Amy, My Daughter
Mitch Winehouse
Harper Collins, PB, 9780007463909
Following her tragic death in July 2011, Mitch Winehouse wants to tell her incredible story in full. AMY, MY DAUGHTER will take the reader through her mischievous early years, her rise to stardom and to her much publicised struggles with addiction. The book will bring the many layers of her life together - the personal, the private and the public - ... More/Buy
Band-Aid for a Broken Leg: Being a doctor with no borders and other ways to stay single
Damien Brown
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781743310212
Damien Brown, a young Australian doctor, thinks he's ready when he arrives for his first posting with Medecins Sans Frontieres in Africa. But the town he's sent to is an isolated outpost of mud huts, surrounded by landmines; the hospital, for which he's to be the only doctor, is filled with malnourished children and conditions he's never seen; and the health ... More/Buy
Barack Obama: The Making of the Man
David Maraniss
Atlantic, PB, 9781848872806
In Barack Obama, David Maraniss has written a sweeping narrative which reveals the real story of Obama's beginnings: child of a black man from Luoland and a white woman born in Texas. He charts the fortunes of the two disparate families, polar opposites in every way, which produced these two extraordinary individuals, who met briefly in Hawaii, never cohabited, and married ... More/Buy
Bert Hinkler: The Most Daring Man In The World
Grantlee Kieza
Harper Collins, PB, 9780733329203
He's all but been lost from history but once upon a time, Bert Hinkler, a small, unprepossessing man from Bundaberg was feted as one of the most daring aviators in the world. Mussolini's favourite pilot, Hinkler was an adventurer who along with early pioneers flew single handed across countries, continents and oceans - often with nothing more than a lunchbox and ... More/Buy
The Boy Who Wouldn't Die
David Nyuol Vincent with Carol Nader
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781743310250
David Nyuol Vincent was a little boy when he fled southern Sudan with his father, as war raged in their country. He left behind his distraught mother and sisters, his village and his childhood. For months David and his father walked across southern Sudan, barefoot, desperately searching for safety, food and water. They survived the perilous Sahara Desert crossing into Ethiopia only ... More/Buy
Butterfly in the Typewriter: The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of A Confederacy of Dunces
Cory Maclauchlin
DaCapo Press, HB, 9780306820403
The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. After writing A Confederacy of Dunces, Toole corresponded with Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster for two years. Exhausted from Gottlieb’s suggested revisions, Toole declared the publication of the manuscript hopeless and stored it in a box. Years later he suffered a mental breakdown, took ... More/Buy
California P I
Rachel Sommerville
NewSouth, PB, 9781742232874
Marquis is accused of involvement in the murder of a man from a rival neighbourhood. Darren has been found guilty of murdering a petrol station attendant. Charles has been charged with the murder of a homeless teenage girl. All of them are potentially facing the death penalty in California. Australian-born Rachel Sommerville is a private investigator whose job is to help ... More/Buy
Charles Dickens: A Life
Claire Tomalin
Penguin, PB, 9780141036939
NOW IN B FORMAT. Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonically hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist - the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and ... More/Buy
The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton
Diane Atkinson
Preface Publishing, HB, 9781848093010
Westminster, London, 6 June 1836. It is a fine, fresh morning that will become hot as the day progresses. Crowds are gathering at The Royal Courts of Justice in Westminster Hall, just a fishwife's shout from the stinking, fetid Thames. On trial is Caroline Sheridan a beautiful, clever, opinionated young woman who has been accused by her husband, George Norton, of ... More/Buy
The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham
Joe Carlen
Prometheus Books, HB, 9781616145576
Warren Buffett has repeatedly acknowledged Benjamin Graham, a man he personally studied and worked under, as the primary influence on his investment approach. Indeed, there is a direct line between the record-shattering investing performance of Buffett (and other value investors) and Graham's life. In six books and dozens of papers, Graham - widely known as the 'Dean of Wall Street' - ... More/Buy
The Guardians: An Elegy
Sarah Manguso
Granta, PB, 9781847083104
In 2008, one of Sarah Manguso's oldest friends eloped from a New York City psychiatric hospital and threw himself in front of a train; the last ten hours of his life are unaccounted for. In this new memoir, Manguso continues her attention to illness, suffering, and time's relentless forward momentum, which prevents total recovery from grief. As she did brilliantly in ... More/Buy
High Season: A memoir of heroin and hospitality
Jim Hearn
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781742378411
High Season is the story of Jim Hearn, a working-class boy made good-and very, very bad. It's a tale about living on the edge, restaurant kitchens, drugs and addiction. And it's a story of waking up from a heroin hell to discover real love, family and success. But what happens when Jim, three young chefs and a waiter do what it takes ... More/Buy
Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
Orlando Figes
Allen Lane, HB, 9781846144882
Just Send Me Word is the extraordinary love story of two Muscovites, Lev and Svetlana. Kept apart for fourteen years by the Second World War and the Gulag, they stayed true to each other and left behind them an astonishing monument to their love: a remarkable cache of 1,500 letters exchanged between them as Lev battled to survive in one of ... More/Buy
Man in a Grey Suit: A Memoir of Surfing, Shark Attack & Survival
Glenn Orgias
Viking, PB, 9780670076055
I didn't see it. It came from behind, and below. One twilight, Glenn Orgias was surfing at Bondi Beach when the worst happened: he was attacked by a shark, a 'man in a grey suit', as surfers call them. Although it suddenly released him, Glenn still thought his life was over — he was 80 metres from shore with one almost ... More/Buy
Mary Boleyn: 'The Great and Infamous Whore'
Alison Weir
Vintage, PB, 9780099546481
Mary Boleyn is remembered by posterity as a 'great and infamous whore'. She was the mistress of two kings, Francois I of France and Henry VIII of England, and sister to Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife. She may secretly have borne Henry a child and it was because of his adultery with Mary that his marriage to Anne was annulled. ... More/Buy
Michael Morpurgo: War Child to War Horse
Maggie Fergusson
Harper Collins, HB, 9780007387267
Without stories, in which all of us - living, dead, not yet born - participate, we are, as T.S. Eliot wrote, no more than 'bits of paper blown on the cold wind'. But, over the past century, the old, oral traditions of storytelling have withered; and today even printed stories are beleaguered. It takes a rare gift to lure children away ... More/Buy
More Room in a Broken Heart: The True Adventures of Carly Simon
Stephen Davis
Gotham, HB, 9781592406517
Carly Simon has won two Grammys and an Academy Award, and her albums have sold more than forty million copies. Her music has touched countless lives since her debut in the 1970s, yet her own life story has remained unpublished-until now. Tapping private archives, family interviews, and a forty-year friendship with the legend herself, Stephen Davis at last captures Carly ... More/Buy
Mud, Sweat and Tears
Bear Grylls
Channel 4, PB, 9781905026494
Bear is a man who has always loved adventure. After leaving school, he spent months hiking in the Himalayas as he considered joining the Indian Army. Upon his return to England after a change of heart, he passed SAS selection and served with 21 SAS for three years. During this time he broke his back in several places in a free-fall ... More/Buy
My Song: A Memoir of Art, Race and Defiance
Harry Belafonte with Michael Shnayerson
Canongate, PB, 9780857865861
Written with Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Schnayerson, My Song is an inspiring story of performance and protest, from a superstar singer and actor who was on the front lines of practically every progressive political battle in modern memory. Along the way, he befriended some of the most influential figures of the 20th century, from Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando and Sidney ... More/Buy
A Passionate Life
Ita Buttrose
Penguin, PB, 9780670076543
In A Passionate Life, she traces her working career - from fifteen-year-old cadet journalist, through editorships of Cleo, the Weekly and ITA magazines, to heading up the National Advisory Council on AIDS (NACAIDS), working with World Vision, Alzheimer's Australia, the Macular Degeneration Foundation and Arthritis Australia, and accepting broad-ranging speaking engagements. Along the way, Ita gives us glimpses of the inner ... More/Buy
Say It Again in a Nice Voice
Meg Mason
Harper Collins, PB, 9780732293529
At 24, Meg Mason was newly married to a man 'essentially indistinguishable from a young Matt Damon' after landing her dream job, writing for The Times in London. What could possibly go wrong? A holiday in Greece, an accidental shortage of birth control, and eight months later she was sobbing on the side of a road over trading her career for ... More/Buy
Tamil Tigress: My story as a child soldier in Sri Lanka's bloody civil war
Niromi de Soyza
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781743310700
NOW IN B FORMAT. Two days before Christmas in 1987, at the age of 17, Niromi de Soyza found herself in an ambush as part of a small platoon of militant Tamil Tigers fighting government forces in the bloody civil war that was to engulf Sri Lanka for decades. With her was her lifelong friend, Ajanthi, also aged 17. Leaving behind ... More/Buy
Then Again: a Memoir
Diane Keaton
Harper Collins, PB, 9780007360703
From the woman know to millions as Annie Hall, THEN AGAIN is the fascinating story of an actress's rise to fame, of her relationships with brilliant talents such as Woody Allen and Al Pacino, and her struggle with bulimia. But it is also an account of her family, a lively group of siblings growing up on the West coast in the ... More/Buy
This is How
Augusten Burroughs
Picador, PB, 9781742611143
From the New York Times bestselling author of Running With Scissors comes a groundbreaking book that explores how to survive the "un-survivable". Augusten Burroughs has lived an unusual life, and has faced more than his fair share of humiliation, transformation and everything in ... More/Buy
The Wolf and the Watchman: A CIA childhood
Scott Johnson
Scribe Publications, PB, 9781921844683
Growing up, Scott Johnson always suspected that his dad was different. Only as a teenager did he discover the truth: his father was a spy, one of the CIA's most trusted officers. And, as Scott came to realise, his father had been living a double life for so long that his lies were hard to separate from the truth. When an ... More/Buy