Karen's and Tracie's Recommendations 2020

Tell Me Why by Archie Roach - A powerful memoir of a true Australian legend: stolen child, musical and lyrical genius, and leader.

Intimate portraits of people who love what they do

A charming, moving account of one man's race to save a herd of elephants.

Smell the chlorine, taste the hot chips and feel the burning concrete underfoot as you read these stories of Australian childhoods at the pool.

With its gorgeous photography, Bibliostyle offers a peek into the private libraries of passionate readers from all over the world and all walks of life, including Karle Ove Knausgaard, Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, Silvia Whitman and Phillip Lim. Featuring an abundance of rare collections, floor-to-ceiling shelves and stacks upon stacks of books, Bibliostyle is a visual feast and inspiration for every bibliophile.

Nothing is off limits, and everything—when captured by Smith’s brilliant gaze—feels fresh and relevant. Perfectly paced and utterly original, Grand Union highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do.

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The year is 2014, editor Erik Jensen contacts short fiction writer Maxine Beneba Clarke, and convinces her to write creative portraits for a new national newspaper, THE SATURDAY PAPER. The next four years will be a journalistic baptism of fire. She will come face to face with Prime Minister Tony Abbott; spend exactly nine minutes with Hollywood film star Hugh Jackman; write a love letter to Prince; be escorted out of David Jones for stalking Santa Claus; watch porn star Buck Angel striptease; eat slut cupcakes with feminist Karen Pickering; troll a local racist fried chicken eatery; hold audience with the Australian Ambassador to China; covertly profile One Plus One presenter Jane Hutcheon; share the stage with writer Roxane Gay; sip green tea with dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and exchange emails with President Obama.

These are The Saturday Portraits

The inside account of the breathtaking rescue that captured the world.

From the brilliant Lucy Hawking and her father, the world's most beloved scientist Professor Stephen Hawking, comes the ultimate children's guide to the universe.

hortlisted for the 2020 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards: Fiction

The House of Youssef is a collection of short stories set in Western Sydney. The stories explore the lives of Lebanese migrants who have settled in the area, circling around themes of isolation, family and community, and nostalgia for the home country. In particular, House of Youssef is about relationships, and the customs which complicate them: between parents and children, the dark secrets of marriage, the breakable bonds between friends. The stories are told with extreme minimalism - some are only two pages long - which heightens their emotional intensity.

Delving deep into the Australian landscape and the environmental challenges we face, Fire Country is a powerful account from Indigenous land management expert Victor Steffensen on how the revival of cultural burning practices, and improved 'reading' of country, could help to restore our land.
From a young age, Victor has had a passion for traditional cultural and ecological knowledge. This was further developed after meeting two Elders, who were to become his mentors and teach him the importance of cultural burning. Developed over many generations, this knowledge shows clearly that Australia actually needs fire. Moreover, fire is an important part of a wholistic approach to the environment, and when burning is done in a carefully considered manner, this ensures proper land care and healing.

Must a girl always be a part?

How can she become a whole?

In the late 1970s, in the forgotten outer suburbs, a girl has her hands in the engine of a Holden. A sinister new man has joined the family. He works as a mechanic and operates an unlicensed repair shop at the back of their block.

The family is under threat. The girl reads the Holden workshop manual for guidance. She resists the man with silence, then with sabotage. She fights him at the place where she believes his heart lives - in the engine of the car.

Spare, poetic and intensely visual, Exploded View is the powerful new novel from the author of Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living and Mateship with Birds - one of Australia's most celebrated writers and winner of the inaugural Stella Prize.

A provocative and inspiring work on overcoming the obstacles facing women on the path to leadership

Shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award 2020

Elizabeth posts a 'room for rent' notice
in Trevor's bookshop and is caught off-guard when Trevor answers the ad himself. She expected a young student not a middle-aged bookseller whose
marriage has fallen apart. But Trevor is attracted to Elizabeth's house because
of the empty shed in her backyard, the perfect space for him to revive the
artistic career he abandoned years earlier. The face-blind, EH Holden-driving
Elizabeth is a solitary and feisty book editor, and she accepts him, on
probation...

Odette Brown has lived her whole life on the fringes of a small country town. Raising her granddaughter Sissy on her own, Odette has managed to stay under the radar of the welfare authorities who are removing Aboriginal children from their communities. When the menacing Sergeant Lowe arrives in town, determined to fully enforce the law, any freedom that Odette and Sissy enjoy comes under grave threat. Odette must make an impossible choice to protect her family.

In The White Girl, Tony Birch has created memorable characters whose capacity for love and courage are a timely reminder of the endurance of the human spirit.

How far would your government go?

A right-wing US president has withdrawn America from the Middle East and the UN. Daesh has a thoroughfare to the sea and China is Australia's newest ally. When a bomb goes off in remote Tasmania, Astrid Coleman agrees to return home to help her brother before an upcoming election. But this is no simple task. Her brother and sister are on either side of politics, the community is full of conspiracy theories, and her father is quoting Shakespeare. Only on Bruny does the world seem sane.

Until Astrid discovers how far the government is willing to go.

Bruny is a searing, subversive, brilliant novel about family, love, loyalty and the new world order.

In the ghost hours of a Monday morning a man feels a dull thud against the side of his car near the entrance to Redfern Station. He doesn’t stop immediately. By the time he returns to the scene, the road is empty, but there is a dent in the car, high up on the passenger door, and what looks like blood. Only a man could have made such a dent, he thinks. For some reason he looks up, though he knows no one is there. Has he hit someone, and if so, where is the victim?

An inspirational and practical book written by two high-achieving women, sharing the experience and advice of some of our most extraordinary women leaders, in their own words.

A powerful debut novel that delicately blends Hawaiian myth with the broken American dream.

From the bestselling author of A Spool of Blue Thread: an offbeat love story about mis-steps, second chances and the elusive art of human connection.

This life is like being in an ocean. Some people keep swimming towards the bottom. Some people touch the bottom with one foot, or even both, and then push themselves off it to get back up to the top, where you can breathe. Others get to the bottom and decide they want to stay there. I don't want to get to the bottom because I'm already drowning.

This is a story of a London you won't find in any guidebooks.

Ruby Tuesday explores the difficulties of being a girl growing up in today’s world, and how strength and healing can be found in the wildest of places – a celebration of the joy to be found in music and creativity, and of strong, equal friendships and relationships.

Hailed as “remarkable…incredibly evocative and compelling” (The Washington Post) and “oral history at its finest” (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), Garrett M. Graff’s The Only Plane in the Sky is the most vivid and human portrait of the September 11 attacks yet, comprised of never-before-published transcripts, recently declassified documents, and original interviews and stories from nearly five hundred government officials, first responders, witnesses, survivors, friends, and family members. Here is a vivid, profound, and searing portrait of humanity on a day that changed the course of history, and all of our lives.

Happiness. Everyone wants more of it. But can you actually get happier? Inspirational Australian Turia Pitt dives into this idea, interviewing high-profile athletes, comedians, scientists and world experts to explore how everything from money to our relationships has an impact on how happy we can be.

Sometimes, rather than making you laugh or cry out in surprise, a story will instead leave you wondering about human fragility ...

In the telling of his own tale, children's author and screenwriter Paul Jennings demonstrates how seemingly small events can combine into a compelling drama. As if assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, he puts together fragments, memories and anecdotes to reveal the portrait of a complex and weathered soul.