Book Club

REVIEWS book club

All books can be ordered through the publisher or your local bookshop. Call 8595 1234 or 1300 367 962, or email library@ nswnma.asn.au for assistance with loans or research. Books are not independently reviewed or reviewed using information supplied by the publishers.

Breathtaking

Rachel Clarke

Hachette Australia: RRP: $32.99 ISBN 9781408713778

SPECIAL INTEREST When the once-in-a-century pandemic struck, it didn’t matter that it was predicted and expected. We ambled, halfS PECIAL INTERES T asleep, into disaster. Economies nosedived. Whole societies shut down. As a palliative care doctor, Rachel Clarke found herself spending less time in the hospice and more in the hospital. Unable to convey the intensity of her days on the wards to friends and family, by night, she wrote about what she and her colleagues were going through. Breathtaking is her inside story of how the health service responded. But when she looked back over her writing, she found that what she had thought was an unrelenting stream of death and darkness was in fact illuminated by pinpricks of light. The curtailing of human contact, it seemed, was a reminder of precisely how precious it was, and just how far a little of it could go.

Rising Heart

Aminata Conteh-Biger with Juliet Rieden

Macmillan Australia RRP $34.99 ISBN 9781760784966

One woman’s astonishing journey from unimaginable trauma to becoming a power for good.

Brutally kidnapped from her father’s house by rebel soldiers. Resettled in Australia as a refugee. Now helping mothers and babies in Sierra Leone.

‘The best and the worst of our shared humanity … breathtaking and heartbreaking.’ The Hon. Dame Quentin Bryce AD CVO.

Old Seems To Be Other People

Lily Brett

Penguin Random House RRP $24.99 ISBN 9781761042348

Sparkling with wit and wisdom, Old Seems to be Other People is a collection of essays by Lily Brett that explores the hilarity, challenges and poignancy of getting older. In this disarming and gently self-deprecating collection of vignettes about ageing, Lily Brett gives us snapshots of her everyday life in New York. After waving enthusiastically to a tall, greyhaired woman she has mistaken for her husband and avoiding a large dog that turns out to be a fire hydrant, Lily has to concede that her ophthalmologist is right: she does need cataract surgery. While at a café with her husband, she’s transfixed by a speed-dating dinner in progress at the other end of the café. She moves closer and watches. The event manager tells her they also have speed-dating dinners for seniors.

The Chase

Candice Fox

Penguin Random House RRP $32.99 ISBN 9781760896799

The new novel by New York Times #1 bestselling Australian author Candice Fox is an electrifying cat-and-mouse thriller set in the Nevada desert. Candice Fox has been described by the Sydney Morning Herald as “one of the finest new gen crime writers” and her latest is another thrilling ride, as a mass prison breakout lets loose 650 of the country’s most dangerous prisoners.