Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

A hybrid of memoir and essay from award-winning writer and critic Alison Croggon.

“I was born as part of a monstrous structure—the grotesque, hideous, ugly, ghastly, gruesome, horrible relations of power that constituted colonial Britain. A structure that shaped me, that shapes the very language that I speak and use and love. I am the daughter of an empire that declared itself the natural order of the world.”

From award-winning writer and critic Alison Croggon, Monsters is a hybrid of memoir and essay that takes as its point of departure the painful breakdown of a relationship between two sisters.

It explores how our attitudes are shaped by the persisting myths that underpin colonialism and patriarchy, how the structures we are raised within splinter and distort the possibilities of our lives and the lives of others.

Monsters asks how we maintain the fictions that we create about ourselves, what we will sacrifice to maintain these fictions—and what we have to gain by confronting them.

“What a fun, educational, and very accessible adventure.”
—Sandor Ellis Katz, author of The Art of Fermentation

Meet the ecosystem inside you …

A timid Bifidobacterium named Biffy is forced to leave their family and become part of a new community, in the gut of a newborn human baby.

Follow Your Gut is a comic that ate a biology textbook. It’s an epic adventure set over the first three years of a new life, exploring one of the most important relationships you will ever have—the one with your gut microbiome.

Created by artists, scientists, and educators, this story is for anyone who’s curious about the human–microbe symbiosis, and what all those trillions of bacteria are doing down there in your intestines!

Inspired by the latest research, Follow Your Gut includes a fascinating and detailed appendix that explains the amazing science behind the story.

‘We fell in love with Biffy, the adorable Bifidobacterium. We also learnt about the scientific process of growing up, and the not-so-secret universe that we have inside us!’ — Kira and Catherine, Year 7, University High School, Melbourne

‘A wildly entertaining science lesson that will change how you see your own body.’ — Dr Nat Bannan, high school science teacher

A captivating, polyphonic novel of one family’s flight from and return to Iran.

1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah’s expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid.

1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behsad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power.

1999. Laleh returns to Iran with her mother, Nahid. Between beauty rituals and family secrets, she gets to know a Tehran that hardly matches her childhood memories.

2009. Laleh’s brother Mo is more concerned with a friend’s heartbreak than with student demonstrations in Germany. But then the Green Revolution breaks out in Iran and turns the world upside down …

A topical, moving novel about revolution, oppression, resistance, and the absolute desire for freedom.

“Margaret Simons, queen of the tiny vegetable garden, heartened me with her radiant pragmatism.” ―Helen Garner, author of This House of Grief

Life lessons from the ground up.

Sometimes you reap what you sow. Sometimes you reap what other people sowed. Sometimes you haven't got a clue what you are sowing, and sometimes you just get lucky, or unlucky. All these things are true of life, as of gardening.

In this thoughtful and beautifully observed book, journalist and gardening enthusiast Margaret Simons takes readers on a journey through the seasons, through her life, and through the tiny patch of inner-urban earth that is home to her garden.

Over the course of a year, within the garden and without, there are births to celebrate and deaths to mourn; there are periods of great happiness and light, and times of quiet reflection. There is, in other words, all the chaos, joy, sorrow, and splendor of being alive.

Why do some adults think it’s fine to hit children? Why does the school system fail so many pupils? And when their future is on the line, why can’t children vote?

How we treat children isn’t fair. Despite the lip service paid to their rights, children are still discriminated against in every aspect of their lives: rising levels of child poverty, underfunded and outdated education and childcare systems, controlling parenting practices, and political systems that exclude their voices on issues which will affect them most — not least the climate crisis.

Children are not passive victims of oppression, but their resistance and struggle for equality has been largely ignored by the wider social justice movement—until now. In this groundbreaking manifesto, Eloise Rickman argues that it’s time to stop viewing children as less than adults and start fighting for their rights to be taken seriously.

Radical, compassionate, and profoundly hopeful, this powerful new book signals the start of a long-overdue conversation about how we treat children. Featuring practical solutions and the voices of children and adults who are working towards them, It’s Not Fair is a call to embrace children’s liberation and the possibility of a better, fairer world.

Natural Farming carries a simple but widely overlooked message: healthy soil makes healthy plants, which in turn make healthy animals and healthy people. The book explores the consequences in the soil of applications of superphosphate and other artificial fertilizers over decades, and explains soil chemistry in terms that every farmer can understand. It describes the exact role of each mineral and vitamin, both in the soil and in the body. And it explains how to prevent expensive disease outbreaks and minimize the use of costly artificial sprays and fertilizers.

The prescriptions are simple and can be applied to any farming enterprise—market gardens, orchards, large-scale crops, and pasture—to restore the natural balance and fertility of the land, improve soil health, and increase productivity. The book is enlivened with accounts of spectacular successes in regenerating degraded land and curing animals that, in many cases, had been given up for dead.

Natural Farming is an essential handbook for any farmer, with detailed information on:

• understanding a soil analysis
• establishment and management of pasture
• treatment of compacted soil and erosion
• alternatives to artificial fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides
• the significance of weeds
• strategies for drought
• diagnosis of diseases and deficiencies in stock
• remedies for common diseases, including Johne's disease and immune-system disorders
• rearing orphan animals.

Natural Farming equips the farmer to get the best from the land using environmentally sustainable methods that save time, expense, and worry—and to supply the rising global demand for pure food.

They blamed alcohol. They blamed men. But they blamed women most of all.

The year is 1942, the place Melbourne. A brownout is in effect to dim the night-time lights of the city, and thousands of American GIs are based in Royal Park. As the latter make plans to defend the Pacific, the women of Australia have stepped up to support the war effort at home. Beatrice is doing her part. She’s enlisted as an air raid warden, preparing the city ahead of a possible Japanese attack. Her sister June is an operator at the telephone exchange, while her other sister, Lizzie, works as a shopgirl by day and parties with the Americans by night.

But the times are about to change again, and the three sisters will have to navigate the consequences of a new threat as a series of grisly murders are committed in the eerie half-light of the brownout. Inspired by true events, The Brownout Murders tells a story of fear, fortitude, and social change—and how the independence of all women is too often set against the violence of a single man.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

International Booker–nominated virtuoso Hwang Sok-yong is back with another powerful story—an epic tale that threads together a century of Korean history.

In contemporary Seoul, a laid-off worker stages a months-long sit-in atop a sixteen-story factory chimney. During the long and lonely nights, he talks to his ancestors, chewing on the meaning of life, on wisdom passed down the generations.

Through the lives of those ancestors, three generations of railroad workers, Mater 2-10 vividly portrays the struggles of ordinary Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. It is at once a gripping account of a nation’s longing to be free from oppression, a lyrical folktale that reflects the blood, sweat, and tears shed by modern industrial laborers, and a culmination of Hwang’s career—a masterpiece thirty years in the making.

A true voice of a generation, Hwang shows again why he is unmatched when it comes to depicting the roots and reality of a divided nation and bringing to life the trials and tribulations of the Korean people.

A poetic new essay collection in which the symbols of Renaissance-era tarot brush up against life in a changing world.

In 2018, author Jessica Friedmann bought her first deck of tarot cards, a facsimile copy of the Tarot de Marseille. This 15th-century deck, with its unfamiliar images, sparked a deep immersion in the art, symbols, myths, and misrepresentations of Renaissance-era tarot.

Over the years that followed, and as tarot became a part of her daily rhythm, Friedmann’s life in rural Australia was touched by floods and by drought, by bushfires and the pandemic, creating an environment in which the only constant was change.

Twenty-Two Impressions: Notes from the Major Arcana uses the Tarot de Marseille as a touchstone for these years, blending historical research, art history, and critical insights with personal reflections. In these essays, Friedmann demonstrates how the cards of the Major Arcana can be used as a lens through which to examine the unexpectedness—and subtle beauty—of 21st-century life.

From the International Booker Prize– shortlisted author of What I'd Rather Not Think About comes a darkly humorous novel about multigenerational family dynamics and individuality in Dutch suburbia.

An unnamed narrator grows up overshadowed by her unconventional mother, an ex–Jehovah’s Witness and former television star with an inferiority complex. Her father is the head of a psychiatric institution, whose only form of parenting is to offer his daughter the same life advice he dispenses to his patients. Reserved and somewhat aloof, he chooses not to intervene when his wife obsesses about charisma, calorie counting, and turning their daughter into a child prodigy.

Their daughter strives to meet her mother's expectations and bond with her father while secretly worrying she lacks the drive or charisma to do anything significant with her life. When her mother is diagnosed with terminal cancer, she begins to address their generational trauma, forge a new relationship with her father, and discover life on her terms. In twelve chapters—each reflecting a different phase of life—Posthuma expertly dissects a fraught family history, exposing the absurdity that often lies at the heart of life's most poignant and challenging moments.

One hundred years ago, Gabriel Wells, a New York bookseller, committed a crime against history. He broke up the world’s greatest book, the Gutenberg Bible, and sold it off in individual pages. This is the story of an Australian man’s hunt for those fragments and his family’s debt to an act of literary vandalism..

In 1921, Wells’ audacity scandalized the rare-book world. The Gutenberg was the first substantial book in Europe to have been printed on a printing press. It represented the democratization of knowledge and was the Holy Grail of rare books.

Was the break-up a sacrilege or a canny deal? New Yorkers were divided. For every frown of disapproval, there was a lick of the lips. It was the Roaring Twenties, the Gatsby era of fabulous wealth. Tycoons were in a feeding frenzy to acquire items that would demonstrate their refinement. Wells marketed the pages as ‘Noble Fragments’, they sold like hot cakes, and he died a rich man.

Half a century later, Sydney journalist Michael Visontay stumbled upon a mysterious legal document that linked Wells to his own family. He became obsessed by the Gutenberg’s invisible imprint on his life, and set out to track down the pages of the broken bible.

Part detective story and part memoir, Noble Fragments is an expedition into the arcane world of book collectors and their eccentric passions, and a journey of discovery about how Wells’s gamble set off a chain of events that changed a family’s destiny.

WINNER OF THE JANN MEDLICOTT ACORN PRIZE FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE MITOQ BEST FIRST BOOK OF FICTION
WINNER OF THE NGAIO MARSH AWARD FOR BEST CRIME NOVEL

aue

1. (verb) to cry, howl, groan, wail, bawl.
2. (interjection) expression of astonishment or distress.

Taukiri was born into sorrow. Aue can be heard in the sound of the sea he loves and hates, and in the music he draws out of the guitar that was his father’s. It spills out of the gang violence that killed his father and sent his mother into hiding, and the shame he feels about abandoning his eight-year-old brother to a violent home.

But Taukiri’s brother, Arama, is braver than he looks, and he has a friend, and his friend has a dog, and the three of them together might just be strong enough to turn back the tide of sadness.

This bestselling multi-award-winning novel is both raw and sublime, introducing a compelling new voice in New Zealand fiction.

A plan for transitioning to a more sustainable world—while keeping the economy afloat

Ulrike Hermann is an economics correspondent whose books on social and economic policy issues are bestsellers in Germany. Here—translated by journalist and international broadcaster David Shaw—Ulrike explores how we might manage to transition to a more sustainable world without the collapse of the economy.

The End of Capitalism tells the story of Capitalism—from its beginnings in 1760 England, where textiles manufacturers had the idea to replace human workers with machines—and what it really means for the world when individual profits overshadow communal and environmental needs.

Hermann makes an argument for a “circular economy,” an economy where only what can be recycled is consumed. We know by now the ruinous effects of Capitalism on the climate and environment. While we hear that “green growth” is meant to be the savior, Ulrike argues that we need “green shrinkage” instead.

Her example for a solution is the British war economy of the 1940s. This is not a utopian scenario (it would involve personal restrictions and government planning) but a comprehensive example of how resources can be diverted.

An interesting and important read for serious thinkers who hope to upend Capitalism, The End of Capitalism offers a realistic alternative from an expert in the field. Readers of Rebecca Solnit, Naomi Klein and Rutgar Bregman; progressive-minded readers; and anyone interested in a different future should read this.

The translation of this book was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

A feminist utopia crumbles with one impossible birth.

On an isolated mountaintop, a small feminist community is fracturing under the weight of ideological divides and dwindling numbers. Mila struggles to hold the women together, while deeper in the bush her aunt Frank—an ailing recluse—lives with only her dog, Chicken Midnight, for company. Nearby, an orchid endling approaches its own death, and the extinction of its entire species.

As Frank grows increasingly unwell and secretive about her condition, the community women begin mysteriously falling pregnant. When Mila gives birth to the only boy, their hardline separatist ideals face an impossible test.

Vividly expressed, wildly funny, and wholly original, The Endling examines the volatile intersection of community and politics, exploring what happens when the borders we construct between species, between sexes, between self and world prove more porous than we imagine.

A gripping, real-life thriller following the authors’ attempt to uncover the truth about one of the world’s most wanted men.

Karl Lee, alias Li Fangwei, plays a key role in the secret struggle between the world powers, bypassing Western sanctions to supply dictators with the weapons they need to wipe out their neighboring countries—or even to trigger a third world war.

For almost two decades, intelligence agencies have been hunting for Karl Lee. The FBI has put a $5 million dollar bounty on his head, but nobody has been able to catch him. Now, four award-winning investigative journalists set out to find him. Following the routes of his deliveries and his money, the authors track down Karl Lee’s businesses in China and uncover his network of shell companies. During their investigation, they get embroiled deeper and deeper in the shady world of the Chinese phantom, and realize that Karl Lee is just a pawn in a much bigger game of modern warfare and international espionage.

A fascinating history of physicist Ernest Rutherford, who developed the key concepts underlying modern physics today.

By the mid-nineteenth century, physicists believed they had discovered the last secrets of the universe. Then a new world opened up: one of waves, particles, and new, fundamental forces. This mysterious world swiftly captured the public imagination, not least because of the technical revolution that emerged from it, giving the world everything from radio to TV, X-ray machines, smoke detectors, and more.

One of the key movers of this new world was Ernest Rutherford, who became popularly known as the “father of the atom” in recognition of his pioneering role in particle physics. But he was far more than that. Through his roles at Manchester University and then the Cavendish Laboratory in England, he steered a new generation of highly influential physicists such as Niels Bohr, helping to shape much of the way we understand physics today—from quantum mechanics to the “standard model” of particles.

This immersive history explores the discovery of that science, using Rutherford’s life as a vehicle to steer the journey. It explains just why this science seized the public imagination of the day, and why Rutherford’s contribution was integral not just to the technical revolution of the twentieth century, but to the way we now understand the nature of the universe. And it explains how that science works, in engaging, accessible terms.

A scientific true-crime caper stretching across the globe, The Butterfly Thief pieces together the bizarre story of one of the largest, most systematic, and baffling museum heists in the records of natural history.

In January 1947, a chance discovery rocks the world of natural science—over 3,000 rare and precious butterfly specimens have vanished from the most prestigious natural history museums in Australia. Alarmingly, the missing insects include many priceless “holotypes”: the first specimen of a given species to be identified, against which all others are compared.

New Scotland Yard and a team of entomologists are tasked to catch the culprit, and the person they suspect turns out to be a fascinating, larger-than-life figure—British ex-soldier, former champion skier, painter, semi-professional yodeller, and amateur lepidopterologist Colin Wyatt.

But who was this man, and how did he pull off such an ambitious string of burglaries? What did he serve to gain from amassing a vast illicit collection of specimens? What was the root of his obsession, and was he really a criminal, marked for life by his thefts, or a gifted and imaginative collector?

A delightful puzzlebox of a mystery drawing from unpublished dossiers, case files, and on-the-ground reporting, The Butterfly Thief unfolds this captivating tale of stolen specimens in rich, spellbinding detail.

A continuation of the acclaimed novel Thunderhead, Fireweather follows Winona Dalloway as she struggles to come to terms with the unrecognizable world around her.

Life for Winona Dalloway is not as it should be. Her husband is no longer her husband, her children are not at home with her, and the city in which she lives is besieged by fires. Black ash falls like snow, songbirds screech like dinosaurs, and the doctors are calling her mad …

In this looking-glass world, Winona is forced to prove she is a sane, rational human being. As the pronouncements of the professionals grow more insistent, so too do the voices crowding inside Winona's head. She seeks solace in the company of plants and animals, and begins to imagine an entirely other way of being—one that might make whole her broken heart.

A darkly comic and compelling satire of the art world from the author of The Disaster Tourist.

An Yiji’s career had been stalling for some time when a representative of the illustrious Robert Foundation offers her a spot on their all-expenses-paid artist residency in California. The residency has launched many famous artists’ careers, so she knows she can’t waste this opportunity. Still, she feels reluctant to accept, and with good reason: the Foundation’s patron is a small dog named Robert, known for both his talent as a photographer, but also his arrogance. Moreover, the offer comes with a condition: on the last day of the residency, one of An’s paintings must be incinerated, and Robert gets to select which one.

When An reaches California, she finds the state ablaze with wildfires, but at the foundation all is calm. She navigates awkward dinners with Robert, tries to find inspiration while being bombarded with sponsors who all want their business to be the subject of her art, and despairs at the prospect of her work being set on fire. Was coming to California a huge mistake?

A powerful eyewitness account of the genocide in Gaza by an extraordinary young writer and general physician.

Five days before October 7, 2023, a young Palestinian doctor returns to Gaza, having completed his medical studies abroad. His family gathers to celebrate his achievements and to welcome him home. On October 11, forty-two members of his extended family are killed in an airstrike, and thus begins his incredible story of survival and service to his people.

For more than eight months, Dr. Ezzideen Shehab volunteers at the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, witnessing at first hand catastrophic injuries and deaths, and working under the most difficult circumstances imaginable. Constantly targeted by the Israeli Defence Forces, the Indonesian hospital is ultimately destroyed.

In December 2024, Dr. Shehab cofounds the Al-Rahma Medical Clinic to provide free medical care in northern Gaza, where no functioning hospitals remain. The clinic is damaged multiple times, and in July 2025 is forced to close. Dr. Shehab and his family are displaced for the fifth time, with no hope of ever returning to their demolished home in the north of Gaza.

In his testimony of these months, Dr. Shehab’s clarity and humanity shine through. He describes the people he treats, the devastation of his homeland, and his incomprehension at the world’s silence in the face of the unfolding genocide. Diary of a Young Doctor is a deeply moving and unforgettable work that bears witness to one of the most shameful periods in recent global history.

The resources race is on. Powering our digital lives and green technologies are some of the Earth’s most precious metals—but they are running out. And what will happen when they do?

The green-tech revolution has been lauded as the silver bullet to a new world. One that is at last free of oil, pollution, shortages, and cross-border tensions. Now updated after several years of research across a dozen countries, this book cuts across conventional green thinking to probe the hidden, dark side of green technology.

By breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence—on rare metals such as cobalt, gold, and palladium. They are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. China has captured the lion’s share of the rare metals industry, but consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or their environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs.

The Rare Metals War is a vital exposé of the ticking time-bomb that lies beneath our new technological order. It uncovers the reality of our lavish and ambitious environmental quest that involves risks as formidable as those it seeks to resolve.

A fresh appreciation of the magic of birds and how watching them fulfils a human need to connect with nature.

Enchantment by birds is commonplace. Birdwatchers merely go a step further than others and actively seek to be enchanted. This book tells why they take that extra step. It takes the reader on a series of excursions into birdwatching’s past, venturing forward to the present. With an intriguing cast of characters, avian as well as human, its lively narratives explore the emotional and aesthetic impulses behind the pastime as well as its scientific and conservationist components.

Its stories of 22 Australian birds range widely: from wordy squabbles over bird names to the artistic finessing of field guides; from the Paradise Parrot’s tragic fall into extinction to the everyday enjoyment of a Magpie’s carol; from the evolution of citizen science to the boom in birding tourism. Interlacing them all is the insight that birdwatching is a means by which modern, urban people reach out to touch the wild. A primal desire to connect with nature lies at the heart of the pastime.

Enchantment by Birds not only offers a compelling exposition of what makes birders tick; it also tells us, imaginatively and informatively, why birds have a special place in our hearts.

Monsters, in all their terrifying glory, have preoccupied humans since we began telling stories. But where did these stories come from?

In Monsterland, award-winning author Nicholas Jubber goes on a journey to discover more about the monsters we’ve invented, lurking in the dark and the wild places of the earth—giants, dragons, ogres, zombies, ghosts, demons—all with one thing in common: their ability to terrify.

His far-ranging adventure takes him across the world. He sits on the thrones of giants in Cornwall, visits the shrine of a beheaded ogre near Kyoto, travels to an eighteenth-century Balkan vampire’s forest dwelling, and paddles among the shapeshifters of the Louisiana bayous. On his travels, he discovers that the stories of the people and places that birthed them are just as fascinating as the creatures themselves.

Artfully written, Monsterland is a fascinating interrogation into why we need these monsters and what they can tell us about ourselves—how they bind communities together as much as they cruelly cast away outsiders.

From the author of Tokyo Vice comes the wild, true story of cyber-era commerce, crime, cold-hard cash, and one of the greatest heists in history.

Even in hell, Bitcoin talks. This modern take on an old Japanese saying still holds true. Cryptocurrency was supposed to do for money what the internet did for information, but it didn’t work out that way. Its virtual existence unleashed real-world chaos—especially in the homeland of its mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Tokyo was the center of the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, until that company collapsed with nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of Bitcoin gone missing. It might be the greatest heist in history. If it was a heist.

So what really happened? The Devil Takes Bitcoin tells the true story of the humble-to-hot commodity, from the former geek website that launched the boom to an inside world of absent-minded CEOs, hucksters, hackers, cybercrooks, drug dealers, corrupt federal agents, evangelical libertarians, and clueless techies. You’ll discover Bitcoin’s connection to the infamous Silk Road, learn why hell has nothing on Japan’s criminal justice system, and get the lowdown on the high cost of betting with the Devil’s dollars. All of this for less than the price of a single Bitcoin.

A panoramic novel of European history, by an internationally bestselling writer.

The whole truth, as the name implies, is the collective knowledge of all those involved. Which is why you can never really piece it together again afterwards. Because some of those who possessed a part of it will already be dead. Or they’re lying, or their memories are bad.

It’s 1989, and in a small town on the Austria–Hungary border, nobody talks about the war; the older residents pretend not to remember, and the younger ones are too busy making plans to leave. The walls are thin, the curtains twitch, there is a face at every window, and everyone knows what they are not supposed to say.

But as thousands of East German refugees mass at the border, it seems that the past is knocking on Darkenbloom’s door.

Still, though, nobody talks about the war.

Until a mysterious visitor shows up asking questions.

Until townspeople start receiving threatening letters and even disappearing.

Until a body is found.

Darkenbloom is a sweeping novel of exiled counts, Nazis-turned-Soviet-enforcers, secret marriages, mislabelled graves, remembrance, guilt, and the devastating power of silence, by one of Austria’s most significant contemporary writers.

Both deeply personal and global in scope, Pride and Prejudices presents the life story of international human rights lawyer Keio Yoshida alongside an urgent, engaging overview of the state of LGBTQ+ rights worldwide.

Keio Yoshida came of age in socially conservative Ireland, where homosexuality was criminalized until 1993. Experiencing discrimination and stigma, Yoshida lived a closeted existence, pressured by their loved ones and by larger society to self-censor and hide their true desires and gender expression until they left the country after college.

Intimate and engaging, Pride and Prejudices pairs Yoshida’s story—from coming out as a lesbian, becoming a trailblazing human rights advocate, to later becoming a nonbinary transmasculine rainbow parent—with a treatise on the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ+ rights around the globe. Fascinating examples of landmark case law are covered from the US, Sri Lanka, the UK, India, and more—from Oscar Wilde’s trial in 1895 to Obergefell v Hodges, from “Don’t Say Gay” to Bostock v Clayton County, from Rosanna Flamer Caldera v Sri Lanka to the “gay cake” case.

By weaving together personal history and legal analysis, Yoshida illustrates the devastating consequences of discrimination and criminalization on queer and trans lives, and the importance of stronger legal protections.

Today, as we see increased hostility toward queer and trans communities in the US, Pride and Prejudices offers a hopeful vision of the future—one filled with queer joy and love and liberation—where each of us has the freedom to live our lives authentically, on our own terms.

This brighter and more just world is possible, Yoshida argues, but we must keep fighting for it.

Understanding relationships isn’t just about other people—it starts with understanding yourself and where you've come from.

In How We Relate, clinical and forensic psychologist Dr Ahona Guha takes us on an illuminating journey through the psychology of human connection. Drawing from her many years of clinical experience, she reveals how our earliest relationships shape every connection we form—from family and friendships to romance and work.

How do childhood blueprints influence adult behaviors? Why do some friendships fail while others flourish? What makes the difference between healthy and toxic dynamics? With warmth and practical insight, Guha explores the hidden patterns that govern our interactions, offering concrete strategies for breaking free from destructive cycles.

Whether you’re struggling with difficult family members, navigating workplace politics, or seeking deeper intimacy in love, this book provides the psychological tools to understand yourself and transform your relationships. How We Relate is your guide to building the meaningful connections you deserve.

True love versus easy money—which would you choose if your partner was literally your golden goose?

The day her careers counsellor informs her that her philosophy major has left her with 'no special skills', Anna gives up on her ambitions and her brilliant career as a student. Now a warm-up act for a TV talk show, she finds consolation only in her relationship: she and Lulu have true love, the kind only two minimum-wage workers defying contemporary consumer society could ever know.

Until one day, Lulu starts vomiting money. While he purges himself of enough to keep her in designer handbags, Anna wonders: should she be worried about his health or should she do her best to make sure he never stops?

In Self-Worth newcomer Emma Tholozan delivers a raw, brutally funny portrait of a generation without ideals.

Imperial China meets Edwardian England in this epic story of loves lost and gained, set during the aftermath of the Opium Wars.

Best friends Jiali and Wu Fang know that no man is a match for them. In their small harbor town of Fudi, they practice sword fighting, write couplets to one another, and strut around dressed as men. Jiali is a renowned poet and Wu Fang is going to be China’s first female surgeon. But when Wu Fang returns from medical training in Japan, she is horrified to hear of Jiali’s marriage to a man who cannot even match her couplets, and confused by her intense feelings of jealousy towards her friend’s new husband, Yanbu.

Ocean man Charles has arrived in Fudi to start a new life. He eschews the company of his fellow foreigners, preferring to spend time with new colleague Yanbu, his wife, Jiali, and her friend, Wu Fang. Over the course of several months, he grows close to them all, in increasingly confusing ways, but what will happen when he is forced to choose between his country and his friends?

As tensions between the Manchu rulers and the people rise, and foreign battleships gather out to sea, loyalties will be tested in more ways than Jiali, Wu Fang, Yanbu, and Charles can possibly imagine.

“A courageous and bold achievement by a bright new voice.” Ocean Vuong

A young woman, torn between two cultures, belonging to neither. A family, torn apart by a war they had no choice about.

Kiều calls herself Kim because it’s easier for Europeans to pronounce. She knows little about her Vietnamese family’s history until she receives a Facebook message from her estranged uncle in America, telling her that her grandmother is dying. Her father and uncle haven’t spoken since the end of the Vietnam War. One brother supported the Viet Cong, while the other sided with the Americans.

When Kiều and her parents travel to America to join the rest of the family in California for the funeral, questions relating to their past—to what has been suppressed—resurface and demand to be addressed.

A playful guide to understanding the ways of “normal people”, The Autist’s Guide to the Galaxy flips our usual scripts about neurodiversity.

Following on from her internationally successful memoir, The Autists, Clara Törnvall has written a fun, comprehensive, and accessible explanation of neurotypical, or “normal”, behavior. Full of facts, tips, and tests, and developed with input from other autists, this book places the difficulties autists face in the context of a world built for the neurotypical majority. It will help neurodiverse people—and their families, friends, and loved ones—navigate this world, nurture stronger relationships, and thrive.

Spring, summer, autumn, and winter
The seasons come and go, bringing changes both welcome and unexpected

Miki Sakamoto has spent a lifetime tending her garden and reflecting on its mysteries. Why do primulas bloom in snow? Do the trees really ‘talk’ to one another? What are the black birds saying today? And is there a mindful way to deal with an aphid infestation?

From rising early to walk barefoot on the grass each morning, to afternoons and evenings spent sipping tea in her gazebo or watching fireflies as she recalls her childhood in Japan, in Zen in the Garden Sakamoto shares observations from a life spent in contemplation—and cultivation—of nature.

An essential guide to one of the world’s most remarkable, and often misunderstood, cities by the author of Why the Dutch Are Different.

When Ben Coates injures his leg and needs to rebuild his strength by walking, he finds himself presented with an exciting opportunity: to rediscover the city he has been working in for over a decade, at a slower pace. He devised ten walks, each demonstrating a different chapter of Amsterdam’s history, from its humble beginnings in the early 1200s as a small fishing community through two Golden Ages, fuelled by the growth of the Dutch colonial empire, two world wars, and countless reinventions.

Join Coates as he meanders past beautiful townhouses and glittering canals, dances at Pride celebrations, witnesses the King’s apology at Keti Koti, attends a WW2 memorial, gets high at a coffee shop, walks through the red-light district, and gazes in awe at Rembrandt paintings, all the while illuminating modern Amsterdam by explaining its past.

Blending travelog and quirky history, The Invention of Amsterdam is an entertaining and sharply observed portrait of a fascinating and complicated city.

Inspired by Robert Macfarlane and curated by Jennie Orchard, an anthology of essays about the joys of giving books to children and young people, from some of the world’s most beloved writers.

Remember the books that shaped your childhood, sparked your imagination, and ignited a lifelong love of reading? In The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation, some of the world’s most beloved authors share their own transformative reading experiences—the books and stories that set them on the path of becoming the readers and writers they are today.

Following the success of its first edition, The Gifts of Reading, this heartwarming collection of essays is a testament to the enduring power of books. By exploring the stories that shaped them, our authors provide a powerful guide to fostering a love of reading in the children and young people in your life.

With contributions from Tristan Bancks, William Boyd, Shankari Chandran, Horatio Clare, Nicola Davies, Imtiaz Dharker, Ursula Dubosarsky, Maisie Fieschi, Pico Iyer, Wayne Karlin, Colum McCann, JohnMichael McCann, Ann Morgan, Sir Michael Morpurgo, Dina Nayeri, Matt Ottley, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Alice Pung, Diana Reid, Nilanjana Roy, Nikesh Shukla, Nardi Simpson, Madeleine Thien, Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and John Wood, and an afterword by Julia Eccleshare.

All royalties generously donated to the two organizations founded by John Wood, Room to Read and U-Go, promoting literacy and education for girls and young women.

“Soul medicine for the smartphone weary… Life-affirming. Brilliant.”
—Matthew Quick, New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook

From the acclaimed author of A Room Called Earth comes an addictive new novel about finding yourself in a world obsessed with staying connected.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and twenty-something Camille is on her way to work. Exhausted and cramping, stressing about having to face another day under the glare of her controlling, passive-aggressive boss, she realizes, too late, that she’s forgotten her phone.

Her panic is instant—no scrolling; no messaging; no escaping reality—and now she faces an hours-long commute with no relief and no distractions.

But as Camille gets closer to the city, her gaze turns inward. She thinks back to how she first met her poet boyfriend Manny; she remembers her dreams of opening her own floral designing business. And, gradually, the world around her becomes a wonder waiting to be rediscovered.

With glittering wit and wry humor, The Knowing dramatizes a day in the life of a young woman who goes to work as usual while dreaming of more.

“A profound diagnosis and wake-up call.”
—Ralph Gerstenberg, Deutschlandfunk Kultur Book Review

Political economist Maja Göpel delivers the tools we need to build the world we want to live in

Humanity is undergoing a massive process of transformation, and the way we live is about to change in a fundamental way.

In recent times, we’ve lived so hard on the earth, that the environment, the economy, politics, society, and technology are crumbling. There have always been great transformations in history, triggered by humans. Structural change is not an imposition, but an opportunity. It is time that we — each of us individually, but also society as a whole — allowed ourselves to think anew, to dream, and to ask two related, radical questions: Who do we want to be, and how do we want to live?

In We Can Do Better, Maja Göpel explains how we can understand such complex developments and use this knowledge to achieve a better world.

“I chose the jagged rocks, the broken bones, the spattered brains. I chose beauty. I'd choose it again.”

Luna Lewis is white. But her friends aren’t, nor are her brothers, nor her one-time Princess of Indonesia–finalist stepmother. After transforming from pudgy preteen to ‘exotic’ beauty, Luna reinvents herself as ‘Luna Lu’ and takes her ticket out of the most isolated city on earth. However, as her international modeling career approaches its expiration date, Luna must grapple with what she’s sacrificed—and who she’s become—in her mission to conquer the world.

Featuring an intersecting cast of glamor-hungry public schoolgirls, WAGs, mining heiresses, backpacker-barmaids, and cosmetic nurses, West Girls is a novel-in-stories that examines beauty, race, class divisions, and social mobility in Australia’s richest state. It’s also a devastating catalog of the myriad, inventive ways in which women love and hurt one another.

“[A] devastating, beautifully written tale imbued with Maori culture and language.”
—Gregory Brown, The New York Times for Auē

The much-awaited follow-up to the award-winning international bestseller Auē.

In Auē, eight-year-old Ārama was taken by his brother, Taukiri, to live with Kat and Stu at the farm in Kaikōura, setting in motion the ensuing tragedy, which resulted in Stu’s death. Aunty Kat was at the center of events, but, silenced by abuse, her voice was absent from the story.

In Kataraina, Kat and her whānau take over the telling. As one, the family recounts her childhood and the time when she first began to feel the greenness of the swamp in her veins—the swamp that holds her tears and the tears of generations of tīpuna that came before her; the swamp on the land owned by Stu that has been growing since the day he was killed.

Unflinching in its portrayal of intergenerational trauma and violence, tender in its harnessing of the hope that future generations represent, Kataraina is a stunning novel that confirms Becky Manawatu as one of the most talented and powerful writers working in Aotearoa/New Zealand today.

“Winona is a compelling character, full of life and humor, and Miranda Darling draws you into her life so thoroughly that Thunderhead becomes a powerful and gripping experience of the insidious and subtle effects of coercive control.” —Midwest Book Review

A brilliant work of feminist fiction, this sharp, powerful novel follows one woman’s struggle to free herself from the confines of contemporary domesticity.

When Winona Dalloway begins her day—in the peaceful early hours before her children, that “tiny tornado of little hands and feet”, wake up—she doesn’t know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed.

On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices—a mind both wild and precise.

And meanwhile, a storm is brewing …

A monumental journey through Baltic history and culture, in which we encounter well-known personalities and forgotten ones, and a disconcerting picture of Europe in the twentieth century.

From 1999 to 2010, Jan Brokken explored life stories in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The result was his masterly Baltic Souls, available here for the first time in English. Brokken uncovered the stories of famous artists and writers such as Mark Rothko, Sergei Eisenstein, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Lipchitz, who were all born in the regions bordering the Baltic Sea before leaving to build their work abroad, spreading a bit of the Baltic soul across Europe and America.

Less well known were the stories of people such as the Rozes and their family bookstore in Riga, or the von Wrangels, the ultimate descendants of the Baltic barons. Or the story of the titanic struggle that violist Gidon Kremer fought with his father in Riga, who was burdened by the death of thirty-five family members in concentration camps. Or the story of Loreta Asanavičiūtė, who was run over by a Russian tank in 1991.

It is this melancholy imbued with fatalism, this vitality forged by the upheavals of history, this appetite for reading, music, and art, that enriches the portraits painted by Jan Brokken.

Conducted in the style of a travel diary where chance encounters and biographical sketches mingle, Baltic Souls makes us feel the cruelty and violence of an era, but also the tenderness and solidarity of an entire people, united across borders.

There is an old Buddhist adage: the teachings are like a finger pointing to the moon. To achieve enlightenment, you are not supposed to look at the finger. You are supposed to look to the celestial light.

I am asking you to look at the finger. The finger is also the moon.

A tilted head. A finger to the lips. A wave that could mean emphasis or dismissal. A raised palm of piety and fellowship.

Our gestures do not simply point to our thoughts, they are our thoughts made flesh. They can be instinctive, intuitive, or calculated—or all three. They exist in the briefest moment and through history, in a gently turned wrist and across whole nations.

Our gestures drag stories with them, whether they mean to or not. They are invitations to think about how our worlds are larger than they seem—how we are much larger than we seem.

Join award-winning philosopher Damon Young—author of The Art of Reading and Philosophy in the Garden—as he sheds light on thirteen curious gestures. Drawing equally from classical poetry and science-fiction, heavy metal and ballet, Young illuminates our varied humanity from prehistory to today.

A Paris police force as you’ve never seen it

Police officers are obliged to give an account of every incident they are involved in. But what happened today will never be logged. Because that's what police solidarity means: what happens in the van stays in the van.

Well, not always. Not this time.

What really happens behind the walls of a police station? To answer this question, investigative journalist Valentin Gendrot put his life on hold for two years and became the first journalist in history to infiltrate the police undetected.

Within three months of training to become an officer, he was given a permit to carry a weapon in public. And although he lived in daily fear of being discovered, in his book Gendrot hides nothing.

Assigned to work in a tough area of Paris where tensions between the law and locals ran high, Gendrot witnessed police brutality, racism, blunders, and cover-ups. But he also saw the oppressive working conditions that officers endured, and mourned the tragic suicide of a colleague.

Asking important questions about who holds institutional power and how we can hold them to account, Cop is a gripping exposé of a world never before seen by outsiders.

From the author of the multi-award-winning bestseller Between a Wolf and a Dog, a powerful collection of previously unpublished stories.

A sister is haunted by the consequences of a simple mistake. A daughter searches for certainty as her mother’s memory degrades. An encounter at a house party changes the course of a life.

In Far From Home, beloved Australian author Georgia Blain returns to her resonant themes of relationships and family, illness and health, love and death. Composed in Blain’s final years, these nine stories grapple with large questions on a human scale, brimming with her trademark acuity, nuance, and warmth.

A collection of beautiful photographs that invites you to immerse yourself and revisit the cool, quirky, glamorous, exciting, menacing, and wonderful times of Retro Sydney.

This collection of photographs celebrates the vibrant and exciting coming of age of Australia’s first city in the ‘golden era’ of 1950 to 2000. From the bustling heart of the CBD, to the quaint suburbia of the outer suburbs, the fashionable streets of Double Bay, the seedy and glamorous Kings Cross, and the carefree beachside suburbs of Sydney, Retro Sydney captures the city’s most significant postwar milestones, and highlights its development and transformation into an international metropolis.

Adapted from the highly popular ‘Retro Sydney’ Instagram account, this collection is a celebration of Sydney. It allows us to behold iconic sights and scenes—some as they were, and some as they still are, generations later. For many readers, it offers a chance to indulge in rare memories of growing up in Australia’s first city.

The sweeping debut novel set in bohemian Paris, by the author of international bestseller The Eighth Life.

In 1953, a teenage girl, Jeanne Saré, jumps in front of a train at the Gare du Nord station. She leaves behind writings that to some are unreadable, but to others tell universal, unspoken truths about the lives and struggles of women. When published in the 1970s, her work triggers a rash of copycat suicides. It is hastily withdrawn from sale and eventually forgotten about.

Then, in 2004, two women from opposite corners of the globe—Amsterdam and Sydney—rediscover Jeanne Saré’s book and set out to discover who the author was and what happened to her.

Women across the ages have attached their own stories to Saré’s, often with devastating results, but the truth about her may be even stranger than the fictions they have invented.

WINNER OF THE 2023 ABIA GENERAL NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD

“The gripping inside story of how Scott Morrison went from miracle man to roadkill. Savva portrays a fatally flawed leader who trashed his government, his party, and his legacy.”
—Laurie Oakes

Between 2013 and 2022, Tony Abbott begat Malcolm Turnbull, who begat Scott Morrison. For nine long years, Australia was governed by a succession of Coalition governments rocked by instability and bloodletting, and consumed with prosecuting climate and culture wars while neglecting policy.

By the end, among his detractors—and there were plenty—Morrison was seen as the worst prime minister since Billy McMahon. Worse even than Tony Abbott, who lasted a scant two years in the job, whose main legacy was that he destroyed Julia Gillard, then himself, and then Turnbull.

Morrison failed to accept the mantle of national leadership, or to deal adequately with the challenges of natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic. He thought reform was a vanity project. He said he never wanted to leave a legacy. He got his wish.

Niki Savva, Australia’s renowned political commentator, author, and columnist, was there for all of it. In The Road to Ruin, she revealed the ruinous behavior of former prime minister Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, that led to the ascension of Turnbull. In Plots and Prayers, she told the inside story of the coup that overthrew Turnbull and installed his conniving successor, Morrison.

Now she lays out the final unravelling of the Coalition at the hands of a resurgent Labor and the so-called teal independents that culminated in the historic 2022 election. With her typical access to key players, and her riveting accounts of what went on behind the scenes, Bulldozed is the unique final volume of an unputdownable and impeccably sourced political trilogy.

‘I don’t hold a hose, mate.’ Scott Morrison, 20 December 2019, on the Black Summer bushfires
‘It’s not a race.’ Scott Morrison, 11 March 2021, on the COVID-19 vaccine rollout

“From schoolboy socialist to boy publisher to mogul on the make: Young Rupert offers a revelatory glimpse of Murdoch becoming Murdoch."—Jeff Sparrow, author of No Way But This: in search of Paul Robeson

For half a century, the Murdoch media empire and its polarizing patriarch have swept across the globe, shaking up markets and democracies in their wake. But how did it all start?

In September 1953, 22-year-old Rupert Murdoch landed in Adelaide, South Australia. Fresh from Oxford with a radical reputation, the young and brash son of Sir Keith Murdoch had arrived to fulfill his father’s dying wish: for Rupert to live a “useful altruistic and full life” in the media.

For decades, Sir Keith had been a giant of the Australian press, but his final years were spent bitterly fending off rivals and would-be successors. When the dust settled on his father’s estate, Rupert was left with the Adelaide-based News Ltd and its afternoon paper The News—a minor player in a small, parochial city.

But even this inheritance was soon under siege, as the left-wing “Boy Publisher” stared down his father’s old colleagues at the city’s paper of record, The Advertiser, and a conservative establishment kept in power by a decades-old gerrymander.

Led by Rupert’s friend, ally, and editor-in-chief Rohan Rivett, the fledgling Murdoch press began a seven-year campaign of circulation wars, expansion, and courtroom battles that divided the city and would lay the foundations for a global empire—if Rupert and Rohan didn’t end up in custody first.

Drawing on unpublished archival material and new reportage, Young Rupert pieces together a paper trail of succession, sedition, and power—and a fascinating time capsule of Australian media on the cusp of an extraordinary ascension.

A revolutionary framework for living well in a broken world, from acclaimed author and psychologist.

How can I manage heartbreak? How do I cope with death? How can I learn to tolerate anxiety and have hope?

In this helpful, practical, and realistic guide to good psychological health, Dr Ahona Guha shows us how to cope, thrive, and still feel hopeful for the future. Combining techniques from a range of therapeutic modalities, she demonstrates how we can build a range of essential psychological skills, and apply them to live a more tranquil and joyful life.

Life Skills for a Broken World is a breath of fresh air, cutting through the confusion to provide solid, practical, and evidence-based answers to existential questions, big and small.

The gripping history of Taiwan, from the flood myths of indigenous legend to its Asian Tiger economic miracle—and the renewed threat of invasion by China.

Once dismissed by the Kangxi Emperor as nothing but a ‘ball of mud’, Taiwan has a modern GDP larger than that of Sweden, in a land area smaller than Indiana. It is the last surviving enclave of the Republic of China, a lost colony of Japan, and claimed by Beijing as a rogue province—merely the latest chapters in its long history as a refuge for pirates, rebels, settlers, and outcasts.

Jonathan Clements examines the unique conditions of Taiwan’s archaeology and indigenous history, and its days as a Dutch and Spanish trading post. He delves into its periods as an independent kingdom, Chinese province, and short-lived republic, and the transformations wrought by 50 years as part of the Japanese Empire. He examines the traumatic effects of its role as a lifeboat in 1949 for two million refugees from Communism, and the conflicts emerging after the suspension of four decades of martial law, as its people debate issues of self-determination, independence, and home rule.

A black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman’s struggle to be free.

When Winona Dalloway begins her day—in the peaceful early hours before her children, that “tiny tornado of little hands and feet”, wake up—she doesn’t know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed.

On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices—a mind both wild and precise.

And meanwhile, a storm is brewing …

The second novel by Booker Prize-longlisted author Anna Smaill. A lyrical and ambitious exploration of madness and what it is like to experience the world differently.

In Ueno Park, Tokyo, as workers and tourists gather for lunch, the pollen blows, a fountain erupts, pigeons scatter, and two women meet, changing the course of one another’s lives.

Dinah has come to Japan from New Zealand to teach English and grieve the death of her brother, Michael, a troubled genius who was able to channel his problems into music as a classical pianist—until he wasn’t. In the seemingly empty, eerie apartment block where Dinah has been housed, she sees Michael everywhere, even as she feels his absence sharply.

Yasuko is polished, precise, and keenly observant—of her students and colleagues at the language school, and of the natural world. When she was thirteen, animals began to speak to her, to tell her things she did not always want to hear. She has suppressed these powers for many years, but sometimes she allows them to resurface, to the dismay of her adult son, Jun. One day, she returns home, and Jun has gone. Even her special gifts cannot bring him back.

As these two women deal with their individual traumas, they form an unlikely friendship in which each will help the other to see a different possible world, as Smaill teases out the tension between our internal and external lives and asks what we lose by having to choose between them.

WINNER OF THE 2022 AGE BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR FICTION
HIGHLY COMMENDED IN THE 2022 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION

‘A parent’s love for a child, you probably know this yourself, it’s pretty bottomless. It goes down into the guts of the world. But a child’s love for a parent is different. It goes up. It’s more ethereal. It’s not quite present on the earth.’

In present-day Melbourne, a man attempts to piece together the mystery of his father’s apparent suicide as his young family slowly implodes. At the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, in 1976, a man searching for salvation must confront his capacity for violence and darkness. And in a not-too-distant future, a woman with a life-altering decision to make travels through a climate-ravaged landscape to visit her estranged father.

In Moonland is a portrait of three generations, each grappling with their own mortality. Spanning the wild idealism of the 70s through to the fragile hope of the future, it is a novel about the struggle for transcendence and the reverberating effects of family bonds. This long-awaited second outing from Miles Allinson, the multi-award-winning author of Fever of Animals, will affirm his reputation as one of Australia’s most interesting contemporary fiction writers, and urge us to see our own political and environmental reality in a new light.

Can knowledge heal chronic pain? The ultimate, science-driven guide to understanding chronic pain.

Paul Biegler—a science journalist and former doctor—has interviewed the world’s leading pain experts, along with people who have weathered their own chronic pain battles.

Chronic pain is the single biggest cause of suffering. And yet, pain that persists for more than three months is often unrelated to any physical injury. So why does it still hurt?

From neuroplasticity, to sensitized nervous systems, and associative learning—Dr. Biegler’s journey through pain clinics and studies debunks common myths about pain treatments and explores the pivotal recent brain science that explains why a nervous system holds on to pain pathways, and how to retrain the brain and the body.

Discover what we can learn from the leading pain doctors and the pain clinics that offer no pain medications but still have excellent (and fast) results.

Why Does It Still Hurt? is a must-read for anyone with chronic pain who wants cutting-edge knowledge and help to live pain-free.

Spring and summer are my mother’s time, autumn and winter are my husband’s. What is left for me?

Persephone spends six months of the year under the ground with her husband, king of the dead, and six months on earth with her mother, goddess of the harvest. It has been this way for nine thousand years, since the deal was struck. But when she resurfaces this spring, something is different. Rains lash the land, crops grow out of season or not at all, there are people trying to build a road through the woods, and her mother does not seem able to stop them. The natural world is changing rapidly and even the gods have lost control.

While Demeter tries to regain her powers and fend off her daughter’s husband, who wants to drag his queen back underground for good, Persephone finally gets a taste of freedom, joining a group of protestors. Used to blinking up at the world from below, as she looks down on the earth for the very first time from the treetops with activist Snow, Persephone realizes that there are choices she can make for herself. But what will these choices mean for her mother, her husband, and for the new shoots of life inside her?

No Season but the Summer takes a classic myth and turns it on its head, asking what will happen when our oldest stories fail us, when all the rules have changed. It is, above all, a book about choice.

A compelling and persuasive look at the social transformations needed to cope with our environmental crises.

As this major German bestseller reports, our world is at a tipping point, and we feel it every day. On the one hand, we have never been so well off; on the other hand, we find destruction and crisis everywhere we look. Whether throughout the environment or within society, our systems are under stress.

In this book, Maja Göpel, co-founder of the Scientists for Future initiative and a former secretary-general of the German Advisory Council on Global Change, explains that this new reality didn’t just happen overnight, but rather is a result of our continuous actions—actions propelled by principles and beliefs, which have shaped us as a society over generations. We do not solely face an environmental crisis, but also a social one. It’s time to question our principles, set new goals, and re-evaluate our priorities. It’s time to rethink our world, because if we want to keep our livelihoods, we need to find a way of living without draining our planet any further. We need a fair distribution of wealth and a way to reconcile the social with the ecological.

Critical, yet full of encouragement, Maja Göpel chooses surprising and enlightening examples to illustrate how we can leave behind our familiar ways of living to achieve a better future. With that, she invites us to look at this future we are shaping every day in a new and completely different way.

The deeply moving memoir of an award-winning war correspondent turned activist—and her rousing defense of human rights in times of resurgent authoritarianism.

As a broadcast journalist for Sky News and Al Jazeera, Sherine Tadros was trained to tell only the facts, as dispassionately as possible. But how can you remain neutral when reporting from war zones, or witnessing brutal state repression?

For twenty-six years, Tadros grew up in the quiet surroundings of her family’s London home, and yet injustice was something her Egyptian immigrant parents could never shelter her from. From her first journalistic assignment trapped inside a war zone in the Gaza Strip, to covering the Arab uprisings that changed the course of history, Tadros searched for ways to make a difference in people’s lives. But it wasn’t until her fiancé left her on their wedding day, and her life fell apart, that she found the courage to find her true purpose. It was the beginning of a journey leading to her current work for Amnesty International at the United Nations, where she lobbies governments to ensure that human rights are protected around the world.

With the compassion and verve of a clear-sighted campaigner and a natural storyteller, Tadros shares her remarkable journey from witnessing injustice to fighting it head-on in the corridors of power.

A dazzling follow-up to Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal.

‘We would love to discover that each species has a biological clock in its cells, because, if that clock existed and if we were able to find it, perhaps we could stop it and thus become eternal,’ Arsuaga tells Millás in this book, in which science is intertwined with literature. The paleontologist reveals essential aspects of our existence to the writer, and debates the advisability of transmitting his random vision of life to a dieting Millás, who discovers that old age is a country in which he still feels like a foreigner.

After the extraordinary international reception of Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal, the most brilliant double act in Spanish literature once again dazzle the reader by addressing topics such as death and eternity, longevity, disease, aging, natural selection, programmed death, and survival.

Here you will find humor, biology, nature, life, a lot of life … and two fascinating characters, the Sapiens and the Neanderthal, who surprise us on every page with their sharp reflections on how evolution has treated us as a species. And also as individuals.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER AWARD

International Booker–nominated virtuoso Hwang Sok-yong is back with another powerful story—an epic tale that threads together a century of Korean history.

In contemporary Seoul, a laid-off worker stages a months-long sit-in atop a sixteen-story factory chimney. During the long and lonely nights, he talks to his ancestors, chewing on the meaning of life, on wisdom passed down the generations.

Through the lives of those ancestors, three generations of railroad workers, Mater 2-10 vividly portrays the struggles of ordinary Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. It is at once a gripping account of a nation’s longing to be free from oppression, a lyrical folktale that reflects the blood, sweat, and tears shed by modern industrial laborers, and a culmination of Hwang’s career—a masterpiece thirty years in the making.

A true voice of a generation, Hwang shows again why he is unmatched when it comes to depicting the roots and reality of a divided nation and bringing to life the trials and tribulations of the Korean people.

The Last Yakuza tells the history of the yakuza like it’s never been told before in this gripping, true crime story by the author of Tokyo Vice.

Makoto Saigo is half-American and half-Japanese, living in small-town Japan. He has two talents: playing guitar and picking fights. When his dream of being a rock star fails to materialize, he turns to the only place where you can start from the bottom and move up through sheer performance, loyalty, and brute force—the yakuza.

Saigo, nicknamed Tsunami, quickly realizes that even within the organization, opinions are as varied as they come, and a clash of philosophies can quickly become deadly. One screw-up can cost you your life, or at least a finger.

The internal politics of the yakuza are dizzyingly complex, and between the ever-shifting web of alliances and the encroaching hand of the law that pushes them further and further underground, Saigo finds himself in the middle of a defining decades-long battle that will determine the future of the yakuza.

Written with the insight of an expert on Japanese organized crime and the compassion of a longtime friend, investigative journalist Jake Adelstein presents a sprawling biography of a yakuza, through postwar desperation, to bubble-era optimism, to the present. Including a cast of memorable yakuza bosses—Coach, the Buddha, and more—this is a story about the rise and fall of a man, a country, and a dishonest but sometimes honorable way of life on the brink of being lost.

‘Are you going into town today?’ she says, which annoys me because it’s something she says all the time, having forgotten she said it before, and I say, ‘Jesus, Mum, not this again,’ and she says, ‘What again?’ and I say, ‘Town is shut down,’ and while she can see I am upset and wants not to upset me like this, she is also wounded by my tone, and I am ashamed then and can only look at my plate, and I decide not to bring up what I intended to bring up, about the past, and about my need for her to apologise for it.

Gavin is spending the quarantine in a small flat in south Dublin with his eighty-year-old mother, whose mind is slowly slipping away. He has lived most of his adult life abroad and has returned home to care for her and to write a novel. But he finds that all he can write about is her.

Moving through a sequence of remembered rooms—the ‘cells’—Gavin unspools an intimate story of his upbringing and early adulthood: feeling out of place in the insular suburb in which he grew up, the homophobic bullying he suffered at school, his brother’s mental illness and drug addiction, his father’s sudden death, his own devastating diagnosis, his struggles and triumphs as a writer, and above all, always, his relationship with his mother. Her brightness shines a light over his childhood, but her betrayal of his teenage self leads to years of resentment and disconnection. Now, he must find a way to reconcile with her, before it is too late.

Written with unusual frankness and urgency, Cells is at once an uncovering of filial love and its limits, and a coming to terms with separation and loss.

An explosive feminist and anti-racist novel about the importance of friendship.

“We don’t exist in this world. Here, we are neither Germans nor refugees, we don’t report the news and we aren’t the experts. We’re some sort of wildcard.”

Hani, Kasih, and Saya have shared a deep friendship ever since they were kids. After years apart, the three young women meet again for a few days, to pick up where they left off. But regardless of what they have achieved, it becomes clear, again and again, that they can’t escape the racism that accompanies their daily lives: the glances, the chatter, the hatred, and the outright rightwing terror. But their friendship gives them stability. Until one dramatic night shakes everything up.

Sisters in Arms is a provocative, uncompromising, and moving novel about the extraordinary alliance between three young women and the only thing that makes a self-determined life possible in a society that doesn’t tolerate otherness: unconditional friendship.

An incisive and deeply candid account that explores autistic women in culture, myth, and society through the prism of the author’s own diagnosis.

Until the 1980s, autism was regarded as a condition found mostly in boys. Even in our time, autistic girls and women have largely remained undiagnosed. When portrayed in popular culture, women on the spectrum often appear simply as copies of their male counterparts — talented and socially awkward.

Yet autistic women exist, and always have. They are varied in their interests and in their experiences. Autism may be relatively new as a term and a diagnosis, but not as a way of being and functioning in the world. It has always been part of the human condition. So who are these women, and what does it mean to see the world through their eyes?

In The Autists, Clara Törnvall reclaims the language to describe autism and explores the autistic experience in arts and culture throughout history. From popular culture, films, and photography to literature, opera, and ballet, she dares to ask what it might mean to re-read these works through an autistic lens — what we might discover if we allow perspectives beyond the neurotypical to take centre stage.

The startling and highly anticipated new short story collection from Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning author of The Animals in That Country.

A family of cat farmers gets the chance to set the felines free. A group of chickens tells it like it is. A female-crewed ship plows through the patriarchy. A support group finds solace in a world without men.

With her trademark humor, energy, and flair, McKay offers glimpses of places where dreams subsume reality, where childhood restarts, where humans embrace their animal selves and animals talk like humans.

The stories in Gunflower explode and bloom in mesmerizing ways, showing the world both as it is and as it could be.

What happens when the person you’ve built your entire life on is suddenly gone?

This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely.

In brief, precise vignettes, full of gentle melancholy and surprising humor, Posthuma tells the story of a depressive brother, viewed from the perspective of the sister who both loves and resents her twin, struggles to understand him, and misses him terribly.

An extraordinary, gripping survival story that also reveals the struggles for social justice of the Indigenous people of Colombia and the Amazon.

In June 2023, four children—Lesly, Soleiny, Tien, and Crispin—were found alive in the Colombian Amazon, forty days after the aircraft they were traveling in had crashed and killed the three adults on board (the pilot, the co-pilot, and the children’s mother). The eldest child, thirteen-year-old Lesly, took the decision to leave her dying mother, gather her siblings—aged nine, five, and eleven months—and head into the jungle. She kept herself and her siblings alive for forty days and nights, finally emerging when heavily armed soldiers closed in, yelling her name above the sound of barking dogs.

Forty Days in the Jungle follows the stories of those involved in the crash and what followed: Maria Fatima Valencia, the children’s grandmother, who had taught Lesly how to survive in the jungle; General Pedro Sánchez who led the rescue team; the shady figure of Manuel Ranoque, the father of the two youngest children; and even the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro.

But there is much more to this than an extraordinary survival story. Interwoven chapters address key questions about Colombian and Latin American history, society, and political economy—the answers to which shed light on the socio-political state of much of the world today. Colombia’s problems mirror, in many ways, the rising Global South in its 21st-century struggles against colonial histories and a globalized world.

From award-winning writer Anjali Joseph, a compelling new novel about a dysfunctional love affair.

Meet Ved, a British investor heading back to his Indian roots with a business proposition: a lightbulb called the Everlasting Lucifer.

Meet Keteki, an art curator with a nomadic lifestyle, on her way home to Assam.

In Heathrow airport, on the way to Mumbai, their paths cross, sparking an affair that soon turns into an intricate power game—and a complicated journey towards intimacy.

A darkly comic sequel to Tokyo Vice that is equal parts history lesson, true-crime exposé, and memoir.

It’s 2008, and it’s been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organized crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about—for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy—himself.

And Adelstein has a different gig these days: due diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden.

The underworld isn’t what it used to be. Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza. Pachinko parlors are a hidden battleground between disenfranchised Korean Japanese and North Korean extortion plots. TEPCO, the electric power corporation keeping the lights on for all of Tokyo, scrambles to hide its willful oversights that ultimately led to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. And the Japanese government shows levels of corruption that make the yakuza look like philanthropists in comparison. All this is punctuated by personal tragedies no one could have seen coming.

In this ambitious and riveting work, Jake Adelstein explores what it’s like when you’re in too deep to distinguish the story you chase from the life you live.

A groundbreaking book that will broaden and expand your thinking, whether you are a trauma survivor, a clinician, someone who loves a survivor, or someone seeking to understand abuse.

The relationship between trauma and mental health is becoming better recognized, but survivors and professionals alike remain confused about how best to understand and treat it. In Reclaim, through a series of case studies and expert analysis, Dr Ahona Guha explores complex traumas, how survivors can recover and heal, and the nature of those who abuse. She shines a light on the ‘difficult’ trauma victims that society often ignores, and tackles vital questions such as, ‘Why are we failing the victims of intimate partner violence?, ‘What kinds of behaviors should we see as red flags?’, and ‘Why do some people harm others, and how do we protect ourselves from them?’

As a clinical and forensic psychologist, Dr Guha has had extensive experience in working with those who perpetrate harm—including stalkers, sex offenders, violent offenders, and those who threaten, bully and harass—and she has a deep understanding of the psychological and social factors that cause people to abuse others. In turn, her clinical work in the trauma treatment field has led her to recognize the enormous impacts of complex trauma, and the failures of systems when working with those who have been victimized.

By emphasizing compassion above all, Dr Guha calls for us to become better informed about perpetrators and the needs of victims, so we might reclaim a safer, healthier society for everyone. 

A timely and inspiring work of comics journalism—the history of unions and why we need them (and a first-hand account of working in an Amazon warehouse).

Workers of the world, unite! From comics journalist Sam Wallman comes a thoughtful plunge into the history of unions. Through distinctive art and sharp-eyed reporting, Wallman ushers us into the hidden aisles of 21st-century labor conditions, and shows us recent labor movements and union triumphs—all while framing current conditions against the history of unions and the earliest rallying cries for worker rights.

It’s an entry point for younger generations, and a reminder for workers who have had their livelihood reduced by capitalist pressures. It’s also a primer for those new to the power of collective action.

From an Amazon warehouse in Melbourne (where Sam worked for a year), to Britain and Bangladesh, to Walmart in China and the New York Taxi Workers Alliance strike against the Trump-era refugee ban of 2017, this book is a highly original and visual exploration of the power of unions.

An authoritative resource for understanding the nature of mental illnesses and for pointing the way to treatment, written by two eminent mental health professionals with almost a century of academic achievement and clinical experience between them.

Many of us take our mental health for granted. But we can feel overwhelmed when confronted by mental illness in ourselves, a family member, or a friend. Troubled Minds is an invaluable guide for anyone whose life has been touched by mental ill-health and who wants to understand and deal effectively with it.

It serves as an ideal introduction to common mental illnesses, developmental disorders, and neurological variations that can lead to distress such as autism, anorexia nervosa, anxiety, depression, alcoholism, post-traumatic stress disorder, and dementia. Innovative chapters cover mental health problems of children and adolescents, and how we have the potential to promote our own mental health and wellbeing.

Bloch and Haslam tell illuminating stories of people they have treated, discuss public figures who have wrestled with mental ill-health, and share their personal experiences. Their book is informed by the latest research, warmed by lived experience and empathy, and seasoned by the insights of philosophers, writers, and artists.

Troubled Minds is essential reading for anyone who seeks deeper psychological insights to help deal with the challenges of contemporary life. It is a balanced and accessible account of a subject that is of profound significance in everyone’s life.

The first major anthology by parents with disabilities.

How does a father who is blind take his child to the park? How is a mother with dwarfism treated when she walks her child down the street? How do Deaf parents know when their baby cries in the night?

When writer and musician Eliza Hull was pregnant with her first child, like most parents-to-be she was a mix of excited and nervous. But as a person with a disability, there were added complexities. She wondered: Will the pregnancy be too hard? Will people judge me? Will I cope with the demands of parenting? More than 15 percent of people worldwide live with a disability, and many of them are also parents. And yet their stories are rarely shared, their experiences almost never reflected in parenting literature.

In We’ve Got This, parents around the world who identify as Deaf, disabled, or chronically ill discuss the highs and lows of their parenting journeys and reveal that the greatest obstacles lie in other people’s attitudes. The result is a moving, revelatory, and empowering anthology that tackles ableism head-on. As Rebekah Taussig writes, ‘Parenthood can tangle with grief and loss. Disability can include joy and abundance. And goddammit — disabled parents exist.’

From the author of Baby, a slow-burning psychological novel about a young wife dangerously obsessed with her husband’s criminal nephew.

Marrying Wayne is the radical act of Eve’s life. Rejecting her city upbringing, she quits her job and moves to his farm in the remote New Zealand countryside. Wayne’s success and social standing means she can have anything she wants—but what does Eve want? She isn’t sure. Embracing her role as a farmer’s wife, she tends the garden, cooks for her husband, arranges their social life, and judges the local future-homemaker awards, but something is missing. She craves excitement. Be careful what you wish for, Eve …

When Wayne’s nephew Luke gets out of prison and comes to work on the farm, Eve’s seemingly idyllic life is upended, and she finds herself drawn into a dangerous psychological game that will force her to decide who she really is and what she really wants.

A multi-award-winning journalist and former editor-in-chief of a major Australian newspaper searingly explores his Jewish identity at a time when a substantial—and growing—part of the left is opposed to the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

Born in a displaced persons’ camp two years after the end of the Holocaust, Michael Gawenda spent his childhood and teenage years in a left-wing non-Zionist Jewish youth group in Melbourne. This shaped the sort of Jew he became—a secular Jew who loved the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture.

Gawenda went on to become a public figure during his 40 years as a journalist, including his role as editor-in-chief of The Age—the only Jewish editor-in-chief in the newspaper’s history. Throughout this time, and since, he became dismayed and pained by the growing hostility of the left to Israel and to Jews like him who were not prepared to declare themselves as anti-Zionists. This has also forced him to examine his own Jewish identity and his relationships with his Jewish friends, and to forensically examine the basis of the critiques of Israel.

At a time of rising anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, My Life as a Jew is a controversial book. It is also a vital book. It should be read by activists for Israel and Zionism, as well as for the Palestinians. It should be read by readers of all political stripes. It should be read by journalists, as it is in part about journalism and its failings. And it should also be read by people interested in the remarkable life and career of its author, Michael Gawenda.

“Raphaela Edelbauer’s impressive debut novel is a subtle allegory of historical memory and collective guilt, combining a dreamy, gothic strangeness …”—The Guardian

“A village that officially does not exist and that seems to be disappearing more and more … Anyone who embarks on this trip is safely guided by Edelbauer—on a fine line between madness and adventure.”—Christina Risken, Buchhandlung Krüger

A town that doesn’t want to be found. A countess who rules over the memories of an entire community. A hole in the earth that threatens to drag them all into its depths.

When her parents die in a car accident, the highly talented physicist Ruth Schwarz is confronted with an almost intractable problem. Her parents’ will calls for them to be buried in their childhood home—but for strangers, Gross-Einland is a village that remains stubbornly hidden from view.

When Ruth finally finds her way there, she makes a disturbing discovery: beneath the town lies a vast cavern that seems to exert a strange control over the lives of the villagers. There are hidden clues about the hole everywhere, but nobody wants to talk about it—not even when it becomes clear that the stability of the entire town is in jeopardy. Is this silence controlled by the charming countess who rules the community? And what role does Ruth’s family history, a history she is only just beginning to uncover, have to play?

The more questions Ruth asks, the more vehement the resistance she encounters from the residents. But as she continues to dig deeper, she comes to realize that the key to deciphering the mysterious codes of the people of Gross-Einland can only lie in the history of the hole.

In the literary tradition of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, Raphaela Edelbauer weaves the complexities of small-town social structures into an opaque dream fabric that is frighteningly true to life, and in the process she turns us towards the abject horror that lies beneath repressed memory. The Liquid Land is a dangerous novel, at once glittering nightmare and dark reality, from an extraordinary new literary voice.

One of the few remaining living Holocaust survivors answers the questions children ask her

“There are no stupid questions, nor any forbidden ones, but there are some questions that have no answer.”

Hédi Fried was nineteen when the Nazis snatched her family from their home in Eastern Europe and transported them to Auschwitz, where she and her sister were forced into hard labor until the end of the war.

Now ninety-eight, she has spent her life educating young people about the Holocaust and answering their questions about one of the darkest periods in human history. Questions like, “How was it to live in the camps?” “Did you dream at night?” “Why did Hitler hate the Jews?” “Do you see yourself in today’s refugees?” and “Can you forgive?”

With sensitivity and complete candor, Fried answers these questions and more in this deeply human book that urges us never to forget and never to repeat.

From the author of I Hate Men, a personal and political reflection on abortion rights.

Discussion about abortion and associated rights are often limited to either ‘anti-abortion’ or ‘pro-choice’, the latter of which focuses on the importance of having the right to choose, rather than on what that right means for real people.

In this timely essay, Pauline Harmange provides an intimate, detailed account of her abortion. Reminiscent of Annie Ernaux’s Happening, Abortion is nuanced, complex, honest, and precise. Harmange gives voice to the emotions, reflections, and contradictions that someone could experience when they choose to terminate a pregnancy.

At a time in which women’s reproductive rights are being called into question around the world, Abortion is a clarion call, a powerful personal testimony, and a resolutely political vision: to restore power to our experiences, all our experiences, by sharing them, and to transform society for the better.

This is a handbook for change. Because we all know ways in which life could be better. And it can be better. We can make it better.

We don’t need to wait for a leader or savior. We don’t need to limit ourselves to comments and clicks. In this stunningly original comic-book tour of a serious topic, Jeff Sparrow and Sam Wallman explore 12 powerful ideas distilled from the history of struggle for better lives, better working conditions, and a better world. They show how solidarity can be built across growing divisions—without compromising our values.

‘Strife’ is just another word for making yourself heard. In fun, short, shareable chapters, 12 Rules for Strife shows how together we can change everything.

An extraordinary Holocaust survival story about an Orthodox Jewish woman who managed to survive in wartime Poland by pretending to be a Catholic.

Polish Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in as if she was their own daughter. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. What none of these people knew was that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. By using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities, she was the only member of her family to survive World War II.

When Dutch journalist Pieter van Os stumbled upon Mala’s story, he set out to revive the world through which she had made her way from war-ravaged middle Europe to the nascent state of Israel before finally settling in the Netherlands. With her memoir and their interviews as guide, van Os physically retraced Mala’s steps, stopping in at local archives and remote villages, searching for anyone who might have known or helped her seventy-five years before.

At times reading like an erudite detective story, this poignant, rich book is an engrossing meditation on what drives us to fear the “other”, and what in turn might allow us to feel compassion for them.

Booze had dominated Jill Stark’s social life ever since she had her first sip of beer, at 13. She thought nothing could curb her love of big nights. And then came the hangover that changed everything. In the shadow of her 35th year, Jill made a decision: she would give up alcohol. But what would it mean to stop drinking in a world awash with booze?

This lively memoir charts Jill’s tumultuous year on the wagon, as she copes with the stress of the newsroom sober, tackles the dating scene on soda water, learns to watch the footy minus beer, and deals with censure from friends and colleagues, who tell her that a year without booze is “a year with no friends.”

Now ten years later, Jill looks at how a global pandemic tested her sobriety and shone a spotlight on the way alcohol has been sold as the panacea for all our troubles. At the same time, it helped accelerate a seismic change in our drinking habits, with the rise of the sober-curious movement and a booming non-alcoholic drinks trend.

Now she feels prompted to ask the question, has sobriety become cool?

“It’s hard not to recommend this book: from teenagers experimenting with their first taste to those who’ve been imbibing for decades, many will find Stark’s story illuminating, touching, and memorable.”—The Australian

“High Sobriety is an entertaining and informative read about one woman’s year of online dating, family reunions, and beer gardens without a drink, and her account of the nation’s attitude towards the thing she denies herself.”— The Sydney Morning Herald

The West has fatally overestimated itself. What does this mean for the world?

Over the past thirty years, through a mixture of naivety and arrogance, the West has lost its global advantage. The challenges are profound: the rise of China, climate change, and the polarization of society. The triumph of the West had seemed unstoppable not that long ago. After the end of the Cold War, the democratic market economy took hold in the former Eastern Bloc, Russia went from being an enemy to a partner, and even China turned to capitalism. Then came the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that shook the world. The War on Terror destabilized an entire region; the Arab Spring only brought forth new autocracies; and, following the annexation of Crimea, the confrontation with Russia intensified. Instead of a liberal world order, a new world disorder has emerged.

Peter R. Neumann is an internationally acclaimed expert on terrorism and geopolitics. In this astute, burning analysis of global politics, he lays out the dangers the world will face if the West fails to reinvent itself.

“You’re a politician, a public figure. What on earth were you thinking?”

Up-and-coming junior minister Gregory Buchanan has had a portrait painted of himself by the acclaimed artist Sophie White—a painting she intends to enter in this year’s Archibald Prize. Until then, Gregory has hung it in pride of place on his dining-room wall. It’s a life-sized standing portrait, practically photographic in nature. And it’s a nude.

His wife will be home soon and he thinks the painting will be a pleasant surprise. Even more surprising will be an unexpected accumulation of guests: his sardonic mother, his fundamentalist mother-in-law, his lesbian sister, and the state governor, Louisa Wetherly—a senior government member has just resigned in scandalous circumstances, and she needs Gregory to step into the spotlight ahead of the coming election.

It’s going to be a wild afternoon, and an even wilder campaign—to do something about Gregory’s naked ambition.

Sometimes I think that carrying—other people, the continuity of history, generational identity, the emotional load of the everyday—is the main thing that women do.

In Marina Benjamin’s new set of interlinked essays, she turns her astute eye to the tasks once termed “women’s work”. From cooking and cleaning to caring for an aging relative, A Little Give depicts domestic life anew: as a site of paradox and conflict, but also of solace and profound meaning. Here, productivity sits alongside self-erasure, resentment with tenderness, and the animal self is never far away, perpetually threatening to break through.

Drawing on the work of figures such as Natalia Ginzburg, Paula Rego, and Virginia Woolf, Benjamin writes with fierce candor of the struggle to overwrite the gender conditioning that pulls her back into “the mud-world of pre-feminism” even as she attempts to haul herself out. From her upbringing as the child of immigrants with fixed traditional values, to looking after her mother and seeing her teenager move out of home, she examines her relationships with with family, community, her body, even language itself. Ultimately, she shows that a woman’s true work may lie at the heart of her humanity, in the pursuit both of transformation and of deep acceptance.

An enchanting collection of annotated historical images and contemporary photographs, revealing the change and development that Melbourne has experienced over the years.

In 1835, as he walked the sacred grounds of the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nations, John Batman wrote in his diary, ‘This will be the place for a village.’ That small village rapidly grew into the vibrant city of Melbourne.

Historical photographs are a window to the past — a time capsule that allows us to walk in the footsteps of our predecessors. Now, this collection enables us to imagine strolling down Bourke Street in 1875, or catching a Collins Street tram in 1910, or walking through the city’s inner suburbs many years ago. As well, a series of then-and-now photographs reveals a striking contrast between the Melbourne of yesteryear and the city we are familiar with today.

Adapted from the popular ‘Old Vintage Melbourne’ Instagram account, this book invites you to reminisce about and cherish the important heritage of the city of Melbourne. Turn back the clock and immerse yourself in these captivating chronicles of an incredibly diverse, unique city.

• In 1835, as he walked the sacred grounds of the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nations, John Batman wrote in his diary, “This will be the place for a village.” That small village rapidly grew into the vibrant city of Melbourne.

Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks.

Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue.

As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realizes this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals—first mammals, then birds and insects, too. As the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean’s infected son, Lee. When he takes off with Kimberly, heading south, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin.

Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in That Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.

“After a couple of weeks, I found myself standing outside the voids in the middle of the night listening for human activity, for any sign of life at all. Voids are flats that have been vacated, that will never be lived in again. But there never were any signs of life. Only the wind whistling through vacant interiors.”

In a condemned tower block in Glasgow, residents slowly trickle away until a young man is left alone with only the angels and devils in his mind for company. Stumbling from one surreal situation to the next, he encounters others on the margins of society, finding friendship and camaraderie wherever it is offered, grappling with who he is and what shape his future might take.

The Voids is an unsparing story of modern-day Britain, told with brilliant flashes of humor and humanity.

“Reading The Voids is a sensory experience. There is never a word too much, it never lingers. There is tragedy but no melodrama. O’Connor’s lightness of touch, the pace, economy, characters… are all perfect, all harmonious, poetic, but unadorned, even in the blackest of moments. Part of me is still in that high rise or watching the sunlight through the fire exit door at The Satellite. It is beautiful and perfect. I want to say this is a book God would like.” —Paul Buchanan, The Blue Nile

Almost 100 years after Hans Fallada committed himself to prison, previously unpublished and rewritten stories by the bestselling mid-century German author have been discovered.

It was the turning point before he became a bestselling author: Hans Fallada handed himself in to the police in September 1925, following repeated cases of embezzlement to finance his alcohol and morphine addiction.

At the time, a court-appointed doctor was assigned to assess the extent to which Fallada could be made accountable. This expert opinion, thought to have been lost, was only recently rediscovered. It is an extraordinary find, because it includes unpublished and rewritten stories by Fallada that reveal his early, unparalleled insight into the female psyche, and that focus on hitherto taboo topics such as rape and abortion.

The title character, Lilly, is a young, untamed, headstrong girl. She sets out to “play” with a young man, but ends up losing control of the situation. Barely able to hide her questionable actions, she ends up in a sanatorium, where she engages in a bizarre duel of reciprocal manipulation with another patient. In the end, it is impossible to tell who is victorious.

Marie and Thilde, the protagonists of two other stories, are strong women who rebel against the pre-established patterns imposed on them by society, while two male outsiders, Pogg and Robinson, seek refuge and hope in a prison cell.

These stories—written while the author was relishing the opportunity in prison to free himself of his addictions—reveal to a new generation of readers Fallada’s immense gifts and his intense battles with the dynamics of human relationships.

This dazzling novella from a rising star of Indonesian literature explores generational legacies, lost loves, the damage that war does to men, and the damage that men do to women.

In today’s Jakarta, an unnamed man tells the story of his lifelong friend Nastiti, and what happened on the day she vanished. In the Dutch East Indies’ Semarang, a young Indo-Dutch girl, Rukmini, is captured by the Japanese military and is forced into prostitution. Years later, Arini travels to the Netherlands to share her mother’s dark past with a researcher.

After the American occupation of Japan in WWII ends, a former war photographer revisits his memories of Hanako, the wife of a traumatised ex-Imperial soldier, but can’t escape his own darkness. And in present-day Osaka, a young Indonesian woman, Dara, haunted by her past and struggling to conceive, becomes obsessed with a Japanese porn star.

Full of surprising turns, and in stunning prose, Birth Canal tells the interwoven stories of women that span time and history.

"More than a memoir, Farm is a call to arms for farmers to do better, for people to understand food systems better, and for all of us to join together and help heal the planet."
Matthew Evans

Is it possible to survive as a new farmer and change the future of farming at the same time?

For years we’ve been told that the food system is destroying the planet. That there are too many cows and tractors, too much fertilizer, too much waste, and that farmers and food manufacturers are polluting our atmosphere. But we’ve also been told that food can help save us from the worst of global warming. How can it be both destroyer and savior?

In 2018, Nicola Harvey and her husband, Pat, left their careers and inner-city Sydney life to farm cattle in rural New Zealand. They thought it would be exciting, even relaxing, but soon found themselves in the middle of heated arguments and deep divisions about food, farming, and climate change.

In this profoundly personal story, Harvey takes readers into the heart of the industrialized global food system to share what life on the land is like when you’re a new farmer just trying to survive—and change the status quo.

At odds with her family and struggling to find a place within her new community, Nicola is at first outraged at the lack of action to curb global warming. When she realizes, though, that we're all being sold a false fix, she begins to transform the farm into a site of activism. In the kitchen and on the land, Nicola finds hope and a path towards a cooler future.

Something’s up down below...

Urinary tract infections result in 8.1 million visits to a doctor every year, and between 50% and 60% of adult women will have at least one UTI in their lifetime. Meanwhile, overactive bladder affects nearly 1 in 5 of the over-40 population, yet many people wait up to 15 years before seeking treatment.

Maybe it’s time we started taking pee a bit more seriously… Home and Dry is the ultimate guide to the bladder; not only will it help you to overcome problems such as recurrent infections or needing the bathroom all the time, it will also inspire wonder for a fascinating part of the body that we usually try to ignore. Using the latest research, Birgit Bulla explores the biggest problem area for women's health, and shows how taking care of your bladder will make you feel a whole lot better.

The compelling story of South Australia’s disgraced former chief forensic pathologist and the legal scandals in which he became implicated.

For nearly three decades, Dr Colin Manock was in charge of South Australia’s forensic pathology services, and played a vital role within the state’s criminal justice system: in cases of unexpected or unexplained death, it was his job to determine when a person took their final breath and whether they had died naturally or as a result of something more sinister. Throughout his long career, he performed more than 10,000 autopsies and gave expert scientific evidence in court that helped secure approximately 400 criminal convictions.

But, remarkably, Manock, a self-described “witness of fact”, did not have the necessary training for such a senior, specialist role, and he made serious errors in several major cases—with tragic consequences, including the apparently wrongful imprisonment of innocent people. The full extent of his wrongdoing and the exact number of cases impacted by it remains a mystery more than twenty-five years after he retired, due to the continuing refusal of those in power to heed calls to launch a formal inquiry into his career.

In this book, Rooke examines several of Manock’s most controversial cases, and speaks with many of his former colleagues, people directly impacted by his flawed work, and legal experts. At its heart, A Witness of Fact is about how an entire legal system has failed badly, how unsafe verdicts have been swept under the carpet—and how forensic evidence that is admitted in courts of law in Australia and across the world is dubious more often than we would like to think.

Spring, summer, autumn, and winter
The seasons come and go, bringing changes both welcome and unexpected

Miki Sakamoto has spent a lifetime tending her garden and reflecting on its mysteries. Why do primulas bloom in snow? Do the trees really ‘talk’ to one another? What are the black birds saying today? And is there a mindful way to deal with an aphid infestation?

From rising early to walk barefoot on the grass each morning, to afternoons and evenings spent sipping tea in her gazebo or watching fireflies as she recalls her childhood in Japan, in Zen in the Garden Sakamoto shares observations from a life spent in contemplation—and cultivation—of nature.

A Paris police force as you’ve never seen it

Police officers are obliged to give an account of every incident they are involved in. But what happened today will never be logged. Because that's what police solidarity means: what happens in the van stays in the van.

Well, not always. Not this time.

What really happens behind the walls of a police station? To answer this question, investigative journalist Valentin Gendrot put his life on hold for two years and became the first journalist in history to infiltrate the police undetected.

Within three months of training to become an officer, he was given a permit to carry a weapon in public. And although he lived in daily fear of being discovered, in his book Gendrot hides nothing.

Assigned to work in a tough area of Paris where tensions between the law and locals ran high, Gendrot witnessed police brutality, racism, blunders, and cover-ups. But he also saw the oppressive working conditions that officers endured, and experienced the tragic suicide of a colleague.

Asking important questions about who holds institutional power and how we can hold them to account, Cop is a gripping exposé of a world never before seen by outsiders.

A timely and arresting collection of essays about the body, climate change, privilege, and environmental neurosis.

In this urgent collection that moves from the personal to the political and back again, writer, activist, and migrant Jessica Gaitán Johannesson explores how we respond to crises.

She draws parallels between an eating disorder and environmental neurosis, examines the perils of an activist movement built on non-parenthood, dissects the privilege of how we talk about hope, and more.

The synapses that spark between these essays connect essential narratives of response and responsibility, community and choice, belonging and bodies. They carry vital signals.

WINNER OF THE 2023 AGE BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD FOR NONFICTION

To essay means to try, to endeavor, to attempt—and to risk failure. For Kim Mahood, it is both a form of writing and an approach to life.

In these finely observed and probing essays, award-winning artist and writer Kim Mahood invites us to accompany her on the road and into the remote places of Australia where she is engaged in long-established collaborations of mapping, storytelling, and placemaking. Celebrated as one of the few Australian writers who both lives within and can articulate the complexities and tensions that arise in the spaces between Aboriginal and settler Australia, Mahood writes passionately and eloquently about the things that capture her senses and demand her attention—art, country, people, and writing. Her compelling evocation of desert landscapes and tender, wry observations of cross-cultural relationships describe people, places, and ways of living that are familiar to her but still strange to most non-Indigenous Australians.

At once a testament to personal freedom and a powerful argument for Indigenous self-determination, Wandering with Intent demonstrates, with candor, humor, and hope, how necessary and precious it is for each of us to choose how to live.

Inspired by a real event, this is the story of a woman and a city that were violated.

It is 2014. There is euphoria in Brazil, especially in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The World Cup is about to take place, and the 2016 Olympics are in sight. It is a time of hope and of frenzied construction.

Júlia is a partner with an architecture firm that is planning projects for the future Vila Olímpica. During a break from one of these meetings at the town hall, Júlia goes for a run in Alto da Boa Vista. Suddenly, someone puts a revolver to her head, takes her to a secluded spot, and rapes her. Left abandoned in the woods, she drags herself home, where her boyfriend and some family members wait for her.

Vista Chinesa brings light and shadow to a city whose stunning beauty cannot conceal the most serious human and political problems. This is a novel that turns a tragic, real chapter in the story of a woman into great literature.

A novel about revenge, obsession, and the dangerous gullibility of religious fanatics.

In 1944, in the outer-Melbourne suburb of Nunawading, a brutal triple murder heralds the return of a long-forgotten cult. A man named Anthony Prescott has declared himself the Messiah and has promised his followers immortality. There are those who believe him and who are ready to kill in his name. Inspector Titus Lambert of the Melbourne Homicide unit, whose detectives are over-stretched, requests the discreet assistance of Helen Lord and Joe Sable, once members of his unit, now private inquiry agents. The investigation is more perilous than any of them realize, and will have tragic consequences.

The Orchard Murders is the fourth novel in Robert Gott’s acclaimed series, set in Melbourne during the dark days of the Second World War.

An updated edition of the classic study of capital punishment originally published 50 years ago, with a new introduction by Barry Jones.

The Penalty Is Death was first published in 1968, in the aftermath of the hanging of Ronald Ryan in Victoria—the last man executed in Australia. At the time, capital punishment had been abolished as the penalty for murder in only 30 nations, although there was a moratorium on its use in many more. In 2022, the number of abolitionist nations has risen to 108, and 54 more have longstanding moratoriums. The World Coalition against the Death Penalty reported the number of recorded executions in 2021 at 2,397, with about 2,000 in China.

Drawing on a wide range of historical and contemporary sources, The Penalty Is Death includes some of the most significant voices in the international history of debates about capital punishment from the eighteenth century to the present day. It contains a historical overview of the arguments for and against capital punishment; legal, political, and philosophical analysis and commentary; and firsthand accounts of the reality of executions and their aftermaths.

It features the views of great novelists such as Charles Dickens, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell; philosophers such as Max Charlesworth; legal scholars such as Cesare Beccaria; and rigid enforcers such as J. Edgar Hoover. Barry Jones’s important new introduction brings the story up to date, including the continuing use of the death penalty in the US.

Prehistory is all around us. We just need to know where to look.

Juan José Millás has always felt like he doesn’t quite fit into human society. Sometimes he wonders if he is even a Homo sapiens at all, or something simpler. Perhaps he is a Neanderthal who somehow survived? So he turns to Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the world’s leading palaeontologists and a super-smart sapiens, to explain why we are the way we are and where we come from.

Over the course of many months, the two visit different places, many of them common scenes of our daily lives, and others unique archaeological sites. Arsuaga tries to teach the Neanderthal how to think like a sapiens and, above all, that prehistory is not a thing of the past: that traces of humanity through the millennia can be found anywhere, from a cave or a landscape to a children’s playground or a toy shop.

Millás and Arsuaga invite you on a journey of wonder that unites scientific discovery with the greatest human invention of all: the art of storytelling.

Against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution and Europe’s sexual revolution, the fates of two families in London and Beijing become unexpectedly intertwined, in this dazzling new novel from the author of Mrs Engels.

Revolution is a Family Affair.

In London, sisters Iris and Eva, members of a radical performance collective, plan an attack on the West End theater where their mother is playing the title role in Miss Julie. Meanwhile in Beijing, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao’s wife, rehearses a gala performance of her model ballet, The Red Detachment of Women, which she will use in order to attack her enemies in the Party.

As the preparations for these two astonishing performances unfold, Iris, Eva, and Jiang Qing are transformed into unforgettable protagonists in a single epic drama. The three ‘sisters’, although fighting very different personal battles, find themselves bound together by the passions of love, by the obsessions of power, and by the forces of history.

Exquisitely observed, relevant, and wise, The Sisters Mao shows us that the political is always personal.

A sequel to Old Vintage Melbourne, this collection invites you again to turn back time and revisit the diverse past of the much-loved city of Melbourne.

This captivating compilation of photographs taken between 1960 and 1990 provides a fascinating glimpse of a time that is familiar and yet different, when significant changes started to affect the city and its suburbs. As historic city buildings were demolished and streetscapes altered, Melbourne embraced modernity. The skyline grew, and so did suburban shopping centers. Under the impact of a rapidly rising population and large-scale migration, the city’s distinctive and vibrant culture that we know today began to emerge. Cafés, fashion, sport, architecture, infrastructure, technology, and even the law were all transformed.

Adapted from the highly popular “Old Vintage Melbourne” Instagram account, this collection allows us to behold iconic sights and scenes—some as they were, and some as they still are, generations later. For many readers, it offers a chance to indulge in rare memories of growing up in our unique city.