Karen's and Tracie's Holiday Reading Suggestions 2018

Angela Duckworth is a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, researcher, and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance.

Helping to ease the transition for students from school to adulthood, each chapter explores different pathways that young people can take after school, including work, study and travel, so readers can consider their options and make informed decisions.

Told with honesty and humour, Not Just Black and White is an extraordinary memoir about two women determined to make sure history is not forgotten.

A laugh-out-loud feminist memoir from one of the boldest new voices on the web.

'You find yourself down at the bottom of the river, for some it's time to give into her. But other times, young fellas like you two, you got to fight your way back. Show the river you got courage and is ready to live.'

The river is a place of history and secrets. For Ren and Sonny, two unlikely friends, it's a place of freedom and adventure. For a group of storytelling vagrants, it's a refuge. And for the isolated daughter of a cult reverend, it's an escape.

Each time they visit, another secret slips into its ancient waters. But change and trouble are coming – to the river and to the lives of those who love it. Who will have the courage to fight and survive and what will be the cost?

A beautiful illustrated hardcover collection of original Australian mystery stories by popular writers and devoted Sherlockians, including Kerry Greenwood, Meg Keneally, Samuel Wagan Watson, Lucy Sussex, Kaaron Warren and many more.

Fifty Inventions that Shaped the Modern Economy paints the epic picture of economic change in an intimate way, by telling the stories of tools and ideas that had far-reaching and unexpected consequences.

In this unforgettable new collection, Tony Birch introduces a cast of characters from all walks of life. These remarkable and surprising stories capture common people caught up in the everyday business of living and the struggle to survive. From two single mothers on the most unlikely night shift to a homeless man unexpectedly faced with the miracle of a new life, Birch’s stories are set in gritty urban refuges and battling regional communities. His deftly drawn characters find unexpected signs of hope in a world where beauty can be found on every street corner – a message on a T-shirt, a friend in a stray dog or a star in the night sky.

From the furthest reaches of the universe to the microscopic world of our genes, science offers writers the kind of scope other subjects simply can't match. Good writing about science can be moving, funny, exhilarating, or poetic, but it will always be honest and rigorous about the research that underlies it. Now in its seventh year, The Best Australian Science Writing brings together knowledge and insight from Australia’s brightest thinkers as they explore the intricacies of the world around us. This lively collection of essays covers a wide range of subjects, and challenges our perceptions of the world and how we exist within it.

You are not doomed by your genes and hardwired to be a certain way for the rest of your life. A new science is emerging that empowers all human beings to create the reality they choose.

In Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself, renowned author, speaker, researcher, and chiropractor Dr. Joe Dispenza combines the fields of quantum physics, neuroscience, brain chemistry, biology, and genetics to show you what is truly possible.

Brilliantly clever and brimming with heart, this unforgettable collection is the work of a significant new talent.

What would you do if your sister disappeared without a trace? This is an emotionally fraught and at some times terrifying story about two sisters and the strength that binds them.

Ex-Denver police detective Jesse Parker has returned home to Steamboat Springs, Colorado, to spend the winter working ski patrol and forgetting about his past. But somewhere out in the snow, a killer has other ideas. It begins when a skier is found brutally murdered. Local Sheriff Lee Torrens asks her old friend to help out with the investigation, and Jesse finds himself reluctantly dragged back into a world of violence and murder he thought he had left behind. As Jesse and Lee work together, the memories of what they felt for each other long ago resurface--even as a madman strikes again and again, leaving no clue or trace as to identity or motive. Because for the killer, there are more important things to do than lead the authorities on... Like choosing who will die next.

Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, is living out his old age on the family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London, and involved such characters as Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley and Peter Guillam himself, are to be scrutinised under disturbing criteria by a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications.

On a normal Wednesday afternoon, Judge Scott Sampson is preparing to pick up his six-year-old twins for their weekly swim. His wife Alison texts him with a change of plan: she has to take them to the doctor instead. So Scott heads home early. But when Alison arrives back later, she is alone - no Sam, no Emma - and denies any knowledge of the text . . .The phone then rings: an anonymous voice tells them that the Judge must do exactly what he is told in an upcoming drug case and, most importantly, they must 'say nothing'.

Michael Tanner is heading home from a business trip when he picks up the wrong laptop at airport security. The computer he takes home belongs to US senator Susan Robbins, and it contains top secret files that should never have been on there in the first place. With her career in politics on the line, Senator Robbins is determined to get her laptop back, whatever the cost... Tanner is now a hunted man. But with the government against him, who can he trust to help him?

In Brilliant Imperfection Eli Clare uses memoir, history, and critical analysis to explore cure—the deeply held belief that body-minds considered broken need to be fixed. Cure serves many purposes. It saves lives, manipulates lives, and prioritizes some lives over others. It provides comfort, makes profits, justifies violence, and promises resolution to body-mind loss. Clare grapples with this knot of contradictions, maintaining that neither an anti-cure politics nor a pro-cure worldview can account for the messy, complex relationships we have with our body-minds

When scouring the land for top-level code breakers, the Bletchley Park recruiters left no stone unturned. As well as approaching the country's finest mathematicians, they cast their nets much wider, interviewing sixth-form music students who could read orchestral scores, chess masters, poets, linguists, hieroglyphics experts and high society debutantes fresh from finishing school. To assess these individuals they devised various ingenious mind-twisters - hidden codes, cryptic crosswords, secret languages, complex riddles - and it is puzzles such as these, together with the fascinating recruitment stories that surround them, that make up the backbone of this book.

The code breakers of Bletchley Park were united in their l

Beverley Farmer, one of Australia’s great prose stylists, and a pioneer of women’s writing, in her exploration of feminine concerns, and her use of different literary forms – novel, short story, poetry, essay, journal, myth and fairy tale.

It is a cold day in January when J. Mendelssohn wakes in his Upper East Side apartment. Old and frail, he is entirely reliant on the help of his paid carer, and as he waits for the heating to come on, the clacking of the pipes stirs memories of the past; of his childhood in Lithuania and Dublin, of his distinguished career as a judge, and of his late wife, Eileen. Later he leaves the house to meet his son Elliot for lunch, and when Eliot departs mid-meal, Mendelssohn continues eating alone as the snow falls heavily outside.

SYDNEY, 1923: a suitcase washed up on a harbourside beach reveals its grisly contents - and from there, an extraordinary story unfolds.

From "America's nerviest journalist" (Newsweek)--a breath-taking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the true heroism and courage of the first Americans to conquer space. "Tom Wolfe at his very best"

Set in Sydney, Paris and Sri Lanka, The Life to Come is a mesmerising novel about the stories we tell and don't tell ourselves as individuals, as societies and as nations. It feels at once firmly classic and exhilaratingly contemporary.

Your parents have been murdered . . . and you're the number one suspect.

With her characteristic wit and dazzling drawings, celebrated graphic novelist Pénélope Bagieu profiles the lives of these feisty female role models, some world famous, some little known. From Nellie Bly to Mae Jemison or Josephine Baker to Naziq al-Abid, the stories in this comic biography are sure to inspire the next generation of rebel ladies.