September 2023 Gleaner

Interview Q&A with crime master Ann Cleeves

Chris Womerlsey On his new novel Ordinary Gods and Monsters

The Dully Dispatch

Spring has sprung and our lovely store is in full bloom with so many books to discover and enjoy. So what are your local booksellers reading? Letitia recommends Anne Enright’s new novel, The Wren, The Wren Irish writers seem to draw from a remarkable well of storytelling. Here we have well-worn territory – a mother and daughter story, family secrets and the separation (or not) of a man’s deeds from his artistic greatness – but it’s fresh and vivid in Enright’s skilful hands.

Next up, Letitia recommends Katherine Brabon’s new novel Body Friend – an unexpected pleasure of a book and highly original. Brabon has written an intimate and very personal novel about a woman living with chronic pain who makes friends with two very different women over one Melbourne summer. This is a book for quiet and surprising self-reflection – with great pace and a thread of mystery.

Dave Eggers is one of those remarkable writers who can turn his hand to anything. This time, it’s a supposed middle grade novel that completely transcends categories and is, rather, a fable for the ages and all ages. The Eyes & The Impossible is a story entirely and unapologetically from the perspective of a “free” dog (not a pet). This is certainly a collectable – bound in timber, gold-edged paper and classical paintings throughout!

Letitia will also be reading Unfinished Woman, the greatly anticipated memoir by Robyn Davidson, the international bestselling author of Tracks. Letitia had the great honour of meeting Davidson earlier this year – she is absolutely remarkable and brilliant and this book will not disappoint.

Dasha recommends Catherine Chidgey’s Pet, a compelling and beautifully written psychological thriller set in a New Zealand Catholic school in the ’80s. Dasha warns that it is a bit creepy at times – but it’s well worth it. Highly recommended!

Lachlan’s early pick for book of the year is Wifedom, a staggeringly great portrait of George Orwell’s first wife by Anna Funder. Equal parts biography, personal story, counter-fiction and critique of patriarchy – and every page is such a pleasure to read.Lachlan was also moved by Southern Aurora by Mark Brandi, another heartbreaking novel about a boy on the knife edge between innocence and experience. Every bit as powerful as Wimmera, with a sure feel for its ‘80s small-town setting – and a voice so familiar it could be your own. And Lachlan is still on a rural crime binge – loving South Australian Margaret Hickey’s latest Mark Ariti novel Broken Bay, and he can’t wait to get into Ripper, Shelley Burr’s follow up to the award-winning Wake Meanwhile Soren, our kids expert, is loving Impossible Creatures, the new novel by Katherine Rundell. describing it as really exciting middle-grade fantasy. Howzat!

WHAT WE’RE READING Be Mine

Richard Ford

The four novels (and one novella) that form Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe “sequence” have given me enormous satisfaction over the almost four decades since The Sportswriter (1986). They’ve been described as “books about happiness as an act of conscious denial” (Kevin Power), and they undoubtedly are. Deeply and richly contemplative, as well as wise, funny, poignant and insightful, they are also a kind of social history of Frank’s (and Ford’s) generation of America. Be Mine (2023) has only added to their significance as a chronicle of our times. – David $34.99, Bloomsbury

The House of Doors

Tan Twan Eng

When not to judge a book by its cover? Well, for me at least, this month it is with The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng. Sorry Canongate, but the cover of this book, with its gilt lettering, and anonymous south-east Asian roofline, washed with a red overlay, like some bastard child of a Jeffrey Archer novel and a Malaysian Airlines in-flight menu, gave me precisely zero inkling of the book’s style or content. And yet, wow, what a captivating read. Its evocation of place (1920s British colonial high society in Penang) is immediate and transfixing; its characters believable and beguiling. Think Somerset Maugham, starring Bette Davis, directed by Willliam Wyler, but with a kind of Ishiguro sensibility and restraint. The House of Doors is on this year’s Booker Prize longlist and is very deserving of making the shortlist, if not going all the way. – Andrew $32.99, Canongate

AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE

The Visitors

Jane Harrison

On a steamy, hot day in January 1788, seven Aboriginal men, representing the nearby clans, gather at Warrane. Several newly arrived ships have been sighted in the great bay to the south, Kamay. The men meet to discuss their response to these visitors. All day, they talk, argue, debate. Where are the visitors from? What do they want? Might they just warra warra wai back to where they came from? Should they be welcomed? Or should they be made to leave? Throughout the day, the weather is strange, with mammatus clouds, unbearable heat and a pending thunderstorm ... Somewhere, trouble is brewing. From award-winning author and playwright Jane Harrison, The Visitors is an audacious, earthy, funny, gritty and powerful re-imagining of a crucial moment in Australia’s history – and an un-putdownable work of fiction.

Burn

Melanie Saward

When a tragic bushfire puts two kids in hospital, Indigenous teenager Andrew knows the police will come after him. Growing up in small-town Tasmania, Andrew has struggled at home, at school, at everything. The only thing that distracts or excites him is starting little fires: they are the only thing in his life he can control. Until one day things get out of hand. As the police close in and Andrew runs out of people to turn to, he must decide whether he can put his faith in himself to find a way forward. Burn is an affecting, powerful novel about prejudice and growing up on the margins from an exciting new Australian voice.

$34, Affirm

Sunbirds

Mirandi Riwoe

Shortly before the Japanese invade West Java in 1941, the van Hoorn family throw their famous Sinterklaas party at their tea plantation. Mattijs, a Dutch pilot, hopes to forge a future in the Dutch East Indies, possibly with the family’s daughter, Anna, but she is torn between her dreams of Holland and her desire to belong. Meanwhile the housekeeper, Diah, keenly observes the goings-on, wondering how much to tell her freedom-fighter brother. Sunbirds depicts the intricate web of loyalties created by war and imperialism, and the heartbreaking compromises.

$32.99, UQP

The Disorganisation of Celia Stone

Emma Young

Meet Celia Stone, the ultimate hyperorganised, journal-obsessed thirty-something with a life that is perfectly planned out and running like clockwork. From her promising writing career to her devoted partner and rigorous fitness routine, Celia has it all – and she’s right on track with her early retirement plan. But when her husband suggests it’s time to start a family, Celia begins to question whether a new addition might just throw off-course everything she’s worked so hard to achieve. Follow Celia’s diary entries on a year-long journey of self-discovery as she navigates the ups and downs of trying to have it all.

$32.99, Fremantle

Beatrix and Fred

Emily Spurr

Beatrix is a loner. She has a love-hate relationship with her one friend, Ray, a hate-hate relationship with everyone else in her office and a genuine attachment to a stuffed canary named Horatio. She drinks alone far too much. Lately she’s been finding the edge of the railway platform dangerously seductive. Her life needs to change. Then she crosses paths with eighty-something Fred – smart, earthy, funny and not the harmless elderly lady she appears to be. When something happens to Ray, Fred decides to reveal herself. A bizarre and beautiful tale of an unlikely friendship.

$32.99, Text

WHAT WE’RE READING

Exquisite Corpse

Marija Peričić

A disturbing and macabre piece of feminist historical fiction. Set in 1930s Stockholm, Dr Dance’s unrequited love for his tuberculosis patient, Lina, knows no boundaries – not even death will keep him from her. Written from different perspectives, this is a compelling read that ultimately shows the extent of delusion and male fantasy. – Jane $34.99, Ultimo Press

$32.99 HarperCollins

Biding his time

Melbourne author Chris Womersley reflects on his childhood and how his latest novel, Ordinary Gods and Monsters, was a story waiting to be told

Writing Ordinary Gods and Monsters has ruined me forever. Not because it was difficult. No. Because it was so smooth and pleasurable. Weird. It was almost ... unseemly. I’ve published five novels and dozens of short stories, plus loads of things that have not yet seen the light of day. A total somewhere in the vicinity of several hundred thousand words. I have spent years slaving over single sentences and paragraphs, trying to craft stories and characters and give them interesting and entertaining challenges. The process of writing Ordinary Gods and Monsters was very different. It came in a rush; three months from start to finish, as if the entire story had been biding its time, waiting for just the right moment to emerge. I’m not sure why this happened, other than the tale was ready to be told. Sometimes, when the work is going well, writing is more like an act of memory than of creation. It’s as if everything – the characters, the setting, the various machinations of the story –are all there just waiting to be uncovered. Ah yes, you think. Then that happened. And then that. It’s so bloody obvious.

I don’t think a great deal about my childhood in the same way that I don’t think very much about my heart – only when it causes me pain. It’s just there, beating away, motivating me in mysterious ways, giving me life. Childhood is where everything happens, the creative cheque, as Graham Greene said, that you can cash forever. Mine, like the house in which I lived, never felt truly safe. Any peace that reigned was really only a respite between battles. For some years, the orange plastic lightshade over the kitchen table had a hole in it from the time my father threw a chair at my sister at dinner. Now I suppose you’d order a replacement online pretty easily, but this was some time ago. The hole in the shade remained there, as far as I can recall, for ages. Or until we moved out a few years’ later and the place was demolished. Whichever came first.

I loved making cubby houses in our sprawling suburban garden. Although cubby is possibly the wrong word, suggestive of something in a tree. Constructing such a thing is beyond me; I can barely make a decision. My hideaways were more akin to dens or nests. On the ground, in the far corner, fashioned from branches and twigs. Dark, dusty, secretive, private. The main thing was to be outside the house. And there, hidden from view, as quiet and sly as a fox, I’d read comic books and watch people passing by, listen to the sounds of the neighbourhood. The barking of dogs, someone

kicking a footy a few houses over, murmurs behind walls, glass breaking, the shrieks all through the night. I was biding my time, waiting for something – but unsure what it might be. My best friend would come over and we’d sit and chat in the arboreal gloom until it was dark and someone called us in for dinner. We played cards or read, rolled disgusting cigarettes from newspaper and leaves. We wondered which family member we’d sacrifice if we absolutely had to choose. Like what if Pol Pot took over and said you had to select one person or the whole family gets shot?

I wonder sometimes for whom I have written those hundreds of thousands of words. I suppose my ideal reader is someone who enjoys rolling around in the same cultural compost that I do. A person who likes Kafka, Lee Hazlewood, Zadie Smith, Seamus Heaney, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and has a weakness for burnt toast with loads of butter and raspberry jam. But this one? Ordinary Gods and Monsters? It’s for that kid, the one in his nest biding his time. This is probably what he was waiting for all along.

Ordinary Gods and Monsters (Macmillan, $34.99) is out now.

‘Any peace that reigned was really only a respite between battles’

Something Bad Is Going to Happen

Jessie

Stephens

Adella is facing the dawn of a new year and the end of her 20s – and she is in a psychiatric unit recovering from a mental breakdown. A decade earlier, her life held such promise. How did it come to this? As we go back and walk with Adella through her life, she searches for her grand purpose through love, career and travel. At her side through the tumultuous highs and lows is her best friend, Jake, facing his own challenges and opportunities. Dealing with the weight young women bear through pressure, anxiety and rejection, this is a generation-defining novel from one of Australia’s most exciting writers.

$34.99, Macmillan

Others Were Emeralds

The daughter of Cambodian refugees, Ai grew up in a small Australian town populated by Asian immigrants who once fled war-torn countries. It is now the late ’90s and Ai and her friends lead seemingly ordinary lives, far removed from the horrors suffered by their parents. But that carefree innocence is shattered in their last year of school by senseless violence. Internationally acclaimed poet Lang Leav brings her poetical lyricism and emotional acumen to create a rich comingof-age narrative set at a time when antiAsian sentiment was sweeping the nation.

$32.99, Viking

Doll’s Eye

Anna Winter flees

1930s Germany overnight, taking her precious doll collection, and sets sail for Australia, hiding her past – until a chance encounter with Alter Mayseh, an eccentric Yiddish poet fleeing persecution. He’s convinced he has found his future with Anna, but a disturbing clue to her dark past threatens to unravel the delicate life she has built. Shifting in time and place, Doll’s Eye weaves an intriguing story of love, loss and survival against a backdrop of war and displacement.

$32.99, Penguin

Songs for the Dead and the Living

Sara M. Saleh

Jamilah has always believed her home is in a house above a paint shop in Beirut, with her large, chaotic, loving family. But as Palestinian refugees, her family’s life in Lebanon is precarious. When conflict comes to Beirut, the family is forced to flee to Cairo. Jamilah will have to choose between holding on to everything she knows and pursuing a life she can truly call her own. Through stunning prose, acclaimed writer and human rights activist Sara M. Saleh offers a breathtaking portrait of the fragilities and flaws of family in the wake of war, and the love it takes to overcome loss.

Everyone and Everything

Nadine J. Cohen

When Yael Silver’s world comes crashing down, she looks to the past for answers and finds solace in surprising places. Everyone and Everything is about family, mental health and inherited trauma, told with humour and humility. It will make you laugh inappropriately, cry unexpectedly and reach out to those you love. This dazzling debut full of wry wisdom by one of Australia’s most exciting emerging novelists asks what makes us who we are and what leads us onto ledges.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Penance

Eliza Clarke

This is a fictional true crime story relayed by interviews, news articles, podcast transcripts, Tumblr posts, and text messages. When a teenage girl is murdered by her peers, a defamed journalist attempts to piece together their motives. What follows is an examination of internet culture, forging identity, schoolyard hierarchy, unreliable narrators, and most importantly, the morality of true crime as a genre. For fans of Moshfegh and Awad. – Angelita

Lang Leav

Leah Kaminsky

$34.99 Affirm

$32.99, Pantera

$32.99, Faber

$34.99

Harville Secker

The Fraud

Zadie

Smith

It is 1873. Mrs Eliza Touchet is the Scottish housekeeper – and cousin by marriage – of a once famous novelist, William Ainsworth. Mrs Touchet is a woman of many interests – literature, justice, abolitionism, class. But she is also sceptical. She suspects her cousin of having no talent; his successful friend, Mr Charles Dickens, of being a bully and a moralist; and England of being a land of façades. Andrew Bogle, meanwhile, grew up enslaved on the Hope Plantation, Jamaica. He knows that people are more easily manipulated than they realise. When Bogle finds himself in London, star witness in a celebrated case of imposture, he knows his future depends on telling the right story. Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, fraudulence and authenticity, and the mystery of “other people”.

The Wolves of Eternity

Karl Ove Knausgaard

It’s 1986 and a nuclear reactor has exploded in Chernobyl. In Norway Syvert Løyning returns home from military service. One night, he dreams of his late father and, searching through his father’s belongings, he finds a cache of letters that lead to the Soviet Union. In present-day Russia, Alevtina is trying to balance work and family. Her friend Vasilisa offers some nourishment

– she is writing a book about the Russian belief in eternal life. This searching and humane novel explores the experiences of a half-brother and half-sister as they learn of their surprising shared history in this prequel to The Morning Star

Absolutely and Forever

Rose Tremain

$39.99, Chatto and Windus

Marianne Clifford, teenage daughter of a peppery army colonel and his vain wife, falls helplessly and absolutely for 18-year-old Simon Hurst, whose cleverness and physical beauty suggest that he will go forward into a successful and monied future, helped on by doting parents. But Simon’s plans are blown off course and Marianne is forced to bury her dreams of a future together. An enthralling short novel of thwarted love and true friendship from one of our greatest living writers.

Can’t I Go Instead

Lee

Geum-yi

$32.99, Scribe

Two women’s lives and identities are intertwined – through World War II and the Korean War – revealing the harsh realities of class division. Can’t I Go Instead follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant. When the daughter’s suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is forced into marriage with one of her father’s Japanese employees and sent to the United States. Her maidservant is sent in her mistress’s place to be a “comfort woman” to the Japanese Imperial army. In the aftermath of World War II, the women make their way home, where they must reckon with the tangled lives they have led, in an attempt to reclaim their identities, and find their place in an independent Korea.

The Wren, the Wren

Anne

Enright

Nell is a young woman with adventure on her mind. As she sets out into the world, she finds her family history hard to escape. For her mother, Carmel, Nell’s leaving home opens a space in her heart, where the turmoil of a lifetime begins to churn. And across the generations falls the long shadow of Carmel’s father, a poet of beautiful words and brutal actions. This is a meditation on love; a multigenerational novel that traces the inheritance not just of trauma but also of wonder. Above all, it is an exploration of the love between mother and daughter –often painful, but always transcendent.

$32.99, Jonathan Cape

Sisters in Arms

Shida

Bazyar

Kasih, Hani and Saya have shared a deep friendship since school. Now Saya is returning, yet amid the laughter and determination of their sisterhood, it is clear they haven’t escaped the racism since childhood – the glances, the chatter, and the outright right-wing terror. Sisters in Arms is a lyrical, explosive novel about the importance of friendship – the kind of extraordinary friendship that brings stability to an unstable world.

$32.99, Scribe

$34.99

Hamish Hamilton

INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE

The Maniac

Benjamin Labatut

As a young man, Johnny von Neumann stunned those around him with his monomaniacal pursuit of the unshakeable foundations of mathematics. But when his faith in this system crumbled, he began to put his prodigious intellect to use for those in power. As he designed unfathomable computer systems and aided the development of the atomic bomb, his work pushed increasingly into areas that were beyond comprehension and control –and that threatened human destruction.

Benjamin Labatut braids fact with fiction in a scintillating journey back to early 20th-century conflict over contradictions in physics and up to advances in artificial intelligence to create a mind-bending story of the mad dreams of reason.

$32.99, Pushkin

Backwaters

Emma Ling Sidnam

Laura is tired of being asked where she’s really from. Her family has lived in Aotearoa New Zealand for four generations, and she is ambivalent about her Chinese heritage. But when she is asked to write about the Chinese New Zealander experience for a work project, Laura finds herself drawn to the diary of her great-great-grandfather Ken, a market gardener in the early years of the British colony. With the help of her beloved grandpa, Laura begins to write a version of Ken’s story. As a family secret comes to light, she will go on her own journey of self-discovery, sexuality and reckoning with the past. This is a tender, nuanced novel about the bittersweet search for belonging. Backwaters marks the arrival of a brilliant new talent.

$32.99, Text

Valentino

Natalia Ginzburg

Valentino is the spoiled child of doting parents who have no doubt he will be “a man of consequence”. His sisters, however, see him for what he really is: a lazy, indifferent medical student who whiles away time with nights out on the town, resulting in a string of failed and incomplete classes. His parents’ dreams are soon undone when, out of the blue, Valentino brings home Maddalena, a wealthy and strikingly ugly wife. What ensues is yet another work of quiet devastation told with Ginzburg’s unflinching moral realism and keen psychological insight, as the family is scandalised by Valentino’s decision and suspicious of Maddalena’s motives.

The Vaster Wilds

Lauren Groff

Part of a trilogy based on the end of empire, The Vaster Wilds is the story of a young girl who is a servant to a minister and his young mistress, and in charge of their young daughter Bess. On an epic voyage across the Atlantic, ship-wrecked, far from home and fighting for survival, the protagonist of Lauren Groff’s extraordinary new novel must endure but also find meaning in the journey.

The Seventh Son

Sebastian Faulks

A billionaire entrepreneur plans to stretch the boundaries of ethics. Through a series of IVF treatments he proposes an experiment that will upend the human race. When a young American academic Talissa Adam offers to carry another woman’s child, she has no idea of the lifechanging consequences. Seth, the baby, is delivered to hopeful parents Mary and Alaric, but when his differences start to mark him out from his peers, he begins to attract unwanted attention. The Seventh Son asks the question – just because you can do something, does it mean you should? Sweeping between New York, London, and the Scottish Highlands, this is an extraordinary novel about unrequited love and unearned power.

$34.99, Hutchinson Heinemann

When human remains are discovered in the wilds of the Tasmanian west coast, the dark past comes into the light of the present in this deeply moving novel from the author of Fortune

Phryne Fisher meets Underbelly in an arch, out-of-the-box debut historical crime caper. A centuries-old curse, a house of secrets and a young woman determined to find out the truth.

$34.99, Hutchinson Heinemann

$19.99, Daunt

The Last Devil to Die

Richard Osman

Shocking news reaches the Thursday Murder Club. An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing. As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home. With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die? The fourth book in the record-breaking Thursday Murder Club series from British national treasure Richard Osman.

$34.99, Viking

The Devil’s Flute Murders

Seishi Yokomizo

Amid the rubble of post-war Tokyo, a once-noble family is in mourning. The old viscount Tsubaki, a brooding, troubled composer, has been found dead. When the family gather for a divination to conjure his spirit, death visits the house once more, and the brilliant Kosuke Kindaichi is called in to investigate. But before he can get to the truth, Kindaichi must uncover all of Tsubakis’ most disturbing secrets, while the gruesome murders continue. The Devil’s Flute Murders is an ingenious and highly atmospheric classic whodunit from Japan’s master of crime.

$22.99, Pushkin

FANTASY

The Golden Spoon

Jessa Maxwell

For six amateur bakers, competing in Bake Week is a dream come true. When they arrive at Grafton Manor, they’re ready to do whatever it takes to win the ultimate prize: The Golden Spoon. But for the show’s famous host, Betsy Martin, Bake Week is more than just a competition. Grafton Manor is her family’s home and legacy – and Bake Week is her life’s work. It’s imperative that both continue to succeed. But as the competition begins, things begin to go awry. At first, it’s small acts of sabotage. But when a body is discovered, it’s clear that for someone in the competition, The Golden Spoon is a prize worth killing for.

$32.99, Michael Joseph

Before We Say Goodbye

Toshikazu Kawaguchi

The Secret Hours

Mick Herron

Two years ago, the Monochrome inquiry was set up to investigate the British secret service with a mission to ferret out misconduct. The civil servants seconded to the inquiry, Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, have been given unfettered access to confidential information in the service archives, yet they find their progress is blocked at every turn. What happened in a newly reunified Berlin that someone is desperate to keep under wraps? And who will win the battle for the soul of the secret service – or was that decided a long time ago? A masterclass in intrigue brimming with tension and paranoid energy.

$32.99, Hachette

Also out this month

The Enchanters

James Ellroy

$32.99, Hutchinson Heinemann

$19.99

Bloomsbury

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s poignant Before We Say Goodbye explores the age-old question: What would you do if you could travel back in time? Who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time? The magical Cafe Funiculi Funicula offers patrons a chance to do just that, whether it’s reuniting with old flames, making amends with estranged family, or visiting loved ones. But the journey is not without risks and there are rules to follow. Travellers must have visited the cafe previously and most importantly, must return to the present in the time it takes for their coffee to go cold. In the hauntingly beautiful Before We Say Goodbye, Kawaguchi invites us to join his characters as they embark on a journey to revisit one crucial moment in time.

Outback

Patricia Wolf

$32.99, Echo

Sleepless in Stringybark Bay

Susan Duncan

$32.99, Allen & Unwin

I’m Not Done with You Yet

Jesse Sutanto

$22.99, HarperCollins

The great escape

The British writer’s character-driven crime novels have enthralled millions of readers and the TV adaptations, Vera, Shetland and The Last Call have become a staple of TV crime lineups. The third book in the Two Rivers series, A Raging Storm, has just been published and next month she will be writer in residence at Tasmania’s crime festival, Terra Australis. Before packing her bags she made time to answer a few questions from The Gleaner about her enduring characters and why reading is ‘the very best escape there is’.

Matthew Venn, from your latest series, Two Rivers, is a married gay man and a police officer who grew up in a rigid, cloistered community. What was the inspiration for this character?

Matthew Venn grew from a visit to an old school friend after my husband died. She’d grown up in a similar community – rigid and certain but not unkind. But if someone lost their faith publicly and dramatically, they’d be cast out. I thought a man with that background might feel chaotic, unsettled, and might turn to the police service to find the sense of duty and community that they’d lost. He’s gay because the people who looked after me after my husband died were a gay couple. They were rattling around in my head when I started writing and I wanted to celebrate their relationship.

Is this the kind of complexity that gives longevity to a character?

I think so! It would be very boring writing about a character with no depth. And if the writer is bored, the

Why do you think your characters resonate so much

I think I’ve been very lucky. Partly that’s down to Silverprint, the television company that makes the adaptations. The actors bring my characters to life, so when viewers come back to the books, they find people they recognize. They might LOOK different, but the tone is the same.

What draws you to the

I’m not very good at plotting, so traditional crime fiction gives me a structure within which to work. Also, by writing about the tragedy of murder, we see people faced with extreme emotion.

You have written more than 30 novels in your career: what drives you to write? Could you imagine life without it?

I’ve never written more than a book a year – I’ve just been lucky enough to sustain a very long career. I still had a day job for the first 20 years. Writing, like reading, has always been an escape for me. I can’t imagine not working.

What do you prefer writing: series or standalone novels?

Series, I think. Both the Vera and Shetland first novels started out as standalones, and then I found I had more to say about the people and the places.

You’re something of a reading evangelist. Apart from the obvious – that you are an author who wants people to read her novels! – why do you see this as important?

Reading opens minds and hearts. It puts us inside the heads of people very different from ourselves, so we can see the world through their eyes. And if people are distressed or unwell, reading is the very best escape there is.

You will be International writer in residence at Tasmania’s crime festival Terror Australis: Tassie Vice in October. What are you most looking forward to about your trip to Australia and could the landscape of our southern-most state inspire a new character?

I’m so looking forward to Terror Australis and I’m very honoured and grateful to have been invited. It’s rare to have the opportunity to spend more than a day or two in a place when I’m touring, and this will give me the chance to get a real sense of the island and its community. I won’t know Tasmania well enough after a fortnight to set a novel there, but it might inspire a short story.

The Raging Storm, the latest Matthew Venn mystery, is out now through Pan Macmillan, $34.99. Tassie Vice is being held in Tasmania from 26-29 October.

The Wilder Aisles

Ithink it was in the early ’80s that I first became acquainted with the books of Barbara Comyns, and her memoir. Quite how I came to know her books, I can”t remember, but I do remember falling in love with them at once. Originally published in the ’40s and ’50s, they were reprinted in the ’80s, and then again in 2013. It is the 2013 editions I am now re-reading.

Barbara Comyns was born in 1909, and wrote her first book when she was 10. Mostly educated by governesses, she later attended art school and had numerous jobs, including breeding poodles. She was also an artist and exhibited in a London gallery. Her home life was chaotic; the siblings mostly ran wild. Governesses unable to control them, came and went. The place where they were the happiest was on the river, where they boated and swam. A river features in most of her novels, a reminder of her past. Another thing that recurs in her books, is violent, brutal fathers who are often drunks and ineffective mothers, often ill.

Now to the books. I think that Our Spoons Came from Woolworths is my favourite, maybe because it was the first one I read. The story of Sophia and Charles and their marriage is one of poverty and despair, and once the baby arrives, things become even more desperate. Sophia keeps the family in food and a roof over their heads, while Charles paints – paintings that never sell. Then Sophia meets Peregrine, an older art dealer, her life changes and happiness is just around the corner for the lovely Sophia.

Sisters by a River, is the most autobiographical of the books, although that doesn’t mean that everything is true. In some ways the sisters have an ideal life, with lots of freedom to play, especially on the river. They are mostly uneducated, although they all read books. There is a hierarchy in the family, with Mary, the eldest, the boss. She sometimes uses her power meanly, dominating the others, including what colour clothes they should wear. There are some very funny moments in these books, but so subtle that when reading you have to stop and think.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, is perhaps the funniest of Comyn’s novels, but only in the most macabre way. Which certainly appealed to me. The story is set in a small village where the Willoweed family rule and strange things start to happen. First the river floods, and the people in the big house

come down in the morning to find ducks floating around the drawing room and dead peacocks bobbing around in the garden. All of a sudden the town’s inhabitants start going mad, and a strange illness appears to infect the townsfolk. The family at Willoweed consists of sisters Emma and Hattie, their meek father and dreadful grandmother with her enormous ear trumpet, who bullies all of them. Emma and Hattie have lived all their lives in that house in that village. How they escape and start new lives is a wonderful, engrossing story.

I can’t tell you how much I love these books.They are strange, mysterious and they have been described as witherly. I also must mention Out of the Red Into the Blue, a memoir she wrote in about 1960, a time when she and her family ran away to Spain, and left behind all their cares and worries. I haven’t reread this yet, but I do remember that while escaping family pressures, she climbed a tree and refused to come down.

– Janice Wilder

PICTURE BOOKS

We Know a Place

Maxine Beneba Clarke

Every Saturday, when the chores are done, two children set out on a journey to their local bookshop, a magical place where sneaky stories escape as you peep in the door and there’s plentiful magic for each and for all. Monsters, giants, trolls and pirates ahoy! But what happens when some cheeky creatures follow the children home one day? This is a playful love letter to those wondrous places where secrets and magic live around every corner and between every cover.

$24.99, Lothian

I Can Open That!

Shinsuke Yoshitake

When a little boy has trouble opening a chocolate wrapper, he starts wondering what life would be like if he could open anything he wanted. Along the way, he learns about the power of being able to do things by yourself – and the fun of helping other people do them too!

$21.99, Thames & Hudson

Betty and the Mysterious Visitor

Anne Twist

Betty loves visiting Grandma and playing in her beautiful garden, Acorn Hollows. But when a mysterious creature starts destroying the Hollows, Betty must come up with a plan to save it. Whatever will she do? A touching celebration of nature by debut author Anne Twist, illustrated by world-renowned children’s book artist Emily Sutton.

$27.99, Walker

When I Became Your Sister

Susannah Shane

A heart-warming picture book about the love between siblings, featuring shimmering gold foil on every page! Whether they’re adventuring in the forest, sharing berries, or wishing on shooting stars, there’s nothing this little raccoon cub loves more than spending time with their big sister. With a gentle rhyming text by Susannah Shane and stunning artwork (right) by award-winning and internationally bestselling illustrator Britta Teckentrup.

$24.99, Nosy Crow

In My Garden

Kate Mayes and Tamsin Ainslie

Join children from around the world as they share their gardens, from blossoming flowers in Japan to the waterside of Malawi, the frozen landscape of Iceland to the bush tracks of Australia. These are the places they love and the places they belong. With uplifting lyrical words and stunning detailed pictures from bestselling duo, Kate Mayes and Tamsin Ainslie.

$24.99, ABC Books

Illustration by Britta Teckentrup from the cover of When I Became Your Sister

EARLY READERS

To the Ice

Thomas Tidholm

Ida, Max and Jack go to the creek one winter’s day. They play on an ice floe then find themselves floating away – all the way to the polar ice, with just a box, a branch and some sandwiches. To the Ice is a beautifully produced chapter book that absorbs young readers in a real-life make-believe filled with problem-solving and adventure. This is a thrilling and plot-filled story – the kind of book children will remember throughout their lives.

$24.99, Gecko

AGES 8-12

Impossible Creatures

Katherine Rundell

Cat of Death! Cat on the Run

Aaron

Blabey

What happens when the World’s #1 cat video star gets accused of a crime she didn’t commit? She becomes a cat on the run, that’s what. But how do you avoid capture and prove your innocence when you are the most famous feline on the planet?! Well, it ain’t easy ... Follow Princess Beautiful as she goes from meme megastar #1 to public enemy #1 and cheer her on as she fights to clear her name.

$16.99, Scholastic

$18.99 Bloomsbury

A boy called Christopher is visiting his reclusive grandfather when he witnesses an avalanche of mythical creatures come tearing down the hill. This is how Christopher learns that his grandfather is the guardian of one of the ways between the non-magical world and a place called the Archipelago, a cluster of magical islands where mythical creatures live alongside humans. They have been protected from being discovered for thousands of years; but now they are in danger. When Christopher meets Mal, a girl with a flying coat, they embark on a quest to find the truth, with unimaginable consequences for both their worlds. Together the two must face the problem of power, and of knowledge, and of what love demands of us.

Geomancer: In the Shadow of the Wolf Queen

Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Ysolda has lived her life in the shadow of the Wolf Queen’s tyrannical rule but, safe in her forest haven, she has never truly felt its threat. Until one day when a mysterious earthquake shakes the land and her older sister Hari vanishes in its wake. Accompanied by her loyal sea hawk, Nara, Ysolda embarks on a desperate rescue mission that forces her to strike a bargain with the Wolf Queen herself. This is the start of an epic new fantasy trilogy from bestselling, award-winning author Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

$17.99, Orion

$22.99

HarperCollins

Millie Mak the Maker

Alice Pung and Sher Rill Ng

Nine-year-old Millie Mak has discovered she has a superpower! Through her creativity and clever thinking, Millie takes everyday objects and turns them into something new, beautiful and useful. Who would ever think that a sunhat could be made from an old bedsheet, a skirt from a tea-towel, or some hair scrunchies from a scarf? You can make the special objects Millie creates from the detailed and easy-to-follow instructions included in the book. And best of all, nothing needs to be bought!

GLEEBOOKS BOOK CLUB

Calling all bookworms: we want to hear about your favourite reads! We’d love to feature more of our wonderful book clubbers in our Gleaner magazine. So if you’ve got a book you’d like to review or if you want to write about an author that’s visiting, send us an email at rachel@gleebooks.com.au. We have exciting giveaways waiting for you!

AGES 8-12

Bedtime Stories

R.A. Spratt

Just as the Grimm brothers collected fairytales and Scheherazade told tales of the Arabian nights, R.A. Spratt has assembled the most comprehensive collection of silly stories ever bound together in one book. Stories so good no human mind could come up with them. If you want joy in your heart, a tickle in your funny bone and a boggled brain as you try to wrap your mind around the brilliance of these bedtime stories, this book is for you.

$22.99, Puffin

YOUNG ADULT

This Camp Is Doomed

Anna Zobel

A run-down camp in the woods. No phone reception. Ten students with untested powers ... Celine is seeing conspiracies everywhere. Fionn has a bad premonition about the colour blue. Mr Berg is horrified at the camp’s questionable safety standards. Something is definitely not right at Camp Buttress. This hilarious and quirky new novel by Anna Zobel will keep you guessing as the students and their teachers try to solve the mystery – and survive.

$16.99, Puffin

Island: Illustrated edition

David Almond

$16.99

Hodder

NONFICTION

Louise has travelled with her father to the island every year since she can remember – it’s the place her mother loved best of all. The arrival of Hassan changes everything. Louise is restless and yearning for independence; meanwhile, the fiercely free and self-reliant Hassan seems to know the island from long ago as if it were his home from birth. Hassan is an acrobat, maybe a sorcerer, possibly a source of great danger. The forces of love, death and hope move Louise and Hassan together. The island will change their lives forever. By the award-winning author of Skellig. Ages 12+

GRAPHIC NOVELS

Saving H’non

Trang Nguyen

Universal Guide to the Night Sky

Lisa Harvey-Smith

$24.99,

Get ready to take a tour of the wonders of the universe with astrophysicist Lisa Harvey-Smith. Explore comets and meteors, stars, planets and moons. Find galaxies and glowing gas clouds. Spot supernovae and enjoy eclipses. Learn everything you need to know about binoculars, telescopes and photographing the stars. You will never look up at the stars in the same way again. Featuring intergalactic illustrations by Sophie Beer, this global guide to the sky is your ticket out of this world.

When Chang meets an elderly elephant named H’non, she makes a promise to rescue her from a lifetime of captivity. Together, they embark on a quest to find a new home where H’non can live as nature intended; wild and free. Created by environmental activist Trang Nguyen and award-winning manga artist Jeet Zdung, Saving H’non: Chang and the Elephant is an inspirational graphic novel adventure, based on a true story, about a young conservationist who overcomes the odds to give H’non the elephant the life she deserves after 50 years of hardship. Chang’s daring story is for any young reader, animal lover and intrepid explorer who’s ready for adventure.

$29.99, Macmillan

The Magic Gems

Xavier Bonet

Lily Halfmoon has just moved to the town of Piedraville. New house, new school and ... new powers? She must learn magic, and find her animal guardian and gemstone, while keeping her new identity a secret. Protecting the people of Piedraville is no easy task, especially when a dangerous creature is on the loose. Will Lily finally discover her gem’s unique power with the help of her new friends, Gigi and Mai, without attracting attention? The Magic Gems is a beautifully illustrated story about the power of friendship and embracing your talents.

$16.99, Allen & Unwin

Thames & Hudson

Age of the City

Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin

For the first time, more than half of humanity lives in cities, a share that continues to rise. Globalisation and technological change have concentrated wealth into a small number of booming metropolises, leaving many smaller cities and towns behind and feeding populist resentment. Yet even within seemingly thriving cities like London or San Francisco, the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to widen and our retreat into online worlds tears away at our social fabric. Visionary Oxford professor Ian Goldin and The Economist’s Tom Lee-Devlin show why the city is where the battles of inequality, social division, pandemics and climate change must be faced.

$32.99, Continuum

Time to Listen

Melissa Castan and Lynette Russell

In Time to Listen

, Melissa Castan and Lynette Russell explore how the need for a Voice has its roots in what anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner in the late ’60s called the “Great Australian Silence”, whereby the history and culture of Indigenous Australians have been largely ignored by the wider society. This “forgetting” has been an intentional policy of erasement. So have times now changed? Is the tragedy of that national silence finally coming to an end? The Voice to Parliament can be a transformational legal and political institutional reform, but only if Indigenous people are clearly heard when they speak.

$19.95, Monash University Press

We Need to Talk about America

Edited by Jonathan Pearlman

The latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines Australia’s evolving ties with the United States as the power balance in Asia changes and Washington continues to face bitter domestic divides. We Need to Talk about America looks at the future of the alliance in an era in which the US’s global role and stature – which once seemed so constant – are becoming less stable and less certain.

The Echidna Strategy

Sam Roggeveen

The Echidna Strategy overturns the conventional wisdom about Australia’s security. It sheds new light on the contest for leadership in Asia and the strategy Australia needs to thrive. This includes a radically different approach to defence. Above all, it means a bolder Australian foreign policy, with three goals: leadership in the Pacific; a much stronger relationship with Indonesia; and a regional order centred on a gathering of its great powers.

Techno-feudalism

Yanis Varoufakis

$36.99 Jonathan Cape

No one noticed when capitalism died. Perhaps we were too distracted by the implosion of global finance, or the rise of populism, or the demise of the planet. But gradually, quietly, a yet more exploitative new system has taken hold: techno-feudalism. Drawing on stories from Greek myth and pop culture, from Mad Men to Karl Marx, Varoufakis explains how the key ingredients of capitalism – profit and markets – have both been replaced. He exposes the hidden connection between your personal data and the“cloud capital” which means that without realising it, we are all working every day for the tech giants, for free.

Doppelganger

Naomi Klein

When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting consistently mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn’t. She decided to follow her double into a bizarre mirror world – one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far-right propagandists. In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something more sinister. Together the two must face the problem of power, and of knowledge, and of what love demands of us.

$36.99, Allen Lane

$24.99, Black inc

$32.99, Latrobe

Twelve Caesars

Mary Beard

For more than two millennia, portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the Twelve Caesars, from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian. Twelve Caesars asks why Rome’s murderous autocrats have loomed so large in art from antiquity and the Renaissance to today. Beginning with the importance of imperial portraits in Roman politics, this richly illustrated book offers a tour through 2,000 years of art and cultural history, along with the gripping story of some of the most challenging and disturbing portraits of power ever created.

$39.99, Princeton

POLITICS

Ukraine 22 Anthology

This anthology brings together writing from inside Ukraine, by Ukrainians. Here they document everyday life, ponder the role of culture amid conflict, denounce Russian imperialism and revisit their relations with the world, especially Europe, as they try to comprehend the horrors of war. These essays reveal the texture, rawness and reality of life in Ukraine under war as never before.

$29.99, Penguin

Also out this month

Tiwi Story

Mavis Kerinaiua and Laura Rademaker

$39.99, NewSouth

Survival and Sanctuary

Freda Hodge

$32.99, Monash University Press

What Is Anti-racism

Arun Kundnani

$34.99, Bloomsbury

Great-Uncle Harry

Michael Palin

Michael Palin recreates the extraordinary life and tragic death of a First World War soldier – his great-uncle Harry. His quest to find out more about his life involved hundreds of hours of painstaking detective work tracking down letters, diaries, official documents and photographs. He walked the route Harry took on that fatal, final day of his life amid the mud of northern France. GreatUncle Harry is an utterly compelling account of an ordinary man who led an extraordinary life. A blend of biography, history, travelogue and personal memoir, this is Michael Palin at his very finest.

Bioterrorism and Biological Warfare

Paul Chrystal

$75 Pen and Sword

This disturbing and timely book focuses on the use of disease and germs as a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) and the threat bioterrorism poses in an increasingly unpredictable and volatile world. It traces developments from the earliest primitive but effective days of infectious rams, poison-tipped arrows and plague-infected corpses to the 21st-century industrial scale weaponisation of biomedicine. Paul Chrystal shows how biological weapons and acts of bioterrorism instil terror, panic, death, famine and economic ruin, shredding public confidence in governments and civilization itself.

Astray: A History of Wandering

Eluned Summers-Bremner

Astray is a meandering celebration of the indirect and unforeseen path, revealing that to err is not just human – it is everything. From ancient Australian Aboriginal cosmology to ancient Greece; from the Eurasian steppe nomadic culture to the movements of today’s refugees, Summers-Bremner argues that wandering is how creativity and skills of adaptation are preserved in the interests of ongoing life.

Southern Signals

Hugh Tranter

$49.99,National Library of Australia

Communications have been vital at every stage of Australia’s history. From the time the First Fleet transport ship Prince of Wales limped back into port eight months after leaving Sydney Cove, to the breakneck rush during the 1970 Apollo 13 crisis to bringing Parkes’ famous radio telescope online, this book shows how adoption (or not) of emerging communication technologies has influenced key events, and formed the backbone of Australia’s development as a society and relationship with the world.

$36.99, Hutchinson Heinemann

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

The Young Man

Annie Ernaux

In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student 30 years her junior – an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the “scandalous girl” of her youth. When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. The past’s immediacy pushes her to take a decisive step in her writing – producing, in turn, the need to expunge her lover. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux’s relationship to time, memory and writing. Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature.

$16, Fitzcarraldo

Farewell to Robert

Vrasidas

Karalis

In 1993, two men, Robert and Vras, met and formed a committed relationship that lasted until Robert’s death of leukaemia in May 2022. This short book is a farewell letter to Robert, a long lamentation exploring the nature of their friendship, their own transformation over time and finally the unexpected event of death. Without idealisation or escapism, this confessional letter pays homage to the power of human emotions and the destiny formed by the will of lovers to be together, until death tore them apart and, perhaps, beyond death.

$26.99, Brandl & Schlesinger

The Dictionary People

Sarah Ogilvie

$35, Chatto and Windus

I’ll Let Myself In

Hannah Diviney

While Hannah Diviney’s friends went to soccer and dance, she was going to physio and doctors’ appointments. While her friends got jobs, fell in love and went clubbing, Hannah surrounded herself with the fantastical worlds she found in books. But books with people like her were nowhere to be found. Deeply personal and yet utterly relatable, I’ll Let Myself In is a young woman’s battle-cry over the voices who try to tell her who she can and can’t be, and a reminder not to wait to be invited to the table but to break the door down and demand to be heard.

$32.99, Allen & Unwin

Oh Miriam!

Miriam Margolyes

$35, Hutchinson

Heinemann

The Oxford English Dictionary has long been associated with elite institutions and educated men – the forces that have dominated how we think about history. But the OED was compiled through crowdsourcing – its editors called on anyone and everyone to send in examples of word use. Those who responded lived hidden or uncelebrated lives – the women, the queers, the eccentrics, the autodidacts and the ordinary families who made word collection their passion. An astonishing discovery of the address books in which each contributor’s name is recorded leads Sarah Ogilvie to trace the strange, marginal lives led by the people who defined the English language.

Wandering Through Life

Donna Leon

Donna Leon has long been open to adventure. In 1976, she made the spontaneous decision to teach English in Iran, before moving on to China, Saudi Arabia and Venice. Leon vividly animates her decades-long love affair with Italy, from her hunt for the perfect cappuccino to the warfare tactics of grandmothers doing their grocery shopping at the Rialto Market. Some things remain constant throughout the decades – her adoration of opera, her advocacy for the environment and the imagination that brought to life Commissario Guido Brunetti, the protagonist of more than 32 crime novels.

Join Miriam Margolyes on a riotous adventure through her unconventional life, from declaring her love to Vanessa Redgrave to being fed cockroaches by Steve Buscemi; from turnipbased comedy with Blackadder to being farted on by Arnold Schwarzenegger. With a cast list that stretches from Churchill to di Caprio, Dahl to Dietrich, Princess Margaret to Maggie Smith, Margolyes bares all – sometimes literally – in this revealing memoir.

$34.99, John Murray

Also out this month

Her Sunburnt Country

Deborah Fitzgerald

$55, Simon & Schuster

Hook, Line & Sinner

Tom Nash

$35, Viking

Elon Musk

Walter Isaacson

$59.99, Simon & Schuster

BIOGRAPHY

Would that Be Funny?

Lorin Clarke

When satirist John Clarke died, in April 2017, many people mourned his passing as if they had lost a friend or a member of the family. In this fascinating memoir, Lorin Clarke tells the story of growing up with her famous father, her art historian mother, Helen, and her little sister, Lucia. Lorin Clarke brings to life her idyllic, hilarious and deeply nerdy childhood, and in doing so reveals not only the private man behind the satirist, but the sense of love and security that comes from being able to laugh at yourself.

$34.99, Text

LITERARY CRITICISM

The Great White Bard

Farah Karim-Cooper

As we witness monuments of white Western history fall, students are asking, “Why should we study Shakespeare? How is he still relevant? Wasn’t he racist?” Combining piercing analysis of race, gender and otherness in famous plays from Antony and Cleopatra to The Tempest with a radical reappraisal of Elizabethan London, The Great White Bard entreats us neither to idealise nor bury Shakespeare but to reckon with the discomforts of his plays, playhouses and society.

$44.99, OneWorld

Burning Questions

Margaret Atwood

Frank Moorhouse: A Life

Catharine Lumby

Frank Moorhouse was one of Australia’s bestknown and most-loved authors. His career spanned the genres of the novel, the short story, the essay, the memoir, the erotic novella, the screenplay and the historical monograph. His interests encompassed social mores, history, politics, foreign policy, intellectual property and censorship. On all these subjects, he wrote and spoke with distinctive elegance, wit and perception. In this fascinating and crucial work, Catharine Lumby weaves the intellectual and aesthetic aspects of Moorhouse’s life into a sparkling dialogue, highlighting the depth of his impact on Australian culture.

Quarterly Essay 91: Lifeboat – Disability, Humanity and the NDIS

Micheline Lee

In this powerful and moving essay, Micheline Lee tells the story of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, a transformative social change that ran into problems. For some users it has been “the only lifeboat in the ocean”, but for others it has meant more exclusion. Lee explains how the NDIS, for all its good intentions, has not understood people with disabilities well enough. This is an essay about common humanity and effective, lasting social change.

$27.99, Black Inc

From cultural icon Margaret Atwood (right) comes a brilliant collection of essays – funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient. In Burning Questions, Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at our world, and reports back to us on what she finds. The roller-coaster period covered in the collection covers a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better questioner of the many and varied mysteries of our human universe.

$29.99, Vintage

$34.99, Allen & Unwin

PSYCHOLOGY SELF-HELP

& HEALTH

Troubled Minds

Sidney Bloch and Nick Haslam

The Joy Thief

Penny Moodie

$35, Scribe

An invaluable guide for anyone whose life has been touched by mental ill-health and wants to understand and deal effectively with it. It is an ideal introduction to common mental illnesses, developmental disorders and neurological variations that can lead to anorexia nervosa, anxiety, depression, alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder and dementia. This book is informed by the latest research, warmed by lived experience and empathy, and seasoned by the insights of philosophers, writers and artists.

Fearless

Jelena Dokic and Jessica Halloran

In Jelena Dokic’s first bestselling book, Unbreakable, the former world No. 4 revealed her incredible survival story; how she overcame adversity, poverty and violence to rise to the top of the tennis world. The past years have taught Jelena many tough and important lessons – Fearless is about how you reclaim life when all feels lost.

Penny Moodie unpacks the stigma and misunderstanding around Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, weaving her personal experience with the stories of other OCD sufferers, as well as the expertise of some of the world’s leading OCD doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists. She explores OCD’s symptoms, stigmas and treatments with raw honesty and zero judgement. An invaluable resource for those suffering from OCD, as well as for their families and loved ones.

$34.99, Allen & Unwin

LANGUAGE

You’re All Talk

Rob Drummond

$34.99, Viking

Wisdom from the Ancients

Emilie Savage-Smith

$29.99, Bodleian

Words of wisdom and advice for leading a good life have long been part of society, handed down from one generation to the next. Many of these wise observations originated from the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, and went on to circulate widely among the Arabic-speaking communities of the middle ages, who added new sayings of their own. This collection features more than 400 sayings, riddles and aphorisms in English translation, offering timeless advice to contemplate, share and enjoy.

WHAT WE’RE READING

Pink Slime

Fernanda Trias

$29.99, Scribe

Winner of the English Pen Award and the Uruguayan National Prize for Fiction, Trias’ debut novel follows a shattered community in the wake of a climate apocalypse. Her eerie style of writing leaves a sense of awe in the way it reminds us not to take normality for granted. Trias creates a world that is believable yet utterly horrifying. – Imogen

In You’re All Talk, linguist Rob Drummond explores the enormous diversity of our spoken language to reveal extraordinary insights into how humans operate. He investigates how and why we automatically associate different accents with particular social characteristics – friendliness, authority, social class, race – and how we, consciously or subconsciously, change the way we speak in order to create different versions of ourselves to fit different environments. You’re All Talk demonstrates the beauty of linguistic diversity and how embracing it can give us a better understanding of other people – and ourselves.

$32.99, Scribe

Also out this month

World Heritage Sites of Australia

Peter Valentine

$59.99, National Library of Australia

The Book of Wilding

Isabella Tree and Charlie Burrell

$69.99, Bloomsbury

GENDER STUDIES

Polywise

Jessica Fern and David Cooley

As polyamory continues to make its way into the mainstream,more and more people are exploring consensual non-monogamy in the hope of experiencing more love, connection, sex, freedom and support. For many, the move expands personal horizons; for others, the transition can be overwhelming. Polyamorous psychotherapist Jessica Fern and restorative justice facilitator David Cooley offer practical strategies for transforming nonmonogamous relationships into opportunities for new levels of clarity and intimacy.

Consent Laid Bare

Chanel Contos

$36.99, Macmillan

This book was born from the thousands of girls and women who sent Chanel Contos their stories of sexual assault during their schooling years. How and why is this happening in an era of growing equality? Consent Laid Bare gives girls and women the encouragement to seek sex that is truly enjoyable and equips them with the information they need to properly consent. It asks boys and men to become advocates for sex centred around intimacy rather than fuelled by aggression. This is a game-changing book about sex and consent that every woman – and man –should read.

Transgender Australia

Noah Riseman

$40, Melbourne University Press

MEDIA

Trans and gender diverse people have always been present in Australian life, but over the last century there have been remarkable changes in how they have identified and expressed themselves. Transgender Australia is the first book to chart the changing social, medical, legal and lived experiences of trans and gender diverse people in Australia since 1910. It highlights how trans people have tried to live authentically in a society that often treated them like outcasts.

SCIENCE & NATURE

Beyond DNA

Benjamin Oldroyd

In this highly accessible book, Benjamin Oldroyd explains how a greater appreciation of the role of epigenetics is helping to solve a multitude of previously intractable problems in evolutionary biology – why invasive plants and animals can rapidly adapt to changes in their environment, how worker bees and queen bees can develop from the same egg, and why cancer becomes more common as we age.

$35, Melbourne University Press

Late Light

Michael Malay

Late Light is the story of Michael Malay, an Indonesian-AustralianAmerican, making a home in England and finding strange parallels between his life and the lives of the animals he examines. Mixing natural history with memoir, this book explores the mystery of our animal neighbours, in all their richness and variety. It is about the wonder these animals inspired in our ancestors, the hope they inspire in us, and the joy they might still hold for our children.

$39.99, Manilla

Storytellers

Leigh Sales

Highly respected ABC anchor, bestselling author and hit podcaster Leigh Sales interviews the cream of Australian journalists about their craft – how (and why) they bring us the stories that inform our lives. In 10 sections – from News and Reporting to Editing, via Investigative, Commentary and of course Interviewing – Sales takes us on a tour of the profession, letting the leaders in their field talk directly to us about how they get their leads, survive in war zones, write a profile or tell a story with pictures. Journalists including Kate McClymont, Tracy Grimshaw, Richard Fidler, David Speers, Stan Grant, Niki Savva, Waleed Aly, Annabel Crabb and Karl Stefanovic – talk candidly about their greatest lessons and their trade secrets. Storytellers is a book for anyone who’s ever wanted to be a journalist, or even just wondered how the news gets made.

$32.99, Scribe

$36.99, Scribner

Garlic, Olive Oil and Everything Else

Daen Lia

Daen Lia’s stunning modern Mediterranean dishes have taken social media by storm thanks to their show-stopping textures and bold flavours. This much-anticipated cookbook is the essential collection of her recipes for lovers of olive oil, garlic, butter and all things delicious. Every dish is iconic, from Daen’s famous crumbed chicken (that almost broke the internet) and the only bolognese recipe you’ll ever need, to fluffy focaccia and must-have condiments. This collection heralds Daen’s arrival as Australia’s new go-to food personality for Mediterranean classics with a modern twist.

Fish Butchery

Josh Niland

Josh Niland returns with the ultimate guide to the art of fish butchery, with expert techniques and groundbreaking recipes that are an urgent call for action on culinary sustainability. Featuring detailed instructions on how to prepare fish as well as more than 40 brilliant recipes for everything from fish sticks to pies, sausage and chorizo, Fish Butchery will disrupt, challenge and inspire the next generation.

There’s Always Room for Cheese

Colin Wood

Colin Wood has worked in some of the world’s best restaurants as the self-proclaimed “casual cheese guy”, and now he wants to teach everyone from amateur cooks to experienced chefs the skills he has learned, including how to make, store and eat cheese. In this book, Colin starts with the basics, from the equipment and ingredients you’ll need right through to concocting the perfect cheeseboard. There’s Always Room for Cheese also features a range of deliciously creative cheesy dishes.

Sustain

Jo Barrett

Author Jo Barrett is one of Australia’s most respected chefs and was part of the team behind urban eco-house futurefoodsystem, a landmark experiment in zero-waste living. Her striking debut provides innovative and achievable solutions to help you connect with your food system, with more than 90 purposeful, nutritious recipes. Featuring brilliant dishes from stuffed potato cakes to red pepper pasta, venison pie and plum galette, this vital book shows the home cook how to master simple techniques, such as fermenting, preserving and using alternative ingredients, helping to save the planet one delicious meal at a time.

$55, Hardie Grant

Simple Noodles

Pippa Middlehurst

Fresh Stephanie Alexander

For the past 20 years, Stephanie Alexander, Australia’s most respected and authoritative cook and food writer, has been encouraging our children to develop a deep love of good food. Through the Kitchen Garden Foundation, she has helped more than 1,000 Australian schools and many thousands of families learn the simple but profound pleasures of the garden, the kitchen and the table. In Fresh, she shares more than 120 recipes, most of them based on vegetables. These are the recipes that primaryaged children have cooked with flair and shared with enjoyment. They are quick to prepare, have inexpensive ingredients and taste delicious.

In Simple Noodles, Pippa Middlehurst guides you through making your favourite noodle dishes at home with 60 versatile recipes that make the most of packet noodles. From quick stir-fries to saucy noodles, soupy noodles and jazzed-up instant noodles, each recipe is useful, practical and easy to follow – perfect for anyone who wants quick and easy dishes that don’t compromise on flavour.

$39.99, Quadrille

Also out this month

Alternative Reality: How

Australian Wine Changed Course

Max Allen

$49.99, Melbourne Books

The Very Hungry Coeliac

Melanie Persson

$44.95, Affirm

Chefs’ Kitchens

Stephen Crafti

$69.99, Images Publishing

$44.99, Macmillan

$29.99 Plum

$70 Hardie Grant

$50, Hardie Grant

Reid All About It

Mid-year reading Part 2: Nonfiction

The Last Grain Race

Eric Newby

$21.99, HarperCollins

“ In the summer of 1938, I wrote to the Finnish shipowner Gustav Erikson asking for a job. I was eighteen ... I had always been attracted to the sea, and I impulsively wrote offering myself as an apprentice on one of his sailing ships.”

Thus begins Eric Newby’s account of his apprenticeship voyage aboard the windjammer S.V. Moshulu, a four masted, steel-hulled barque and the largest grain-carrying ship of the day.

A grain race was the annual squarerigged windjammer sailing journey between Australia to the UK. An unofficial competition between the ships loaded with produce from the South Australian wheat belt. The contest flourished between 1920-39.

Young Eric joined a mostly Swedish and Finnish crew of 28. He describes the constant – often extremely arduous – work of maintaining a windjammer and hauling sail and the maritime ceremonies – upon “Crossing the Line” – the Equator:

“ Sitting astride the end of the bowsprit I had the sensation of flying through the air into the Southern Hemisphere.”

Experiencing a ferocious Southern Ocean storm on the return voyage:

“

As I watched the poop [deck] began to sink before my eyes and the horizon astern was blotted out by a high polished wall, solid and impenetrable like marble ... At the moment when it seemed that this impregnable mass must engulf us, a rift appeared in its face and it collapsed beneath the ship, bearing her up ... now like a bird skimming the water, supported by the wind high above the valley.

After eight months, Eric’s voyage ends at Queenstown, Ireland in June 1939:

“ ‘Coming again?’ the captain asked me, as he signed my discharge – by now I was a lättmatros or Ordinary Seaman.

‘I’ll think it over,’ I said. But within a few months war began to disperse the Erikson fleet.”

This is a maritime travel writing classic. A wonderful, descriptive account of an astonishing bygone age of both ships and sailors.

Killing Thatcher

Rory Carroll

$34.99, HarperCollins

Friday 12 October 1984. The final day of the Conservative Party Conference at the seaside town of Brighton. The bomb was a 20kg package of gelignite, covered in plastic wrap to avoid detection by sniffer dogs.

It had been placed under the bath in Room 629 of the Grand Hotel on 14-17 September by Irish Republican Army volunteer Patrick Magee. This was five floors above the prime minister’s suite.

At 2.54am the bomb exploded. A five-ton chimney stack crashed down through the façade of the hotel. Five people were killed and 34 injured; several were permanently disabled.

Margaret Thatcher survived.

The IRA had been ramping up its bombing campaign since the mid-1970s. The aftermath of pub bombs in Guildford, Birmingham and Woolwich in 1974-75 left 21 dead and four innocent people known as the Guildford Four imprisoned for 15 years after the British government withdrew political status from those convicted of terrorist acts following the assassination of Lord Mountbatten in 1979.

The IRA was also flush with funds in this period – especially from supporters in the United States after the deaths of 10 hunger strikers in the Maze Prison in Belfast, between May and October 1981. In December 1983, Harrods department store in central London was car bombed. Six died.

The IRA issued a statement following the Brighton bombing: “

Mrs Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.

Journalist Rory Carroll gives a superbly researched and written account of the whole dramatic episode: the political atmosphere; the planning; the aftermath and – decades later – the moving reconciliation between some of the victims, their children and the perpetrators.

– Stephen Reid

PERFORMING ARTS

Lost Music of the Holocaust

Francesco Lotoro

For more than 30 years Francesco Lotoro, an Italian pianist and composer has been on an odyssey to recover music written by the inmates of Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps and the gulags of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Lotoro unearthed more than 8,000 unpublished works of music, 10,000 documents and interviewed many survivors who had been trained musicians and composers. Many pieces were hastily scribbled down on whatever the composer could find: food wrappings, a vegetable sack and even a train ticket stub. In many cases, the composers would be murdered in the gas chambers or worked to death, not knowing whether their music would be heard by the world. Their stories and their music add colour and humanity to the horrors of the Holocaust and Stalin’s oppressive rule.

$34.99, Headline

Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile

Fiona Maddocks

Sergei Rachmaninoff left Petrograd in 1917 while the country was in the throes of the Russian Revolution. He was 44 years old and at the peak of his powers as composerconductor-performer. He had already written the music which has made him one of the most popular composers of all time. Once in the US, he quickly reinvented himself as a feted virtuoso pianist, building up untold wealth and meeting the stars – from Walt Disney and Charlie Chaplin to his Russian contemporaries Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Yet the melancholy of leaving his homeland never lifted. Using a wide range of sources, including newly translated texts, Maddocks’ immensely readable book builds a portrait of this enigmatic figure, exploring his life as an emigre artist and how he clung to an Old Russia that no longer existed.

$49.99, Faber

Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me

Bernie Taupin

“This is the most glorious of books. I am besotted by the life I never knew he had.” – Elton John

Bernie Taupin is half of one of the greatest creative partnerships in popular music: he wrote the lyrics for Elton John and conceived the ideas that spawned countless hits, and sold millions and millions of records. Written with honesty, candour and an infectious energy that only a vivid songwriter’s prose could offer, Scattershot follows Taupin from his childhood in the East Midlands of England to the glittering, star-studded fishbowl of ’70s and ’80s Beverly Hills.

Holding the Note

David Remnick

The greatest popular songs, whether it’s Aretha Franklin singing Respect or Bob Dylan performing Blind Willie McTell, have a way of embedding themselves in our memories. You remember a time and a place and a feeling when you hear that song again. In Holding the Note, David Remnick writes about the lives and work of some of the greatest musicians and songwriters of the past 50 years, including Leonard Cohen, Buddy Guy, Mavis Staples, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and more. These are intimate portraits of some of the greatest creative minds of our time written with a lifetime’s passionate attachment to music that has shaped us all.

$36.99, Picador

Full Coverage

For more than 50 years, Australia has maintained its own rock press – a vibrant, passionate, sometimes volatile industry of dozens of papers and magazines committed to the coverage of the country’s robust music scene. Drawing on comprehensive research and dozens of interviews with key figures such as Molly Meldrum, Phillip Frazer and Lily Brett, journalist Samuel J. Fell captures the vivacity of music journalism in Australia with colourful anecdotes and surprising stories. From the glossy and glamorous to the punk and pernicious, these publications were the medium that launched the careers of countless musicians, as well as writers, editors and photographers.

$36.99, Monash

DO NOT DETONATE Without Presidential Approval

Edited

by Wes Anderson and Jake Perlin

Featuring eight newly commissioned pieces alongside more than 20 classic essays from the likes of François Truffaut and Jonas Mekas, Do Not Detonate explores key influences on director Wes Anderson’s latest film Asteroid City. Together they form a detailed, captivating portrait of the mid-century film world and the enduring myths of the American West. It includes an exclusive interview with Wes Anderson in which the director details how the pieces collected here shaped the characters, stories, and settings in the film.

$22.99, Pushkin

Samual J. Fell

$34.99 Monoray

Mina Loy

Jennifer Gross

Bauhaus Style

Mateo Kries

Discover the fascinating world of the Bauhaus, the most influential art school of the 20th century, and its lasting impact on modern culture. From architecture and art to design, fashion, film and photography, the Bauhaus revolutionised interdisciplinary practices and inspired generations of artists worldwide. This community of like-minded individuals generated an enormous concentration of artistic energy and continues to shape the modern aesthetic we know today. This volume, curated by Mateo Kries, curator of the Vitra Design Museum, offers new perspectives and surprising insights into the movement. It contains 225 images illustrating Bauhaus-inspired art and design, from the past 100 years, including architecture, art, objects, and fashion.

$220, Assouline

Cult Heels: Exceptional Talent in Shoe Design

Ursula Carranza

This magnificent book spotlights the exciting and innovative contemporary international shoemakers whose in-demand designs are hip, feminine and chic. For these designers, staying true to their aesthetic principles and producing high quality creations is their top goal. The result is unique designs beloved by stylists, fashion mavens and celebrities. This celebration of their work contains 310 illustrations bringing their groundbreaking and imaginative designs to life.

$59.99, Loft

Herzog & De Meuron

Ila Bek

Mina Loy (1882–1966) was one of the most iconoclastic figures in modernism. A groundbreaking poet, she also left an indelible mark in painting, drawing, prose, art criticism, and fashion. Mina Loy: Strangeness Is Inevitable is the first book to examine the full scope of her extraordinary career, demonstrating Loy’s transformative impact on the visual arts as well as the literary avantgarde of the 20th century. It features dozens of her paintings, drawings, and constructions alongside selections of her poems and writings, and includes rare and previously unpublished artworks that reveal this visionary artist’s extraordinary contributions as an image-maker, writer, and cultural arbiter, introducing her work to a new generation of readers and charting new directions in art history, women’s studies, poetry, and modernism.

$89.99, Princeton

Renowned for such prominent buildings as London’s Tate Modern, Beijing’s Bird’s Nest National Stadium and 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, Herzog & de Meuron sits at the cutting edge of contemporary design. Founded in Basel more than 40 years ago, the Swiss architectural practice is now an international partnership with projects across the globe, including museums, hospitals, skyscrapers, arenas and private and civic buildings. Produced in close collaboration with the architects, and comprising new texts by leading writers, practitioners and thinkers, this exciting new publication gives an authoritative account of the inner workings of what The New York Times dubbed “one of the most admired architecture firms in the world”.

$49.99, Royal Academy of Arts

Customisable Pop-up Paper Spheres

Seiji Tsukimoto

Famous in Japan for his three-dimensional pop-up art, Seiji Tsukimoto teaches readers to create amazing globe-shaped, decorative forms simply by cutting and folding paper. Each design folds down to a flat surface and, when pressed at both ends, shifts to a sphere that features images, messages, and intricate patterns based on themes including classic children’s tales, Christmas, Easter and more. These intricate designs are simple enough for beginners and versatile enough to be a springboard for advanced paper artists and includes ready-to-assemble templates and 300 images.

$62.99, Schiffer

CRAFT

GARDENING

Modern Japanese Gardens

Shinobu

Sawada

FASHION

Sustainable Wardrobe

Sophie Benson

$75, ACC Art

Books

A Japanese garden represents the essence of Japanese culture, embodying the country’s spirit and philosophy. Modern Japanese Gardens illustrates this through the work of 20 contemporary Japanese garden design masters and features gardens from all over Japan. Some are of traditional appearance; others have a distinctly modern aesthetic. All have been created by masters who are internationally recognised and lauded for their skills. Modern Japanese Gardens includes insightful text on each garden, revealing the concept behind the design and the use of plants, alongside 300 colour photographs and illustrations.

SUSTAINABILITY

Live Greener

Cayetano Cardelus Vidal

In recent decades, there has been a growing awareness of environmental issues in society, from the catastrophic consequences of climate change to the degradation of the natural environment. The practice of “Green Architecture” stands as one of the main tools to promote a change of course that helps to ensure the sustainability of the planet and the preservation of its natural heritage. This book showcases recent house designs which exemplify green architecture and how such houses provide sustainable living environments.

$59.99, Loft Pub

The Handover

David Runciman

A few hundred years ago, humans started building the robots that now rule our world. They are called states and corporations: immensely powerful artificial entities, with capacities that go far beyond what any individual can do, and which, unlike us, need never die. They have made us richer, safer and healthier than would have seemed possible even a few generations ago – and they may yet destroy us. The Handover distills more than 300 years of thinking about how to live with artificial agency.

$34.99, Profile Books

TECHNOLOGY FISHING

The Catch

Anna Clark

The amount of clothes we are consuming, maintaining and discarding is having a devastating effect on the planet. So what can we do to make a difference? Sophie Benson believes that small steps can result in a big change. She breaks down the issues, from the clothes we buy, to the way we care for them, to how we dispose of them. She provides easy tutorials that will show you that small changes in habit can result in a more sustainable, eco-friendly wardrobe without breaking the bank.

$35, White Lion

TRAVEL

The Mindful Traveller

Nina Karnikowski

A stunning memoir and manifesto about the ethics of modern travel by travel journalist Nina Karnikowski. In The Mindful Traveller, she takes an expedition to the very essence of travel, reflecting on the profound and transformative experiences to be had from heading into the wild, and how to travel in a way that is as nourishing for the places we visit as they are for us. Nina provides a road map for anyone looking to broaden their horizons while better caring for our environment, by hiking, camping, connecting to First Nations communities, forest bathing, gardening and meditating.

$32.99, Vintage

In every coastal, town in Australia, there is a bait shop and a boat ramp. Walk over a bridge, look across to a wharf and there will be people casting a line. Many people have a special fishing spot, and families pass on tips from generation to generation. Bringing her personal passion for throwing in a line, author and historian Anna Clark celebrates the enduring pleasure of fishing in The Catch She charts its history, from the first-known accounts of Indigenous fishing and early European encounters with Australia’s waters, to the latest fishing fads; from the introduction of trout and flyfishing, to the challenges of balancing the needs of commercial and recreational fishers.

$34.99, Affirm

Also out this month

The Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook

Kirsten Bradley

$45, Murdoch

Birds with Personality

Georgia Angus

$26.99, Hardie Grant

The Age of Decadence Simon Heffer

Encounters with Euclid Benjamin Wardhaugh

Becoming Dr. Seuss Brian Jay Jones

Ghost Music An Yu

Analects of Confucius Confucius

Europe’s Babylon Michael Pye

Charles Darwin’s Barnacle & David Bowie’s Spider Stephen Heard

Girl, Woman, Other Bernardine Evaristo

Apeirogon Colum McCann

The Evolution of Charles Darwin Diana Preston

The Committed Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Great War Carolyn Holbrook and Keir Reeves

A Ballet of Lepers Leonard Cohen

Flames of Extinction John Pickrell

Convenience Store Woman Sayaka Murata

Heaven on Earth Jacob Fauber

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Was $40 NOW $16.95

Why Read: Selected Writing 2001-2021 Will Self

The Heroine with 1001 Faces Maria Tatar

Patti Smith: Camera Solo Patti Smith and Susan Talbot

The Man in the Red Coat Julian Barnes

Time for Socialism Thomas Piketty

How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs Elizabeth Thompson

Peggy Guggenheim Francine Prose

Manifesto Bernardine Evaristo

Warner Bros: The Making of an American Movie Studio David Thomson

How to Walk on Water and Climb up Walls David L. Hu

A Primer for Forgetting Lewis Hyde

Mantel Pieces Hilary Mantel

Ways of Hearing Dorothea Von Moltke

Last Days of Roger Federer Geoff Dyer

Selected Works Samuel Beckett

The Neither/Nor of the Second Sex Celine Leon

$34.99, Andrews McMeel

a “Working Life”

Eileen Myles

The stunning new collection from peerless writer, activist and poet Eileen Myles captures the many dualities of human life: loneliness and companionship, city and country, youth and ageing, travel and stasis, fear and wonder. Here, she depicts the beauty and ridiculousness of love and sex, articulates the immense anxieties about the future world threatened by climate change and capitalism, and finds transcendent wonder in the landscapes and animals around us, and in the radical human act of caring for one another and our world. With humour, beauty and singular vision, a “Working Life” shows Eileen Myles working at the height of their poetic and philosophical powers.

$29.99, Grove

This Day Is dark

r.h. Sin

r.h. Sin’s This Day Is Dark is a blistering case study of red flags being mistaken for passion and love falling into the hands of the wrong people explored in his signature poetic voice. This heartbreaking and relatable collection of poetry and prose is an evocative exploration of how it feels when forever is temporary and once-celebrated love becomes unrecognisable.

ORDER FORM

ABN 87 000 357 317

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The Poetry of Birds

Anthology, edited by Samuel Carr

Timeless works by the world’s greatest poets are paired with enchanting illustrations by Audubon in this anthology of works inspired by our feathered friends. The Poetry of Birds includes poems by Chaucer, Blake, Shakespeare and Milton; Wordsworth, Baudelaire, Tennyson, Keats and Shelley; Yeats, de la Mare, Laurie Lee and Ted Hughes; and Thoreau, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost – and many more.

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Delivery charges: Gleeclub members: free postage within Australia. Non-Gleeclub members: $10 Australia wide. For larger orders post office charges apply. For express, courier and international, rates apply accordingly.

$29.99, Batsford

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