In this highly original account of Mahler’s life and work, Norman Lebrecht explores the Mahler Effect – why it is that the work of this composer holds such a fascination for so many people still, a century after his death., Many believe his music has the power to heal emotional wounds and ease the pain of death. Others struggle with the intellectual fascination of its contradictory meanings. In this multi-layered exploration of the role that music plays in our lives Lebrecht wonders how this music captures the yearnings and anxieties of post-industrial society.
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Gabriel Brockwell, aesthete, poet, philosopher, disaffected twenty-something decadent, is thinking terminal. His philosophical enquiries, the abstractions he indulges, and how these relate to a life lived, all point in the same direction. Taking in London, Tokyo and Berlin, Lights Out In Wonderland documents Gabriel Brockwell’s remarkable global odyssey. An allegorical banquet and a sly commentary on these End Times and the march towards insensate banality, DBC Pierre’s third novel completes a loose trilogy of fictions.
Former rock singer Hollis Henry has lost a lot of money in the crash, which means she can’t turn down the offer of a job from Hubertus Bigend, sinister Belgian proprietor of mysterious ad agency Blue Ant. Hollis is at the front line of Bigend’s attempts to get a slice of the military budget, and she gradually realises he has some very dangerous competitors. Gibson’s new novel, set largely in London, spookily captures the paranoia and fear of our post-Crash times.
Travelling by small sailing craft, container ship and general cargo vessel, Simon Winchester journeys around the edges and across the vast expanse of this ocean which stretches for 9 000 miles from pole to pole. Atlantic is an enthralling mixture of history, science and reportage that describes the birth of the ocean in distant geological time, the myriad of ways it has profoundly influenced human lives over the centuries through to its imagined extinction millions of years in the future.
Presenting the first grand history of democracy for well over a century, Keane poses some tough and timely questions: can we really be sure that democracy had its origins in ancient Greece? How did democratic ideals and institutions come to have the shape they do today? A fresh and irreverent look at the past, present and future of democracy that explains why it is still potentially the best form of government on earth — and why democracies everywhere are sleepwalking their way into deep trouble.
Inspired by antique mapmakers and their global vision, The West and the Map of the World presents the past as a single narrative in which European history is an offshoot of Asian history. Matthew Richardson explains that the dominating ethos of the modern West owes more to Asian nomads, who colonised Europe, than to the classical civilisation of the Greeks and Romans. Lavishly illustrated with more than 100 outstanding maps from the State Library of Victoria.
Most economists are obsessed with financial and economic measures. Ross Gittins mounts a provocative and persuasive case for a different approach. He argues that happiness is our most important measure of economic success. Distilling the practical wisdom from all the recent scientific study of happiness by psychologists and economists, Gittins argues that if governments put less emphasis on economic growth and efficiency, and more on preserving the planet and the social fabric our ‘national happiness would increase.
Bernardo Greene is attempting to rebuild his life. Imprisoned and tortured by Pinochet’s regime for introducing his students to political poetry, he has arrived at Copenhagen’s centre for rehabilitating torture victims at the age of forty-nine to begin again. Across from the King’s Garden, Michela Ibsen also seeks a new beginning. She has survived an abusive marriage and the death of a child. During a long Scandinavian summer these two lost souls begin to heal, to forgive and to trust themselves to love in a novel about passion, loss, pain, truth and salvation. 
Since the early 1980s, David Byrne has been riding a bicycle as his principal means of transportation in New York City. A few years later he discovered folding bikes, and starting taking them with him on music tour overseas, and experienced a sense of liberation as he pedalled around many of the world’s principal cities. From music and the visual arts, to globalisation, politics, the nature of creative work, fashion and art, this book gives the reader an insight into what Byrne is seeing and thinking as he pedals around these cities. A celebration of bike riding and seeing the world at bike level. New in paperback.
In a timely edition on what has become a key election issue the Griffith Review looks at population in Australia and how to strike the right balance between environmental preservation, cultural diversity and a robust economy. A major essay by Peter Mares explores the tensions between a humanitarian and an environmental approach to migration and population, with a look at the emergence of an anti-growth movement and political party and an evaluation of how we measure economic growth and quality of life.
As the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars gave way to retrenchment and repression 1824 became a watershed year. The premiere of the Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony signalled that the desire for freedom was not dead. In The Ninth, eminent music historian and biographer Harvey Sachs employs memoir, anecdote and his vast knowledge of history to explain how the premiere of Beethoven’s staggering last symphony was emblematic of its time – a work of art unlike any other – and a magisterial, humanistic statement.
The Cosmicomics tell the story of the history of the universe, from the big bang, through millennia and across galaxies. It is witnessed through the eyes of ‘cosmic know-it-all’ Qfwfq, an exuberant, chameleon-like figure, who takes the shape of a dinosaur, a mollusc, a steamer captain and a moon milk gatherer, among others. This is the first complete edition in English of Italo Calvino’s funny, whimsical and delightful stories, which blend scientific fact, flights of fancy, parody and wordplay to show the strangeness and the wonders of the world. New in paperback.
The sun brightens in the east, reddening the blue-grey haze that marks the distant ocean. The vultures roosting on the hydro poles fan out their wings to dry them. The air smells faintly of burning. The waterless flood, a manmade plague, has ended the world. But two young women have survived: Ren, a young dancer trapped where she worked, in an upmarket sex club (the cleanest dirty girls in town); and Toby, who watches and waits from her rooftop garden. Is anyone else out there? Atwood’s latest in paperback.
In Kadare’s latest novel an old woman is awoken in the dead of night by knocks at her front door. She opens it to find her daughter, Doruntine, standing there alone in the darkness. She has been brought home from a distant land by a mysterious rider she claims is her brother Konstandin. But unbeknownst to Doruntine, Konstandin has been dead for years. What follows is a chain of events which plunges an Albanian village into fear and mistrust. Kadare draws on the folklore of his country to tell this dark and mysterious tale.
Evelyn Waugh was already famous when Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945. Written at the height of the war, the novel was, he admitted, of no ?immediate propaganda value?. Instead, it was an elegy, in many ways, for a vanishing world and a testimony to a family he had fallen in love with a decade earlier. In her biography Paula Byrne sets out to capture Waugh through the friendships that meant so much to him and in doing so she illuminates the loves and obsessions that shaped his life.