Gleaner September 2019

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Vol. 26 No. 8 September 2019

Indigenous Literacy Day Wednesday September 4th Get involved ... www.indigenousliteracyfoundation.org.au

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Get Involved!

Well, as our cover shows September is our annual chance to highlight the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, as we celebrate Indigenous Literacy Day, on Wednesday September 4th. Of course, as our readers would know, Gleebooks has been a passionate advocate of ILF for well over a decade, and we’ve delighted in the growth and expansion of the essential services the ILF supports. For us it’s a year-round commitment, and we’d encourage you to respond at any stage with support, financial or otherwise, at any stage. But, as the ILF website says (have a look ilf.org.au—it’s terrific to get an overview of the scope and range of projects in train): ‘Wednesday 4 September is a national celebration of Indigenous culture, stories, language, and literacy. Through activities on the day, we focus our attention on the disadvantages experienced in remote communities, and encourage the rest of Australia to raise funds and advocate for more equal access to literacy resources for remote communities.’

Schools, businesses, community groups and individuals are all encouraged to to take part in activities to raise much-needed funds. Join in!

Meanwhile, I’ve just done my annual trip to Melbourne to look at the offerings for Christmas and holiday reading, and I’m happy to report that you can expect a rich and varied menu in fiction, non-fiction, and kids’ books this year. To whet the appetite, here’s a sample of what I’m hoping to read: Margaret Atwood’s ‘sequel’ to The Handmaid’s Tale—The Testaments (Sept); Author of Museum of Modern Love, Heather Rose returns with a political thriller, Bruny (Oct); Christos Tsiolkas turns to historical fiction with Damascus—based around the gospels and letters of St Paul, focusing on characters one and two generations on from the death of Christ (Nov); Ann Patchett The Dutch House—out this month and reviewed glowingly by Louise and Morgan—by some accounts her best novel yet; Helen Ennis has written a biography of Australian photographer, Olive Cotton (Nov); in Gotta Get Theroux This Louis Theroux offers memoir of his ‘Life and Strange Times in Television ‘(Oct); in the style of his A Short History of Nearly Everything Bill Bryson turns his highly readable attentions inward to explore the human body in The Body (Oct): Geoffrey Robertson takes his cue from Cicero, the great Roman barrister, to argue that justice requires the return not only of the ‘Elgin’ Marbles to Greece, but of many looted antiquities on display in the museums of Britain, Europe and America in Who Owns History? (Nov); Julian Barnes tours Belle Epoque Paris, via the life story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi in The Man in the Red Coat (Nov); John Le Carré is back chronicling the horrors of our age with Agent Running in the Field (Oct); Archie Roach—stolen child, seeker, teenage alcoholic, lover, father, musical and lyrical genius, and leader gives us his life story in Tell Me Why (Nov); Arkady Renko returns to do battle with harsh and forbidding landscape of Siberia in Martin Cruz Smith’s The Siberian Dilemma (Nov); Helen Garner offers up accounts of her everyday in Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume One 1978–1986 (Nov) and much, much more.

You’ll see them all in the Gleaner and the Summer Reading Guide of course, but in the meantime, here are two more from the list which I have managed to get my hands on on: Garry Disher’s Peace (Nov) is the second of many (I hope) in a crime fiction series set around and beyond the Flinders Ranges. In my opinion, Disher mastered the now red-hot (viz Jane Harper and Chris Hammer) rural noir genre, and he has created, in Paul Hirschhausen a credible and compelling cop. There’s many a twist and plot turn, but Disher’s feel for atmosphere, and capacity to make real characters in real settings is first-rate. A terrific continuation to Bitter Wash Road.

It’s been four years since the publication of Charlotte Wood’s ground-breaking The Natural Way of Things. The Weekend (Nov) is a brilliant, provocative, original, disquieting unsettling, follow-up.

Four older women have been close friends for decades. Three of them converge on the beach house of the fourth, Sylvie, on the Christmas just after her death, to fulfil her wish that they clean out her house. It’s a sad, tender, funny, uncomfortable scenario, and Wood is asking serious and challenging questions about the nature of relationships, and about how honest people might be about others and themselves, once the apparent bedrock of shared friendship is rocked. David

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Australian Literature The Rich Man’s House by Andrew McGahan ($33, PB)

In the freezing Antarctic waters south of Tasmania, a mountain was discovered in 1642 by the seafaring explorer Gerrit Jansz. Not just any mountain but one that Jansz estimated was an unbelievable height of 25,000 metres. In 2016, at the foot of this unearthly mountain, a controversial & ambitious ‘dream home’, the Observatory, is painstakingly constructed by an eccentric billionaire—the only man to have ever reached the summit. Rita Gausse, estranged daughter of the architect who designed the Observatory is surprised, upon her father’s death, to be invited to the isolated mansion to meet the famously reclusive owner, Walter Richman. But from the beginning, something doesn’t feel right. Why is Richman so insistent that she come? What does he expect of her? When cataclysmic circumstances intervene to trap Rita & a handful of other guests in the Observatory, cut off from the outside world, she slowly begins to learn the unsettling—and ultimately horrifying—answers. This is Andrew McGahan’s 11th & final novel.

The Unforgiving City by Maggie Joel ($30, PB)

Colonial Sydney in the final weeks of the 19th century: a city striving for union & nationhood but dogged by divisions so deep they threaten to derail, not just the Federation, but the colony itself. There are chasms opening too when a clandestine note reaches the wrong hands in the well-to-do household of aspiring politician Alasdair Dunlevy & his wife Eleanor. Below stairs, their maid Alice faces a desperate situation with her wayward sister. Each alone in their torment, Eleanor, Alice & Alasdair must each find some solution, but at what cost to themselves & those they love? This is the story of 3 people, their passions & ambitions & the far-flung ripples their choices will cause.

The Breeding Season by Amanda Niehaus ($30, PB)

The rains come to Brisbane just as Elise & Dan descend into grief.

Elise, a scientist, believes that isolation & punishing fieldwork will heal her pain. Her husband Dan, a writer, questions the truths of his life, and looks to art for answers. Worlds apart, Elise & Dan must find a way to forgive themselves & each other before it’s too late. An astounding debut novel that forensically & poetically explores the intersections of art and science, sex and death, and the heartbreaking complexity of love.

Wolfe Island by Lucy Treloar ($30, PB)

Kitty Hawke, the last inhabitant of a dying island sinking into the windlashed Chesapeake Bay, has resigned herself to annihilation—until one night her granddaughter blows ashore in the midst of a storm, desperate, begging for sanctuary. For years, Kitty has kept herself to herself—with only the company of her wolfdog, Girl—unconcerned by the world outside, or perhaps avoiding its worst excesses. But blood cannot be turned away in times like these. And when trouble comes following her granddaughter, no one is more surprised than Kitty to find she will fight to save her as fiercely as her name suggests.

The Collaborator by Diane Armstrong ($33, PB)

It is 1944 in Budapest & the Germans have invaded. Jewish journalist Miklos Nagy risks his life & confronts the dreaded Adolf Eichmann in an attempt save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the death camps.

But no one could have foreseen the consequences. It is 2005 in Sydney, and Annika Barnett sets out on a journey that takes her to Budapest & Tel Aviv to discover the truth about the mysterious man who rescued her grandmother in 1944. By the time her odyssey is over, history has been turned on its head, past & present collide, and the secret that has poisoned the lives of three generations is finally revealed in a shocking climax that holds the key to their redemption..

Hollow Earth by John Kinsella ($30, PB)

Fascinated by caves & digging holes since childhood, Manfred discovers a path through to another realm via a Neolithic copper mine at Mount Gabriel in Schull, Ireland. The world of Hollow Earth, while no Utopia, is a sophisticated civilisation. Its genderless inhabitants are respectful of their environment, religious & cultural differences are accommodated without engendering hate or suspicion, and grain not missile silos are built. Yet Ari & Zest accompany Manfred back to the surface world.

‘Come with me and see my world.’ So begins an extraordinary adventure in which the 3 wander the Earth like Virgil’s Aeneas, Ari & Zest seeking re-entry to their own world. The Hollow Earthers are shocked at the cruelty & lies of the surface world, the dieback spreading through the forests. Yet they are seduced by the world’s temptations.

Here Until August by Josephine Rowe ($30, PB)

An agoraphobic French emigré watches disturbing terrorist footage as she minds a dog named Chavez. A young couple weather the interiority of a Montreal winter, more attuned to the illicit goings-on of their neighbours than to their own hazy, unfolding futures. A Melbourne writer of real-estate listings reflects on the stifling power of shared history as she wonders what life might be like over the fence. From the Catskill Mountains to NSW, the abandoned island outports of Newfoundland to the sprawl of an Australian metropolis, Josephine Rowe shows us how the places we inhabit shape us in ways both remote & intimate.

Southerly 78–3, Violence ($26.95, PB)

In literary terms, violence provides a readymade drama, an impetus for action & reaction, shock, emotion, transformation—from Milton’s War in Heaven to Modernist aesthetics of shock to the contemporary thriller. Literature is also a site where violent experience is variously recorded, masked, performed & objectified. The work in this issue of Southerly is situated at the intersections where intense personal experience meets the force of pervasive operations including poverty, colonialism, gendered & racialised violence from the colonial period to the present. This issue of Southerly includes work that engages with violence across that spectrum in relation to both content and form.

Wild by Nathan Besser ($33, PB)

Jonathan Wild knows power like no one else in London. He arrived as a wide-eyed young man in 1703, dazzled by a metropolis brimming with trade, immigration & crime. Wild has stopped at nothing to secure his place in this great & monstrous London & within a few years, he became the city’s Thief-Taker General, one of the most feared & wealthy officials in town, charged with the capture & arrest of felons for reward—his power is matched only by the number of enemies he’s made along the way. Daniel Defoe is in trouble.

Following a series of failed business ventures, the renowned pamphleteer, fiction writer & political operative is dead broke. With his creditors at his heels, and facing debtors’ prison, Defoe is too crippled with anxiety to write. That is, until he visits Newgate Prison with the intention of chronicling the stories of its inmates, & meets a young man with a deep hatred for Jonathan Wild & a story to tell.

Meanjin Vol 78 No 3 ($25, PB)

In the lead essay UNEARTHED—Last Days of The Anthropocene, James Bradley writes compellingly on the urgent crisis of climate change. ‘There is a conversation I do not know how to have, a conversation about what happens if we are headed for disaster. It is not a theoretical question for me. I have two daughters.’ Michael Mohammed Ahmad writes on how his thinking about literature, politics & race was shaped in Reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X as An Arab Australian. Khalid Warsame reflects on life & writing while making a complete reading of the works of James Baldwin. Essays, short fiction & poems from Glyn Davis, Karen Wyld, Fatima Measham, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Alex Cothren, Lal Perera, Jill Jones, John Kinsella, Gavin Yuan Gao, Ella Jeffrey, Lucas Smith and Phillip Neilsen.

Lucky Ticket by Joey Bui ($30, PB)

In the comic-tragic eponymous story, Lucky Ticket, the narrator, a genial, disabled old man, whose spirit is far from crushed, sells lottery tickets on a street corner in bustling Saigon. In Mekong Love, 2 young people in a restrictive society try to find a way to consummate their relationship. In Abu Dhabi Gently a migrant worker leaves Vietnam to earn money in the UAE in order to be able to marry his fiancé. White Washed depicts a strained friendship between two students in Melbourne, the Vietnamese narrator & a white girl. What does it mean to be Asian? What does it mean to be white? And what makes up identity? A highly original collection of stories by a talented young writer.

The Palace of Angels by Mohammed M. Morsi

Three young men, fired with idealism for Palestine’s second Intifada and fuelled by hashish, ventured on a clandestine transaction that left just one of them standing. Amidst the bombardment of Gaza in 2014, Farida & Fathi are caught in the clash of religious ideologies & the struggle to wrest or retain power. In their first pre-dawn encounter at a checkpoint queue, Adnan and Linah, on opposite sides of authority, had their minds convulsed and their eyes bloodied as a delirious young man was gunned down in the yellow-lit darkness of the night. These are stories of fighting for freedom by fighting with our defined selves. ‘... written with the urgency of breaking news & the delicacy of poetry.’—Geraldine Brooks. ($32.95, PB)

On D’Hill August and September can be rather drear months in the book trade as the publishers hold back the big guns for October and November. So we’re happy to have out in September, The Dutch House by Ann Patchett. Like her marvellous novel, Commonwealth, this is a family drama, tracing the lives of one Philadelphian family over many years. Narrated by the son Danny, he tells of his close relationship with his beloved sister Maeve and how they’ve made an obsession out of their disappointment when their step-mother inherits the enormous house (the Dutch House) they thought would be theirs. Their mother had left when they were children, appalled by her husbands’ wealth and the ostentation of the house she goes away, we learn later, to work with charity all her life.

Patchett is more and more being compared to Ann Tyler, because of her incisive depiction of ordinary Americans (albeit this family is well off), their connections and lost connections, their fears and sorrows. All the characters, except the step-mother and perhaps her daughters, are likeable people, doing the best they can with the cards dealt them. An extremely satisfying read from an author we know we can depend on for a well-written and heartfelt story.

Released this August is On Drugs by UWS academic Chris Fleming.

Chris has been a customer of gleebooks since he was an undergraduate at Sydney University and for the last few years lived in Dulwich Hill, so I saw him often. On Drugs, is—I have to use the word—mind-blowing. Brilliant in its analysis, lyrical in its prose and intellectually rigorous (he can’t help himself!), this is a book about addiction, mental health and the desire so strong in Fleming to reinvent himself. ‘I loved the idea that one could simply swallow something and be transformed as a result; the notion transfixed me.’ Fleming’s writing is superb and to use another well-worn phrase, this book is searingly honest and very powerful for it. There’s no sentimentality, no self-pity and no lecturing. A memoir not to be missed.

I’ve been banging on about children’s writers at Dulwich Hill Fair Day on Sunday September 15. The program can be found on the Inner West Council website, but I’ll dash it off here in brief. 10.30am Ursula Dubosarski (Ask Hercules Quick), 11.30am Josh Pyke (yes, the singer with a children’s book—Lights Out, Leonard), 12.30pm Lisa Siberry (The Brilliant Ideas of Lily Green), 2pm Zoe and Georgia Norton-Lodge (Elizabella books), 3pm Mark Mordue and Addison Road community centre (The Hollow Tree). See you there or be square! Morgan

Campfire Satellites: An Inland Anthology

Night air perfumed with fried chicken & sweat Charred mulga-root Tobacco & the faintest trace of water rising. From deep beneath our feet Songlines, highways, coffins, campfire satellites. In this new collection, four inland writers, Maureen O’Keefe, Gretel Bull, Linda Wells & Emma Trenorden tell stories made by country & about people made by place. ‘an intimate, irresistible conversation. These are strong voices, charged in various ways by the particular energy of central Australia.’—Jennifer Mills. ($15, PB)

Going Under by Sonia Henry ($30, PB)

Dr Katarina ‘Kitty’ Holliday thought once she finished medical school and found gainful employment at one of Sydney’s best teaching hospitals that her dream was just beginning. The hard years, she thought, were finally over. But Kitty is in for a rude shock. Between trying to survive on the ward, in the operating theatre and in the emergency department without killing any of her patients or going under herself, Kitty finds herself facing situations that rock her very understanding of the vocation to which she intends to devote her life. ‘From the first grim failed attempt to cannulate a vein, I knew Going Under was the real deal.’ Nick Earls

SLEEP by Catherine Cole ($25, PB)

In a small café in London teenager, Ruth, and elderly artist, Harry, recognise something profound in each other. They strike up a conversation that leads to regular meetings & takes them on a journey through their memories of traumatic times. Harry has much to tell about his childhood beside the Canal St Martin in Paris. Ruth has collected stories about her mother’s childhood in the Yorkshire Dales & London. How much has the stain of tragedy charged these memories with the pain of loss and what use can be made of the pain? Looking back on her special years with Harry, Ruth sees how shared memories—happy or sad—can reshape the ways in which we value the lives of others while fully living our own. Taking Harry back to Paris draws on a special relationship that will shape her own place in the world.

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International Literature

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett ($30, PB)

Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish mansion.

Though his father is distant & his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve—Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her wit, her brilliance. Life is coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house’s former owners in the frames of their oil paintings. Then one day their father brings Andrea home. Her arrival to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny & Maeve’s lives. The siblings are drawn back time & again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own exile is that of their mother’s—an absence more powerful than any presence they have known.

The Truants by Kate Weinberg

About a Girl Rebekah Robertson Part memoir and part inspirational message of hope for those navigating a similar path, About a Girl is Rebekah Robertson’s extraordinary personal story of raising her transgender child.

Out 3 September

The Man Who Saw Everything Deborah Levy Electrifying and audacious, an unmissable new novel about what we see and what we fail to see, from the twice-Man Booker-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home.

Out 3 September

($30, PB) Jess Walker, middle child of a middle class family, has perfected the art of vanishing in plain sight. But when she arrives at a concrete university campus under flat, grey, East Anglian skies, her world flares with colour. Drawn into a tightly-knit group of rule breakers led by their maverick teacher, Lorna Clay Jess begins to experiment with a new version of herself. But the dynamic between the friends begins to darken as they share secrets, lovers & finally a tragedy. Soon Jess is thrown up against the question she fears most—what is the true cost of an extraordinary life? ‘Combines the best elements of a crime thriller, a campus novel, a love story and a psychological study’ Alain de Botton.

Lampedusa by Steven Price ($30, PB)

Set in a sun-drenched Sicily, among the decadent Italian aristocracy of the late 1950s, Steven Price’s Lampedusa explores the final years of Giuseppe Tomasi, last prince of Lampedusa, as he struggles to complete his only novel, The Leopard. In 1955, Tomasi was diagnosed with advanced emphysema; shortly after, he began work on a novel that would not be published in his lifetime, but when The Leopard did appear it won Italy’s Strega Prize, and became the greatest Italian novel of the century. Sticking closely to the facts of Lampedusa’s life, but moving deep into the mind of the author, Price inhabits the complicated interior of a man facing down the end of his life, struggling to make something of lasting worth, while there is still time.

The Grammarians by Cathleen Schine ($35, HB)

We are the Weather Jonathan Safran Foer From the bestselling author of Eating Animals, a brilliantly fresh and accessible take on climate change – and what we can do about it.

Out 17 September

Talking to Strangers Malcolm Gladwell From international bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell, this is a powerful and provocative exploration of what our interactions with strangers tell us about who we are.

Out 17 September

‘The Grammarians’ are Laurel & Daphne Wolfe, identical, inseparable redheaded twins who share an obsession with words. They speak a secret ‘twin’ tongue of their own as toddlers; as adults making their way in 1980s Manhattan, their verbal infatuation continues, but this love, which has always bound them together, begins instead to push them apart. Daphne, copy editor & grammar columnist, devotes herself to preserving the dignity & elegance of Standard English. Laurel, who gives up teaching kindergarten to write poetry, is drawn, instead, to the polymorphous, chameleon nature of the written & spoken word. Their fraying twinship finally shreds completely when the sisters go to war, absurdly but passionately, over custody of their most prized family heirloom: Merriam Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition.

A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier ($33, PB)

1932, the losses of WW1 are still keenly felt. Violet Speedwell, mourning for both her fiancé & her brother & regarded by society as a ‘surplus woman’ unlikely to marry, resolves to escape her suffocating mother & strike out alone. This new life in Winchester might be one of draughty boarding-houses & sidelong glances at her naked ring finger, but it is also a life gleaming with independence & opportunity. She falls in with the ‘broderers’, a disparate group of women charged with embroidering kneelers for the Cathedral, and is soon entwined in their lives & their secrets. As the almost unthinkable threat of a second Great War appears on the horizon Violet collects a few secrets of her own.

The Peppermint Tea Chronicles

by Alexander McCall Smith ($35, HB)

Quichotte Salman Rushdie The epic new novel from the Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie – a playful inversion of Don Quixote set in contemporary America.

Out 3 September

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The Secrets We Kept Lara Prescott A hotly-anticipated, dazzling debut novel about two women in the CIA’s typing pool and the fate of Boris Pasternak’s banned masterpiece Doctor Zhivago.

Out 3 September

Now in paperback Evening in Paradise: More Stories

by Lucia Berlin, $20

It is summer in Scotland Street & for the habitués of Edinburgh’s favourite street some extraordinary adventures lie in waiting. The impossibly vain Bruce Anderson—he of the clove-scented hair gel—may finally be settling down, picking the lucky winner from the hordes of his admirers. The Duke of Johannesburg is keen to take his flight of fancy, a microlite seaplane, from the drawing board to the skies. Big Lou discover that her young foster son has a surprising gift for dance, and with Irene now away to pursue her research in Aberdeen, hubbie, Stuart rekindles an old friendship over peppermint tea whilst Bertie & his friend Ranald Braveheart Macpherson get more they bargained for from their trip to the circus.

Animal Farm by George Orwell (graphic novel) Illustrated by Odyr ($40, HB)

When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another.

Illustrated by Brazilian artist Odyr.

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood ($43, HB) When the van door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead. At last the wait is over. Margaret Atwood’s sequel picks up 15 years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead. ‘Dear Readers—Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.’ Margaret Atwood

Gleebooks’ special price $37.99 Ithaca Forever: Penelope Speaks, A Novel

by Luigi Malerba ($48, HB)

After 20 years, Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, but instead of receiving the homecoming he had hoped for finds himself caught in an intense battle of wills with his faithful & long-suffering wife Penelope.

When Penelope recognizes him under the guise of a beggar, she becomes furious with him for not trusting her enough to include her in his plans for ridding the palace of the Suitors. As a result, she plays her own game of fictions to make him suffer for this lack of faith, inspiring jealousy, self-doubt, and misgivings in her husband, the legendary Homeric hero. Shifting between deeply personal & powerful perspectives of both wife & husband as they struggle for respect & supremacy within a marriage that has been on hold for 20 years, this retelling of the Odyssey sees Penelope rise as a major force with whom to be reckoned.

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy

In 1989, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is fine; he gets up & goes to see his girlfriend, Jennifer. They have sex & then break up. He leaves for the GDR, where he will have more sex (with several members of the same family), harvest mushrooms in the rain, bury his dead father in a matchbox, and get on the wrong side of the Stasi. In 2016, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is not fine at all; he is rushed to hospital & spends the following days in & out of consciousness, in & out of history. Jennifer is sitting by his bedside. His very-much-not-dead father is sitting by his bedside. Someone important is missing. ($33, PB)

Shelf Life by Livia Franchini ($33, PB)

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hat controls our sex lives?

Our brains. Yet there is

surprisingly little research into the ways our brains influence our sex drive. Extraordinary insights into how the brain works can be gained when something goes wrong through brain injury or disease. In Sex in the Brain, clinical neuropsychologist Dr Amee Baird takes readers on an entertaining and informative tour of the sexiest bits of the human brain. Drawing from

Ruth is 30 years old. She works as a nurse in a care home and her fiancée has just broken up with her. The only thing she has left of him is their shopping list for the upcoming week. And so she uses that list to tell her story. Starting with six eggs, and working through spaghetti & strawberries, and apples & tea bags, Ruth discovers that her identity has been crafted from the people she serves; her patients, her friends, and, most of all, her partner of ten years. Without him, she needs to find out—with conditioner & single cream & a lot of sugar—who she is when she stands alone.

true stories, this revealing and

Mario Cardoso’s meteoric rise to fame begins in the early 60s, when the promise of sex & revolution permeates the Rio air. But as he conquers the stage, arthouse cinema & primetime TV, the fever & the decadence of stardom take their toll, and middle-aged Mario finds himself with an ebbing reputation, hairline & bank account. Enter a royal comeback in King Lear. His turn as Shakespeare’s mad monarch goes well until he’s overtaken by a fit of laughter that gets more demented with each performance. Forced to cancel the show, he’s confronted with his mother’s unstaged madness—she’s now convinced that Mario is in fact her long-departed husband. Broke & desperate, Mario signs on for an evangelical network production: Sodoma. Yet, as low as he’s fallen, Mario’s final set is one he never imagined.

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Glory and its Litany of Horrors

by Fernanda Torres ($27, PB)

Bivouac: A Novel by Kwame Dawes ($28, PB)

Was Ferron Morgan’s father’s death the result of medical negligence or a political assassination? Ferron has lived in awe of his father’s radical political endeavours but knows that with the resurgence of the political right in the Caribbean in the 1980s, his father had lost faith, and was ‘already dead to everything that had meaning for him.’ Ferron’s response to the death is complicated by guilt, particularly over his recent failure to protect his fiancée, Dolores, from a brutal rape. This is a sharply focused portrayal of Jamaica at a tipping point in its recent past, in which the private grief and trauma condenses a whole society’s scarcely understood sense of temporariness and dislocation.

sometimes heartbreaking book unfolds a better understanding of the links between brain function and our sexual selves.

arragirls profiles how

contemporary art helped

transform the lives and memories of former residents of Parramatta Girls Home in Western Sydney, and a long-neglected site located on the lands of the Burramattagal people of the Darug nation.

Focusing on the art and activism of Parragirls themselves, this ground-breaking book reveals how art can change places and perceptions, using images and creative writing to reimagine the difficult spaces and memories of a former child welfare institution.

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

The Lost Country by William Gay ($30, PB)

Travel back to the south of the 1950s—a landscape populated with a colourful cast of scoundrels, accidental heroes, and ne’er-do-wells—in William Gay’s picaresque The Lost Country . Gay’s book follows four people on the road: a young sailor hitchhiking to Tennessee from the West Coast, a one-armed con-man, a kid dodging the law, and an enigmatic young woman who has fled her sordid and abusive home life. Everybody’s looking for something—redemption, revenge, a moment of grace—and their separate paths will eventually intersect in the town of Ackerman’s Field, where these four disparate story lines will be inextricably drawn together. Another powerfully unsettling novel by the master of the Southern gothic.

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THE WILDER AISLES

It has been a while since I read a Fred Vargus and I’d forgotten how good they are. A colleague gave me a copy of the latest and I was delighted to find that Vargus has not lost her touch with her latest—This Poison will Remain. I had forgotten how much I loved Commissaire Jean-Baptiste Adamsburg, head of the Paris Serious Crimes Squad. Another of my favourite fictional policemen, who love their food and wine, and rely on instinct and feelings to solve crime. Much against his will Adamsburg is called back to Paris’ 13th arrondissement from a holiday in Iceland to clear up the attempted murder of a woman by her husband—a liar and a cheat, and altogether highly disgusting person he takes great delight in charging. On returning to the squad room, he finds a really obnoxious smell belonging to a large moray eel, that one of his idiosyncratic colleagues Voisenet has tucked under his desk. Adamsburg, who rarely misses anything, notices that Voisenet is cagey about what’s on his computer, and he asks resident computer whiz, Froissy, to investigate—quietly. What she finds is the story of three elderly people dying from a spider bite—the recluse, Loxosceles Reclusa, a shy, timid brown spider, that rarely bites humans. When more people die from the spider’s bite, Adamsburg joins Voisenet in thinking something odd is afoot. What follows is a weird and wonderful journey into the world of spiders, the medieval female ‘recluse’, rape, murder, terrible crimes against women and historic child abuse. This incredible journey leads the squad up many a false inlet, like Magellan trying to find his way through to the Pacific Ocean. Magellan never stopped trying, so Adamsburg tells his officers that they must not stop either. This reference to Magellan is charmingly explained in the story. False trails abound, and Adamsberg is hampered by an unexpected betrayal coming from his second-in-command, Danglard’s, and to his great shame, is duped by the one person he never suspected. This is a great read, full of great characters, including Mathias, an archeologist from a previous series called The Three Evangelists, which I also highly recommend.

Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is the story of Kya Clark, known locally as the Marsh Girl—because she lives in the marsh area of Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. When we first meet her Kya is living with her family, in a shack, sheltered by oak forests, that also shelter the closest lagoon. One morning Kya sees her mother walking down the road, wearing her best shoes and carrying a blue case. One by one everyone leaves until Kya is left with her father, a drunk and gambler, who disappears for days on end, and eventually doesn’t returrn. At the tender age of 7 she has to learn to fend for herself.

She is made to attend the local school by the truant officer, where she is teased and tormented by the other children, and so escapes back to the marsh. At 15 she is befriended by local boy Tate—her first real contact with the world beyond the marsh, apart from her visits to the store, and she tentatively opens up. However, when a popular local man, Chase Andrews, is found dead, the ‘Marsh Girl’ is immediately a suspect and Kya is charged with murder. The future looks bleak, but things have a way of changing and when all looks dark, sometimes the light shines again.

Recently I recommended a book called The Day of the Accident by Nuala Ellwood—a thriller about a woman who wakes from a coma to find her world completely unrecognisable. I really enjoyed this book, and chose the book I’m currently reading because it looked to be exploring similar themes. And so far I looked Away by Jane Corry is paying off. Young grandmother, Ellie looks after her grandson Josh every Monday. She knows that her husband, Roger, has been unfaithful—but he assures her that his indiscretion is over. One Monday Ellie is with Josh and Roger when hubbie gets a call from his supposed ex. A betrayed Ellie looks away for a moment, and her world changes forever. The book is not just about Josh’s disappearance—Ellie also has secrets, which she is desperate to keep close. This, like Day of the Accident is a small (B format) paperback. It surprises me that Penguin didn’t publish them in the large format edition, as in my opinion they are as good as, if not better, than some of the more well-known authors released in ‘Trade’ format. A good read, although I’m not sure about the title. Janice Wilder

6

Crime Fiction

The Long Call by Ann Cleeves ($30, PB)

In North Devon, where the rivers Taw & Torridge converge & run into the sea, Det. Matthew Venn stands outside the church as his father’s funeral takes place. The day Matthew turned his back on the strict evangelical community in which he grew up, he lost his family too. Now he’s back, not just to mourn his father at a distance, but to take charge of his first major case in the Two Rivers region. A body has been found on the beach near to Matthew’s new home: a man with the tattoo of an albatross on his neck, stabbed to death. The first in a new series from Ann Cleeves.

The Other End of the Line by Andrea Camilleri

A surge of migrants have been coming into Vigata by boat, and all the town’s hands are on deck to help the arrivals. At the heart of the scene are Montalbano & crew—on the lookout for the people smugglers responsible. One night, while Montalbano is enduring yet another gruelling stint at the port, Elena, the dressmaker at the town’s famous tailors, is found dead—slaughtered by her own scissors. As a swell of desperate people arrive in search of a better life, Inspector Montalbano finds himself trying to unravel the mystery of who murdered the dressmaker. What will happen if he keeps tugging on this thread? And what will he find at the end of the line? ($30, PB)

The Girl Who Lived Twice by David Lagercrantz

Lisbeth Salander has been gone from Stockholm since Holger Palmgren’s funeral, & Mikael Blomkvist is worried—but perhaps he should be more concerned for himself. In the pocket of an unidentified homeless man, who died with the name of a Swedish government minister on his lips, the police find a list of telephone numbers—Blomkvist’s among them.

Following the scorched trail of her twin sister Camilla to Moscow, Salander nevertheless continues to watch over her old friend—and soon he’ll need her help. But first, she has an old score to settle; and fresh outrage to avenge. ($33, PB)

Three Hours by Anders Roslund & Borge Hellström

Stockholm, Sweden. 73 refugees have been found dead, suffocated in a container at Varta harbour. Niamey, Niger. Ewert Grens arrives in a city he’s never heard of, in search of a man he never thought he would see again. Piet Hoffmann has again got himself in too deep, infiltrating a West African trafficking ring. He thinks he has two weeks to extricate himself, but will learn that his life, and that of countless defenceless people, now hangs on his actions during 3 desperate hours. The third novel in the Ewert Grens/Piet Hoffmann trilogy. ($33, PB)

Missing Person by Sarah Lotz

Missing-linc.com is a group of misfit sleuths whose macabre passion is giving names to the unidentified dead. Their latest investigations is the corpse known as the Boy in the Dress. The Boy was Teddy Ryan. He was meant to have been killed in a car crash in the west of Ireland in 1989—but there’s no grave in Galway & Teddy was writing letters from New York a year after he supposedly died. But one night he met a man in a Minnesota bar and vanished off the face of the earth. Teddy’s nephew, Shaun, joins forces with Missing-linc to hunt down the killer. Unfortunately, so too does the killer. ($30, PB)

How the Dead Speak by Val McDermid ($33, PB)

When human remains are discovered in the grounds of an old convent, it looks like someone has been using the site as their personal burial ground. But with the convent abandoned long ago & the remains dating back many years, could this be the work of more than one obsessive killer? After their last case ended catastrophically, Tony Hill & Carol Jordan can only watch from afar. As they deal with the consequences of previous actions, someone with a terrifying routine is biding their time— and both Tony & Carol find themselves closer to the edge than they have ever been before.

I Looked Away by Jane Corry ($20, PB)

Every Monday Ellie looks after her 4 year-old grandson Josh. The love she feels for him is different to anything she’s experienced before. The only thing that can mar her happiness is her husband’s affair. But he swore it was over. Then one day, while she’s looking after Josh, her husband gets a call from that woman. And just for one moment, Ellie takes her eyes off her grandson. The accident that happens will change Ellie’s life forever. Not least when the police discover that her younger brother died in suspicious circumstances 35 years ago.

The Godmother by Hannelore Cayre ($28, PB)

Meet Patience Portefeux, fifty-three, an underpaid French-Arabic translator who specialises in police phone taps. Widowed after the sudden death of her husband, Patience is wedged between the costs of raising her daughters and the nursing home fees for her ageing mother. She’s laboured for twenty-five years to keep everyone’s heads above water.

The she happens upon an especially revealing set of wiretaps ahead of all other authorities, and makes a life-altering decision that sees her intervening in—and infiltrating—the machinations of a massive drug deal.

She thus embarks on an entirely new career path—Patience becomes La Daronne ‘the Godmother’.Cayre’s novel casts a piercing & darkly humorous gaze on everyday survival in con-temporary France.

Platform Seven by Louise Doughty ($33, PB)

Platform 7 at 4am: Peterborough Railway Station is deserted. The man crossing the covered walkway on this freezing November morning is confident he’s alone. As he sits on the metal bench at the far end of the platform it is clear his choice has made him as far from the night staff as he can get. But he has company. Lisa Evans knows what he is about to do as she tries & fails to stop him walking to the platform edge. Two deaths on Platform 7 in 18 months . No one is more desperate to understand what connects them than Lisa Evans —after all, she was the first of the two to die..

The Man That Got Away by Lynne Truss ($30, PB) It is summer in Brighton and the Brighton Belles are on hand to answer any holidaymaker’s queries, no matter how big or small. The quickest way to the station, how many pebbles are on the beach and what exactly has happened to that young man lying in the deckchair with blood dripping from him? Constable Twitten has a hunch that the fiendish murder may be connected to a notorious Brighton nightspot and the family that run it, but Inspector Steine is as ever distracted by having his own waxwork model made & an unexpected arrival, while Sergeant Brunswick is just delighted to have spied an opportunity to finally be allowed to go undercover.

Sleepless Summer by Bram Dehouck ($28, PB) A butcher kept awake by the irritating hum of a wind turbine, a veterinarian obsessed by flickering shadows, a village driven into ruin.

Seasons come and go in provincial Blaashoek, where the town’s superficial harmony is upended by the arrival of a wind farm. The irritating hum of the turbines keeps butcher Herman Bracke awake at night. He falls prey to a deadly fatigue and gradually loses control over his work, setting off a series of blood-curdling events with fatal consequences for the townspeople.

The Triumph of the Spider Monkey

by Joyce Carol Oates ($17, PB)

Unavailable for 40 years, in this seminal novel of madness & murder Joyce Carol Oates journeys into the mind of a maniac. Abandoned as a baby in a bus station locker, shuttled from one abusive foster home & detention centre to another, Bobbie Gotteson grew up angry, hurting, damaged. His hunger to succeed as a musician brought him across the country to Hollywood, but along with it came his seething rage, his paranoid delusions, and his capacity for acts of shocking violence. Also includes Oates’ never-before-collected companion novella which examines the impact of Gotteson’s killing spree on a woman who survived it.

A Better Man by Louise Penny ($33, PB)

True Crime

Fallen by Lucie Morris-Marr ($30, PB)

Lucie Morris-Marr attended every day of George Pell’s secret trial, and she now tells the full story of the fall of a prince of the church. From his modest upbringing, his steady rise to the most senior ranks of the church in Australia, to his appointment by Pope Francis to the position of treasurer in the Vatican, it seemed nothing could stop George Pell. Fallen includes many details from the court proceedings that have not been reported, as well as the Morris-Marr’s journey investigating the biggest story of her career & the attacks she endured from Pell supporters. The book also charts how Pell’s conviction plunged the Catholic Church into an unprecedented crisis after decades of clergy abuse cases.

The Lost Boys of Mr Dickens by Steve Harris

This is the gripping real-life story of 2 young boys sent by the British Government as impoverished & unwanted juveniles to exile to Van Diemen’s Land in the world’s first prison built exclusively for children. Prejudice, moral panic, harsh justice & expedience saw unwanted boys condemned to severe isolation, solitary confinement, hard labour in chains & thrashings in a juvenile version of notorious Port Arthur. Reading like a novel, this story of the death of childhood in the cradle of the world’s mightiest empire, and the atmospheric tale of crime & punishment leading to a sensational murder trial is from another time but raises questions which remain with us today. ($34.95, PB)

Dead Man Walking by Kate McClymont ($35, HB)

Just prior to his murder, Michael McGurk—who had a history of violence, threats, arson charges, intimidation & failed businesses—had informed Kate McClymont that he believed there was a hit out on him. They agreed they would meet, and then he was shot. Not just a Sydney story, McClymont’s investigation traverses Moscow, Brunei, Indonesia & Hawaii & involves property deals, fraud, conspiracy, false identities, kidnapping & a miniature Koran—an extraordinary story of ten years of events that you simply could not make up.

Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder

by Linda Stratmann ($35, PB)

Murder by poison alarmed, enthralled, and in many ways encapsulated the Victorian age. Linda Stratmann’s dark & splendid social history reveals the 19th century as a gruesome battleground where poisoners went head-to-head with authorities striving to detect poisons, control their availability & bring the guilty to justice. She corrects many misconceptions about particular poisons & documents how the evolution of issues such as marital rights & 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 & sad.

Armand Gamache returns to the Sûreté du Québec for his first day of work since being demoted from its command to head of homicide. Amid blistering personal social media attacks, he sets out on his first assignment—finding a missing woman, but while he leads the search for Vivienne Godin, Three Pines is threatened when the river breaks its banks, an emergency declared. As the waters rise, a Stealing the Show: A History of Art and Crime in body is discovered—and the victim’s distraught father contemplates Six Thefts by John Barelli ($50, HB) a murder of his own. Gamache, a father himself, is haunted by a When he retired as the chief security officer of NYC’s Metropoliquestion—what would he do, if his child’s killer might walk free? tan Museum of Art, John Barelli had spent the better part of 40 To the Land of Long Lost Friends years responsible not only for one of the richest treasure troves on the planet. Here he takes readers behind the scenes at the Met, inby Alexander McCall Smith ($30, PB) Mr J. L. B. Matekoni has been approached by a client of the garage troduces curators & administrators, takes after hours walks in the who tells a tale of woe. This man has entrusted his brother to oversee empty corridors amongst Goyas, da Vincis, Rembrandts, Warhols, Pollacks, Egyptian the building of a house, yet the project is complete & now the broth- mummies, Babylonian treasures, Colonial crafts & Greek vases, and shares what it’s er won’t leave. Surprisingly, Mr Polopetsi comes to the rescue. Else- like to get the call that an ancient masterpiece has gone missing. Focusing on 6 thefts where, a woman with a troublesome daughter comes to see Mma but filled with countless stories that span the late 1970s through the 21st Century, John Ramotswe, Charlie is still enamoured of Queenie-Queenie, but she opens the files on thefts, shows how museum personnel along with local & sometimes has developed a fancy for Fanwell—Mma Makutsi gets involved Federal Agents opened investigations & more often than not caught the thief. and so do her shoes.

Walking Towards Thunder by Peter Fox ($35, PB) Former DCI Peter Fox was a police officer with 36 years’ service Elevator Pitch by Linwood Barclay ($33, PB) Monday, when four people board an elevator in a Manhattan office in the Hunter region, he rose to national prominence in 2012 for tower. Each presses a button for their floor, but the elevator pro- his major role in speaking out for the victims of abuse within the ceeds, non-stop, to the top. Once there, it stops for a few seconds, church. He had been at the coalface fighting these heinous crimes and then plummets. Right to the bottom of the shaft. It appears to for decades. His decision to become a whistle blower helped trigbe a horrific, random tragedy. But then, on Tuesday, and Wednes- ger PM Julia Gillard’s historic decision to establish a far-reaching day, it happens again. Office workers stay home, the city grinds to a Royal Commission into the sexual abuse of children in instituhalt. Who is behind the terror, do these deadly acts of sabotage have tions. His book details the cumulative horrors our police face something to do with the fingerless body found on the High Line? every day, it reveals the cover ups & the way sexual predators Two seasoned New York detectives & a straight-shooting journalist were moved around. It shows the backlash he faced & the lengths those in power will go to avoid facing the truth. must race against time to find the answers

The Bastille Spy by C. S. Quinn ($30, PB)

Paris, 1789. English spy Attica Morgan has been charged with investigating the murder of a rebel in the morgue of the Bastille, that notorious prison of no return. A murder her backers are convinced is part of a much more treacherous plot. With France on the cusp of a bloody revolution, Attica soon realizes her mission is a great deal deadlier than she bargained for. A mythic treasure has vanished, a strange man named Robespierre wants her dead, and on the city streets, all hell is about to break loose.

Devil’s Grip by Neal Drinnan ($33, PB)

No one could have anticipated the orgy of violence in Victoria’s rolling Barrabool Hills that wiped out 3 generations of the Wettenhall family, much less the lurid scandals about Darcy Wettenhall, the man behind the world famous Stanbury sheep stud, that would emerge from the aftermath. Almost 3 decades later, the web of secrets & lies that led to this bizarre & seemingly motiveless murder spree are unravelled with the help of Bob Perry, Darcy Wettenhall’s secret lover for a decade prior to his murder.

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Biography

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith ($30, PB) CHLOE HIGGINS ‘Higgins spares nothing in her telling of the slow violence of grief, in the puzzlement of transformation and the skewing of sound mind from one instant of catastrophe.’

Kate Holden

JULIET RIEDEN ‘Memoirs such as this will ensure we do not lose the struggle against “forgetting” – that sly accomplice of tyranny.’

Magda Szubanski

LUCY TR E LOAR ‘This lovely, atmospheric book sings . . . so evocative it will stay with the reader as an important literary fable of our period of history.’

Tom Keneally

K AT E B E R RY Life-affirming, warm and incredibly real, this inspiring, hand-on-heart look at modern families charts the ebbs and flows of family life through the four school terms. www.panmacmillan.com.au

First, they Erased Our Name: A Rohingya speaks Habiburahman & Sophie Ansel ($35, PB)

Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland, with no design yet heeding signs, including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and sparring like the Cheshire Cat. In February, a surreal lunar year begins, bringing with it unexpected turns, heightened mischief, and inescapable sorrow. In a stranger’s words, ‘Anything is possible- after all, it’s the year of the monkey’. For Patti Smith—inveterately curious, always exploring, tracking thoughts, writing the year evolves as one of reckoning with the changes in life’s gyre—with loss, aging, and a dramatic shift in the political landscape of America.

A Short History Of Falling: Everything I Observed About Love Whilst Dying by Joe Hammond ($28, PB)

As I get weaker, less a part of this world, or less a part of what I love, less a part of my family’s life, I can perceive its edges with fantastic clarity. I can lie against it, lolling my arm over the edge, running my fingers around the rim. And this is where I am. Joe Hammond’s memoir about the experience of living with, and dying of, motor neurone disease (ALS) is a deeply imaginative meditation on what it feels like to confront the fact that your family will persist through time without you.

It’s a book about love and about fatherhood. But it’s also an extraordinary kind of travel writing: an unblinking account of a journey into unlighted territory & of what it means to lose your body & your connections to the world one by one.

Mr Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder by John Waters ($45, HB)

John Waters serves it up raw: how to fail upward in Hollywood; how to develop musical taste from Nervous Norvus to Maria Callas; how to build a home so ugly & trendy that no one but you would dare live in it; more important, how to tell someone you love them without emotional risk; and yes, how to cheat death itself. Through it all, Waters swears by one undeniable truth: ‘Whatever you might have heard, there is absolutely no downside to being famous. None at all’. Studded with cameos of Waters’s stars, from Divine and Mink Stole to Johnny Depp, Kathleen Turner, Patricia Hearst & Tracey Ullman, and illustrated with unseen photos from Waters’s personal collection.

Habiburahman was born in 1979 & raised in a small village in western Burma. When he was 3 years old, the country’s military leader declared that his people, the Rohingya, were not one of the 135 recognised ethnic groups that formed the 8 ‘national races’. He was left stateless in his own country. Since 1982, millions of Rohingya have had to flee their homes as a result of extreme prejudice & persecution. In 2016 and 2017, the government intensified the process of ethnic cleansing, and over 600,000 Rohingya people were forced to cross the border into Bangladesh. Witness the violence Habiburahman endured throughout his life until he escaped the country in 2000, eventually reaching Australia by boat in December 2009. He spent nearly 3 years in detention centres before being released, and now lives in Melbourne.

Shortest Way Home by Pete Buttigieg ($33, PB)

Interweaving two narratives, that of a young man coming of age & a town regaining its economic vitality, the 37 year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana Buttigieg recounts growing up in a Rust Belt city, amid decayed factory buildings & the steady soundtrack of rumbling freight trains passing through on their long journey to Chicagoland. He first left northern Indiana for red-bricked Harvard & then studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, before joining McKinsey, where he trained as a consultant becoming an expert in grocery pricing. He then returned to Indiana to the ultimate challenge of reviving a once-great industrial city—helping steer its future in the 21st century. Elected at 29 as the nation’s youngest mayor, he recalls confronting gun violence, renaming a street in honour of Martin Luther King Jr, or attracting tech companies to a city that had appealed more to junk bond scavengers than serious investors, his audacious campaign to reclaim 1,000 houses 1,000 days, deploying to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy officer, and coming out just before being reelected with 78 percent of the vote, and then finding Chasten Glezman, a middle-school teacher, who would become his partner for life.

The Writing On The Wall Juliet Rieden ($33, PB)

Australian journalist Juliet Rieden grew up knowing precious little about her Czech father’s childhood as a refugee. On a trip to Prague she is shocked to see the Rieden name written many times over on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue memorial. These names become the catalyst for a life-changing journey that uncovers a personal Holocaust tragedy of epic proportions. Juliet traces the grim fate of her father’s cousins, aunts and uncles on visits to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps and learns about the extremes of cruelty, courage and kindness. Then in a locked box in Britain’s National Archives, she discovers a stash of documents including letters from her father that reveal intimate details of his struggle.

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About a Girl: A Mother’s Powerful Story of Raising Her Transgender Child by Rebekah Robertson

In 2000, Rebekah gave birth to twin boys, George & Harry. By the age of 3 it was clear Georgie was drawn to anything that was pretty or had a skirt that could swirl, and before long Georgie was insisting that she was a girl & became distressed that she had to hide who she really was when she began school and the bullying started.

Rebekah & her husband were determined to help her live freely & fearlessly. They sought permission for her to begin puberty-blocking medication—a case that was the start of the long road to justice for transgender children in Australia & became the basis of the 2013 landmark decision to remove the Family Court’s jurisdiction. Georgie has gone on to become one of the brightest stars of the Australian youth leadership landscape through her advocacy work. And Rebekah founded Transcend, a support network for transgender kids & their families in Australia. ($35, PB)

Keep Clear: My adventures with Asperger’s

by Tom Cutler ($33, PB)

After a crack-up, at the age of 55, Tom Cutler finally got the diagnosis that allowed him to make sense of everything that’s come before, including his weird obsessions with road-sign design, magic tricks, spinning tops & Sherlock Holmes. Cutler explores his eccentric behaviour from boyhood to manhood, examines the role of autism in his strange family, and investigates the scientific explanations for the condition. He recounts his anxiety & bewilderment in social situations, his sensory overload, his strange way of dressing, and his particular trouble with girls. He shares his autistic adventures in offices, toyshops, backstage in theatres, and in book & magazine publishing houses, as well as on—or more often off—roads.

To War With the Walkers

by Annabel Venning

‘We were one of those lucky families. Six of us & we all survived the war. And yet one knew of other families who lost all of their children.’ This is the story of the Walkers, 6 siblings (including Annabel Venning’s grandfather)—an ordinary family whose experiences combine to tell a new social history of WW2. Harold was a doctor who spent a week in a coma after being bombed whilst conducting an operation in St Thomas’s hospital.

Glamorous Beatrice married an American airman, and was widowed just weeks before the end of the war. Peter suffered terrible torture as a Japanese POW. Edward fought with the 1/8 Punjab regiment in India. Ruth performed pioneering skin grafts as a nurse for soldiers returning from Dunkirk. And Walter fought with the 8th Gurkhas against the Japanese in Burma. Together, the stories of these ordinary yet extraordinary siblings tell the story of WW2 from the home front to Italy, Burma and Malaya, North Africa & more. ($33, PB)

Travel Writing

North Korea Journal by Michael Palin ($30, PB)

In May 2018 Michael Palin spent 2 weeks in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a cut-off land without internet or phone signal, where the countryside has barely moved beyond a centuries-old peasant economy but where the cities have gleaming skyscrapers & luxurious underground train stations. In this book he shares his day-by-day diary of the visit, in which he describes not only what he saw—and his fleeting views of what the authorities didn’t want him to see—but recounts the conversations he had with the country’s inhabitants, talks about his encounters with officialdom, and records his musings about a land unlike any other he has visited—one that inspires fascination & fear in equal measure.

Down and Out in Paradise by Luke Williams ($30, PB)

Luke Williams flies to Kuala Lumpur coming down off crystal meth without plans or much cash. He is in Asia for 3 years. He spends time working as a prostitute in Pattaya, eats snake heart in Vietnam, consults an American medium in Ubud, and explores the eye-popping red light scenes in Jakarta & the Philippines. Along the way, he encounters other Westerners who go to Asia for the things they can’t find at home—riches, wives, ladyboys, cheap living and even cheaper drugs, cults, spices, mountains, tropical beaches, beach gigolos, ‘self-esteem’ necklaces & ascended masters. Going far beyond reportage, aspects of Williams’ own history—his dreams, disappointments, urges, and his inherited struggle with mental illness—begin to catch up with him, Ultimately ending up in jail confronted by what is & what was, and his own footprint upon it all.

Going Home: A walk through fifty years of occupation

by Raja Shehadeh ($33, PB)

Raja Shehadeh travels Ramallah to record the changing face of the city.

Walking along the streets he grew up in, he tells the stories of the people, the relationships, the houses, and the businesses that were & now are cornerstones of the city & his community. Green spaces—gardens & hills crowned with olive trees—have been replaced by tower blocks & concrete lots; the occupation & the settlements have further entrenched themselves in every aspect of movement—from the roads that can & cannot be used to the bureaucratic barriers that prevent people leaving the West Bank. The culture of the city has also shifted with Islam taking a more prominent role in people’s everyday & political lives & the geography of the city. As Shehadeh grapples with ageing & the failures of the resistance, he notes the ways that the past still invades the presence from the ruins of the compound that was Yasser Arafat’s home to the power of emigrated families to reshape neighbourhoods by selling their long-abandoned homes.

Idiot Wind: A Memoir by Peter Kaldheim ($33, PB)

In 1987 a massive snowstorm hits New York as Peter Kaldheim flees the city, owing drug debts to a dealer who is no stranger to casual violence.

Leaving behind his chaotic past, Kaldheim hits the road, living handto-mouth in flop-houses, pan-handling with his fellow itinerants. As he makes his way across America in search of a new life, the harsh reality of vagrancy forces him to face up to his past, from his time in Rikers prison, to relationships lost and lamented. Kaldheim hikes and buses through an America rarely seen, and his encounters with a disparate collection of characters instils in him a new empathy and wisdom, as he journeys on a road less travelled.

‘How to Defend Australia is a serious work from a serious patriot that requires close reading.

It deserves a wide audience.’—Kim Beazley

The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd ($30, HB)

In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland, where she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times & shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores & records the rocks, rivers, creatures & hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the ‘essential nature’ of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us.

Composed during the WW2, the manuscript of Shepherd’s book lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.

World Heritage Sites of Australia by Peter Valentine

Peter Valentine presents Australia’s 19 World Heritage sites in a magnificent tribute to natural & cultural history. The outstanding qualities of each site are described & illustrated in exquisite detail, along with an account of how the site came to be on the World Heritage List—which in many cases was not straightforward. Rainforests that show the connections of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana. Rock art that points to a history of human settlement reaching over 60,000 years into the past. Sandstone remnants of 80 years of convict labour & imprisonment.

A marvel of 20th century architecture. ($50, HB)

The Great Song Cycle by Joanna Wallfisch ($27, PB)

In August 2016 Joanna embarked on a solo concert tour of the West Coast of the USA—by bicycle. Over the course of 1,154 miles (1,860 km) she performed 16 solo shows between Portland & LA carrying her musical instruments, camping gear & everything else she needed upon her bike.

This book follows her journey from the moment the idea was sparked in Brooklyn to the triumphant completion at Santa Monica Pier, & everything in between. Throw in some sex, drugs, cooperative accommodation services, sleazy men and, of course, more than a little music, this is the ride of her life.

BL ACKINCBOOKS .COM

9

books for kids to young adults A Stone Sat Still by Brian Wenzel ($25, HB)

Acclaimed creator of They All Saw a Cat and Hello Hello, Wenzel brings a philosophical element into play in his newest book, presenting a stone from the varying perspectives of different creatures. Is the stone somewhere to live, or a place to rest; somewhere to feed or a place to shelter?

Exploring Nature and the progress of Time, Wenzel reveals the stone to be all these and more. For me part of the appeal is Wenzel’s use of assorted media including coloured pencil, cut paper, computer and oil pastels to portray the textures. From the cover: the stillness of the stone on the dust jacket to the underlying cover—a microcosm of a stone debossed with the meandering route of a little snail, and throughout, the book bears repeated viewing and anyone from age 3 to adult will find aspects to discuss. Lynndy

compiled by children’s correspondent, Lynndy Bennett

picture books

Welcome to Country by Marcia Langton ($30, HB)

Now fully adapted for younger readers of 11+, Langton’s bestseller is a vital book which deserves longevity. ‘Written by one of Australia’s most prominent Indigenous voices, this is essential reading for every young Australian. The chapters cover prehistory, post-colonial history, language, kinship, knowledge, art, performance, storytelling, Native Title, the Stolen Generations, making a rightful place for First Australians & looking to the future for Indigenous Australia. This book is for the new Australian generations & works towards rectifying the wrongs of this country’s past. You will quickly appreciate how lucky we are to be the home of the world’s oldest continuing civilisation—diverse & thriving in Australia today.’

The Big Little Thing by Beatrice Alemagna ($25, HB)

Kindness Grows by Britta Teckentrup ($25, HB)

In her latest book, staff favourite Teckentrup treats us to her perspective on behaviour & its effects both on people & on a totemic tree, shown in her distinctive cut-outs. In each double spread she uses contrasting palettes & actions, with non-nurturing behaviour in bleaker tones featuring glum people; compared with the opposing page of brighter hues, connections between characters, and a tree that is thriving. Far from simple didacticism, this gorgeous addition to Teckentrup’s work offers a physical & artistic dimension to the urge towards more compassionate lives. Lynndy

Beverly, Right Here by Kate DiCamillo ($20, HB)

I’m really looking forward to reading this third book about a trio of friends Raymie, Louisiana & Beverly. Set in Florida in the 1970s, these books are mainly about friendship & the travails of childhood. None of the characters come from ideal backgrounds, and they all have more than their fair share of troubles. Written with a light touch, and a great sense of humour, Kate DiCamillo has created a completely believable set of characters, and the world they inhabit. Raymie Nightingale is the first book, Louisiana, Going Home the second, both equally compelling, although Louisiana is probably my favourite. These are terrific books for middle school aged children, and would be equally good to read aloud to slightly younger readers. Louise

Lunch at 10 Pomegranate Street: A Collection of Recipes to Share

by Felicita Sala ($28, HB)

special gifts

A Spoonful of Murder by Robin Stevens ($17, PB)

teen fiction

It Sounded Better in My Head by Nina Kenwood

When the perfect family, ‘perfect’ sister and perfect friendship waver from their axis Natalie’s life seems to stop making sense, so she makes some uncharacteristic decisions. Frothy yet with some very full-bodied themes, this debut novel is an absolute joy. Fresh and original contemporary realism leavened with humour, beautifully crafted with relatable characters—this is a novel to relish. I loved it, and can easily imagine it as a film from which the audiences would emerge beaming. ($20, PB) Lynndy

Searching for Cicadas

by Lesley Gibbes and Judy Watson ($20, HB)

In the summertime, Grandpa & I go cicada-watching. We put our camping gear into my wagon and walk down to the local reserve. Last year we saw five Green Grocers, three Yellow Mondays & one Floury Baker. Can we find the rare Black Prince this year? This nonfiction picture book is written by award-winning author Lesley Gibbes & gorgeously illustrated by Judy Watson.

Journey through the life cycle of plastic­—how plastics are produced, the many uses of plastics throughout the last century, how our plastic use has spiralled out of control, and what we can do about it.

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fiction

Robin Stevens’ Murder Most Unladylike series feature two schoolgirl detectives, Hazel Wong and her school friend Daisy Wells. The plots are always fairly far fetched, but quite believable and very entertaining, with the rather serious Hazel narrating the story. Her aristocratic co-detective, Daisy, is a foil for Hazel, with each of them playing off each other. In A Spoonful of Murder, Hazel is called back from her English boarding school to Hong Kong, as her grandfather has just died. Daisy joins her there, and realises what a different world Hazel comes from. The pair uncover a murder, and set out to find the culprit, who might be a bit close for comfort. I like these books for their authentic sense of time and place, for the rich detail, and the carefully thought out plotlines. It’s a fascinating background in this book, with the complicated family arrangements of Hazel’s extended family well described. Look out too for the latest book Top Marks for Murder. Great books for 9-12 year old readers. Louise

Is this a picture book? Is it a cookery book? Lunch at 10 Pomegranate Street is hard to categorise. Something smells delicious at the wonderfully international 10 Pomegranate St, and as you read the book you see why. Everyone who lives at 10 Pomegranate Street is cooking up a storm—from Mr Ping’s Little Trees (of sesame soy broccoli), to Mr Melville’s Sole Meunière, to Jemima and Rosie’s Banana and Blueberry Bread. This book is a celebration of diversity of both people and food, community and sharing. The illustrations are warm and detailed, with lots of humorous touches. I’m looking forward to cooking quite a few of these recipes with the younger members of my family, but they are certainly sophisticated enough for the whole family to enjoy eating. Louise

Plastic: Past, Present and Future

by Eun-ju Kim ($28, HB)

Alemagna’s The Big Little Thing lives up to its title. It is really big!

A little thing has a far reaching impact, is it happiness? Is it sadness?

No matter what, it affects many people. The illustrations are quite extraordinary, detailed, yet abstracted, simple but rich with meaning.

Alemagna has used colours & textures to great effect, with each picture taking us further into the journey of the big, little thing.

This is a stunning picture book from a favourite illustrator. Louise

Ghost: Thirteen Haunting Tales to Tell

by Illustratus ($45, HB)

While spooky stories are not everyone’s first choice, this lusciously presented collection of original tales and poems (according to this book itself, the only true ghost stories in existence) is unquestionably one to delve into. The promise of the visually arresting cover is fulfilled within on high quality paper, showcasing various talents from the Illustratus studio of authors, illustrators and animators. Framed inside the overarching story of boys at camp listening to ghost stories, the book twists back to include the boys as victims of the thrilling sagas. Sumptuous art lures you into this instant keepsake of timeless tales for discerning readers of 9 to adult who enjoy a frisson or two of dread. Lynndy

non fiction

Tim & Tigon

by Tim Cope ($19, PB)

Award-winning Australian filmmaker & adventurer Tim Cope’s childhood dream was to travel the 10,000 kilometres from Mongolia to Hungary on horseback—a journey undertaken by the legendary leader of the Mongols, Genghis Khan. Cope made this epic journey across the windswept wilderness & wolf-infested plateaux of Mongolia & Kazakhstan with his dog Tigon (a half Kazakh Tazi breed (a sight hound), and half shepherd dog). On this 3 1/2-year odyssey Cope immersed himself in the traditions & histories of the people of the steppe, marvelling at their ingenuity and resilience, and the nomadic lifestyle they have followed since the Mongols first travelled there in the C13th. Copes’ trek compares with the pioneering spirit of the explorers of old—something for the kids to aspire to. But, above all, it is the story of the extraordinary friendship between Tim and Tigon.’ For his personal story, the foreignness of the culture, and the presence of Tigon I am very keen to read this account. Lynndy

Argh! There’s a Skeleton Inside You!

by Idan Ben-Barak and Julian Frost ($20, HB)

Quog and Oort are on their way to Kevin’s birthday party. Unfortunately, their spaceship has crashed. Pick up this book to lend them a hand! An interstellar exploration of hands and what’s inside them, from the awardwinning creators of the internationally successful Do Not Lick This Book—It’s got germs

book to screen news

And the award goes to… Australian authors

Filming has begun on Krystal Sutherland’s YA romance novel Our Chemical Hearts, under the title Chemical Hearts. My Life as an Alphabet by Barry Jonsberg, starring Miriam Margoyles & Deborah Mailman, will be screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Food & Health

We are the Weather: Saving the Planet Starts at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer ($35, PB) A significant proportion of global carbon emissions come from farming meat. Giving up meat is incredibly hard & nobody is perfect—but just cutting back is much easier and still has a huge positive effect on the environment. Just changing our dinners—cutting out meat for one meal per day—is enough to change the world. Rather than depressingly doom-laden Jonathan Foer faces the environmental crisis with a single clear solution that individual readers can put into practice straight away.

An act of heroism, the taint of collaboration, a doomed love affair, and an Australian woman who travels across the world to discover the truth...

The Whole Fish Cookbook by Josh Niland ($55, HB)

Seafood chef Josh Niland reveals a completely new way to think about all aspects of fish cookery—from sourcing & butchering to dry ageing & curing. Featuring more than 60 recipes for dozens of fish species ranging from Cod Liver Pate on Toast, Fish Cassoulet & Roast Fish Bone Marrow to the Perfect Fish and Chips, Niland will have you seeing that there is so much more to a fish than just the fillet & that there are more than just a handful of fish in the sea.

Vignette: Stories of Life and Wine in 100 Bottles

by Jane Lopes ($40, HB)

In part memoir and part wine book, Australian master sommelier Jane Lopes tells stories of triumph & defeat that comprise her life in wine, and recommends the 100 bottles of wine (and some spirits & beers) to best expand your wine journey, giving you a complete palate education of the important styles, grapes, regions & flavours of this magical & ever-growing world. Alongside that, you will find imaginative ways to engage with the foundational wine knowledge that underpins a good drinking experience.

Pretty Unhealthy: Why our obsession with looking healthy is making us sick by Nikki Stamp ($33, PB)

Despite an explosion in the number of gyms, health foods and activewear, we are more obese, less active, more stressed than ever before. We obsess over looking healthy, but our health is getting worse.

Why did we start equating beauty with health? And is it possible to be fit and fat? Cardiothoracic surgeon Nikki Stamp unpicks the web of online pseudoscience and urges us to take back our health from the people who don’t value it as much as we do. She explores the secret of longterm motivation for healthy diet & exercise, and shares the scientific value of self-kindness for true physical & mental health.

Zaika: Vegan recipes from India by Romy Gill

Inspired by her own heritage, Romy Gill offers over 100 vegan curries & side dishes—both classic and new. These recipes are simple and quick to make. The spices used in Indian cooking are at the core of Ayurvedic medicine, with purported health benefits as diverse as promoting digestion, bolstering the immune system, reducing inflammation—and even benefiting prostate health. ($45, HB)

Lunch in Paris: Delicious & simple French recipes

by Suzy Ashford ($30, HB)

Each chapter of Lunch in Paris focuses on one of Paris’ arrondissements (neighbourhoods) and is studded with dreamy location photography. With 50 simple & classic examples of French cuisine, Suzy Ashford proves that you need not go to Le Cordon Bleu culinary school to perfect a Pork & Pistachio Terrine. Or Caramelised Onion & Goat’s Cheese Tartlets. Or an Olive & Anchovy Pissaladière. Or a Comté & Asparagus Tart (among many more).

East: 120 Vegetarian and Vegan recipes from Bombay to Bangkok by Meera Sodha Meera Sodha puts vegetables at the centre of the table, drawing from her New Vegan Guardian column. East also features plenty of brand-new recipes inspired by a wide range of Asian cuisines, from India to Indonesia, China to Singapore, by way of Thailand & Vietnam. There are noodles, curries, rice dishes, salads & bakes. Sodha shows how to whip up a swede laksa & a chard potato & coconut curry; how to make Kimchi pancakes or silken tofu with pine nuts.

There are sweet potato momos for starters & unexpected desserts like salted miso brownies. ($45, HB)

Sour: The magical element that will transform your cooking by Mark Diacono ($45, HB)

What is it that makes sourness such an enticing, complex element of the eating experience? And what are the best ways to harness sour flavours in your own kitchen? Mark Diacono demystifies the sour world, exploring why everyone’s extolling the virtues of kombucha and fermenting for their digestive health. He grapples with gooseberries & turns his hand to sourdough, experiments with ultra-cool shrub cocktails, and makes his own yoghurt, keffir & pickles—explaining what makes things sour, and offering recipes that maximise the transformative power of this amazing taste..

New this month Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine 2020, $23

‘So compelling and warm and subtle, and very moving’ Bridget Collins

A cracking account of the rivalries and hatreds that split the Liberal Party, brought down Malcolm Turnbull and propelled Scott Morrison to power

More Plants Less Waste by Max La Manna ($45, HB)

Zero waste chef Max La Manna has inspired thousands of people across the world to rethink their approach to consumption and made it his mission to turn the tide on plastic & breathe new energy into the leftovers that are typically destined for the bin. In this book he shares 80 of his tasty, healthy recipes that will help you save money, food & eat well—from Sumptuous Spag Bol & Crunchy Cauliflower Curry to Leftover Veggie Nachos in a Hurry. Plus with home hacks like Citrus Bomb House Cleanser, & a 21-day zero waste challenge he adds value to what you already own & sets you on the path to living more sustainably.

Pain and Prejudice: A call to arms for women and their bodies by Gabrielle Jackson ($30, PB)

‘In medicine, man is the default human being. Any deviation is atypical, abnormal, deficient.’ 14 years after being diagnosed with endometriosis, Gabrielle Jackson couldn’t believe how little had changed in the treatment & knowledge of the disease.

What began as an investigation of this one issue led Jackson to explore how women—historically & through to the present day—are under-served by the systems that should keep them happy, healthy & informed about their bodies. The stark reality is that women are more likely to be disbelieved & denied treatment than men, even though women are far more likely to be suffering from chronic pain. In a potent blend of personal memoir & polemic, Jackson confronts the private concerns & questions women face regarding their health and medical treatment.

The Japanese Table: Small plates for simple meals

by Sofia Hellsten ($35, HB)

Based on the ichijuu-sansai tradition—which literally means ‘one soup, three dishes’—uncomplicated, delicious small plates are served with steamed rice, and can be enjoyed any time of day. Each ingredient is treated like royalty, Hellsten’s recipes include Onigiri, Clear shiitake soup, Soy-pickled eggs & Sweet miso cod. She also provides suggestions on how to build the perfect meal, as well as easy-to-find ingredients & quick methods.

The Fit Foodie Meal Prep Plan: Easy steps to fill your fridge for the week by Sally O’Neil ($35, PB)

Sally O’Neil moved to Sydney from the UK in 2010, overhauled her eating habits & started meal prepping to save time & money, & lost 14 kg in the process. The cupboard is empty, so dial up a takeaway - we’ve all been there. O’Neil gives you a three-step practical guide that gives you a fridge full of healthy, ready-to-eat meals & takes the ‘what’s for dinner’ worry out of your busy days.

Meal prepping will have you stressing less & eating better, spending less & living more.

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Events r Calenda

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Sign up for gle weekly The gleebooks pdate. email events u oks.com.au asims@gleebo

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Nah Doongh’s Song in conv. with Mark McKenna Distinguished historian Grace Karskens is the winner of the thirteenth Calibre Essay Prize, Australia’s most prestigious essay prize, for her essay Nah Doongh’s Song—about a remarkable nineteenth-century Aboriginal woman.

The Enchan Long-ha Tim Bonyhady ex of the long-haired nal culture. He rec Australians respon the way illuminate tinent, its climate a never b

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Hearing Maud in conv. with Dr Breda Carty This is a work of creative non-fiction that details the author’s experiences of deafness after losing most of her hearing at age 4. It charts how, as she grew, she was estranged from people & turned to reading & writing for solace, eventually establishing a career as a writer.

Unrequited Lov Accidenta in conv. with From Lyndon Joh Altman’s diary ta early days of AIDS against a backdro strange love f

Grace Karskens

Jessica White

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Dennis A

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Michael Moha & Khalid

Reading Ma James B Join us for a conv Michael Mohamm Khalid Warsame their respective Reading Malcolm X tralian and On J

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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 September 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 2019

SDAY

—6 for 6.30 nyhady

ntment of the aired Rat xplores the place d rat in Aborigicounts how settler nded to it & along es a species, a conand its people like before.

—6 for 6.30 Altman

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WEDNESDAY Event—6 for 6.30 Jack Charles

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THURSDAY Event—6 for 6.30

Antony Loewenstein

Jack Charles: Born-again Blakfella in conv. with Karla Grant Jack Charles has worn many hats throughout his life: actor, cat burglar, musician, heroin addict, activist, even Senior Victorian Australian of the Year. But the title he’s most proud to claim is that of Aboriginal Elder. This is his no-holds-barred memoir.

Pills, Powder & Smoke in conv. with Jeff Sparrow In reporting on the frontlines across the globe—from the killing fields of Central America to major cocaine transit routes in West Africa—Antony Loewenstein reveals how the war on drugs has become the most deadly war in modern times.

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Event—6 for 6.30 Brian Toohey

Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State in conv. with John Lyons Brian Toohey draws on decades of inquiries into national security to examine governing by stealth. Fresh archival material & details of conversations between former CIA, US & Australian officials will make you reconsider the world around you.

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07428

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alcolm X and Baldwin versation between med Ahmad and as they discuss Meanjin essays; X as an Arab AusJames Baldwin.

25 Event—6 for 6.30 Alan Fels

Tough Customer in conv. Lisa Murray During his 12 years as head of Australia’s competition watchdog, he took on banks, airlines, supermarkets and big telcos to make sure Australians were getting a fair deal. This is his story, both public and private during his 50 years of public service.

13 Launch—6 for 6.30

Sex in the Brain in conv. with Dr Karl Drawing from true stories, in this revealing and sometimes heartbreaking book clinical neuropsychologist Amee Baird unfolds a better understanding of the links between brain function and our sexual selves.

Prof. John Maynard The Aboriginal Soccer Tribe Launcher: Larissa Behrendt An updated and revised edition of John Maynard’s popular best-seller from 2012 which is a celebration of the journey of taken by Aboriginal sportsmen and women who forged the way for the current crop of talented players.

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Amee Baird

Kate Mildenhall and Katherine Collette First Time Feels with the First Time Podcast Panel: John Purcell, Cassie Hammer, Ashley Kalagian-Blunt Co-hosts of The First Time Podcast, Kate Mildenhall & Katherine Collette talk debut publication.

Come for the live podcast!

ve: Diary of an al Activist Anton Enus hnson to Trump, akes us from the S to gay liberation op of Australia’s for America.

—6 for 6.30 ammed Ahmad Warsame

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Amanda Niehaus

The Breeding Season Panel An astounding debut novel that forensically and poetically explores the intersections of art and science, sex and death, and the heartbreaking complexity of love.

27 Event—6 for 6.30 Toni Hassan

Families in the Digital Age in conv. with Geraldine Doogue This is one of the most-needed and grab-you-by-the throat convincing books around today, and it says things no other writer is saying about social media—smartphones, selfies, Instagram, the whole digital box and dice—Steve Biddulph

Coming in October

Wed 2: Imre Salusinszky with Kate McClymont—The Hilton Bombing Thur 3: Heather Rose—Bruny Sat 5: Metin Mustafa—The Ottoman Renaissance Thur 10: Debra Adelaide with Bernadette Brennan—The Innocent Reader Wed 16: Charlotte Wood with Malcolm Knox—The Weekend Thur 17: Fred Watson—Cosmic Chronicles Fri 18: Roslyn McFarland with Patrick Abboud—All the Lives We’ve Lived for more events go to: http://www.gleebooks.com.au/bookings 13

Granny’s Good Reads

with Sonia Lee

The highlight of my reading year is Underland by Robert Macfarlane, closely followed by Horizon by Barry Lopez.

Both men are pre-eminent writers about landscape and the human heart—matters on which they write with great urgency because they observe homo sapiens destroying the planet on which we all live. Lopez writes with an extra urgency because, at 74, he has a very serious cancer diagnosis. Horizon is an attempt to describe his experience of six regions: Oregon’s Cape Foulweather, where Captain Cook first set foot in North America and where he observes virgin forest on a mountainside being clear-felled; the Galapagos, where he frees sea lions caught in a net; the Arctic, where he once wrote Arctic Dreams and consults the Inuit for their traditional ecological knowledge; Botany Bay—Captain Cook again—and Port Arthur; western Kenya’s Turkana uplands; and the ice shelves of Antarctica, where he searches for meteorites—and flies a kite. Lopez is a man of many parts: ecologist, geologist, archaeologist and photographer. He calls Horizon an ‘autobiographical reflection’ in which he tries to explain his driven need to explore the world’s most rugged and inhospitable corners. In a footnote he directs the reader to an article in Harper’s in which he describes being sexually abused in childhood by a family ‘friend’. One wonders if this explains, partly at least, his restless urge to explore. This book is Lopez’s crowning achievement: a long, challenging, sorrowful and beautiful work on which he laboured for 35 years.

Underland is all about Robert’s Adventures Underground, most of them so difficult and dangerous that my heart was in my mouth just reading about them. In a cave system in the Mendips his belay rope becomes entangled and it’s touch-and-go for him until he’s able to climb out. He spends three days in the catacombs under Paris, where he’s trapped in a narrow crevice and, for an achingly long spell, can go neither forward nor back. In northern Italy he ventures for a thousand feet ‘into an immense rotunda of stone, cut by a buried river and filled with dunes of black sand’. He visits a Finnish underground nuclear waste dump, supposedly ‘the most secure place on earth’. He began writing this book in 2010, while the Deepwater Horizon disaster was unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, and finished it in 2018 as the Thai soccer team and their coach were being rescued from the cave system into which they’d unwisely ventured. He spends time with some remarkable people, including a mycologist called Merlin, who introduced him to the ‘wood wide web’ of the fungal network by which trees transmit nutrients and even send messages to each other. My favourite is Bjørnar Nicolaisen, the fisherman who spent three years fighting a proposal for oil-drilling which would have largely destroyed Norway’s pristine Arctic cod fisheries. Macfarlane’s time is one of ‘burial and unburial and deep time’: in the north of Russia some buried reindeer infected with anthrax spores reappear as the permafrost melts, resulting in the infection of 23 people and the death of a child, and in Greenland a US army base buried with a load of chemical contaminants during the Cold War is now coming to light again.

Meanwhile the miners are waiting avidly for the melt to be complete so they can dig up the minerals and rare earths that we need for our smartphones and other gewgaws, paying no heed to the dangers posed to coastal cities as the ice caps melt. Macfarlane’s sobering conclusion is that by now we’ve become too addicted to the extractive industries to be able to stop easily, and that the climatic consequences of past human actions have gone well beyond our control.

In a lyrical and moving final chapter, he takes his four-year-old son Will to a place a mile from their home where ‘nine springs flow clear from the bedrock’.

Lopez’s Horizon and Macfarlane’s Underland are definite Must Reads.

It’s a bittersweet experience reading Metropolis by the late Philip Kerr, because it’s the very last outing of everyone’s favourite detective, Bernie Gunther. Kerr takes us back to 1928, during the Weimar Republic, just as the Nazi Party is beginning to take hold, anti-Semitism has become the prevailing sentiment, and inflation and unemployment are forcing numerous women to become prostitutes. Bernie’s task is to find who has killed four prostitutes, murdered and scalped in as many weeks. Another challenge is a murderer who specialises in the crippled war veterans begging in the streets.

Bernie wonders if it’s the same perpetrator in both cases.

A notable crime boss whose daughter was murdered then puts pressure on Bernie to solve the case. As a last resort his boss asks him to go on the street under cover and impersonate a crippled vet. Beautifully written, with memorable one-liners, interesting characters and a fascinating setting, this is one not to miss. Sonia

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Now in paperback You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote & Inspired the World by Clare Wright, $35

Australian Studies

Venom: Vendettas, Betrayals & the Price of Power

by David Crowe ($35, PB)

They plotted. They schemed. They unleashed chaos. Australia lost 2 prime ministers in 3 years in a period of political bloodshed that took the nation’s government to the brink of collapse—until an extraordinary election changed everything. Venom is the secret history of the brutal power play to lead the government. It sheds new light on the fall of Tony Abbott, the rise of Malcolm Turnbull & the electrifying leadership spill that brought parliament to a halt in August 2018. In a day-by-day account, it reveals the strategy Scott Morrison used to defeat his opponents and claim ultimate authority. A cracking account of the rivalries & hatreds that split the Liberal Party, brought down Malcolm Turnbull & propelled Scott Morrison to power.

Gun Control: What Australia got right (and wrong)

by Tom Frame ($35, PB)

In the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, John Howard surprised his colleagues & the nation by moving swiftly to transform Australia’s lax firearm laws. The National Firearms Agreement, produced just 12 days after the massacre with support from all levels of government & across the political divide, is now held up around the world as a model for gun control. Tom Frame analyses whether the government achieved its intention & what it might have done in response to the massacre, and didn’t. ‘Anyone interested in learning how a democratic nation reduced senseless gun deaths needs to read this.’—Jeffrey Bleich, former US Ambassador to Australia.

Project RAINFALL: The secret history of Pine Gap

by Tom Gilling ($33, PB)

At the height of the Cold War the chief of one of Australia’s spy agencies joined 3 CIA men at a remote site in Central Australia to toast the success of a top secret project known in US intelligence circles as RAINFALL. The CIA listening station at Pine Gap was officially called the Joint Defence Space Research Facility, but it had nothing to do with research & was joint in name only: Australians were hired as cooks & janitors but the first spies were all American. The job of the satellites controlled from Pine Gap was to eavesdrop on Soviet missile tests. While government ministers denied that Australia was a nuclear target, bureaucrats in Canberra secretly planned for Armageddon in the suburbs of Alice Springs. No longer just a listening station, Pine Gap has metamorphosed into a key weapon in the Pentagon’s war on terror, with Australians in frontline roles. Drawing on declassified documents in Australian & US archives, Tom Gilling’s book exposes the uncensored story of Australia’s most secret place.

Andrew Bolt, the Far Right & the First Nations: Deconstructing a demagogue by Steve Mickler

The rights of First Nations peoples are ‘racist’, left-wing activists are ‘fascists’ & immigration has become tantamount to a ‘foreign invasion’. These are some of the core concepts found in the daily demagoguery of ‘Australia’s most read’ social & political commentator, Andrew Bolt. Packaged as being underpinned by patriotism, conservative values & egalitarian principles, this book argues, Bolt’s commentary frequently resonates with the ideas & sentiments of the Far Right—ultra-nationalism, cultural chauvinism & a reactionary hostility to progressive thought. History has taught us that these ideas stand against democracy, internationalism, the security of Indigenous & non-Indigenous peoples alike. ($25, PB)

How Powerful We Are: Behind the scenes with one of Australia’s leading activists by Sally Rugg

Sally Rugg is Executive Director at political activist group change. org, and was previously Campaign Director at GetUp. This is her manifesto for championing what you believe is right. In these pages Sally will teach you some of the things she learnt on the marriage equality campaign: how to develop a strategy, how to frame your messages, how to get your campaign to the media, how to build community power. And she’ll share with you the much harder lessons learnt: the consequences of campaign decisions; how to weather criticism & harassment from every angle; and how, in mass campaign movements, nothing is black & white. ($33, PB)

Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State

by Brian Toohey ($40, PB)

Elected governments pose the greatest threat to Australians’ security. Political leaders increasingly promote secrecy, ignorance & fear to introduce new laws that undermine individual liberties & magnify the risks of being dragged into a horrific new war for no good reason. It is a criminal offence to receive or publish a wide range of information unrelated to national security. Our defence weapons are so dependent on US technical support that Australia couldn’t defend itself without US involvement. The Commonwealth is amassing comprehensive databases on citizens’ digital fingerprints & facial recognition characteristics. True? False? Brian Toohey’s book will help you decide.

Fresh archival material & revealing details of conversations between former CIA, US State Department & Australian officials will make you reconsider the world around you.

Politics

Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia: 2nd Pills, Powder, and Smoke: Inside the bloody war Edition (eds) Bill Arthur & Frances Morphy on drugs by Antony Loewenstein ($35, PB)

An atlas can represent, in graphic form, a pattern of human activities in space & time. This 2nd edition of the Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia opens a window onto the landscape of Australian Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander lives, from over 60 000 years ago to the present. Each chapter has been extensively revised & updated by one or more experts in the field, under the general editorship of Bill Arthur & Frances Morphy of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the ANU. The maps, which form the core of the book, are supplemented by explanatory text & numerous diagrams, photographs & illustrations, including Indigenous artworks. ($80, HB)

Like the never-ending war on terror, the drugs war is a multibillion-dollar industry that won’t go down without a fight. In reporting on the frontlines across the globe—from the streets of London’s King’s Cross to the killing fields of Central America to major cocaine transit routes in West Africa—Antony Loewenstein reveals how the war on drugs has become the most deadly war in modern times. Designed & inspired by Washington, its agenda has nothing to do with ending drug use or addiction, but is all about controlling markets, territories & people. Instead, Loewenstein argues, the legalisation & regulation of all drugs would be a much more realistic & humane approach.

QE 75: Annabel Crabb on Politics, Work & Gender This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War When NZ PM Jacinda Ardern announced her pregnancy, the headlines raced around the world. But when Scott Morrison & Josh Against Reality by Peter Pomerantsev ($30, PB)

When information is a weapon, everyone is at war. We live in a world of influence operations run amok, a world of dark ads, psy-ops, hacks, bots, soft facts, ISIS, Putin, trolls, Trump.

We’ve lost not only our sense of peace & democracy—but our sense of what those words even mean. As Peter Pomerantsev seeks to make sense of the disinformation age, he meets Twitter revolutionaries & pop-up populists, ‘behavioural change’ salesmen, Jihadi fan-boys, Identitarians & truth cops. 40 years after his dissident parents were pursued by the KGB, he finds the Kremlin re-emerging as a great propaganda power. His research takes him back to Heartland: How Rugby League Explains Queens- Russia—but the answers he finds there are surprising. Part reportage, part intellectual land by Joe Gorman ($32.95, PB) adventure, this is a Pynchon-like exploration of how we can reimagine our politics & For more than 40 years, rugby league has embodied all the hopes ourselves in a time where truth has been turned topsy-turvy. & dreams, contradictions & tensions of life in the Sunshine State.

The game speaks to Queenslanders’ sense of being the underdog & The Economists’ Hour: How the False Prophets the outsider—a powerful undercurrent that sweeps through politics, of Free Markets Fractured Our Society business, the arts & sport. The enduring appeal of State of Origin by Binyamin Appelbaum ($3, PB) is that it allows Queensland to balance the scales, at least for 80 In the 4 decades between 1969 & 2008, economists played a minutes. Joe Gorman chronicles a tale of loss & rebirth—from leading role in reshaping taxation & public spending & clearing the decline of the Brisbane Rugby League competition & North the way for globalization. They reshaped the US government’s Queensland’s Foley Shield to the extraordinary rise of the Broncos approach to regulation, assigning a value to human life to deter& the Cowboys in the NRL. Weaving together stories of diehard supporters & game- mine which rules are worthwhile. Economists even convinced changing players, from Arthur Beetson to Johnathan Thurston, this is a revealing ac- President Nixon to end military conscription. The embrace of markets was a global phenomenon, but the revolution failed to count of Queensland’s coming of age, both on & off the field.

Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Aus- deliver on its central promise of increased prosperity. Growth has slowed in every successive decade since the 1960s, soaring inequality extends far beyond incomes, and tralia by Samia Khatun ($34.95, PB) the focus on efficiency has come at the expense of the future: lower taxes instead of Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beeducation & infrastructure; limited environmental regulation as oceans rise & Califorginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a 19th century nia burns. This book is a reckoning: the economists’ hour is coming to an end, and the mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together world they have left us with feels less predictable than when it began. the stories of various peoples colonised by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Khatun composes a his- Addressing Modern Slavery tory of Muslims in Australia through Sufi poetry, Urdu travel tales, by Justine Nolan & Martijn Boersma ($35, PB) Persian dream texts & Arabic concepts, as well as Wangkangurru An estimated 40 million people are modern-day slaves, more song-poetry, Arabunna women’s stories & Kuyani histories—chal- than ever before in human history. Long after slavery was oflenging a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across ficially abolished, the practice not only continues but thrives. the Anglophone world—that European knowledge traditions are superior to the episte- Whether they are women in electronics or apparel sweatshops, mologies of the colonised. Arguing that Aboriginal & South Asian language sources are children in brick kilns or on cocoa farms, or men trapped in keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonised geographies, Khatun shows that bonded labour working on construction sites, millions of people stories in colonised tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, globally are forced to perform labour through coercion, intimipresent & future. dation or deceit. In a world of growing inequality & trade-offs The Golden Country: Australia’s Changing Identity between the haves & the have-nots, consumers, business & government are all part of the problem & the solution. While we have all become accustomed to

by Tim Watts ($33, PB) John Howard was the unlikely reformer of Australian society. He fast fashion & cheap consumer goods, the affordability of these commodities often loosened migration laws, massively boosting the population & mak- comes at the price of human exploitation. This book examines slavery in the modern ing it less white. Simultaneously, his divisive rhetoric about national world & outlines ways it can be stopped.

Frydenberg became the first PM & Treasurer duo since the 1970s to take on those roles while bringing up primary-school-aged children, this detail passed largely without notice. Why do we accept that fathers will be absent? Why do so few men take parental leave in this country? In the last half-century, women have revolutionised the way we work and live. But men’s lives have changed remarkably little in that time. Annabel Crabb deploys political observation & workplace research to argue that gender equity cannot be achieved until men are as free to leave the workplace (when their lives demand it) as women are to enter it. ($23, PB)

identity—a legacy of White Australia—hamstrung discussion of these huge changes. As the MP for a diverse electorate, the partner of a Hong-Kong-Chinese-Australian & father of Eurasian-Australians, and the descendant of a proponent of laws stopping Chinese people from coming here, Tim Watts asks: Why don’t we remember Billy Sing, the Chinese-Australian sharpshooter at Gallipoli, or that Ararat was founded by Chinese miners? Why is Australia’s imagined community so far behind our lived community? Watts challenges us to reckon with the dark heart of Federation, the racial core of the Australian Legend, and to confront outdated notions of Australianness—crunching the numbers on the economic & social effects of migration, and looking to a more inclusive future.

Talking Up a Legacy by Tom Clark ($27, PB)

Within the extraordinary complexity that a government must be, the leading indication of its values & of the strategic thrust of its actions is the behaviour of its leading official, the Prime Minister. He or she is the clearest & most observed example of what a government can or cannot, will or will not do. Speeches have conventionally been regarded as each PM’s opportunity to entrench a legacy. This is not insider or partisan account, Tom Clark (a speechwriter for premiers in Victoria & NSW) aims to cast light on some of the most difficult challenges of political communication, using language and concepts that speak to non-specialist readers.

This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook ($20, PB)

Extinction Rebellion are a new force taking realistic action at a critical time for our species and for life on this planet. Now or never, we need to be radical. We need to rise up. And we need to rebel. Extinction Rebellion is a mass movement of peaceful people, demanding radical action on our global climate crisis.

This is a book of action. With pages to rip out and pages to fill in, with instructions on how to rebel and how to organise a roadblock, by the time you finish this book you will have become an Extinction Rebellion activist. Act now before it’s too late.

Now in paperback & B Format Red Flags: Why Xi’s China Is in Jeopardy

by George Magnus, $30 Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite by Jake Bernstein, $23 Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience, and the Fight for a Sustainable Future by Mary Robinson, $23 Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party by A. James McAdams, $65

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History

The Anarchy: The Rise and Fall of the East India Company by William Dalrymple ($30, PB)

In August 1765 the East India Company defeated the young Mughal emperor & forced him to establish in his richest provinces a new administration run by English merchants who collected taxes through means of a ruthless private army. The creation of this new government marked the moment that the East India Company ceased to be a conventional international trading corporation dealing in silks and spices and became an aggressive colonial power in the guise of a multinational business. In less than 4 decades it had trained up a security force of around 200,000 men twice the size of the British army. William Dalrymple tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company, based thousands of miles overseas in one small office, five windows wide, and answerable only to its distant shareholders.

The Kremlin Letters: Stalin’s Wartime Correspondence with Churchill & Roosevelt ($43, PB)

Stalin exchanged more than 600 messages with Allied leaders Churchill & Roosevelt during WW2. In this riveting volume—the fruit of a unique British-Russian scholarly collaboration—the messages are published & also analysed within their historical context. Ranging from intimate personal greetings to weighty salvos about diplomacy & strategy, this book offers fascinating new revelations of the political machinations & human stories behind the Allied triumvirate. Edited and narrated

by David Reynolds & Vladimir Pechatnov & based on a decade of research in British, American & newly available Russian archives, this book illuminates an alliance that really worked while exposing its fractious limits and the issues and egos that set the stage for the Cold War that followed.

Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil by Susan Neiman ($45, HB)

In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monument, Susan Neiman shows how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long & difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the US, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi & Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront their violent history.

Our Man in New York by Henry Hemming

When William Stephenson—’our man in New York’—arrived in the US towards the end of June 1940 with instructions from the head of MI6 to ‘organise’ American public opinion, Britain was on the verge of defeat. Surveys showed that just 14% of the US population wanted to go to war against Nazi Germany.

Those campaigning against America’s entry into the war, such as legendary aviator Charles Lindbergh, talked of a Britishled plot to drag the US into the conflict. They feared that the British were somehow flooding the American media with ‘fake news’, infiltrating pressure groups, rigging opinion polls & meddling in US politics.

Henry Hemming, using hitherto private & classified documents, including the diaries of his own grandparents, who were briefly part of Stephenson’s extraordinary influence campaign—arguably the most effective in history’. ($33, PB)

Only the World Was Enough: A Biography of Adolf Hitler by Brendan Simms ($65, HB) Brendan Simms’ major new biography focuses on the true origins of Hitler’s ideas—what those ideas really were & how they emerged. This gives a very different picture of Hitler, highlighting both how deeply he had always reflected wider (and now forgotten) paranoid geopolitical German concepts, as well as what was original, particularly Hitler’s obsession with the US (which loomed far greater in his imagination than the USSR).

It was this poisonous mix which was to have such a terrible impact on Europe’s future.

Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune

by Rory Muir ($60, HB)

In Jane Austen’s England the eldest son usually inherited almost everything while his younger brothers, left with little inheritance, had only a few options if they were to remain gentlemen’—such as joining the Church or the Army. Rory Muir explores the lifestyle & prospects afforded by these different professions, weaving together the stories of many young men, both well-known & obscure including Austen’s brothers and Sydney Smith while shedding a great deal of light on Regency society.

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Science & Nature

How To by Randall Munroe ($33, PB)

How To is full of highly impractical advice for everything from landing a plane to digging a hole. Randall Munroe explains how to predict the weather by analysing the pixels of your Facebook photos. He teaches you how to tell if you’re a baby boomer or a millennial by measuring the radioactivity of your teeth. He offers tips for taking a selfie with a telescope, crossing a river by boiling it, and if you want to get rid of this book once you’re done with it, you can dissolve it in the ocean, convert it to a vapour, use tectonic plates to subduct it into the Earth’s mantle, or launch it into the sun. By exploring the most absurd reaches of the possible Munro offers is a delightfully mind-bending way to better understand the science & technology underlying the things we do every day.

Animal Languages: The secret conversations of the living world by Eva Meijer ($35, HB)

Dolphins & parrots call each other by their names. Fork tailed drongos mimic the calls of other animals to scare them away & then steal their dinner. In the songs of many species of birds, and in skin patterns of squid, we find grammatical structures. If you are lucky, you might meet an animal that wants to talk to you. If you are even luckier, you might meet an animal that takes the time & effort to get to know you. Such relationships can teach us not only about the animal in question, but also about language & about ourselves. From how prairie dogs describe intruders in detail—to how bats like to gossip, to the impressive greeting rituals of monogamous seabirds, this is a fascinating & philosophical exploration of the ways animals communicate with each other, and with us.

Consider the Platypus by Maggie Sandford ($40, HB) Maggie Ryan Sandford explores the history & features of more than 50 animals to provide insight into our current understanding of evolution. Using Darwin’s theory as a springboard, she details scientists’ initial understanding of the development of creatures & how that has expanded in the wake of genetic sequencing, including the: Peppered Moth, which changed colour based on the amount of soot in the London air; California Two-Spotted Octopus, which has the amazing ability to alter its DNA/RNA not over generations but during its lifetime; miniscule tardigrade, which is so hearty it can withstand radiation, lack of water & oxygen, and temperatures as low as -328 F & as high 304 F; and, of course, the platypus, which has so many disparate features, from a duck’s bill to venomous spur to mammary patches, that scientists originally thought it was a hoax.

Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control by Stuart J. Russell ($45, HB)

Creating superior intelligence would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, according to the world’s pre-eminent AI expert, it could also be the last. In this groundbreaking book Stuart Russell explains why he has come to consider his own discipline an existential threat to his own species, and lays out how we can change course before it’s too late. Russell has spent decades at the forefront of AI research. Through brilliant analogies & crisp prose, he explains how AI actually works, how it has an enormous capacity to improve our lives—but why we must ensure that we never lose control of machines more powerful than we are. He shows how we can avert the worst threats by reshaping the foundations of AI to guarantee that machines pursue our objectives, not theirs.

Reverse Mathematics: Proofs from the Inside Out

by John Stillwell ($39, PB)

Reverse mathematics is a new field that answers some old questions—this book presents reverse mathematics to a general mathematical audience for the first time. In the 2000 years that mathematicians have been deriving theorems from axioms, it has often been asked: which axioms are needed to prove a given theorem? Only in the last 200 years have some of these questions been answered, and only in the last 40 years has a systematic approach been developed. John Stillwell gives a representative view of this field, emphasizing basic analysis—finding the right axioms to prove fundamental theorems—and giving a novel approach to logic.

Underwater Sydney

by Inke Falkner & John Turnbull ($40, PB)

With underwater forests & gardens, hundreds of species of fish and thousands of invertebrates, Sydney is as colourful & diverse below the water as it is above. This book celebrates Sydney’s incredible harbour and coast through eclectic stories & stunning underwater photography. It also explores the challenges the harbour is facing today after more than 200 years of coastal development, and the role that marine science plays in maintaining the harbour’s health.

Out this month 2020 Australasian Sky Guide by Nick Lomb ($16.95, PB) Australian Bird Names: Origins and Meanings 2nd edition

by Ian Fraser & Jeannie Gray ($55, PB)

Philosophy & Religion

Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland ($35, PB)

Ranging in time from the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC to the migration crisis in Europe today, and from Nebuchadnezzar to the Beatles, Tom Holland explores just what it was that made Christianity so revolutionary & disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mind-set of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that has become increasingly doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain irredeemably Christian. Holland looks at how novel & uncanny Christian teachings were when they first appeared in the world, and how we, and all that we take for granted, appear similarly strange in consequence. We stand at the end-point of an extraordinary transformation in the understanding of what it is to be human: one that can only be fully appreciated by tracing the arc of its parabola over millennia.

This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free

by Martin Hägglund ($33, PB)

Would Heaven be boring? Do you want to live forever? If this is all there is, what should we do with it? To truly embrace the freedom that life grants us, Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund argues, we must rid ourselves of two delusions. On the one hand, all the great religions try to persuade us that immortality is just around the corner. This is a not only a lie: it couldn’t help us if it was true. In reality our time in this world is the only thing of value we can ever possess, and its value depends on the fact that we must fight to keep it. Yet capitalism, our other spiritual enemy, constantly beguiles us to steal it. Via profound engagements with some of the greatest philosophers & theologians in history, including Aristotle, St Augustine, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hegel & Marx, Hägglund takes aim at these 2 great adversaries, religion & capitalism, stripping away their many subtle illusions to return us to life itself in all its fragility.

Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal

by Martha C. Nussbaum ($50, HB)

The cosmopolitan political tradition in Western thought begins with the Greek Cynic Diogenes, who, when asked where he came from, responded that he was a citizen of the world. Rather than declaring his lineage, city, social class, or gender, he defined himself as a human being, implicitly asserting the equal worth of all human beings. Martha Nussbaum pursues this noble but flawed vision of world citizenship as it finds expression in figures of Greco-Roman antiquity, Hugo Grotius in the 17th century, Adam Smith during the 18th century, and various contemporary thinkers. She confronts its inherent tensions: the ideal suggests that moral personality is complete, and completely beautiful, without any external aids, while reality insists that basic material needs must be met if people are to realize fully their inherent dignity. Given the global prevalence of material want, the lesser social opportunities of people with physical & cognitive disabilities, the conflicting beliefs of a pluralistic society, and the challenge of mass migration & asylum seekers, what political principles should we endorse? Nussbaum brings her version of the Capabilities Approach to these problems, and she also takes on the challenge of recognizing the moral claims of nonhuman animals & the natural world.

Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide

by Richard Dawkins ($33, HB)

Should we believe in God? Do we need God in order to explain the existence of the universe? Do we need God in order to be good? In twelve chapters that address some of the most profound questions human beings confront, Dawkins marshals science, philosophy and comparative religion to interrogate the hypocrisies of all the religious systems and explain to readers of all ages how life emerged without a Creator, how evolution works and how our world came into being.

Lessons in Stoicism by John Sellars ($23, PB)

Philosopher John Sellars weaves together the key ideas of the three great Roman Stoics—Seneca, Epictetus & Marcus Aurelius—with snapshots of their fascinating lives, to show us how their ideas can help us today. He shows how the works of these three Stoics speak to some of the perennial issues that face anyone trying to navigate their way through life. Their works, fundamentally, are about how to live—how to understand one’s place in the world, how to cope when things don’t go well, how to manage one’s emotions & how to behave towards others.

Now in B Format I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche

by Sue Prideaux, $25 Sex and the Failed Absolute by Slavoj Žižek ($47, HB)

In a rigorous articulation of his philosophical system, Slavoj Žižek provides nothing short of a new definition of dialectical materialism.

In forging this new materialism, he critiques & challenges not only the work of Alain Badiou, Robert Brandom, Joan Copjec, Quentin Meillassoux & Julia Kristeva, but everything from popular science & quantum mechanics to sexual difference & analytic philosophy. Alongside striking images of the Mobius strip, the cross-cap & the Klein bottle, he brings alive the Hegelian triad of being-essence-notion. Radical new readings of Hegel, & Kant, sit side by side with characteristically lively commentaries on film, politics & culture.

Psychology Sex in the Brain: How your brain controls your sex life by Amee Baird ($30, PB)

Clinical neuropsychologist Dr Amee Baird takes readers on an entertaining tour of the sexiest bits of the human brain.

Spiced with real case studies, her book reveals pathologies no longer hidden in medical journals or the bedrooms of people whose sex lives are undergoing dramatic change, for better & worse. In the style of Oliver Sacks, Baird captures the humanity & complexity of patients, even when their neurological challenges have rendered them permanently or temporarily unlikeable. Drawing from true stories, this revealing & sometimes heartbreaking book unfolds a better understanding of the links between brain function & our sexual selves.

Feeling of Life Itself by Christof Koch

Psychologists study which cognitive operations underpin a given conscious perception. Neuroscientists track the neural correlates of consciousness in the brain, the organ of the mind. But why the brain & not, say, the liver? How can the brain, 3 pounds of highly excitable matter, a piece of furniture in the universe, subject to the same laws of physics as any other piece, give rise to subjective experience? Neuroscientist Christof Koch argues that what is needed to answer these questions is a quantitative theory that starts with experience & proceeds to the brain. Koch describes how his theory explains many facts about the neurology of consciousness & how it has been used to build a clinically useful consciousness meter. The theory predicts that many, and perhaps all, animals experience the sights & sounds of life; consciousness is much more widespread than conventionally assumed. But contrary to received wisdom, he argues that programmable computers will not have consciousness. Consciousness is not a special type of computation or a clever hack—it is about being. ($50, HB)

Now in B Format Inflamed Mind: A radical new approach to depression

by Edward Bullmore, $23 Psychotherapy: An Australian Perspective

Psychotherapy research has identified a bewildering array of factors that are important to client outcome. These include client factors, therapist factors, the alliance, and specific form of intervention, each with its associated rationale & techniques. Adopting a scientist-practitioner framework, the authors guide readers through the successive stages of working with clients, demonstrating how their integrative model can be applied to enhance assessment, conceptualisation, treatment, risk management, and outcome evaluation, irrespective of a practitioner’s theoretical orientation or a client’s presenting problem. The text ends with consideration of professional practice & development issues, including supervision, & therapist well-being & self-care Case studies & clinical anecdotes enliven the text. A set of video vignettes, available for download from the internet, illustrate many of the skills, techniques, process issues, and situations mentioned in the text. ($85, PB)

Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing As We Age

by Mary Pipher ($40, HB)

Women growing older contend with ageism, misogyny, & loss. Yet as psychologist Mary Pipher shows, most older women are deeply happy & filled with gratitude for the gifts of life. Their struggles help them grow into the authentic, empathetic, and wise people they have always wanted to be.

In this book Pipher offers an examination of the cultural & developmental issues women face as they age. Drawing on her own experience as daughter, sister, mother, grandmother & clinical psychologist she explores ways women can cultivate resilient responses to the challenges they face.

Undressing: A story of recovery and renewal

by James O’Neill ($25, HB)

When therapist-in-training, James O’Neill, starts his placement at a therapy centre in West London, his first referral is Abraham, a silent and frightened young man in a tightly zipped, hooded anorak. After spending the majority of their initial sessions in silence, O’Neill gradually gains Abraham’s trust and learns of the abuse and violence he was subjected to as a child that caused him to hide away from the world - barely sleeping, too frightened to get undressed and shower, anything that might make him that vulnerable. Over the many years they meet, Abraham’s unfolding story and bravery inspires O’Neill to confront his own complicated past. This is at once a case-history, a novella, a remarkable story of two people discovering through trust what they can do for each other..

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Sociopath-free Ann Patchett’s new book The Dutch House has been a refreshing reading experience for me. Every other book I’ve read recently seems to be about sociopaths, and it’s nice to read about characters I’d be happy to meet in real life. It’s beautifully written—a very literate book—and full of fairytale and allegory. All of this is underneath the surface, while the narrative drives along with a most compelling plot, and extremely engaging characters. Danny is the narrator, and we first meet him and his sister Maeve as young adults, sitting in a car, watching their old house. This house is the eponymous Dutch House—a marvellous old mansion, that either bewitches or repels the characters in the book. Patchett takes us back and forth in time, unfolding the story of the inhabitants of the house. Danny and Maeve are abandoned by their mother very early on in the book, and their father remarries Andrea—a great admirer of the house, but an unwilling stemother.

Full of surprises, the plot unravels and reveals itself in a most compelling way. Wonderfully detailed descriptions of the house, with its secret nooks that charm Danny and Maeve, and its opulence that alienates their mother; the family portraits of the original owners, (and one of the beautiful Maeve) dominating the house, and its wooden panels full of flying swallows, all of this adds layers of symbolism to the book, and adds to sense of place, and the mystery of the house, that resonates throughout. It is full of literary allusions too, The Great Gatsby comes to mind, as well as Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella, and later in the book, when two of the characters reunite, they discover they both love Marilynne Robinson’s masterpiece of parental abandonment, Housekeepng—a small but revealing detail. The Dutch House is a memorable book, it’s stayed with me since I read it, and I can’t wait to read it again. Louise

Cultural Studies & Criticism

Seduction & Betrayal by Elizabeth Hardwick

Sidelined. Betrayed. Killed off. Elizabeth Hardwick dissects the history of women and literature. In her most virtuoso work of criticism, she explores the lives of the Brontës, Woolf, Eliot and Plath; the fate of literary wives such as Zelda Fitzgerald and Jane Carlyle; and the destinies of fictional heroines from Richardson’s Clarissa to Ibsen’s Nora.

With fierce empathy and biting wit, Hardwick mines their childhoods, families, and personalities to probe the costs of sex, love, and marriage. Shattering the barrier between writing and life, she asks who is the seducer and who the seduced; who the victim and who the victor. Both urgently timely and timeless, Seduction and Betrayal explodes the conventions of the essay: and the result is nothing less than a reckoning.

Fixed It by Jane Gilmore ($35, PB)

On average, at least one woman is murdered by a current or former partner every week in Australia. Finally, we are starting to talk about this epidemic of gendered violence, but too often we are doing so in a way that can be clumsy and harmful. Victim blaming, passive voice & over-identification with abusers continue to be hallmarks of reporting on this issue. And, with the 24 hour news cycle journalists & editors often don’t have the time or resources bring new ways of thinking into their newsrooms. Jane Gilmore demonstrates the myths that we’re unconsciously sold about violence against women, and undercuts them in a powerful look at the stories we are told—and the stories we tell ourselves—about gender & power, and a call to action for all of us to think harder & do better.

Sontag: Her Life by Benjamin Moser ($65, HB)

Susan Sontag’s writing on art & politics, feminism & homosexuality, celebrity & style, medicine & drugs, radicalism, Fascism, Freudianism, Communism & Americanism, forms an indispensable guide to our modern world. Sontag was present at many of the most crucial events of the 20th century—when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down, in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel & in besieged Sarajevo.

Benjamin Moser tells these stories and examines her work, as well as exploring the woman behind her formidable public face—the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, her agonizing construction of herself and her public myth. This is the first biography based on exclusive access to her restricted personal archives & on hundreds of interviews conducted with many people around the world who spoke freely for the first time about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz.

Night Fishing: Stingrays, Goya and the singular life

by Vicki Hastrich ($30, PB)

Vicki Hastrich takes a voyage through her writer’s life & across her chosen patch: the private byways of Brisbane Water, north of Sydney, where she has spent much of her life. She fuses her intimate knowledge of a tiny arena of Australia’s natural world with the grand influence of ideas from throughout civilisation—from the baroque to the American Western, and artists as diverse as Zane Grey, Tiepolo & Goya—to create a deeply pleasurable collection. The book unfolds as a series of expeditions or essays, undertaken in the spirit of the philosopher scientist. All the while Hastrich reveals the ordinary & remarkable detail of her life, from her childhood by the sea to her life as a camera operator for the ABC, as a historian & amateur marine biologist, and as a single woman exploring her small stretch of water.

White Tears/Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad ($35, PB)

When white people cry foul it is often people of colour who suffer.

White tears have a potency that silences racial minorities. Ruby Hamad blows open the inconvenient truth that when it comes to race, white entitlement is too often masked by victimhood. Never is this more obvious than the dealings between women of colour & white women.

What happens when racism and sexism collide? Hamad provides some confronting answers.

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray ($33, PB)

Douglas Murray examines the 21st century’s most divisive issues—sexuality, gender, technology & race. He looks at the new culture wars playing out in our workplaces, universities, schools & homes in the names of social justice, identity politics & ‘intersectionality’. We are living through a postmodern era in which the grand narratives of religion & political ideology have collapsed. In their place have emerged a crusading desire to right perceived wrongs & a weaponisation of identity, both accelerated by the new forms of social & news media. Narrow sets of interests now dominate the agenda as society becomes more & more tribal and, as Murray shows, the casualties are mounting.

Christina Stead and the Matter of America

by Fiona Morrison ($45, PB)

Christina Stead set 5 of her novels in the US, capturing & critiquing American life with uncanny sharpness. Yet her relationship with place & nation remains difficult to pin down: she resisted the label ‘expatriate’ & her books defy easy classification. In this re-evaluation of Stead’s American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead’s profound engagement with American politics & culture & their influence on her ‘restlessly experimental’ style. Through the turbulent political & artistic debates of the 1930s, WW2, and the emergence of McCarthyism, America provoked Stead to create new ways of writing about politics, gender & modernity. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead’s American novels reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid 20th century, and that Stead’s account of American ideology & national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.

A New Sublime: Ten Timeless Lessons on the Classics

by Piero Boitani ($30, PB)

Piero Boitani invites the reader to discover the timeless beauty and wisdom of ancient literature, highlighting its profound & surprising connections to the present—with their emphasis on the mutability & fluidity of identity & matter, their examination of the power & position of women in society, and their enduring treatments of force & subjugation, fate & free will, the ethical life, hospitality, love, compassion & mysticism. Ranging from Homer to Tacitus, with Thucydides, Aristotle Sophocles, Cicero, and many others in between, Boitani’s A New Sublime is a fresh, inspiring reminder of the enduring importance & beauty of the classics of the Western canon.,

Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell ($35, PB)

In July 2015, a young black woman named Sandra Bland was pulled over for a minor traffic violation in rural Texas. Minutes later she was arrested and jailed. Three days later, she committed suicide in her cell.

What went wrong? How do we make sense of the unfamiliar? Why are we so bad at judging someone, reading a face, or detecting a lie? Why do we so often fail to ‘get’ other people? Through a series of puzzles, encounters & misunderstandings, from little-known stories to infamous legal cases, Gladwell takes a journey through the unexpected—including the spy who spent years undetected at the highest levels of the Pentagon, the man who saw through Bernie Madoff, the suicide of the poet Sylvia Plath & the false conviction of Amanda Knox.

Kim Scott: Readers, Language, Interpretation by Ruby Lowe et al ($35, PB)

Reissued this month How to Read Literature

by Terry Eagleton ($29, PB)

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Over a quarter of a century he has explored and unravelled the intertwined destinies of Aboriginal and Settler from the moment of invasion, contact and occupancy to the contradictory aspirations and government policies of today. In carrying out this project Scott consistently engages with the history and discourses that shape the national imaginary. These 12 essays deal with all of Scott’s novels to date, along with his collaborative non-fiction & his work in the Wirlomin Noongar Stories & Language Project. The collection as a whole amounts to a case for Kim Scott as Australia’s most representative novelist today.

2nd 2nd 2nd Hand Hand Hand Rows Rows Rows Transported for his Country’s Good – three times!

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Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta ($33, PB)

Tyson Yunkaporta looks at global systems from an Indigenous perspective. He asks how contemporary life diverges from the pattern of creation. How does this affect us? How can we do things differently? Sand Talk provides a template for living.

It’s about how lines and symbols and shapes can help us make sense of the world. It’s about how we learn and how we remember. It’s about talking to everybody and listening carefully. It’s about finding different ways to look at things. This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrödinger’s cat. Most of all it’s about Indigenous thinking, and how it can save the world.

On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein ($30, PB)

In frank, personal terms, Naomi Klein shows how the only way forward out of a polluted world of our own making is only through policy reform—a concrete set of actions to combat the mounting threat of total environmental catastrophe. In wideranging essays reporting from varying stages of ecological crisis—prescient clarion calls from years ago to the panicked present—Klein wakes us up from our environmental sleepwalk with a course of potent, necessary action.

Knowledge resistance by Mikael Klintman

Why do people & groups ignore, deny & resist knowledge about society’s many problems? Mikael Klintman draws on cutting-edge scholarship as well as personal experiences of culture clashes to integrate insights from the social, economic & evolutionary sciences to advance our understanding of the phenomenon of knowledge resistance. He identifies simplistic views in public & scholarly debates about what facts, knowledge & human motivations are & what ‘rational’ use of information actually means. He covers controversies about nature-nurture, climate change, gender roles, vaccination, genetically modified food & artificial intelligence. ($53, HB) Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking ($34, HB) Walking and writing have always gone together. Poets who walk out a rhythm for their lines and novelists who put their characters on a path. This wonderful little jewel collects extracts from Dickens and John Clare, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, DH Lawrence, Kipling, Kafka and many more. They are all here, from young ladies seeking to escape the confines of the drawing room, through flâneurs posing on city streets, to adventurers like Mark Twain and Jack London.

The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux—Including his Vocabulary of the FLASH LANGUAGE

by James Hardy Vaux and Noel McLachlan (Editor) William Heinemann, London. UK, 1964. ($20, HB) James Hardy Vaux (1782–1841?) was an English-born convict transported to Australia on three separate occasions. His legal occupations included that of a linen draper, a midshipman, a legal clerk, a wine merchant, an ironmonger and a deputy overseer. His illegal capacities encompassed jewellery theft, currency forgery, pickpocketing, bigamy and desertion—many of these committed under several aliases. Vaux was first transported to Australia in 1800 at age 19. He is last recorded as being released in Sydney in 1841, when nearly 60, after a two-year sentence for criminal assault. Vaux vanishes from recorded history. His Memoirs survive.

Published in London in 1819, they are both the first full length autobiography, providing a fascinating glimpse of both the prison system and London criminal life, and the first dictionary written in Australia, which is a unique glossary of criminal slang. A 20th century critic of the work, literary historian H.M. Green in A History of Australian Literature (1961) regarded Vaux with distaste: ‘Vain and impudent…

A smug, sanctimonious hypocrite, sneak by character and profession’. However, Green did enjoy the Memoirs: ‘His memoirs are entertaining, once one gets used to the unpleasant taste of his character…Vaux is an inferior member of the tribe of Jonathan Wilde and Barry Lyndon.’ I can forgive James Hardy Vaux (a little) after reading how our future felon spent his childhood in the village of Shifnal, Shropshire: My principal delight when very young, was to frequent the only bookseller’s shop our little town afforded, where I would stand for hours reading, or rather devouring, whatever books I could lay hold of. There was also an old woman who had a circulating library, consisting of about a hundred volumes, chiefly novels, to which I disbursed my pocket money. My parents did not wholly approve this passion for reading, fearing, indeed with reason, as I am now convinced, that I should meet with matter tending to vitiate a young mind.

Redmond Barry: An Anglo-Irish Australian by Ann Galbally ($25, HB) Sir Redmond Barry was the pre-eminent figure in Melbourne of the middle years of last century. A Supreme Court judge for 30 years, he was the founding & sustaining force behind the University of Melbourne, the Supreme Court Library, the Public Library, the National Gallery & the Museum. Of the Irish caste who were the colonizers of Ireland, Redmond believed with certainty in the virtues of classical European culture, public education & the active pursuit of knowledge, and in the social obligations of his class. He did not achieve, nor seek, personal wealth but pursued a vast range of cultural, educational & social goals. While seen by many as a hidebound, even villainous judge (he sentenced Ned Kelly to hang), his trust in the rule of law underpinned, for example, an unusually sympathetic & active response to Aboriginal people. Yet fear of losing social standing & his Irish family’s esteem blinkered him to injustice on his own doorstep—say his unacknowledged relationship of 30 years with Louisa Barrow, and their 4 illegitimate children.

The Reporting of Ned Kelly & the Kelly Gang by Trudy Toohill ($15, PB) This is a compilation of the many newspaper articles published on Ned Kelly from 1869 to 1910. They off insight into the world of Ned & the Kelly Gang, and also a window into the life of ‘Kelly Hunters’ who tracked them in the unforgiving Australian bush. The articles contain transcripts & interviews from numerous hostages held captive the Gang—painting a very different picture of the romanticized bushranger. There are also court transcripts of Kelly’s trial, with appearances from the above Mr Justice Barry. Black & white illustrations throughout.

That Damned Democrat: John Norton, an Australian populist, 1858–1916

by Michael Cannon ($20, HB) When the gifted but erratic newspaper publisher & politician John Norton died in 1916, the Sydney Bulletin believed that nobody could ever write his life’s story.

But this impartial biography manages to separate fact from the fantasies which Norton enjoyed weaving around his origins, motives & activities—a succinct, compelling story of an extraordinary character who used radical journalism & politics to achieve personal goals, doing much good & some harm along the way. The books ‘Norton Anthology’ gives entertaining examples of the type of journalism which made Norton idolized by large sections of the work class.

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Sunburn, Shivers & Shakes

As I write a fierce cold snap has arrived in the Blue Mountains.

So, if the icy winds, sleet and snow arrive (any time), here are three recommendations to read in front of a fire.

Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life by Richard Cohen (2nd hand HB, $35) The Sun is 32,000 light years from the centre of its galaxy of a hundred billion stars, which it orbits at about 155 miles (250kms) a second, taking about 200 million years to complete a revolution. The Sun has been active for 4.6 billion years and a single particle of light, a photon, from its core takes 150,000 years to reach space. Every second, about five million metric tonnes of mass are converted into nuclear energy: equivalent to the detonation of 90,000 million onemegaton hydrogen bombs. The numbers are mind-boggling, but this constant blast of nuclear reactions pushes energy to the surface, releasing it as light and heat.

While waiting for sunny days to reappear I dip into this wonderful, eccentric, encyclopaedic compendium of all things Solar. Author Cohen begins with a journey to Mt Fuji to observe the summer solstice and concludes with an evening sunset at Varanasi on the Ganges. In his varied travels as Sun chaser, he journeys to the Sun Temples of Peru and Mexico, witnesses a total eclipse in the Antarctic, examines Stonehenge and an ancient observatory in Jaipur, India. In between these accounts, he provides a dazzling survey of every aspect of Solar miscellanea: The Babylonians and Greeks were the earliest civilisations to track the Sun, its size, movement and distance from Earth. We are shown the impact of sunspots, the history of the Sun in the development of the telescope, map making and navigation and calendars—from Julius Caesar to medieval Popes. The creation—during World War I—of daylight-saving time. Yet our author is just warming up. He also journeys through Art, Literature and Music to reveal the enduring symbolism of the Sun: Captain Cook, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Tintin, Milton, Omar Khayyam, Matisse, David Hockney and James Joyce are all part of the fabulous detail. You will learn why Wagner hated the Sun in Tristan and Isolde and why Mozart worshipped it in The Magic Flute. A penultimate chapter describes - in astounding detail - the eventual death of our Star - and therefore Earth - some 5 to 6 billion years hence. The Sun will expand in size and temperature, becoming a Red Giant star, one that will engulf Mercury, Venus and (probably) Earth. Even if we escape that fate, the surface temperature of our planet will by then exceed 2,000 C—hot enough to melt Earth itself. Sunset. Until then, enjoy this fascinating treasure trove of all things Solar.

The Travelling Bag and Other Ghostly Stories by Susan Hill ($20, PB) Unlike my esteemed colleague Louise, when the cold dark draws in, I thoroughly enjoy reading scary stories. Ghost stories in particular. Susan Hill, famed author of The Woman in Black (1983), is the modern master of the traditional ghost story.

This collection of four short stories and a novella, displays her unrivalled ability to create and sustain an atmospheric tale. One that creates a palpable sense of unease and approaching dread. My choice for the best of these is the novella, Printer Devil’s Court. I place it in the same high rank as M.R. James’s Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad (1904), Edith Nesbit’s Man-Size in Marble (1883) and Algernon Blackwood’s The Wendigo (1910). Guaranteed to leave the reader breathless.

A Short History of Drunkenness by Mark Forsyth ($23, PB) To survive any cold weather, one also needs to indulge in the nectar of the grape.

This wonderfully entertaining, and informative, book chronicles humankind’s (over) indulgence with drink. From the prehistoric (25,000 BCE) carving of a buxom woman, called Venus of Laussel, holding a drinking horn (we think) up to her mouth, onto to the Egyptians who perfected the top fermentation process for beer. In Sumeria, if a tavern patron received a short measure of their beer, by law the publican was punished with drowning. The ancient Athenians usually held their famed philosophical Symposiums in friend’s villas with many a libation drunk to aid learned discourse—‘Socrates himself is particularly missed. A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he’s pissed.’—to quote Monty Python.

The Romans were the original wine bores—the age mattered, not the drinking quality. When not dispatching numerous Roman legions sent to conquer them, the warlike German tribes, according to the Roman historian, Tacitus, enjoyed quaffing a liquor of fermented barley: ‘Drinking bouts lasting all day and night are not considered disgraceful. The quarrels that arise over the cups are seldom settled by hard words, but more often by bloodshed.’ The Aztecs drank a viscous cider-like liquid called pulque. Drinking was central to Aztec culture, along with human sacrifice, but was ferociously restricted.

Breezy and entertaining accounts are given of drunken, and consequential, episodes from the Bible. Robin Hood and medieval ale houses are touched upon.

Madame Geneva (Mother Gin) and the 18th Century London Gin Craze is explained. American Wild West frontier saloons are visited. Imperial Russia, vodka and the fall of the 300-year Romanov Dynasty in 1917 are not unrelated.A chapter on 20th century alcohol prohibition by various nations provides surprises. The US Prohibition experiment (1920–1933) is well known, however Iceland did not legalise beer drinking until 1989. Norway banned spirits for a decade. Finland forbade all alcohol drinking for nearly two decades.

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Australia’s founding on Rum has a separate chapter all to itself. Rum inspired a rebellion, a hospital and was a currency for the new colony. Attempts to develop an Australian wine growing culture in this Rum-sodden settlement began with the publication of the first book on viticulture in 1803. Translated from the French, the translator forgot to reverse the Seasons, this caused the vines to be pruned in January. Oh Dear.

I wonder what that first colonial vintage tasted like?

Stephen Reid

Poetry

The Odes by Pindar ($39, PB)

One of the most celebrated poets of the classical world, Pindar wrote odes for athletes that provide a unique perspective on the social & political life of ancient Greece. Commissioned by successful contestants at the Olympic games & other Panhellenic contests, such odes were performed in the victors’ hometowns & conferred enduring recognition on their achievements. Andrew M. Miller’s superb new translation captures the beauty of Pindar’s 45 surviving victory odes, preserving the rhythm, elegance & imagery for which they have been admired since antiquity while adhering closely to the meaning of the original Greek. This edition provides a comprehensive introduction and interpretive notes to guide readers through the intricacies of the poems & the world-view that they embody.

Amnesia Findings by Anna Jacobson ($24.95, PB)

Now I knit myself back into a human. It’s hard work relearning the steps—slip-stitch, drop-stitch, pick-up stitch, loop. I get into a rhythm. The pattern is complex—I drop a few stitches.

The holes form gaps in my memory. Knitting visions & memories, Anna Jacobson’s collection traces the skeins of lost histories & the spaces of dropped stitches. Exquisite & whimsical, these poems bear witness to the broken & healed. Gentle but robust, these are poems of personal resilience, framed by explorations of Jewish culture & family & fuelled by a boundless & exhilarating imaginativeness.

Liberty Faber Poetry Diary 2020 ($30, HB)

A full colour hardback A5 size desk diary with a week to a view, with a poem or illustration every week. Illustrated throughout with vintage & contemporary book jackets the diary has a sturdy cover & an elastic closure.

Unfollowing You by Komal Kapoor ($25, PB)

Komal Kapoor uses her perceptive understanding of romance in the digital age to tells a chronological tale of a modern love through a series of poems, prose, texts, screen grabs & unsent letters. Exploring digital phenomena like swipe culture & technological realities, Kapoor’s words affirm experiences & sentiment echoed across many media platforms.

In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive

by Clementine von Radics ($33, PB)

Lyrical poet, Clementine von Radics presents a collection of brutally honest poetry that lends itself to the powerful anthem of survival—bravely exploring life at its darkest and most inspiring moments, drawing on central themes of love, loss, mental health, and abuse. An attempt to understand and to be understood, these book is an ode to vulnerability that deliver concentrated, thought-provoking, and earnest verse.

Almost Complete Poems by Stanley Moss

Stanley Moss’s voice echoes the boom of the Old Testament, the fluty trill of Greek mythology, and the gongs of Chinese rituals as he writes about love, nature, war, oppression & the miracle of language. He addresses the God of the Jews, the Christians & the Muslims with awe & familiarity, and chants to lesser gods of his own invention. In every surprising poem, every song to life, beautiful life, Moss, by turns giddy and sorrowful, expresses a sacred sensuality & an earthy holiness— here is a mind operating in open air, unimpeded by fashion or forced thematic focus, profoundly catholic in perspective, at once accessible & erudite, inevitably compelling. ($50, PB)

The Fall at Home: New & Collected Aphorisms

by Don Paterson ($33, HB)

Aphorisms have been described as ‘the obscure hinterland between poetry and prose’ (New Yorker)—short pithy statements that capture the essence of the human condition in all its shades. Consciousness is the turn the universe makes to hasten its own end. Agnosticism is indulged only by those who have never suffered belief. Moving and mischievous, canny and profound—Don Paterson’s wide-ranging observations of no more than one or two lines demonstrate that the aphorism is the perfect form for our times.

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Ends of the Earth Robert Goddard, HB

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The Secret Chord Hardcover Geraldine Brooks, HB

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The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit Michael Finkel, PB

The Corners of the Globe Robert Goddard, PB

Days Without Number Robert Goddard, PB

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Now $18.95 The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds Michael Lewis, HB

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The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett, HB

Go Set a Watchman Harper Lee, Leatherbound

Suffer the Little Children Donna Leon, PB

Always Looking: Essays on Art John Updike, HB

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Dreams of a Great Small Nation Kevin J. McNamara, HB

The Moth Presents All These Wonders: True Stories about acing the Unknown, HB

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The Age of the Horse: An Equine The Secret Life of the Mind: Mariano Sigman, HB Journey Through Human History Susanna Forrest, HB

Leningrad: Siege and Symphony Brian Moynahan, HB

Time Travel : A History James Gleick, HB

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The Bible: A Beginner’s Guide Paula Gooder, PB

The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond Stephen O’Shea, HB

The Book of Hygge: The Danish Secondhand Time: Art of Contentment, Comfort The Last of the Soviets & Connection, HB Svetlana Alexievich, HB

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The Arts Parragirls: Reimagining Parramatta Girls Home through art & memory (eds) Lily Hibberd & Bonney Djuric ($60, PB)

Parragirls profiles the transformative artwork Parragirls realised in collaboration with contemporary artists & communities since the Parragirls Memory Project began in 2012. This vividly illustrated book reveals how art can change places & perceptions, in this case the long-neglected site of Parramatta Girls Home in Western Sydney, located on the lands of the Burramattagal people of the Darug nation. Centred on the art & activism of its former residents, this is the first publication of its kind to use images & creative writing to open up the difficult spaces of an Australian former child welfare institution, one where significant abuse took place right up until its closure in 1974, as evidenced in the royal commission into child sexual abuse.

Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations

by Stephen Ornes ($35, HB)

Stephen Ornes explores ‘math art’, presenting more than 80 pieces, including a crocheted, colourful representation of nonEuclidian geometry that looks like sea coral & a 65-ton, 28-foottall bronze sculpture covered in a space-filling curve. For each work is accompanied by the artist’s story followed by accessible & thought-provoking explanations of the mathematical concept & equations behind the art. From 3D-printed objects that give real form to abstract mathematical theories, to mystic fractals, to Andy Warhol as a solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem, these artworks embody some of strangest, most beautiful relationships among numbers & across dimensions.

The Green Florilegium ($105, HB)

Neither signed nor dated, The Green Florilegium is generally attributed to the German painter Hans Simon Holtzbecker & originates from the library at Gottorp Castle in Schleswig, on the border of Germany & Denmark. The album now resides at the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. Recently the book was painstakingly restored, allowing the delicate illustrations to come to new life in their original colours. This beautiful volume reproduces the original work of 178 botanical illustrations in its entirety. It also includes an introductory essay & captions with basic information on each flower.

Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities & Radical Politics

by Elizabeth Otto ($75, HB)

Elizabeth Otto liberates Bauhaus history, uncovering a movement that is vastly more diverse & paradoxical than previously assumed. Most often associated with a handful of famous artists, architects & designers Paul Klee, Walter Gropius & László Moholy-Nagy, Otto enlarges this narrow focus by reclaiming the historically marginalized lives & accomplishments of many of the more than 1,200 Bauhaus teachers & students (the socalled Bauhäusler)—revealing Bauhaus members’ spiritual experimentation, expressed in double-exposed spirit photographs & enacted in breathing exercises & nude gymnastics; their explorations of the dark sides of masculinity & emerging female identities; the queer hauntology of certain Bauhaus works; and the role of radical politics on both the left & the right during the school’s Communist period, when some of the Bauhäusler put their skills into the service of the revolution, and, later, into the service of the Nazis.

Renoir: The Body, The Senses ($110, HB)

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was deeply inspired by classical traditions & returned often to the canonical subject of the nude. Tracing the entire arc of Renoir’s career, this volume examines the different approaches he employed in his various depictions of the subject from his works that respond to Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas & Paul Cézanne, to his late, and still controversial, depictions of bathers that inspired the next generation of artists. Eminent scholars not only look at the different ways that Renoir used the nude as a means of personal expression but also analyse Renoir’s art in terms of a modern feminist critique of the male gaze.

Soft City: Building Density for Everyday Life

by David Sim (59, PB)

Imagine waking up to the gentle noises of the city, and moving through your day with complete confidence that you will get where you need to go quickly and efficiently. David Sim draws from his vast design experience to make a case for a dense & diverse built environment at a human scale, which he presents through a series of observations of older & newer places, and a range of simple built phenomena, some traditional & some totally new inventions. The soft city must consider the organization & layout of the built environment for more fluid movement & comfort, a diversity of building types, and thoughtful design to ensure a sustainable urban environment & society—beginning with the big ideas of happiness & quality of life, Sim then shows

how they are tied to the way we live.

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City of Women: Female Artists in Vienna from from 1900 to 1938 ($105, HB)

Although overshadowed by their male colleagues, many important women artists carved out successful careers in early 20th century Vienna. Their names, however, are largely unknown today & their masterpieces relegated to footnotes in history.

Artists such as Elena Luksch-Makowsky, Helene Funke, Erika Giovanna Klien, Ilse Bernheimer, Maria Cyrenius, Friedl Dicker, Marie Egner & Louise Fraenkel-Hahn are profiled along with vibrant reproductions of their works. The stories of how many of these women found their way to Vienna from Germany, Russia, & beyond are accompanied by explorations of their contributions to such movements as Atmospheric Impressionism, Secessionism, Expressionism, Kineticism & New Objectivity.

Colmar Treasure: A Medieval Jewish Legacy

by Barbara Boehm ($45, PB)

A chance discovery in 19th century Colmar, France, unveiled a precious hoard of medieval jewellery & coins hidden in the wall of a confectioner’s shop. The cache is thought to have been concealed by a Jewish family prior to the outbreak of the Plague in 1348, when Jews were terribly persecuted. This exquisite volume, published to accompany an exhibition at The Met Cloisters, examines Jewish legacy through the lens of this treasure, shedding light on the work, homes, worship & values of its owners.

Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work ($75, HB)

Throughout her long & prolific career American artist Ruth Asawa developed innovative sculptures in wire, a medium she explored through increasingly complex forms using craft-based techniques she learned while travelling in Mexico in 1947. In 1949, after studying at Black Mountain College, Asawa moved to San Francisco & created dozens of wire works, as well as an iconic bronze fountain the first of many public commissions for the city’s Ghirardelli Square. Bringing together examples from across Asawa’s rich career, this volume is a reorientation of her sculptures within the historical context of 20th century art..

A Museum Miscellany by Claire Cock-Starkey

Which are the oldest museums in the world? What is a cabinet of curiosities? Who haunts Hampton Court? What is on the FBI’s list of stolen art? This book celebrates the intriguing world of galleries & museums, from national institutions such as the Musée du Louvre, the British Museum & the Metropolitan Museum of Art to niche collections such as the Lawnmower Museum & the Museum of Barbed Wire. Here you will find a cornucopia of museum-related facts, statistics & lists, covering everything from museum ghosts, dangerous museum objects & conservation beetles to museum heists & the Museum of London’s fatberg. ($27, HB)

Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage ($57, PB)

This definitive survey of collage & 3-D sculpture (made from bits & pieces stuck & nailed together) spans the whole period from about 1600 to the present day. The lavish illustrations include images of items such as books with fold-out flaps, Victorian collage, Valentine & greeting cards, double exposure photographs, album covers such as Sgt Peppers, the Hungry Caterpillar, many curiosities & items from Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Pop, 70s counterculture, video & computerised collage.

Out this month V&A Pocket Diary 2020,

($15, HB)

Helene Schjerfbeck ($70, HB)

Finnish artist, Helene Schjertbeck’s career stretched from the late 1870s to the end of the WW2, encompassing both Impressionism & Modernism. This book records an exhibition that marks the first time her works have been seen in the UK since she exhibited in London herself in 1890. It presents the full range of her paintings & drawings, with 70 works from portrait, landscape to still-life. There are essays on Schjerfbeck’s technique, her social & cultural context, and her influence on such artists as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud & Frank Auerbach, and a series of self-portraits shows Schjerfbeck from youth to old age.

Colony: Australia 1770 1861 / Frontier Wars

It is now over 50 years since James Cook & crew set sail in the Endeavour to explore the Pacific. In 1770 they reached the east coast of a continent that has been inhabited for more than 65,000 years by many Indigenous groups with different languages & diverse cultures. His landing marked the beginning of a history that still has repercussions today, a history that both unites & divides Australia & highlights the need for reconciliation. Colony explores the immediate & far-reaching impact of the British colonisation of Australia, through historical, twentieth-century & contemporary art, illuminating the confronting & complex shared history of First Peoples & European settlers. ($80, HB)

Performing Arts Rough Ideas: Reflections on Music and More

by Stephen Hough ($40, HB)

Concert pianist Stephen Hough is also a writer, composer—recently described by the Economist as one of ‘20 Living Polymaths’. As an international performer he spends much of his life at airports, on planes, and in hotel rooms—and this book expands notes he has made, in his words, ‘during that dead time on the road’. He writes about music and the life of a musician, from exploring the broader aspects of what it is to walk out on to a stage or to make a recording, to specialist tips from deep inside the practice room: how to trill, how to pedal, how to practise.

He also writes vividly about people he’s known, places he’s travelled to, books he’s read, paintings he’s seen; and touches on more controversial subjects, such as assisted suicide, abortion, the existence of God, problems with some biblical texts & the challenge of being a gay Catholic.

Choreography: Creating & Developing Dance for Performance by Kate Flatt ($53, PB)

Kate Flatt has over 40 years’ experience as a choreographer & choreography teacher. She has choreographed dance, textbased theatre, film, musicals, opera & notably on the original Les Misérables with the RSC. Trained in ballet & contemporary dance, she has also travelled widely, researching vernacular dance forms in their traditional context. Choreography is the highly creative process of interpreting & coordinating movement, music & space in performance. By tracing different facets of development & exploring the essential artistic & practical skills of the choreographer, Flatt’s book offers unique insights for apprentice dance makers.

What They Didn’t Teach You in Film School

by Miguel Parga ($30, HB)

Miguel Parga has been in the industry for 25 years. As a news producer for ABC, he won an Emmy, a DuPont Award, and a Peabody Award. He’s created advertisements for Pepsi, Canon, Fisher Price, Bud Light, and Verizon. As a writer in Los Angeles, he’s worked on over 20 feature-length scripts. And since 2007, he’s been teaching acting, directing, writing, and editing at the New York Film Academy. His guide combines a practical, no-nonsense approach with a lifetime of insider knowledge Parga shows you how to get the best out of your film-school education, how to navigate some of the most frustrating moments in an artist’s life, and how to keep the inspiration going as you battle your way through the filmmaking world.

John: Over the last several weeks I what we're reading have read the first ten books in the Patrick O’Brian books featuring Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.

I’ve had this whole series sitting on the shelf awaiting my attention for possibly 15 years. And having finally begun, I find myself to be no exception to the readers I’ve seen fall prey to the O’Brian addiction—I find myself compelled towards the next episode, while trying to limit myself because I don’t want them to end. Aubrey is a Commander, and later Post Captain, in the Royal Navy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

Stephen Maturin is his friend, musician, Physician, naturalist, naval surgeon and spy. The books are set in the same period as Jane Austen’s work but show a very different side of Britain (where the non-inheriting second and third sons in an Austen novel may choose the navy as a career). This is Britain as a World Power. The battle scenes are exciting but O’Brian doesn’t shy away from the horrors of war. Giant splinters from the breached structure of the ships leave men dead and horribly injured. O’Brien has managed to create characters with complex inner lives and while much happens on the high seas, Jack and Stephen’s lives are very different, and equally compelling ashore. This is compulsive reading and I am looking forward to the remaining eleven books in the series.

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Andrew: I’ve just started Inland by Tea Obreht and so far it is worthy of the swag of rapturous reviews it has received. It has one of those first sentences that immediately drops you into a time and place and compels you to keep reading: ‘When those men rode down to the fording place last night, I thought us done for.’ SerbianAmerican Obreht made her name with The Tiger’s Wife which was set in an unnamed Balkan country, but with this, her sophomore effort, she confidently shifts to the American West of Arizona in 1893. I’ve also just started The Dutch House by Ann Patchett. It is out later this month, and an advance copy has been in high demand here—traded with the reverence and enthusiasm of six year olds trading Woolworth’s plastic collectables in the playground. I would have to say that based on the first three chapters it is worth all the hype it is receiving and destined to be one of our big books of the year.

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Bestsellers—Non-Fiction 1. Dark Emu

Bruce Pascoe

2. Banking Bad: How Corporate Greed & Broken

Governance Failed Australia

Adele Ferguson

3. Plots & Prayers: Malcolm Turnbull’s Demise &

Scott Morrison’s Ascension

Niki Savva

4. No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

Greta Thunberg

5. See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control &

Domestic Violence

Jess Hill

6. The Politics of the Common Good: Dispossession in Australia

Jane R Goodall

7. A Lot with a Little

Tim Costello

8. The History of Philosophy

A C Grayling

9. No Friend But the Mountains

Behrouz Boochani

10. QE 74: Prosperity Gospel: How Scott Morrison Won

and Bill Shorten Lost

Erik Jensen

Bestsellers—Fiction 1. Too Much Lip 2. Three Women 3. The Yield 4. The Overstory 5. City of Girls 6. Normal People 7. Big Sky 8. Frankissstein: A Love Story 9. Knife: Harry Hole 12 10. Milkman

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Melissa Lucashenko Lisa Taddeo Tara June Winch Richard Powers Elizabeth Gilbert Sally Rooney Kate Atkinson Jeanette Winterson Jo Nesbo Anna Burns

and another thing.....

As a Glebe resident who has walked a well-worn path from home to the shop and back for many years I was hugely gratified to find a Glebe Society book dropped off awaiting shelving about a character I’ve walked past for the same amount of years—a small, stern looking woman, either sitting or seatwalkering at a pace along Glebe Point Road. I’ve always thought she seemed like a model for old age—out and about under her own steam rather than stuck inside gnawing on old bones. As it turns out Sadie King, the woman of whom I speak, is 98 in December this year. She’s lived in Glebe for over 70 years, so no wonder she inhabits Glebe Point Road like it’s hers. Working in a munitions factory during WW2, she was active in the Labor Party and the union movement for many years, and also involved in saving Glebe from being paved over by expressways, and in the purchase and refurbishment of the Glebe Estate. This slender volume of oral history, Glasgow to Glebe: Sadie King’s Life Story, is written by Janice Challinor who ‘met and yarned’ with Sadie over a period of three years. I’ve always felt Sadie’s gaze too fierce to dare to start up a conversation, but thanks to Challinor and the Glebe Society the mystery of the ‘walking frame woman’ is solved. Meanwhile, I am reading and greatly admiring Elizabeth Hardwick’s collection, Seduction and Betrayal. These essays about the Brontë sisters (and the ‘hysterical, addictive and self-indulgent’ Branwell), Ibsen’s women, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf (and Bloomsbury), Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Carlyle are nothing short of fantastic—writing to aspire to. I’ve ordered the New York Review of Books career-spanning collection of her essays, reviews, criticism, because 200 pages of Hardwick is not enough. Next on the list is the new Margaret Atwood (no proofs to be had of this—the publisher is keeping the contents of The Testaments as close to the vest as the new Harry Potters were), and Sonia Lee has me wanting to head into Philip Kerr/Bernie Gunther land—perhaps for a read of the whole series—but I’ll start with Kerr’s last, but Gunther’s first, Metropolis. Viki

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