Bring Up The Bodies

Hilary Mantel

Fourth Estate, LITERATURE, PB, 9780007353583

$25.41 ex $27.95 inc

'My boy Thomas, give him a dirty look and he'll gouge your eye out. Trip him, and he'll cut off your leg,' says Walter Cromwell in the year 1500. 'But if you don't cut across him he's a very gentleman. And he'll stand anyone a drink.' By 1535 Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son, is far from his humble origins. Chief Minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes have risen with those of Anne Boleyn, Henry's second wife, for whose sake Henry has broken with Rome and created his own church. But Henry's actions have forced England into dangerous isolation, and Anne has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. When Henry visits Wolf Hall, Cromwell watches as Henry falls in love with the silent, plain Jane Seymour. The minister sees what is at stake: not just the king's pleasure, but the safety of the nation. As he eases a way through the sexual politics of the court, its miasma of gossip, he must negotiate a 'truth' that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge undamaged from the bloody theatre of Anne's final days.

Zona: A Book About A Film About A Journey To A Room

Geoff Dyer

Text Pub, LITERARY CRITICISM, PB, 9781921922060

$20.86 ex $22.95 inc

Geoff Dyer, described by the Daily Telegraph as 'possibly the best living writer in Britain', takes on his biggest challenge yet: unlocking the film that has obsessed him all his adult life. Magnificently unpredictable and hilarious (and surely one of the most unusual books ever written about cinema), Zona takes the reader on an enthralling, thought-provoking journey. The ostensible subject of Zona is the film Stalker, by the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky. As Dyer immerses us in the movie, it becomes apparent that Stalker is only the point of departure for a wonderfully digressive exploration of cinema, of how we understand our obsessions and of how we try to realise - and, discover - our deepest wishes.

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance : 2010 Costa Biography Award

Edmund De Waal

Chatto & Windus, BIOGRAPHY/AUTO, PB, 9780099539551

$18.14 ex $19.95 inc

264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie. Later, when Edmund inherited the 'netsuke', they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined... The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the world; in the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new generation settling in Paris. Charles's passion was collecting; the netsuke, bought when Japanese objets were all the rage in the salons, were sent as a wedding present to his banker cousin in Vienna. Later, three children - including a young Ignace - would play with the netsuke as history reverberated around them. The Anschluss and Second World War swept the Ephrussis to the brink of oblivion. Almost all that remained of their vast empire was the netsuke collection, dramatically saved by a loyal maid when their huge Viennese palace was occupied. In this stunningly original memoir, Edmund de Waal travels the world to stand in the great buildings his forebears once inhabited. He traces the network of a remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century and tells the story of a unique collection.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson

Random House, BIOGRAPHY/AUTO, PB, 9780099556091

$18.14 ex $19.95 inc

In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, was published. It tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. The girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary. Instead she falls in love with a woman. Disaster.Written when Jeanette was only twenty-five, her novel went on to win the Whitbread First Novel award, become an international bestseller and inspire an award-winning BBC television adaptation.Oranges was semi-autobiographical. Mrs Winterson, a thwarted giantess, loomed over that novel and its author's life. When Jeanette finally left her home, at sixteen, because she was in love with a woman, Mrs Winterson asked her: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?This book is the story of a life's work to find happiness. It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a tyrant in place of a mother, who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the duster drawer, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an northern industrial town now changed beyond recognition, part of a community now vanished; about the Universe as a Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how the painful past Jeanette Winterson thought she had written over and repainted returned to haunt her later life, and sent her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other people's stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life-raft which supports us when we are sinking.Funny, acute, fierce and celebratory, this is a tough-minded search for belonging, for love, an identity, a home, and a mother.

The Office: A Hardworking History

Gideon Haigh

Miegunyah Press, SOCIOLOGY, PB, 9780522855562

$40.91 ex $45.00 inc

In The Office: A Hardworking History, Gideon Haigh traces from origins among merchants and monks to the gleaming glass towers of New York and the space age sweatshops of Silicon Valley, finding an extraordinary legacy of invention and ingenuity, shaped by the telephone, the typewriter, the elevator, the email, the copier, the cubicle, the personal computer, the personal digital assistant. Amid the formality, restraint and order of office life, too, he discovers a world teeming with dramas great and small, of boredom, betrayal, distraction, discrimination, leisure and lust, meeting along the way such archetypes as the Whitehall mandarin, the Wall Street banker, the Dickensian clerk, the Japanese salaryman, the French bureaucrat and the Soviet official. In doing so, Haigh taps a rich lode of art and cinema, fiction and folklore, visiting the workplaces imagined by Hawthorne and Heller, Kafka and Kurosawa, Balzac and Billy Wilder, and visualised from Mary Tyler Moore to Mad Men, from Network to 9 to 5 - plus, of course, The Office. Far from simply being a place we visit to earn a living, the office emerges as a way of seeing the entire world.

Salvage The Bones: National Book Award Winner 2011 : B Format Paperback

Jesmyn Ward

Bloomsbury, LITERATURE, PB, 9781408827000

$18.17 ex $19.99 inc

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. He's a hard drinker, largely absent, and it isn't often he worries about the family. Esch and her three brothers are stocking up on food, but there isn't much to save. Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; at fifteen, she has just realised that she's pregnant. Her brother Skeetah is sneaking scraps for his prized pit bull's new litter, dying one by one. Meanwhile, brothers Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. As the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to a dramatic conclusion, this unforgettable family - motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and nurturing where love is scarce - pulls itself up to face another day.

Painting Out The Stars: Three Fables : The Mysterious Traveller; Night Sky Dragons; Cloud Tea Monkeys

Peet Mal & Graham Elspeth

Walker Books, CHILDRENS, HC, 9781406324860

$14.50 ex $15.95 inc

This title includes three deftly spun, emotionally resonant stories with the feel of time-honoured fables but the freshness of a contemporary voice. When Tashi's mother falls ill and is unable to work, Tashi looks to the monkeys on a Himalayan tea plantation for help...Yazul and his clan, trapped inside their desert fortress by bandits, are saved from starvation by fiercesome dragon kites...Issa, the old mountain guide, has his life turned upside down when he stumbles upon a camel sheltering a baby girl in a desert storm...This title features three charming tales from an award-winning author and illustrator.

The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides

Harper Collins, LITERATURE, PB, 9780007441303

$18.17 ex $19.99 inc

Madeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn't get the memo. While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little too nicely for the taste of her more Bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend whose college love life, despite her good looks, hadn't lived up to expectations.

But now, in the spring of her final year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course 'to see what all the fuss is about'. And, for reasons that have nothing to do with her studies, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with Leonard Morten - charismatic loner and college Darwinist - who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus - devotee of Patti Smith and Thomas Merton - resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that she will be his wife.

The triangle at the heart of this novel is at once age-old and completely fresh and surprising. With brilliant wit, irony and an incredible understanding of and love for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides captures the original energies of the novel while creating a story so contemporary that it reads like an intimate journal of our own lives.

Demanding The Impossible: Seven Essays On Resistance

Sylvia Lawson

Melbourne U Press, POLITICS, PB, 9780522854855

$29.99 ex $32.99 inc

Demanding the Impossible asks what has become of the ideal and myth of resistance. It searches for the power of ‘no’ and ‘enough’.

Combining elements of fiction, history, reportage and analysis, Sylvia Lawson examines the way the spirit of wartime resistance resurfaced in Paris in the insurrection of May 1968, when a rare unity of intellectuals and industrial workers woke a complacent society.

She chronicles moments of resistance: the story of intrepid Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, who was murdered for her opposition to the Russian oppression of Chechnya; the highly contentious Northern Territory Intervention and Aboriginal dispossession; East Timorese and West Papuan resistance to Indonesian domination.

Resistance is about more than protest in the streets; it’s about writing and art-making, music and filming, and not least about the way ordinary people keep going.

As the Arab Spring unfolds and the Occupy Wall Street initiative has spread round the world, a resistant tradition has been actively inherited: the right to protest and rebel against greed and injustice, to claim public space, to recreate the active, convivial city.

The New Jumper

Oliver Jeffers

William Collins, CHILDRENS, HC, 9780007420650

$22.72 ex $24.99 inc

The thing about the Hueys is... they all look the same, they all think the same, they all do the same. Until one day, one of them knitted himself a new jumper...

How will the other Hueys react?

A hilarious story about individuality."

Look, A Book!: Shortlisted For 2012 CBCA Award - Picture Books

Libby Gleeson

Little Hare Books, CHILDRENS, HC, 9781921541803

$22.68 ex $24.95 inc

Look, A Book! You never know where it might take you. When two ragamuffins stumble across a book in the dust their world begins to change. The familiar becomes fantastical, the mundane becomes magical, and a fractured community finds a focus. Set in a dreary, underprivileged, contemporary world, Look, A Book! is an exhilarating whirl through the magic of imagination that leaves the reader in an vertiginous trance.

The Carousel

Ursula Dubosarsky

Viking, CHILDRENS, HC, 9780670074624

$22.68 ex $24.95 inc

One winter's day my dad and I Went down to see the carousel. We stood and watched as round and round The little horses rose and fell.

So begins the magical journey of a small girl and a wooden horse.

A journey of music and mirrors, of green hills and sunlit skies, of wishes and freedom.

From this much-loved author and brilliant new illustrator...

Cold Light: 3 Edith Campbell Berry Trilogy : The Companion Novel To Grand Days And Dark Palace

Frank Moorhouse

Random House Aus, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781741661262

$29.95 ex $32.95 inc

It is 1950, the League of Nations has collapsed and the newly formed United Nations has rejected all those who worked and fought for the League. Edith Campbell Berry, who joined the League in Geneva before the war, is out of a job, her vision shattered. With her sexually unconventional, husband, Ambrose, she comes back to Australia to live in Canberra. Edith now has ambitions to become Australia's first female ambassador, but while she waits for a Call from On High, she finds herself caught up in the planning of the national capital and the dream that it should be 'a city like no other'. When her communist brother, Frederick, turns up out of the blue after many years of absence, she becomes concerned that he may jeopardise her chances of becoming a diplomat. It is not a safe time to be a communist in Australia or to be related to one, but she refuses to be cowed by the anti-communist sentiment sweeping the country. It is also not a safe time or place to be 'a wife with a lavender husband'. After pursuing the Bloomsbury life for many years, Edith finds herself fearful of being exposed. Unexpectedly, in mid-life she also realises that she yearns for children. When she meets a man who could offer not only security but a ready-made family, she consults the Book of Crossroads and the answer changes the course of her life.

The Australian Moment

George Megalogenis

Viking, AUSTRALIAN STUDIES, PB, 9780670075218

$29.95 ex $32.95 inc

There's no better place to be during economic turbulence than Australia. Brilliant in a bust, we've learnt to use our brains in a boom. Although the Great Recession continues to rumble around the globe, we successfully negotiated the Asian financial crisis, the dotcom tech wreck and the GFC. Despite a lingering inability to acknowledge our achievements at home, the rest of the world now asks: How did we get it right? This is the page-turning story of our nation's remarkable transformation since the '70s. One of our most respected journalists, George Megalogenis, traces the key economic reforms and brilliant moments of collective instinct that opened our society to the immigration of capital, ideas and people to just the right degree. He pinpoints the events that shaped our good fortune and national character, and corrects our selective memory where history has been misunderstood or misdirected by self-interested political leadership. No one writing today is better at reading the numbers and telling the story around them than Megalogenis, and no one else has been able to coax our former prime ministers to candidly re-assess each other's contribution to the Australian Moment. Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard and Rudd, as well as Whitlam's confidant Graham Freudenberg, go on record for the first time about many aspects of the internal politicking, decision-making and bids for the legacy of our astonishing period of significant reform.

The Art Of Fielding

Chad Harbach

Harper Collins, LITERATURE, PB, 9780007374458

$18.17 ex $19.99 inc

In The Art of Fielding, we see sport played in its purest form: by young men who know that their four years on the baseball diamond at Westish College, "a little school in the crook of the thumb of the baseball glove that is Wisconsin," are all they have left. Only their preternaturally gifted fielder, Henry Skrimshander, seems to have the chance to keep his dream - and theirs, vicariously - alive, until a routine throw goes astray. Five lives brought together at Westish - three players; the college's president and his prodigal daughter - are forever changed by Henry's single error. The novel that unfolds thereafter is many things: a masterpiece of what James Wood would call "free indirect style," but what a lover of fiction would simply recognize as great storytelling; a campus novel as good as any to spring from that well-tilled soil; and a beautiful and trenchant and veracious depiction of sport.

Late Night Shopping

Ryhll McMaster

Brandl & Schlesinger, POETRY, PB, 9781921556302

$22.68 ex $24.95 inc

These are poems that reflect many aspects of the human condition and the individual, from poems about love and death, the family, science, the natural world and historical figures such as Ned Kelly and Charles Darwin. Her sequence on Ned Kelly (originally published in an illustrated limited edition) is reproduced here for a wider readership.

10 Years That Shook The World: A Timeline Of Events From 2001

Loretta Napoleoni

Uni. Of Western Australia, HISTORY, PB, 9781742584331

$18.14 ex $19.95 inc

From 9/11 to the launch of the iPod, from the creation of ‘Gmail’ to the 2004 tsunami, from the Enron bankruptcy to the killing of Osama bin Laden, 10 Years That Shook the World is the story of an extraordinary decade. For each year, Loretta Napoleoni presents events not as a chronology but as dispatches from the world’s collective memory. Topics like politics, economics, celebrities, and the environment intersect and converge to reveal the accelerating pace of globalisation and the changes that have affected us all.

“And in the flickering of news that has passed before our eyes over the years, [10 Years That Shook the World] traces a different and deeper understanding of events than the black and white.” — Lars Linder, Dahens Nyheter (Sweden)

The Fine Colour Of Rust

Paddy O'Reilly

Harper Collins, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9780007434930

$22.72 ex $24.99 inc

Single mother and dreamer Loretta Boskovic lives in Gunapan, a town lost in the scrubby Australian bush. She has fantasies about dumping her two kids in the orphanage and riding off on a Harley with her dream lover. Her best pal is a crusty old junk man called Norm. She needs a lawnmower; he gives her two goats called Terror and Panic. Loretta's a self-dubbed 'old scrag', but she's got a big heart and a strong sense of injustice. So when the government threatens to close down Gunapan's primary school, and there's a whiff of corruption wafting through the corridors of the local council, Loretta stirs into action. She may be short of money, influence and a fully functioning car, but she has loyal friends. Together they can organise protests, supermarket sausage sizzles, a tour of the abattoir - whatever it takes to hold on to the scrap of world that is home.

Anatomy Of A Disappearance

Hisham Matar

Penguin, LITERATURE, PB, 9780141027500

$18.14 ex $19.95 inc

In Egypt, Nuri, a teenage boy, falls in love with Mona - the woman his father will marry. Consumed with longing, Nuri wants to get his father out of the way - to take his place in Mona's heart. But when his father disappears, Nuri regrets what he wished for. Alone, he and Mona search desperately for the man they both love. Only for Nuri to discover a silence he cannot break and unimaginable secrets his father never wanted him to know.

Rupert Murdoch: An Investigation Of Political Power

David Mcknight

Allen & Unwin, MEDIA STUDIES, PB, 9781742373522

$29.99 ex $32.99 inc

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is the most powerful media organisation in the world. Murdoch's commercial success is obvious, but less well understood is his successful pursuit of political goals, using News Corporation as his vehicle. David McKnight tracks Murdoch's influence, from his support for Reagan and Thatcher, to his attacks on Barack Obama and the Rudd and Gillard governments. He examines the secretive corporate culture of News Corporation: its private political seminars for editors, its sponsorship of think tanks and its recurring editorial campaigns around the world. Its success is reflected in the fact that the campaigns are familiar to us all: small government and market deregulation, skepticism on climate change, support for neo-conservative adventures such as Iraq and criticism of all things 'liberal'. While the phone hacking crisis has tarnished his reputation, Rupert Murdoch's influence is far from finished.

The Biggest Estate On Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia

Bill Gammage

Allen & Unwin, ABORIGINAL, HC, 9781742377483

$45.45 ex $49.99 inc

Across Australia, early Europeans commented again and again that the land looked like a park. With extensive grassy patches and pathways, open woodlands and abundant wildlife, it evoked a country estate in England. Bill Gammage has discovered this was because Aboriginal people managed the land in a far more systematic and scientific fashion than we have ever realised. For over a decade, Gammage has examined written and visual records of the Australian landscape. He has uncovered an extraordinarily complex system of land management using fire and the life cycles of native plants to ensure plentiful wildlife and plant foods throughout the year. We know Aboriginal people spent far less time and effort than Europeans in securing food and shelter, and now we know how they did it. With details of land-management strategies from around Australia, The Biggest Estate on Earth rewrites the history of this continent, with huge implications for us today. Once Aboriginal people were no longer able to tend their country, it became overgrown and vulnerable to the hugely damaging bushfires we now experience. And what we think of as virgin bush in a national park is nothing of the kind.

Extreme Money: The Masters Of The Universe And The Cult Of Risk

Satyajit Das

Portfolio, POLITICS, PB, 9781921880131

$29.95 ex $32.95 inc

Satyajit Das draws on over thirty years of personal experience at the heart of modern global finance to narrate this story. Das reveals the spectacular, dangerous money games that have generated increasingly massive bubbles of fake growth, ponzi prosperity, sophistication and wealth – while endangering the jobs, possessions and futures of virtually everyone outside the financial industry. You'll learn how everything from home mortgages to climate change has become financialized, as vast fortunes are generated by individuals who build nothing of lasting value. Das shows how 'extreme money' has become ever more unreal; how 'voodoo banking' continues to generate massive phony profits even now; and how a new generation of 'Masters of the Universe' has come to dominate the world.

Rise Of The Ruddbot: Observations From The Gallery

Annabel Crabb

Black Inc, AUSTRALIAN STUDIES, PB, 9781863954839

$29.95 ex $32.95 inc

Rise of the Ruddbot presents the distilled highlights of Annabel Crabb’s writing on the political events of the last few years, featuring Godwin Grech, Peter Garrett, Tony ‘People Skills’ Abbott, the Ruddbot, and more. Sequenced and introduced by Annabel Crabb, this is the perfect companion for an election year.

The Man Without A Face: The Rise And Crimes Of Vladimir Putin

Masha Gessen

Granta, EUROPEAN STUDIES, PB, 9781847086310

$27.26 ex $29.99 inc

A brave and revelatory account of how a small-minded, low-level KGB operative became the most powerful man in the world's largest country. Since coming to power in 1999, Vladimir Putin has ruthlessly seized control of media, exiled or killed political rivals and dismantled Russia's fragile electoral system, transforming Russia once more into a threat to her own people and to the world. Masha Gessen experienced this history first-hand, in the form of death-threats and the murder, exile, and mysterious disappearances of many of her friends and colleagues. She courageously returned to Moscow to report on Putin's alarming ascent, tracking down sources who dared speak to no one else.