Higher Sobriety

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.

From INSTANT POODLES to CHEESE GHOSTIE, RHYME HUNGRY is the ultimate book of lunchtime wordplay!

Flip the flaps to reveal unexpected rhymes and bold, bright illustrations. A book that will delight adults, appeal to design lovers, and get young kids squealing and begging to read it again and again.

From the creator of award-winning Rhyme Flies.

Ages 1-4

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.

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