charming & repulsive traits, his talents & weaknesses, his deepseated insecurities & murderous passions. Drawing on a wealth of previously neglected or unavailable sources, Ullrich renders the Führer not as a psychopath but as a master of seduction and guile—and it is perhaps the complexity of his character that explains his enigmatic grip on the German people more convincingly than the clichéd image of the monster.

The Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay ($32, PB)

The culmination of a lifetime’s field work and research, William Lindesay selects 50 artefacts from around the world to tell the story of the Great Wall from the second century BC to the late 20th century. Abraham Ortelius’ pioneering world atlas, the unexpected origins of ‘wolf smoke’, the proliferation of the blunderbuss in the 15th century Great Wall theatre of war, even Kafka’s classic short story ‘At the Building of the Great Wall’ are some of the unique objects that were shaped by China’s most famous national landmark. Enhanced by stories of their discovery, and those of their modern-day keepers, The Great Wall in 50 Objects is a personal and historical exploration of a world wonder.

100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today

by Stephen Le ($40, HB)

To the charity workers, Dabaab refugee camp is a humanitarian crisis; to the Kenyan government, it is a ‘nursery for terrorists’; to the western media, it is a dangerous no-go area; but to its half a million residents, it is their last resort. Situated hundreds of miles from any other settlement, deep within the inhospitable desert of northern Kenya where only thorn bushes grow, Dadaab is a city like no other. Its buildings are made from mud, sticks or plastic, its entire economy is grey, and its citizens survive on rations and luck. Over the course of 4 years, Ben Rawlence became a first-hand witness to a strange and desperate limbo-land, getting to know many of those who have come there seeking sanctuary. He interweaves the stories of 9 individuals to show what life is like in the camp and to sketch the wider political forces that keep the refugees trapped there.

Biological anthropologist Stephen Le presents the long view of the human diet, taking the reader on an historic & geographic tour of how different cuisines have evolved in tandem with their particular environments, as our ancestors took advantage of the resources & food available to them. Like his mentor Jared Diamond, Le uses history & science to present a fascinating & wide-ranging tour of human history as viewed through what & how we eat. Travelling the world from Vietnam & Kenya to Nova Scotia & Iowa, Le visits people producing food using traditional methods as well as modern techniques, and looks at how our relationship to food has strayed from centuries of tradition, to mass-produced assembly lines dependent on chemicals.

In 1979, seemingly overnight moving at a clip some 30 years faster than the rest of the world Iran became the first revolutionary theocracy in modern times. Since then, the country has been largely a black box to the West, a sinister presence looming over the horizon. But inside Iran, a breathtaking drama has unfolded since then, as religious thinkers, political operatives, poets, journalists & activists have imagined & reimagined what Iran should be. They have drawn as deeply on the traditions of the West as of the East & have acted upon their beliefs with urgency & passion, frequently staking their lives for them. With more than a decade of experience reporting on, researching & writing about Iran, Laura Secor narrates this unprecedented history as a story of individuals caught up in the slipstream of their time, seizing & wielding ideas powerful enough to shift its course as they wrestle with their country’s apparatus of violent repression as well as its rich & often tragic history.

From the ancient Greek and Roman origins of human intelligence to its use in the Catholic church to Francis Walsingham’s Elizabethan secret service to the birth of the surveillance state in today’s digital hi-tech age, Colonel John Hughes-Wilson, professional military-intelligence officer and author of the bestselling Military Intelligence Blunders and Cover-Ups, gives an extraordinarily broad and wide-reaching perspective on intelligence, providing an up-to-date analysis of the importance of intelligence historically and in the recent past. Drawing upon a variety of sources, ranging from first-hand accounts to his own personal experience, Hughes-Wilson covers everything from undercover agent handling to photographic reconnaissance to today’s much misunderstood cyber welfare. ($59.99, HB)

Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran by Laura Secor ($54, HB)

Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post 9/11 Presidency

by Charlie Savage ($54, HB)

Barack Obama promised change from George W. Bush’s global war on terrorism. But the Obama administration used drones to kill suspected militants and vacuumed data on Americans’ phone calls. Obama criticised Bush’s unilateralism and secrecy, but launched wars without going to Congress and presided over an unprecedented crackdown on leaks. With extensive reporting, Savage explores how and why Obama and his legal team—an elite, liberal group who vowed to restore the rule of law—end up accused of entrenching the sweeping powers of the post-9/11 security state. If legitimate, the accusation stands to change the legacy of Obama’s entire presidency.

On Intelligence: The History of Espionage and the Secret World by John Hughes-Wilson

Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World by Tim Whitmarsh ($60, HB)

Long before the European Enlightenment & the Darwinian revolution, brave people doubted the power of the gods. Religion provoked scepticism in ancient Greece, and heretics argued that history must be understood as a result of human action rather than divine intervention. They devised theories of the cosmos based on matter, and notions of matter based on atoms. They developed mathematical tools that could be applied to the world around them, and tried to understand that world in material terms. Their scepticism left a rich legacy of literature, philosophy and science, and was defended by great writers like Epicurus, Lucretius, Cicero and Lucian. Tim Whitmarsh tells the story of the tension between orthodoxy and heresy with great panache.

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Science & Nature

In Love with Betty the Crow: The First 40 Years of The Science Show by Robyn Williams ($32.99, PB)

The Science Show with Robyn Williams on Radio National is one of the longest running programs on Australian radio. Scientific issues, debates, events, personalities, exposing scientific fraud, discoveries and broadcasting pranks have been its hallmarks, and the show has given Australians fascinating insights into all manner of things. In this lively account of forty years of The Science Show, Williams reveals in his inimitable style why science is important—touching on topics like the flakes and the heroes, propaganda, cosmic revolutions, our relationship with animals, women in science, and of course, the environment.

Gleebooks’ special price $29.99

The Powerhouse: America, China & the Great Battery War Steve LeVine ($35, PB)

D

amned Whores and God’s Police was first published

in 1975. In the 40 years since, it has sold over 100,000 copies and is considered an Australian classic. In that time we have seen the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984 and women have become increasingly visible in employment, in politics and elsewhere across society. In this updated edition, however, Anne Summers argues that the stereotypes that characterised women in 1975 as either ‘damned whores’ or ‘God’s police’ persist to this day. Who are today’s damned whores? Why do women themselves still want to be God’s Police? And why are sexual harassment, domestic violence and date rape still with us and on the rise?

G

Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945

by J. McNeill & Peter Engelke ($39.95, PB)

The Earth has entered a new age—the Anthropocene—in which humans are the most powerful influence on global ecology. More than any other factor, human dependence on fossil fuels inaugurated this new age— before 1700, people used little in the way of fossil fuels, but over the next 200 years coal became the most important energy source. When oil entered the picture, coal and oil soon accounted for 75 percent of human energy use. Since the mid 20th century, the accelerating pace of energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth has thrust the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment. The Great Acceleration explains its causes and consequences, highlighting the role of energy systems, as well as trends in climate change, urbanisation, and environmentalism.

Human Advantage: A New Understanding of How Our Brain Became Remarkable

by Suzana Herculano-Houzel ($64, HB)

arry Wotherspoon’s Gay Sydney: A history is an

updated version of his 1991 classic, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-culture, written in the midst of the AIDS crisis.

In this vivid book Wotherspoon traces the shifts that have occurred since then, including majority support for marriage equality and anti-discrimination legislation. He also ponders the parallel evaporation of a

distinctly gay sensibility and the disappearance of once-packed gay bars that have now become cafes and gyms. This book also tells the story of gay Sydney across a century, looking at secret, underground gay life, the never-ending debates about sex in society and the role of social movements in the ’60 and ’70s in effecting social change.

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

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A worldwide race is on to perfect the next engine of economic growth, the advanced lithium-ion battery. It will power the electric car, relieve global warming, and catapult the winner into a new era of economic and political mastery. Steve LeVine was granted unprecedented access to a secret federal laboratory outside Chicago, where a group of geniuses is trying to solve this next monumental task of physics. But these scientists—almost all foreign born—are not alone. With so much at stake, researchers in Japan, South Korea & China are in the same pursuit. The drama intensifies when a Silicon Valley start-up licenses the federal laboratory’s signature invention with the aim of a blockbuster sale to the world’s biggest carmakers. This is a realtime, two-year thrilling account of big invention, big commercialisation, and big deception.

It exposes the layers of competition and ambition, aspiration and disappointment behind this great turning point in the history of technology.

Now in B Format Adventures in Human Being by Gavin Francis, $23 Professor Stewart’s Incredible Numbers

by Ian Stewart, $23.99

The human brain uses 25% of all the energy the body requires each day.

So the human brain is special, right? Wrong, according to Suzana Herculano-Houzel. Humans have developed cognitive abilities that outstrip those of all other animals, but not because we are evolutionary outliers.

Herculano-Houzel shows that it is not the size of our brain that matters but the fact that we have more neurons in the cerebral cortex than any other animal, thanks to our ancestors’ invention, some 1.5 million years ago, of a more efficient way to obtain calories: cooking. Because we are primates, ingesting more calories in less time made possible the rapid acquisition of a huge number of neurons in the still fairly small cerebral cortex—the part of the brain responsible for finding patterns, reasoning, developing technology, and passing it on through culture.

Miniature Lives: Identifying Insects in Your Home and Garden by Michelle Gleeson ($40, PB)

This book provides a range of simple strategies that people can use to identify and learn more about the insects in their homes and gardens.

Featuring a step-by-step, illustrated identification key and colour photographs, the book guides the reader through the basics of entomology (the study of insects). Simple explanations, amusing analogies and quirky facts convey information on diet, lifecycle, habitat and risks in a way that is both interesting and easy to understand. Identifying an insect using field guides or internet searches can be daunting—Miniature Lives allows the reader to identify an insect without having to capture or touch it.

Sorting the Beef from the Bull: The Science of Food Fraud Forensics by Evershed & Temple ($29.99, PB)

Food adulteration, motivated by money, is an issue that has spanned the globe throughout human history. Whether it’s a matter of making a good quality oil stretch a bit further by adding a little extra ‘something’ or labelling a food falsely to appeal to current consumer trends. This book explains the scientific tools and techniques that revealed the century’s biggest food fraud scams. It looks in detail at the biggest scams in recent times; drawing on Richard Evershed’s experience at the forefront of the fight against these fraudsters, it goes on to explore the arms-race between scientists and adulterers as better techniques for detection spur more creative and sophisticated means of adulteration. Finally, it looks at the up-and-coming techniques and devices that will help the industry and consumers fight food fraud in the future.

Philosophy & Religon

The Persuaders by James Garvey ($28, PB) In almost every hour of every day, people will try to change your mind—but none of it consists in giving you good reasons. Instead, you’ll experience product placement, infoganda, sock puppeteering, psychological pricing, viral marketing, crowd manipulation, framing, spinning, propagandising. Loyalty cards, death panels, airport toilets, think tank reports, search algorithms & weapons dossiers are all symptoms of this. You are nudged, anchored & incentivised.

It’s a profound shift in the way human beings interact with one another. Philosopher James Garvey writes clearly and entertainingly about the dangers we face when we lose our grip on persuasion by rational means. But The Persuaders isn’t just a requiem for rationality. It’s a call to think again about the way we think now.

In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies by David Rieff ($37.95, HB)

The conventional wisdom about historical memory is summed up in George Santayana’s celebrated phrase, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. Today, the consensus that it is moral to remember, immoral to forget, is nearly absolute. And yet is this right? David Rieff, an independent writer who has reported on bloody conflicts in Africa, the Balkans, and Central Asia, insists that things are not so simple. Collective remembrance can be toxic.

Sometimes, Rieff concludes, it may be more moral to forget. Ranging widely across some of the defining conflicts of modern times-the Irish Troubles and the Easter Uprising of 1916, the white settlement of Australia, the American Civil War, the Balkan wars, the Holocaust, and 9/11-Rieff presents a pellucid examination of the uses and abuses of historical memory. His contentious, brilliant, and elegant essay is an indispensable work of moral philosophy.

The Ultimate Walking Dead and Philosophy (ed) Wayne Yuen ($25, PB)

Did Dr. Jenner do the right thing in committing suicide, when all hope seemed to be lost? Does the Governor, as the new Machiavelli, prove that willingness to repeatedly commit murder is the best technique for getting and keeping political power? Why do most characters place such importance on keeping particular individuals alive, especially children? What can we learn about reality from Rick’s haunting hallucinations? In The Walking Dead, human beings are pushed to their limits by a zombie apocalypse and have to decide what really matters. Good and evil, freedom and slavery, when one life has to be sacrificed for another, even the nature of religion—all the ultimate questions of human existence are posed afresh as the old society crumbles away and a new form of society emerges, with new beliefs and new rules.

At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell ($50, HB)

Sarah Bakewell tells the story of modern existentialism as one of passionate encounters between people, minds and ideas. From the ‘king and queen of existentialism’—Sartre and de Beauvoir—to their wider circle of friends and adversaries including Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Iris Murdoch, this book is an enjoyable and original journey through a captivating intellectual movement. Weaving biography and thought, Bakewell takes us to the heart of a philosophy about life that also changed lives, and that tackled the biggest questions of all: what we are and how we are to live.

The Name of God is Mercy: A Conversation with Andrea Tornielli ($33, HB)

In a conversation with Vatican expert Andrea Tornielli, Pope Francis discloses the core of his papacy and, in his own words, conveys the great message of the Holy Year of Mercy. Through his own experience as a priest and shepherd, the pope talks about Mercy, a subject of central importance in his teaching and testimony. He explains the reasons for this extraordinary Holy Year, and in doing so he speaks to all the souls—inside and outside the Church—who are looking for a meaning in life, for a road to peace and reconciliation, for a healing to their physical and spiritual wounds. It is the summing up of his teachings and papacy.

Reading Heidegger’s Black Notebooks 1931–1941 (eds) Ingo Farin & Jeff Malpas ($76, HB)

For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the Black Notebooks after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of ‘World-Jewry’—written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks.

Psychology He Wanted The Moon by Mimi Baird

Texas-born and Harvard-educated, Dr Perry Baird was a rising medical star in the late 1920s and 1930s. Early in his career he grew fascinated with identifying the biochemical root of manic depression, just as he began to suffer from it himself. By the time the results of his groundbreaking experiments were published, Baird had been institutionalised multiple times, his medical license revoked, and his wife and daughters estranged.

He later received a lobotomy & died from a consequent seizure, his research incomplete, his achievements unrecognised. Mimi Baird’s family were silent about the father who had been absent for most of her childhood—but a string of coincidences led to the recovery of a manuscript which Dr Baird had worked on throughout his brutal institutionalisation, confinement & escape. This remarkable document, reflecting periods of both manic exhilaration & clear-headed health, presents a portrait of a man who was a uniquely astute observer of his own condition, struggling with a disease for which there was no cure, racing against time to unlock the key to treatment before his illness became impossible to manage. ($33, PB)

When the Sun Bursts: The Enigma of Schizophrenia by Christopher Bollas ($49.95, HB)

Many schizophrenics experience their condition as one of radical incarceration, mind-altering medications, isolation & dehumanisation. In this sensitive and evocative narrative, Christopher Bollas draws on his personal experiences working with schizophrenics since the 1960s. He offers his interpretation of how schizophrenia develops, typically in the teens, as an adaptation in the difficult transition to adulthood. He depicts schizophrenia as an understandable way of responding to our precariousness in a highly unpredictable world. He celebrates the courage of the children he has worked with and reminds us that the wisdom inherent in human beings-to turn to conversation with others when in distress-is the fundamental foundation of any cure for human conflict.

Stranger in the Mirror: The Scientific Search for the Self by Robert Levine ($65, HB)

In Stranger in the Mirror, Robert Levine offers a provocative, wide-ranging, and entertaining scientific exploration of the most personal and important of all landscapes: the physical and psychological entity we call our self. Who are we?

Where is the boundary between us and everything else? Are we all multiple personalities? And how can we control who we become? Psychologically, we switch back and forth like quicksilver between incongruent, sometimes adversarial subselves. Socially, we appear to be little more than an ever-changing troupe of actors.

And, culturally, the boundaries of the self vary wildly around the world--from the confines of one’s body to an entire village. The self, in short, is a fiction--vague, arbitrary, and utterly intangible. But it is also interminably fluid. And this, Levine argues, unleashes a world of potential. Fluidity creates malleability. And malleability creates possibilities.

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time

by Maria Konnikova ($30, PB)

Con men are artists of persuasion and exploiters of trust.

They hold a deep, enigmatic fascination for us. But how do they do it? Whether it’s a suspicious-looking email or a multimillion-dollar global swindle, Maria Konnikova investigates the psychological principles that underlie each stage of the confidence game and the profile of both the con artist and his mark. We learn how grifters can be so persuasive, even to those of us who consider ourselves immune, and how we can train ourselves to discern the signs of a story that isn’t quite what it seems..

Treatment Planning for Psychotherapists: A Practical Guide to Better Outcomes 3rd ed

by Richard Makover ($122, PB)

Drawing on Richard Makover’s years of experience, this book presents a top-down, outcome-based approach to treatment planning that emphasizes the importance of the initial interview & assessment to the planning process, while providing practical advice for enhancing patient collaboration & reducing drop-out rates. This revised edition has been updated to reflect important changes in mental health delivery systems & funding relevant to treatment providers, as well as the challenges & opportunities posed by the digital revolution.

The Idiot Brain by Dean Burnett ($30, PB)

Unpredictable and entertaining, Dean Burnett’s account gives up-to-date research and the principles of neuroscience along the way. Looking at memory, intelligence, observation, social interaction and personality, Burnett explains why: memory is like a doting mother; tall people are more intelligent; criticism is more powerful than praise; we remember faces before names; a glass of wine can refresh your memory and you can’t be ‘a little bit OCD’.

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Eminently Eligible A few years ago on a national television show about books, one of the younger members of the bookish panel described Pride and Prejudice as a ‘rom com’. So I stopped watching it. Last year I started reading The Austen Project, a publishing confection where well known contemporary writers rewrite Jane Austen’s novels in a contemporary setting. All very enjoyable, but the one I have really been waiting for is Curtis Sittenfeld’s version of Pride and Prejudice—possibly the most popular of all of Austen’s novels, and certainly one of my favourites. I like Curtis Sittenfeld’s novels too. The American Wife was a surprisingly engaging book (a fictional account of Laura Bush)—very dense and detailed, and quite compelling. Eligible is the name of this version of P&P, and eligibility is what it’s all about. Set in Cincinnati, the two oldest Bennett girls have returned to their childhood home after their father has suffered a heart attack.

Lizzy is a journalist, and Jane a yoga teacher. They are both unmarried and childless, although Jane is undergoing IVF treatment. On their return they are aghast at the state of decay in the family home, and the general torpor of their sisters. Mary is a perpetual student, and Lydia and Kitty spend a lot of time at the gym. Mr and Mrs Bennett do very little themselves, and are slowly but surely eating up their trust funds.

Some of the original characters are slightly conflated and distorted.

Lizzy has a secret boyfriend, Jasper Wick—who is clearly Wickhamesque. While the cad that Lydia elopes with, Ham, reveals himself to be a person of both interest and very good intent. Bingley is highly eligible, being a doctor—slightly less so in Lizzy’s eyes as he has recently appeared on the reality dating show, Eligible. All the issues of modern life flip through the narrative—race, entitlement, transexuality, adultery, celebrity, to name a few. A lot of these things really don’t resonate with the original story of course, but their is plenty of pride and prejudice in this new version, as well as the perennial search for love, chasms of misunderstanding and miscommunication, and the ever crucial issues of social standing and upbringing. Darcy (a neurosurgeon) is an excellent catch for Lizzy, once he climbs off his high horse, and once she sees the light about Jasper Wick. Just as walking is used as a metaphor in Jane Austen’s novels, the central characters in Eligible are constantly running, recreationally that is. Lizzy and Darcy often meet accidentally as they run, and Lizzy eschews the family car in favour of running when Jane is taken ill, and lands in hospital (where Darcy and Bingley are working). In fact, this modern version is a ‘rom com’, and very entertaining reading. It does lack the gravity if the original, but is clearly not trying to reproduce it, and as my children repeatedly say ‘it is what it is’, and none the worse for that.

Eligible is out in May. Louise

What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing by Brian Seibert ($63, HB)

This is a story with a huge cast of characters, from Master Juba (it was probably a performance of his in a Five Points cellar that Charles Dickens described in American Notes for General Circulation) through Bill Robinson and Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Gene Kelly and Paul Draper to Gregory Hines and Savion Glover. Seibert traces the stylistic development of tap through individual practitioners, vividly depicting dancers both well remembered and now obscure.

And he illuminates the cultural exchange between blacks and whites over centuries, the interplay of imitation and theft, as well as the moving story of AfricanAmericans in show business, wielding enormous influence as they grapple with the pain and pride of a complicated legacy.

A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age : Scientific Habits of Mind by David J. Helfand

We live in the Information Age, with billions of bytes of data just two swipes away. Yet how much of this is mis- or even disinformation? A lot of it is, and your search engine can’t tell the difference. As a result, an avalanche of misinformation threatens to overwhelm the discourse we so desperately need to address complex social problems such as climate change, the food & water crises, biodiversity collapse, and emerging threats to public health. This book provides an inoculation against the misinformation by cultivating scientific habits of mind—which everyone must do if our species is to survive on this crowded & finite planet. Astronomer & science educator, David Helfand, has taught scientific habits of mind to generations in the classroom, where he continues to wage a provocative battle against sloppy thinking and the encroachment of misinformation. ($59.95, HB)

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Cultural Studies & Criticism In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri ($30, PB)

This is at heart a love story—that of a writer for another language. For Jhumpa Lahiri, her love for Italian began during a trip to Florence after college. Although she studied Italian for many years afterwards, full mastery had always eluded her. So in 2012, seeking full immersion, she decided to uproot herself, her husband and two children, and move to Rome for ‘a trial by fire, a sort of baptism’ into a new world and way of being. Over the course of three years, Lahiri read, spoke, wrote—even in her journal—solely in Italian, slowly beginning to feel she could not only communicate in Italian, but fully express herself, even in fiction.

Drawing, also, on Lahiri’s parent’s own experiences with another culture when they first came to America, she explores the often emotionally fraught links between identity and language in a book about exile, linguistic and otherwise, written with an intensity and clarity not seen since Nabokov. Gleebooks’ special price $26.95

Moranifesto by Caitlin Moran ($35, PB) This is Caitlin’s engaging and amusing rallying call for our times.

Combining the best of her recent columns with lots of new writing unique to this book, Caitlin deals with topics as pressing and diverse as 1980s swearing, benefits, boarding schools, and why the internet is like a drunken toddler. And whilst never afraid to address the big issues of the day, Caitlin also makes a passionate effort to understand our 21st century society and presents us with her ‘Moranifesto’ for making the world a better place.

Quicksand by Henning Mankell ($35, PB)

In January 2014 I was informed that I had cancer. However, Quicksand is not a book about death & destruction, but about what it means to be human. I have undertaken a journey from my childhood to the man I am today, writing about the key events in my life, and about the people who have given me new perspectives. About men and women I have never met, but wish I had. I write about love and jealousy, about courage and fear. And about what it is like to live with a potentially fatal illness. This book is also about why the cave painters 40,000 years ago chose the very darkest places for their fascinating pictures. And about the dreadful troll that we are trying to lock away inside the bedrock of a Swedish mountain for the next 100,000 years. It is a book about how humanity has lived and continues to live, and about how I have lived and continue to live my own life. And, not least, about the great zest for life, which came back when I managed to drag myself out of the quicksand that threatened to suck me down into the abyss.

The Secret Teachers of the Western World

by Gary Lachman ($40, PB)

Running alongside the mainstream of Western intellectual history there is another current, which, in a very real sense, should take pride of place, but which for the last few centuries has occupied a shadowy, inferior position, somewhere underground. The historical roots of our ‘counter tradition,’ as Lachman explores, trace an extraordinary arc of history from ancient Egypt and other primeval cultures through the reawakening of the Western mind during the Renaissance and Enlightenment, through the occult revival of the late nineteenth century that brought names such as Blavatsky and Crowley into common usage, to the psychedelic and thought experiments of the 1960s, to our present era which has experienced the rebirth of a critical, rigorous investigation of the ancient wisdom. With many detours and dead ends, we now seem to be slowly moving into a watershed, Lachman observes—we may be on the brink of a culminating moment of the long esoteric intellectual tradition of the West.

Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction by M. A. Orthofer ($66, PB)

For more than a decade, the Complete Review has been an essential and popular site for readers interested in learning about new books in translation and developments in global literature. Expanding upon the site’s content, this wide-ranging yet user-friendly resource is the perfect guide for English-language readers eager to explore fiction from around the world. Profiling hundreds of titles and authors from 1945 to today, with an emphasis on fiction published in the past two decades, this reference provides a fascinating portal into the styles, trends, and genres of the world’s literatures, from Scandinavian crime thrillers and cuttingedge works in China to Latin American narco-fiction and award-winning French novels.

Dante: The Story of His Life by Marco Santagata

Marco Santagata’s Dante illuminates one of the world’s supreme poets from many angles—writer, philosopher, father, courtier, political partisan. Santagata traces Dante’s attempts to establish himself in Florentine society as a man of both letters and action. Along the way, he raises intriguing possibilities. Did the poet suffer from epilepsy? The condition would partly explain the intensely physical phenomenology of love that Dante constructs in the Vita Nuova. He highlights Dante’s constant need to readjust his political stance—his involvement with the pro-Papacy Guelph faction as well as his network of patrons—in response to unfolding events. Linking these shifts to the changing ethical and political convictions expressed in the Commedia, Santagata reveals the paradoxical achievement of Dante’s masterpiece: a unified, universal poem nonetheless intimately entwined with the day-to-day dealings of its author. ($79, HB)

Anywhere out of the world: The work of Bruce Chatwin by Jonathan Chatwin ($48.95, PB)

Chatwin’s first book In Patagonia ‘redefined travel writing’, whilst his later work The Songlines became one of the literary sensations of the 1980s. Incorporating original & extensive archival research, as well as new interviews with his family & friends, this book provides the definitive critical perspective upon the literary life & work of this enigmatic & influential author. It offers a chronological overview of Chatwin’s literary career, from his first, ultimately aborted work The Nomadic Alternative—here discussed in detail for the first time— through to his final novel Utz. The study uncovers a striking thematic commonality in Chatwin’s oeuvre—work fundamentally preoccupied with the subject of human restlessness. Jonathan Chatwin provides detailed insight into Chatwin’s treatment of the subject in his work, identifying and discussing the biographical and philosophical sources of this defining preoccupation.

Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea by Robert Sussman ($44.95, PB)

Biological races do not exist—and never have. This view is shared by all scientists who study variation in human populations. Yet racial prejudice and intolerance based on the myth of race remain deeply ingrained in Western society. In his powerful examination of a persistent, false, and poisonous idea, Robert Sussman explores how race emerged as a social construct from early biblical justifications to the pseudoscientific studies of today.

What Works: Gender Equality by Design

by Iris Bohnet ($62, HB)

Gender equality is a moral and a business imperative. But unconscious bias holds us back, and de-biasing people’s minds has proven to be difficult and expensive. Diversity training programs have had limited success, and individual effort alone often invites backlash. Behavioural design offers a new solution. By de-biasing organisations instead of individuals, we can make smart changes that have big impacts. Drawing on data collected by companies, universities, and governments in Australia, India, Norway, the United States, Zambia, and other countries, Iris Bohnet hands us the tools we need to move the needle in classrooms and boardrooms, in hiring and promotion, benefiting businesses, governments, and the lives of millions..

The Paul de Man Notebooks ($59.99, HB) This anthology collects texts and papers from the Paul de Man archive, including essays on art, translations, critical fragments, research plans, interviews & reports on the state of comparative literature. These texts offer a fascinating insight into the work of one of the 20th century’s most important literary theorists. The volume engages with Paul de Man’s institutional life, gathering together pedagogical and critical material to investigate his profound influence on the American academy and theory today. It also contains a number of substantial, previously unpublished and untranslated texts by de Man from the span of his writing career.

I Find That Offensive! by Claire Fox ($20, HB) When you hear that now ubiquitous phrase ‘I find that offensive’, you know you’re being told to shut up. While the murder of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists demonstrated that those who offend can face the most brutal form of censorship, there’s a broader threatening climate where we all have to walk on eggshells to avoid saying anything offensive—or else. So, while Islamists & feminists may seem to have little in common, they are both united in demanding retribution in the form of bans, penalties and censorship of those who hurt their feelings. Claire Fox blames three culprits: official multiculturalism’s relativistic conflation of tolerance with positive ‘recognition’; narcissistic identity politics that proclaims the personal is political; and, finally, therapeutic educational interventions such as antibullying campaigns, through which the young are taught that psychological harm is interchangeable with physical violence.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans & Robots

by Professor John Markoff ($49, HB)

John Markoff offers a sweeping history of the complicated & evolving relationship between humans & computers. In recent years, the pace of technological change has accelerated dramatically, posing an ethical quandary. If humans delegate decisions to machines, who will be responsible for the consequences? As Markoff chronicles the history of automation, from the birth of the artificial intelligence & intelligence augmentation communities in the 1950s & 1960s, to the modern-day brain trusts at Google & Apple in Silicon Valley, and on to the expanding robotics economy around Boston, he traces the different ways developers have addressed this fundamental problem & urges them to carefully consider the consequences of their work. We are on the brink of the next stage of the computer revolution, Markoff argues it remains for us to determine whether this new world will be a utopia.

Now in B Format Being There by David Malouf, $22.99 Pursuit: The Uncensored Memoirs of John Calder, $21.99

s d d w n n a o 2 H R

Dr No, the first film of the exploits of the British MI6 agent, James Bond appeared just before the Cuban Missile Crisis in midOctober, 1962. The real threat of nuclear war added a grim topicality to Bond’s on-screen battle against a madman bent on using atomic power to foil the US Government. President John F. Kennedy hosted a private screening of Dr No at the White House, and was quoted as saying, ‘I wish I had had James Bond on my staff.’

I went and saw SPECTRE over the holiday break—the 24th Bond film since the franchise began. Even with its absurdly extended plot it was watchable enough.

007 moves smoothly into late middle age, although Daniel Craig looks a little weary with it all. I suspect this fourth Bond outing will be his last. A more serious criticism is the criminally short screen time (maybe four minutes) for the stunning Monica Bellucci—Be still my Heart!—playing Lucia Sciarra, an assassin’s widow, who has a (very) brief encounter with Bond.

My favourite Bond film remains Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Jonathan Pryce steals the show as Elliot Carver, a megalomaniacal media mogul (based upon guess who?). He plans to provoke war between China and the United Kingdom, in order to fulfil his nefarious plans for global media domination. Also, the first third of the film is set in Hamburg and one special scene has 007 driving past the exact spot where I first met my German wife-to-be!...Call me sentimental.

Gleebooks Secondhand has recently acquired a quartet of four early Bond novels with spectacular matching cover artwork. All are published in either 1962 or 1963.

All are in as new condition. Price $20.00 each.

Stephen Reid

19

Verdun 1916

The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916

by Alistair Horne ($32, PB)

For all the historical and military significance we in Australia and New Zealand place on Gallipoli, it was only on the Western Front that the military power of Germany could be broken and the First World War won. This year will mark the centenary of some of the most important Western Front battles—Verdun, the Somme, Fromelles, Pozières, Thiepval.

The enduring impact of Verdun, World War One’s longest and most murderous battle of attrition, on the consciousness of all who fought on the Western Front was illustrated more than a quarter of a century later during one of the defining battles of the Second World War. On 8 November 1942, Adolf Hitler, former First World War combatant, now Fuehrer and Supreme Military Commander of Nazi Germany, gave a speech in Munich outlining progress in the ongoing battle of Stalingrad—some 1300 kms to the East on the Volga River in the Soviet Union. Hitler declared that the 6th Army had virtually captured the entire city: Only a few small pockets of resistance are left. Some ask: ‘Why not fight onwards?’ Because I don’t want a second Verdun! It is a supreme historical irony that Hitler’s flawed military strategy at Stalingrad would see his army destroyed in a lengthy, ruinous battle similar to the very one he claimed to have avoided.

Verdun was an important garrison city in north-eastern France on the River Meuse. Surrounded by a ring of fortresses and defended by two principal ones: Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux. The German military plan was devised by the ambitious Chief of the General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn. It sought to engage the French in an Ausblutungsstrategie—a mighty battle of attrition—less to defeat the enemy than ‘to bleed the French army white’ in defence of their historic citadel. It was named Operation Gericht—an ambiguous word meaning either Place of Judgement or Punishment.

A nine hour artillery bombardment by 850 heavy guns, unprecedented in warfare—and of such ferocity that French troops were buried alive in their trenches—opened a battle that raged from 21 February to 17 December 1916, along a front of 24 kms (15 miles) and an area of a mere 10 square kms (3.8 square miles). The Germans, employing poison gas shells and their surprise new weapon, flamethrowers, hurled a million men against 500,000 French defenders. Nearly three quarters of the entire French Army would eventually be drawn into the battle.

French resolve during the ten month battle was personified in the command given by General Robert Nivelle: ‘On ne passe pas’—They Shall Not Pass!

Verdun has the unenviable reputation of being the battlefield with the highest density of dead per square metre. Total casualties—dead, wounded and missing—suffered by both combatants would eventually number over 700,000—more than 70,000 per month.

The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 is the second book of Alistair Horne’s trilogy, which includes The Terrible Year: The Paris Commune, 1871 and To Lose a Battle: France 1940. Together they narrate the story of seven decades of military rivalry between France and Germany.

This classic work, continuously in print for over fifty years, is a masterpiece of historical narrative—a profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the battle and the men who fought there. It shows that ‘understanding Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War to the minds of those who waged it.’

Before Verdun Germany still had a reasonable chance of winning the war; in the course of those ten months this chance dwindled away ... Neither the French or German army would be quite the same again. Verdun marked the point at which, among the Allies, the main burden of the war passed from France to Britain... In the aftermath, too, Verdun was to become a sacred national legend, and universally a household word for fortitude, heroism and suffering; but it was also a modern synonym for Pyrrhic VicStephen Reid tory.

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Poetry

Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems

by Dulce Maria Loynaz ($30, PB)

In the first comprehensive selection and translation of Dulce María Loynaz’s poetry, James O’Connor invites us to hear the haunting voice of Cuba’s celebrated poet, Dulce Maria Lynaz. Widely published in Spain during the 1950s, Loynaz’s poetry was almost forgotten in Cuba after the Revolution. International recognition came to her late: at the age of 90 she was living in seclusion in Havana when the Royal Spanish Academy awarded her the 1992 Cervantes Prize, the highest literary accolade in the Spanish language.

Small Town Soundtrack by Brendan Ryan

This collection continues Brendan Ryan’s exploration of place and belonging that resonate in country towns. From the lives of farmers, abattoir workers, and dog walkers to the history of aboriginal dispossession; from a tour of the communities of the Mt Noorat Football League in Victoria’s isolated Western District to moments of wonder on back country roads celebrated with gentle irony. Here is a view of the country that is both contemporary and wry. ($19.95, PB)

Word Migrants by Hazel Smith ($24, PB) Hazel Smith’s new poetry collection engages in a direct way with contemporary political & social issues—civil war & the flight of populations, oppressive regimes & the disappearance of dissidents, the unpredictable effects of climate change— relating these issues to the personal experience of death & dementia, abuse & disability & childlessness. Smith is a new media artist & musician, and the poems employ a variety of techniques drawn from these fields, flourishes of linguistic coloratura, the evocation of virtual realities, cutting & pasting from the internet, remixing, sampling & quotation.

Lemons in the Chicken Wire

by Alison Whittaker ($22.95, PB)

From a remarkable new voice in Indigenous writing comes this highly original collection of poems bristling with stunning imagery and gritty textures. At times sensual, always potent, Lemons in the Chicken Wire delivers a collage of work that reflects rural identity through a rich medley of techniques and forms. It is an audacious, lyrical & linguistically lemon flavoured poetry debut that possesses a rare edginess & seeks to challenge our imagination beyond the ordinary.

Winner 2015 black&write! Indigenous Writing Fellowship.

Unexpected Clearing: Poems by Rose Lucas

‘Rhythm and pattern follow with precision the rich tonality of Lucas’s visual and aural perceptions delivered with just enough tension to allow a line to run free or a word to drop and hang alone where it dances or stops.’– Amanda Joy Cordite. ‘Lucas’s collection shines with a clear intelligence and keen observation of the everyday, landscape, place, art, love and grief. The poems, evocative and moving, also sit so lightly on the page.’ – Lucy Dougan, Philip Mead and Marcella Polain, Mary Gilmore Award Judges 2014. ($25, PB)

Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.—from Digging. Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland. Death of a Naturalist, his first collection, appeared 50 years ago in 1966. With its lyrical and descriptive powers, this collection marked the auspicious debut of one of the century’s finest poets—now reissued in this beautiful new hardback edition. ($30, HB)

Blue Laws: Selected and Uncollected Poems, 1995–2015 by Kevin Young ($54, HB)

From his stunning lyric debut (Most Way Home, 1995) and the amazing double album life of Jean-Michel Basquiat (2001, remixed for Knopf in 2005), through his brokenhearted Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003) and his recent forays into adult grief and the joys of birth in Dear Darkness (2008) and Book of Hours (2014), this collection provides a grand tour of a poet whose personal poems and political poems are equally riveting.

Late in the Day: Poems 2010–2014

by Ursula K. Le Guin ($34, HB)

As Le Guin herself states, science explicates, poetry implicates. Accordingly, this immersive, tender collection implicates us (in the best sense) in a subjectivity of everyday objects and occurrences. Her poems are bookended with two short essays, Deep in Admiration and Some Thoughts on Form, Free Form, Free Verse.

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Literary Rivals: Feuds & Antigonisms in the world of Books Richard Bradford, HB

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The Story of Medicine : From Bloodletting to Biotechnology Mary Dobson, HB

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Nigellissima: Easy Italian-Inspired Recipes, HB

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Secrets of the Knights Templar: The Hidden History of the World’s Most Powerful Order, S. J. Hodge, HB

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A Short History of the 20th Century Geoffrey Blainey, HB

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Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air Richard Holmes, HB

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Hundertwasser: The Art of the Green Path, HB

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Little Failure Gary Shteyngart, HB

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To the Edge of the World: The Story of the Trans-Siberian Express, the World’s Greatest Railroad Christian Wolmar, HB

Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction Kidder & Todd, HB

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Year Zero: A History of 1945 Ian Buruma, HB

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Money: The Unauthorized Biography Felix Martin, HB

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Full of Grace: Encountering Mary in Faith, Art, and Life Judith Dupré, HB

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Outlaw Marriages: The Hidden Histories of 15 Extraordinary Same-Sex Couples Rodger Streitmatter, HB

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The Car: A History of the Automobile Jonathan Glancey, PB

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Out of Time: The Pleasures Visions of Infinity: and Perils of Ageing The Great Mathematical Problems Lynne Segal, HB Ian Stewart, HB

The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon Alexander McCall Smith, HB

The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking Olivia Laing, HB

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The Last Days of Pompeii:Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection, HB

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The Arts

Hieronymus Bosch: Visions of Genius

This beautiful book accompanies the largest exhibition ever held on Bosch’s work, and will feature important new research on his 25 known paintings and 20 drawings. The book, divided into six sections, covers the entirety of the artist’s career. It discusses in detail Bosch’s Pilgrimage of Life, Bosch and the Life of Christ, his role as a draughtsman, his depictions of saints, and The Garden of Earthly Delights, among other topics, and is handsomely illustrated by new photography undertaken by the Bosch Research and Conservation Project Team. ($49.95, PB)

The Outsider & His Indignant Eye: The Art & Philosophy of Passionate Iconoclast George Morant by Michael Richards

Michael Richards explores Outsider Art through the work & philosophy of an extraordinary Australian painter, George Morant, a self-taught artist who began painting while mining opal at Lightning Ridge in outback NSW in the 1960s.

Since then Morant has created 100s of typically big bold bravura compositions & held almost 20 solo exhibitions.

Many of his most audacious & savagely satirical paintings are held in private and corporate collections around the world, and he is represented in the Australian National Gallery with a highly controversial work on the theme of Aboriginal deaths in custody. This book presents a brief outline of the life and work of this enigmatic and reclusive artist, along with reproductions of some of Morant’s most iconic and iconoclastic paintings. ($44.95, HB)

William Yang: Stories of Love and Death

Photographer William Yang has captures the zeitgeist by providing a very personal insight into the evolution of Mardi Gras, the spectre of AIDS, Sydney’s theatrical and social scenes, & changing notions of ‘belonging’ in multicultural Australia. In this book, featuring 100 images from William Yang’s personal archive, Helena Grehan & Edward Scheer explore Yang’s self-portraiture across photography, performance and documentary—considering the ways in which Yang’s constantly evolving art captures the enduring power of family, friendship & connection. ($49.99, PB)

Beethoven for a Later Age: The Journey of a String Quartet by Edward Dusinberre

‘They are not for you but for a later age!’ Ludwig van Beethoven, on the Opus 59 quartets. Beethoven’s 16 string quartets are some of the most extraordinary and challenging pieces of music ever written. Edward Dusinberre, first violinist of the Takacs string quartet since 1993, recounts the exhilarating challenge of tackling these pieces. He takes the reader inside the daily life of a quartet, vividly showing the necessary creative tension between individual & group expression & how four people can enjoy making music together over a long period of time. The key, the author argues, is in balancing continuity with change and experimentation—a theme that lies at the heart of Beethoven’s remarkable compositions. No other composer has posed so many questions about the form & emotional content of a string quartet, and come up with so many different answers. In an accessible style, suitable for novices & chamber music enthusiasts alike, Dusinberre illuminates the variety & inherent contradictions of Beethoven’s quartets, composed against the turbulent backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars & their aftermath, and shows that engaging with this radical music continues to be as invigorating now as it was for its first performers & audiences. ($40, HB)

DVDs With Scott Donovan The Bridge Season 3: $59.95 Region 2

TV’s favourite dysfunctional detective Saga Norén is back in the third, and arguably best, series of The Bridge. A macabre multiple murder in an abandoned warehouse in Stockholm is the first in a series of elaborately staged killings that confound the Swedish and Danish police. As the body count mounts a bewildering number of suspects are drawn into the investigation including a corporate raider with a passion for modern art, a deranged undertaker, a self-help guru with a dark secret, and a teenage couple heavily indebted to a ruthless crime boss. And to further complicate things for our heroine, Saga’s new police partner is a cocaine addict who sees ghosts, and her estranged mother is casting doubts within the police force about her daughter’s mental state.

Full of unexpected twists and turns, The Bridge Series 3 is a breathtaking nine hours of television that will keep you guessing to the very end.

22

The Barber Book

The Phaidon editors explore the tradition of the barber shop throughout the 1940s, 50s & 60s and its recent resurgence in popularity. The book features the most fashionable & retro men’s hairstyles of the past 50 years, including: the Brylcreem Look, Crew Cut, Ivy League, Madison Ave, Mohawk, Undercut, Caesar, Italiano, Afro & Teddyboy, among others. Packed with fascinating anecdotes, information on how to achieve the ‘total look’ and instructions on how to cut each style. Fully illustrated with vintage photographs and quirky line drawings by popular Italian artist Matteo Guarnaccia. ($29.95, HB)

Looking for Bruce Conner by Kevin Hatch

In a career that spanned five decades, most of them spent in San Francisco, Bruce Conner (1933–2008) produced a unique body of work that refused to be contained by medium or style.

Whether making found-footage films, hallucinatory ink-blot graphics, enigmatic collages, or assemblages from castoffs, Conner took up genres as quickly as he abandoned them. In this first book-length study of Conner’s enormously influential but insufficiently understood career, Kevin Hatch explores Conner’s work as well as his position on the geographical, cultural, and critical margins. ($63, PB)

Van Gogh’s Bedrooms (ed) Gloria Groom

Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom, a painting of his room in Arles, is arguably the most famous depiction of a bedroom in the history of art. The artist made three versions of the work, and in this book an international team of art historians, scientists, and conservators address the context in which the bedroom was first conceived, the uniqueness of the subject, and the similarities and differences among the three works both on and below the painted surface. The publication reproduces more than 50 paintings, drawings, and illustrated letters by the artist, along with other objects that evoke his peripatetic life and relentless quest for ‘home’. ($71, PB)

Robert Mapplethorpe—The Photographs

Drawing from the extraordinary collection jointly acquired in 2011 by the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, as well as the Mapplethorpe Archive housed at the Getty Research Institute, the authors were given the unique opportunity to explore new resources and present fresh perspectives. The result is a fascinating introduction to Mapplethorpe’s career and legacy, accompanied by a rich selection of illustrations covering the remarkable range of his photographic work. All of these beautifully integrated elements contribute to what promises to become an essential point of access to Mapplethorpe’s work and practice. ($98, HB)

Hypergraphia: The Writings of David Sylvian 1980–2014 ($120, HB)

English singer-songwriter & musician David Sylvian came to prominence in the late 1970s as the lead vocalist & main songwriter in the group Japan. Spanning a duration of over 30 years, Hypergraphia includes previously unpublished material, as well as conversations with the influential improvisational guitarist & founding member of the group AMM, Keith Rowe & writer & musicologist Marcus Boon. The volume includes aspects of Sylvian’s own photographic work and its design celebrates the longstanding collaboration between Sylvian & acclaimed designer Chris Bigg.

Far From Men: $32.95

Albert Camus’s short story The Guest has been brilliantly adapted for the big screen in Far from Men starring Viggo Mortensen and Reda Kateb. At the outbreak of the French/Algerian war school teacher Daru (Mortensen), a second generation Spanish Algerian, gets saddled with the task of taking an Arab prisoner—Mohamed (Kateb)—to the authorities in Tinguit. Along the way the pair encounter Algerian freedom fighters, French soldiers, Arab tribesmen and the stunning landscapes of the Algerian high country. As their journey becomes more and more perilous the two men must confront political and cultural differences in order to survive. Beautiful cinematography, a hauntingly atmospheric soundtrack by Australians Warren Ellis and Nick Cave, and a tight script brilliantly acted make Far from Men one of the best films of recent years. Highly recommended!

The Honourable Woman: $39.95

Maggie Gyllenhaal and Stephen Rea star in the thrilling BBC spy drama The Honourable Woman. As a young girl Nessa Stein (Gyllenhaal) witnessed the assassination of her father by the PLO. Now in her late thirties, Nessa is at the forefront of the Middle East peace process, devoting the considerable resources of her father’s telecommunications business to improve relations between Israel and Palestine. But when she awards a lucrative contract to a Palestinian businessman who is subsequently murdered Nessa comes under the close scrutiny of Whitehall and MI5. In a web of intrigue extending from London to Washington to Jerusalem and the West Bank nothing is what it seems and nobody—colleagues, family, or friends—can be trusted!

Winton's Paw Prints

Hopefully our reviews and recommendations both in these pages and in the shop are of use in sending you on rewarding reading trails. But this relationship cuts both ways, and the book I’m reading this month was a book we special ordered for a customer that caught my eye. Given the current ‘growing momentum’ for South Australia to build a nuclear waste storage facility for ‘more than 390,000 tonnes of spent rods and nuclear waste currently in temporary storage around the world and looking for a permanent home’, John D’Agata’s 2010 About a Mountain couldn’t be more topical.

After having moved his mother into her new home in Las Vegas, journalist D’Agata started digging into the US government’s plan to store nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain—a desert range near Las Vegas. If you want to find out about the poison chalice that is ‘a commercial-scale nuclear waste storage facility which would bring $5 billion in revenue annually for the first 30 years’, read this book. No amount of revenue is worth the potential disasters represented by the transportation and storage of nuclear waste.

D’Agata’s book really tears the mask off the friendly face of ‘clean nuclear energy’. His tale of bureaucratic pinball when he was bounced from the Yucca Mountain Information Centre (where school students are introduced to cartoon mascot ‘Yucca Mountain Johnny’ and propaganda dressed in rubbish science) to the Department of Energy to the Environmental Protection Agency to the National Academies of Science to the National Research Council to the National Research Council’s Board on Radioactive Waste Management in search of the answer to why 10,000 years had been designated the ‘half life’ for the radioactive waste in Yucca is an eye-opener. Bob Halstead, nuclear waste consultant for the state of Nevada: This is an exercise in planning for a nuclear catastrophe that is fundamentally rhetorical. It’s theatrical security, because the preparations that are being made by the DOE have no real chance of succeeding. They satisfy the public, however, because they’re a symbol of control. 10,000 years sounds like a long time, right? But in terms of actually doing what that mountain needs to do, 10,000 years is useless. This waste is going to be deadly for tens of millions of years. And how do you signpost this deadly mountain so that people in 10,000 years time will understand?

A panel of thinkers—philosophers, sociologists, linguists, semioticians—is convened.

Edvard Munch’s The Scream is arrived at. Halstead continues: In reality, I’ve come to believe that the greatest threat we face at Yucca Mountain isn’t actually posed by the waste’s half-life. The biggest threat we face is the transportation of this shit. 77 thousand tons of waste would take 108,000 individual shipments—1000 pounds at a time, carried in shipping casks that have never been subjected to full-scale safety tests. That’s 3000 yearly truckloads over 40 years ‘converging with the traffic of Las Vegas at the intersection of Interstates 15 and 80 in an area that is know for exchanges so confusing that commuters simply call it the Las Vegas ‘spaghetti bowl.’ You get the gist. Las Vegas covered in a radioactive cloud. Or South Australia.

There’s a companion book—The Lifespan of a Fact—D’Agata & his fact-checker, Jim Fingal, wrestle over ‘truth’ & ‘accuracy’ in literary nonfiction. It’s next on the reading list. Meanwhile I’m going to be mailing The Scream to ex-SA governor Kevin Scarce in the hope he’ll rethink the ‘economic benefits’ of nuclear waste storage. Winton

what we're reading

John: During the hectic weeks before Christmas I picked up Clive James’ latest collection of essays, Latest Readings. I have enjoyed his writing for years and this collection of essays on the books he has been (re) reading is exceptional. Clive shares his joy of reading and rediscovering books read in his youth and others more contemporary.

His dozen pages on Anthony Powell inspired me to read A Dance to the Music of Time which is one of those multi-volume works I have been going to read for 25 years. Later in the year I must return to read the later Patrick O’Brien Jack Aubrey novels and then try some Olivia Manning. Clive’s enthusiasm is contagious.

Andrew: A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin—I have just discovered the incredible writing of Lucia Berlin via this astonishing collection of short stories selected from a career of sporadic but brilliant writing spanning the 1960s to the 1980s. Berlin lived a restless, alcoholic life, moving around the USA (with stints in Chile and Mexico too). She worked a varied set of jobs—cleaning woman, ER nurse, school teacher, switchboard operator, supporting herself and her four sons. The stories are heavily autobiographical, often short vignettes—set one moment in laundromat, the next in a detox unit, or an abortion clinic. One moment we are in the company of black maids on a bus being ferried to a country club; the next a young woman in an emergency ward delicately undresses a jockey in a masterpiece of erotic writing. Confrontingly well-observed, with dialogue that is cinema-alive; these stories are vintage polaroids struck with lightning.

Jack: Grief is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter—The thing with feathers is a crow who ‘snuck in easy through the wall and up the attic bedroom to see those cotton boys silently sleeping, lint, flack, gack-pack-nack, the whole place was heavy mourning, every surface was dead Mum, every crayon, tractor, coat, welly, covered in a film of grief.’ Narrated by two boys, a father and, in flight from the poetry of Ted Hughes, a crow who ‘won’t leave until you don’t need me anymore.’ Funny. Daring. Imaginative. Moving—‘we pissed on the seat, we never shut drawers. We did those things to miss her, to keep wanting her.’ A sublime debut.

Viki: I’ve been browsing Gwen Harwood: Idle Talk—Letters 1960–1964. Perfect for a late-night injection of epistolary mirth, erudition, and glorious and potentially libellous internecine feuding amongst Australian literati of the early 60s.

They inspire me to want to take up letter writing again—email & text just aren’t the same. Harwood’s correspondence to the collection’s editor, Alison Hoddinot, and her husband Bill is sharp and witty (her collage postcards, reproduced in the book, are sometimes laugh out loud funny). But don’t get me wrong, while the letters are littered with digs and jabs at many an Australian literary lion, and storm-in-a-teacup controversy ‘flooh flah’ (endlessly entertaining as reported by Harwood), plus the day-to-day of family life, Harwood also spends a lot of loving time on language and poetry—creating a fascinating window into the poet’s craft.

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Bestsellers—Non-Fiction 1. The Shock of Recognition: The Books & Music That

Have Inspired Me

Barry Jones

2. Credlin & Co: How the Abbott Government

Destroyed Itself

Aaron Patrick

3. Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most

Under-Rated Organ

4. A Treasury of Cartoons

Giulia Enders First Dog on the Moon

5. The Oldest Foods on Earth: A History of Australian

Native Foods With Recipes

John Newton

6. The Road to Little Dribbling

Bill Bryson

7. Reckoning: A Memoir

Magda Szubanski

8. Island Home: A Landscape Memoir

Tim Winton

9. Flesh Wounds: For Anyone Whose Family Was Not

What They Ordered

Richard Glover

10. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

Mary Beard

Bestsellers—Fiction 1. My Brilliant Friend: 1 Neapolitan Novels

2. The Noise Of Time 3. A Little Life 4. All the Light We Cannot See 5. Carol

Elena Ferrante Julian Barnes Hanya Yanagihara Anthony Doerr Patricia Highsmith

6. A Brief History of Seven Killings

Marlon James

7. Napoleon’s Roads

David Brooks

8. The Secret Chord 9. The World Without Us 10. Numero Zero

Geraldine Brooks Mireille Juchau Umberto Eco

and another thing.....

I hope you’ve taken note of the front cover—Brenda the Civil Disobedience Penguin, First Dog On the Moon, the ABC Interpretive Dance Bandicoot (posable), Ian The Climate Change Denialist Potato and Fiona the Unemployed Bettong are here, plush and loveable, and all with accompanying ‘stick it to the person’ badges. Get the set, keep First Dog afloat. Meanwhile sales of Elena Ferrante go from strength to strength—I have to admit to doctoring the best sellers this month, otherwise all four of the Neapolitan novels would have been in the top ten, and I like to give every book a moment in the sun. But given the best seller of the four best-selling Ferrantes was the first in the series, I reckon she’ll be top of the heap for a while as it seems from the conversations I’ve had with her readers—once you start, there’s no stopping until you get to number 4. I’m reading City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp by Ben Rawlence at the moment. Dadaab, the eponymous refugee camp, was established in Kenya in 1992 to hold 90,000 refugees fleeing Somalia’s civil war—25 years on it is nearly half a million strong—‘a teeming ramshackle metropolis with cinemas, football leagues, hotels & hospitals’. Rawlence has spent many years there—reporting on human rights, and researching the lives of the inhabitants of the camp. In the prologue he is briefing the National Security Council—trying to get them to understand that a high proportion of the inhabitants are pro-American. That as desperate as they may be they have no desire to join militant organisations like al-Shabaab, the al-qaida-linked group who has control of most of Somalia—in fact most had fled to the camp to escape extremists. This unfortunately doesn’t fit with the official narrative of poverty leading to radicalisation, and Rawlence’s lobbying doesn’t go well. Like Katherine Boo in Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Rawlence has a real care for his subjects. I’d recommend this book as a second opinion on Australia’s continued off shore processing, and do hope someone in a position to change government policy also reads it. Viki

For more March 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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