Gleaner April16

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Vol. 23 No. 3 April 2016

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Everywhere I Look New from Helen Garner 1

Everywhere I Look

I mentioned last month that I would review two new Australian books. Helen Garner’s Everywhere I Look is a collection of shorter non-fiction pieces written over the last fifteen years. I should declare that I’d probably give Helen Garner five stars for her shopping list. I’ve loved her work, fiction and non-fiction, since Monkey Grip was published in 1977—the year I began selling books. And I reckon her shopping list would make good reading anyway, such is her gift for writing about the everyday. Short pieces which are snatches of vivid observation about domestic life, public transport, communications between strangers, grandmotherly moments—they are all brief but telling. You could choose any of these essays to single out for praise, but I loved Red Dog: A Mutiny. Packed into three pages it is a marvellous insight into human-dog relationships which is at once funny, alarming, wise and a salutary tale. Balanced against the short pieces are some longer essays rich in insight and clear-eyed intelligence about family (a beautiful elegy to her mother), about murder (Cinque, Robert Farquarson and a teenage mother who killed her new-born are all written about with compassion and care), and about writing and ballet. Then there’s a 2014 interview with Rosie Batty, a piece about the murder of Jill Meagher, and a marvellous essay on Barbara Baynton and the importance of her collection of short stories, Bush Studies. Throw in some astute observations about Russell Crowe and you’ll see what I mean. Not a word wasted or out of place.

I also urged people to read Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog. She is, like Helen Garner, an acute and sensitive observer of people and place. This is a rich and sympathetic portrait of one woman, Ester, a family therapist whose working life advising and patching the relationships of her clients stands in intriguing contrast to the tangled and tense relationships within her own family. And although the action takes place in one day, we are drawn into the life journeys of all those family members. It’s a novel which impresses itself upon you, and stays with you.

Again, that bonus of reading time for the recuperating bookseller means I’ve spread my wings into a couple of fresh areas again. The Trap is a first novel

by German writer, Melanie Raabe. The cover says ‘I know who killed sister. I wrote this novel for him’.

This is ‘the trap’, and Raabe’s smart and devious psychological thriller delivers on its promise. A page turner with enough suspense and twists, and a clever ending to satisfy the crime aficionado.

Debra Jopson’s Oliver of the Levant (I’m in the middle of it) is another terrific local release this month.

Debra Jopson, for many years a highly regarded Sydney journalist, has drawn on her childhood and subsequent experience of Beirut to produce an absorbing, perceptive and original story about a Bondi teenager caught up in the Lebanese civil war in 1969.

It’s a journey to adulthood set in a dramatic atmosphere and landscape.

Finally, I outed myself as a one-time surfer last column, this month it’s cricket. When The Grade Cricketer came to my notice I couldn’t ignore it. As a cricket tragic for decades, I could (sadly) empathise all too easily with this curious Australian story (it’s drawn from a blog, and has three anonymous authors) of the very average grade cricketer whose promise and hopes of great deeds on a more exalted stage have been dashed by the brutal realities of proving to be more journeyman than champion. A splendid, eye-opening look at the world of the (almost) champion cricketer. So raw that you’ll need sometimes recoil, but always engaging (if you’re interested in cricket, that is).

David Gaunt

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The Secret Recipe for Second Chances

By Josephine Barrett ($29.99, PB)

Lucy Muir is leaving her husband. It’s complicated. They’re joint owners & chefs at one of the best restaurants in town, so making a clean break is tough. Despondently driving around the back streets of Woolloomooloo one night, Lucy happens upon an old, empty terrace that was once the city’s hottest restaurant: Fortune—and suddenly she’s planning a pop-up bistro. When Lucy fires up Fortune’s old kitchen she discovers a little red recipe book that belonged to the former chef, the infamous Frankie Summers, and senses Frankie beside her— she can almost see him there ... This fiery chef, who lived with a passion for food and women in almost equal measure, just might help Lucy cook herself up a better life. But is she brave enough to believe?

An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire ($30, PB)

When 25-year-old Bella Michaels is brutally murdered in the small town of Strathdee, the community is stunned and a media storm descends. Unwillingly thrust into the eye of that storm is Bella’s beloved older sister, Chris, a barmaid at the local pub, whose apparent easygoing nature conceals hard-won wisdom and the kind of street-smarts only experience can bring. As Chris is plunged into despair and searches for answers, reasons, explanation—anything—that could make even the smallest sense of Bella’s death, her ex-husband, friends and neighbours do their best to support her. But as the days tick by with no arrest, Chris’s suspicion of those around her grows.

Where The Trees Were By Inga Simpson

‘All in?’ Kieran pulled me up, and the others followed. We gathered around the bigger tree. No one asked Matty—he just reached up and put his right hand on the trunk with ours. Kieran cleared his throat. ‘We swear, on these trees, to always be friends. To protect each other - and this place.’ Finding those carved trees forged a bond between Jay and her four childhood friends and opened their eyes to a wider world. But their attempt to protect the grove ends in disaster, and that one day on the river changes their lives forever. Seventeen years later, Jay finally has her chance to make amends. But at what cost?

Not every wrong can be put right, but sometimes looking the other way is no longer an option. ($29.99, PB)

Precious Things by Kelly Doust ($30, PB) Normandy, France, 1891: a young woman painstakingly sews an intricate beaded collar to her wedding dress, the night before her marriage to someone she barely knows. Yet Aimee longs for so much more ... Shanghai, 1926: dancing sensation and wild child Zephyr spies what looks like a beaded headpiece lying carelessly discarded on a ballroom floor. She takes it with her to Malaya where she sets her sights on a prize so out of reach that, in striving for it, she will jeopardise everything she holds dear ... Precious Things tells the story of a collar - a wonderful, glittering beaded piece—and its journey through the decades.

It’s also the story of Maggie, an auctioneer living in modern-day London, who comes across the crumpled, neglected collar in a box of old junk, and sets out on an unexpected mission to discover more about its secret and elusive past.

The Beekeeper’s Secret by Josephine Moon

Maria Lindsey is content. She spends her solitary days tending her bees and creating delicious honey products to fund orphaned children. A former nun, her life at Honeybee Haven has long been shaped by her self-imposed penance for terrible past events. But the arrival of two letters heralds the shattering of Maria’s peaceful existence. Pushing aside the misgivings of her family and friends, Tansy Butterfield, on the eve of her marriage, made a serious deal with her adored husband, Dougal. A deal she’d intended to honour. But, seven years on, Tansy is finding her current feelings difficult to ignore. And on top of those not-really-there feelings, Dougal wants to move to Canada! ($30, PB)

What the Light Hides by Mette Jakobsen

Vera and David have been passionately in love since the day they met more than twenty years ago. They live in the Blue Mountains where Vera is a sculptor and David makes furniture. Their son, Ben, is at university in Sydney. Or at least he was. What the Light Hides begins five months after Ben’s death, an apparent suicide. Vera is trying to pick up the pieces, but David cannot let go, cannot believe that Ben is dead. He goes to Sydney, ostensibly to work, but cannot get Ben out of his mind. He keeps seeing him in the street, visits the room where he was living, goes in pursuit of Ben’s friends. His refusal to come to terms with the death of his son is destroying his relationship with Vera, but he cannot help himself, in spite of all the evidence. David is risking everything. ($30, PB)

Now in B Format The Rosie Effect by Graeme Simsion, $23 The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion, $23

Australian Literature Between a Wolf and a Dog by Georgia Blain

Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the woes of the middle class. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Estranged from both her sister, April, and her ex-husband, Lawrence, Ester wants to be able to let herself fall in love again. Meanwhile, April and Lawrence are battling through their own messy lives, and Ester and April’s mother, Hilary, is facing the most significant decision she’ll ever have to make. Taking place over one rainy day in Sydney, Between a Wolf and a Dog is a novel about dissatisfactions and anxieties in the face of relative privilege. Yet it is also a celebration of the best in all of us—our capacity to live in the face of ordinary sorrows, and to draw strength from the transformative power of art. ($30, PB)

Gleebooks’ special price $26.99 Carry Me Down by M. J. Hyland ($12.95, PB)

John Egan lives with his mother, father and grandmother in rural Ireland. The Guinness Book of Records is his favourite book and he wants to visit Niagara Falls with his mother. But, more than anything, he is determined to become a world-famous lie detector, almost at any cost. Carry Me Down is written in clean, compelling prose, and is about John’s obsessive and dangerous desire to see the truth, even as his family is threatened in countless ways. In this singular tale of disturbed love every word rings true.

Oliver of the Levant by Debra Jopson ($30, PB) It’s 1969 and the world is alight with revolution. Oliver Lawrence, a Bondi Beach kid, is transported to one of the world’s most bewitching cities: Beirut in the Levant. The city is on the verge of civil war, but Oliver, who idolises Jimi Hendrix and Lawrence of Arabia, is more concerned with holding his family together. This mission becomes complicated as Oliver’s ravishing, gin-swilling stepmother, Babette, and cavalier playboy pilot father indulge in unbridled expatriate partying. Beirut is a confusing place to learn how to be a man, involving snipers, codes of honour and purloined letters. It’s bad enough when Oliver develops a very public crush on the local warlord’s girlfriend, but it turns disastrous when his young guerrilla friend, ‘Ringo’, enlists his misguided enthusiasm to turn his exploding cigar magic trick into a suitcase bomb. When Oliver is given an old Box Brownie, he finds a way into the world, into the lives of others and, finally, into adulthood.

One by Patrick Holland ($29.95, PB) The last bushrangers in Australian history, James and Patrick Kenniff, were at the height at their horse thieving operation at turn of the 20th century. In One, troops cannot pull the Kenniff Gang out of the ranges and plains of Western Queensland—the brothers know the terrain too well, and the locals are sympathetic to their escapades. When a policeman and a station manager go out on patrol from tiny Upper Warrego Station and disappear, Sergeant Nixon makes it his mission to pursue the gang, especially, Jim Kenniff, who becomes for him an emblem of the violence that resides in the heart of the country. From the award-winning author of The Mary Smokes Boys, One is a novel of minimalist lyrical beauty that traverses the intersections between violence and love. It asks what right one man has to impose his will on another, and whether the written law can ever answer the law of the heart?

Asylum by John Hughes ($25, PB) In the Sanctuary, two robed men cut the hair of clients who have been called to pass through the White or Black Door. Along with their hair, the clients shed stories: of the horrors of their past, the Place they’ve inhabited since their escape, and what lies beyond the Doors. These stories are inscribed as Legends, but do they record a vision of Paradise or Hell? This allegory, echoing Kafka, illuminates the stark terror of the modern age, marked by a border in constant shift between gods and men, truth and deception, freedom and constraint, memory and forgetting, revealing a world whose essence is its hidden-ness—a world that hides, not in darkness, but in the light.

Seeing The Elephant by Portland Jones ($24, PB) A poignant story of a remarkable relationship between Frank Stevens, an Australian soldier sent to the Vietnamese Highlands to recruit and train the local hill tribes during the Vietnam War, and his Vietnamese translator, Minh. Nearly fifty years later, Minh, now living in Australia and seriously ill, remembers the experiences that he shared with Frank, and discovers that even amongst his traumatic memories, there is consolation and joy.

On D’Hill

I’m writing this in the middle of March, sweltering in the unseasonable heat. I hope by the time you’re reading this in April, autumn will have arrived. I usually get out the winter wardrobe at Easter but suspect that throwing on a cardi will suffice for some time.

Ms Kennedy’s Storytime has been a great hit and will now be a permanent fixture on Thursdays (10am) at Dulwich Hill. Sure, some of the younger members of the group feel it necessary to roll around with their legs in the air while listening to the stories, but I like to do that sometimes too, while reading a book. We like the interactive nature of storytime, particularly the little girl who added ‘Said the bear’ every time Ms Kennedy paused ... despite, or maybe because, there was no bear in the story.

It is my job, as a bookseller, to continually read books so I can recommend them to customers—but I’m only human and like everyone, sometimes I go through a phase where nothing grabs my attention. I pick up a book that seems promising, read a few pages, put it down and pick up something else which also fails to interest. It’s getting very tiresome, especially when I read a glowing review of said book, which makes me feel like a total idiot.

Having said that, I loved Jumpha Lahiri’s In Other Words, a fascinating meditation on language, writing and translation. It’s published in both Italian and English and I do envy those who can read and compare the original, written in Italian and the English translation. Graham Swift’s Mothering Sunday is appealing— very beautiful, very slow. Maybe what will break the impasse is something like Maestra, touted as a kind of pro-feminist take on the erotic novel. Apparently the heroine goes around chopping men up after having fab sex with them. Surely that will keep me reading. See you on D’Hill, Morgan

Lord Wolseley Hotel: A Social History of a Very Small Pub by Shirley Fitzgerald ($35, PB)

This book details the fluctuating fortunes of ‘Australia’s smallest hotel’ from 1879 when ex-convict Thomas Leahy built it, through wars, depressions, rapacious Tooths Brewery ownership and the patronage of some of Sydney’s toughest criminals. It tells the story of how a rough working class pub through gentrification became a ‘heritage gem’. Sydney historian Shirley Fitzgerald has written a fascinating account of the pub, its colourful publicans and the community who kept its bar open through good times and bad. 100 illustrations, maps and plans. Never before has the history of one hotel been so thoroughly documented or so engagingly portrayed.

We Ate the Road like Vultures

by Lynnette Lounsbury ($30, PB)

We Ate the Road like Vultures is what happens when Lulu, a girl from down-under, discovers Jack Kerouac alive and living Mexico with a bloke called Chicco, meets the sexy angel back-packer, Adolf and they all dust off the Hummer in the garage... Lynnette Lounsbury’s witty, insightful and deeply wise road story is impossible to put down. Written in the scroll style of the renowned Beat writer, and reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, the story unravels vibrantly, enticing readers to reach for Kerouac’s classic.

Like I Can Love by Kim Lock ($30, PB)

Jenna Rudolph, 26 years old, has left behind a devoted husband, an adorable young son and a stunning vineyard. But Fairlie knows she should have seen this coming. Yet Fairlie doesn’t know what Jenna’s husband Ark is hiding, nor does she know what Jenna’s mother Evelyn did to drive mother and daughter apart all those years ago. Until Fairlie opens her mail and finds a letter. In Jenna’s handwriting. Along with a key. Driven to search for answers, Fairlie uncovers a horrifying past, a desperate mother, and a devastating secret kept by those she loves the most.

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International Literature

The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh ($32.99, PB)

Jim Francis has finally found the perfect life—and is now unrecognisable, even to himself. A successful painter and sculptor, he lives quietly with his wife, Melanie, and their two young daughters, in an affluent beach town in California. Some say he’s a fake and a con man, while others see him as a genuine visionary. But Francis has a very dark past, with another identity and a very different set of values. When he crosses the Atlantic to his native Scotland, for the funeral of a murdered son he barely knew, his old Edinburgh community expects him to take bloody revenge. Meanwhile, Melanie discovers something gruesome in California, which indicates that her husband’s violent past might also be his psychotic present, things start to go very bad, very quickly.

All the Birds in the Sky Charlie Jane Anders

Surrender

Georgiana Molloy

Joshua Yeldham

Bernice Barry

‘Welcome to the extraordinary and wonderful world of Joshua Yeldham. I hope you wore sensible shoes.’

As a resilient and independent woman in the 19th century, Georgiana Molloy’s appreciation and wonder of the landscape around her became her salvation, and her legacy.

A tale of love, adventure and flora, this beautifully designed biography reveals one of Australia’s first female botanists.

RICHARD ROXBURGH

Award-winning artist Joshua Yeldham explores a spiritual connection with, and journey into, the Australian landscape. panmacmillan.com.au

The Trees by Ali Shaw ($28, PB) There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement.

Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins. Adrien Thomas has never been much of a hero. But when it becomes clear that no help is coming, he has little choice but to venture out into this unrecognisable world. The trees reach to the horizon, seemingly the work of centuries rather than hours. When Adrien meets Hannah—a woman who sees the arrival of the trees as a sign of renewal rather than destruction—and Seb, her teenage son, they persuade him to join them. Together, they pack up what remains of their lives and set out to find Hannah’s forester brother, to reunite Adrien with his wife—and to discover just how deep the forest goes.

Trading Futures by Jim Powell ($33, HB)

Matthew Oxenhay is sixty: a stranger to his wife, an embarrassment to his children, and failed former contender for the top job at his City firm. Seizing on his birthday party as an opportunity to deliver some rather crushing home truths to his assembled loved ones, it seems as though Matthew might have hit rock bottom. The truth, however, is that he has some way to go yet...With forensic precision and mordant wit, Matthew unpicks the threads that bind him: a comfortable home in the suburbs, a career spent trading futures and a life that bears little resemblance to the one he imagined for himself at twenty. When he unexpectedly bumps into Anna (the one who got away), the stage is set for an epic unravelling.

For a Little While by Rick Bass ($50, HB)

Rick Bass is unparalleled in his ability to evoke the enduring truths of the human heart amid astonishing portraits of wilderness both within & without. In his world the reader encounters larger-than-life characters—a couple that escapes from a sudden blizzard by traversing a frozen lake beneath the ice, or a young boxer who flees from a charging horse as a means of training for bar fights—each attempting to triumph against fate & time, in rugged landscapes that both save & destroy. To read his fiction is to feel more alive—connected, incandescently, to ‘the brief longshot of having been chosen for the human experience’, as one of his characters puts it. He reveals men & women living with passion and tenderness at the outer limits of the senses, each attempting to triumph against fate.

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Childhood friends Patricia Delfine & Laurence Armstead didn’t expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during high school. After all, the development of magical powers & the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one’s peers & families. But now they’re both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who’s working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention into the changing global climate. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world’s magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world’s every-growing ailments. Little do they realise that something bigger than either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together—to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages. ($17, PB)

Anatomy of a Soldier by Harry Parker ($30, PB)

Let’s imagine a man called Tom Barnes, aka BA5799, who’s leading British troops in the war zone. And two boys growing up together, riding a prized bicycle and flying kites, before finding themselves estranged once foreign soldiers appear in their countryside; and the man who trains one to fight against the other’s father and these infidels.

Then include the family and friends who radiate out from these lives, people on all sides of this conflict with most everyone caught in the middle. But then imagine not how they see themselves but as all the objects surrounding them do—their shoes, a helmet, a trove of dollars, a drone, that bike, weaponry, a bag of fertilizer, a medal, beer glass, a snowflake, dogtags, or a horrific explosion that ties them all together and the various medical implements that are subsequently employed. The result is a novel that amplifies what Tim O’Brien accomplished in his legendary The Things They Carried, and reveals a man of enormous character in Captain Barnes as well as all the people who were part of this same heart-stopping journey.

The Bricks that Built the Houses by Kate Tempest

Young Londoners Becky, Harry and Leon are escaping the city with a suitcase full of stolen money. Taking us back in time, and into the heart of the capital, award-winning poet and rapper Kate Tempest explores a cross-section of contemporary urban life with a powerful moral and literary microscope, exposing the everyday stories that lie behind the tired faces on the morning commute, and what happens when your best intentions don’t always lead to the right decisions.

Wise but never cynical, and driven by empathy and ethics, she leads the reader into the homes and hearts of ordinary people and their families and communities, giving a unique perspective on how we live with and love each other. ($27.99, PB)

Exposure by Helen Dunmore ($33, PB) London, November, 1960: the Cold War is at its height. Spy fever fills the newspapers, and the political establishment knows how and where to bury its secrets. When a highly sensitive file goes missing, Simon Callington is accused of passing information to the Soviets, and arrested. His wife, Lily, suspects that his imprisonment is part of a cover-up, and that more powerful men than Simon will do anything to prevent their own downfall. She knows that she too is in danger, and must fight to protect her children. But what she does not realise is that Simon has hidden vital truths about his past, and may be found guilty of another crime that carries with it an even greater penalty.

Green Island by Shawna Yang Ryan ($35, PB)

February 28, 1947. Trapped inside their home due to an uprising that has rocked Taipei, Dr Tsai delivers his youngest daughter, the unnamed narrator of Green Island. A few days later, he is one of the many thousands of people dragged away from their families. Missing for a decade, he eventually returns a haunted man. Feeling a stranger in the midst of his family, who have carried on with their lives, he connects with his youngest daughter and unwittingly brings her into an uneasy political scene where neighbours are set against neighbours to survive. Green Island sweeps across 6 decades & 2 continents, the life of the narrator & her family shadowing the course of Taiwan’s history, from the end of the period Japanese colonial rule to its decades under martial law administered by the Chinese nationalists, and finally to its transformation into a democracy.

How to Set a Fire and Why by Jesse Ball

14-year-old Lucia is angry with almost everyone, especially people who tell her what to do. She follows the one rule that makes any sense to her: Don’t Do Things You Aren’t Proud Of. Orphaned and living with her elderly aunt in poverty in the converted garage of a large mansion, Lucia makes her way through the world with only a book, a Zippo lighter, and a pocket full of stolen liquorice.

Expelled from school, again, Lucia spends her days riding the bus to visit her mother in The Home. When Lucia discovers a secret Arson Club, she will do anything to be a part of it. Her own arson manifesto is a marvellous anarchist pamphlet, written with biting wit and striking intelligence. The voice of teenaged Lucia is a tour de force: a girl who can’t help telling us the truth, a riveting chronicle of family, misguided friendship, and loss. ($29.99, PB)

BlackBooks

Altitude

The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over 50 years. Their house has seen 13 children grown & gone; it has seen the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit’s East Side, the loss of a father. Despite abandoned lots, an embattled city, and the inevitable shift outward to the suburbs, the house still stands. But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home & move in with her eldest son, the family discovers that the house is worth just a 10th of its mortgage. The Turner children are called home to decide its fate & to reckon with how each of their pasts haunt—and shape—their family’s future. Anglela Flournoy paints a striking examination of the price we pay for our dreams & futures, and the ways in which our families bring us home.

We are excited to kick off our events program up here in the mountains with Meg & Tom Keneally. They will be talking about their newly released collaboration, The Soldier’s Curse—Book 1 of the Monsarrat Series—on April 30th at the Carrington Hotel, Katoomba. See below for full details. Tickets are available from Gleebooks Blackheath.

Victoria Jefferys

Boo ks w ith

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy ($33, PB)

The Notebook Trilogy by Agota Kristof ($34.99, PB)

Claus and Lucas are twins. Their new life begins when they are left with their grandmother, the ‘Witch’, in a village in an occupied country. It’s wartime. Their angelic looks are deceiving.

They are implacable, dangerously ethical; what motivates them is a deeply embedded morality of absolute need. The trilogy—The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie—follows their stories from the Second World War, through the years of communism and into a fractured Europe. In what could be seen as an allegory of post-war Europe, the twins become separated and are isolated in different countries. They yearn to be connected again, but perspectives shift, memories diverge, identity becomes unstable.

The Latecomer by Dimitri Verhulst ($25, PB)

Desire Cordier—mild-mannered former librarian, put-upon husband, lover of boules—is losing his mind. Or is he? Happily tucked away in the Winterlight Home for the Elderly, Desire is looking forward to a quiet retirement with the other forgetful residents, safe in the knowledge that no one knows he’s faking his memory loss. And as if there weren’t reasons enough to opt out of the modern world, it would be worth it just to see Rosa Rozendaal again—the love of Desire’s youth, the one who got away. But dementia isn’t all fun and games. There’s a former war criminal hiding out in the home; once-beautiful Rosa might be too far gone to return Desire’s ardour; and our hero soon begins to suspect he might not be the only one in Winterlight who’s acting a part.

A Man of Genius by Janet Todd

A Man of Genius portrays a psychological journey from safety into obsession and secrecy. It mirrors a physical passage from flamboyant Regency England through a Europe conquered by Napoleon. Ann, a successful writer of cheap Gothic novels, becomes obsessed with Robert James, regarded by many, including himself, as a genius, with his ideas, his talk, and his band of male followers.

However, their relationship becomes tortuous, as Robert descends into violence and madness. The pair leaves London for occupied Venice, where Ann tries to cope with the monstrous ego of her lover. Forced to flee with a stranger, she delves into her past, to be jolted by a series of revelations—about her lover, her parentage, the stranger and herself. ($30, PB)

Oblivion by Sergei Lebedev ($20, PB)

In one of the first 21st century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbour who saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds, among the forgotten mines & decrepit barracks of former gulags, is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims & the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great & ruined beauty of a land where man & machine worked in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to rescue history from the brink of oblivion.

Now in B Format Golden Age by Jane Smiley, $20 Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish, $22

Adios, Cowboy by Olja Savicevic ($27, PB)

Dada’s life is at a standstill in Zagreb. She’s sleeping with a married man, working a dead-end job, and even the parties have started to feel exhausting. So when her sister calls her back home to help with their aging mother, she doesn’t hesitate to leave the city behind. But she arrives to find her mother hoarding pills, her sister chain-smoking, her long-dead father’s shoes still lined up on the steps, and the cowboy posters of her younger brother Daniel (who threw himself under a train four years ago) still on the walls. Hoping to free her family from the grip of the past, Dada vows to unravel the mystery of Daniel s final days. This debut by a poet from Croatia’s lost generation explores a beautiful Mediterranean town’s ‘ darkest alleys: the bars where secrets can be bought, the rooms where bodies can be sold, the plains and streets and houses where blood is shed’.

Reader, I Married Him (ed) Tracy Chevalier

The 21 stories in Reader, I Married Him are inspired by Jane Eyre & shaped by its perennially fascinating themes of love, compromise & self-determination. A bohemian wedding party takes an unexpected turn for the bride & her daughter; a family trip to a Texan waterpark prompts a life-changing decision; Grace Poole defends Bertha Mason & calls the general opinion of Jane Eyre into question. Mr Rochester reveals a long-kept secret in Reader, She Married Me, & The Mirror boldly imagines Jane’s married life after the novel ends. A new mother encounters an old lover after her daily swim and inexplicably lies to him, and a fitness instructor teaches teenage boys how to handle a pit bull terrier by telling them Jane Eyre’s story. ($34.99, HB)

Paradise Lost by Pablo Auladell ($55, HB) First published nearly 350 years ago, John Milton’s epic poem, charts humanity’s fall from grace and the origin of the struggle between God and Satan, good and evil, life and death. In the aftermath of the Angels’ devastating defeat in the war for Heaven, Satan determines to seek his revenge.

Meanwhile, Adam and Eve have newly awakened in the Garden of Eden. Spanish artist Pablo Auladell has reimagined Paradise Lost, his artwork portraying the complexity and tragedy of one of the great stories of all time.

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THE WILDER AISLES

Sometimes an author has been around for a while. They’ve written a few books that haven’t received much attention—and then the publishers decide to give them a bit of a push, or so it seems to me. A case in point is Elly Griffiths, with her series of Dr Ruth Galloway crime novels. I read The Crossing Place, the first in the series & the second, The Janus Stone, some time ago and then her books sort of disappeared. But recently, the ninth book in the series, The Woman in Blue, was released as a large format paperback with a striking cover—I think to encourage more readers. To catch up on my Griffiths reading I read number 8, The Ghost Fields, before The Woman in Blue.

All her novels feature Dr Ruth Galloway. She is a forensic archeologist who teaches at a university, who assists the police when bones are found in unusual places—often in the digs where Ruth and her team are working. Ruth has a special relationship with DCI Harry Nelson, which goes a long way back.

The Woman in Blue is set in and around Walsingham in Norwich, a place of pilgrimage over many centuries—both for Anglicans and Roman Catholics. The story of how Walsingham came into being, how it was destroyed and then rebuilt is a very interesting one, but this book is concerned with modern times and a recent death. One night, Cathbard, a friend of Ruth’s and some-time Wizard, who is house-sitting in the Norfolk village of Walsingham, sees a young woman, wearing a white gown and what looks like a blue cloak, in a graveyard, attached to St Simeon’s church. But it’s not a vision of the Virgin Mary, and when a young woman’s body, dressed in a white night gown and blue dressing gown, with rosary beads around her neck, is found the next morning, she is all too real. Meanwhile an old friend of Ruth’s, Hilary Smithson, who is now, to Ruth’s surprise, an Anglican priest, writes to Ruth asking to meet. Over tea in the Blue Lady Tea rooms, Hilary tells Ruth that she has been receiving anonymous and increasingly threatening letters targeting her as a woman priest. The last letter has left her in fear for her life. When Ruth tells Nelson about the letters he at first dismisses them, but soon changes his mind. Hilary is in Walsingham because of a conference on the subject of the possibility of women bishops. When another woman is murdered, just before the annual performance of the Good Friday Passion play, it begins to look like the deaths maybe connected. Then it is up to Ruth, Cathbard and Nelson to find the killer before another death occurs.

This is great fun—the setting, Walsingham’s history, the characters. Ruth is immensely likeable, as are modern-day druid Cathbard, and Nelson, a hardworking policeman who doesn’t always play by the rules.

I broke one of my self-imposed reading rules by reading The English Girl by Margaret Leroy—never to read novels set in Hitler’s Germany. I find that whole period too distressing. However, as I continue reading my way through Leroy’s books, I had to relax my rule. In The English Girl, seventeen-year-old English piano student, Stella Whittaker, is offered the chance to study piano in Vienna—and she is thrilled. Due to lack of funds, she can only take up the opportunity because of the offer accommodation from Rainier and Marthe Krause, old friends of her mother. At first everything is wonderful, she loves the family, especially their young son Lukas, to whom she is a sort of governess—giving him English lessons and taking him on outings when not at lessons or practicing She also likes her teacher, the renowned Dr Zaslavsky. He is a hard taskmaster, which upsets Stella at first, but she gradually realises his criticism is for her benefit. When Stella meets young Jewish doctor, Harri Reznik, she feels that her happiness is complete. Things change as the shadow of war starts to cover Europe, and Hitler threatens to move into Austria. Stella comes to see that all is not what it had seemed. Even life with the Krauses, and the city of Vienna itself, are no longer as welcoming as she once thought. At a party for Marthe’s birthday Stella meets Frank Reece, a cultural attache at the British Embassy. Frank tries to tell Stella about what is happening in Germany, but Stella doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t want the lovely life she has built up to come crumbling down—but eventually Stella is forced to see that bad things are happening, especially when Harri is bashed and attacks are made on Jewish shops, with windows smashed and fire bombs thrown—and when Harri’s mother’s shop is attacked, she can no longer hide from the terrible truth. When Frank Reece contacts her asking if she is willing to help in the effort to stop Hitler (she had mentioned to him that mysterious men called at the Krause’s home at night—men she was never allowed to meet), she at first declines. But after the attacks on Jews and Harri’s beating, with her dream of a happy ever after disappearing, she can no longer remain neutral. So Stella becomes a spy in the Krause household, watching for the comings and goings the ‘mysterious men’. Stella becomes a new person—she grows up and starts to ask questions as she witnesses the fact that everyone’s life can be threatened by forces outside their control. I loved this book, despite its subject matter. Stella is a great character and her journey from young student in Brockenhurst to a woman in Vienna on the edge of war is both disturbing and heartwarming at the same time.

Janice Wilder

6

Crime Fiction

Dangerous to Know by Anne Buist ($30, PB)

Natalie King is back: back from a stay on the psych ward. Her reluctance to live a quiet life has contributed to a severe depressive episode, so she has retreated to a borrowed house on the Great Ocean Road; a low-key research job at a provincial university nearby. But Natalie and trouble have a strange mutual fascination. Her charismatic new boss Frank is friendly, even attractive. But it turns out his pregnant wife is an old enemy of Natalie’s. And when Frank’s tragic personal history is revealed—then reprised in the most shocking way—Natalie finds herself drawn deep into a mystery. And even deeper into danger.

The Sword of Justice by Leif G. W. Persson ($33, PB)

Gangster lawyer Thomas Eriksson, renowned defender of the guilty, is found brutally murdered—finding a suspect isn’t difficult as a lot of people who wanted Eriksson dead might be. High on this list is DS Evert Bäckström—but luckily, by virtue of his questionable contacts, Bäckström has an unequalled skill for having the guilty handed to him on a plate. All he has to do is break every rule in the book—and receive a healthy wad of cash for his trouble. But this time he’s in for a surprise because even he couldn’t have predicted where this trail would lead, or how far from comfortable he might be at its end.

The Trap by Melanie Raabe ($30, PB) I know who killed my sister. I wrote this book for him. 12 years ago, Linda’s sister Anna was murdered. Her killer was never caught, but Linda saw him. Now, all these years later, she’s just seen him again on TV. He’s become a well-known journalist, and Linda—a famous novelist and infamous recluse—knows no one will believe her if she accuses him. She does the only thing she can think of: she sets a trap, writing a thriller called Blood Sisters about the unsolved murder of a young woman. When Blood Sisters is published, Linda agrees to give just one media interview. At home. To the one person who knows more about the case than her. Gleebooks’ special price $26.99 Fool Me Once by Harlan Coben ($33, PB)

If your husband was murdered, and you were a witness, how do you explain it when he appears on your nanny cam? You thought you trusted him. Now you can’t even trust yourself. Dark secrets and a terrifying hunt for the truth lie at the heart of this gripping new thriller from the ‘master of the double twist’.

Wireless by Jack O’Connell ($25, PB)

Quinsigamond is a decaying New England factory town—when an activist priest meets a grisly death in his own cathedral, it becomes clear that the perp is no everyday low-life but a demented ex-FBI agent named Speer who is in search of the jammers, particularly the infamous O’Zebedee brothers, who have been hijacking local radio airwaves with their singular brand of subversive diatribe. Detective Hannah Shaw tracks Speer’s enraged quest to Wireless, the funky retro-radio nightclub and epicentre of the diverse jammer subculture. Shaw and/or the Wireless crew must stop the defrocked Fed or fall prey to a campaign of censorship, violence and ultimately death.

Fellside by M. R. Carey ($29.99, PB)

Fellside is a maximum security prison on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. It’s not the kind of place you’d want to end up. But it’s where Jess Moulson could be spending the rest of her life. It’s a place where even the walls whisper. And one voice belongs to a little boy with a message for Jess. Will she listen?

The Loving Husband by Christobel Kent ($30, PB)

Can you ever truly know the one you love? Fran Hall and her husband Nathan live in a farmhouse on the edge of the Fens with their two children. One February night, when Fran is woken by her baby, she finds the bed empty beside her and Nathan gone. Searching the house for him she makes a devastating discovery. As Fran finds herself under intense police scrutiny, she and her two small children become more isolated as she starts to doubt whether or not she really knew Nathan. Was he really the loving husband that Fran had trusted him to be? As police suspicion grows the questions for Fran begin to mount. Is there something that she is hiding from them—something that she has kept hidden from everyone, including her husband?

Far from True by Linwood Barclay ($30, PB)

After the screen of a run-down drive-in movie theatre collapses, killing four people, the daughter of one of the victims asks PI Cal Weaver to look into a recent break-in at her father’s house. Cal discovers a hidden basement room where it’s clear that salacious activities have taken place—and some DVDs appear to be missing. Meanwhile, Detective Barry Duckworth is still trying to solve two murders he believes to be connected. Lies begin to unravel as Cal & Duckworth’s investigations collide—and evil deeds long thought buried are about to haunt the residents of Promise Falls as the sins of the past and present collide with terrifying results.

The Waters of Eternal Youth by Donna Leon

Brunetti is investigating a cold case by request of, a friend of Brunetti’s mother-in-law. 15 years ago the grand Contessa Lando-Continui’s teenage granddaughter, Manuela, was found drowning in a canal. She was rescued from the canal at the last moment, but she suffered severe brain damage & now aged 30, Manuela cannot remember the accident, or her beloved horse, and lives trapped in an eternal youth. The Contessa, unconvinced that this was an accident, implores Brunetti to find the culprit she believes was responsible for ruining Manuela’s life. ($29.99, PB)

April’s To-Read List

Gleebooks’ special price $26.99

The Crow Girl by Erik Axl Sund ($33, PB) A body is found—tortured, mummified and then discarded. Its discovery reveals a nightmare world of hidden lives. Of lost identities, secret rituals and brutal exploitation, where nobody can be trusted. This is the darkest, most complex case the police have ever seen. This is the world of the Crow Girl.

The Primrose Path by Rebecca Griffiths ($33, PB) As a teenager, Sarah D’Villez famously escaped a man who abducted and held her hostage for 11 days. The case became notorious, with Sarah’s face splashed across the front of every newspaper in the country.

17 years later, that man is about to be released from prison. Fearful of the media storm, Sarah decides to flee to rural Wales under a new identity, telling nobody where she’s gone. Settling into the small community she is now part of, Sarah soon realises that someone is watching her. Someone who seems to know everything about her ....

The Other Side of Silence by Philip Kerr ($30, PB) The French Riviera, 1956. A world-weary Bernie Gunther is working under a false name as a hotel concierge. His attempts to keep his nose clean go horribly awry when a wartime acquaintance sucks him into a blackmail plot involving Somerset Maugham & the Cambridge Spies.

A shared love of bridge draws Bernie to Maugham’s magnificent villa, where Maugham tells him of the existence of a very compromising photograph that shows Maugham among a group of naked men beside a swimming pool—including the infamous spy Guy Burgess. Harold Hennig, a former captain in the Nazi security service has the photograph and is demanding $50,000 for its release. Bernie is reluctant to become Maugham’s agent but his former life has made him as vulnerable to blackmail as Maugham himself. And he has a massive score to settle with Hennig.

Be encouraged by detailed gardening notes that explain how you can plant, grow and harvest 73 different vegetables, herbs and fruit.

An insight into a shepherd’s year, offering a unique account of rural life and a fundamental connection with the land that most of us have lost.

Journey from an era when children were condemned to institutions, to one in which parents push not simply for inclusion, but understanding of autism.

It’s time to give shame a good name.

Jennifer Jacquet shows how, when used in the right way, it is the most effective tool of resistance we have.

In the 25th instalment in the bestselling Brunetti series, our Commissario finds himself drawn into a case that may not be a crime at all.

It’s 1969 and the world is alight with revolution. Oliver, a Bondi Beach kid, is transported to one of the world’s most bewitching cities: Beirut.

Action-packed and full of danger, this memoir by Peter Willcox – the senior captain for Greenpeace International – reads like a real-life thriller.

The terrifying and infamous Francis Begbie, perhaps the most memorable character in Trainspotting, returns – with his own novel.

The Ice Child by Camilla Lackberg ($30, PB)

A semi-naked girl wanders through the woods in freezing cold weather.

Four months ago she disappeared on her way home from the local riding school, and no one has seen her since. It quickly becomes clear that she has been subjected to unimaginably brutal treatment. And it’s likely she’s not the only one. Meanwhile, Detective Patrik Hedstrom’s wife, crime writer Erica Falck, is looking into an old case—a family tragedy that led to a man’s death. His wife was convicted of murder, but Erica senses that something isn’t right. What is the woman hiding? As Erica digs deeper, the past starts to cast a shadow over the present and Patrik is forced to see his investigation in a whole new light.

Ten Days by Gillian Slovo ($30, PB) It’s 4 am and dawn is about to break over the Lovelace estate. Cathy Mason drags herself out of bed as she swelters in her overheated bedroom—the council still haven’t turned the radiators off despite temperatures reaching the 30s. In a kitchen across London, Home Secretary Peter Whiteley finishes his tea before heading to Parliament, whilst his new police chief, Joshua Yares, clears his head for his first day with a run. All three will have reasons to recollect this morning as their lives collide over ten days they will never forget. Gillian Slovo’s novel about political expediency and personal disenfranchisement is gripping.

The Vanished by Lotte & Søren Hammer ($28, PB)

A postman is found dead at the bottom of his apartment stairs. At first glance, his death appears to be a tragic accident. However, when Detective Superintendent Konrad Simonsen is called to investigate, he notices that something doesn’t add up. When life-sized images of a vanished girl are discovered plastering the walls of the dead man’s attic, the case takes a new and sinister turn. Who is she? Could she be alive? As the homicide team approach the truth, Simonsen is forced to confront long-hidden skeletons in his own cupboard.

Fire Damage by Kate Medina ($30, PB) Four-year-old Sami is deeply traumatised, and it’s up to psychologist Dr Jessie Flynn to unlock his terrifying memories—but nothing can prepare her for the truth about what haunts him. Meanwhile, Jessie’s former patient, Captain Ben Callan, is investigating the suspicious death of an officer in Afghanistan—the problem is the only suspect refuses to talk. When a dead body washes up on a Sussex beach, Jessie and Ben’s cases converge. Soon it’s clear that the mystery in Afghanistan began with a secret much closer to home. And a desperate killer will do anything to keep it buried.

Now in B Format Even the Dead by Benjamin Black, $23 Make Me by Lee Child, $23

7

Biography

Our Man Elsewhere: In Search of Alan Moorehead

by Thornton McCamish ($40, HB)

A world-famous Australian writer, an inspiration to Robert Hughes and Clive James, a legendary war correspondent who also wrote bestselling histories of exploration and conservation . . . and yet forgotten? As a reporter, Moorehead witnessed many of the great historical events of the mid-20th century: the Spanish Civil War and both world wars, Cold War espionage, and decolonisation in Africa. He debated strategy with Churchill and Gandhi, fished with Hemingway, and drank with Graham Greene, Ava Gardner and Truman Capote. As well as being a regular contributor to the New Yorker, in 1956 Moorehead wrote the first significant book about the Gallipoli campaign.With its countless adventures, its touch of jet-set glamour and its tragic arc, Moorehead’s story is a beguiling one. Thornton McCamish tells it as a quest—intimate, perceptive and superbly entertaining.

All My Januaries: Pleasures of Life and Other Essays

by Barbara Blackman ($29.95, PB)

A

ustralia lost 600 men in the Boer War, a three-year

conflict fought in the heart of Africa that had ostensibly nothing to do with Australia.

Coinciding with Federation, the war kickstarted Australia’s commitment to fighting in Britain’s wars overseas, and forged a national identity around it. This is Henry Reynolds at his searing best, as he shows how the Boer War left a dark and dangerous legacy, demonstrating how those beliefs have propelled us into too many unnecessary wars – without ever counting the cost.

A

woman’s innocuous cold symptoms mask a

debilitating rare tick infection.

A young man develops shingles then suffers blinding head pain later in life. After years of frustration, a family eradicates head lice forever. Frank Bowden’s Infectious delves into everyday infectious diseases but also tackles critical issues in modern medical practice such as the emergence of antibiotic resistance, the Ebola epidemic, the Lyme Disease controversy and the causes of chronic fatigue.

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

8

Blind since her twenties, Barbara Blackman has been an artist’s model, broadcaster, poet, librettist and essayist. All My Januaries celebrates this remarkable journey as she reflects on food, travel, friendships, family and the many unexpected pleasures of life. Ranging from her Brisbane childhood to her marriage to renowned artist Charles Blackman, her time in London and Paris, and her life beyond, these essays capture her love of language and her acerbic wit.

Greenpeace Captain: My Adventures in Protecting the Future of Our Planet by Peter Willcox ($34.99 PB)

Peter Willcox would never call himself a hero, but as the senior captain for Greenpeace International he has been at the epicentre of almost every dramatic ecological conflict in the past thirty years. From the globally televised imprisonment of his crew, the ‘Arctic 30’, by Russian commandos to international conspiracies involving diamond smuggling, gun-trading and al-Qaeda, Willcox has braved the unimaginable and triumphed. This is his story—which begins when he was a young man sailing with activist Pete Seeger and continues right up to his becoming the iconic environmentalist he is today. His daring adventures and courageous determination will inspire readers everywhere.

Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land

by Robert Crawford ($30, PB)

Quoting extensively from poetry and prose as well as drawing on new interviews, archives, and previously undisclosed memoirs, Robert Crawford shows how T. S. Eliot’s background in Missouri, Massachusetts and Paris made him a lightning conductor for modernity. Crawford shows how deeply personal were the experiences underlying masterpieces from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock to The Waste Land. T. S. Eliot wanted no biography written, but this book reveals him in all his vulnerable complexity as student and lover, stink-bomber, banker and philosopher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.

Benjamin Franklin in London: The British Life of America’s Founding Father by George Goodwin

For the great majority of his long life, Benjamin Franklin was a loyal British royalist. In 1757, having made his fortune in Philadelphia & established his fame as a renowned experimental scientist, he crossed the Atlantic to live as a gentleman in the heaving metropolis of London.

From his house in Craven Street was to be his home until 1775 he mixed with both the brilliant & the powerful, whether in London coffee house clubs, at the Royal Society, or on his summer travels around the British Isles & continental Europe. He counted David Hume, Matthew Boulton, Joseph Priestley, Edmund Burke & Erasmus Darwin among his friends, and as an American colonial representative he had access to successive Prime Ministers & even the King. On the eve of the American War of Independence, Franklin fled arrest & escaped by sea. He would never return to London. George Goodwin has created an enthralling portrait of the man, the city and the age. ($55, HB)

Georgiana Molloy: The Mind That Shines

by Bernice Barry ($39.99, PB)

From the refined beauty of 19th century England & Scotland, to the dramatic landscape of the WA coast, this book gives new insight into the life of pioneering botanist, Georgiana Molloy. Following a swift marriage, Georgiana & Captain John Molloy emigrated to Australia among the first group of European settlers to the remote southwest. Here, despite personal tragedy, Georgiana’s passion for flora was ignited. Entirely self-taught, she gathered specimens of indigenous flora from Augusta & Busselton that are now held in some of the world’s leading herbarium collections. Using Georgiana’s own writings and notes, accompanied by full-colour pictures Bernice Barry reveals a resilient, independent woman, whose appreciation and wonder of the landscape around her become her salvation, and her legacy.

Now in paperback & B Format The Shepherd’s Life: A Tale of the Lake District

by James Rebanks, $25

Rosetta: A Scandalous True Story

by Alexandra Joel ($34.99, PB)

Alexandra Joel’s scandalous great-grandmother escaped her safe Melbourne life in 1905, deserting her respectable husband and five-year-old daughter to run away with Zeno the Magnificent, a half-Chinese fortune teller and seducer of souls. Rosetta & Zeno reinvented themselves in London, where they beguiled European society—Rosetta saying she was American; Zeno claiming to be a brilliant Japanese professor. Together they attracted the patronage of famous writers, inventors and scientists, lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses. Empress Eugenie, the widow of Napoleon III, and Princess Charlotte, sister of Germany’s last Kaiser, were among their greatest devotees. Rosetta revelled in a life few women of her time would have dared to embrace, yet all the while she hid her secret shame: the daughter she had left behind.

Penguin Bloom by Cameron Bloom & Bradley Trevor Greive

Cameron Bloom’s wife, Sam, suffered a near fatal fall that left her paralysed & deeply depressed. Then came Penguin, an injured magpie chick abandoned after she fell from her nest. Penguin’s rescue & the incredible joy & strength she gives Sam & all those who helped her survive demonstrates that, however bleak things seem, compassion, friendship & support can come from unexpected quarters, ensuring there are always better days ahead. ($28, PB)

Travel Writing

Barging Round Britain: Exploring the History of our Nation’s Canals and Waterways

by John Sergeant & David Bartley ($24.99, PB)

Britain is crisscrossed by more than 3000 miles of canals. This book explores both these canals and their contribution to Britain’s history. Telling of their origins and workings, it looks at the pleasures and sights of the canals as well as their part in our industrial heritage—from Josiah Wedgewood’s need to transport fragile bone china to engineer James Brindley’s visionary solutions to the geological obstacles in his path. Taking eight of the most celebrated waterways—including the Caledonian, Grand Union and the Trent and Mersey canals—Sergeant & Bartley chart a course through the history of British inland navigation from its industrial heyday to today’s pleasure seekers, looking for beauty and tranquillity.

Ubuntu: One Woman’s Motorcycle Odyssey Across Africa by Heather Ellis ($30, PB)

Heather Ellis rides her Yamaha TT600 to the dizzying heights of Mt Kilimanjaro and the Rwenzori Mountains, to the deserts of northern Kenya where she is befriended by armed bandits and rescued by Turkana fishermen, to a stand-off with four Ugandan men intent on harm, and to a voyage on a ‘floating village’ on the mighty Zaire River. Everywhere she goes she is aided by locals and travellers alike, who take her into their homes and hearts, helping her to truly understand the spirit of ubuntu—a Bantu word meaning ‘I am because you are’.

Gleebooks’ special price $24.99 A Sky Full of Birds by Matt Merritt ($40, HB) What Happened, Miss Simone?

by Alan Light ($32.99, PB)

Drawn from a trove of rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including Nina Simone’s remarkable private diaries), this nuanced examination of Simone’s life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for equality, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exile in Liberia and Paris. Harnessing the singular voice of Miss Simone herself and incorporating candid reflections from those who knew her best, including her only daughter, music journalist Alan Light brings us face to face with a legend, examining the very public persona and very private struggles of a great artist.

Now in paperback & B Format Bloodhound: Searching for My Father by Ramona Koval, $24 One Life: My Mother’s Story by Kate Grenville, $24 Words Without Music by Philip Glass, $25 Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War by Ian Buruma ($30, PB)

Ian Buruma’s grandparents, Bernard Schlesinger & Winifred Regensburg (Winnie & Bun), wrote to each other regularly over their 60 years together. The first letters were written in 1915, when Bernard was still at school at Uppingham & Win was taking music lessons in Hampstead. The last ones were written in the 1970s. Most of them are love letters, written from the trenches in France in WWI, from Oxford & Cambridge in the 1920s, from Germany in the 1930s, from Norway & India in WW2. Often, especially when Bernard was away for 3 years in India as a doctor in the British Army, they wrote every day, knowing it would take weeks, and sometimes months to reach the other side. Their letters are a priceless record of an assimilated Jewish family living in England throughout the upheavals of the 20th century and a moving portrait of a loving couple separated by war. By using their own words, Ian Buruma tells their story and embarks on a personal journey that reveals his own family history.

Building: Letters 1960–1975 by Isaiah Berlin

In the period covered here (1960–75) Isaiah Berlin creates Wolfson College, Oxford; he dines with JFK on the day he is told of the Soviet missile bases in Cuba; witnesses the Six-Day Arab–Israeli war of 1967; Richard M. Nixon succeeds Johnson as US President & resigns over Watergate; and the long agony of the Vietnam War grinds on in the background. Berlin publishes some of his most important work, including Four Essays on Liberty, and the essays later included in Vico and Herder.

He talks on the radio, appears on television and in documentary films and gives numerous lectures, especially his celebrated Mellon Lectures, later published as The Roots of Romanticism. Andbehind these public events is a constant stream of gossip and commentary, acerbic humour and warm personal feeling. A master of the letter writing craft, Berlin writes about an enormous range of topics to a dazzling cast of correspondents. ($65, PB)

From city-centre hunters to vast flocks straight out of the Arctic wilderness, much-loved dawn songsters to the exotic invaders of supermarket car parks, a host of remarkable wildlife spectacles are waiting to be discovered right outside a Briton’s front doors. In A Sky Full of Birds, poet and nature writer Matt Merritt shares his passion for birdwatching, taking the reader to some of the great avian gatherings that occur around the British isles—from ravens in Anglesey & raptors on the Wirral, to Kent nightingales & Scottish capercallies. By turns lyrical, informative and entertaining, he shows how natural miracles can be found all around us, if only we know where to look for them.

South Pole: Nature & Culture by Elizabeth Leane

The Geographic South Pole is a point around which the Earth, quite literally, pivots. An invisible spot on a high, featureless ice plateau, the Pole has no obvious material value, but is nonetheless a much sought-after location. The endpoint of exploration’s most famous ‘race’ between teams led by Robert F. Scott & Roald Amundsen, the Pole has more recently become a favoured destination of ‘extreme’ tourists. Like the whole of Antarctica, ‘90 South’ does not belong to any nation, but six national claims meet there, and for nearly 60 years the US has occupied the site with a series of scientific stations.

Elizabeth Leane explores the important challenges that this strange place poses to humanity. What is its lure? How and why should people live there? What can it teach us about our planet and ourselves? Along the way, she considers the absurdities and banalities of human engagement with the Pole, ranging from the ancient Greeks to the present, and featuring spectacular images of the South Pole. ($38, PB)

Billy Connolly’s Tracks Across America ($45, HB) In recent years, Billy Connolly has had more than his share of challenges—in 2013 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer (he’s now been given the all-clear); on the same day he was diagnosed with the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. But being a determined 72 year-old, Connolly isn’t about to let the illness put him off one more exploration of the country he knows and loves so well. So he heads off on another epic American adventure—an 8,000 mile rail journey through 28 states to the four corners of the country.

Messengers: City Tales From a London Bicycle Courier by Julian Sayarer ($20, PB)

Fresh from a world of deserts, oceans and human kindness Julian Sayarer goes about adjusting back to the hard indifference of a city amongst ever-rising skyscrapers and the turning waters of the Thames. From a bicycle view of the streets, Messengers watches a merry-go-round of media sensation, consumerism and crony politics. Against this background Julian returns to the courier community, so telling the stories of both the jailbirds, drug addicts and alcoholics who can’t hold down any other job, and the fashionable graduates living the bohemian dream in a world of courier races and squat parties. From the saddle and ever-turning pedals, Messengers shows a hidden version of London’s underbelly and those living in the margins of the metropolis. Recounting a year of fear, insecurity and frustration on the breadline, Messengers is a chronicle of the modern city at the start of the twenty-first century, and the task of finding a peace within it.

Now in paperback The Italians by John Hooper, $26.99 The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson, $25

9

books for kids to young adults

compiled by Lynndy Bennett, our children's correspondent

Little Honey Bee by Jane Ormes ($27, BD)

This pretty lift-the-flap book takes us on a journey through a garden from Spring to Summer. Beautiful pictures of flora and fauna, with really imaginative flaps—petals, berries, leaves, butterflies, Nature abounds in a most imaginative way. This is a warm, appealing book —a counting book as well, with an almost poetic text: ‘Five cherry blossoms, opening in the trees. Six blooming hollyhocks, trembling in the breeze’—both pictures and text convey the wonder of a garden in a gentle way. A great book to share with a young child. Louise

ZOOM by Istvan Banyai ($13, PB)

The best children’s picture book you’ve never heard of, first published in 1995. This astonishing wordless display recreates the effect of a camera zooming out.

Gentle philosophical questions are posed. What are you really looking at? Worlds within Worlds? Unique and entertaining, as is its companion visual odyssey RE-ZOOM. Ages 6+. Stephen

Non fiction

Picture Books

Flora and the Penguin by Molly Idle

Flora is back! The first book in which we met Flora, Flora and the Flamingo, was a celebration of movement and dance, and this second book is equally eloquent. Flora has partnered up with a penguin, and together they skate by the water’s edge, on an ice floe.

With a suitably glacial palette of blues and white, with touches of yellow, Molly Idle has created a real winter wonderland, where Flora and the penguin skate and play in a very elegant manner. Fold-outs and flaps create another dimension to the book, adding to the visual narrative in a most entertaining way. Molly Idle was an animator, and her wordless picture books capture all the vitality and dynamism of that medium, while fitting perfectly between the pages of a book. ($28, HB) Louise

Flora and the Peacocks

by Molly Idle ($30, HB)

Fans of Flora, Molly Idle’s graceful, balletic star, will enjoy the next book, Flora and the Peacocks, in which Flora dances with a fan, and two peacocks. Clever lift-up flaps, and marvellously dynamic pictures are used in this wordless picture book, conveying all the drama and movement of the ballet. The peacocks tussle over Flora’s fan, which leads to a visually surprising denouement with a large fold out of Flora and the peacocks making amends. Molly Idle’s work is very expressive, she captures the mood as well as the movement of dance, with Flora and her birds. Louise

My Monster-Mashing Activity Book

by Catherine Leblanc (ill) Roland Garrigue

Flora and Her Friends Matching Game This is an attractive spin-off from the Flora books.

Artwork from each of the three books is included, making a very appealing memory game for young Flora fans. The illustrated tiles are a good size, with white backgrounds, making it suitable for 3 year olds and older. ($28, BX) Louise

Sputnik’s Guide to Life on Earth

by Frank Cottrell Boyce ($17, PB)v

Pack your favourite drawing implements, a sharp concentration, and all your courage, because there are monsters hiding behind every page of this scary, but super fun puzzle activity book.

Along the way, you will meet monsters of every sort: nice, big, talkative, funny, and of course ... hungry. You will need to draw them cool clothes and hats and maybe a thing to two to sink their fangs into. Spot the differences between almost identical ogres; put stains on the dress of the monster that is obsessed with cleanliness; design ID cards for the Republic of Monsters; above all, keep them occupied while you make your daring escape. Monstrously good fun! ($19, PB) Lynndy

Cloth Lullaby: The Woven Life of Louise Bourgeois

by Amy Novesky (ill) Isabelle Arsenault ($28, HB)

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) was a world-renowned modern artist noted for her sculptures made of wood, steel, stone, and cast rubber. Her most famous spider sculpture, Maman, stands more than 30 feet high. Just as spiders spin and repair their webs, Louise’s own mother was a weaver of tapestries. Louise spent her childhood in France as an apprentice to her mother before she became a tapestry artist herself. She worked with fabric throughout her career, and this biographical picture book shows how Bourgeois’s childhood experiences weaving with her loving, nurturing mother provided the inspiration for her most famous works. With a beautifully nuanced and poetic story, this book stunningly captures the relationship between mother and daughter and illuminates how memories are woven into us all. Simply gorgeous!. Lynndy

The Sidekicks by Will Kostakis (20, PB) Each third of this novel details the perspective of a ‘best friend’ of a deceased high school boy.

Ryan, Harley, and Miles gravitated to the charismatic Isaac to keep their secrets, avoid their issues, or define themselves by him. The title is apt: these young men struggle to accept control over their lives, or deny that they are compelling enough protagonists to support a story. It feels right that they share this one, as they try to build real friendships with each other, and find new ways to live in the absence of their friend. The structure allows The Sidekicks to grow more affecting as it progresses; reactions are delayed to great effect and the reader’s ideas are disputed.

Kostakis isn’t afraid to forego subtlety and go in for the kill, emotionally. The three boys are recognisable and strongly characterised. The writing can be awkward, but mostly in ways that reflect the viewpoint’s character. The first third of the novel contains a very wonderful mother character. The last contains an emotionally messy, sentimental, relatively happy ending. Josh Follow Me Back by Nicci Cloke (17, PB)

Follow Me Back is an entertaining and interesting book. It makes you really understand that you never know who you’re talking to on the internet and you can’t always trust people are who they say they are. It makes you also stay clear of anonymous question websites like ask.fm. It follows the story of a teenager called Lizzie who mysteriously disappears. Only Aiden knows what might have happened to her, or does he? For ages 13+. Persia (age 12)

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for primary level readers

Sputnik’s Guide to Life on Earth will send your imagination into orbit! The Blythes are a big, warm, rambunctious family who live on a small farm and sometimes foster children. Now Prez has come to live with them. But, though he seems cheerful and helpful, he never says a word. Then one day Prez answers the door to someone claiming to be his relative. This small, loud stranger carries a backpack, walks with a swagger and goes by the name of Sputnik. As Prez dithers on the doorstep, Sputnik strolls right past him and introduces himself to everyone in the household. Prez is amazed at the response. The family pat Sputnik on the head, call him a good boy and drop food into his mouth. It seems they all think Sputnik is a dog. There was no advance copy of this available, but award-winning author Frank Cottrell Boyce is one of my favourite writers for this age range, with a distinctive warmth and brink-of-credibility storylines leavened with gentle humour so I’ve no hesitation whatsoever in recommending his newest novel. Lynndy

teen / ya fiction

The Special Ones by Em Bailey (20, PB)

‘He keeps us here because we’re Special. Esther is one of the Special Ones - four people who live under his protection in a remote farmhouse. The Special Ones are not allowed to leave, but why would they want to? Here, they are safe from toxic modern life, safe from a meaningless existence, safe in their endless work.

He watches them every moment of every day, ready to punish them if they forget who they are - all while broadcasting their lives to eager followers on the outside. Esther knows he will renew her if she stops being Special, and that renewal almost certainly means death. Yet she also knows she’s a fake. She has no ancient wisdom, no genuine advice to offer her followers. But like an actor caught up in an endless play, she must keep up the performance - if she wants to survive long enough to escape.’

I’ve not read it yet, but my rep couldn’t enthuse enough about this chilling novel of suspense by award-winning Australian author Em Bailey. Consequently I’m longing to immerse myself in the sinister world of The Special Ones, where obedience is enforced by inferred threats, and their safety depends on their maintaining a resemblance to their unknown predecessors. Lynndy

Food, Health & Garden

Kitchen Garden Companion: Growing

by Stephanie Alexander ($50, PB)

If you have ever dreamed of picking fresh salad leaves for the evening meal, gathering vine-ripened tomatoes or pulling up your own sweet carrots, this is the book for you. Stephanie Alexander shares her experiences and the secrets of rewarding kitchen gardening with detailed gardening notes that explain how you can plant, grow & harvest 73 different vegetables, herbs & fruit. Whether you have a large plot in a suburban backyard or a few pots on a balcony, you will find everything you need to get your kitchen garden started in this fully updated paperback edition.

The Middle Eastern Vegetarian Cookbook

by Salma Hage ($49.95, HB)

Traditionally, the Middle Eastern diet consisted largely of vegetables, fruits, herbs, spices, pulses, grains & legumes. Drawing inspiration from ancient and prized Phoenician ingredients, from grassy olive oil to fresh figs & rich dates, this book offers an array of delicious breakfasts & drinks, mezze and salads, vegetables and pulses, grains and desserts. Salma Hage simplifies this popular cuisine with easily achievable recipes, many with vegan & gluten-free options.

A beautifully illustrated, visually lush and intriguing book about the world’s most popular and most powerful flower by award-winning, best-selling writer Helen O’Neill.

CHASING ASYLUM, her memoir, is a very personal story of the cost, risks and rewards of putting yourself on the line for a film and for a cause - and also an insightful, provocative, challenging look at an issue which should outrage us all.

Infectious: A Doctor’s Eye-opening Insights Into Contagious Diseases by Frank Bowden ($30, PB)

A woman’s innocuous cold symptoms mask a debilitating rare tick infection. A young man develops shingles then suffers blinding head pain later in life. After years of frustration, a family eradicates head lice forever. Infectious follows on from Frank Bowden’s 2011 Gone Viral but deals much more with everyday infectious diseases—the flu, colds, sore throats and head lice. It also tackles topical and critical issues in modern medical practice—the emergence of antibiotic resistance, the Ebola epidemic, the Lyme Disease controversy and the causes of chronic fatigue.

Smiling Sushi Roll by Tama Chan ($16.99, PB) In this unique and humorous sushi book, illustrator and maki artist Tama-chan (Takayo Kiyota) shows how basic ingredients like rice, seaweed, pickles, and cucumber can be used like paint and ink to create maki that is so fun to look at, you almost won’t want to eat it. The book includes a few of the basics of using condiments, herbs and spices to colourise rice as well as of preparing a sushi roll for some artistic strokes.

One Pot Favourites by Pete Evans ($40, PB)

Stews, roasts, braises, curries, stir-fries and even Pete Evans’ favourite meatloaf recipe—all of which can be prepared in just one pot (or wok!). Evans draws inspiration from around the globe as well as closer to home, from Vietnamese beef curry & Moroccanspiced leg of lamb to chicken tikka masala & herb-crusted fish with native greens. The ingredients in these approachable paleo recipes will make you feel great—fresh vegetables, sustainable seafood, free-range chicken and meat, healthy fats, nuts, seeds and spices—with no dairy, legumes, grains or refined sugar.

100 Best Jewish Recipes by Evelyn & Judi Rose

This book allows you to create modern feasts packed with oldschool deli charm—with mouth-watering ideas for small plates and soups, mains and desserts, as well as bakes & breads. You’ll also discover the best dishes to prepare for every major festival, alongside advice on how to make everyday recipes suitable for the kosher kitchen. For everything from perfect pickles to great gefilte fish, and brilliant bagels to meltingly tender cholent, this is the ultimate contemporary guide to the best Jewish food. ($38, HB)

Quick. Easy. Healthy. Good Food Every Day

by Callum Hann & Themis Chryssidis ($40, PB)

The first cooking class ever conducted by Callum Hann and Themis Chryssidis at their cooking school, ‘Sprout’, was called Quick, Easy & Healthy, and to this day it remains their most popular course.

They present over 70 simple, quick & convenient recipes for fresh, healthy, flavoursome food. Dishes that use easy to find, seasonal ingredients; that represent good value for money; and which require minimal preparation & clean-up time. Nutritional information is given for every recipe. The book is divided into 4 seasonal chapters, each with a collection of recipes using readily available ingredients in season, with suggestions for variations & substitute ingredients.

Real Food Projects: 30 skills. 46 recipes. From scratch. by Kate Walsh ($40, PB)

Self-taught cook and sustainable food advocate Kate Walsh knows that learning how to cook a few kitchen staples from scratch, using fresh local and seasonal produce, is the best way to improve your health and that of our food system. Churn your own butter & slathering it on your own no-knead bread, barbecue your own homemade sausages or use the season’s freshest fruits to make your own cordials. Step-by-step instructions and photographs guide you from start to finish.

A sharp, funny and deftly observed debut about a wonderfully dysfunctional New York family, The Plumbs, and the three grown-up siblings fighting to save the family money pot - the ‘nest’ as their youngest brother threatens to lose it all.

The 24-Hour Wine Expert by Jancis Robinson

From a whistlestop tour of regions & grapes to what terms like ‘full-bodied’ & ‘nose’ really mean, internationally respected wine expert Jancis Robinson, in this myth-busting little book, will ensure you’ll never panic when faced with a wine list or dinner party again. ($13, PB)

Quarterly Essay reissued Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly

by Karen Hitchcock, $23

In Dear Life, using vivid and moving case studies, Karen Hitchcock show what care for the elderly and dying is really like—both the good and the bad. With honesty and deep experience, she looks at end-of-life decisions and over-treatment, frailty and dementia.

Yia Yia’s Kitchen Secrets ($34.99, PB) The dinner table is a place where families come together to eat, share, love and laugh. So, wouldn’t it make meal time more special if everyone at the table enjoyed the same food? That’s what this book is all about – food that is loved by young and old. Poppy Stamateris and Marika Gouveros’ mother Mary has created a lifetime of recipes through her joy, passion and years of experience. Join Mary on her culinary journey and learn the secrets she has to share with the whole family.

Not Just Jam: The Fat Pig Farm book of preserves, pickles & sauces by Matthew Evans

Harness the harvest, make real food from scratch using this collection of more than 90 modern recipes for old-fashioned preserving methods. Pear & cardamom jam will brighten morning toast, use your beetroot relish all year. Lunches made with apple cider mustard are always the better for the addition. A bowl of ice cream is transformed with a drizzle of homemade gooseberry & sour cherry syrup. ($35, HB)

Clean Cakes by Henrietta Inman ($40, HB) Cashew cream, nut butters and homemade jams. Plus over 75 beautifully photographed recipes, from rich chocolate brownies, a show-stopping courgette, basil, lime & pistachio layer cake and raw desserts to five grain omega mix granola bars, spectacular fruit pies & enticing savoury tarts.

An invaluable book for anyone who for health or lifestyle reasons wants to eliminate gluten, dairy or refined sugar from their diet but who still wants to satisfy their sweet tooth.

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events

s Eve nt ar d n e Cal

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MONDAY

TUESDAY

ut! miss o mail! t ’ n o D ee for gl weekly p u n Sig llen’s ate.

A h t e d b Eliza l events up om.au emai eebooks.c @gl asims

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WEDNESDAY

Remember!

Join the Gleeclub and get free entry to events held at our shops, 10%credit accrued with every purchase, and the Gleaner delivered to your door every month.

Launch—6 for 6.30 Nancy Knudsen

Event—6 for 6.30 Anne Summers

Damned Whores & God’s Police Anne Summers will talk about her updated feminist classic—Who are today’s damned whores? And why do women themselves still want to be God’s Police? And although sexual harassment, domestic violence and date rape are well understood today they are nevertheless still with us — the fight is far from over.

Stuart Rees

Henry Reynolds

12 Launch—6 for 6.30

13 Event—6 for 6.30

A Lover’s Country Launcher: Mary Kostakidis A Lover’s Country sheds light on the intrigue, struggle and behind-thescenes wrangling associated with the nomination of a Palestinian woman as the recipient of a major peace prize.

Unnecessary Wars in conv. with Alison Broinowski Henry Reynolds at his searing best, shows how the Boer War left a dark and dangerous legacy, demonstrating how those beliefs have propelled us into too many unnecessary wars— without ever counting the cost.

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20 Event—6 for 6.30

Event—6 for 6.30

The Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott & Peta Credlin Destroyed Their Own Government Savva paints an unforgettable picture of the unique duo of Abbott and Credlin, who wielded power ruthlessly but not well.

26 Launch—6 for 6.30 Claire Halliday

Things My Mother Taught Me Panel: Benjamin Law, Naomi Simson & Claire Halliday A diverse range of Australian identities reflect on how a mother shapes, nurtures, and complicates a life.

These are stories of fondness, gratitude, respect and regret.

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Accidentally Istanbul: Decoding Turkey for the Enquiring Western Traveller In conv. with Jaqui Lane Nancy Knudsen’s story is vivid, lively and sometimes hilarious, full of insights into things she wished she’d known before she arrived in an allblack apartment above a sports field, with not a word of Turkish.

Niki Savva

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THUR

2016 Stella Prize Winner

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Launch— Hazel

Word M Launcher: J Hazel Smith’s new engages in a direct porary political an relates these issue experience of dea abuse & disability

14 Launch— Carmel

A Darker Magic T in conv. with This is the first ta crets. It is an epic war, knights & w the legend from 2 that of Merlin, who do da Vinci with a a laughing gifted Devon, who keep

21 Event—

Sarah Fe

in conv. with Geordie Williamson Nominees for this years Stella: Debra Adelaide, Stephanie Bishop, Jen Craig, Tegan Bennett Daylight, Peggy Frew, Elizabeth Harrower, Gail Jones, Mireille Juchau, Amanda Lohrey, Alice Robinson, Charlotte Wood, and Fiona Wright.

Who will it be?

The Killing S in conv. with This is the book th scenes of the series ing the stories behi ‘.... now we have a sodes of rich mater put into a 5—Sarah F

27 Event—6 for 6.30

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The Lucky Country?

Reinventing Australia in conv. with Philip Adams Highlighting that the global economy and the environment are in crisis, Ian Lowe illustrates the need—and the opportunity—to transform Australia into the world-leading model of sustainable development that we have the potential to become.

Fairness, Opportu Filling the Po in conv. with In the present po editors of this col cles consider it is of informed publi sufficient consensu encourage the po embrace a proper

Ian Lowe

Event—

John M

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

Gleeclub members free entry to events at 49 Glebe Pt Rd

April 2016

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

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

RSDAY

—6 for 6.30 Smith

FRIDAY 1

Event—6 for 6.30

Martin McKenzie-Murray

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

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Event—6 for 6.30 Migrants Stan Grant Joy Wallace Talking To My Country w poetry collection Stan Grant will give a talk about his t way with contemnew book—an extraordinarily pownd social issues and erful and personal meditation on es to the personal race, culture and national identity. ath & dementia, and childlessness.

—6 for 6.30 Niland

This Way Comes Amy Hume ale in Merlin’s Sestory of love and wizardry—retelling 2 points of view— o is like a Leonarwand, and Emily, girl from today’s ps Merlin honest.

—6 for 6.30 erguson

Season Uncut David Marr hat goes behind the s, candidly revealind the interviews. a place for the epirial we could have -part series.’

Ferguson

—6 for 6.30 Menadue

unity & Security: olicy Vacuum Ross Gittins olicy vacuum the llection of 48 artionly by this type ic discussion that us will emerge to olitical parties to r reform agenda.

15 Launch—6 for 6.30 Adam Aitken

One Hundred Letters Home In conv. with Beth Yahp Adam Aitken’s evocative memoir probes the reasons his father married his mother, an ‘Asian woman’.

He tests the construction of his hybridity, the notion of his Asian ‘face’ and where it might be welcome, and where and with whom a trans-Asia citizen belongs.

22 Launch—6 for 6.30 Wayne Hudson

Australian Religious Thought Launcher: Alan Atkinson This book is the first major study of Australian religious thought. It argues that religious thought can be found in many intellectuals in Australia, both in the religiously inclined and in those who were not conventionally religious.

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Launch—6 for 6.30

SATURDAY

SUNDAY

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Launch—3.30 for 4 Pitt Street Poetry Double Anthony Lawrence Headwaters

Eileen Chong

Painting Red Orchids

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24 In Early May Sun 1.5, 3.30 for 4 Launch Pitt Street Poetry Triple: John Foulcher, Geoff Page and Lisa Brockwell

30 Launch—6 for 6.30

Vagabond Press Double Chris Edwards

Debra Jopson O Sonata Oliver of the Levant Toby Fitch It’s 1969 and the world is alight with The Bloomin’ Notions of revolution. Oliver Lawrence, a BonOther & Beau di Beach kid, is transported to one of the world’s most bewitching cities: Poetry readings by Chris Edwards, Toby Fitch, Elizabeth Allen, Emily Beirut in the Levant.

Stewart, a.j. carruthers, David Malouf, Nicolette Stasko & Pam Brown.

Tue 3.5, 6 for 6.30 Launch John Hughes, Asylum Wed 4.5, 6 for 6.30 NSW Launch ABR States of Poetry Readings by David Malouf, Susie Anderson, Fiona Wright, Toby Fitch, Pam Brown and Michael Aitkin

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Granny’s Good Reads with Sonia Lee

When I took Latin for the Leaving Certificate ages ago, the set poet was Catullus. The textbook had a modest (in every sense) selection of his poems, some of them addressed to ‘Lesbia’, his code name for Clodia, wife of Metellus Celer, with whom he had fallen fathoms deep in love. When she ended the affair it broke his heart, and he let her know it in suitably vitriolic verse.

Our text also had some modern verse inspired by Catullus, including G. S. Davies’ lovely version, channelling Robbie Burns, of the lament for Lesbia’s dead sparrow, Tennyson’s lines on olive silvery Sirmio, the place in the lake district where Catullus’ family had their villa and, my favourite, Elroy Flecker’s The Old Ships. I’ve had a soft spot for Catullus ever since, and when the Gleaner featured Catullus’ Bedspread by Daisy Dunn I just had to read it. The book’s striking red cover is decorated with a charming reproduction of a bird (in memory of Lesbia’s sparrow) and Dunn’s translations of the poems are scattered through the text. Catullus was born circa 82 BCE in Cisalpine Gaul, the northeastern district of Italy, and the family were prominent enough to have the local magistrate, Julius Caesar, as their guest. Catullus’ poetry is full of passion and wit, not to mention a good helping of indelicacy. He came to Rome in his youth, just as the Republic was being fatally undermined by the political ambitions of power-brokers like Caesar, Crassus and Pompey. He wrote vividly about the teeming streets, the late night bars, the prostitutes and the scheming politicians, lamenting that his purse was ‘full of cobwebs’, hardly surprising given his torrent of toilet talk lampooning bigwigs like Caesar. The Bedspread poem of the title is a mini-epic, setting tales of love and war against the backdrop of the Ages of Man, as depicted on a quilt belonging to one of Jason’s legendary Argonauts.

Dunn’s hope is that her book will ‘inspire others to discover or rediscover [these] exquisite poems’, and her enthusiasm is infectious.

Still in ancient Rome, I turned to Robert Harris’s Cicero trilogy Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator. These stories purport to be the work of Tiro, Cicero’s slave-cum-secretary, who devised a system of shorthand (including our ‘&’ symbol) and wrote a life of Cicero which has not survived. Well researched, exciting and totally engaging. When Tiro recounts some of the scathing speeches that Cicero made against Mark Antony, one marvels that he kept his head for as long as he did. A supreme irony is that the soldier sent to execute Cicero was his former client, who had when only fifteen murdered his father and been got off by Cicero on condition of his joining the army.

While Cicero left many letters, speeches and other writings, Dunn has had to reconstruct Catullus’ life mainly from the internal evidence of his poetry. She includes some coloured plates illustrating the sort of clothes that young blades like Catullus wore, and the ruins of a building on Lake Garda where the family villa stood. Catullus died young in about 53 BCE, but his poems have secured his place in the galaxy.

While still in Rome, I can’t leave out the Lindsey Davis’ series of Roman thrillers, with its detectives Marcus Didius Falco and, more recently, Falco’s adopted British daughter. These are set in the empire of the first century CE, in the reigns of Vespasian, Titus and their appalling successor Domitian. There’s low life and high life aplenty and the stories zing with energy.

Last, and by no means least, on my list was Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet, a pilgrimage through places associated with seven Roman poets, including Catullus and Virgil. This great classic from 1957 is beautifully written and well worth your time and money. Sonia

The Killing Season Uncut ($33, PB)

More than a hundred people were interviewed for ABC’s The Killing Season—ministers, backbenchers, staffers, party officials, pollsters and public servants—recording their vivid accounts of the public and private events that made the Rudd and Gillard governments and then brought them undone. The journey to screen for each of the Rudd/Gillard interviews is telling in itself. Kevin Rudd gives his painful account of the period and recalled in vivid detail the events of losing the prime ministership. Julia Gillard is frank and unsparing of her colleagues.

‘The making of The Killing Season matched the drama on screen and that’s a story we wanted to tell. And now we have a place for the episodes of rich material we could have put into a 5-part series.’—Sarah Ferguson

Richard Brooks by Christine Maher ($30, PB) Richard Brooks was a man of self interest and entrepreneurial verve. Privateer, smuggler, convict sea captain, rum trader turned respectable magistrate & colonial squire. His life was a microcosm of early colonial Australia. He was a shipowner, merchant ship captain & financier. He kept the colony supplied with spirits, he imported cattle from South Africa and India.

As the largest cattle owner in the country he was at the frontier of exploration & Aboriginal dispossession. He survived numerous scandals, including accusations of inhumanity, fraud, smuggling, receiving, cattle theft, assault, claim-jumping and infidelity. His story provides a glimpse into the social, political and domestic life of that famed group of landowning settlers of the first 20 years of the colony—large convict estates, regency mansions, dynastic marriages & extensive pastoral and squatting empires.

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Australian Studies Unnecessary Wars by Henry Reynolds ($30, PB) ‘Australian governments find it easy to go to war. Their leaders seem to be able to withdraw with a calm conscience, answerable neither to God nor humanity.’ Australia lost 600 men in the Boer War, a three-year conflict fought in the heart of Africa that had ostensibly nothing to do with Australia. Coinciding with Federation, the war kickstarted Australia’s commitment to fighting in Britain’s wars overseas, and forged a national identity around it. By 1902, when the Boer War ended, a mythology about our colonial soldiers had already been crafted, and a dangerous precedent established. This is Henry Reynolds at his searing best, as he shows how the Boer War left a dark and dangerous legacy, demonstrating how those beliefs have propelled us into too many unnecessary wars—without ever counting the cost.

Gleebooks’ special price $26.99

Generation Less: How Australia is Cheating the Young by Jennifer Rayner ($23, PB)

It’s time to decide what kind of future we want for this country. Will it be one where young Australians enjoy the same opportunities to build stable, secure lives as their parents and grandparents had? And can we do right by the elderly without making second-class citizens of the young? Generation Less investigates the life prospects of young Australians. It looks at their emotional life, their access to credit, education and fulfilling jobs, and considers whether they will ever be able to buy a house. This is a wake-up call for young and old alike, and a ground-breaking blueprint for a fairer future.

The Lucky Country? Reinventing Australia

by Ian Lowe ($29.95, PB)

In 1964, Donald Horne described Australia in his iconic book as ‘a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck’.

More than 5 decades later, scientist & environmentalist Ian Lowe shows that little has changed after generations of short-sighted leadership. In his frank and fearless way, Lowe assesses the state of Australia in four key areas: our environment, population and society, geographical position, and unrelenting pursuit of economic growth. Highlighting that the global economy and the environment are in crisis, Lowe illustrates the need—and the opportunity—to transform Australia into the world-leading model of sustainable development that we have the potential to become.

Armenia, Australia & the Great War

by Peter Stanley & Vicken Babkenian ($34.99, PB)

24 April 1915 marks the beginning of two great epics of the First World War. It was the day the allied invasion forces set out for Gallipoli; and it marked the beginning of what became the Genocide of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenians. For the first time, this book tells the powerful, and until now neglected, story of how Australian humanitarians helped people they had barely heard of and never met, amid one of the 20th century’s most terrible human calamities. With 50,000 Armenian-Australians sharing direct family links with the Genocide, this has become truly an Australian story. ‘Australians’ responses to the wider world have a complex history but the humanitarian strand is deeply entrenched. Babkenian and Stanley have done a great service in casting light on this little-known but fascinating story’.— Tim Costello

Who Bombed the Hilton? by Rachel Landers

I unpick and put in chronological order thousands of pieces of paper—lay out the facts as they arrived the first time, unadorned, uninterpreted, flying in from dozens of sources and every corner of the world. What really went on? Were the police corrupt? Did the conspiracy theorists believe what they wanted to believe? On 13 February 1978 a bomb exploded outside the Hilton Hotel in George Street, Sydney. Two garbage collectors & a police officer were killed—the crime is still unsolved. Filmmaker & historian Rachel Landers wrestles with the evidence to unravel this complex cold case in forensic detail, exposing corruption, conspiracy theories and political intrigue— and a prime suspect. ($33, PB)

For Love of Country by Anthony Hill ($35, PB)

At the close of the WW1 and after surviving a gas attack on the Western Front, Captain Walter Eddison moved his family from war-ravaged Britain to start a new life in Australia. The Eddisons were offered ‘land fit for heroes’ under the Australian government’s soldier-settlement scheme, but the grim realities of life in the remote bush were not easy for a family used to the green pastures of England. Walter and Marion made the best of their limited prospects, but as they raised their young family on the outskirts of the nation’s newly established capital, tensions were again simmering in Europe. When WW2 broke out, they were forced to confront their worst fears as their three sons headed back to the battlefields they’d tried so hard to leave behind. Anthony Hill expertly weaves military history and gripping accounts of frontline fighting into this intimate portrait of a family who sacrificed everything for their country, showing how the global conflicts of the 20th century came home to Australia, with tragic consequences.

Aboriginal Studies Defending Country: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Military Service since 1945

by Noah Riseman & Richard Trembath ($34.95, PB)

Many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander enlisted in the army before they had the right to vote, to drink alcohol or even to receive equal wages. This is the first book to document the unique experiences of Indigenous Australian men and women since WW2. Using compelling personal narratives and rigorous archival research, it explores how military service impacted the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander recruits. It also reveals how their involvement in Australia’s defence contributed to the advancement of Indigenous rights.

It’s Our Country: Indigenous Arguments for Meaningful Constitutional Recognition and Reform (eds) Megan Davis & Marcia Langton ($29.99, PB)

The idea of constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians has become a highly political & contentious issue. It is entangled in institutional processes that rarely allow the diversity of Indigenous opinion to be expressed. With a referendum on the agenda, Indigenous people should have a direct say in the form of recognition that constitutional change might achieve. This is a collection of essays

by Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander thinkers & leaders including Patrick Dodson, Noel Pearson, Dawn Casey, Nyunggai Warren Mundine & Mick Mansell exploring what recognition & constitutional reform might achieve—or not achieve—for Indigenous people.

The Aboriginal Story of Burke and Wills: Forgotten Narratives (eds) Ian D. Clark & Fred A. Cahir

This book is the first major study of Aboriginal associations with the Burke and Wills expedition of 1860–61. It provides a history of Aboriginal cross-cultural exchanges with the expedition, as well as the various relief expeditions, and offers a reinterpretation of the literature surrounding Burke and Wills, using official correspondence, expedition journals and diaries, visual art, and archaeological and linguistic research—all complemented by references to Aboriginal oral histories and social memory. It highlights the interaction of expedition members with Aboriginal people and their subsequent contribution to Aboriginal studies. Illustrated with historical photographs and line drawings. ($49.95, PB)

After Before Time by Robbi Neal ($29.99, PB) At the end of 2008, Robbi Neal and her family travelled to the other end of mainland Australia to a remote Aboriginal community. They planned to stay for 12 months. 7 years later, they are still there. This collection of linked narratives centring around a remote Indigenous community has been inspired by real people and real events—the stories might read like fiction, but they are based on fact. The events they describe really happened—Neal has been given permission to share these truths by writing them down, both by the person who influenced each story & by the Elders concerned.

Politics

When We Fight, We Win: 21st Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World by Greg Jobin-Leeds & AgitArte

Same-sex marriage, #BlackLivesMatter, the DREAM Act, the People’s Climate March, End the New Jim Crow, Occupy Wall Street, the fight for a $15 minimum wage—these are just a few of the remarkable movements that have blossomed in the past decade, a most fertile and productive era of activism. Now, in a visually rich and deeply inspiring book, the leaders and activists of these and other movements distil their wisdom, sharing lessons of what makes—and what hinders—transformative social change. ($23, PB)

The Five Horsemen of the Modern World : Climate, Food, Water, Disease & Obesity by Daniel Callahan

In recent decades, we have seen five perilous & interlocking trends dominate global discourse: irreversible climate change, extreme food & water shortages, rising chronic illnesses & rampant obesity. Why can’t we make any progress in counteracting these problems despite vast expenditures of intellectual, institutional & social capital? What makes these global emergencies the ‘wicked problems’ that resist our best efforts and only grow more daunting? Daniel Callahan examines these global problems & shines a light on the institutions, practices, & actors that block major change. We see partisan political & ideological forces, old-fashioned hucksters, and trumped-up scientific disagreements but also the problem of modern progress itself. Obesity, anthropogenic climate change, degenerative diseases, ecological degradation, and global famine are often the unintended consequences of unchecked industrial growth, insatiable eating habits, and technologically extended life spans. Only through well-crafted political, regulatory, industrial, and cultural counter-strategies can we change enough minds to check these threats. ($72, HB)

Now in B Format Don’t Trust, Don’t Fear, Don’t Beg: 100 Days as a Prisoner of Putin—The Story of the Arctic 30 by Ben Stewart, $24

History

Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild looks at the Spanish civil war through More than 35,000 volunteers from dozens of other countries went to help defend the Spanish Republic. A few are famous, such as Ernest Hemingway, but others are less familiar. They include a 19-year-old Kentucky woman, a young man who ran away from his Pennsylvania college and became the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid; and a swashbuckling Texas oilman who covertly violated US law and sold Generalissimo Francisco Franco most of the fuel for his army. Two New York Times reporters, fierce rivals, covered the war from opposite sides, with opposite sympathies. There are Britons in Hochschild’s cast of characters as well: including George Orwell; a London sculptor who fought with the American battalion; another, who had just gone down from Cambridge who joined Franco’s army and found himself fighting against the Americans. ($35, PB)

Lawrence of Arabia’s War: The Arabs, the British and the Remaking of the Middle East in WWI by Neil Faulkner ($71, HB)

Neil Faulkner draws on ten years of field research to offer the first truly multidisciplinary history of the conflicts that raged in Sinai, Arabia, Palestine, and Syria during the First World War. Faulkner rewrites the history of T. E. Lawrence’s legendary military campaigns in the context of the Arab Revolt. He explores the intersections among the declining Ottoman Empire, the Bedouin tribes, nascent Arab nationalism, and Western imperial ambition—providing a new analysis of Ottoman resilience in the face of modern industrialised warfare, and assessing the relative weight of conventional operations in Palestine & irregular warfare in Syria. Faulkner thus reassesses the historic roots of today’s divided, fractious, war-torn Middle East.

First Day of the Somme: The Complete Account of Britain’s Worst-ever Military Disaster by Andrew Macdonald ($35, HB)

It took several million bullets and roughly half an hour to destroy General Sir Douglas Haig’s grand plans for the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916. Working back from the ‘butcher’s bill’ of mass casualties on the battlefield, to the inept planning in London’s Whitehall, Andrew Macdonald penetrates the ‘fog of war’ to explain how and why this was a human disaster waiting to happen. Told fully from both the British and German perspectives for the first time, this book sheets home blame for the butchery (a total of almost 60 thousand casualties) directly to widespread British intelligence and command failure. It further finds the outcome was very definitely a German victory over a so-called British defeat, and, again for the first time, identifies how talented German commanders mostly outclassed their opposite numbers and inflicted the galling bloodletting. Taking that terrible first day of battle as his focus, Andrew Macdonald casts new and damning light on the true causes of the disaster.

Now in B Format The New Spymasters: Inside Espionage from the Cold War to Global Terror by Stephen Grey, $25 Farewell Kabul: From Afghanistan To A More Dangerous World by Christina Lamb, $25 The Morning They Came For Us: Dispatches from Syria by Janine di Giovanni ($28, PB)

In May of 2012, Janine di Giovanni travelled to Syria. It would mark the beginning of a long relationship with the country, starting with her coverage of the peaceful uprising and continuing as the situation quickly turned into one of the most brutal, internecine conflicts in recent history. Speaking to those directly involved in the war, di Giovanni relays here the personal stories of rebel fighters thrown in jail at the least provocation; of children and families forced to watch loved ones taken and killed by regime forces with dubious justifications; and the stories of the elite, holding pool parties in Damascus hotels, trying to deny the human consequences of the nearby shelling.

My Journey Into the Heart of Terror: Ten days in the Islamic State by Jurgen Todenhöfer

ISIS, IS, the Islamic State. The name is chilling. The images are horrific. This is a group that chops the heads off journalists—and yet one, the German Jürgen Todenhöfer, went out of his way to get an invitation to visit ISIS fighters in Mosul to ask them to explain their beliefs. This book is the result of his conversation. Todenhofer shows how the organisation grew from its al-Qaeda roots and takes a harsh look at the West’s role both today and in its past. Only by understanding, Todenhöfer believes, can we move forward and combat ISIS’s radical, violent interpretation of Islam and the terror and destruction it brings. ($33, PB) 15

Science & Nature

Australian Wildlife After Dark Martyn Robinson & Bruce Thomson ($35, PB)

Australia is a land with many animals found nowhere else on Earth. Yet many are active only during the cooler evening & night-time & so are rarely seen. This book brings this hidden fauna into the light. The after dark fauna includes a surprising diversity of familiar (and some not-so-familiar) species, from moths & spiders through to bandicoots, bats & birds.

In Praise of Simple Physics: The Science and Mathematics Behind Everyday Questions

by Paul J. Nahin ($65, HB)

Physics can tell us why the night is dark, what causes the tides, and even how best to catch a baseball. With In Praise of Simple Physics, popular math and science writer Paul Nahin presents a plethora of situations that explore the science & math behind the wonders of everyday life. Roaming through a diverse range of puzzles, he illustrates how physics shows the way to wring more energy from renewable sources, to measure the gravity in your car garages, to figure out which of three light switches in the basement controls the light bulb in the attic, and much more.

Solar System by Marcus Chown ($35, PB)

With hundreds of stunning photographs and graphics, as well as fascinating text by the award-winning writer and broadcaster, Marcus Chown, Solar System takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the planets, dwarf planets, moons and asteroids that orbit our sun—from the surface of Mars to the rings of Saturn, from the volcanoes of Io to the latest images of Pluto from NASA’s New Horizons probe.

Chancing It: The laws of chance—and what they mean for you by Robert Matthews ($33, HB)

Robert Matthews uses real-life cases to demonstrate different facets of the laws of probability. He shows you: how to understand and even predict coincidences; when an insurance policy is worth having, and when it’s just a rip-off; how to judge a health recommendation as worth following or just a scare; why flex and fishing lines get tangled up—and how to cure the problem; when a scientific claim is a breakthrough or baloney; how to make an investment so as to maximise the return; the secrets of the Golden Rule of Gambling which reveal precisely when a bet can be justified and when it cannot. The chances are this will be one of the most valuable books you’ve ever read.

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The Adventures of Sir Thomas Browne in the 21st Century by Hugh Aldersey-Williams ($24.99, PB)

This is a profound & delightful jeu d’ésprit of a book, mixing biography, etymology, cultural history and quixotic scientific experiments. Hugh Aldersey-Williams pulls the unfairly neglected yet enormously influential writer, English polymath Thomas Browne, out of the obscure pages of his encyclopaedia, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very many Received Tenets, and commonly Presumed Truths and into the 21st century, to apply his generous curiosity & rational intelligence to the vagaries & contradictions of life today.

The River by Helen Humphreys ($30, HB) For more than a decade Helen Humphreys has owned a small waterside property on a section of the Napanee River in Ontario.

In the watchful way of writers, she has studied her little piece of the river through the seasons and the years, cataloguing its ebb and flows, the plants and creatures that live in and round it, the signs of human usage at its banks and on its bottom. The result is The River, a gorgeous and moving meditation that uses fiction, non-fiction, natural history, archival maps and images, and fullcolour original photographs to get at the truth of the landscape.

Turing’s Vision: The Birth of Computer Science

by Chris Bernhardt ($56.95, HB)

In 1936, when he was just twenty-four years old, Alan Turing wrote a remarkable paper in which he outlined the theory of computation, laying out the ideas that underlie all modern computers.

This groundbreaking and powerful theory now forms the basis of computer science. In Turing’s Vision, Chris Bernhardt explains the theory, Turing’s most important contribution, for the general reader.

Bernhardt argues that the strength of Turing’s theory is its simplicity, and that, explained in a straightforward manner, it is eminently understandable by the nonspecialist.

The Birth of the Anthropocene by Jeremy Davies

The world is facing an environmental crisis unprecedented in human history. CO2 levels have reached heights not seen for 3 million years, & the greatest mass extinction since the time of the dinosaurs appears to be underway. Such far-reaching changes suggest something remarkable: the beginning of a new geological epoch. It has been called the Anthropocene. Jeremy Davies shows how this epochal transformation puts the deep history of the planet at the heart of contemporary environmental politics. He argues that unequal relations between human societies must now be understood as ecological & geophysical forces that leave profound traces in the makeup of the planet. ($56.95, HB)

Philosophy & Religon

Reflections on Presence by Vrasidas Karalis

This is a philosophical notebook which explores the complexities and concerns of contemporary conscience. Vrasidas Karalis’ reflections construct a program of ‘spiritual exercises’, in the tradition of Marcus Aurelius, Ignatius Loyola & Nikos Kazantzakis, starting with the recognition of contemporary disillusion followed by the gradual investigation of the interconnected nature of reality & imagination, the affirmation of the individual presence & the ethics born out of such presence. They culminate in a vision of existential transparency that links poetry, philosophy & religion through the impure materiality of the everyday being. ($25, PB)

The Philosopher: A History in Six Types

by Justin E. H. Smith ($55.95, HB)

What would the global history of philosophy look like if it were told not as a story of ideas but as a series of job descriptions--ones that might have been used to fill the position of philosopher at different times and places over the past 2,500 years? The Philosopher does just that, providing a new way of looking at the history of philosophy by bringing to life six kinds of figures who have occupied the role of philosopher in a wide range of societies around the world over the millennia--the Natural Philosopher, the Sage, the Gadfly, the Ascetic, the Mandarin, and the Courtier. The result is at once an unconventional introduction to the global history of philosophy and an original exploration of what philosophy has been--and perhaps could be again.

The Age of Genius: The Sevventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind by A. C. Grayling (28, PB)

What happened to the European mind between 1605, when an audience watching Macbeth at the Globe might believe that regicide was such an aberration of the natural order that ghosts could burst from the ground, and 1649, when a large crowd, perhaps including some who had seen Macbeth 44 years earlier, could stand & watch the execution of a king? Or consider the difference between a magus casting a star chart & the day in 1639, when Jonathan Horrock & William Crabtree watched the transit of Venus across the face of the sun from their attic, successfully testing its course against Kepler’s Tables of Planetary Motion, in a classic case of confirming a scientific theory by empirical testing. In this turbulent period, science moved from the alchemy & astrology of John Dee to the painstaking observation & astronomy of Galileo, from the classicism of Aristotle, still favoured by the Church, to the evidence-based, collegiate investigation of Francis Bacon. And if the old ways still lingered & affected the new mind set—Descartes’s dualism an attempt to square the new philosophy with religious belief; Newton, the man who understood gravity & the laws of motion, still fascinated to the end of his life by alchemy—by the end of that tumultuous century ‘the greatest ever change in the mental outlook of humanity’ had irrevocably taken place.

Gleebooks’ special price $24.99

Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence

by Timothy Morton ($56.95, HB)

Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this Oedipal path in the film Blade Runner when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness has this form because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are. The logistics of agricultural society resulted in global warming & hardwired dangerous ideas about life-forms into the human mind. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere & our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think. Morton explores the logical foundations of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence yet evolving, as we explore its loop form, into something playful, anarchic, and comedic.

New in paperback: European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche

by Frank M. Turner, $37.95 What is a People? by Judith Butler et al ($45.95, HB) Seeking to reclaim ‘people’ as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses & abuses over time Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity & emancipation & a negative tool of categorisation & suppression; Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of ‘popular’ and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs & even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an exclusionary ‘we’. Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalising narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist’s perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic & national categories, and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a ‘people’ is too diffuse to support them.

Psychology Switched On by John Elder Robison

People with autism have trouble reading the unspoken signals of others. The conventional wisdom says they don’t have the wiring in their brains to do it. But thanks to astounding advances in brain-mapping technologies, a revolutionary new brain therapy called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is being pioneered at Harvard Medical School. Join free-range Aspergian’ John Elder Robison as he journeys towards having his emotional intelligence ‘unlocked’ by this remarkable treatment. ‘For the first time in my life, I learned what it was like to truly ‘know’ other people’s feelings. It was as if I’d been experiencing the world in black and white all my life, and suddenly I could see everything—and particularly other people—in brilliant beautiful colour.’ ($33, PB)

Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive by Charles Duhigg ($35, PB)

Productivity relies on making certain choices. The way we frame our daily decisions; the big ambitions we embrace and the easy goals we ignore; the cultures we establish as leaders to drive innovation: these are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive. At the core of Charles Duhigg’s new book are 8 key concepts—from motivation & goal-setting to focus & decision-making—that explain why some people & companies get so much done. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology & behavioural eco­nomics—as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, air­plane pilots & Broadway songwriters—Duhigg explains that the most productive people, companies & organisations don’t merely act differently. They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.

In a Different Key: The Story of Autism

by John Donvan & Caren Zucker ($40, PB)

John Donvan & Caren Zucker tell the whole story of autism— from the small Mississippi town where Donald Triplett, the first child to be diagnosed the condition still lives to the classrooms, laboratories & courts where essential questions concerning autism have been contested. This is the story of families fighting for a place in the world for their children: women like Ruth Sullivan, who rebelled against a medical establishment that blamed mothers for causing autism, fathers who pushed scientists to dig harder for treatments, parents who forced schools to accept their children, and those with autism, like Temple Grandin & Ari Ne’eman, who explained their inner worlds & championed a philosophy of ‘neurodiversity’. In a Different Key takes a journey from an era when families were shamed & children were condemned to institutions, to one in which parents and people with autism push not simply for inclusion, but for a new understanding of autism: as difference rather than disability.

Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time by Marc Wittmann ($51.95, PB)

Marc Wittmann explores the riddle of subjective time, explaining our perception of time—whether moment by moment, or in terms of life as a whole. Drawing on the latest insights from psychology & neuroscience, Wittmann explains, among other things, how we choose between savouring the moment & deferring gratification; why impulsive people are bored easily, & why their boredom is often a matter of time; whether each person possesses a personal speed, a particular brain rhythm distinguishing quick people from slow people; & why the feeling of duration can serve as an ‘error signal’, letting us know when it is taking too long for dinner to be ready or for the bus to come. He considers the practice of mindfulness, and whether it can reduce the speed of life & help us gain more time, & he describes how, as we grow older, subjective time accelerates as routine increases; a fulfilled & varied life is a long life.

The Person of the Therapist Training Model: Mastering the Use of Self ($59, PB) (eds) Harry J. Aponte & by Karni Kissil

This book presents a model that prepares therapists to make active & purposeful use of who they are, personally & professionally, in all aspects of the therapeutic process-relationship, assessment & intervention. The authors take a process that seems vague & elusive, the self-of-the-therapist work, and provide a step-by-step description of how to conceptualise, structure & implement a training program designed to facilitate the creation of effective therapists, who are skilled at using their whole selves in their encounters with clients. The book looks to make conscious & planned use of a therapist’s race, gender, culture, values, life experience, and in particular, personal vulnerabilities & struggles in how he or she relates & works with clients. This evidence-supported resource is ideal for clinicians, supervisors & training programs.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Depressed Adolescents: A Practical Guide to Management and Treatment

by Randy P. Auerbach et al ($67, PB) 17

Good Listening

Audiobooks are my salvation at the moment, as I traverse the countryside, going from pillar to post. Here are a few I’ve enjoyed greatly— oddly enough they are all biographies, and all but one read by the author.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends, written and read by Rob Lowe. The story of former teen heart throb actor Rob Lowe is very entertaining and well written. It is an interesting account from someone who developed both ambition and energy at a very young age. His rise to Hollywood stardom was, if not meteoric, very steady, and he shows admirable insight into the aspects of that kind of fame and its effects.

Not My Father’s Son by Alan Cumming is perhaps not so easy to listen to. It’s a fairly heartbreaking account of this wonderful actor’s brutal childhood at the hands of his horrible father. But it is a riveting account of the author’s determination and drive to forge his way past childhood, and into adulthood. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this as much as I did, given that I had read the book and knew what was going to happen—but I was compelled to listen to it, no small part of that compulsion being Cumming’s magnetic presence through his vocal delivery, and beautiful Scots accent.

Antonia Fraser’s My History: A Memoir of Growing Up, read by Penelope Wilton, is a very interesting look at the childhood and adolescence of historian Antonia Fraser. Growing up in a very large, privileged family is fodder for lots of Anglo memoirs, but this one is different for two reasons. Firstly the author’s parents were both committed to politics and social change, and both her mother and father had separate, interesting careers. Secondly, it is a fabulous account of someone who read prodigiously from a very young age; she writes about the books she read with admirable enthusiasm, and especially so when she describes how she fell in love with history (at a very young age), which set her on her life’s path.

Last, and certainly not least is Richard Glover’s Flesh Wounds. I knew what this book was about having heard about it, read bits of it, and listened to him being interviewed. But I was not prepared for the effect it had on me while I listened to it. It is definitely entertaining, told with a light touch, and full of extremely amusing anecdotes. But the underlying narrative, the story of the author’s parents, the extraordinary choices they made and the impact of those choices on their son, is quite shocking. Like the memoirs written about above, this one is told with a clear eye, with humour and no self pity, but as the author is local, and not only that, on the radio every day, this book has a familiarity that makes some of the revelations startling. Life stories are often interesting, but what makes them particularly so, is the insight gained and the evident resilience that is borne of that insight. Louise

Cultural Studies & Criticism

Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World by Gregory Woods ($67, HB)

In a hugely ambitious study which crosses continents, languages, and almost a century, Gregory Woods identifies the ways in which homosexuality has helped shape Western culture. Extending from the trials of Oscar Wilde to the gay liberation era, this book examines a period in which increased visibility made acceptance of homosexuality one of the measures of modernity. Woods introduces an enormous cast of gifted and extraordinary characters, most of them operating with surprising openness; but also explores such issues as artistic influence, the coping strategies of minorities, the hypocrisies of conservatism, and the effects of positive and negative discrimination. Travelling from Harlem in the 1910s to 1920s Paris, 1930s Berlin, 1950s New York and beyond, this sharply observed, warm-spirited book presents a surpassing portrait of 20th century gay culture and the men and women who both redefined themselves and changed history.

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon ($32, HB)

Kiese Laymon grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. Drawing on his own personal experiences, these essays are Laymon’s attempt to deal with many issues occupying America today, from race, identity and writing to music, celebrity and violence. Through letters between his own disparate family members, pleas to performers whose voices will never be heard again, recollections of his own failure to become a world-famous emcee, analysis of the growing culture of fear in the media and detailed accounts of his clashes with an education system that has both advanced and failed the generation he grew up in, Laymon gets closer not only to the truth behind himself, but to the promises behind the promised land.

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Everywhere I Look by Helen Garner ($30, PB) Spanning 15 years of work, Everywhere I Look is a book full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. Garner’s essays take the reader from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. She moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice. The collection includes Garner’s famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother and extracts from her diaries, which have been part of her working life for as long as she has been a writer.

Gleebooks’ special price $26.99 Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool

by Jennifer Jacquet ($27, PB)

It’s time to give shame a good name. In this galvanizing, optimistic book, Jennifer Jacquet shows how, when used in the right way, it is the most effective tool of resistance we have. From forcing companies to act ethically to holding governments to account, shame could solve the most urgent problems of our time. ‘Well argued, beautifully written, sophisticated and down to earth.’ Sherry Turkle, MIT, author of Alone Together.

Shakespeare’s Dead: Stages of Death in Shakespeare’s Playworlds Emma Smith & Simon Palfrey

Shakespeare scripts his scenes of dying with extraordinary care.

Famous final speeches like Hamlet’s ‘The rest is silence’, Mercutio’s ‘A plague o’ both your houses’, or Richard III’s ‘My kingdom for a horse’ give crucial choices to the actors as to exactly how & when to die. Instead of the blank finality of death, we get a unique entrance into the loneliness or confusion of dying. Shakespeare’s Dead tells of deathhaunted heroes such as Macbeth and Hamlet, and death-teasing heroines like Juliet, Ophelia and Cleopatra. It explores the fear of ‘something after death’, and characters’ terrifying visions of being dead. But it also uncovers the constant presence of death in Shakespeare’s comedies, and how the grinning jester might be a leering skull in disguise. This book celebrates the paradox: the life in death in Shakespeare. ($55.95, PB)

Family Politics: Domestic Life, Devastation and Survival, 1900–1950 by Paul Ginsborg ($48.95, PB)

Paul Ginsborg’s groundbreaking book spans 1900 to 1950 and encompasses five nation states in the throes of dramatic transition: Russia in revolutionary passage from Empire to Soviet Union; Turkey in transition from Ottoman Empire to modern Republic; Italy, from liberalism to fascism; Spain during the Second Republic and Civil War; and Germany from the failure of the Weimar Republic to the National Socialist state. Ginsborg explores the effects of political upheaval and radical social policies on family life and, in turn, the impact of families on revolutionary change itself. Families, he shows, do not simply experience the effects of political power, but are themselves actors in the historical process. Ginsborg places the family at centre stage of 20th century history with biographical details and individual family histories, along with a fascinating selection of family photographs and portraits.

Sexual Politics by Kate Millett ($53.95, PB)

A sensation upon its publication in 1970, Sexual Politics documents the subjugation of women in great literature and art. Kate Millett’s analysis targets four revered authors—D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet—and builds a damning profile of literature’s patriarchal myths & their extension into psychology, philosophy & politics. Her eloquence & popular examples taught a generation to recognise inequities masquerading as nature & proved the value of feminist critique in all facets of life. This new edition features the scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon and the New Yorker correspondent Rebecca Mead on the importance of Millett’s work to challenging the complacency that sidelines feminism.

Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance (ed) Laura Poitras ($72, PB)

Questioning the role of surveillance & advocating for collective privacy are central tennets for Laura Poitras (director of the academy award winning documentary about Edward Snowden, Citizenfour) who has long engaged with and supported free-software technologists. In this collection of essays, Poitras has invited authors ranging from artists and novelists to technologists and academics to respond to the modern-day state of mass surveillance. Among them are author Dave Eggers, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the former Guantanamo Bay detainee Lakhdar Boumediene, the writer and researcher Kate Crawford, and Edward Snowden, to name but a few. Some contributors worked directly with Poitras and the archive of documents leaked by Snowden; others contributed fictional reinterpretations of spycraft.

The result is a ‘how-to’ guide for living in a society that collects extraordinary amounts of information on individuals.

Visions And Revisions by Dale Peck ($28, PB)

Novelist and critic Dale Peck’s latest work—part memoir, part extended essay—is a foray into what the author calls ‘the second half of the first half of the AIDS epidemic’, that is, the period between 1987, when the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) was founded, and 1996, when the advent of combination therapy transformed AIDS from a virtual death sentence into a chronic manageable illness.

Reminiscent of Joan Didion’s The White Album and Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday, Visions And Revisions is a sweeping, collage-style portrait of a tumultuous era. Moving seamlessly from the lyrical to the analytical to the reportorial, Peck’s story takes readers from the serial killings of gay men in New York, London, and Milwaukee, through Peck’s first loves upon coming out of the closet, to the transformation of LGBT people from marginal, idealistic fighters to their present place in a world of widespread, if fraught, mainstream acceptance.

s d d w n n a o 2 H R

A large collection of paperbacks from the 1960s and 1970s has found its way to our Blackheath storage shed. These are a wonderfully varied range of titles.

All have been cared for by their previous owner and are in very good condition. Presented below is a selection. All are priced at $9.00 each.

Stephen Reid

The Art of Reading by Damon Young ($28, PB)

We are not born readers, we learn to turn words into worlds. But why is fine writing lauded while excellent reading is ignored? In The Art of Reading, philosopher Damon Young reveals the pleasures of this intimate pursuit through a rich sample of literature: from Virginia Woolf’s diaries to Batman comics. He writes with honesty and humour about the blunders and revelations of his own bookish life. Devoting each chapter to a literary virtue—curiosity, patience, courage, pride, temperance, justice—Young celebrates the reader’s power: to turn shapes on a page into a lifelong adventure.

Gleebooks’ special price $24.99

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz ($35, PB)

In January 2013, Aaron Swartz, under arrest and threatened with 35 years of imprisonment for downloading material from the JSTOR database (journal storage), committed suicide. He was 26 years old.

But in that time he had changed the world we live in: reshaping the Internet, questioning our assumptions about intellectual property, and creating some of the tools we use in our daily online lives. Besides being a technical genius & a passionate activist, he was also an insightful, compelling & cutting critic of the politics of the Web. In this collection of his writings that spans over a decade he shows his passion for and in-depth knowledge of intellectual property, copyright, and the architecture of the Internet. This book contains the life’s work of one of the most original minds of our time.

The Media and the Massacre: Port Arthur 1996–2016

by Sonya Voumard ($29.95, PB)

Inspired, in part, by renowned Janet Malcolm’s famously controversial work The Journalist and the Murderer, Sonya Voumard’s elegant new work of literary non-fiction is a chilling portrayal of journalism, betrayal, and storytelling surrounding the 1996 Port Arthur massacre.

Voumard brings to bear her own journalistic experiences, ideas and practices in a riveting inquiry into her profession that is part-memoir and part ethical investigation. One of her case studies is the 2009 book Born or Bred? by Robert Wainwright and Paola Totaro about the perpetrator of the Port Arthur massacre, Martin Bryant, and his mother Carleen Bryant. Carleen received an undisclosed legal settlement, over the best-selling book’s use of her personal manuscript.

The Media and the Massacre explores the nature of journalistic intent and many of the wider moral and social issues of the storytelling surrounding the events and their place in our cultural memory.

The Books that Changed My Life: Reflections by 100 Authors, Actors, Musicians & Other Remarkable People (ed) Patrick Bethanne ($28, PB)

100 of today’s most prominent literary and cultural icons talk about the books that hold a special place in their hearts—that made them who they are today. Contributors include Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, Tavi Gevinson, Karin Slaughter, Eric Idle, Sofia Coppola, Fay Weldon, Fran Lebowitz, Gillian Flynn, Gregory Maguire, Jodi Picoult, Laura Lippman, Lev Grossman, Liev Schreiber, Sarah Waters, R.L. Stine, Rosanne Cash, Susan Orlean, Tim Gunn, Fay Weldon & Tommy Hilfiger.

The Globe Guide to Shakespeare: The plays, the productions, the life by Andrew Dickson ($40, PB)

This is the ultimate guide to the life & work of the world’s greatest playwright. With full coverage of the 39 Shakespearian plays, including a synopsis, full character list, stage history & a critical essay for each, this comprehensive guide is both a quick reference & in-depth background guide for theatre goers, students, film buffs & lovers of literature alike. The book also explores Shakespeare’s sonnets and the narrative poems, combined with fascinating accounts of Shakespeare’s life and theatre, exploring in colourful detail each play’s original performances. This comprehensive guide includes up-to-date reviews of the best films and audio recordings of each play, from Laurence Olivier to Baz Luhrmann, Kozintsev to Kurosawa.

Now in paperback & B Format Quite A Good Time to be Born: A Memoir: 1935-1975

by David Lodge, $28 One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Asne Seierstad, $22.99

19

Summer Reading Catch-up

Books of unconscionable size have formed a precarious leaning tower on my bedside table these last three months. Some still await their turn. Some are half read.

Some dipped into. Others—now finished—also lie scattered on the floor. Herewith a brief reading-in-progress report of three non-fiction monoliths: To Hell & Back: Europe 1914–1949 by Ian Kershaw 624 pages ($70, HB) Hitler’s biographer and his generation’s foremost scholar of Nazi Germany, here widens his scope to present the first of a two volume work on Europe’s tumultuous Twentieth Century. Kershaw deftly lays out the political, social and economic history of a continent. With a keen eye for the telling quote, he clearly explains the racist ideologies, the militarism, the economic crises that doomed Europe and its peoples to two World Wars. This volume concludes with the commencement of a third “Cold” War that would endure four decades. This is finely written history clear, compelling and essential reading.

Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva by Rosemary Sullivan 752 pages ($30, PB) I remember reading Svetlana Alliluyeva’s fascinating memoirs Twenty Letters to a Friend (1967) in the 1970s. It was a worldwide sensation that provided a grim glimpse into the world of Stalin’s dictatorship from a unique viewpoint. Further details about her were also provided by Simon Sebag Montefiore in Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2004). However, I had to stop reading this complete biography several times. Not because it is poorly written, on the contrary, it is a compassionate recounting of the truly tragic life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926–2011), Communist tyrant Josef Stalin’s only daughter, who he called his ‘Little Sparrow’.

It was simply that the catalogue of trials and tribulations visited upon this woman in her long life, led me to head outside to fresh air and bright blue skies. Among them: the suicide of her mother, when she was six; the death of her two brothers—one in Nazi captivity when Stalin refused a prisoner exchange, the other from alcoholism; the state murder of her uncle; Stalin sending her first love to a Siberian labour camp. Her defection to the United States in 1967 caused a sensation. There followed more wanderings throughout her life, as well as a variety of faiths (Hinduism, Christianity Buddhism)—perhaps in search of both physical and spiritual peace. She lived in the United States, England, Switzerland, France, back to Moscow in the 1980s to reunite with her children and finally a return to America, here a third marriage proved (briefly) happy and lasting.

They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper by Bruce Robinson 864 pages ($33, PB) I am about three-quarters through this 800 page bizarre, sprawling, astonishing volume, written by the director and writer of the cult film Withnail and I (1987).

Fifteen years in the researching and writing, They All Love Jack is an obsessively detailed account of the notorious 1888 ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders of five prostitutes in Whitechapel, London. Robinson’s prime suspect is the now utterly obscure Michael Maybrick, then a famous singer and composer. He was also apparently a Freemason, which served to both protect him and hinder a full police investigation into the crimes. Apparently anybody who was somebody within the 19th Century Victorian Establishment was a Freemason. Indeed, the vast shadowy presence of Freemasonry looms over the whole book. Robinson argues that the Ripper mutilation murders were carried out in accordance with ancient Masonic ritual.

According to Robinson—and his portrait is genuinely chilling—Maybrick was a psychopathic ‘Masonic joker’ who left obvious clues that he knew would taunt his Freemason ‘Brothers’, and which they would be powerless to act upon. The most famous being left on 30 September 1888. The body of the second victim, 46 year-old Catherine Eddowes, was found by police at Mitre Square. A few streets away a torn, bloodied piece of the victims apron was found as well as a chalkwritten message on a wall, which contained a clear reference to early Masonic folklore. When informed of it, Sir Charles Warren, Metropolitan Police Commissioner (Founder of London Masonic Lodge No. 2076), rushes to the scene at 4.30 am and orders it erased immediately. (see Chapter 4, The Funny Little Game pp.

119–161 and p.125 for the actual message). The ‘Masonic Conspiracy’ perpetrator path has been followed before, most notably in Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution (1976), where Queen Victoria’s physician, Sir William Withey Gull, is identified as the Ripper. Robinson also treats seriously the numerous ‘Ripper’ letters collected by the police. Long dismissed by many ‘Ripperologists’ as hoaxes, he believes them to be genuine: ‘Maybrick had many styles of handwriting, and used many different pens’. I found the author’s painstaking examination of these letters one of the most fascinating parts of the book. Nevertheless, there is also a vast amount of conjecture and surmise within this book and despite Robinson’s doggedness, I remain to be completely convinced that Michael Maybrick is indeed ‘Jack’. Yet even if the Ripper has eluded him, Bruce Robinson with his entertainingly raucous, yellow-heat critique of the Victorian ruling classes and the amount and variety of everyday Victorian social history and mores he has uncovered and presents to us, has—without question—written a totally unique book.

Stephen Reid

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Poetry

Aeneid Book VI by Seamus Heaney ($35, PB)

Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem composed sometime between 29 and 19 BC, follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld.

In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the importance of the poem to his writing, noting that ‘there’s one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas’s venture into the underworld. The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years—the golden bough, Charon’s barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father.’ In this new translation, Heaney employs the same deft handling of the original combined with the immediacy of language and flawless poetic voice as was on show in his translation of Beowulf, a reimagining which, in the words of Bernard O’Donoghue, brought the ancient poem back to life in ‘a miraculous mix of the poem’s original spirit and Heaney’s voice’.

Plevna by Geoff Page ($25, PB)

He was a Melbourne surgeon. He worked for the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War. He was the oldest man at Gallipoli, and took illegal photographs during a nine-hour truce. He repaired Ned Kelly after the Siege of Glenrowan.

He cut quite a figure in ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ of the 1880s and 90s. He did remarkable things. He wrote it all down. In this verse-portrait of Sir Charles Snodgrass ‘Plevna’ Ryan (1853–1926), Geoff Page weaves the writing of Ryan together with his own voice as biographer, setting down the life of a man forgotten by history at the same time as reflecting on his role as intermediary. Page’s sensitive investigation into the lost life of Charles Ryan probes broader topics of mortality, posterity and collective memory. Written in second person and in verse, Page reflects both on the power and the unreliability of storied lives.

Either, Orpheus by Dan Disney ($23, PB) ‘Neither strictly poetic nor purely philosophical, these deliriously pedagogical poems summon Rilke, Levertov, Ashbery, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Cage and multitudinous others to reconsider what we thought we knew of authorship, form, religion, phenomenology and love. For Disney, the proper response to Bloom’s anxiety of influence is ‘a godless both/and’ in which a series of ‘elegiac anthroposcenes’ transforms the labyrinth of solitude into the kinds of worlds that we ‘non-residents’ might want to inhabit. Hospitable, demanding, festive and fearless, either, Orpheus passes through ‘where previously it was not evident that anyone could find a passage’. — Fiona Hile.

Language & Writing

The DIY Book PR Guide: The HAPPIER Guide to Do-It-Yourself Book Publicity in Seven Easy Steps by Emma Noble ($20, PB)

The book world has changed dramatically thanks to the digital revolution. Now, anyone with a great book idea and the time to write it can become a published author. But what happens when your masterpiece goes out into the world? How do you make your book stand out from the crowd and find your readers? Publicist Emma Noble distills her 15 years of experience in promoting fiction and non-fiction into one handy, easyto-follow guide to creating your own tailor-made campaign.

Latin: Story of a World Language

by Jürgen Leonhardt ($45.95, PB)

The mother tongue of the Roman Empire and the lingua franca of the West for centuries after Rome’s fall, Latin survives today primarily in classrooms and texts. Yet this ‘dead language’ is unique in the influence it has exerted across centuries and continents. Latin originated in the Italian region of Latium, around Rome, and became widespread as that city’s imperial might grew. By the first century BCE, Latin was already transitioning from a living vernacular, as writers and grammarians like Cicero and Varro fixed Latin’s status as a ‘classical’ language with a codified rhetoric and rules. As Romance languages spun off from their Latin origins following the empire’s collapse—shedding cases and genders along the way—the ancient language retained its currency as a world language in ways that anticipated English and Spanish, but it ceased to evolve. Jürgen Leonhardt charts the vicissitudes of Latin in the post-Roman world: its ninth-century revival under Charlemagne and its flourishing among Renaissance writers who, more than their medieval predecessors, were interested in questions of literary style and expression. Ultimately, the rise of historicism in the eighteenth century turned Latin from a practical tongue to an academic subject. Nevertheless, of all the traces left by the Romans, their language remains the most ubiquitous artifact of a once peerless empire.

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East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg Gordon Ball, HB

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Prevail : The Inspiring Story of Ethiopia’s Victory Over Mussolini’s Invasion, 1935–1941 Jeff Pearce, HB

Was $44.95

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The Queen’s Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth’s Court Anna Whitelock, HB

Now $39.95

Picasso’s Drawings, 1890-1921 : Reinventing Tradition, HB

Now $17.95

Now $18.95

Great Expectations: The Sons & Daughters of Charles Dickens Robert Gottlieb, PB

Was $69.95

Was $50

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Sabres on the Steppes: Danger, Diplomacy and Adventure in the Great Game John Ure, HB

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Transatlantic Colum McCann, HB

Trespass: A Novel Rose Tremain, HB

The Last Days of Hitler Hugh Trevor-Roper, PB

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Pissarro’s People Richard R. Brettell, HB

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The Dance of the Seagull Andrea Camilleri, HB

Speak, Nabokov Michael Maar, HB

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Now $18.95 The Animals : Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, HB

Was $43

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Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking Daniel C. Dennett, HB

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Extra Sensory: the Science & Pseudoscience of Telepathy & Other Powers of the Mind Brian Clegg, HB

Was $60

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Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion Anne Somerset HB

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Titian Norbert Wolf, PB

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My Brother’s Book Maurice Sendak, HB

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A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid John Romer, HB Was $120

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Turner and the Masters David H. Solkin, HB

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The Arts

Surrender: A Journal for my Daughter

by Joshua Yeldham ($50, PB)

In this journal for his daughter Indigo, Joshua Yeldham charts his life from growing up on the Hawkesbury River to becoming one of the most astonishing artists Australia has produced in decades. Yeldham’s first foray into literature, Surrender is a stunning creation that mirrors the complexity of his artistic practice, layering painting, photography, drawing and prose. Surrender navigates Yeldham’s early life from the intense pain of schoolyard bullying to his time at Rhode Island School of Design, hiking in Venezuala and his odyssey into the Australian outback in an old kombi. It’s a love story too, recounting how Joshua and his wife Jo—his collaborator and a photographer in her own right—met, and their journey through his infertility, IVF, and the joy of parenthood.

The Documentary Impulse by Stuart Franklin

Award-winning photographer Stuart Franklin took one of the most powerful photographs of the 20th century—the ‘tank man’ in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, 1989. In this book he explores why we are driven to visually document our experiences and the world around us. He focuses on photography but traces this universal need through art, literature & science.

Looking at photojournalism, war photography and work recording our culture, Franklin identifies some of documentary’s driving impulses: curiosity, outrage, reform & ritual; the search for evidence, for beauty, for therapy; and the immortalisation of memory. And further considers photographic staging—where, perhaps, the future of the genre lies: in search of truth over fact.

Photography (and journalism) practised respectfully has the power to educate us all towards a greater understanding & empathy towards others.’ ($39.95, HB)

Puja & Piety: Hindu, Jain & Buddhist Art from the Indian Subcontinent ($115, HB)

This book celebrates the complexity of South Asian representation and iconography by examining the relationship between aesthetic expression and the devotional practice, or puja, in the three native religions of the Indian subcontinent. The book presents some 150 objects created over the past two millennia for temples, home worship, festivals & roadside shrines. From monumental painted temple hangings and painted meditation diagrams to portable pictures for pilgrims, from stone sculptures to processional bronzes and wooden chariots, from ancient terracottas to various devotional objects for domestic shrines, this volume provides muchneeded context and insight into classical and popular art of India.

DVDs With Scott Donovan The Jinx ($29.95)

The inequities of the American legal system are writ large in Andrew Jarecki’s chilling television documentary series The Jinx. With a crack team of lawyers Robert Durst, heir to a Manhattan real-estate fortune worth billions, was acquitted of the murder of his elderly neighbour in Galveston, Texas, despite admitting to dismembering the corpse, placing the body parts in black garbage bags and tossing them into the ocean. Durst had earlier been implicated in the mysterious disappearance of his first wife and in the murder of a close friend who was about to talk to police about Durst’s possible involvement in the case. Brilliant, reclusive and the subject of relentless media scrutiny, Durst had never spoken publicly about these crimes but contacted Jarecki after seeing the director’s fictionalised Hollywood account of his wife’s disappearance to give his side of the story. A combination of hubris, bitter family resentment and a momentary lapse in concentration lead to Durst’s eventual undoing. Over six episodes The Jinx presents the chilling details of these crimes and constructs a portrait of Durst which is both fascinating and damning. Compelling television—not to be missed.

600 Miles: Dir. Gabriel Ripstein ($26.95) Winner of the Best Debut Feature Award at the Berlin Film Festival, 600 Miles is a gripping thriller about Arnulfo (Kristyan Ferrer), a young man trafficking illegal weapons between the US and Mexico who is unaware he is being followed by special agent Hank Harris (Tim Roth). After Harris risks an arrest that goes wrong, Arnulfo panics, makes a desperate decision and smuggles the agent into Mexico. During their long road trip across the border towards certain bloodshed, the two enemies slowly connect and discover that the only way they will get out alive is by trusting each other.

22

Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan

by Reiko Tomii ($78, HB)

1960s Japan was one of the world’s major frontiers of vanguard art. Reiko Tomii examines three key figures in Japanese art of the 1960s who made radical and inventive art in the ‘wilderness’ —away from Tokyo with little institutional support: the conceptualist Matsuzawa Yutaka, known for the principle of ‘vanishing of matter’ and the practice of ‘meditative visualization’ (kannen); The Play, a collective of ‘Happeners’; and the local collective GUN (Group Ultra Niigata).

The innovative work of these artists included a visionary exhibition in Central Japan of ‘formless emissions’ organised by Matsuzwa; the launching of a huge fiberglass egg— ‘an image of liberation’—from the southernmost tip of Japan’s main island by The Play; and gorgeous colour field abstractions painted by GUN on accumulating snow on the riverbeds of the Shinano River.

Quentin Blake: In the Theatre of the Imagination: An Artist at Work by Ghislaine Kenyon

Quentin Blake’s work is loved by millions the world over. Ghislaine Kenyon has known Blake for many years & has worked with him staging exhibitions. Interviewing school friends and contemporaries at the The Royal College of Art, Kenyon places Blake, his work & working processes in the context of other creative geniuses. It aims to answer two key questions: who is the person behind the work & how does one join up with the other? ($51, HB)

David Lynch: The Man from Another Place

by Dennis Lim ($36, HB)

Filmmaker, musician, painter, photographer, carpenter, entrepreneur—David Lynch and his work defy easy definition. Dennis Lim proposes several lenses through which to view Lynch and his work: through the age-old mysteries of the uncanny and the sublime, through the creative energies of surrealism and postmodernism, through ideas of America and theories of good and evil. This is not a book that seeks to decode his art or annotate his life to dispel the strangeness of the Lynchian so much as one that offers complementary ways of seeing and understanding one of the most distinctive bodies of work in modern cinema.

Gift Shop

Mushroom Bookcase, $59.95

Tame those unruly piles of books with this cute littlespace saver. It’s the perfect size for little hands to grab their favourite book and will encourage them to put it back with a sense of satisfaction.

Made of solid birch plywood, they are an attractive space-saving product for children’s rooms, are can hold 20+ books of varying sizes.

Cartel Land: Dir. Matthew Heineman ($32.95)

In the Mexican state of Michoacán, Dr Jose Mireles, a small-town physician known as ‘El Doctor’, leads the Autodefensas, a citizen uprising against the violent Knights Templar drug cartel that has wreaked havoc on the region for years. Meanwhile, in Arizona’s Altar Valley—a narrow, 52-mile-long desert corridor known as Cocaine Alley—Tim ‘Nailer’ Foley, an American veteran, heads a small paramilitary group called Arizona Border Recon, whose goal is to stop Mexico’s drug wars from seeping across the US border. With never before seen footage of the brutality of this seemingly unstoppable war, filmmaker Matthew Heineman gives us front-seat access to a real and shocking story about an inescapable web of violence, corruption and exploitation.

War & Peace ($54.95, Region 4)

Leo Tolstoy’s epic gets the Andrew Davies’ treatment. Napoleon’s army advances and Pierre (Paul Dano), Natasha (Lily James) and Andrei (James Norton) negotiate a Russia in upheaval. Featuring Jim Broadbent, Gillian Anderson, Stephen Rea, Brian Cox, Kenneth Cranham, Ken Stott, Aneurin Barnard, Jessie Buckley, Tom Burke, Adrian Edmonson, Rebecca Front, Matthieu Kassovirz, Aisling Loftus, Jack Lowden, Tuppence Middleton, Greta Scacchi & Callum Turner.

Extras: Making of War & Peace Featurettes

The Last Kingdom: Season 1 ($49.95, Region 2 Import) This Eight-part historical BBC drama centres around the wars between the Saxons and Danes during the ninth century. Alexander Dreymon stars as the warrior Uhtred of Bebbanburg, the son of a Saxon nobleman who was captured by the Danes as a child and raised as one of their own. After Uhtred is blamed for an English uprising he is imprisoned along with fellow captive Brida (Emily Cox). When they are released the pair flee to Winchester, the capital of Wessex, and pledge allegiance to King Alfred (David Dawson). Uhtred takes on the role of training the Saxon forces but will he remain loyal to the country of his birth or will he turn back to those who raised him?

The Man That Got Away: The Life and Songs of Harold Arlen by Walter Rimler ($59.95, HB)

Over the Rainbow, Stormy Weather, and One for My Baby are just a few of Harold Arlen’s well-loved compositions. Yet his name is hardly known—except to the musicians who venerate him. At a gathering of songwriters George Gershwin called him ‘the best of us’. Irving Berlin agreed. Paul McCartney sent him a fan letter and became his publisher. Bob Dylan wrote of his fascination with Arlen’s ‘bittersweet, lonely world’. A cantor’s son, Arlen believed his music was from a place outside himself, a place that also sent tragedy. When his wife became mentally ill and was institutionalised he turned to alcohol. It nearly killed him. But the beautiful songs kept coming: Blues in the Night, My Shining Hour, Come Rain or Come Shine, and The Man That Got Away. Walter Rimler drew on interviews with friends and associates of Arlen and on newly available archives to write this intimate portrait of a genius whose work is a pillar of the Great American Songbook.

Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege by M. T. Anderson ($30, HB)

In September 1941, Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht surrounded Leningrad in what was to become one of the longest and most destructive sieges in Western history almost three years of bombardment and starvation that culminated in the harsh winter of 1943 1944. More than a million citizens perished. Trapped between the Nazi invading force and the Soviet government itself was composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who would write a symphony that roused, rallied, eulogized, and commemorated his fellow citizens the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony. National Book Award winner M. T. Anderson delivers a brilliant and riveting account of the siege & a fascinating look at the power and layered meaning of music in beleaguered lives.

The Secret Life of the American Musical: How Broadway Shows Are Built by Jack Viertel ($50, HB)

Structured like a musical, The Secret Life of the American Musical begins with an overture and concludes with a curtain call, with stops in between for I Want songs, conditional love songs, production numbers, star turns, and finales. The ultimate insider, Jack Viertel has spent three decades on Broadway, working on dozens of shows old and new as a conceiver, producer, dramaturg, and general creative force; he has his own unique way of looking at the process and at the people who collaborate to make musicals a reality. He shows us patterns in the architecture of classic shows and charts the inevitable evolution that has taken place in musical theatre as America itself has evolved socially and politically. Viertel’s book makes you feel as though you’ve been there in the rehearsal room, in the front row of the theatre, and in the working offices of theatre owners and producers as they pursue their own love affair with that rare and elusive beast the Broadway hit.

what we're reading

John: Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty—Belfast 1985, double time, overtime and danger money for police riot duty. Whiskey, cocaine and black forest gateau breakfast. A proposition from MI5.

Vignettes from a day in the life of DI Sean Duffy from the very mean streets of Belfast, The Troubles, made worse by the Anglo Irish Agreement, are shaking the city and Duffy is investigating a double murder and the suicide (or maybe murder) of two more, a missing ‘weapons system’ investigation, throw in a handful of suspects with a variety of possible motives, an eclectic soundtrack, add some American spooks, add Special Branch coppers for good measure. Shake, serve cold over ice with a slice of lime.

Andrew: ‘And yet for all his closeness, he seems more and more to belong to a world that is utterly beyond me and beyond my human imagining.’ I was a little late to the party but I have just finished reading (and enjoying) H is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald. By a lovely coincidence I’ve been reading it in tandem with David Malouf’s superlative 1978 classic novella An Imaginary Life—and it wasn’t long before I began to appreciate a lovely accidental synergy. Macdonald’s book is ostensibly a memoir of falconry; Malouf’s an imagined relationship between Ovid and a wildling boy he encounters, and attempts to teach. I admit to a couple of small problems with the Macdonald book; she spends a good deal of time discussing T. H. White (author of Sword in the Stone and, by accounts, a bit of an all-round sadistic nut-case) and his hawk, Gos. Frankly, I quickly began to lose patience with White. The great joy of the book, however, is easily sustained

by Macdonald’s richly described rearing and training of a young goshawk of her own, called Mabel. The intense, spiky, and unpredictable relationship between the woman and a wildly savage yet curiously vulnerable bird, draws out a wonderful reverie on the author’s own raw and exposed humanity (she is mourning the recent and sudden death of her father). Something similar is explored by Malouf; both books are exquisite treatises on creativity and what makes us civilised; indeed what makes us human.

Viki: After reading Gail Jones’ A Guide to Berlin with its fantastic sequence of ‘speak, memories’ delivered by her cast of Nabokov fans, I had to go to the source—Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory. Nabokov is the definition of ‘polymath’—his command of language leaves me feeling like I should start reading the dictionary, my vocabulary is so limited. But he wears his erudition with charm and wit—a breezy & wry (rather than the almost stifling circular self obsession of Marcel Proust) use of associative memory leads Nabokov through an idyllic childhood full of butterflies and quirky tutors, World War 1, dispossession by the Bolsheviks, Nazi Germany, and more butterflies in America. It’s an incredible tale, and a real pleasure to read.

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Bestsellers—Non-Fiction 1. The Road to Ruin: How Tony Abbott & Peta Credlin

Destroyed Their Own Government

2. Faith without Fear

Niki Savva Keith Mascord

3. Talking To My Country

Stan Grant

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

Native Foods With Recipes

John Newton

5. Finding Eliza: Power & Colonial Storytelling

Larissa Behrendt

6. This is Gail

Gail & Juliette O’Brien

7. Credlin & Co: How the Abbott Government

Destroyed Itself

Aaron Patrick

8. Econobabble: How to Decode Political Spin and

Economic Nonsense

Richard Denniss

9. Blood Year: Islamic State & the Failures of the

War on Terror

David Kilcullen

10. Private Lives, Public History

Anna Clark

Bestsellers—Fiction 1. My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante

2. The Noise of Time

Julian Barnes

3. The High Places

Fiona McFarlane

4. A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara

5. The High Mountains of Portugal 6. The Sick Bag Song 7. The Life of Elves 8. My Name is Lucy Barton

Yan Martel Nick Cave Muriel Barbery Elizabeth Strout

9. Shylock is My Name

Howard Jacobson

10. The Soldier’s Curse

Meg & Tom Keneally

and another thing.....

I wanted to read Niki Savva’s Road to Ruin, which is by all accounts a riveting read, but they literally galloped out of the shop—our first delivery sold out before they were out of the boxes. So, while waiting for my copy, I’ve been reading American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales (author of The Bling Ring).

Sales spent two years interviewing girls aged 13 to 19 across America to investigate the effect social media is having on the females of the ‘Igeneration’. The attraction of Instagram, Whisper, Yik Yak, Vine, Tinder, Facebook and the relentless demands of constant communication are anathema to me—my generation gap moment, give me land lines and letters! However, Sales’ book is a non-judgemental window into this new adolescence lived online that whilst offering a pretty disturbing portrait of an environment dominated by porn, bullying and a multi-million dollar advertising industry built around the teen ‘internet celebrity’, she also offers a way of entering into a discussion with teenage girls about what they are likely to face online, and how to deal with it. I’d recommend it to any parent.

With the Sales finished, this month I’m heading straight to the crime pages and the new Donna Leon, plus Gillian Slovo’s Ten Days looks like a real page-turner. Janice has tempted me to try some Elly Griffiths, and the new Helen Garner is a must. David’s review sees me leaning towards The Grade Cricketer (I was a fast bowler in my day), and Stephen has convinced me to open one of his doorstoppers—the biography of Joseph Stalin’s daughter.

Speaking of doorstoppers I’ve got E. Annie Proulx’s new book, Barkskins, in proof to read—a 700 page epic that crosses three centuries and many generations to bring down the world’s forests. It comes out in June. Viki

For more April new releases go to:

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

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