Avid Reader's Summer Reading Guide

This season's best books, selected by your favourite independent bookseller

M M E U R S Reading • guide •

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THE AGE OF REINVENTION Karine Tuil

Scribner PB $29.99

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Doubleday PB WAS $32.99 NOW $27.99

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Canongate PB WAS $29.99 NOW $14.95

Manhattan attorney Sam Tahar appears to have it all: fame, fortune and family. But his charmed life is built on a lie – Sam isn’t the person he pretends to be. After studying law and losing the love of his life to his best friend Samuel, this son of a Tunisian immigrant flees Paris for America and assumes Samuel’s identity.

Years later, the two men and the woman they had both wanted meet again, with disastrous consequences. Tuil has written a suspenseful tale of a tangled love triangle in the long shadow of the socalled war on terror.

HarperCollins HB WAS $29.99 NOW $12.95

Transit Lounge PB $29.99

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‘Black Rock White City is a bold, mature and compassionate novel, and I couldn’t put it down.’ So says writer Christos Tsiolkas about the latest work from Australian author AS Patric. Set in suburban Melbourne, it’s a tale of displacement and immediate threat, and the unexpected responses of two Sarajevan refugees as they try to reclaim their dreams. The first novel by this up-and-coming talent (his previous works have been novellas or stories), Black Rock White City shows assurance and promise in equal parts.

Hamish Hamilton PB $32.99

BREAM GIVES ME HICCUPS & OTHER STORIES Jesse Eisenberg

Grove PB $29.99

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Sceptre PB WAS $29.99 NOW $13.95

1. What dish sometimes includes ant larvae?

THE BOOK OF STRANGE NEW THINGS Michel Faber

Imaginative, thoughtful and provocative, the first novel in over a decade from Michel Faber (The Crimson Petal and the White) is utterly absorbing. Faber delves into ideas of love, faith and hope through the story of Peter, a former homeless drug user turned Christian evangelist, and his wife Bea, the nurse who brought him to religion. Peter is chosen by a shadowy multinational to be a missionary on a distant planet, but his passion for his mission conflicts with his passion for Bea, left at home on Earth.

Turning all possible clichés on their heads, Faber balances an unputdownable plot with characters you’ll care desperately about, ideas you’ll turn over in your head for weeks, and a perfect touch of poignancy.

In this collection of 10 stories, the author of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies once again employs her considerable gifts of characterisation, observation and intelligence. With settings ranging from Saudi Arabia to Greece to London, these stories reveal what novelist James Lasdun has described as Mantel’s ‘great eye for the dross and dreck of urban and suburban life’.

THE AUTOMOBILE CLUB OF EGYPT Alaa Al Aswany

BLACK ROCK WHITE CITY AS Patric

AVENUE OF MYSTERIES John Irving

It’s been a few years since we were treated to a book from Irving, so the publication of this, his 14th novel, is extremely welcome.

Avenue of Mysteries follows an ageing writer as he journeys to the Philippines. Juan Diego takes his dreams and memories with him as he travels; and he feels most alive when remembering his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. In the Philippines, the past collides with his future. As should be expected from the author of classics including The World According to Garp, Irving uses comedy to enliven his musings on sex, mortality, fame and memory.

THE ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER Hilary Mantel

Jesse Eisenberg is best known for his portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in the 2010 film The Social Network. This collection of humorous stories is likely to change that, giving equal prominence to his achievements as a satirical writer. A number of the stories have previously featured in the New Yorker’s ‘Shouts & Murmurs’ column, and both they and the new material are funny and creative. A number are poignant, too. Steeped in a deep sense of neurosis and anxiety (Eisenberg admits to visiting two therapists per week), these stories are succinct, accessible and extremely difficult to put down.

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Faber PB WAS $29.99 NOW $13.95

Anyone who read Al Aswany’s global bestseller The Yacoubian Building will know that he is a masterful storyteller.

The Automobile Club of Egypt once again proves the point, telling the epic story of Abd el-Aziz, his family and his workplace – the Cairo social club that gives the book its title – against a backdrop of a country on the brink of major social and political change.

As conditions at their workplace become increasingly out of tune with life in modern Egypt, the Automobile Club’s employees face a stark choice: to live safely, but without dignity, or to fight for their rights and risk everything. The story of their choice and its repercussions makes for riveting reading.

THE BONE CLOCKS David Mitchell

In this metaphysical thriller, David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas, follows the twists and turns of his protagonist’s life from a scarred adolescence in Gravesend to old age on Ireland’s Atlantic coast as Europe’s oil supply dries up – a life not so far out of the ordinary, yet punctuated by flashes of precognition, visits from people who emerge from thin air and brief lapses in the laws of reality. For Holly Sykes – daughter, sister, mother, guardian – is also an unwitting player in a murderous feud played out in the shadows and margins of our world, and may prove to be its decisive weapon.

THE BURIED GIANT Kazuo Ishiguro

The latest novel from the author of Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day begins with a couple setting off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they haven’t seen in years.

On the way, they become involved with a mysterious Saxon warrior called Wistan, the old-fashioned knight Gawain and a child, Edwin, who is on the run from his village.

Writing in the Guardian, novelist Alex Preston described it as ‘Game of Thrones with a conscience…a beautiful, heartbreaking book about the duty to remember and the urge to forget’.

Literary Award Winners ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS

THE EYE OF THE SHEEP

HOW TO BE BOTH

PREPARATION FOR THE NEXT LIFE

THE STRAYS

THE TRAVELLERS AND OTHER STORIES

WHEN THERE’S NOWHERE ELSE TO RUN

Anthony Doerr Fourth Estate PB $19.99 This epic novel set during WWII was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Atticus Lish Oneworld HB $29.99 Lish’s powerful debut novel was awarded the 2015 PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Marlon James Oneworld PB $22.99 Marlon James became the first Jamaican writer to win the Man Booker Prize with this novel exploring the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s.

Emily Bitto Affirm PB $24.99 Bitto’s engrossing story of ambition, sacrifice and compromised loyalties won this year’s Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing.

Sofie Laguna Allen & Unwin PB $19.99 This year’s Miles Franklin Award went to this powerful story of a poor family struggling to cope with a different and difficult child.

Carys Davies Text PB $29.99 This volume incorporates two collections of Davies’ short stories, including the The Redemption of Galen Pike, winner of the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award.

Ali Smith Penguin PB $22.99 Smit h twists two tales of love and injustice into a single yarn in this challenging novel, which won the 2015 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Murray Middleton Allen & Unwin PB $27.99 The 2015 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award was awarded to this vivid and compelling collection of stories.

Fiction

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CARRYING ALBERT HOME Homer Hickam

HarperCollins PB $29.99

You know how family stories get embroidered to such an extent that it’s hard to tell where fact ends and fiction begins?

Homer Hickam, author not just of novels but of three memoirs about growing up in a West Virginian coal town, has taken this to the extreme. Carrying Albert Home is apparently based on stories his parents, Homer and Elsie, told him about their road trip during the Great Depression to return a pet alligator to Florida. Out of these tall tales he has created an even taller tale – a Forrest Gump–ish narrative that takes Homer, a solid, dependable coal miner, and Elsie, a woman despairing of her future as his wife, through extraordinary events while meeting famous American figures. Hickam’s real subjects are kismet and love.

CITY ON FIRE Garth Risk Hallberg

Jonathan Cape PB $32.99

Text HB $29.99

Hogarth PB $29.99

Here, one of the most lyrical contemporary novelists at work today reimagines one of Shakespeare’s most playful plays – The Winter’s Tale. Jeanette Winterson’s digressive and discursive adaptation recounts the story of a powerful, reckless king and his exiled infant daughter, but relocates the setting to post-GFC Britain and an apocalyptic American city. This is an entirely modern interpretation that plays fast and loose with the details of the original play, jettisoning characters and scenes but mirroring the original’s central thematic concerns of jealousy, absolution and the passage of time. Winterson boldly transforms and reinvents Shakespeare’s work while retaining its emotional heart – a major achievement.

GOLD FAME CITRUS Claire Vaye Watkins GHOST RIVER Tony Birch

UQP PB $29.95

The river is a place of history and secrets.

For Ren and Sonny, two unlikely friends, it’s a place of freedom and adventure.

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

Another powerful novel from the author of Blood (UQP PB $22.99).

In his latest novel, award-winning British writer Andrew Miller, author of Pure and Oxygen, continues his interest in exploring his characters’ relationship to pain. Obsessed with sailing and science, unlikely heroine Maud Stamp will intrigue readers. She meets and marries Tim, irritates his posh liberal family and has a child, but is Maud ‘a good mother’? Animosity builds until a tragic Sceptre PB $29.99 accident brings the marriage to breaking point. The Crossing is never predictable, offering a curious, completely absorbing meditation on grief and healing. Miller writes ruthlessly and compellingly about class and motherhood, generating considerable momentum with a taciturn protagonist.

Maud’s solo Atlantic voyage is a revelation.

THE GAP OF TIME Jeanette Winterson

A FEW DAYS IN THE COUNTRY & OTHER STORIES Elizabeth Harrower Internationally acclaimed for her five brilliant novels, Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower is also the author of a small body of short fiction. A Few Days in the Country brings together for the first time her stories published in Australian journals in the 1960s and 1970s, along with a number from her archives. New Yorker literary critic James Wood has described Harrower’s writing as being ‘witty, desolate, truthseeking, and complexly polished’, and all of those qualities apply to the stories in this collection. Some are caustic satires, others gentler explorations of friendship – all are essential reading for Harrower fans.

When the New York Times’ influential reviewer Michiko Kakutani describes a novel as being a work of ‘head-snapping ambition and heart-stopping power’, serious readers sit up and take note. And so it was when Garth Risk Hallberg released this, his first and highly anticipated novel. Set in New York, City on Fire kicks off with an attempted murder in Central Park on New Year’s Eve 1976 and concludes with the infamous New York blackout of July 1977. Drawing comparison with the novels of Don DeLillo, Tom Wolfe and even Charles Dickens, it’s a literary epic as dense, complex and filled with compelling characters as NYC itself.

THE CROSSING Andrew Miller

Quercus PB $29.99

GHOST: 100 STORIES TO READ WITH THE LIGHTS ON Louise Welsh (ed)

Head of Zeus HB $39.99

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Huge drifts of sand have laid waste to California, and a land that was once famed for its riches, film studios and orange groves is now a post-apocalyptic landscape where water and compassion are equally rare commodities. It’s difficult to get out, so Luz and Ray are squatting in the abandoned mansion of a Hollywood starlet, relying on Ray’s ingenuity and Luz’s cash to survive.

But then they adopt toddler Ig, and are left with no choice but to try to escape. In this dystopic debut, Claire Vaye Watkins lays bare a world crippled by ecological disaster, plagued by false prophets and largely bereft of hope. Pertinent and powerful, it’s an extraordinarily assured novel from a writer with a great future.

Bloomsbury HB WAS $32.99 NOW $27.99

This beautifully presented anthology brings together an eclectic collection of ghost stories by contemporary and classic authors. From the sinister to the outright terrifying, these are stories of gothic hauntings and modern noir.

Traditional folktales sit alongside unnerving modern tales of not-quite-departed dead lovers and chilling stories of revenge enacted beyond the grave. Contributors include masters of the horror genre such Stephen King, Angela Carter, HP Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe, along with accomplished stories by renowned contemporary literary authors such as Lydia Davis, Haruki Murakami, Kate Atkinson and Hilary Mantel. Lovers of spine-tingling supernatural tales, whatever their preferred genre or era of ghost stories, will find much to delight them in these 800 pages.

THE HEART GOES LAST Margaret Atwood

Stan and Charmaine are a married couple having trouble staying afloat in the midst of economic and social collapse. So when they see an advertisement for the Positron Project in the town of Consilience – a ‘social experiment’ offering stable jobs and a home of their own – they sign up immediately. At first, all is well. But slowly, Positron starts to look less like a prayer answered and more like a chilling prophecy fulfilled. Atwood returns to territory that she last ventured into three decades ago in The Handmaid’s Tale, and does so in a similarly thoughtprovoking fashion.

Highly Recommended BEAUTY IS A WOUND

THE BOOK OF ARON

THE DRESSMAKER

FEVER OF ANIMALS

THE FOX AND THE STAR

A GUIDE TO BERLIN

GUIDELINES FOR MOUNTAIN LION SAFETY

LIST OF THE LOST

Eka Kurniawan Text PB $32.99 This English-language debut of Indonesia’s rising literary star is compulsively readable, combining history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humour and romance in an astonishing epic novel.

Coralie Bickford-Smith Particular Books HB $35 A fable for all ages, presented in a magnificently designed book with cloth cover and full-colour illustrations.

Jim Shepard Quercus PB $29.99 This heartbreaking novel depicts the Warsaw ghetto through the eyes of a nine-year-old boy and commemorates the famous Doctor Korczak, saver of children.

Gail Jones Vintage PB $32.99 The latest novel by Australian writer Gail Jones tells the story of a group of six international travellers who meet in empty apartments in Berlin to share stories and memories.

Rosalie Ham Duffy & Snellgrove PB $22.99 A new film tie-in edition of Ham’s much-loved novel.

Read it before you see Jocelyn Moorhouse’s onscreen version!

Poe Ballantine Transit Lounge PB $29.95 A hilarious and heartwrenching collection of essays by an American essayist whose work is often compared with that of Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski.

Miles Allinson Scribe PB $29.99 After receiving an inheritance, Miles heads to Europe on the trail of surrealist painter Emil Bafdescu, who disappeared in 1967. But in trying to unravel the mystery of Bafdescu’s secret life, Miles must also reckon with his own.

Morrissey Penguin PB $19.99 A high-octane, ferociously lyrical novel by the former front man of the Smiths.

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Fiction HOPE FARM Peggy Frew

Scribe PB $29.99

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Picador HB WAS $46.99 NOW $39.99

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Fourth Estate PB WAS $32.99 NOW $27.99

Her debut novel House of Sticks drew comparisons to Henry James and Helen Garner, and now Peggy Frew returns with an equally menacing, sharply observed domestic drama set mostly in the 1980s.

When Ishtar falls for and follows charismatic Miller to a commune in Gippsland, her teenage daughter, Silver, is wary but hopeful. Told from Silver’s perspective, interspersed with Ishtar’s diary entries, Hope Farm showcases Frew’s poise in depicting complex emotional fault lines.

She takes a cool-handed hammer to hippy idylls, expertly exposing excruciating gender divisions, and her portrait of motherhood, its sacrifices and compromises, is heartbreaking.

THE MOUNTAIN SHADOW Gregory David Roberts

In this long-awaited sequel to the bestselling Shantaram, Roberts continues the story of Lin, an Australian fugitive working for the local mafia in Mumbai. It has been two years since the events in Shantaram unfolded, and Lin has lost two people he had come to love: his father figure, Khaderbhai, and his soul mate, Karla. Returning from a prolonged smuggling trip, he finds a city that seems to have changed too much, too soon. Many of his old friends are long gone, the new mafia leadership has become entangled in increasingly violent and dangerous intrigues, and a fabled holy man challenges everything that Lin thought he’d learned about love and life. But Lin can’t leave the Island City: Karla, and a fatal promise, won’t let him go.

PURITY Jonathan Franzen

This is a novel that elicits strong reactions in its readers. Novelist Colm Tóibín, reviewing it in the New York Times, damned it with praise so faint it was almost undetectable. But another acclaimed novelist, Curtis Sittenfeld, enthused about its ‘rich scenes and crackling dialogue, its delicious observations about contemporary life’ when reviewing it for the Guardian. And the contradictions don’t stop there – while addressing very modern issues such as privacy in the information age and gender equality in the workplace, Franzen uses a framework for this story that is resolutely old-fashioned, dredging up references to Dickens’ Great Expectations at every opportunity. Thought provoking and eminently readable, this is a highly entertaining novel.

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THE JAPANESE LOVER Isabel Allende

Scribner HB WAS $39.99 NOW $32.99

On the eve of WWII, young Polish refugee Alma is sent to America to live with wealthy relatives. There she meets Ichimei, the unassuming son of the gardener. From this first childhood meeting, Alma and Ichimei form an intimate bond. But when Ichimei and his family are imprisoned in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans, it is only the first in a series of obstacles that conspire to keep them apart. The Japanese Lover tells of Alma and Ichimei’s decades-long thwarted love, and traces their brief interludes of intimacy. Isabel Allende’s sweeping escapist romance renders the dramatic minutiae of everyday lives against the backdrop of momentous historical events.

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When Tom Keneally discovered by chance that Betsy Balcombe, a young girl living on St Helena while Napoleon was exiled there, had become the former emperor’s ‘intimate friend and annoyer’ before emigrating with her family to Australia, he felt impelled to research and tell Betsy’s story. This novel is the result, and it’s another of the cracking reads that we’ve come to expect from Keneally. We follow Betsy as she and her family befriend, serve and are ruined by ‘The Great Ogre’, and as they move to New South Wales to start a new life and a new dynasty.

An extraordinary story, colourfully told.

2. Who maps the probability of paranormal activity?

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Hachette HB WAS $39.99 NOW $34.99

Picador PB $32.99

NAPOLEON’S LAST ISLAND Tom Keneally

Knopf HB WAS $45 NOW $32.99

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A LITTLE LIFE Hanya Yanagihara

Shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Yanagihara’s unsettling novel is sure to be one of the most talked-about books this summer. A huge, ambitious and confronting work, it is an epic tale of male friendship in the 21st century that dwells in the darkest corners of human existence. Few books have included such graphic depictions of abuse and physical suffering, and some readers will find these very hard to take, especially as Yanagihara refuses to apply concepts such as redemption and deliverance. Nevertheless, those who do persevere will find a strange beauty and undeniable power in this astonishing book.

THE NATURAL WAY OF THINGS Charlotte Wood

At first glance, the cover of Charlotte Wood’s latest novel looks like a pretty rendering of Australian flora. Perhaps a nice pastoral lies within? But look closer, and you see chains, a lock and even a knife, signalling that there’s probably nothing pastoral in this tale. In fact, Wood delivers a literary punch Allen & Unwin PB in the guts – a beautifully written book $29.99 about misogyny and how far it might go, especially with tacit corporate and political backing. A group of women are imprisoned in the back of beyond, forced to wear oldfashioned uniforms, subject to arbitrary rules and the whims of their jailers. Why? The slow unfolding of their pasts and futures is nothing less than a literary triumph.

THE SIMPLEST WORDS: A STORYTELLER’S JOURNEY Alex Miller THE SECRET CHORD Geraldine Brooks

One thing must be said about Geraldine Brooks – she certainly isn’t predictable.

After setting her first novel Year of Wonders in 17th-century Britain, she moved to 19thcentury America in March, to Sarajevo across the centuries in People of the Book and back to 17th-century America in Caleb’s Crossing.

In The Secret Chord, she turns her powerful imagination to the biblical era, recounting the story of King David from his youth as a shepherd through his rise to power and his fall from grace. It’s a compelling portrait of a morally complex hero that is full of drama and richly drawn detail.

Allen & Unwin HB $35

It’s hard to believe that this is the first published collection of Alex Miller’s shorter works. The winner of multiple literary awards (including the Miles Franklin twice), Miller has reserved his place in the pantheon of Australian writers with his novels. Now The Simplest Words gives us a sample of stories, essays and articles from the last 40 years, with a poem to finish.

There is much to gain from each individual piece, but it is the way they build up to give a picture of Miller’s work and how he comes to it that is the real pleasure. There is also much biographical material, giving us an insight into not just the work, but the author’s life too – and the profound links between the two.

Highly Recommended Little Jewel/ Paris Nocturne

THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WORLD

RUSH OH!

SALT CREEK

SWEET CARESS

THE SYMPATHIZER

TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS & TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS

UNDERMAJORDOMO MINOR

Patrick Modiano Text PB $27.99 each In these two extraordinary novels, the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature explores childhood, memory, betrayal and the search for identity and connection.

William Boyd Bloomsbury PB $29.99 Boyd is a master storyteller, and this story of photographer and free spirit Amory Clay is a wonderful melange of reportage, history and fiction.

Stephanie Bishop Hachette PB $29.99 A story of melancholy beauty that proves the only thing harder than losing home is trying to find it again. Winner of the Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction 2015.

Viet Thanh Nguyen Corsair PB $29.99 This gripping spy novel set against the backdrop and legacy of the Vietnam War has been likened to classics by Conrad, Greene and Le Carré.

Shirley Barrett Picador PB $32.99 A poignant and hilarious story set in the whaling community of Eden on the NSW south coast at the start of the 20th century.

Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape PB $32.99 Rushdie’s lush, richly layered and strictly adults-only novel is set in New York in the near future and was inspired by the Arabian Nights.

Lucy Treloar Picador PB $29.99 1855. In South Australia’s Coorong, 15-year-old Hester Finch and her family try to tame the landscape and farm the traditional land of the Ngarrindjeri people, unleashing a chain of events that will tear the family asunder.

Patrick deWitt Granta PB $27.99 An ink-black comedy of manners in fairy-tale form by the author of Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers.

Fiction

SLADE HOUSE David Mitchell

Sceptre HB $27.99

The many fans of David Mitchell’s distinctive brand of weird and wonderful writing will be both spooked and delighted by his newest release, a collection of five linked ghost stories. Each takes place nine years to the day after the last, when the barrier between the everyday and supernatural worlds is temporarily weakened. The eponymous Slade House is a metaphysical mansion that appears in the physical realm only temporarily, allowing its malevolent soul-sucking inhabitants a chance to lure their next victim and sate their supernatural hunger for nine more years. Set in the same universe as his 2014 novel The Bone Clocks, Mitchell’s absorbingly eerie tales are sure to leave readers wanting more.

STORIES FROM OTHER PLACES Nicholas Shakespeare

Harvill Secker HB $35

The accomplished stories in this collection traverse the globe and flawlessly evoke a sense of place, whether the setting is an isolated mining village in Bolivia or a shabby postcolonial hotel in India. Shakespeare is adept at the deft characterisation that can bring a short story to life, and his protagonists include convicts, widows, unlikely assassins and an amnesiac flight attendant. His artful prose is grounded in realism, and although his characters often find themselves caught up in the absurdity of pivotal historical moments, they are always driven by unmistakably human desires.

SORCERER TO THE CROWN Zen Cho

Macmillan PB $29.99

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Text PB $29.99

SUBMISSION Michel Houellebecq

William Heinemann PB $32.99

Houellebecq’s provocative sixth novel tackles political and religious sacred cows with brutal acuity. Set in a near-future France, it depicts the rise of radical Islam in the form of a charismatic and wily political leader, Muhammed Ben Abbes, whose religious beliefs underpin his party platform.

What follows is the transformation of secular France into an Islamic state that is equal parts utopic and dystopic – all seen through the eyes of François, a nihilistic, spiritually vacuous middle-aged academic. Submission is a challenging read, and though Houellebecq’s insensitivity and occasional misogyny are in full force, they are always deployed in the service of his grand satirical ambitions and desire to confront and dismantle contemporary complacencies.

This rollicking yarn set in Regency London gets our vote as the most original novel in this year’s catalogue. A decidedly strange hybrid of Georgette Heyer–style romance and Harry Potter–style fantasy, it’s the story of Zacharias Wythe, England’s first African Sorcerer Royal, and Prunella Gentleman, an ambitious magical prodigy. Zacharias isn’t finding his initial tenure as Sorcerer Royal easy – he must juggle the conflicting demands of the Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers and also cope with the Fairy Court refusing to grant Britain the magical resources it needs. But these problems fade into insignificance when compared with the problem of Prunella, who has just stumbled upon English magic’s greatest discovery in centuries and intends to make the most of it.

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Bloomsbury HB WAS $35 NOW $14.95

THE STORY OF THE LOST CHILD Elena Ferrante

Ferrante’s brilliant Neapolitan series culminates in a fourth instalment that not only matches the power of the novels that came before it but also encapsulates and further develops the many ideas they contained.

The Story of the Lost Child opens with Elena once again pondering the loyalties, rivalries, jealousies and betrayals that have defined her long friendship with Lila. The two women are now mothers, and the loss of a child will both bind and divide them. Like its extraordinary predecessors, the book is about politics, place and personhood – about nothing less than the full experience of being a woman. Special Offer: Buy the first three books in Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, and we’ll only charge you for two!

Simon & Schuster PB $32.99

STONE MATTRESS Margaret Atwood

In these nine darkly humorous tales, acclaimed Canadian writer Margaret Atwood ventures into the shadowland that has in the past been explored by fabulists and concoctors of dark yarns such as Robert Louis Stevenson and Daphne du Maurier.

All of the characters in these stories look back from old age on a distant past that has become its own mythological landscape. In one, a recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband. Others feature vampires, ghostly presences, disembodied hands and something very nasty that’s been vacuum-packed and left in an abandoned storage unit.

A STRANGENESS IN MY MIND Orhan Pamuk

Hamish Hamilton PB $32.99

TOM HOUGHTON Todd Alexander

Todd Alexander’s frank and tender comingof-age story juxtaposes his character’s younger and older selves to explore how an unresolved past can unravel us. Forty-yearold Tom is an almost amazing actor in an almost amazing relationship. His foibles will resonate with readers but it is the younger Tom who shines. Ebullient, vulnerable and obsessed with Katharine Hepburn’s dead brother, he’s decidedly uncool in 1970s Western Sydney and is bullied relentlessly.

As young Tom hurtles towards what readers anticipate is certain social suicide, Alexander writes convincingly and empathically about teenage friendship, sexuality, motherhood and mental illness.

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If you are yet to read a novel by Orhan Pamuk, this is a good place to start.

Previous titles by Turkey’s Nobel Laureate have been hard work – he’s not one to make concessions to those with short-ish attention spans or a suspicion of excessive introspection – but A Strangeness in My Mind is a very different proposition. A Dickensian-style yarn about the life of street vendor Mevlut Karataş, it does for Istanbul what Charles Dickens did for London, chronicling the city and the lives of its inhabitants with insight, compassion, fondness and occasional moral outrage.

Mevlut is a wonderful protagonist – an innocent abroad in an often cruel but always colourful city.

THE WOMEN’S PAGES Debra Adelaide

Picador PB $29.99

Dove is writing a novel about the life of Ellis, an ordinary young woman of the 1960s troubled by secrets and gaps in her past. Having read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to her dying mother, Dove finds she cannot shake off the influence of that singular novel, and its story slowly becomes entwined with her own. Debra Adelaide, author of the much-loved The Household Guide to Dying (Picador PB $22.99), writes about the choices and compromises women make, about the mysterious process of creativity, and about the way stories are shaped and fiction is formed.

Highly Recommended BER DECEM SE RELEA

THE VIOLINIST OF VENICE

WHERE MY HEART USED TO BEAT

THE LOST TUDOR PRINCESS

THE SECRET WAR

Alyssa Palombo Macmillan PB $29.99 Spanning more than 30 years, this novel tells the story of composer and priest Antonio Vivaldi’s two great loves: his mistress and his music.

Alison Weir Jonathan Cape PB $35 The fascinating biography of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, an extraordinary woman whose life spanned five Tudor reigns and who was instrumental in securing the Stuart succession to the throne of England for her grandson.

Sebastian Faulks Hutchinson PB $32.99 The latest novel by the author of the much-loved Birdsong revisits his favourite themes of war – in this case, WWII – romance, loss and mental illness.

Max Hastings HarperCollins PB $32.99 Military historian Max Hastings examines the espionage and intelligence machines of all sides in WWII, as well as the impact of spies, code-breakers and partisan operations on events.

THE WORLD WITHOUT US Mireille Juchau Bloomsbury PB $29.99 Told from the perspective of six interconnected characters, this Australian novel is in turn mystery, love story and elegy for a denatured landscape.

THE BIG BAD BOOK OF BILL MURRAY

Robert Schnakenberg Quirk PB $39.99 Part biography, part critical appreciation, this book profiles the incomparable Bill Murray, an actor who can do Hamlet and Charlie’s Angels in the same year… and get away it.

THE YEAR OF THE RUNAWAYS

Sunjeev Sahota Picador PB $29.99 Shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Sahota’s novel moves between India and England, and between childhood and the present day, to tell a story of dignity in the face of adversity.

THE LIFE-CHANGING MAGIC OF TIDYING

Marie Kondo Vermilion HB $35 A beautiful hardback gift edition of the international bestseller that can help you to live in a clean and clutter-free home forever courtesy of the life-changing KonMari Method.

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Crime & Thrillers A IS FOR ARSENIC Kathryn Harkup

Sigma PB $29.99

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Avid Agatha Christie fan and research chemist Kathryn Harkup discusses the poisons used by Christie in 14 of her novels, proving that just because they were used in fiction doesn’t mean they lacked factual accuracy. Christie’s choice of poisons was far from random; their chemical and physiological characteristics provide vital clues to solve the murders. Much of her knowledge was gleaned from her work as an apothecary’s assistant in hospitals during both world wars, so she knew why certain chemicals kill, how they interact with the body, and how they can be detected. From the ancient (the hemlock in Five Little Pigs) to the modern (the thallium in The Pale Horse), this guide to Dame Agatha’s deadly dispensary is fascinating reading.

UQP PB $32.95

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CAREER OF EVIL Robert Galbraith

Sphere PB WAS $32.99 NOW $27.99

The third book in JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series continues to develop the working relationship of the private detective and his assistant Robin Ellacott. When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman’s severed leg. Cormoran is less surprised but no less alarmed. There are four people from his past who may be responsible – and Strike knows that any one of them is capable of sustained and unspeakable brutality. With the police refusing to focus on more than one suspect, Strike and Robin have no choice but to take matters into their own hands, delving into the dark and twisted worlds of the other three possible culprits.

Unexpected twists around every corner make this yet another unputdownable volume from a master storyteller.

THE HEAT Garry Disher

Text PB $29.99

One of Australia’s most accomplished crime writers returns, this time with a novel set in Queensland. Disher’s creation of Wyatt, a contract thief with a talent for staying under the radar, owes much to Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley – both are men who have based careers on meticulous planning and their possession of a flexible, almost non-existent, moral compass. When Wyatt is contracted to steal a painting in Noosa, he finds himself involved in more than a burglary, with paedophilia and a murderous double-cross being thrown into the mix. Visits to paradise aren’t meant to be like this…

Orion PB WAS $32.99 NOW $27.99

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Those readers who found themselves mesmerised by Condon’s Three Crooked Kings and Jacks and Jokers will be equally enthusiastic about the closing volume in this true-crime trilogy. It’s 1983, and soon-to-beknighted Police Commissioner Terry Lewis continues to turn a blind eye to the operation of the Joke, a highly organised system of graft payments from illegal gambling, prostitution and illicit drugs. As the tentacles of this fraudulent vice network spread, the fabric holding together the police, judiciary and political system starts to unravel. All Fall Down draws from interviews with key players to provide the definitive account of an unforgettable period in Queensland’s history.

Detective Inspector Siobhan Clarke is investigating the death of a senior lawyer during a robbery. When a note is discovered indicating that this wasn’t a random attack – and when local gangster Big Ger Cafferty receives an identical message – Clarke decides that the recently retired John Rebus may be able to help. At the same time, a notorious family has arrived in Edinburgh, tailed by a team of undercover detectives who are liaising with DI Malcolm Fox. There’s something that this family wants, and they’ll stop at nothing to get it. It’s a game of dog eat dog – in the city as in the wild.

3. What once looked down on dinosaurs?

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Harvill Secker PB WAS $32.99 NOW $27.99

This slim novel from Umberto Eco is framed as a thriller – the novel opens with narrator Colonna in hiding, waiting for an unidentified ‘them’ to hunt him down because of what he knows. But what does he know? It’s a complicated question that is part of a layered plot about 20th-century Italian history, set in 1992 Milan, but looking back to the assassination of Mussolini in 1945. Colonna is a journalist, hired on a newspaper that will never be published but is a plaything of a wannabe mover and shaker. One of his colleagues is a conspiracy theorist, convinced Mussolini is still alive, and the novel’s concerns are less thriller than philosophical and political – truth, history, narrative, connectedness and Italy’s inheritance.

A BANQUET OF CONSEQUENCES Elizabeth George

Detective Inspector Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers are back, doing what they do best – solving complex crimes under pressure. When noted feminist writer and speaker Clare Abbott is poisoned after a debate at Cambridge University, Havers sees a chance to redeem herself with her superior officers through disciplined hard work. Was the case linked to the recent death of the son of Abbott’s personal assistant in Dorset?

With Lynley working the case in London and DS Winston Nkata working with Barbara in Dorset, the twisted personality behind both events is revealed. As always, George’s complex plotting, characterisation and attention to detail are flawless.

GOOD MONEY JM Green

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A new series of Australian crime novels – goody! Featuring Stella Hardy, a wisecracking social worker with a thirst for social justice, good laksa and cask wine, Good Money is a fast-paced romp through Melbourne’s western suburbs that reflects that city’s ethnic diversity and sometimesdangerous undercurrents. After the death of a client and the disappearance of her neighbour, Stella begins to suspect that the incidents might be linked. Enlisting the help of her friend, Senior Constable Phuong Nguyen, she digs a little deeper and ends up embroiled in a nightmarish world of drug dealers, sociopaths and killers.

RECIPES FOR LOVE AND MURDER Sally Andrew

NUMERO ZERO Umberto Eco

Text PB WAS $29.99 NOW $24.99

This summer’s number-one feel-good crime title! Sally Andrew’s debut novel features an endearing protagonist in the form of Tannie Maria, who writes a hybrid recipe-advice column for the Klein Karoo Gazette, a struggling local paper servicing a semi-desert region in South Africa. Tannie usually assists the locals with their romantic challenges, but then she receives a letter from Martine, whose husband beats her, and Tannie Maria feels a pang of recognition and dread – this may be a problem that cooking can’t solve. Filled with loveable characters, romance and recipes – not to mention colourful Afrikaans language – Recipes for Love and Murder is reminiscent of Alexander McCall Smith’s books, but Andrew has successfully carved out a niche for a second popular series set in that part of the world.

BER DECEM SE RELEA

THE AMERICAN

BLACK-EYED SUSANS

THE PORT FAIRY MURDERS

RESURRECTION BAY

Robert Gott Scribe PB $29.99 This sequel to The Holiday Murders (Scribe PB 29.99) sees Detective Joe Sable and Constable Helen Lord investigating a double murder in the coastal town of Port Fairy in the 1940s.

Hodder & Stoughton PB WAS $29.99 NOW $25.99

EVEN DOGS IN THE WILD Ian Rankin

Highly Recommended Nadia Dalbuono Scribe PB $32.99 Detective Leone Scamarcio (The Few) is back, called to investigate an apparent suicide on the Ponte Sant’ Angelo in Rome. Soon, US Intelligence officers warn Scamarcio to drop his investigation. Will he listen?

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ALL FALL DOWN Matthew Condon

EDEN

Julia Heaberlin Michael Joseph PB $32.99 As a teenager, Tessa was the only survivor of a serial killer’s attack, and her testimony helped to put the killer behind bars. Or did it? Many years later, Tessa starts to hold concerns about her own teenage daughter’s safety.

Emma Viskic Echo PB $29.99 Caleb Zelic is deaf but he refuses to let this limit his work as an investigator. When one of his friends is violently murdered, it’s up to Caleb to track down the killers, aided by his troubled partner Frankie and his ex-wife Kat.

Candice Fox Bantam PB $19.99 Winner of the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for Best Australian Crime Fiction, Eden follows Detective Frank Bennett and his partner, the enigmatic Eden Archer, as they try to find three missing girls.

BER DECEM SE RELEA

SWOONING

Christopher Lawrence Nero PB $27.99 This ‘Classical Music Guide to Life, Love, Lust and Other Follies’ documents the alltoo-human flaws in the lives of the great composers.

LIFE OR DEATH

Michael Robotham Sphere PB $19.99 Only the second Australian crime novel to be awarded the British Crime Writers’ Association’s prestigious Gold Dagger Award (the other was Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore), Robotham’s 10th novel is a fast-paced thriller set in Texas.

THE UNSEEN ANZAC

Jeff Maynard Scribe HB $39.99 Though he was Australia’s greatest WWI photographer, George Hubert Wilkins remains largely unknown. In this biography, Jeff Maynard aims to redress this situation by telling the story of Wilkins’ exploits on the Western Front.

BER DECEM SE RELEA

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Language, Poetry & Essays THE ANNOTATED LITTLE WOMEN John Matteson (ed)

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is a publishing phenomenon. It’s been translated into more than 50 languages; has inspired six films, four television shows, a Broadway musical, an opera and a web series; and has been read by millions since its initial publication in the 1860s. In this annotated version, Alcott scholar John Matteson gives plenty of background on the book and on the family who inspired it. Over 200 illustrations evoke Alcott’s world, and Matteson’s introductory essays examine the novel’s pivotal place in children’s literature. A fascinating analysis of a perennial favourite.

THE DEVIL IS A BLACK DOG Sándor Jászberényi

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War-torn Africa, a Middle East in crisis and post-Soviet Eastern Europe form the backdrop to the stories told in this collection – stories based on the extraordinary real-life experiences of acclaimed photojournalist Sándor Jászberényi. From Cairo to the Gaza Strip, from Benghazi to Budapest, his characters contemplate the meaning of home, love, family and friendship in the face of brutality. Immersed in the societies he reports on and heedless in the face of war and revolution, Jászberényi observes mothers, martyrs, soldiers and lovers who must confront the extremes of contemporary experience. In spare, evocative prose, he combines fact and fiction to create a profoundly true portrait of the humanity behind the headlines.

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THE BEST AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS 2015

BER DECEM SE A E L E R

Geordie Williamson (ed)

Black Inc PB $29.99

THE BEST AUSTRALIAN POEMS 2015 Geoff Page (ed) Black Inc PB $24.99

THE BEST AUSTRALIAN STORIES 2015

Amanda Lohrey (ed) Black Inc PB $29.99 Summer wouldn’t be the same without these annual showcases of the local literary scene. This year, Essays includes contributions from authors including Helen Garner, DBC Pierre, Ceridwen Dovey, Tim Winton, Drusilla Modjeska and Sophie Cunningham; Poems includes contributions from Fiona Wright, Robert Adamson, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Clive James and others; and Stories features works by writers including Cate Kennedy, Julie Koh, Ryan O’Neill, Jo Case and Balli Kaur Jaswal.

FROM THE HEART Michaela McGuire & Marieke Hardy (eds)

Viking PB $29.99

ON BUNYAH Les Murray

On Bunyah is a love letter of sorts, unravelling the history of the author’s home near Taree through verse. Murray’s Bunyah is intimately and exquisitely observed: from a farmer’s ‘murmured vowel’ to clouds the colour of a ‘worn-out dairy bucket’. Folklore farm machinery, plants and animals mingle with personal reflections on survival and loss. Photographs pepper the text – toddler Murray with chickens, a Calvinist church, an axe stuck in a fence post – amplifying the brutality and beauty of this collection of new, old and reworked poems. Like the humble cockspur bush Murray describes, ‘I am lived and died in, vine woven, multiplied’, Murray’s latest volume offers a complex, tender portrait of the ebb and flow of life.

BER DECEM SE RELEA

Norton HB $49.95

Now an annual event, the publication of this compilation of letters first read at Women of Letters afternoons is eagerly anticipated by all those who haven’t been lucky enough to attend the events themselves. This year’s contributors include musician Amanda Palmer, who thanks a song for reminding her of the importance of both music and love; Senator Penny Wong, who tells of the ‘amazing highs and terrible lows’ of choosing a career in Australian politics; and chef and author Stephanie Alexander, who writes of the shining moment when she received a letter from her hero Elizabeth David. All royalties for the book go to Edgar’s Mission animal rescue shelter.

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Mary Norris, author of the bestselling Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, describes Thomas Vinciguerra’s Cast of Characters as being akin to ‘a tantalising gossip session about the star writers and supporting players of The New Yorker in its formative years’. These star players included theatre critic and noted wit Wolcott Gibbs; eccentric founding editor Harold Ross; enigmatic novelist EB White; cartoonist and fabulist James Thurber; and dashing reporter and editor St Clair McKelway, famed for being married five times and having no fewer than 12 personalities. Vinciguerra shows how, as a group, these and other members of the inner circle brought forth a profound transformation in how life was perceived, interpreted, written about and published in mid-20th-century America.

LISTS OF NOTE Shaun Usher

In his follow-up to the bestselling Letters of Note, Shaun Usher, sole custodian of the popular blogs listsofnote.com and lettersofnote.com, turns his hand to lists.

Having trawled the world’s archives, he has put together a rich visual anthology that stretches from ancient times to the present day. From a to-do list of Leonardo da Vinci’s to Charles Darwin on the pros and cons of marriage or Julia Child’s list of possible titles for what would later become an American cooking bible, Lists of Note is constantly surprising and utterly engrossing.

WORST WORDS Don Watson

THE WELL-EDUCATED MIND Susan Wise Bauer Academic and publisher Susan Wise Bauer condenses a staggering quantity of information into this accessible survey of the sum of human knowledge across six key genres – fiction, autobiography, history, drama, poetry and science. Bauer covers essential developments in each field, and draws clear links between traditions and trajectories of knowledge through the centuries. Each section is lucidly presented and carefully annotated, encouraging the reader to draw links between classical texts and contemporary writers.

CAST OF CHARACTERS Thomas Vinciguerra

Vintage PB $29.99

The English language can win minds, hearts and nations. So why, asks Don Watson, don’t we use it properly? Returning to the follies he described in Death Sentence and Weasel Words, Watson laments the fact that the language of business and work is growing ever more depleted, barren and senseless. And this sad state of affairs has gone viral: leaping from corporate windows of opportunity, it has taken hold in universities and schools, our parliaments, the public service, hospitals, local councils, fire brigades, even the weather bureau. Full of Watson’s trademark management-jargon mockery, Worst Words will make you cringe, laugh and maybe even feel a twinge or two of shame.

Highly Recommended BER DECEM SE RELEA

BEST AUSTRALIAN COMEDY WRITING 2015

Luke Ryan (ed) Affirm PB $29.99 This chortle-inducing compilation includes contributions by Shaun Micallef, Annabel Crabb, Monica Dux, Andrew Denton, Tony Martin, Ben Pobjie and others.

NEIN. A MANIFESTO.

Eric Jarosinski Text PB $19.99 Inspired by the philosophical aphorisms of Nietzsche, Kraus, Benjamin and Adorno, Jarosinski has put together this collection of four-line compositions that seek to illuminate our most urgent – and ephemeral – questions.

BETWEEN YOU & ME: CONFESSIONS OF A COMMA QUEEN

Mary Norris Text HB $29.99 New Yorker editor Mary Norris puts her vast experience and sharpened pencil to good use in this irreverent and enjoyable book about grammar and usage.

THE SPECTACLE OF SKILL

Robert Hughes Knopf HB $79.99 This collection of Hughes’ writings about art, architecture, culture, religion and himself includes neverbefore-published pages from his unfinished second volume of memoirs.

THE HOLLOW OF THE HAND

LATEST READINGS

SPQR: A HISTORY OF ANCIENT ROME

UTOPIA: THE SCRIPTS

PJ Harvey & Seamus Murphy Circus PB $35 Musician PJ Harvey collaborates with filmmaker and photographer Seamus Murphy in this one-of-akind collection of poetry and images.

Clive James Yale University Press HB $32.95 In this valediction to his lifelong engagement with the written word, Clive James assesses both old favourites and recent discoveries.

BER DECEM SE RELEA

Mary Beard Profile HB $49.99 One of the world’s foremost classicists explores the history of ancient Rome, tracking how it grew from an insignificant village to the world’s greatest power.

Santo Cilauro, Tom Gleisner & Rob Sitch ABC Books PB $35 The scripts of all 16 episodes in series one and two of the hilarious ABC TV show, as well as plenty of stills and behindthe-scenes photographs.

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Biography & Memoir AMAZING FANTASTIC INCREDIBLE Stan Lee, Peter David & Colleen Doran

Touchstone HB $45

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Shazam! Stan Lee – the hugely influential co-creator of Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, Iron Man and many other Marvel superheroes – has finally decided to write his memoir. And as is only fitting, he’s done so using a graphic format.

Known for creating superheroes who struggle with personal hang-ups, as well as bad guys with complex psychological problems, Lee employs his trademark wit and energy when recounting the story of his life and his long career with Marvel.

Lee wasn’t just a superlative comic artist, he was also a visionary corporate leader who led the company’s journey from a small division of a publishing house to a large multimedia corporation. The book is illustrated by celebrated artist Colleen Doran, one of Neil Gaiman’s collaborators on the Sandman series.

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Flamingo PB $27.99

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GOUGH WHITLAM: THE DEFINITIVE BIOGRAPHY Jenny Hocking

Jenny Hocking is no stranger to the art of biography, having written about both High Court judge Lionel Murphy and author and communist Frank Hardy. For her third biographical project, she chose to remain left of the political centre and take on the enormous challenge of recounting the life of Gough Whitlam, Australia’s 21st prime minister. This two-volume boxed set includes Volume One: A Moment in History and Volume Two: His Time. It’s a fascinating account of an extraordinary man and a tumultuous period in Australia’s history.

AN IMPROBABLE FRIENDSHIP Anthony David

William Heinemann PB $34.99

THE ANTI-COOL GIRL Rosie Waterland

This fascinating joint biography offers a unique insight into the ongoing Israeli– Palestinian conflict. Raymonda Tawil and Ruth Dayan should have been enemies.

Raymonda was Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s mother-in-law, while Ruth was the wife of a celebrated Israeli general who spent his career in pursuit of Arafat. But against all odds and expectations, the two women developed a covert, passionate friendship underpinned by shared feminist ideals and the radical desire to see peace in the Middle East. Despite their intimate proximity to two powerful, influential political leaders, Raymonda and Ruth’s friendship, which continues to this day, is based on mutual respect and deep love.

This engaging and balanced portrait of two women demonstrates the importance of foregrounding individual lives within the larger political debate.

Hodder & Stoughton PB WAS $35 NOW $29.99

Q

Allen & Unwin HB WAS $49.99 NOW $39.99

HOME IS BURNING Dan Marshall

At 25, Dan leaves his ‘spoiled white asshole’ life in Los Angeles and returns to his family home in Salt Lake City, Utah. His father has been diagnosed with motor neurone disease and his mother, who has been battling cancer on and off for nearly two decades, is incapable of looking after herself, let alone her husband. They and his siblings need help, and it’s up to Dan to provide it.

Home is Burning is his account of a year spent nursing his parents, drinking too much alcohol, growing apart from his girlfriend and coming to terms with the loss of his father. It’s a funny, moving, foul-mouthed and above all honest account of love, life, death and your average dysfunctional family.

Virago PB $32.99

IN ORDER TO LIVE Yeonmi Park

Fig Tree PB $32.99

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When Yeonmi Park told the 2014 One Young World Summit about her harrowing escape from North Korea, her speech became an instant YouTube sensation. This memoir tells the full story of how she and her mother made the dangerous decision to cross the frozen waters of the Yalu River into China, only to fall straight into the hands of human traffickers. After nearly two years at the mercy of their Chinese captors, living in a world perhaps even more brutal and dangerous than the one they’d left, the mother and daughter risked death once more in another desperate – and fortunately successful – attempt to escape. In Order to Live is a powerful testament to the bravery and resilience of a young woman who now symbolises North Korea’s oppressed.

M TRAIN Patti Smith

Writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani describes the new memoir by Patti Smith as a ‘kaleidoscopic ballad about the losses dealt out by time and chance and circumstance’. M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village cafe where the writer, performer and visual artist goes every morning for black coffee. Here, she ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was. M Train is a record of these ruminations, and also of her many travels.

Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft, on artistic creation and on the death of her brother Todd and husband, Fred Sonic Smith. Illustrated with her signature black-and-white Polaroid photographs and written in hauntingly beautiful prose, M Train is a worthy follow up to Smith’s magnificent 2010 memoir Just Kids.

BIG BLUE SKY Peter Garrett

Musician, environmental activist, politician – Peter Garrett has been all this and more.

A man of boundless energy and fierce intelligence, he seems poised for his next challenge, but in the meantime has penned this memoir of his extraordinarily eventful life to date. We read about his childhood in Sydney’s northern suburbs and his university studies at ANU; his time fronting Midnight Oil and the Australian Conservation Foundation; and the near-decade he spent in Canberra as the member for Kingsford Smith and a minister in both the Rudd and Gillard ministries. Garrett doesn’t spill many secrets – his belief that Kevin Rudd is an unpredictable megalomaniac is hardly unexpected – but his deep commitment to social justice and environmental protection shine through and make Big Blue Sky a satisfying and enjoyable read.

HUNGER MAKES ME A MODERN GIRL Carrie Brownstein

4. Who gave up the software business for cookery?

LEGACY Tim Cahill

It’s an unlikely footballing fairy tale. Born in Sydney to a Samoan mother and British father, Tim Cahill grew up in the sprawling western suburbs, where cricket and rugby league ruled. But for Cahill, soccer was supreme – he trained and played with local clubs, watched the stars play on television and aspired to one day join them. By the time he was a teenager, his parents had applied for a bank loan to fund his travels to England for a shot at the big time. It paid off, and Cahill went on to play for Everton, where he enjoyed a stellar international career. In Legacy, he reflects on what it takes to make it to the top – the sacrifices, the physical cost, the mental stamina and the uncompromising self-belief.

Her childhood and adolescence had all the ingredients of misery lit – alcoholic parents; a sexually abusive foster father; bullying; an eating disorder; attempted suicide – but Mamamia columnist Rosie Waterland navigates these personal tragedies with a light touch and an eye for the absurd humour of life in this memoir. The Anti-Cool Girl takes a Puberty Blues–esque approach to the awkwardness of adolescent social mores and formative sexual (in)experiences, and Waterland is a frank and charming narrator. Her love and compassion for her deeply flawed family are evident, and there is no hint of self-pity in her recollections.

This is an endearingly candid book about a smart, funny woman who not only survived, but who ultimately thrived in the face of overwhelming odds.

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Even if you’re not familiar with her work as the guitarist and vocalist in the band Sleater-Kinney, you’ll probably recognise Carrie Brownstein’s name from the credits of the hit television series Portlandia, for which she is co-creator, co-writer and costar. In this memoir, she writes about her escape from a turbulent family life into a world where music was the means towards self-invention, community and rescue. We get her take on the Riot Grrrl underground feminist punk-rock movement of the 1990s, as well as on the Sleater-Kinney breakup in 2006. Along the way, there are plenty of stories and ruminations, including about what it means for a woman to be both a fan and a star in a staunchly maledominated industry.

KEATING Kerry O’Brien

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Though it’s been nearly 20 years since he left office, former Prime Minister Paul Keating is yet to release an autobiography or memoir. Fortunately, this book of revelations fills the gap. Journalist Kerry O’Brien has spent many long hours with Keating, teasing out stories and testing the man’s memories and assertions. What emerges is a treasure trove of anecdotes, insights, reflections and occasional admissions from one of the most colourful political leaders Australia has known – a man who was the driving force through a period of Labor government that changed the face of Australia.

MODERN LOVE Lesley Harding & Kendrah Morgan

There seems to be a new book about the Heide circle almost every year, so readers could perhaps be forgiven for saying enough is enough. To say this before reading Modern Love would, however, be a grave mistake. This is a riveting double biography of the circle’s founders, John and Sunday Reed, and it’s full of hitherto unpublished and sometimes shocking facts about their unconventional lifestyle.

Harding and Morgan have done a wonderful job in researching and evoking the lives of this influential couple and their artistic collaborators and protégés. The well-known associations with Sidney Nolan, Max Harris, Albert Tucker and Joy Hester are fully investigated, but so too are their privileged pasts, their role as adoptive parents and their many artistic and literary endeavours.

Biography & Memoir MY LIFE ON THE ROAD Gloria Steinem

Nero HB $29.99

Journalist, activist, organiser and feminist icon Gloria Steinem received two bequests from her parents. From her father, an addiction to the freedom of life on the road.

From her mother, a love of community, which came, she writes, ‘from seeing the price my mother paid for having none’. This is one of many revealing statements and stories in this memoir, which details a life that has been rich in human interactions and unstinting in its dedication to making the world a better place. Steinem is clearly a good listener, and the book is full of stories she has heard on her travels – in taxis and airplanes, on college campuses and campaign trails.

Knopf HB $39.99

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THE TRUTH Neil Strauss

When Neil Strauss published The Game, a funny and slyly instructive account of how he transformed himself from a scrawny, insecure nerd into an ultra-confident, ultrasuccessful pickup artist, he jump-started the international ‘seduction community’ and was both celebrated and excoriated around the globe. The results were heady, to be sure.

But they also led to a lifestyle rich in casual sex and decidedly light on when it came to intimacy and long-term commitment.

Eventually, perhaps inevitably, he met a woman who forced him to choose between herself and the parade. The Truth recounts how this choice forced Strauss, to confront not only the moral dimensions of his pickup lifestyle, but also a mystery in his childhood that shaped the man that he became.

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PLAIN-SPEAKING JANE Jane Caro

Macmillan PB $34.99

SECOND HALF FIRST Drusilla Modjeska

Beginning with an account of the lifechanging event that occurred on the night before her 40th birthday, Drusilla Modjeska (Poppy, Stravinsky’s Lunch) looks back on the experiences that have shaped her writing, her reading and the way she has lived.

Modjeska recounts stories of her childhood in England, her time as a young newlywed in Papua New Guinea and life as a single woman in 1970s Sydney, where she lived with housemates including Helen Garner in a much-loved house on a corner of an innersuburban street. Modjeska’s previous books have a consistent theme – questioning how women can find the shape of their own lives – and this volume is no different, pondering love and friendship, death and ageing, independence and familial ties.

When Jane Caro was a young girl, there was a clear rule in Australian society: girls shouldn’t be too pushy. When she worked in advertising, it was assumed that men would be in charge, and it was OK for them to be sexist pigs. But Caro has never been one to keep quiet, and her frankness and success have endeared her to many Australians.

Here her frankness extends to talking about the anxiety disorder she endured for two decades. She writes about her feminism, her family, her career in advertising (and the secrets of the trade) and her passion for public education. Caro is as likeable in print as she is on screen and readers are left with a sense that the public persona isn’t too far from the private individual.

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SMALL ACTS OF DISAPPEARANCE Fiona Wright

Giramondo PB $24.99

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RECKONING Magda Szubanski

Writing in The Australian newspaper, reviewer Peter Craven described this memoir as ‘an extraordinary hymn to the tragic heroism at the heart of ordinary life’.

Other critics and readers have been equally laudatory, deeming this intimate and often heartbreaking book an instant Australian classic. Szubanski, who is best known for her comedic performances in television shows including Kath & Kim, describes her journey of self-discovery from a suburban childhood haunted by the demons of her father’s espionage activities in wartime Poland and by her secret awareness of her sexuality, to the complex dramas of adulthood and her need to find out the truth about herself and her family.

SOMETHING FOR THE PAIN Gerald Murnane

Anorexia, so often clichéd in its portrayal, receives remarkable analysis in this essay-based memoir by Sydney poet Fiona Wright. Melding her personal experience of the illness with rigorous exploration of philosophical, psychological, cultural and literary representations of hunger, Wright weaves in and out of her life as a student, traveller, writer, reader and patient. Her essays challenge and fascinate, revealing the contradictions and allure of a disease that both empowers and disables her. Intelligent, humane, lively, at times darkly comic, this provocative collection illuminates the delicate balance between illness and wellness.

Text PB $29.99

TRUTHS, HALF TRUTHS & LITTLE WHITE LIES Nick Frost

‘No life can really be all black, right? Even during the darkest times, what got me through that bleakness was laughter and time. With enough of both of these things I reckon you could get over just about anything.’ So writes actor and comedian Nick Frost (Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) in this often hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking memoir. Frost recounts his childhood growing up in Essex in a household full of love and optimism but tragically blighted by alcoholism, illness and sudden life-shattering misfortune.

He writes of being dogged by his own personal demons, of drinking far too much, of meeting best friend and comedic collaborator Simon Pegg, and of the joy and responsibility of parenthood.

BER DECEM SE RELEA

Scribe HB $35

As a boy, novelist Gerald Murnane (The Plains) became obsessed with horse racing. He had never ridden a horse, nor seen a race. Yet he was fascinated by photos of horse races in the Sporting Globe, and by the incantation of horses’ names in radio broadcasts of races.

Murnane discovered in these races more than he could find in religion or philosophy: they were the gateway to a world of imagination.

In adulthood, heading to the racecourse became a regular activity, a solitary and cherished pastime. Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf tells the story of his life through the lens of horse racing. It’s a candid, droll and moving book that will be a sure bet for lovers of both literature and the turf.

A WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME Jeremy Gavron

How could a woman who seemed to have it all – children, husband, friends, a book about to be published, blossoming academic career – decide to gas herself in a friend’s kitchen? That’s what Hannah Gavron’s son, journalist Jeremy Gavron, sets out to find out, even though he was a toddler when she died in 1965. Hannah was an extraordinary woman: intelligent and intellectually curious; beautiful and charismatic. Gavron’s careful and honest reconstruction of her life and death is an intellectual and emotional excursion that beautifully portrays both his mother and the changing social mores of the 1960s. It also explores profound questions around womanhood and identity that continue to resonate today.

Highly Recommended BORN TO RULE

Paddy Manning MUP HB $45 The unauthorised biography of Malcolm Turnbull, the man who has just become the 29th Prime Minister of Australia.

NOTES FROM THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

Howard Sounes Doubleday PB $39.99 This meticulously researched biography of the late Lou Reed covers his musical achievements as well as his mental health problems, bisexuality, three marriages and addictions to drugs and alcohol.

FRANCIS BACON IN YOUR BLOOD

Michael Peppiatt Bloomsbury HB $39.99 An intimate memoir-biography of the controversial painter, written by a curator, art critic and long-term friend.

H IS FOR HAWK

Helen Macdonald Vintage PB $22.99 Macdonald’s unflinchingly honest and extraordinarily lyrical account of learning to train a falcon won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.

RECKLESS

Chrissie Hynde Ebury $35 The charismatic rocker recounts her life, including her Ohio childhood, dalliances with bikers and drugs, college years at Kent State, time working with Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood in London and career with the Pretenders.

THESE THINGS HAPPEN

Greg Fleet Macmillan PB $34.99 A memoir about life, work and drug addiction by the Australian standup comedian.

NOT JUST BLACK AND WHITE

Lesley & Tammy Williams UQP PB $32.95 Awarded the 2014 David Unaipon Award for unpublished Indigenous writers, this powerful memoir is about a mother and daughter who demand that a past injustice is acknowledged.

UNFAITHFUL MUSIC & DISAPPEARING INK

Elvis Costello Viking PB $34.99 Costello’s memoir is predictably idiosyncratic – in turn self-deprecating, funny, introspective and oblique.

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History CHURCH OF SPIES Mark Riebling

Scribe PB $35

Q

Pope Pius XII is perhaps the most vilified and detested Pope in modern history. He and the Vatican are thought to have appeased Hitler and betrayed international Jewry by staying silent during the Holocaust. But this narrative – of a spiritual leader who stumbled in the world’s greatest hour of need – is not the complete story. Using documents recently released by the Vatican Secret Archives and the British Foreign Office, historian and policy analyst Mark Riebling uses a wealth of recently uncovered documents to argue that Pius was not Hitler’s lackey, but rather an active anti-Nazi spymaster, and that the Church’s wartime campaign against Hitler was far more extensive than ever thought.

5. What’s the Japanese word for ‘house’?

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DANCING IN MY DREAMS Kerry Highley

Monash University Publishing PB $39.95

Thanks to vaccination, polio is barely known to most Australians born after the 1960s.

Medical scientist turned medical historian Kerry Highley reminds us of its horrors, using the voices of patients, their families, doctors and nurses. The stories are of families torn apart, exclusion from communities, poor and kindly treatment at the hands of medical staff, and of course the iron lung, the image of which has become an icon of medical treatment of last century. This in itself would be of sufficient strength to carry the book, but Highley is just as interested in exploring the different treatment styles of two Australian women – one a doctor and the other a (probably under-qualified) nurse – and showing how hard it can be to challenge medical orthodoxy.

Black Inc HB WAS $45 NOW $39.99

William Heinemann PB $35

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THE EIGHTIES: THE DECADE THAT TRANSFORMED AUSTRALIA Frank Bongiorno

It was the era of Hawke and Keating, Kylie and INXS, the America’s Cup and the Bicentenary. And it was also perhaps the most controversial decade in Australian history, with high-flying entrepreneurs booming and busting; torrid debates over land rights, environmental policy and immigration; the advent of AIDS; a harsh recession; and the rise of the New Right. In The Eighties, historian Frank Bongiorno brings all this and more to life. He uncovers forgotten stories – of factory workers proud of their skills who found themselves surplus to requirements; of Vietnamese families battling to make new lives for themselves in the suburbs – and sheds new light on what he describes as ‘both the ordinary and extraordinary things that happened to Australia and Australians during this liveliest of decades’.

Celebrated 19th-century Parisian courtesan Valtesse de la Bigne was painted by Manet and inspired Emile Zola, who immortalised her in his scandalous novel Nana. Her rumoured affairs with Napoleon III and the future Edward VII kept gossip columns busy, but this extraordinary women’s glamorous existence hid a dark secret: she had been born into abject poverty and raised on a squalid Paris backstreet. Despite this, she transformed herself into an enchantress who possessed a small fortune, three mansions, fabulous carriages and a collection of art that was the envy of connoisseurs across Europe. Catherine Hewitt’s biography tells the forgotten story of this remarkable woman who, though her roots were lowly, never stopped aiming high.

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Chatto & Windus PB $35

This is both a personal quest in search of porcelain’s origins, and a global cultural history of the ‘white gold’ prized by collectors and art lovers. British ceramicist Edmund de Waal, best known for The Hare with Amber Eyes (Vintage PB $19.99), has an enduring and infectious fascination with porcelain, and his pilgrimage takes him around the world in search of the places where it is mined, created, celebrated and traded. From China and England to Italy and Germany, he seeks out makers and collectors who also understand the pull of the perfectly smooth, white material. De Waal has a poet’s curiosity and deeply held appreciation for beautiful objects, and this book is sure to enthral both devotees of his work and newcomers alike.

DAMPIER’S MONKEY: THE SOUTH SEAs VOYAGES OF WILLIAM DAMPIER Adrian Mitchell

William Dampier was the first Englishman to set foot on Australia, 100 years before Captain Cook, and he was also the first man to circumnavigate the world three times.

Yet strangely, little is known about him.

Academic Adrian Mitchell takes a scholarly approach to getting a sense of the man and his times, focusing on Dampier’s journals, and how they were used as the basis for his popular books. Mitchell also traces the grand narrative themes that are hidden in those accounts, and how they relate to Dampier’s changing times. The second half of the book contains a typed transcript of the journals, complete with original spelling, seemingly random capitalisation and Dampier’s marginal notes. Fun fact: Dampier introduced 80 words to the English language, including avocado and barbecue.

GREAT SOUTH LAND Rob Mundle

For many, the colonial story of Australia starts with Captain Cook’s discovery of the east coast in 1770. In fact, European mariners had their first interactions with the Australian continent some 164 years before his historic voyage. In 1606, Dutch navigator and explorer Willem Janszoon and his 20-man crew sailed their tiny ship Duyfken to the coast of the Gulf of Carpentaria and became the first Europeans to discover Australia.

In the decades that followed, other Dutch mariners discovered and mapped the majority of the coast yet – incredibly – made no effort to lay claim to it, or establish any settlements.

In telling their stories, Rob Mundle, author of Cook (HarperCollins PB $29.99), delivers another sweeping and powerful account of Australian maritime history.

PACIFIC: THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE Simon Winchester

Combining the skills of a travel writer, storyteller and historian, bestselling author Simon Winchester takes us on a journey across the Pacific Ocean of yesterday and today, leaving us with a pertinent message for the future: take care of where we live, for it is all we have. Winchester drops into ports across the ocean, from Cape Horn to the Bering Strait, Bikini Atoll to Australia, focusing on key moments since the 1950s and highlighting issues on the horizon.

He reassesses Western domination in the region and provides insights into issues close to home such as deep-seabed mining, coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, threats to the Pacific’s birdlife and Chinese colonisation of the South China Sea.

THE WITCHES: SALEM, 1692 Stacy Schiff

THE WHITE ROAD Edmund de Waal

A STEADY HAND Linda Groom

John Hunter, First Fleet sea captain and second governor of New South Wales, emerges from this biography as a skilled navigator, diplomatic leader and talented artist. Biographer Linda Groom, a former curator of pictures at the National Library of Australia, carefully refutes the arguments that he was a weak leader or a poor navigator in the chapters dedicated to his life. And then she lets his art speak for itself – the treasures from his First Fleet sketchbook, held by the National Library, are reproduced in the back of the book. The wonky proportions of a kangaroo reflect how strange this creature appeared to European eyes, but the many birds and fish are elegant and more lifelike. A steady hand indeed.

Charting a 2000-kilometre route from Tweed Heads to Point Hicks, Ian Hoskins’ history of the NSW coast is both objective and personal, warmed by the author’s passion for his subject and respect for the coast’s original, Indigenous caretakers.

Structured thematically rather than strictly chronologically, the book ranges from the natural world and exploitation of those resources to the story of lighthouses and other infrastructure, and of course the coast’s more recent embrace by surfers and weekenders. Thoughtfully and beautifully illustrated throughout, the book also ponders the threat posed by climate change and the lack of consensus around managing marine parks.

THE MISTRESS OF PARIS Catherine Hewitt

THE HOUSE BY THE LAKE Thomas Harding

This is the story of how, in 1993, writer Thomas Harding (Hanns and Rudolf) visited a small house by a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. It had been a holiday home for his grandmother and her family, one that they had been forced to abandon when the Nazis swept to power. Years later, the derelict house was scheduled for demolition and Harding started to piece together the lives of the five families who had lived there.

All had made the house their home, and all – bar one – had been forced out. As their stories took shape, Harding realised that fighting for the house’s future would involve a major challenge: resolving his own family’s highly ambivalent feelings towards their former homeland.

COAST: A HISTORY OF THE NEW SOUTH WALES EDGE Ian Hoskins

Weidenfeld & Nicolson PB $32.99

The Salem witch trials have become a historical touchstone, a case study demonstrating the worst possible outcome of mass hysteria. The result of a frenzied collective fear that gripped colonial American society, more than 20 people – mostly women and children – were accused of witchcraft over the course of the trials and executed for their supposed magical crimes.

Over the years, layers of popular mythology have developed, obscuring what actually took place at the trials as well as the events surrounding them. Schiff’s exhaustively researched historical investigation seeks to strip back these layers and debunk cultural superstitions, reclaiming the humanity of the women at the story’s centre. The result is a fascinating and vigorous work that proves that the facts are often far more compelling than fiction.

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Hamish Hamilton PB WAS $34.99 now $29.99

AUSTRALIA’S SECOND CHANCE George Megalogenis

Most nations don’t get a first chance to prosper; Australia is onto its second. For the best part of the 19th century, we were the world’s richest country, a pioneer for democracy and a magnet for migrants. Yet our last big boom was followed by a 50-year bust. Now we’re back on top, in the position where history tells us we made our biggest mistakes. Can we learn from our past? With newly available economic data and fresh interviews with former leaders, Megalogenis crunches the numbers and brings welcome insights into the urgent questions of who we are, and what we can become.

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Yale University Press HB $44.95

DECEMBER RELEASE

Black Inc Boxed set WAS $79.99 NOW $69.99

Simon & Schuster PB $35

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Text HB $29.99

As the world struggles to come to terms with an increasingly assertive Russia, the importance of understanding its charismatic president has never been greater. Former New York Times Moscow bureau chief Steven Lee Myers recounts Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, depicting a cool and calculating leader with enormous ambition and few scruples. Entering office in 2000 as a reformer, Putin soon orchestrated the preservation of a new kind of authoritarianism – consolidating power, reasserting his country’s might, brutally crushing revolts and swiftly dispatching dissenters. Though the cover depicts Putin as a Bond-style villain, Myers avoids dwelling on prurient details of his personal life, instead concentrating on substantive issues such as the dodgy financial dealings involving Putin’s St Petersburg cronies.

Scribe PB $29.99

Bryan Doerries produces performances of Greek tragedies for soldiers returned from conflict, as well as for addicts, prison communities, victims of natural disasters and other vulnerable people. Here, he discusses how the story of Sophocles’ Ajax can help today’s soldiers and their loved ones grapple with trauma; why people in the penal system are liberated by Prometheus Bound; and how with Heracles, Euripides changed the way that some doctors manage end-of-life care. In drawing on such extraordinarily intimate experiences, and in telling his own story of loss and learning, Doerries illustrates the redemptive potential of one of the oldest human artforms.

As a young philosophy student, Daniel Klein, author of the amusing and enlightening Travels with Epicurus (Text PB $19.99), filled a notebook with short quotes from the world’s greatest thinkers in the hope that these would give him some guidance on how to live the best life he could. Now, from the vantage point of his eighth decade, Klein revisits the wisdom he relished in his youth with this collection of philosophical gems, adding new ones that strike a chord. From Epicurus to Emerson and Camus to Reinhold Niebuhr – whose words provide the title of this book – each pithy extract is annotated with Klein’s inimitable charm and insights.

ON INEQUALITY Harry G Frankfurt

Princeton University Press HB $29.95

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THE THEATRE OF WAR Bryan Doerries

SHORT BLACKS Publisher Black Inc believes that the long essay has gained a new confidence and ambition in Australia in recent years.

Celebrating this, it has released a handsome boxed set of individually bound essays just in time for Christmas. All originally published as Quarterly Essays or in The Monthly, the essays cover subjects ranging from the problem of Indigenous binge drinking to what Richard Flanagan describes as ‘the Australian disease of conformity’. The contributor list is stellar: Flanagan, Karen Hitchcock, Noel Pearson, Helen Garner, John Birmingham, Anna Krien, David Malouf, Simon Leys, Robert Manne, Les Murray, Robyn Davidson and Galarrwuy Yunupingu.

As a professor of economics at Princeton University, Ben Bernanke dedicated his professional life to studying the Great Depression. So it was fitting that in 2008, when the world faced the greatest economic catastrophe since the 1930s, he was the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve. Bernanke plunges the reader into the depths of an unimaginable crisis, examines the causes and captures the moments in which eventual solutions began to emerge. The book is academically rigorous and thorough, but Bernanke is skilled in his ability to untangle the complexity of the financial system and explain tricky economic concepts.

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EVERY TIME I FIND THE MEANING OF LIFE, THEY CHANGE IT Daniel Klein

THE NEW TSAR Steven Lee Myers

HOPE WITHOUT OPTIMISM Terry Eagleton

In this erudite and humorous volume, academic Terry Eagleton teases apart the concept of hope as it has been (often mistakenly) conceptualised over six millennia, from ancient Greece to today.

He distinguishes hope from simple desire, idealism or adherence to the doctrine of progress, arguing that it is a state of being that requires reflection and commitment, arises from clear-sighted rationality and can be cultivated by practice and self-discipline.

Considering centuries of thought about the many modes of hoping – Ernst Bloch, the Stoics, Aquinas, Marx, Benjamin and Kierkegaard, as well as the hopefulness of the Left and Right – he throws new light on religious faith and political ideology.

THE COURAGE TO ACT Ben S Bernanke

Viking PB WAS $34.99 NOW $29.99

Professor emeritus at Princeton University and the author of the legendary 2005 essay On Bullshit, Harry G Frankfurt has never shied away from challenging orthodoxies.

Here, he questions the moral concept that economic equality should be a societal goal. For Frankfurt, the more important question is not whether we all have more or less the same amount, but whether everyone has enough. Sure to trigger debate (the New Spectator dismissed it as ‘pompous, trite and economically illiterate’), On Inequality is a serious challenge to a belief hitherto held dear by opposite sides of the political spectrum.

UNFINISHED BUSINESS Anne-Marie Slaughter

If you are one of the many people who were powerfully affected by Anne-Marie Slaughter’s now-iconic 2012 Atlantic article ‘Why Women Still Can’t Have it All’, you’ll be thrilled to hear that she continues to ponder its thought-provoking subject matter in this new book. The first female director of policy planning at the US State Department, Slaughter chose to leave her position due to the impossibility of juggling it with the responsibilities of family life. Questioning the feminist narrative she and many of us have grown up with, she gives a broad action plan for change and presents her vision for what equality between women and men really means.

Highly Recommended AN ECONOMY IS NOT A SOCIETY

Dennis Glover Redback PB $19.99 A passionate and personal J’accuse against the high priests of economics whose policy making has robbed the country of manufacturing knowhow and ripped the guts out of Australia’s old industrial communities.

THE SHORT AND EXCRUCIATINGLY EMBARRASSING REIGN OF CAPTAIN ABBOTT

Andrew P Street Allen & Unwin PB $29.99 An irreverent take on the political life and times of the man who was our 28th prime minister.

BEST AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL CARTOONS 2015

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

QUARTERLY ESSAY 60

A TREASURY OF CARTOONS

GIRT

HISTORY’S PEOPLE

Russ Radcliffe (ed) Scribe PB $29.99 The year in politics as observed by Australia’s funniest and most perceptive political cartoonists.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Text PB $27.99 A stimulating amalgam of lyrical personal narrative, reimagined history and emotionally charged reportage about racial politics in the USA.

BER DECEM SE RELEA

First Dog on the Moon ABC Books PB $29.99 A personalised year-byyear, blow-by-blow, best-of cartoon account of the world according to Andrew Marlton (aka First Dog on the Moon).

David Hunt Black Inc HB $34.99 A new hardback edition of Hunt’s irreverent history of Australia. ‘Hilarious and insightful – Hunt has found the deep wells of humour in Australia’s history’ (Chris Taylor, The Chaser).

Laura Tingle QE PB $22.99 In Political Amnesia, Tingle cites present-day cases, examples from history and interviews with leading figures to show the long-term harm that has come from undermining the public sector as a source of ideas and experience.

Margaret MacMillan Text PB $32.99 Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan, author of the acclaimed The War that Ended Peace, presents a personal selection of the memorable figures of the past who have changed the course of history.

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Science & Nature ADAM SPENCER’S WORLD OF NUMBERS Adam Spencer

Number crunchers, science bods, fact finders and those of us filled with the wonder of things will be more than happy to find mathematician and radio presenter Adam Spencer’s follow-up to last year’s Big Book of Numbers in their Christmas stocking. Packed with stuff you should know, might need to know and might as well know just for the hell of it, Spencer’s book covers a dizzying amount of subject matter about the world around us. Pilates for the brain and fun for all the family.

AFRICA ON SAFARI Kym & Tonya Illman

Wildlife photographers Kym and Tonya Illman get closer to their subjects than most of their peers by using remotely operated cameras. They also travel further than others to get their simply extraordinary shots. Their work in Africa is legendary, and this book reproduces their stunning photographs Papadakis HB $65 taken in national parks and game reserves throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Sleeping lions, hunting cheetahs, curious hippos, acrobatic elephants and stampeding zebras are only a few of the wild animals featured in this full-colour book.

FORENSICS: THE ANATOMY OF CRIME Val McDermid

The author of the bestselling Tony Hill series puts aside crime fiction to concentrate on fact, uncovering the secrets of forensic medicine from the crime scene to the courtroom. Drawing on interviews with toplevel professionals, groundbreaking research and her own experience, McDermid explores and demystifies this fascinating science in accessible fashion. Along the way, she wonders at how maggots collected from a corpse can help determine time of death, how a DNA trace a millionth the size of a grain of salt can be used to convict a killer and how a team of young Argentine scientists led by a maverick American anthropologist uncovered the victims of a genocide.

Affirm PB $29.99

Macmillan PB $29.99

A cardiologist himself for more than half a century (and obviously a very good one), Dr James Forrester is well placed to recount the history of breakthroughs in the understanding and treatment of heart disease. Fortunately, he is also well skilled in the art of telling this fascinating story, knowing that people are at its centre. So we meet both the patients and the researchers or doctors who were driven to save their lives and the lives of future patients.

Forrester suggests that most of those doctors were misfits, mavericks and rebels, people who could think beyond accepted medical wisdom. He is also good on tackling the ethical question of how to balance the need for research with the obligations of the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm.

RESURRECTION SCIENCE MR O’Connor

Affirm PB $29.99

THE UNIVERSE IN YOUR HAND Christophe Galfard

This book should really be called The Universe in Your Head because it’s all about using your imagination to try to get a handle on what physics tells us about the world – from the universe and beyond, to the atom and within. Galfard, who was Stephen Hawking’s PhD student at Cambridge University, asks his readers to embark on a series of thought experiments that will introduce them to the sum knowledge of early-21st-century theoretical physics.

Quantum mechanics, string theory, the birth of the universe, antimatter and dark matter – it’s all here. Galfard reckons anyone can understand it, and his chatty tone and refusal to use equations just about stops the ordinary person’s head from exploding with the sheer mind-bendingness of what he’s talking about.

NewSouth PB $29.99

This annual collection is always full of scientific discoveries, ideas and inventions.

It’s a must read for anyone interested in…well, the world, really. It’s also a good snapshot of what’s been occupying scientific minds in the last year. In 2015, robotics, species loss and medicine are common threads. As editor Bianca Nogrady points out, science writers get to enjoy scientists’ eureka moments, but the journeys that those scientists take to reach those moments are just as interesting. As readers we get to witness and enjoy both, too. Writing is drawn from newspapers, full-length books, science journals, blogs, websites and even a student newspaper.

THE HEART HEALERS James S Forrester

JOHN GOULD’S EXTINCT AND ENDANGERED BIRDS OF AUSTRALIA Sue Taylor

In her third book about Australia’s feathered friends, Sue Taylor has selected 59 beautifully illustrated colour plates from the seven-volume work The Birds of Australia (1848) created by the father of Australian ornithology, John Gould. Taylor’s selection covers birds that are already extinct and those that are currently threatened with extinction, and she has included a historical overview detailing Gould’s first encounter with each bird as well as chapters on naming, description, habitat, voice, diet, breeding and current threats. Poignant and saddening, this volume only touches the surface of how vulnerable our birdlife is, leaving us with the hope that as many as possible on the list are saved from the fate of the aptly named paradise parrot – last seen in 1927.

the BEST AUSTRALIAN SCIENCE WRITING 2015 Bianca Nogrady (ed)

To save or not to save – that is the question in this thought-provoking conservation page-turner. With the ever-expanding footprint of climate change and overpopulation, more and more resources, time and money are being channelled into the preservation of species vulnerable to extinction. The biotechnological challenges and philosophical, moral and ethical questions surrounding this dilemma are explored in eight chapters, each focusing on a particular species and the extraordinary steps that are being taken to save them.

From the reintroduction of an African amphibian to its natural habitat to the possibility of resurrecting the Neanderthal, these fascinating and intricate stories of the fate of our natural species ask as many questions as they provide answers.

VOICES IN THE OCEAN Susan Casey

Scribe PB $32.99

In this compassionate and lyrical account of a two-year global adventure to explore dolphins and their relationship to humans, Susan Casey examines the work of John Lilly, a scientist whose interest in dolphins led him down some very strange paths; visits a Hawaiian community that believes dolphins are key to enlightenment; travels to Ireland, where ‘the world’s most loyal animal’ has delighted tourists for decades; and explores the ancient Minoans’ interdependence on dolphins in Crete.

She also encounters the dark side of our relationship with these beautiful animals, many of which are the stars of a global, multibillion-dollar captivity industry, visiting both this industry’s harrowing epicentre in the Solomon Islands and the Japanese town of Taiji, made infamous by the Oscar– winning documentary The Cove.

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Hamish Hamilton HB WAS $39.99 NOW $33.99

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Hodder & Stoughton HB $35

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Scribe PB $27.99

ISLAND HOME: A LANDSCAPE MEMOIR Tim Winton

In Tim Winton’s acclaimed novels, the natural world is as much a living presence as any character. In this evocative and sometimes provocative memoir, he explains that what is true of his work is also true of his life: from boyhood, his relationship with the world around him has been as vital as any other connection. Island Home is the story of how that relationship with the Australian landscape came to be, and how it has determined his ideas, his writing and his life. It is also a passionate exhortation for all of us to feel the ground beneath our feet and acknowledge how the landscape shapes who we are both as individuals and as a nation.

THING EXPLAINER Randall Munroe

The creator of xkcd.com (‘A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language’) is nerd royalty, and his latest book is bound to be as wildly popular as both that website and his previous cartoon-based book What If? (John Murray PB $19.99). Thing Explainer is chock-full of brilliantly simple diagrams that show how important things work: everything from the nuclear bomb to the biro. Munroe tells us where these things came from, how they work, what they look like if you open them up and what would happen if we heated them up, cooled them down, pointed them in a different direction…you get the picture. A perfect gift for anyone – age 5 to 105 – who has ever wondered how things work, and why.

WE ARE ALL STARDUST Stefan Klein

This book may well have the longest subtitle ever: ‘World-leading natural and social scientists shed light on their discoveries and lives in conversation with an award-winning science writer’. In it, Stefan Klein, author of The Science of Happiness, records his conversations with 19 of the world’s bestknown scientists, allowing us to listen in as today’s leading minds reveal what they still hope to discover – and how their paradigmchanging work entwines with their lives outside the lab. Interviewees include evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins on selfishness; anthropologist Sarah Hrdy on motherhood; primatologist Jane Goodall on animal behaviour; neuroscientist VS Ramachandran on consciousness; and geographer Jared Diamond on chance in history.

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Miegunyah PB WAS $44.99 NOW $14.95

AUSTRALIA’S REMARKABLE TREES Richard Allen & Kimbal Baker

Elephantine boabs dot the Kimberley region of Western Australia; cattle rub against giant bottle trees and ironbarks in Queensland; and strangler figs with 40-metre girths thrive in our northern rainforests. Snow gums and shining gums eke out their lives on our icy mountaintops; and bunya pines, which once looked down on the dinosaurs, grow in an isolated place in Australia’s northeast. Australia’s Remarkable Trees records the extraordinary lives of 50 of our oldest, largest and most unusual trees, and is a persuasive call to arms to preserve and protect both them and the forests and wilderness in which they live.

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Murdoch HB WAS $89.99 NOW $39.95

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Viking HB $59.99

Wakefield PB $39.95

The coastal gardens of Australia are as varied as the geography of this vast continent itself. In this labour of love, horticulturalist and landscape designer Myles Baldwin travels around the country to showcase a diverse range of gardens – some created by professionals, others by enthusiastic amateurs, but all appropriate to their location and often-difficult conditions.

An extensive plant guide gives practical advice for gardening by the sea, and Sue Stubbs’ gorgeous photographs provide plenty of inspiration.

Murdoch HB $49.99

Weidenfeld & Nicolson HB $69.99

Historian Thomas Pakenham has circled the globe searching out the oldest, biggest and most interesting trees. He has led expeditions to conserve seeds, planted forests, chaired tree societies, led protests against tree and forest destruction, and lectured tirelessly. This book covers his adventures, documenting the trees he has encountered, their stories and the oftenhazardous journeys he made to find them.

Pakenham investigates the future and the likely threats to the landscapes we take for granted. A passionate writer, educator and entertainer, he brings both wit and grit to a subject of universal appeal.

Lantern PB $45

Scribe HB $24.99

This authoritative and practical book focuses on growing and using native plants in the home garden. It provides expert information on the fundamentals – soils, cultivation techniques, pruning, fertilising and maintenance – and looks at different styles of garden design, using Australian plants not only for aesthetic reasons but for creating drought-proof gardens, fire-resistant gardens and environments attractive to native fauna. Stewart (Gardening Australia) is an acknowledged expert in propagating and cultivating Australian native plants, and he and Bishop have put together an inspirational book showcasing well-designed Australian gardens and exploring rural areas around Australia where indigenous species thrive in the wild.

When broadcaster and journalist Indira Naidoo transformed her tiny 13th-floor balcony into a bountiful kitchen garden, it changed her life forever. She joined the quiet revolution rolling through our cities – the army of urban gardeners turning concrete into crops. She also came to realise that gardening spaces in cities are limited only by the imagination. In this follow-up volume to her bestselling The Edible Balcony (Lantern.

PB. $39.99), she visits some of Australia’s most innovative and memorable kitchen gardens, gives gardening tips and provides practical advice on beekeeping, worm farming, composting, setting up a community garden and cooking with your home harvest.

WENDY WHITELEY AND THE SECRET GARDEN Janet Hawley

SIX SQUARE METRES: REFLECTIONS FROM A SMALL GARDEN Margaret Simons

In this thoughtful and beautifully observed book, journalist and gardening enthusiast Margaret Simons takes readers on a journey through the seasons, through her life and through the tiny patch of innerurban earth that is home to her garden.

Over the course of a year, within the garden and without, there are births to celebrate and deaths to mourn; there are periods of great happiness and light; and there are times of quiet reflection. There is, in other words, all the chaos, joy, sorrow and splendour of being alive.

THE AUSTRALIAN NATIVE GARDEN: A PRACTICAL GUIDE Angus Stewart & AB Bishop

THE EDIBLE CITY Indira Naidoo

THE COMPANY OF TREES Thomas Pakenham

ENDLESS PLEASURE Trevor Nottle

Passionate collector of plants and gardening paraphernalia Trevor Nottle reveals the stories behind the garden-related tools, ornaments, prints and drawings, books and decorative arts that fill this lavishly illustrated volume. He draws on the collection of the new Australian Museum of Gardening in Adelaide to illustrate gardenalia both useful and deeply strange, and includes contributions from gardeners and gardening writers who provide recipes, recount their gardening experiences and nominate their favourite tools and memories of gardens past. Quirky and unexpected, this is garden history with a decided difference.

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6. Who was immortalised in Zola’s novel Nana?

BIRDSCAPING AUSTRALIAN GARDENS George Adams

Attracting native birds to your garden or property is a joy for any gardener or homeowner. This updated edition of George Adams’ Birdscaping Australian Gardens is a must-have guide to creating a welcoming environment and habitat to encourage native species to thrive in your neighbourhood and call your garden home. The basics of growing native plants and essentials such as providing food, nesting sites, water and shelter are combined with plenty of practical tips and ideas on how to get started.

Colour photographs and fine pen-and-ink illustrations are included throughout, but it’s the comprehensive plant and bird directories that really make this book stand out.

AUSTRALIAN COASTAL GARDENS Myles Baldwin

Lantern HB $79.99

Over the last 20 years, Wendy Whiteley has painstakingly created a secret garden on a stretch of overgrown public land situated close to her Lavender Bay home. Less of a secret nowadays, it’s now an oasis for local garden enthusiasts and visitors alike, who get lost in its meandering pathways, gasp at its stunning Sydney Harbour vistas and relax in its many hidden corners. Writer and close friend Janet Hawley’s marvellously illustrated book charts the garden’s evolution, from Wendy’s first foray into the wasteland after the death of her husband, renowned artist Brett Whiteley, followed nine years later by that of her daughter, Arkie.

Highly Recommended ATMOSPHERE OF HOPE

Tim Flannery Text PB $29.99 A decade after his international bestseller The Weather Makers, Flannery argues that Earth’s climate system is approaching a crisis. He provides both a snapshot of the trouble we are in and an up-to-theminute analysis of some newly emerging options for mitigating climate change.

THE HEALTH GAP

Michael Marmot Bloomsbury PB $29.99 Marmot believes that creating the conditions for people to lead flourishing lives is key to reduction of health inequalities across the globe.

THE BIOLOGY OF DESIRE

Marc Lewis Scribe PB $29.99 Cognitive neuroscientist and former addict Marc Lewis makes a convincing case that addiction is not a disease, showing why treatment based on the disease model so often fails, and how treatment can be retooled to achieve lasting recovery.

THE KNOWLEDGE WARS

Peter Doherty MUP PB $29.99 Making a passionate case for citizens to become informed so they are able to evaluate the facts of any scientific debate, Nobel laureate Peter Doherty provides practical advice on how to analyse research and take meaningful action.

THE BRAIN’S WAY OF HEALING

Norman Doidge Scribe PB $35 Doidge shows how the amazing process of neuroplastic healing works, introducing us to the doctors, therapists and patients who are healing the brain without surgery or medication.

THE LITTLE VEGGIE PATCH CO DIY GARDEN PROJECTS

Mat Pember Hardie Grant PB $45 Thirty-eight practical projects of varied complexity for small-space edible gardening and backyard fun.

GUT

Giulia Enders Scribe PB $29.99 Subtitled ‘The Inside Story of the Body’s Most Underrated Organ’, Enders’ global bestseller argues that the gut is one of the most complex, important and miraculous parts of our anatomy.

ON TRACK: SEARCHING OUT THE BUNDIAN WAY

John Blay NewSouth PB $39.99 The story of naturalist John Blay’s epic bushwalk in search of the Bundian Way, an important Aboriginal pathway between Mt Kosciuszko and Twofold Bay on the NSW far south coast.

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Food & Drink ALLA FRATELLI Barry McDonald & Terry Durack

Murdoch HB $49.99

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THE ART OF PASTA Lucio Galletto & David Dale Lantern

HB WAS $59.95 NOW $29.95

THE ART OF TRADITIONAL ITALIAN

Sydneysiders won’t need any introduction to the Fratelli Fresh phenomenon – its three produce stores and six cafes have a fiercely loyal coterie of clients across the city. Now the rest of the country can sample some of the recipes that are chalked up on the daily menu at Café Sopra, revelling in how delicious they are. Barry McDonald’s Italianophile leanings are clear (he jokes that he had to drop the ‘O’ from Donaldo in order to assimilate into Australia) and his food philosophy is also clear – the simpler and fresher the food, the better.

Lucio Galletto Lantern HB WAS $59.99 NOW $29.95

The Ligurian-born owner of Sydney’s muchloved Lucio’s restaurant celebrates Italian food and Australian art in these two books.

The Art of Pasta includes hundreds of recipes for this most simple and delicious staple, and The Art of Traditional Italian is the perfect resource for home cooks wanting to add classic dishes to their repertoire. Both books are beautifully presented, with the latter featuring artworks by painters including John Olsen, Euan Macleod and Garry Shead.

BOLD PALATES: AUSTRALIA’S GASTRONOMIC HERITAGE Barbara Santich

What makes the Australian barbecue characteristically Australian? How did eating lamb become a patriotic gesture? Where did the national love of cake and pies come from? Why are we so obsessed with tomato sauce? Australia’s leading culinary historian answers these and other questions about our gastronomic heritage, describing how Australian cooks have improvised and invented to lay the foundations of a distinctive and internationally acclaimed food culture.

Lavishly illustrated (we particularly loved the photo of a shop window celebrating Arnott’s Biscuit Week in 1937), this fascinating book is as much a history of Australia and Australians as it is of our national cuisine.

CORNERSMITH Alex Elliott-Howery & James Grant

Murdoch HB $49.99

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EAT YOUR HISTORY Jacqui Newling

Kale and espresso might seem a long way from mutton and billy tea, but author Jacqui Newling argues that our food and the way we eat now are products of our past. The resident gastronomer at Sydney’s Living Museums, she dives into Australia’s culinary history from the days of the First Fleet to the 1950s, exploring the foods that waxed and waned in popularity over the centuries and how social and culinary trends were interwoven. Though at a loss to explain why turn-of-the-century cooks were instructed to boil vegetables for so long (25 minutes for asparagus?!), she has uncovered a number of historical recipes suited to modern-day taste buds, and the book’s appetising modern styling and photography manage to make the old seem deliciously new again.

Murdoch HB WAS $59.99 NOW $49.99

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Beloved of Sydney’s inner west, Cornersmith is a ‘cafe and picklery’ with a strong sense of community and sustainability – it runs fermenting workshops, trades coffees for the excess bounty of local gardeners, and makes its own pickles and preserves.

There’s a sense of generosity and urban farmer adventurousness here that’s truly infectious. Ideas such as using the leftover whey from making labneh in a salad dressing seem like good sustainable practice; others, like a chutney of pear, lemon and rosemary, just plain delicious. If your salad repertoire needs a refresh, or you think it’s about time you tried fermenting something, this big-hearted book is for you.

Lantern PB $39.99

Adam Liaw Hachette HB $49.99 A guide to traditional Asian home cooking that’s full of instructions, handy tips and simple recipes.

FALAFEL FOR BREAKFAST

Michael Rantissi & Kristy Frawley Murdoch HB $49.99 A wealth of accessible Middle Eastern recipes for the contemporary home cook.

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ANTONIO CARLUCCIO’S PASTA

Antonio Carluccio Quadrille HB WAS $45 NOW $22.95 Carluccio shares his love of Italy’s favourite food, providing innovative and exciting recipes for soups, main courses, salads and even desserts.

Macmillan PB $39.99

THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN COOKBOOK

PQ Blackwell HB $49.95 One hundred well-known cooks, chefs, bakers and local heroes share their favourite recipes, showcasing Australia’s ethnic diversity and fresh local produce.

THE COOK AND THE BAKER

Cherie Bevan & Tass Tauroa Murdoch HB $49.99 Recipes for irresistible oldschool cakes, slices, pastries and pies to make at home.

Move over CWA – the cook and the baker are here!

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With 200 modern recipes, this book will satisfy not just David Herbert’s fans (as cooking columnist for the Weekend Australian he has inspired a loyal following), but also anyone seeking inspiration for everyday cooking. A home cook rather than a chef, Herbert creates recipes for real people. His skill is in giving the familiar a slight twist to make it interesting again, and in true Australian style he roams the world, flitting from Sardinia to Japan, Morocco to India. There are weeknight dinners, easy side dishes to brighten a meal and tempting sweet treats including the baked goods that he is best known for. Ideal for the child newly flown the nest, but just as desirable for the cook with years of experience.

SIMPLICIOUS: I QUIT SUGAR Sarah Wilson

Highly Recommended ADAM LIAW’S ASIAN COOKERY SCHOOL

At Biota Dining, the two-hatted restaurant in NSW’s Southern Highlands, owner-chef James Viles takes inspiration from the local environment, foraging and sourcing locally to create edible works of experimental art (think Attica in the bush). This book is a wonderful evocation of artist-at-work – the photography, recipes and features profiling suppliers and explaining ingredient sourcing are likely to make you want to make the trek up to Bowral immediately. The recipes – each with numerous separate, intriguing elements (mead gel, beetroot leather, molasses sponge, fried bone juices) – may prove challenging, but if you’re ready to take your cooking to the next level – or maybe just dream about it – this is a book for you.

DAVID HERBERT’S BEST HOME COOKING David Herbert

EDIBLE SELBY Todd Selby

Brooklyn-based blogger Todd Selby has made a project of photographing interesting, creative people in their curated and curiofilled living quarters. For this book, he has amassed an intriguing collection of food obsessives: farmers and artisans, butchers and briners, Japanese cheesemakers, a Californian bento-box guru. If it sounds like an almanac of hipsterdom, that’s not far off the mark – esoteric ingredients, artisanal ingredients and a DIY philosophy are givens.

But the subjects – from the celebrated (Fergus Henderson of London’s St John) to the obscure (the Sea Forager, hunting monkey-faced eels in the waters around San Francisco) – have fascinating stories to tell, and Selby’s evocative photography and scrapbook-like approach are quite charming.

BIOTA: GROW. GATHER. COOK. James Viles

SOUTH AMERICAN GRILL

Rachael Lane Hardie Grant HB $36.95 NOW $14.95 Guaranteed to please every barbecue fanatic, this guide to the asados and churrascos of Argentina and Brazil covers snacks and starters, rubs and marinades, mains, sides, desserts and drinks.

Sarah Wilson has forged her own path in the popularisation of wellness through food in a series of books, blogs, TV lifestyle shows and magazine articles. In her latest book, she tackles the double whammy of going sugar-free and eating real food while following some basic eating principles. With the emphasis on fun, this magazine-style cookbook includes tips covering everything from how to shop to storing, preserving and preparing food – not to mention a stack of tried-and-tested recipes. Whether fermenting vegetables, cobbling together midweek one-pan wonders or showcasing show-stopping sugar-free treats, Wilson’s food philosophy shines through with an infectious style that even naysayers will find hard to resist.

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THE ESSENCE OF FRENCH COOKING

Michel Roux Lantern HB WAS $59.99 NOW $16.95 One of the world’s great chefs has distilled a lifetime’s knowledge of French food and cooking into this definitive volume. Includes recipes for over 100 classic dishes.

THE ENERGYFREEDOM HOME

Beyond Zero Emissions Scribe PB $39.99 The perfect guide to help homeowners liberate themselves from costly and non-renewable sources of energy.

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Food & Drink

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GREEK George Calombaris

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A beautifully produced package with a personal touch (thanks for the fun handdrawn sticker set, George!), the latest cookbook from Australia’s favourite Greek chef does the man’s heritage proud. Whole chapters are devoted to dips and souvlakis (and one to his mum’s classic Cypriot dishes), but these are Greek recipes with a twist – an eggplant dip delightfully spiked with miso, souvas with crispy sweetbreads or soft-shelled crab. George’s career has evolved through an early dalliance with molecular gastronomy through TV mega-stardom and back to his homespun roots. Here, he has created a modern brand of Greek that’s both comforting and surprising. Taramosalata-flavoured popcorn?

Cucumbers with ouzo? Yasou!

HAPPY GO PALEO Irena Macri

Viking PB $34.99

Q Black Inc HB $39.99

Melbourne Books HB WAS $44.95 NOW $39.95

For nearly 20 years, the Moroccan Soup Bar has been a much-loved Melbourne institution. Its spoken menu, delicious strictly vegetarian food and unique ambience, founded on principles of equality and generosity, have a loyal following and are now celebrated in a beautifully illustrated book in which the restaurant’s founder and head chef Hana Assafiri shares her recipes for food and life. You’ll be able to impress family and friends with traditional dips, stews, soups and legendary dishes such as her chickpea and yoghurt bake – yum!

This isn’t just a cookbook. A labour of love that was first published in 2000 before its author’s untimely death, it’s as much social and cultural history as it is a compendium of traditional Italian recipes. O’Donnell was part of a well-known family of Italian restaurateurs (her mother was a Viganó) and she ran two very famous restaurants in Melbourne during the 1970s,’80s and early ’90s. For this book she harked back to the flavourful family meals of her childhood. Chapters cover every course in a traditional Italian feast – antipasti, pasta and risotto, meat and vegetable dishes, desserts – and vignettes about Melbourne’s Italian heritage are interspersed throughout.

Phaidon HB $195

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NEAR & FAR: RECIPES INSPIRED

BY HOME AND TRAVEL Heidi Swanson

MOROCCAN SOUP BAR Hana Assafiri

Hardie Grant HB $39.95

The food of Lombardy is hearty peasant fare based on rice and polenta with plenty of butter, cheese and meat. Celebrated dishes such as osso bucco, vitello tonnato and risotto Milanese hail from here, and Alessandro Pavoni pays them all due respect in his authentic and evocative new book. You’ll be in spit-roast heaven if that’s your thing, with a chapter covering everything from pigeon to veal shanks. And if you’re looking to perfect your polenta or risotto technique, the recipes and tips here might pave your way.

MODERNIST CUISINE AT HOME Nathan Myhrvold & Maxime Bilet

MIETTA’S ITALIAN FAMILY RECIPES Mietta O’Donnell

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7. What was last seen in 1927?

LUKE NGUYEN’S FRANCE Luke Nguyen

As you’ll know if you’ve seen the SBS series, Luke Nguyen isn’t presenting himself as an expert on French cuisine. In fact, he first visited France to make the program this book is based on. But that’s OK, because what’s intriguing is his exploration of the French influence on his native Vietnamese cuisine, and how, in turn, Vietnamese ingredients and techniques can be used to enhance classic French dishes. So we find steak tartare enlivened with Vietnamese flavours, a French onion pho soup, crème caramel with coconut. There’s some straight-up French too – pissaladière, pot-au-feu, rabbit in red wine – and flat-out Vietnamese, like chilli and lemongrass quail.

Or, as he suggests, you could substitute frogs’ legs. After all, pourquoi pas?

This is the friendly face of paleo. Irena Macri’s easy-going approach puts meat front and centre (along with fruit, vegetables, nuts and seeds), but also gives butter, fermented dairy, white rice and quinoa a look-in. While it might be surprising to see recipes for pork chops and chorizo frittata in a ‘healthy eating’ cookbook, Macri outlines her food philosophy and explains why we should eat more red meat and offal, and avoid things we once thought wholesome, like legumes and brown rice. And her recipes – crispy prosciutto and peach salad with almonds, ginger honey roasted duck legs – will help ease the yearning for spaghetti and sourdough.

A LOMBARDIAN COOKBOOK Roberta Muir & Alessandro Pavoni

The marriage of food and travel is one made in heaven and New York Times best-selling author, photographer and recipe blogger Heidi Swanson doesn’t sell the maxim short.

Near & Far is both an inspirational travel and recipe journal and gorgeously photographed vegetarian cookbook. Swanson takes us on a culinary adventure that takes in the sights, smells and flavours of near (her home, San Francisco) and far (Morocco, Japan, Italy, France and India). Wholefood ingredients and an uncluttered approach to technique and ingredients make this a potential kitchen classic.

Plum HB WAS $44.99 NOW $39.99

Meet the food technologists at the forefront of the culinary arts. Nathan Myhrvold helped Bill Gates popularise software at Microsoft, but now he focuses on a different type of byte. Dedicated to advancing the state of culinary art through the creative application of scientific knowledge and experimental techniques, he heads a team of scientists and research and development chefs devoted to deconstructing the process of cooking. This illustrated 456-page volume draws on their research to give handy tips on how to stock a modern kitchen, master Modernist techniques and make hundreds of recipes.

NEW KITCHEN Karen Martini

The way we cook and eat has changed dramatically over the past decade. Here, the ever-reliable Karen Martini offers a glimpse into what she terms her ‘New Kitchen’ – a culmination of local and international influences seen through her easy-to-emulate filter. The book is divided into nine chapters covering an eclectic range of subject matter.

There are projects for the weekend (roasted raspberry jam, fresh ricotta, quick kimchi), strolls down memory lane with old-school dishes reinvented (French fish soup with spicy rouille, macaroni and cheese with mustard and fresh truffle) and a fittingly sweet finale (coconut marshmallow kisses, slow-baked apple pie). With an emphasis on healthy eating, local ingredients and simple presentation (one chapter even focuses on cutlery-free food), this celebration of the modern Australian kitchen is sure to be a hit this summer.

Highly Recommended ANIMAL KINGDOM: A COLOURING BOOK ADVENTURE Millie Marotta Batsford PB $19.99

COLOR ME STRESS-FREE: 100 COLORING TEMPLATES TO UNPLUG AND UNWIND

Lacy Mucklow & Angela Porter Race Point PB $19.99

POSSIBLE WORLDS: A POSTER COLOURING BOOK

Dylan Martorell Thames & Hudson PB $24.99

SECRET GARDEN ARTIST’S EDITION: A PULL-OUT & FRAME COLOURING BOOK Johanna Basford Laurence King PB $29.99

ELSEWHERE: A COLOURING BOOK Joji Koyama Particular PB $24.99

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THIS ANNOYING LIFE: A MINDLESS COLOURING BOOK FOR THE HIGHLY STRESSED Oslo Davis Black Inc PB $9.99

THE OFFICIAL A GAME OF THRONES COLOURING BOOK George RR Martin Voyager PB $19.99

TROPICAL WONDERLAND: A COLOURING BOOK ADVENTURE Millie Marotta Batsford PB $19.99

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Food & Drink NOPI: THE COOKBOOK Yotam Ottolenghi & Ramael Scully

This may sound sacrilegious (forgive us!), but after the release of his last mega-selling cookbook Plenty More (Ebury HB $49.99) we found ourselves wishing that Yotam Ottolenghi might shake things up a bit for his next title and take a brief holiday from the simple Middle Eastern–influenced dishes for which he is so renowned. Lo and behold, this new book does just that, showcasing recipes that are drawn from a wider geographical palate and are more technically demanding to prepare. The Asian-flavoured fish and vegetable dishes are knockouts, but there are plenty of Middle Eastern, French and Italian alternatives as well. Perhaps best described as ‘Ottolenghi haute cuisine’, this delicious diversion is sure to satisfy.

THE NORDIC COOKBOOK Magnus Nilsson

Phaidon HB $59.95

SPECIAL DELIVERY Annabel Crabb & Wendy Sharpe

SHAKESPEARE, NOT STIRRED: COCKTAILS FOR YOUR EVERYDAY DRAMAS Caroline Bicks & Michelle Ephraim

Scribe HB $27.99

Shakespeare, Not Stirred adds a dash of the Bard to mix a cocktail collection with a difference. Proving that Shakespeare’s insights into the human condition still hold true today, each cocktail connects characters to daily predicaments – from dysfunctional families to failed romance – paired with Antonio’s Meatballs, Puck’s Magic ’Shrooms and other suggested accompaniments. The menu includes shots of context and commentary throughout, but readers shouldn’t feel obliged to put on their clever clogs – the only requirement is to raise a Kate’s Shrew-Driver or Viola’s Salty Dog with the authors, Boston-based associate professors of English specialising in Shakespeare.

Murdoch HB $39.99

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SPICE TEMPLE Neil Perry

Perry delivers another cookbook that’s both über-stylish and incredibly practical. Like its namesake restaurants in Melbourne and Sydney, the angle is regional Chinese, avoiding the commonly dominant Cantonese. There are plenty of popular favourites – peppery Sichuanese, chilli-hot Hunanese, warmly spiced lamb dishes from Xinjiang – as well as new regional cuisine to discover (steamed flathead from Jiangxi, Nanjing-braised pork hock). The invaluable selection of basic preparations will leave you no excuse not to make your own XO sauce, and a chapter on dumplings is sure to send you dashing for your steamer – never before have these pleated little devils seemed so easy! Sure to put some regional pizzazz into your Chinese repertoire, this book will have you smoking, steaming and deep-frying your way to tea-smoked duck heaven.

Melanie King Bodleian Library HB

$28.95

A SHAKESPEAREAN BOTANICAL Margaret Willes Bodleian Library HB $37.95 Two fascinating new releases from the prestigious publishing arm of the main research library of the University of Oxford.

Tea, Coffee & Chocolate is an enthralling and comical insight into the roots of today’s enduring (or should that be obsessive?) caffeine culture. A Shakespearean Botanical gives the social context behind the Bard’s botanical references to provide an intriguing and original focus on daily life in Tudor and Jacobean England.

Both volumes are lavishly illustrated and handsomely presented.

TIPSY Clare Burder

Affirm PB $24.99

Peter Gilmore may head the kitchen at one of the world’s most acclaimed restaurants, but his philosophy of cooking is relatively simple. The executive chef of Sydney’s Quay believes that only four elements are required to create perfect unison in a dish: nature, texture, intensity and purity. Here, Doyle introduces us to the edible plant species that he loves to include in his recipes, as well as to the people who grow, catch and source many of the other ingredients he utilises.

TEA, COFFEE & CHOCOLATE

Arguing that tacos are one of the most definitive traits of their rich culture, proud Mexicans Holtz and Mena deliver a comprehensive tribute to this fast-food favourite. Apparently, their countrymen and women consume over 60 kilos of tortillas per year – and most of these are stuffed with grilled or fried meat or fish, topped with spicy salsa and garnished with coriander.

The book profiles regional differences, lists the best tacquerías in Mexico, gives plenty of recipes and also profiles members of the taco family: enchiladas, quesadillas and tlayudas. There are plenty of infographics and fascinating facts (did you know that ant larvae, grasshoppers and maguey worms are all popular fillings?).

Within these pages you’ll learn the difference between pinot gris and pinot grigio, discover how whisky gets smoky and why gin goes with tonic. Burder wants us understand the alcohol that we drink – its history, how it’s made and what makes it special. There are chapters on wine (the different varietals, understanding wine speak, identifying faults and flaws, matching wine and food); sake (did you know that it’s free from histamines and sulphur?); beer (to get the full flavour, you really should drink out of a glass); cider (what the heck is scrumpy?); and spirits (did you know that the maguey worm in mezcal is a marketing ploy that was developed in the 1940s to hook in impressionable gringos?). One for devotees of the grape and the grain.

ORGANUM Peter Gilmore

8. Who had no fewer than 12 personalities?

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THUG KITCHEN PARTY GRUB: eat clean, party hard Kitchen Thug

Question: How the hell are you supposed to eat healthily when you hang around with a bunch of a**holes who don’t care what they shove in their faces? Answer: You make kick-ass plant-based dishes from this book and your friends will be more than happy to share them with you. Written by the foulmouthed but highly entertaining duo behind www.thugkitchen.com, this party grub guide features over 100 recipes for healthy and delicious vegan food that are sure to be popular with hipsters, teenagers and other social mother*uckers of your acquaintance.

Warmth, generosity and humour shine out of every page of this gorgeous cookbook from the smart and witty Annabel Crabb, whose delectable desserts on the ABC’s Kitchen Cabinet have distracted viewers from the preceding political chat. Special Delivery supplies recipes for dishes to give to friends when they need practical or emotional support. Crabb has written the book with lifelong friend Wendy Sharpe (the two have been delivering food to each other for years) and includes instructions for transporting food and, in some cases, assembling at the destination. Their suggestions include salads Ottolenghi-like in their bejewelled tastiness and cakes that have more than a hint of CWA in their heritage.

Murdoch HB WAS $100 NOW $39.95

TACOPEDIA Déborah Holtz & Juan Carlos Mena

SUMMER BERRIES & AUTUMN FRUITS Annie Rigg

It may not have the name of a celebrity chef attached to it, but this compilation of 120 sweet and savoury recipes featuring summer berries and autumn fruits deserves both attention and accolades. Recipes are easily executed by the average home cook and are each accompanied by a photograph that will guide presentation. Dishes range from the simple but sophisticated (tuna crudo salad with pink grapefruit and citrus dressing), to the rustic (fig and goat’s cheese tart) to the downright decadent (summer berry tiramisu cake). It’s rare to come across a cookbook in which every single recipe makes the reader want to don an apron and hit the kitchen, but this is one of them.

Not many of us can afford to make the trek to Scandinavia to eat at internationally renowned restaurants such as Fäviken, Noma and Restaurant Frantzén. And even if we could, the ultra-refined New Nordic cuisine that these establishments serve isn’t to all tastes. Fortunately, the same caveats don’t apply to this comprehensive guide to traditional Nordic food. The 600 recipes here are those that are cooked in home kitchens across the region – hearty dishes featuring meat, fish, root vegetables, grainy bread, nuts and wild game. Curated by acclaimed chef Magnus Nilsson after a web-based poll of home cooks across the Nordic states formed a shortlist of entries, this culinary reference is sure to offer plenty of inspiration.

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A YEAR OF GOOD EATING: THE KITCHEN DIARIES III Nigel Slater

Fourth Estate HB $39.99

The third instalment of Nigel Slater’s classic Kitchen Diaries series includes a year’s worth of failsafe recipes and companionable kitchen stories. The emphasis here is on quick, weeknight suppers in the style of Slater’s bestselling Eat (Fourth Estate HB $45). A salmon pie with herb butter sauce or an asparagus and blue cheese tart for when you have time to cook; roasted summer vegetables with sausages or quick-baked eggs and greens for when you need to get dinner on the table fast. It’s sure to make good eating a joy, every day of the year.

Art

ANDY GOLDSWORTHY: EPHEMERAL WORKS 2004–2014 Andy Goldsworthy

Abrams HB $90

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Andy Goldsworthy makes art using the materials and conditions he encounters wherever he is in the world. Earth, rocks, leaves, ice, snow, rain, sunlight and shadow are used in works that exist briefly before they are altered and eventually erased by natural processes. Ephemeral Works features approximately 200 of these artworks, selected by Goldsworthy from thousands he has made between 2001 and the present. Arranged in chronological sequence, they capture his creative process as it interacts with material, place and the passage of time and seasons.

CAYLEY & SON Penny Olsen

Neville Henry Cayley and his son Neville William Cayley are widely acknowledged as two of Australia’s most respected ornithologists and illustrators of birds.

Indeed, Neville William’s What Bird is That?, published in 1931, was the first comprehensive field guide to Australian birds. Here, natural history writer and research scientist Penny Olsen explores the background of father and son in biographical essays, revealing two very colourful characters. The book’s illustrations were drawn from the comprehensive collection of both artists’ work held in the National Library of Australia, and are quite magnificent.

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MASTER OF STILLNESS: JEFFREY SMART Barry Pearce

Wakefield HB $49.95

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This revised and expanded edition of Barry Pearce’s lavishly illustrated monograph on the celebrated Australian-born artist Jeffrey Smart covers his career from its start in Adelaide to its end in Smart’s adopted homeland of Italy and lets the man’s art do most of the talking. Pearce, the former head curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of NSW, argues that Smart created an entirely new vernacular of modern painting (the ‘shock of the familiar’) by confronting a brave new universe of technology and architecture and declaring that it was beautiful.

STRANGE COUNTRY Patrick McCaughey

Why has Australia, an island continent with a small population, produced such original and powerful art? And why is that art so little known beyond our shores? In Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters, McCaughey, art historian and former director of the National Gallery of Victoria, ponders the paradoxical neglect of Australian art abroad, explores the ways in which our island continent has made such a distinctive and compelling contribution to art despite our relatively small population, and explains the progression and development of a uniquely Australian style of painting.

THE VISION SPLENDID Stephanie Own Reeder

This full-colour National Library of Australia publication showcases the sketchbooks of 19th-century artists who recorded their time in Australia and New Zealand. The artists range from well-known professionals such as Eugene von Guérard, Albin Martens and John Glover, to amateurs about whom little is known. These artists, engineers, surveyors, military men, solicitors, public servants and pastoralists all delighted in recording colonial life in Australia and sharing their visual accounts with family, friends and the wider public. Admiring their sketches gives an invaluable insight into the early days of white settlement in the two countries.

AUSTRALIAN ART: A HISTORY Sasha Grishin

The resplendent cover of Sasha Grishin’s history of Australian art (a detail from Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s 1993 painting Yam Awely[e]) is a good indicator of the riches to be found inside. This lavishly illustrated 572-page book covers the history of our nation’s art from ‘Terra Nullius’ (Indigenous rock art) all the way through to the early 21st century. Divided into four sections – Terra Nullius; The Art of Colonial Australia; Nationalism, Federation and the Question of Modernism; and Postmodernism and Postcolonial Australia – it’s a comprehensive and beautifully presented reference book.

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FLORENCE: THE PAINTINGS AND FRESCOES 1250–1743 Ross King & Anja Grebe The city of Florence is a Renaissance time capsule, full of galleries and churches housing extraordinary paintings and frescoes dating from that culturally rich period. This magnificent volume contains quality reproductions of 2000 artworks in Florentine repositories, including every painting on display in the Uffizi Gallery, Pitti Palace, Accademia and Duomo. The works date from the Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods, and the list of artists represented is truly staggering (Michelangelo, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Filippo Lippi, Raphael and Titian, to name only a few).

Produced by the Institute for Aboriginal Development in Alice Springs, a not-for-profit Aboriginal-controlled organisation that aims to celebrate more than 50,000 years of stories from the heart of Australia, these diaries and calendar feature quality colour reproductions of contemporary Central Australian Aboriginal art.

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In 2014 the late Betty Churcher discovered a forgotten sketchbook in her files and decided to put together a final companion volume to her bestselling Notebooks series.

Created in the 1990s, when she drew her way around the galleries of the world while arranging artwork loans for the National Gallery of Australia, it includes sketches and notes inspired by works from artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Vermeer, Cézanne, Monet and Duchamp.

Churcher brings the artworks to life as she explores the stories of how they were created and reveals each artist’s influences.

THE SINGING BONES Shaun Tan

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Think fairy stories and you’ll likely think cute tales for children. But many fairy stories are strange and sinister indeed, qualities recognised by Shaun Tan in the sculptural art he has created in response to Grimms’ fairy tales. Originally created to illustrate the German edition of Philip Pullman’s telling of the stories, Tan’s small sculptures are here photographed beautifully, set next to an extract of the story they illuminate. And illuminate they do, adding a further layer to the narrative.

STREETS OF PAPUNYA Vivien Johnson STREET ART: AUSTRALIA Lou Chamberlin

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An unprecedented survey of the various ways in which the human body has been both an inspiration and a medium for artists, this book explores the diverse manifestations of the body in art across time, cultures and media. Covering everything from Palaeolithic caves and ancient Egyptian sculptures to 21st-century painting, video and installation art, it looks at the human body in art in expansive terms – Western and non-Western, ancient and contemporary, representative and conceptual.

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BODY OF ART

THE FORGOTTEN NOTEBOOK Betty Churcher

JUKURRPA CALENDAR & DIARIES

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It seems that street art is now almost ubiquitous in cities and towns across Australia. But often, the artists of these urban interventions remain unknown and the stories behind their creations untold.

Street-art photographer Lou Chamberlin aims to rectify this in her celebration of this local artform, recording images of many ephemeral pieces for posterity in the process. The list of artists and Instagram handles at the back of the book is an inspired addition, encouraging further research and appreciation.

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THE WAYWARD LEUNIG Michael Leunig

Australian living treasure and old master of the Mr Magoo nose, Michael Leunig has selected 400 cartoons from five decades of work for this companion piece to The Essential Leunig. Titled The Wayward Leunig: Cartoons that Wandered Off, it’s a result of what the man himself describes as ‘the recurring tendency to mentally stray into the realm of the peculiar, the silly, the mysterious and the unfamiliar’.

This all-encompassing, witty, insightful and 30-centimetre-thick collection is a musthave for the Leunigites amongst us.

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Established in the late 1950s, the small Indigenous community of Papunya in the Western Desert found wide recognition as a centre for the production of art in the 1970s and ’80s. In Streets of Papunya, sociologist and art scholar Vivien Johnson highlights the work of the artists who flourished during the community’s heyday and survived the dark days of exploitation. She also describes the resurgence of Papunya as an important centre for Indigenous art and artists, particularly focusing on the women artists working today. Beautifully written and photographed, this is a masterful and important work.

WOLFGANG SIEVERS Helen Ennis

The National Library of Australia holds an archive of 65,000 photographs shot by prolific photographer Wolfgang Sievers (1913–2007).

Excelling in the fields of architectural, industrial and mining photography, Sievers documented the post-war boom in manufacturing and the working conditions of many Australians. A master at evoking the beauty and excitement of industrial forms, his predominantly black-and-white images constitute a unique body of work and are a window onto Australian history, culture and photography. This survey of his work was curated by photographic historian Helen Ennis and includes hundreds of photographs shot between 1933 and 1985.

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Travel

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THE ART OF FREE TRAVEL Patrick Jones & Meg Ulman

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Many Australians dream of packing up their normal lives and spending a year travelling across the country. And that’s exactly what Patrick Jones, Meg Ulman and their two children did. Committed to sustainable living, the family travelled on their bikes, spending and using as little as possible. This memoir, in which they take turns to recount the journey, is at once an intimate insight into their experience, a handbook for those inspired to follow in their footsteps and a manifesto about the need to live more lightly on the earth.

9. Who has a passion for public education?

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GREEN NOMADS Bob Brown

Subtitled ‘Across Australia’s Wild Heritage’, this book by environmental activist and ex-politician Bob Brown is a photographic record of a recent three-month, 19,000 km road trip in which he and his partner Peter visited some of the million hectares owned and managed by Bush Heritage Australia, a not-for-profit organisation established in 1990 to protect wildlife and endangered habitats. A celebration of Australia’s wilderness areas, the book is filled with photographs and Brown’s personal and insightful anecdotes about the trip and the ‘Great Southland’ that we call home.

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NAPLES: A WAY OF LOVE Carla Coulson & Lisa Clifford

This photographic portrait of the colourful and historic capital of the Mezzogiorno should carry a warning sticker, because as soon as readers flick through its pages they are going to feel an overwhelming urge to throw fiscal responsibility to the winds and immediately book a flight to southern Italy.

Pizza makers, musicians, tailors, chefs, nuns and vegetable sellers are only a few of the Neapolitans who are photographed and profiled in this exuberant journey through the Naples most tourists never see.

A PERSONAL GUIDE TO INDIA & BHUTAN Christine Manfield

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lonely planet’s BEST EVER VIDEO TIPS 1

Contemplating a trip to the subcontinent?

Looking for advice on how to tackle this formidable part of the world – and eat well when you get there? Spice doyenne and inveterate traveller Christine Manfield has spent many years tasting her way around these two intriguing countries, and this book is the result. The best bhel puri in Bombay, where to drink cardamom lassi in Jodhpur, the finest biryani in Hyderabad – everything from top-class dining to street vendors is covered, along with her expert take on must-see sights and the best boutique places to stay.

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Video is a powerful vehicle for capturing our travel experiences.

This collection of more than 50 tips from film-industry insiders and social media experts will help you to shoot and share better travel videos on digital camera, smartphone and tablet. Lonely Planet’s pearls of wisdom on kit, techniques and editing will give you the skills to capture great moments on film and share them with the world, and will be appreciated by novices and experienced videographers alike.

KISSED BY A DEER: A TIBETAN ODYSSEY Margi Gibb

Serendipity plays a key role in this honest and raw memoir, which captures the joys and trials of travel. Seeking a healing experience after the death of her father, Margi Gibb pursues the study of mandalas in the US, where an otherworldly encounter with a wild deer leads to further travel and a journey of self-discovery. Heading to India, she travels via Dharamsala, Goa and Amravati to her ultimate destination, Tibet. As she learns to deal with loneliness, jealousy and judgemental behaviour, Gibb accepts that true self-discovery can’t be found in the East or West, but only within.

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The best way to explore a city is on foot and without a rigid itinerary, a fact that lifelong traveller Alexandra Carroll clearly understands well. In this ‘inspired wander through the Manhattan and Brooklyn boroughs’, she introduces the reader to her favourite neighbourhoods in New York – Uptown, Midtown, Downtown and Brooklyn – using pithy text and plenty of pictures. Identifying galleries, delis, cafes, bars, shops, museums and other places to investigate, Carroll supplies inspiration and practical advice aplenty.

READER’S DIGEST WORLD ATLAS An atlas is more than just a series of maps.

Continuing a 52-year tradition as one of the leading producers of up-to-date knowledge about our planet, this stunning new edition of the Reader’s Digest World Atlas is an indispensable and fascinating reference featuring over 200 maps (including updated political maps), thematic features (the art of mapmaking, the world’s oceans) and an A–Z gazetteer of all the world’s 242 countries and autonomous territories featuring population figures, official languages, flags, capital cities and major resources and industries. A fantastic resource, offered at a bargain price!

WINE TRAILS

Compiling the ultimate list of travel destinations every traveller should aspire to visit can’t have been an easy task, but Lonely Planet has never been one to shirk from a challenge. In this fully illustrated book, the global travel publisher nominates the 500 most thrilling, memorable and interesting places on this planet and ranks them in order of desirability as travel destinations. Bound to knock the dated ‘Places you Must See Before You Die’ series off the shelves, the Ultimate Travelist is sure to inspire you to get on a plane and into a lifetime of travel.

The first book in Lonely Planet’s ‘Perfect Weekends’ series, Wine Trails heads to well-known regions such as Napa, the Adelaide Hills, Stellenbosch, Tuscany, Burgundy and Rioja, but also explores off-the-beaten-path wine-growing areas in Georgia, Greece, Morocco, Lebanon, Turkey and beyond. Fifty-two detailed itineraries nominate the best wineries to visit, and also list recommended places to stay and eat in each region. Winemakers offer personal insights, Lonely Planet authors offer their usual expert text and plenty of photographs bring the regions to life.

BEST 100 BIRDWATCHING SITES IN AUSTRALIA Sue Taylor

Well-known birder and author Sue Taylor (Why Watch Birds?: A Beginner’s Guide to Birdwatching) will make you want to pack your binoculars and hit the road as she nominates her top 100 Australian birdwatching sites. These range from national parks (25 of them) to suburban parks, sewage ponds, remote offshore islands, easily accessible beaches, outback towns and cities. This compact, full-colour guide includes every state, territory and island, and features more than 700 birds – it’s an essential buy for every enthusiastic member of the twitcher species.

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LONELY PLANET’S WILD WORLD

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A follow-up volume to Lonely Planet’s Beautiful World, the latest read-at-home volume from the world’s most reliable travel publisher continues the company’s quest to provide us with vivid and inspiring portraits of the world in which we live. Featuring breathtaking images of the natural world, this gorgeous collection of full-page photographs is full of wildlife spectacles and natural phenomena from the earth’s wildest corners.

PARIS IN STYLE Janelle McCulloch

NEW YORK Alexandra Carroll

ULTIMATE TRAVELIST

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In Paris, there seem to be style icons on every street. So how to make sure you see and experience the best of them? Let Janelle McCulloch, former editor of Vogue Living, introduce you to the best of Paris style – boutique hotels, design museums, shopping destinations and the quartiers in which the city’s elegance can best be absorbed. Her guide is full of gorgeous photos and plenty of advice: where to pick up a super-cheap Hermès scarf, how to score big at the legendary twice-yearly sales, tackling the incredible flea markets.

It’s guaranteed to ensure that your next Parisian jaunt is a style triumph.

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THE ROAD TO LITTLE DRIBBLING Bill Bryson

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Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson journeyed around Britain to celebrate the place that had become his adopted country. The book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, became an international bestseller and established his reputation as one of the most amusing and insightful travel writers on the planet. Now, in his first travel book for 15 years, Bryson once again sets off to explore the small island, journeying from Bognor Regis on the Sussex coast to Cape Wrath in the Scottish Highlands. The result is an acute, perceptive and amusing insight into all that is best and worst about Britain today.

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YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE

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The message in You Only Live Once is to make every travel experience count.

Tantalising travel possibilities both great and small are distilled into five chapters covering an hour, a day, a week, a month and a year. Experiences range from big-ticket adventures such as taking an African safari to simple pleasures like sipping a mojito while in Havana. These suggestions and many more are combined with enlightening facts and information, travel tips and the mouth-watering photography we’ve come to expect from the Lonely Planet team.

Style & Design

BOAT Simon Griffiths

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There is an inherent sense of adventure and freedom when rowing, sailing or cruising on the water. Even the humble dinghy can ignite the imagination. Here, photographer Simon Griffiths explores our seafaring obsession with a hop-aboard visit to some of the country’s best watercraft. Even without sea legs, it’s impossible not to admire the beauty, design and craftsmanship of the rowing, sailing and steamboats selected for inclusion. Behind-the-scenes visits to boat-builders’ yards and a section on boat festivals round off this magnificently photographed celebration of our love of life on the ocean wave.

DO IT YOURSELF Thomas Barnthaler

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This collection of 50 simple projects can be made at home with basic tools and everyday items. Devised by renowned designers and artists from a variety of disciplines and drawn from across the globe, each project is illustrated with full-colour photographs of the finished piece and all tools and materials required to make it, as well as handdrawn illustrations supplying step-by-step instructions. Text for each object describes the design concept and includes a biography of the designer.

CABIN PORN: INSPIRATION FOR YOUR QUIET PLACE SOMEWHERE Zach Klein

Created by Zach Klein, co-founder and designer of Vimeo, Cabin Porn began as a Tumblr blog to collect inspiration for building projects by Klein and a group of friends who preserve 55 acres of hidden forest in Upstate Particular HB $45 New York. It has since grown into a collection of photos of remarkable handmade homes in breathtaking landscapes, and attracted a global following on social media. The book features the most alluring images from the blog but also includes interior photography and the stories behind some of these unusual and inspiring retreats.

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RURAL AUSTRALIAN HOMES Leta Keens

Design writer Leta Keens travelled around Australia to find the 18 homes featured in this book, and presents us with an eclectic and idiosyncratic selection of rural properties. These include a sheep station that has been in the same family for a century, a converted general store, an adapted shed and award-winning architectdesigned contemporary houses. Covering every state and the Northern Territory, Rural Australian Homes gives a compelling insight into contemporary life in rural Australia, and offers a glimpse into some of the history that has defined it.

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As compact and design-driven as the 411 houses that it profiles, this photographic survey of the Japanese jutaku (house) profiles one architect-designed house per page, one image per house, in a fastpaced ‘quick hit’ format that shines a Shinjuku-bright light on the sheer volume and variety of residential architecture in Japan. Architect, design writer and curator Naomi Pollock, author of Modern Japanese House, travelled the length of the country to identify the projects included in the book and has put together a reference work that is sure to inspire both architects and Grand Designs devotees.

SHED Simon Griffiths

A photographic homage to what for many males is the most sacred of all Australian spaces. Corrugated iron and rusted tin roofs abound; eclectic artists’ studios rub shoulders with tool-sheds and abandoned farming storage spaces. From a disused stables erected in the colonial era to a converted outdoor dunny and the shabby chic of a dedicated ‘party shed’, Simon Griffiths celebrates the diversity and variety of these Australian outbuildings in all their scruffy majesty.

THE TERRACE HOUSE Cameron Bruhn & Katelin Butler

SUPERHOUSE Karen McCartney

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Highly sought-after for their nostalgic charm and inner-city locales, Australian terrace houses are being reimagined for a 21stcentury lifestyle. From subtle refinements to bold geometric forms, alterations and additions are often hidden from the street, creating a sense of intrigue about what lies behind, above or beyond the facade. The homes in this book celebrate the history and enduring appeal of these well-loved buildings, and offer plenty of inspiration for those contemplating an inner-city renovation.

THE CRAFT COMPANION Ramona Barry & Rebecca Jobson

Once the domain of the domestic, craft has now infiltrated every creative sphere –including food, fashion, fine art and architecture. This guide to navigating the new craft frontiers features over 30 new and old crafting techniques, including everything from appliqué to the Japanese phenomenon of zakka (‘many things’). Each chapter looks at the evolution of a craft, lists the various tools and techniques required to get you started and suggests a project you can do at home. There are also 165 bonus project ideas to test your newfound skills.

HUMANS OF NEW YORK: STORIES Brandon Stanton

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JUTAKU: JAPANESE HOUSES Naomi Pollock

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What’s a superhouse? Design critic Karen McCartney describes it as a home with an exterior and interior that are seamlessly executed and one that is, above all else, awe-inspiring. This book profiles 19 such houses, including both international examples and projects by high-profile Australian architects. Richard Powers’ stunning photographs take centre stage, accompanied by thoughtful essays about each project.

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HANDMADE FOR THE GARDEN Susan Guagliumi

Garden and interior restorer Susan Guagliumi conjures up 75 creative ideas to help enhance your garden space without breaking the bank in the process. With its DIY ethos, Handmade for the Garden uses reclaimed and inexpensive materials to provide original and practical solutions to challenges facing STC Craft/Melanie the home gardener. Simple trellis, rustic fencing, garden storage, ornamental planters Falick PB and how to master mosaic are just a few of WAS $35 the achievable ideas that will add interest in NOW $14.95 your garden. The book is fully illustrated, with loads of easy-to-follow projects suitable for all skill levels.

INDOOR GREEN: LIVING WITH PLANTS Bree Claffey & Lauren Bamford

Bree Claffey is the creative force behind fashionable Melbourne shop Mr Kitly, which almost singlehandedly kick-started the current resurgence of indoor plants in inner-city neighbourhoods across the country. Here, she journeys into the worlds of fellow plant lovers to explore the enduring attraction of houseplants and give an inspirational guide to incorporating plants in small indoor spaces. Photographs by Lauren Bamford celebrate everything from the everreliable peace lily and beguiling fiddle-leaf fig, to the elusive Chinese money plant.

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Maybe you’re one of the 15 milli on people who’ve seen these stories of random New Yorkers float by in your Facebook feed over the last five years. And maybe you’d question the point of collecting a few of them together into a book. But here they are, beautifully observed photographs matched with a few words from their subjects, each briefly opening a door onto that biggest of mysteries: the inner life of another human being. Together, they form a compelling, sometimes humorous, sometimes heartbreaking, ultimately life-affirming picture of the wonder of humanity, and its wonderful variety.

THE KINFOLK HOME: INTERIORS FOR SLOW LIVING Nathan Williams

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This book could easily be subtitled ‘Hipsters with Money’. Published by the creative types that bring us Kinfolk Magazine and a companion volume to The Kinfolk Table: Recipes for Small Gatherings (Workman HB $65), it profiles 35 stylish homes around the world that reflect some of the key principles of slow living: cultivating community, simplifying our lives and reclaiming time for what matters most. Lavishly photographed, its subjects are predominantly drawn from the Scandinavian countries, Japan, the US and UK, but there are a few from Australia and other countries in Europe and the Americas.

SHELTER: HOW AUSTRALIANS LIVE Kara Rosenlund

Do you dream of going bush and living in a ramshackle old house that has been loved by generations? The softly lit photographs and romantic accompanying words in this splendidly produced book are sure to feed those fantasies. Kara Rosenlund developed a love for old houses as she drove around Australia for work, and she soon began to record them for posterity. A project to remind citified folk of country ways, and to capture a disappearing way of living.

WORKING SPACE Martyn Thompson, Emma Balfour & Andrew Egan

Offering a fascinating insight into the creative lifestyle, this sneak-peek into the spaces where some of the world’s most influential and important artists, artisans and designers work is full of ideas and inspiration that can be utilised by us all. New York–based photographer Martyn Thompson has documented spaces across the globe, and presents them here in all of their cluttered and colourful splendour.

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Gift THE BEACH: AN AUSTRALIAN PASSION Robert Drewe

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In this personal and affectionate look at Australia’s obsession with the beach, Robert Drewe casts an eye back through our collective history, coursing a coastline that kisses three great oceans: the Pacific, the Indian and the Southern. With a poetic sensibility and irreverent sense of humour, Drewe delves into the historical and cultural events that both helped shape the nation’s psyche and enhanced our reputation as a country of mad-for-it beachgoers.

Wonderfully observed and researched, the book is further enhanced by a great selection of photographs from the collection of the National Library of Australia.

BIG MAGIC: CREATIVE LIVING BEYOND FEAR Elizabeth Gilbert

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10. Who visits two therapists per week?

LADYSCAPING Caroline Selmes

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A landing runway or a martini goblet? A Mohican crest or a postage stamp? What exactly does your private garden hide?

This ‘Girl’s Guide to Personal Topiary’ is a witty analysis of the new trends and secret fashions in woman’s intimate shaving styles, interpreted by the caustic hand of the French illustrator Caroline Selmes. This is the definitive handbook on a subject that no book has ever had the courage to discuss…until now!

THE NEW YORK DOG Rachael Hale McKenna

Any visitor to the Big Apple will realise pretty quickly that New Yorkers adore their dogs, though it might seem anachronistic that this quintessentially tough town is home to so many pampered pooches of all shapes and sizes. Photographer and best-selling author Rachael Hale McKenna is renowned for her dog and cat portrait books. As she pounds the pavements of Manhattan and surrounds, she meets some of the city’s most photogenic four-legged residents and shares their stories.

If you have a dog in the house, here’s the perfect kennel-filler for Christmas.

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Strewth, this book’s bound to run off the shelves this Chrissy! Learn to distinguish your drongos from your dropkicks with this handy pictorial guide to Australian slang.

You’d need to be a few sandwiches short of a picnic – or simply a silly duffer – not to buy one for yourself and also for friends and family members. After all, every man and his dog are going to want one!

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MAP: EXPLORING THE WORLD This visually splendid compilation highlights the widespread presence of maps in our lives and the many reasons that people create them, from finding their way to staking a claim to ownership.

Selected by an international panel of cartographers, academics and map dealers and collectors, it features some of the greatest masterpieces from the history of cartography and guides the reader through the story of this scientific art, giving biographies of selected cartographers and an illustrated timeline detailing significant events in mapmaking, exploration and related historical events.

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Granted unprecedented access to the archives of the Charles M Schulz Museum and Research Center in California, renowned graphic designer and writer Chip Kidd embarked on a true labour of love – curating the best of Schulz’s Peanuts newspaper strip. Schulz believed that the key to cartooning was to take out the extraneous details and leave in ‘only what’s necessary’, but Kidd has widened the range of Peanuts art usually showcased, reproducing much-loved episodes alongside developmental work and rare and hitherto unpublished original art.

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HOW TO BE A GRRRL! Charles M Schulz

Here, Lucy van Pelt, the feisty heroine of Charles M Schulz’s much-loved cartoon strip, gives flawless advice about how best to give the patriarchy a kick in the (Pea)nuts. Entrepreneur, psychiatrist, fussbudget, new feminist – Lucy is finally presented as the role model she has always wanted to be. Packed with tips on how to stick up for yourself, how to make yourself heard and how to stand up for what you believe in, Lucy’s handbook has one clear message: it is a scientific fact that girls are smarter than boys!

One for the fans, Heart of Gold pays homage to one of rock’s most enduring legends.

Part fanzine, part oral history, this lushly illustrated book lovingly charts Neil Young’s 50-year career from high school bands in early-1960s Canada to his 2015 release The Monsanto Years. What sets this book apart is the liberal inclusion of reminiscences and perspectives from peers such as Nils Lofgren, Graham Nash and Jim Jarmusch, exclusively interviewed by the author, music historian Harvey Kubernik. A full discography with retrospective album-by-album commentary, bibliography and contributor notes are also included.

PERFUME: A CENTURY OF SCENTS Lizzie Ostrom

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UNEMPLOYABLE: 30 YEARS OF HARDCORE, SKATE AND STREET Jason Boulter

This is the fascinating story of a bunch of misfits who chose to create a world to exist in, rather than conform to one in which they didn’t fit. Led by Australia’s Hill brothers (Stephen, Peter and Matt), the group went on to become industry pioneers, forming the skate, street and surf company, Globe International. Superbly designed and packed with images, Unemployable covers the rise of the underground skate culture of the ’70s, the debauched skateboard tours of the ’80s and the streetwear fashion explosion dating from the 1990s.

Featuring all kinds of dogs – big, small, graceful, cute, funny – this quirky collection of 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century paintings featuring dogs is sure to be a hit with those who love the species. Each artwork (by artists as diverse as Goya, Stubbs, Bonnard, Freud and Hockney) is accompanied by a short text, anecdote or witty quote about the dog breed.

NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD Harvey Kubernik

ONLY WHAT’S NECESSARY: CHARLES M SCHULZ AND THE ART OF PEANUTS Chip Kidd

TAILS FROM THE BOOTH Lynn Terry

It started as an awareness-raising exercise for a local animal shelter, quickly became an internet sensation and is now a book. Lynn Terry’s clever idea of putting two pooches in a photo booth to see how they react resulted in these funny and heart-warming images of dogs, which capture their personalities, sense of humour, innate need to socialise and willingness to improvise. Behind that curtain these posing pups and mischievous mutts become superstars in their own right.

Laurence King PB $27.99

FAIR DINKUM! HG Nelson (intro)

THE BOOK OF HUMAN EMOTION Tiffany Watt Smith

Subtitled ‘An Encyclopaedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust’, this thesaurus of emotion is full of entertaining and informative alphabetical entries revealing the surprising connections and fascinating facts behind our emotional lives. Smith draws on history, anthropology, science, art, literature, music and popular culture to find the perfect words to match 200 emotions, enriching both our vocabularies and our emotional resilience.

In her latest book, Gilbert returns to the self-actualising territory of Eat Pray Love, aiming to help her readers to construct lives that are ‘driven more strongly by curiosity than by fear’. By sharing stories from her own life, as well as those from her friends and the people that have inspired her, Gilbert aims to empower others to embrace their curiosity and creativity, do what they most enjoy and face down what they most fear. Divided into six sections – Courage, Enchantment, Permission, Persistence, Trust and Divinity – Big Magic is full of sensible advice and inspiration.

THE BOOK OF THE DOG Angus Hyland & Kendra Wilson

Author Lizzie Ostrom has been dubbed ‘the Heston Blumenthal of perfume’ by London’s Daily Mail and this book proves without doubt that she knows her scents. In this olfactory adventure she recounts the stories of 100 perfumes – signature scents and now-lost masterpieces; the visionaries who conceived them; the wild and wonderful campaigns that launched them; and the women and men who wore them.

VARGIC’S MISCELLANY OF CURIOUS MAPS Martin Vargic

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Nineteenth-century cartography meets 21st-century creativity in this virtuoso collection of 64 maps and infographics.

There are maps of the internet, of literature (wonderful!), of the probability of getting struck by lightning, of stereotypes, of average penis length, of NSA surveillance rates, of paranormal activity and even of the number of heavy metal bands per capita. Their Slovenian creator Martin Vargic (halcyonmaps.com) has an utterly unique and endlessly fascinating way of viewing the world and his first book is certain to be a global bestseller.

Kids

ADAM SPENCER’S ENORMOUS BOOK OF NUMBERS Adam Spencer

XOUM PB $19.99

THE ADVENTURES OF MISS PETITFOUR Anne Michaels & Emma Block

ADVENTURES AROUND THE GLOBE Lonely Planet PB $16.99

THE TRAVEL BOOK

Every time a child moans that ‘maths is boring’, a little mathematics fairy dies.

Here’s the bookish equivalent of clapping hands to save them. With his infectious enthusiasm for all things numerical, Adam Spencer is out to prove that maths isn’t boring. Wondrous mathematical facts combine with activities ranging from straightforward tasks like word searches and writing numbers through to mid-level magic number boxes and a brainteaser so perplexing it’ll have parents scratching their heads for the answers. 7+

Lonely Planet HB $29.99

HOW TO BE AN INTERNATIONAL SPY Lonely Planet HB $24.99

These new releases from Lonely Planet’s kids imprint are sure to keep junior travellers occupied and happy over the summer holidays. Adventures around the Globe is an activity book crammed with fun facts, maps, stickers, puzzles and projects. Both it and How to be an International Spy (codebreaking! invisible ink! gadgets!) offer hours of distraction at home or on the road and are perfect companions to the kid-specific version of The Travel Book, which takes a whirlwind trip through 200 countries. 8+

THE BEAR’S SURPRISE Benjamin Chaud Chronicle HB

Bloomsbury HB $19.99

L SPECIA E C I R P

THE BOY AT THE TOP OF THE MOUNTAIN John Boyne

Corgi PB $19.99

CINDERELLA: A FASHIONABLE TALE Steven Guarnaccia Abrams HB WAS $24.95 NOW $13.95

GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS: A TALE MODERNE

BER DECEM SE RELEA

Steven Guarnaccia Abrams HB

WAS $24.95 NOW $13.95

Budding style gurus are introduced to design classics of the 20th century in these two takes on classic fairy tales. A Twiggy-like Cinderella stars in ‘A Fashionable Tale’ with outfits ranging from Dior to Westwood, set off with Bally pumps and Manolo Blahnik sandals. The Three Bears’ house is decked out with furnishings from designers such as Aalto, Rennie Mackintosh and Eames, and Goldilocks sups chilli from 1947 Town and Country bowls. Style-obsessed parents will get as much of a kick out of these as their offspring. Ages 4+

Text PB $19.99

Macmillan PB $19.99

ABC Books PB $16.99

In a dead-end town like Barwen, a girl need only be a little different to feel like a freak.

And Clancy, a typical 16-year-old misfit with a moderately dysfunctional family, a genuine interest in Nature Club and a major crush on the local hot girl, often feels like the freak tag fits. But then, after a tragedy that her family and the town must deal with, Clancy meets someone who could possibly – at last – become a friend. Brisbane-based author Currie delivers a gripping coming-of-age story for readers aged 14+.

Against all the evidence, Danny Best, aged 8¾, is convinced he is a dead-set legend.

Danny reckons he’s the boss of his gang of mates, and they just about let him believe it. In these five stories, the kids muck about in make-believe games like cops-androbbers and wilderness explorers that are as endearingly daggy as they are authentic. The visuals add to the storytelling, all resulting in plenty of laughs. 7+

ABC Books PB $16.99

Two thoroughly modern children encounter ancient Norse magick in this entertaining novel that blends emotional realism with genuinely frightening moments of supernatural happenings. Siblings Angus and Martha live with their father, who is distracted by his grief for their recently deceased mother. When a very curious curiosity shop opens next door, owned by an even curiouser woman, the children are drawn into an exciting battle where the fate of their father, as well as the world, is at stake! 9+

Charlie and Lola are back! And this time Lola’s grappling with maths in her own inimitable way. Simple concepts rather than explicit instruction added to Lola’s quirky personality multiplied by Charlie’s gentle forbearance equals an accessible introduction to how maths works in the world. Child’s illustrative style has developed while retaining its unique character, and Charlie and Lola remain as lovable and relatable as ever. 3+

THE CLEO STORIES: A FRIEND AND A PET Libby Gleeson & Freya Blackwood

CLANCY OF THE UNDERTOW Christopher Currie

THE FOURTEENTH SUMMER OF ANGUS JACK Jen Storer & Lucinda Gifford

FASHION STUDIO Helen Moslin

Budding fashion designers can create 50 fabulous outfits complete with accessories using the press-out patterns and designer Walker Kit $29.95 paper and tissue in this kit. It includes a designer’s handbook with detailed stepby-step instructions, notes on the couture origins of each look and a chic foldout studio where the creations can be displayed. 8+

Orchard HB $24.99

Allen & Unwin HB $16.99

If the young children in your life haven’t met Cleo yet, they’re in for an absolute treat. And if they have, they’ll welcome her second appearance like a familiar friend.

The perfect pairing of author Libby Gleeson and illustrator Freya Blackwood has again produced a gorgeous hardback with two gentle stories about small happenings that ring absolutely true. For each familiar problem that she encounters (a desperate wish for a pet, and longing for a friend who is entirely devoted to her), imaginative Cleo manages to resolve things herself. 5+

BER DECEM SE RELEA

THE DOLDRUMS Nicholas Gannon

DANNY BEST: FULL ON Jen Storer & Mitch Vane

CLOUDWISH Fiona Wood

Part of the joy of reading YA fiction is seeing talented writers take familiar themes of the genre, put their creativity to work and make something entirely fresh. With Cloudwish, Fiona Wood has done just that. Scholarship is the daughter of Vietnamese girl Vân refugees living in public housing. Billy Gardiner is the rowing star of their private school. She wishes he would notice her and – is it magic? – he does. But this is much, much more than a romance. Joyful at times, sad at others, touching always, Cloudwish is sure to be a hit with readers aged 13+.

A decade after the publication of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Vintage PB $14.99), John Boyne has created another captivating and harrowing story about morality, guilt, fear and loyalty set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany. Sent to live with his aunt in the Bavarian Alps, Pierrot experiences the insidious appeal and unmitigated horror of Nazism firsthand. Will he be able to retain his innocence in this heart of darkness? A powerful fable for readers aged 11+.

Some adventures are so small that we don’t even know they’re underway. Others, such as growing up, are so big and long that we sometimes forget how extraordinary they are. But the best adventures are just the right size – fitting into one single but magical day. These are the types of adventures that Miss Petitfour and her 16 cats like to take. Emma Block’s whimsical illustrations perfectly complement Anne Michaels’ text, which brings to mind classics such as Mary Poppins and Pippi Longstocking. 6+

CHARLIE AND LOLA: ONE THING Lauren Child

$29.95

Hibernation is over and Little Bear is ready for another adventure. But where is Papa Bear? We follow the curious cub as he makes his way through interactive cut-outs on every page of this detail-rich extravaganza in search of his father. What will the little adventurer discover when he finally locates his high-flying papa? A showstopping and sweet surprise awaits in this action-packed picture book. Also available: The Bear’s Song Puzzle ($29.95) and The Bear’s Song Matching Game ($24.95). 2+

21

BER DECEM SE RELEA

HarperCollins HB $24.99

For the child who yearns for adventure, Archer Helmsely is the perfect fictional alterego. The grandson of fearless explorers, Archer has adventure in his blood, but is kept away from the world by his overprotective yet contemptuous mother. Two years after his grandparents disappear on an iceberg, Archer is unable to restrain the stirrings of adventure, and conscripts two quirky friends to join him in a rescue mission. This original story about the importance of friendships, daydreaming and individuality is brilliantly complemented by the author’s whimsical illustrations. 9+

HISTORIUM Richard Wilkinson & Jo Nelson

Five Mile Press HB $39.95

STORY OF LIFE: EVOLUTION Katie Scott Five Mile Press HB $24.95

These magnificently illustrated follow-up titles to last year’s acclaimed virtualmuseum-in-a-book, Animalium (Five Mile Press HB $39.95), are sure to be hugely popular with junior historians and scientists.

There are more than 140 exhibits in Historium, including objects from ancient civilisations and great works of art. The Story of Life is quite different, featuring a twometre-wide timeline capturing the history of life on earth in a single snapshot. 8+

22

Kids JUST ANDY! Andy Griffiths & Terry Denton

There’s a reason why Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton are the rock gods of the children’s book world. Their books might seem like anarchy on the page, but they’re careful and clever creations that hook kids in. Now the Just series – hilarious stories about Andy the accident-prone boy who loves to play pranks – has been released in a boxed set. If you’ve viciously deprived your child of these books until now, you should buy this set. Also available: The 65-Storey Treehouse (PB $12.99) and the 13-Storey Treehouse: Book & Treehouse Trivia Cards (Set $19.99). 6+

Pan Macmillan Boxed set $99.99

ILLUMINAE Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

Very occasionally, a book is published that changes the landscape of publishing.

Illuminae may well be one of these. Written

by Melbourne-based duo Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, its form is hybrid (multiformatted text and graphics), its theme is universal (individuals vs an evil corporation) Allen & Unwin PB and its main characters (teenage lovers Kady and Ezra, and an AI unit called AIDAN) $19.99 are so wonderfully evoked that they almost leap off the page. Kids who love video games such as Mass Effect and sci-fi films such as Aliens are going to go crazy for this and subsequent instalments of the Illuminae Files, and so too will their parents. 13+

INBETWEEN DAYS Vikki Wakefield

Text PB $19.99

At 17, Jack (Jacklin) Bates is all grown up.

A school dropout, she lives with her runaway sister Trudy in the dying town of Mobius and is in secret, obsessive love with Luke, who doesn’t love her back. Then things get even worse – her only friend, Astrid, does something unforgivable; her parents aren’t getting on; and Trudy’s brilliant façade begins to crack. As Jack struggles to hold onto the life she thought she wanted, she learns that growing up is complicated – and that love might be the biggest mystery of all. Powerful Australian YA fiction from a rising star in the genre. 14+

Macmillan Australia HB $19.99

Tate Publishing HB $24.99

Scholastic PB $19.99

Quirk PB $22.99

Scholastic HB $34.99

Allen & Unwin HB $24.99

Children with supernatural qualities, timebending loops and monstrous creatures who feed on souls – yes, it’s the latest instalment in the decidedly strange Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series, which uses doctored vintage photographs to help create its uncanny atmosphere. Fans of the previous two volumes will continue to be enthralled by Jacob’s journey, which culminates in a battle for the souls of the Peculiars. Newcomers should read the previous volumes first and then enjoy this one before seeing the upcoming film adaptation of the first book by the equally peculiar director Tim Burton. 11+

Penguin PB $22.99

L SPECIA PRICE

Puffin HB $24.99 WAS $24.99 NOW $19.99

The first in a new series from the author of the Percy Jackson books, this thrilling 21st-century reimagining of Norse mythology is the story of a boy who is destined for greatness, even if he might die in the pursuit of it. Magnus Chase has never been ordinary, but the news that his uncle gives him is truly extraordinary: Magnus’ father is a Norse god and Magnus is destined to save the world from Doomsday. Facing the impossible has never been so enthralling! 9+

KidGlovz is a musical genius whose gift is so special that he is kept under lock and key. One night he meets a thief and escapes, beginning a remarkable and hair-raising adventure in which he meets a variety of new friends and old enemies, and begins to discover the mysterious origins of his musical powers. Julie Hunt’s lyrical dialogue is perfectly complemented by Dale Newman’s sombre and evocative pencil illustrations, which are drawn with a hint of surrealism. The result is a rollicking yarn and graphic delight. 9+

THE LION AND THE BIRD Marianne Duboc

Book Island HB $29.99

A delightful story about caring, kindness, loneliness and love that is sure to enchant pre-schoolers and their parents. One autumn day, Lion finds a wounded bird in his garden. After nursing his visitor back to health, the two become fast friends.

Then, in spring, the bird departs with her flock. What will become of Lion, and of their friendship? Translated from French, Marianne Duboc’s picture book features simple text and softly coloured illustrations that are perfectly suited to before-bed reading and discussion. 3+

MANGO & BAMBANG THE NOT-A-PIG Polly Faber & Clara Vulliamy

MAGNUS CHASE AND THE SWORD OF SUMMER Rick Riordan

THE MARVELS Brian Selznick A splendid homage to the art of storytelling, this era-spanning pair of tales – one told in text and another in over 400 pages of wordless illustrations – begins in 1766 and tells the story of the Marvel family through countless hidden visual clues. More than a century later, the narrative of Joseph Jervis takes over, detailing his struggle to uncover secrets about his family’s past. Selznick (Wonderstruck, The Invention of Hugo Cabret) has reimagined the technique he pioneered with his two previous bestsellers, endowing his beautifully evocative pencil drawings with mystery, drama and plenty of action. 10+

Everyone loves a happy ending, and Jill’s no exception. Taking pity on the sad dragon in one of her picture books, she pulls him out of the book and into her life, teaching him how to do all of her favourite things.

Alas, even flower arranging and hosting tea parties fail to make this dragon live happily ever after. The solution? Using his major talent to please the king! The wonderful colour illustrations here are the main draw, as befits a picture book published by London’s Tate Gallery. 3+

Sometimes, with a little luck or magic, an imaginary friend can appear when you need one. An imaginary friend like Fred, who floated like a feather in the wind until a lonely little boy wished for him and found a friendship like no other. The text by Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl) and illustrations by Oliver Jeffers (Once Upon an Alphabet) are quirky, charming and perfect for kids who are a bit shy and find it difficult to make friends. 4+

KIDGLOVZ Julie Hunt & Dale Newman

LIBRARY OF SOULS Ransom Riggs

LIQUIDATOR Andy Mulligan

Liquidator is a brand-new energy drink that is set to make billions for its creators, Lockson & Lockson. Vicky is a 13-yearold student who discovers a dark secret about the company during what could well be the worst work experience ever.

Realising that her time at the company might be more dangerous than she had anticipated, she and her classmates try to uncover the dark truth behind the drink.

Andy Mulligan, author of the bestselling Trash (Corgi PB $19.99), delivers an action-packed thriller about corporate crime, friendship and one extremely exciting work-experience week. 11+

HarperCollins HB $27.99

JILL & DRAGON Lesley Barnes

LAUGH YOUR HEAD OFF Andy Griffiths, Andrew Daddo et al

This Australian anthology of funny stories for all kinds of kids includes contributions

by Andy Griffiths, Frances Watts, Andrew Daddo, Lollie Barr, James O’Loghlin, Tristan Bancks, Sam Bowring, Randa Abdel-Fattah and Judith Rossell. Whether they are about organic rodent pies, choco-pops robots or a nit epidemic (yuk!), these stories are sure to call up plenty of chuckles. 8+

IMAGINARY FRED Eoin Colfer & Oliver Jeffers

Walker HB $17.95

Bambang is the heir apparent to Paddington: a lost creature from a far-away jungle who finds himself in a busy city.

People think he’s a pig, but Bambang is a tapir, one with a habit of curling up into a ball when he feels threatened. Luckily he is befriended by the divine Mango Allsorts, a girl who is good at many things, including making tapirs happy and safe, and together the two gain in confidence. With striking illustrations, these four stories of a developing friendship are both reassuring and thoroughly entertaining. 7+

MY WILD FAMILY Laurent Moreau MY DOG BIGSY Alison Lester

This little dog has a very busy morning!

Lester’s tale of what a naughty and inquisitive dog gets up to on the farm involves lots of squawking, quacking, oinking and clucking. Toddlers will love matching animals to the sounds they make, and will ask to be read the story of this pooch with clickety clickety claws and five brown patches over and over again.

Consider yourselves warned. 1+

Chronicle HB $29.95

Originally published in France, this largeformat picture book features brightly coloured double-page spreads in which a young girl likens her family members and best friends to animals – her mother is a tall and beautiful giraffe, her older brother is a strong and respected elephant who it’s best not to provoke and her father is a very hairy and often fierce lion. Moreau’s illustrations are endearingly primitive and the text is both affectionate and humorous, nudging readers to the book’s final and defining question: What makes each of us special? 3+

Kids

23

NIGHT OWLS Jenn Bennett

Simon & Schuster PB $19.99

FREE GIFT

Hardie Grant Egmont HB $24.95

Meeting Jack on the Owl – San Francisco’s night bus – turns Bex’s world upside down. Jack has a life that is even more complicated than hers (which is really saying something), and Bex needs to get behind his Zen façade if their relationship is to go anywhere meaningful. Jenn Bennett’s first YA novel is wonderfully written, wildly romantic and full of important themes and messages. Bex is a strong and determined female protagonist and Jack is a creative and empathetic male equivalent – teenage readers are bound to be totally infatuated with them both. 13+

PERFECT Danny Parker & Freya Blackwood

Freya Blackwood is one of our best picturebook illustrators, able to capture not just images but feelings and atmospheres too.

Here she brings her talents to a gentle verse about a perfect day in the life of a group of children. These are real-life children – messy and mischievous. Their day encompasses both the comforts of home (cooking, pottering and cuddling) and the joys of exploration as they venture into the wider world (kite-flying, running and digging). Every copy includes a charming A5 print. 2+

NUMERICAL STREET Antonia Pesenti & Hilary Bell NewSouth HB $24.99

L SPECIA E C I PR

Ripley Entertainment HB WAS $49.99 NOW $39.99

Tonke Dragt Pushkin Children’s HB

$29.99

THE LETTER FOR THE KING Tonke Dragt Pushkin Children’s PB

Dorling Kindersley HB $35

Thames & Hudson HB $31.99

Allen & Unwin HB $19.99

Viking HB $24.99

THE DAY THE CRAYONS CAME HOME

Drew Daywalt & Oliver Jeffers HarperCollins HB $24.99 Hilarious text by Daywalt and joyful illustrations by Jeffers continue the story of Duncan’s very cross crayons that began in the bestselling The Day the Crayons Quit. 4+

A building blown up by cow farts. Inflatable poo sculptures. An Indian boy born with a monkey-like tail. A man born with a werewolf face. People who drink cow pee every morning. Scenarios in Andy Griffiths books? No – these are some of the eyepopping oddities that fill the 200+ fully illustrated pages of this decidedly bizarre book. Truly disgusting, and sure to be a huge playground hit with kids aged 8+.

GRANDPA’S GREAT ESCAPE

David Walliams HarperCollins PB $19.99 Jack’s Grandpa wears his slippers to the supermarket and often doesn’t remember Jack’s name, but he can still take to the skies in a speeding Spitfire and save the day! 8+

L SPECIA E C I R P

J K Rowling & Jim Kay Bloomsbury HB WAS $59.99 NOW $49.99 Jim Kay’s illustrations brim with rich detail and humour in this hardback edition of the first Harry Potter novel. 7+

Here’s a tip – not just for this Christmas, but for future years too. Publisher Dorling Kindersley puts a book of this type out every Christmas, and they are always the perfect gift solution for the child whose reading tastes and abilities you’re not quite sure of.

These graphic-heavy titles lure kids in with illusions and challenges, and then sneakily teach them the science behind what’s happening. This year’s version focuses on the five senses, and features everything from a marble maze to scratch and sniff paper. 7+

Prolific Australian author Catherine Jinks has a boundless imagination, which here takes us to the streets of Georgian London and introduces a cast of colourful characters starring the very likeable Theophilus Grey.

An honest 12-year-old, Theophilus captains a gang of ‘linkboys’ (youngsters who use torches to light cityfolk through the streets at night). When the crime rate skyrockets and rumours erupt about a demon thief in the neighbourhood, Theophilus is determined to protect his mates. But what exactly is he protecting them from? Written in language harking back to the times, this is a can’t-put-it-down tale for confident readers aged 10+.

HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE: ILLUSTRATED EDITION

THE HUSH TREASURE BOOK

BER DECEM SE RELEA

Allen & Unwin HB $29.99 This handsome collection of stories, poems and artwork was commissioned by the Hush Music Foundation, which aims to reduce distress and promote an atmosphere of healing and peace in hospitals around the world. Includes bonus CD.

I’LL WAIT, MR PANDA

Steve Antony Hodder HB $24.99 Stunning art, an unforgettable panda and a hilarious lesson in good manners! 2+

LOVE IS MY FAVOURITE THING

Emma Chichester Clark Red Fox HB $29.99 Based on Clark’s hugely popular Plumdog blog, this picture book is about adorable canine Plum, her calamities and her very favourite thing… 2+

THE REST OF US JUST LIVE HERE

WHAT DO YOU WISH FOR? Jane Godwin & Anna Walker

This is the fifth collaboration between Godwin and Walker, and it’s just as charming as its predecessors. Ruby is an inner-city Australian girl who always looks forward to Christmas. In the lead-up to the neighbourhood Christmas show, she thinks about all the things that make this time of year so special and she makes a Christmas wish. A fitting companion to the much-loved All Through the Year (Viking HB $24.99), Godwin’s simple text is perfect for reading aloud and Walker’s illustrations – created with pencil, ink and collage – are simply gorgeous. 3+

Julian Clary & David Roberts Anderson PB $18.99 A family of hyenas who pretend to be people? Yes, really. But can the Bolds keep the noise down and their secret safe? 7+

RIPLEY’S BELIEVE IT OR NOT! EYE-POPPING ODDITIES

THEOPHILUS GREY AND THE DEMON THIEF Catherine Jinks

THAT’S MY HAT! Anouck Boisrobert & Louis Rigaud

French graphic designers Boisrobert and Rigaud utilise truly amazing paper engineering to deliver intricate pop-ups that are sure to keep youngsters occupied for hours. A cheeky monkey has stolen a blue hat, and it’s up to the reader to find him hiding in all sorts of places in this colourful pop-up city. 5+

THE BOLDS

Take your pre- and early-schoolers on a walk up Numerical Street, and discover a numerical treat on every page. Playwright and author Hilary Bell joins with illustrator Antonia Pesenti to deliver a whimsical wander past the laundromats, hardware stores, cake shops, clothing boutiques and hair salons that make up a typical Australian suburban shopping strip. Doing for numbers what the duo’s previous collaboration Alphabetical Sydney did for letters, this book’s vibrant collage-based illustrations are wonderful and sure to be appreciated by both children and adults. 3+

SENSEATIONAL ILLUSIONS

THE SECRETS OF THE WILD WOOD

$17.99 Making its English-language debut half a century after its original Dutch publication, the sequel to Tonke Dragt’s multi-awardwinning The Letter for the King continues the exciting story of 16-year-old Tiuri, whose perilous mission to deliver a secret letter ensured the survival of his homeland in the first book. Tiuri, now a knight, is sent into the mysterious Wild Wood on another mission, uncovering a secret plot that threatens to bring down the kingdom of King Unauwen. Set in an enchanted world of chivalry, both stories deal with courage and true friendship and will be adored by imaginative readers aged 10+.

Highly Recommended

THE WONDER GARDEN Kristjana S Williams & Jenny Broom

Quarto UK HB $35

Each double-page spread of this book is a work of art in its own right – the illustrations are taken from engravings, and are lush with colour and detail. The ‘Wonder Garden’ of the title is our planet, and words and pictures combine to show readers the riches of natural habitats from the Great Barrier Reef to the Himalayan Mountains. A deliberate intervention to bring urbanised young readers closer to nature, The Wonder Garden softens information and statistics with language lyrical enough to match the extraordinarily rendered illustrations. 8+

Patrick Ness Walker HB $24.95 The latest novel by the author of the multi-award-winning Chaos Walking trilogy is about finding the extraordinary in every ordinary life. 14+

ULTIMATE STAR WARS

Dorling Kindersley HB $69.99 Packed with information about the films, their characters and their storylines. Includes behind-the-scenes shots and prints. 5+

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PROJECT MANAGER: VIRGINIA MAXWELL. REVIEWS: TOM CRAWFORD, JANINE EBERLE, DEXTER GILLMAN, MAX HANDSAKER, LORIEN KAYE, SALLY KEIGHERY, DAVID MCCLYMONT, VIRGINIA MAXWELL & VERONICA SULLIVAN. EDITING: VIRGINIA MAXWELL. PROOFREADING: JANET AUSTIN. COVER ILLUSTRATION: OSLO DAVIS. DESIGN: MARY CALLAHAN. PRINTING: HANNANPRINT NSW.