The End of Gender - Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society by Debra Soh

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Category: New Hardbacks

International sex researcher, neuroscientist, and columnist Debra Soh debunks popular gender myths in this research-based, scientific examination of the many facets of gender identity. Is our gender something we're born with, or are we conditioned by society? In The End of Gender, neuroscientist and sex ologist Dr. Debra Soh uses a research-based approach to address this hot-button topic, unmasking popular misconceptions about the nature vs. nurture debate and exploring what it means to be a woman or a man in today's society. Both scientific and objective, and drawing on original research and carefully conducted interviews, Soh tackles a wide range of issues, such as gender-neutral parenting, gender dysphoric children, and and the neuroscience of being transgender. She debates today's accepted notion that gender is a social construct and a spectrum, and challenges the idea that there is no difference between how male and female brains operate. The End of Gender is a conversation-starting work that will challenge what you thought you knew about gender, identity, and everything in between. Timely, informative, and provocative, it will arm you with the facts you need to come to your own conclusions about gender identity and its place in the world today. ...Show more

The Story of China: A Portrait of a Civilisation and Its People by Michael Wood

$59.99 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

China's story is extraordinarily rich and dramatic. Now Michael Wood, one of the UK's pre-eminent historians, brings it all together in a major new one-volume history of China that is essential for reading for anyone who wants to understand its burgeoning role in our world today. China is the oldest li ving civilisation on earth, but its history is still surprisingly little known in the wider world. Michael Wood's sparkling narrative, which mingles the grand sweep with local and personal stories, woven together with the author's own travel journals, is an enthralling account of China's 4000-year-old tradition, taking in life stationed on the Great Wall or inside the Forbidden City. The story is enriched with the latest archaeological and documentary discoveries; correspondence and court cases going back to the Qin and Han dynasties; family letters from soldiers in the real-life Terracotta Army; stories from Silk Road merchants and Buddhist travellers, along with memoirs and diaries of  emperors, poets and peasants.    In the modern era, the book is full of new insights, with the electrifying manifestos of the feminist revolutionaries Qiu Jin and He Zhen, extraordinary eye-witness accounts of the Japanese invasion, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution under Chairman Mao, and fascinating newly published sources for the great turning points in China's modern history, including the Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989, and the new order of  President Xi Jinping.   A compelling portrait of a single civilisation over an immense period of time, the book is full of intimate detail and colourful voices, taking us from the desolate Mongolian steppes to the ultra-modern world of Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. It also asks what were the forces that have kept China together for so long? Why was China overtaken by the west after the 18th century? What lies behind China's extraordinary rise today? The Story of China tells a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity and deep humanity; a portrait of a country that will be of the greatest importance to the world in the twenty-first century. ...Show more

Unfinished Tales (illustrated edition) by J.r.r. Tolkien; Christopher Tolkien (Editor); Alan Lee (Illustrator); John Howe (Illustrator); Ted Nasmith (Illustrator)

$59.99 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

Sumptuous, 40th anniversary collector's edition of this collection of tales which takes readers further into the stories told in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, featuring 18 full-colour paintings depicting scenes from the First, Second and Third Ages of Middle-earth, and housed i n a matching illustrated slipcase. Unfinished Tales is a collection of narratives ranging in time from the Elder Days of Middle-earth to the end of the War of the Ring, and provides those who have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with a whole collection of background and new stories. The book concentrates on the realm of Middle-earth and comprises such elements as The Quest of Erebor, Gandalf's lively account of how it was that he came to send the Dwarves to the celebrated party at Bag-End; the emergence of the sea-god Ulmo before the eyes of Tuor on the coast of Beleriand; and an exact description of the military organization of the Riders of Rohan. Unfinished Tales also contains the only story about the long ages of Númenor before its downfall, and all that is known about such matters as the Five Wizards, the Palantíri and the legend of Amroth. The tales were edited by Christopher Tolkien, who provides a short commentary on each story, helping the reader to fill in the gaps and put each story into the context of the rest of his father's writings. In celebration of its 40th anniversary, this new edition features 18 stunning paintings from critically acclaimed Tolkien artists, Alan Lee, John Howe & Ted Nasmith, which reveal the three Ages of Middle-earth like never before. This special collector's edition is printed on superior quality paper, features a unique special binding and ribbon marker and is housed in a custom-made, fully illustrated slipcase. ...Show more

The Liar's Dictionary by Eley Williams

$33.00 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

mountweazel n. a fake entry deliberately inserted into a dictionary or work of reference. Often used as a safeguard against copyright infringement. It is the final year of the nineteenth century and Peter Winceworth has reached the letter 'S', toiling away for the much-anticipated and multi-volume Swan sby's New Encyclopaedic Dictionary. He is overwhelmed at his desk and increasingly uneasy that his colleagues are attempting to corral language and regiment facts. Compelled to assert some sense of individual purpose and exercise artistic freedom, Winceworth begins inserting unauthorised, fictitious entries into the dictionary. In the present day, young intern Mallory is tasked with uncovering these mountweazels as the text of the dictionary is digitised for modern readers. Through the words and their definitions she finds she has access to their creator's motivations, hopes and desires. More pressingly, she must also field daily threatening anonymous phone calls. Is a suggested change to the dictionary's definition of marriage (n.) really that controversial? What power does Mallory have when it comes to words and knowing how to tell the truth? And does the caller really intend for the Swansby's staff to 'burn in hell'? As their two narratives combine, Winceworth and Mallory must discover how to negotiate the complexities of an often nonsensical, untrustworthy, hoax-strewn and undefinable life. The Liar's Dictionary explores themes of trust and creativity, naming the unnameable, and celebrates the rigidity, fragility and absurdity of language. It is an exhilarating debut novel from a formidably brilliant young writer. ...Show more

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

$35.00 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

Animals don't exist to teach us things, but that is what they have always done, and most of what they teach us is what we think we know about ourselves. From the internationally acclaimed author of H is for Hawk comes Vesper Flights, a transcendent collection of essays about the human relationship to th e natural world. In Vesper Flights Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved pieces, along with new essays on topics and stories ranging from nostalgia and science fiction to the true account of a refugee's flight to the UK. Her pieces ranges from accounts of swan upping on the Thames to watching tens of thousands of cranes in Hungary to seeking the last golden orioles in Suffolk's poplar forests. She writes about wild boar, swifts, mushroom hunting, migraines, the strangeness of birds' nests, what we do when we watch wildlife and why. This is a book about observation, fascination, time, memory, love and loss and how we make the world around us, by one of this century's most important and insightful nature writers. ...Show more

Pelsaert's Nightmare by Gregory Hansen

$45.00 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

In the antipodean winter of 1629, the Dutch East Indiaman 'Batavia' was wrecked on the desolate cays of the Houtman Abrolhos, an island chain lying beyond the sea horizon of what is now Western Australia. One year later her merchant commander, Francisco Pelsaert, lies dying in a mildewed room outside t he walls of Batavia Castle (modern-day Jakarta), the stigma of shipwreck and bloody mutiny foreclosing on his legacy. With only a servant-carer and the occasional visitor to relieve his solitude, he passes the hours in haunted reflection of events which have shaped his life. From the Netherlands and its colonial outposts to Mogul India and the coastal wildernesses of the Great South Land, Pelsaert's tale is one of many parts and places, of exotic encounter and shrouded pleasure to unnerving dreams and thwarted certainties. Ultimately, 'Pelsaert's Nightmare' is a journey in the quest for redemption. The manuscript was shortlisted for the inaugural 2016 First Novel Prize in the United Kingdom and was a First Place Category Winner in the 2018 Chaucer Book Awards for Pre-1750s Historical Fiction. ...Show more

A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville

$39.99 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

Do not believe too quickly... What if Elizabeth Macarthur-wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney-had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? In her introduction Kate Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of discovering a long-hidden box containing that memoir. What follows is a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented. Grenville's Elizabeth Macarthur is a passionate woman managing her complicated life-marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her own heart, the search for power in a society that gave her none-with spirit, cunning and sly wit. Her memoir reveals the dark underbelly of the polite world of Jane Austen. It explodes the stereotype of the women of the past- devoted and docile, accepting of their narrow choices. That was their public face-here's what one of them really thought. At the heart of this book is one of the most toxic issues of our times- the seductive appeal of false stories. Beneath the surface of Elizabeth Macarthur's life and the violent colonial world she navigated are secrets and lies with the dangerous power to shape reality. A Room Made of Leaves is the internationally acclaimed author Kate Grenville's first novel in almost a decade. It is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand that gives the past the piercing immediacy of the present.   ...Show more

Hollow Places: an Unusual History of Land and Legend by Christopher Hadley

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Category: New Hardbacks

'Impossible to summarise and delightfully absorbing, Hadley's book is comfortably the most unexpected history book of the year' Sunday Times A luminous journey through a thousand years of folklore and English history. Once upon a time in a Hertfordshire field, an ancient yew tree hid a dragon hunted by a giant named Piers Shonks. Today, the dragon and its slayer are the survivors of an 800-year battle between rural legend and national record, storytellers and sceptics. In this brilliant and lyrical history, Christopher Hadley journeys from churches to tombs to manuscript margins, to explore history, memory and legend, and the magical spaces where all three meet. ...Show more

Down Days: A Novel by Hugo, Ilze

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Category: New Hardbacks

An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky; Jackie Smith (Translator)

$45.00 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

A dazzling cabinet of curiosities from one of Europe's most acclaimed and inventive writers. Judith Schalansky's strange and wonderful new book, recalling writers as different as W.G. Sebald and Christa Wolf, Joan Didion and Rebecca Solnit, sees her return to the territory she explored so successfully w ith her best-selling Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will, which Robert MacFarlane called "utterly exquisite" (Guardian) and about which Time Out's reviewer said "Rarely has armchair travel been so farflung and romantic". Judith Schalansky is a wholly original writer whose books articulate perfectly what she wishes to say. Each of the pieces, following the conventions of a different genre, considers something that is irretrievably lost to the world, including the paradisal pacific island of Tuanaki, the Caspian Tiger, the Villa Sacchetti in Rome, Sappho's love poems, Greta Garbo's fading beauty, a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, and the former East Germany's Palace of the Republic. As a child of the former East Germany, it's not surprising that the dominant emotion in Schalansky's work should be "loss" and its aftermath, but what is extraordinary is the thoroughly engaging mixture of intellectual curiosity, down-to-earth grasp of life's pitiless vitality, ironic humour, stylistic elegance and intensity of feeling that combine to make this book a masterpiece and one of the most original and beautifully designed books to be published in 2020. Translated from the German by Jackie Smith ...Show more

Hurricane Season by Melchor, Fernanda, Hughes, Sophie

$43.00 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse has the whole village investigating the murder. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these ch aracters--inners whom most people would write off as irredeemable--forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.Like Roberto Bolano's 2666 or Faulkner's novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world saturated with mythology and violence--real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it's a world that becomes more and more terrifying the deeper you explore it. ...Show more

Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty

$29.99 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

Winner of the 2020 Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing.   Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of 15-year-old Dara McAnulty's world. From spring and through a year in his home patch in Northern Ireland, Dara spent the seasons writing. These vivid, evocative and moving diary entries abo ut his connection to wildlife and the way he sees the world are raw in their telling. Diary of a Young Naturalist portrays Dara's intense connection to the natural world, and his perspective as a teenager juggling exams and friendships alongside a life of campaigning. 'In writing this book,' Dara explains, 'I have experienced challenges but also felt incredible joy, wonder, curiosity and excitement. In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child's eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere.'   Dara lives with his mum, dad, brother Lorcan, sister Bláthnaid and rescue greyhound Rosie in County Down, Northern Ireland. Dara's love for nature, his activism and his honesty about autism, has earned him a huge social media following from across the world and many accolades: in 2017 he was awarded BBC Springwatch 'Unsprung Hero' Award and Birdwatch magazine 'Local Hero'; in 2018 he was awarded 'Animal Hero' of the year by the Daily Mirrorand became ambassador for RSPCA and the iWill campaign; in 2019 he became a Young Ambassador for the Jane Goodall Institute and became the youngest ever recipient of the RSPB Medal for conservation. 'We share a mind, a fascination with nature and a forthright desire to make the world a better place for it. I can't wait to read Dara's book.' Chris Packham 'Dara's is an extraordinary voice and vision: brave, poetic, ethical, lyrical, strong enough to have made him heard and admired from a young age.' Robert Macfarlane 'Our planet and its wildlife are in a dire state, but if anyone can help save them, Dara can - and he's bringing our generation along with him.' Bella Lack ...Show more