One Day I'll Remember This: Diaries 1987-1995 by Helen Garner

$29.99 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

Helen Garner's second volume of diaries charts a tumultuous stage in her life. Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming, and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the bombshell that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in l ove and a great writer at work. With devastating honesty, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another--how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both thrilling and uncompromising. And through it all we see the elevating, and grounding, power of work.   ...Show more

Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

$35.00 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks | Reading Level: near fine

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

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. Wha t 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

A Jealous Tide by Anna MacDonald

$34.99 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

A restless woman upends her world, abandoning her domestic inertia to seek refuge in a foreign hemisphere. Purposefully unsettled on the labyrinthine streets of London, she assembles a new routine amid the afterglow of a story from a century earlier. A traumatised widow, doubly bereaved, threw herself i nto the icy Thames. A shell-shocked soldier, heading home from war, gave himself to the depths to save her. Now disoriented by slippages in time as well as place, the woman begins imagining her own presence in the lives of these two strangers entwined by fate. But as her days blur together, as her intrigue becomes obsession, and as her sympathies grow to encompass all manner of souls lost to water — drowned, shipwrecked, cast adrift, or driven to the poles of the planet — she feels her restlessness returning with all the power of a tide in flood. In this mesmerising début novel, Anna MacDonald finds a language of perpetual motion for an almost static experience of interior life. Lyrical, lilting, and melodious, her gentle words rise into rhythms that surge forth, then break and recede, leaving treasures in their wake. Hers is the poetry of alienation embodied: corporeal and sensory, spatial and recursive, making magic from a tilt of the head, a turn of the gaze, a stride, a halt, an interplay of gesture and orientation. In her dizzying proliferation of spirals and orbits, trajectories and bearings, her every sentence is a search for traction on a world that bewilders anew with every daily revolution. ...Show more

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

Rage by Bob Woodward

$49.99 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

Bob Woodward's new book, Rage, is an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of original reporting on the Trump presidency. Rage goes behind the scenes like never before, with stunning new details about early national security decisions and operations and Trump's moves as he faces a global pandemic, e conomic disaster and racial unrest. Woodward, the #1 internationally bestselling author of 13 #1 bestsellers, including Fear: Trump in the White House, shows Trump up close in his entirety before the 2020 presidential election. President Trump has said publicly that Woodward has interviewed him. What is not known is that Trump provided Woodward a window into his mind through a series of exclusive interviews. At key decision points, Rage shows how Trump's responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president. Rage draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand witnesses, as well as participants' notes, emails, diaries, calendars and confidential documents. Woodward obtained 25 personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un that have not been public before. Kim describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a "fantasy film," as the two leaders engage in an extraordinary diplomatic minuet. Rage will be the foundational account of the Trump presidency, its turmoil, contradictions and risks. It is an essential document for any voter seeking an accurate inside view of the Trump years - volatile and vivid.   ...Show more

The Mirror and the Light (#3 Thomas Cromwell) by Hilary Mantel

$45.00 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks | Series: The Wolf Hall Trilogy | Reading Level: very good

The long-awaited sequel to Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies; the stunning conclusion to Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning Thomas Cromwell trilogy. ‘If you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it?’. England, May 1536. Anne Boleyn is dead, decapitated in the spac e of a heartbeat by a hired French executioner. As her remains are bundled into oblivion, Thomas Cromwell breakfasts with the victors. The blacksmith’s son from Putney emerges from the spring’s bloodbath to continue his climb to power and wealth, while his formidable master, Henry VIII, settles to short-lived happiness with his third queen, before Jane dies giving birth to the male heir he most craves. Cromwell is a man with only his wits to rely on; he has no great family to back him, no private army. Despite rebellion at home, traitors plotting abroad and the threat of invasion testing Henry’s regime to breaking point, Cromwell’s robust imagination sees a new country in the mirror of the future. But can a nation, or a person, shed the past like a skin? Do the dead continually unbury themselves? What will you do, the Spanish ambassador asks Cromwell, when the king turns on you, as sooner or later he turns on everyone close to him? With The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.     ...Show more

A Promised Land: The Presidential Memoirs (Vol 1. HB) by Barack Obama

$65.00 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of th e first term of his historic presidency - a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation's highest office. Reflecting on the presidency, he offers a unique and thoughtful exploration of both the awesome reach and the limits of presidential power, as well as singular insights into the dynamics of U.S. partisan politics and international diplomacy. Obama brings readers inside the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room, and to Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, and points beyond. We are privy to his thoughts as he assembles his cabinet, wrestles with a global financial crisis, takes the measure of Vladimir Putin, overcomes seemingly insurmountable odds to secure passage of the Affordable Care Act, clashes with generals about U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, tackles Wall Street reform, responds to the devastating Deepwater Horizon blowout, and authorises Operation Neptune Spear, which leads to the death of Osama bin Laden. A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective — the story of one man's bet with history, the faith of a community organiser tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of hope and change and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible. This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama's conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.   ...Show more

Watsonia: A Writing Life by Don Watson

$49.99 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

No other writer has journeyed further into the soul of Australia and returned to tell the tale... Watsonia collects the fruits of a writing life. It covers everything from Australian bush humour to America gone berserk; from Don Bradman to Oscar Wilde; from Animal Farmto the Australian parliament. Wher ever Watson turns his incisive gaze, the results are as illuminating as they are enjoyable. Artfully arranged, Watsonia showcases the many sides of Don Watson- historian, speechwriter, commentator, humourist, nature writer and biographer. It also features several previously unpublished lectures and a wide-ranging introduction by the author. This comprehensive anthology - replete with wit, wisdom and diverse pleasures - is essential reading. ...Show more

Phosphorescence: On Awe, Wonder and Things That Sustain You When the World Goes Dark by Julia Baird

$32.99 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks

A beautiful, intimate and inspiring investigation into how we can find and nurture within ourselves that essential quality of internal happiness - the 'light within' that Julia Baird calls 'phosphorescence' - which will sustain us even through the darkest times. Over the last decade, we have become bett er at knowing what brings us contentment, well-being and joy. We know, for example, that there are a few core truths to science of happiness. We know that being kind and altruistic makes us happy, that turning off devices, talking to people, forging relationships, living with meaning and delving into the concerns of others offer our best chance at achieving happiness. But how do we retain happiness? It often slips out of our hands as quickly as we find it. So, when we are exposed to, or learn, good things, how do we continue to burn with them?And more than that, when our world goes dark, when we're overwhelmed by illness or heartbreak, loss or pain, how do we survive, stay alive or even bloom? In the muck and grit of a daily existence full of disappointments and a disturbing lack of control over many of the things that matter most - finite relationships, fragile health, fraying economies, a planet in peril - how do we find, nurture and carry our own inner, living light - a light to ward off the darkness? Absorbing, achingly beautiful, inspiring and deeply moving, Julia Baird has written exactly the book we need for these times. ...Show more

For Now (Why I Write) by Eileen Myles

$26.95 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks | Series: Why I Write Ser.

"[Myles] has a good time journeying through Hell, and like a hip Virgil, . . . is happy to show us the way."--NPR   In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity's immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; exist ential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time.   For Myles, time's "optic quality" is what enables writing in the first place--as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists. ...Show more

Uncanny Valley A Memoir by Wiener, Anna

$42.99 AUD

Category: New Hardbacks