Across Many Mountains: Three Daughters of Tibet
Yangzom Brauen
Vintage, PB, 9780099546030
At a Free Tibet demonstration in Moscow in 2001, a Swiss actress is captured on film being arrested. She catches people's attention for her passion and her striking, Tibetan beauty. A German publisher suggests she tells the world her story. The result is this breathtaking book about Yangzom Brauen's Tibetan heritage, and most particularly her extraordinary grandmother and mother, who fled ... More/Buy
Algerian Memoirs
Henri Alleg
Seagull Books, HB, 9780857420305
The personal history of journalist Henri Alleg is tied inextricably to the history of the French-Algerian Conflict. Best known for his book The Question, a first-hand account of his torture by French troops during the Algerian war for independence, Alleg is famous both for having brought the issue of French torture to the public eye and for his passionate work as ... More/Buy
Antonia and Her Daughters: Secrets, Love, Friendship & Family in Tuscany
Marlena de Blasi
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781742374079
The renovations to 34 via del Duomo now complete, Marlena de Blasi, the bestselling international author and woman with the 'fairytale life', longs to find time and space to finish a book. Lured by a friend's offer of a simple stone cottage in a remote province of western Tuscany and distant from the distractions of everyday life in Orvieto, she sets ... More/Buy
Are You My Mother?
Alison Bechdel
Jonathan Cape, HB, 9780224093521
Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, her remarkable graphic memoir about her father, established itself immediately as a classic of the genre, being chosen as Time Magazine's Best Book of the Year for 2006, while The Times called it 'a profound and important book'. Now Bechdel has written another memoir, equally rich and funny, about her mother. A voracious reader, a lover of ... More/Buy
The Blue Door: A little girl's incredible story of survival in the Japanese POW camps of Java
Lise Kristensen
Macmillan, PB, 9780230766976
1942: It was towards the middle of the year when my friends started disappearing... On the island of Java, the stirrings of the Second World War in Europe and the angry-looking man called Hitler seem a million miles away from Norwegian-born Lise and her siblings. Then one day, her friends and neighbours start to disappear, and she begins to realise that ... More/Buy
Crossing the Borders of Time: A true story of war, exile, and a love reclaimed
Leslie Maitland
Scribe Publications, PB, 9781921844713
France, 1941. Janine, a Jewish teenager, and Roland, her Catholic boyfriend, are passionately in love, and believe that nothing can come between them. But World war II intervenes, and Janine is forced to flee the Nazis with her family. They set sail from the docks of Marseille on one of the last ships to take Jews to safety. For 50 years, ... More/Buy
Dream New Dreams: Reimagining My Life After Loss
Jai Pausch
Hodder & Stoughton, HB, 9780733628405
'I asked Jai what she has learned since my diagnosis,' Randy Pausch wrote about his wife in THE LAST LECTURE. 'Turns out, she could write a book titled Forget the Last Lecture; Here's the Real Story.' DREAM NEW DREAMS traces Jai's experiences since Randy's diagnosis, from the constant struggle she faced as a mother of three small children, to the burdens ... More/Buy
Every Beat of My Heart: An ABC Journalist's Journey From Death by Cardiac Arrest to Complete Recovery
Jeff Waters
Harper Collins, PB, 9780733329920
One ordinary weekday evening, Jeff Waters had just gone to bed in his Melbourne home when pain began in his left arm and chest. He mentioned it casually to his wife, a GP, but dismissed her evident alarm - after all, he ate healthily, he swam regularly, he wasn't overweight or diabetic, and he was only 43. What did he have ... More/Buy
Grand Tour: Letters and Photographs from the British Empire Expedition 1922
Agatha Christie
Harper Collins, HB, 9780007447688
In 1922 Agatha Christie set sail on a 10-month voyage around the British Empire as part of a trade mission to promote the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition. Leaving their two-year-old daughter behind with Agatha's sister, Agatha and her husband set sail at the end of January and did not return until December. She kept up a detailed weekly correspondence with her ... More/Buy
Growing Old Outrageously: A memoir of travel, food and friendship
Hilary Linstead, Elisabeth Davies
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781742376912
Two old school friends reconnect unexpectedly after thirty-five years and discover that they both love travelling - and the more exotic and far-flung the location, the better! Not having a clue whether they will get along, the eccentric pair embark on a trial journey to Morocco. That tentative beginning has turned into a series of wonderfully unusual holidays, and Hil and ... More/Buy
House of Fiction: Leonard, Susan and Elizabeth Jolley ( a memoir)
Susan Swingler
Fremantle Press, PB, 9781921888663
Susan Swingler is the step-daughter of one of Australia's most revered writers — Elizabeth Jolley. Abandoned by her father Leonard at the age of four, Susan had no contact with the Jolley family until they found and reclaimed her at the age of twenty-one. Why they were kept apart is the subject of this startling new memoir. The House of Fiction ... More/Buy
The Italian Girl
Rebecca Huntley
UQP, PB, 9780702239182
After Rebecca Huntley's Italian nonna died, incredible stories about her life surfaced. Rebecca then realised her grandmother was much more than the wonderful cook and kind-hearted lacemaker she had always known. Desperate to learn more, Rebecca seeks out the truth about her nonna - a search that takes her from the island of Elba off the Tuscan coast through the sugar ... More/Buy
James Joyce: A Biography
Gordon Bowker
Phoenix, PB, 9780753828601
James Joyce was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, but he was not immediately recognised as such; rather he lived in exile in the cosmopolitan Europe of the 1920s in a bid to escape the suffocating atmosphere and parochial prejudices of his native Dublin. His unstinting dedication to authorship picks him out as a writer in the romantic ... More/Buy
Lessons in Letting Go: Confessions of a Hoarder
Corinne Grant
Allen & Unwin, PB, 9781743310717
Lessons in Letting Go is an honest, uproariously funny and sometimes moving memoir of the year in which Corinne Grant decides to do something about her hoarding. From every scrunchie she's ever owned, to every pencil case and magazine, it's time for it all to go. Problem is, getting rid of the stuff turns out to be much harder than she ... More/Buy
Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir
Jenny Lawson
Harper Collins, PB, 9780732295462
'When I tell people that my father is kind of a total lunatic, they laugh and nod knowingly. They assure me that theirs is too, and that he's just a "typical father". And they're probably right, if the typical father runs a full-time taxidermy business out of the house, and shows up at the local bar with a miniature donkey and ... More/Buy
Lives
Peter Robb
Black Inc, PB, 9781863955638
Peter Robb has an uncanny ability to get into the skin of other people: to show them in a new light, to home on what makes them tick. In Australia, these range from Alex Dimitriades to Ivan Milat, from Marcia Langton to Julian Assange. In Italy, Robb immerses the reader in the worlds of Fellini, Caravaggio, Calvino and Pasolini. Elsewhere, his ... More/Buy
Living with Max: Our Family Story
Chloe Maxwell
Harper Collins, PB, 9780732292287
Chloe Maxwell seemed to be living the dream: discovered at sixteen as a model, she went on to become a household name as a TV personality. Then she met rugby star Mat Rogers and a great romance was born. Inside, though, Chloe was fighting her own demons: her parents' separation in her teens had led to a deep sense of insecurity. ... More/Buy
The Mind of a Thief: How Do You Belong to a Stolen Land?
Patti Miller
UQP, PB, 9780702249365
When writer Patti Miller discovers that the first post-Mabo Native Title claim was made by the Wiradjuri in the Wellington Valley where she grew up, she begins to wonder where she belongs in the story of the town. It leads her to the question at the heart of Australian identity - who are we in relation to our cherished stolen country? ... More/Buy
More Lives than One: A Biography of Hans Fallada
Jenny Williams
Penguin, PB, 9780241952672
Hans Fallada was a drug addict, womanizer, alcoholic, jailbird and thief. Yet he was also one of the most extraordinary storytellers of the twentieth century, whose novels, including Alone in Berlin, portrayed ordinary people in terrible times with a powerful humanity. This acclaimed biography, newly revised and completely updated, tells the remarkable story of Hans Fallada, whose real name was Rudolf ... More/Buy
No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf
Carolyn Burke
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408822159
Edith Piaf was one of the most greatly loved singers of the twentieth century. From the start of her exceptional career in the 1930s, her waif-like form and heart-wrenching voice endeared her first to the French, then to audiences around the globe. As she moved from her youth singing in the streets to the glamour of the Paris music-halls, Piaf formed ... More/Buy
Norman Foster: A Life in Architecture
Deyan Sudjic
Phoenix, PB, 9780753828571
Norman Foster is a phenomenon - as an architect, but also as an individual. He is responsible for a dozen or more of the most recognisable buildings of the last thirty years. Under his driven leadership, what is now called Foster and Partners has grown to an international firm with almost 1,000 employees, building astonishing constructions all over the world. Deyan ... More/Buy
The Recluse
Evelyn Juers
Giramondo Publishing, PB, 9781920882884
Evelyn Juers’s study of reclusion focuses on Eliza Emily Donnithorne, long considered the model for Charles Dickens’s character Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. For most of her life she lived in isolation in a large house in the inner-Sydney suburb of Newtown. It was said that she had been jilted at the altar and become a recluse, wearing her wedding dress ... More/Buy
Remembering Che: My Life With Che Guevara
Aleida March
Ocean Press, PB, 9780987077936
This is the story of a great legend and a great love. This is the story of a tenacious but loving woman, who lived through great danger and sorrow with incredible courage and the heart of a rebel. Forty-five years after Che’s assassination in Bolivia in 1967, his widow and the great love of his life has finally released her memoir ... More/Buy
Running with the Kenyans: Discovering the Secrets of the World's Greatest Runners
Adharanand Finn
Faber, PB, 9780571274055
After years of watching Kenyan athletes win the world's biggest races, from the Olympics to big city marathons, Adharanand Finn set out to discover just what it was that made them so fast - and to see if he could keep up. Packing up his family (and his running shoes), he moved from Devon to the small town of Iten, in ... More/Buy
Tolstoy
A N Wilson
Atlantic, HB, 9781848879621
In this biography of Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, A.N. Wilson narrates the complex drama of the writer's life: his childhood of aristocratic privilege but emotional deprivation, his discovery of his literary genius after aimless years of gambling and womanizing, and his increasingly disastrous marriage. Wilson sweeps away the long-held belief that Tolstoy's works were the exact mirror of his life, and ... More/Buy
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson
Vintage, PB, 9780099556091
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 ... More/Buy
Wicked Company: Freethinkers and Friendship in pre-Revolutionary Paris
Philipp Blom
Phoenix, PB, 9781780220109
From the 1750s to the 1770s, the Paris salon of Baron d'Holbach was an epicenter of debate, intellectual daring and revolutionary ideas, uniting around one table vivid personalities from Denis Diderot, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, the radical ex-priest Guillaume Raynal, the Italian Count Beccaria and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who later turned against his friends. It was a moment of astonishing racialism in ... More/Buy
Wild Card: An Autobiography 1923 - 1958
Dorothy Hewett
UWAP, PB, 9781742583952
Republished for a new generation of readers, this extraordinary autobiography of one of Australia’s most celebrated female writers, Dorothy Hewett, traces the personal and political metamorphoses of her first thirty-five years. After university, several failed love affairs, an attempted suicide and a major poetry prize, Dorothy Hewett joined the Australian Communist party in 1945. Four years later she left her husband ... More/Buy
Wilkie Collins
Peter Ackroyd
Chatto & Windus, HB, 9780701169909
Short and oddly built, with a head too big for his body, extremely short-sighted, unable to stay still, dressed in colourful clothes, 'as if playing a certain part in the great general drama of life', Wilkie Collins looked distinctly strange. But he was none the less a charmer, befriended by the great, loved by children, irresistibly attractive to women - and ... More/Buy
Woolgathering
Patti Smith
Bloomsbury, PB, 9781408832301
In this small, luminous memoir, the National Book Award-winner Patti Smith revisits the most sacred experiences of her early years, with truths so vivid they border on the surreal. The author entwines her childhood self - and its 'clear, unspeakable joy' - with memories both real and envisioned from her twenties on New York's MacDougal Street, the street of cafes. Woolgathering ... More/Buy
Young Elizabeth: The Making of our Queen
Kate Williams
W&N Non Fiction, HB, 9780297867814
Kate Williams reveals how the 25-year-old young Queen carved out a lasting role for herself amid the changes of the twentieth century. Her monarchy would be a very different one to that of her parents and grandparents. And its continuing popularity in the twenty-first century owes much to the intelligence and elusive personality of this remarkable ... More/Buy