Sorted on book title (not in series order)
Telling the story of Australia as it is today, Gabrielle Chan has gone hyper-local. Unpacking the small towns around where she lives and the communities that keep them going through threat and times of plenty. With half her year spent in Canberra, reporting from Parliament House, and half...Read more
'In fairytales, the characters who look different are often cast as the villain or monsters. It's only when they shed their unconventional skin that they are seen as "good" or less frightening. There are very few stories where the character that looks different is the hero of the story...Read more
A bold and uncompromising feminist manifesto that shows women and girls how to defy, disrupt, and destroy the patriarchy by embracing the qualities they've been trained to avoid.
Seizing upon the energy of the #MeToo movement, feminist activist Mona Eltahawy...Read more
Shadow Lines is the story of Jessie Argyle, born in the remote East Kimberley and taken from her Aboriginal family at the age of five, and Edward Smith, a young Englishman escaping the rigid structures of London who fell in love and married. Despite unrelenting surveillance and harassment,...Read more
Is Hamlet really mad or is the world mad? Is Othello merely gullible or is there something about his place in society that makes him vulnerable? Why can there be no happy ending to King Lear? In this radical approach to Shakespearean tragedy, Fintan O'Toole, Ireland's foremost theater critic, shows how Shakespeare's plays have been made unintelligible to modern students.Read more
On February 27, 1902, Lieutenant Harry Morant and Lieutenant Peter Hancock were shot by a British military firing squad. Both were serving in the Boer War as Australians under British command. They had been found guilty by court martial of killing Boer prisoners.
While there is...Read more
It is rare that a single book actually changes the course of history. Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, did exactly that. It spurred revolutionary changes in government policy toward the environment and was instrumental in launching the environmental movement that has made "ecology...Read more
Australian and New Zealand crime and thriller writing is booming globally, with antipodean authors regularly featuring on awards and bestseller lists across Europe and North America, and overseas readers and publishers looking more and more to tales from lands Down Under.
...Read more
Peter Wright’s Spycatcher received more legal attention than any other book in history. What started as an attempt by the Secret Service to muzzle a former M15 officer ended with the British Government on trial in Australia. The 1986 case made Spycatcher an international bestseller. And it...Read more
This is the story of one of the most extraordinary episodes in recent Australian political history, of how a powerful media pack, a vicious commentariat and some of those within her own party contrived to bring down Australia's first woman prime minister.
'Don't write crap. Can...Read more
"But down these mean streets must go a man who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished or afraid." When Raymond Chandler wrote these words in his classic The Simple Art of Murder, he drew a blueprint for the male private eyes who descend from Philip Marlowe to populate the world of...Read more
Revealing the invisible position of power and privilege in feminist practice, this accessible and provocative analysis elucidates the whiteness of Australian feminism. A pioneering work, it will overturn complacent notions of a mutual sisterhood and the common good.Read more
An extraordinarily powerful and personal meditation on race, culture and national identity.
In July 2015, as the debate over Adam Goodes being booed at AFL games raged and got ever more heated and ugly, Stan Grant wrote a short but powerful piece for The Guardian that went viral...Read more
Jamie wants to be the real thing. From the roots of her dyed blonde hair...
There are a lot of things Jamie hates about her life: her dark hair, her dad's Stone Age Charter of Curfew Rights, her real name - Jamilah Towfeek.
For the past three years Jamie has hidden...Read more
Jacky was running. There was no thought in his head, only an intense drive to run. There was no sense he was getting anywhere, no plan, no destination, no future. All he had was a sense of what was behind, what he was running from. Jacky was running.
The Natives of the...Read more
'Toksvig's Almanac is intended merely as a starting point for your own discoveries. Find a fabulous (or infamous) woman mentioned and, please, go looking for more of her story. The names mentioned are merely temptations. Amuse-bouches for the mind, if you like. How I would have loved to...Read more
Are urban legends no more than harmless tales of modern folklore, or is there something more sinister lurking beneath the surface? "Urban Legends Uncovered" investigates to reveal the truth behind the legends. From campfire classics that send shivers down the spine to the paranoia that...Read more
For the first time, Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history. Now free from the constraints of running, Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the...Read more
On the thirtieth anniversary of John Howard coming to power, a searing analysis of the untouchable prime minister: how the ‘great economic manager’ sold our future.
John Howard is often revered as one of the great Australian prime ministers (1996–2007):...Read more
This book is a study of the "mothers" of the mystery genre. Traditionally the invention of crime writing has been ascribed to Poe, Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle, but they had formidable women rivals, whose work has been until recently largely forgotten. The purpose of this book is to "...Read more
Alison Hoddinott writes about the history of crime fiction set in Oxford, from the early decades of the 20th century to the present. Her emphasis is on novels written by women and the ways in which their fiction deals with both the mystery and its solution and with the situation of women...Read more
A bonzer (p. 288) discussion of the strange but dinkum (p. 289) pedigree (p. 224) of the naughty (p. 202), nice (p. 212), and, sometimes, obscene (p. 217) English language.
We live in a torrent of words — from radio and television, books and newspapers, and now from the...Read more
Whatever you need, Susie Dent has a word for it.
Do you know the name for someone who loves reading in bed, or what a binfluencer does? How about the medieval invention of Lubberland as a place for lazy teenagers, or the...Read more
Widely acclaimed author Jackie French's journal of a year in the life of the Araluen Valley in the beautiful Southern Highlands of NSW. It's a combination of many stories - foxes in the autumn and the first of the asparagus, dashes to the school bus in the mornings and sleepy lizard...Read more
