BETTER READ THAN DEAD

Title: Tales From Outer Suburbia, The

Author: Shaun Tan

Binding: ~

Category: Humour+Gift

ISBN: 9781741149173

RRP: $35.00

Our Price: $31.50 incGST BUY

Do you remember the water buffalo at the end of our street? Or the deep-sea diver we found near the underpass? Do you know why dogs bark in the middle of the night? Shaun Tan, creator of The Arrival, The Lost Thing and The Red Tree, reveals the quiet mysteries of everyday life: homemade pets, dangerous weddings, stranded sea mammals, tiny exchange students and secret rooms filled with darkness and delight.

Title: Breath

Author: Tim Winton

Binding: ~

Category: Fiction

ISBN: 9780241015308

RRP: $45.00

Our Price: $40.50 incGST BUY

More than once since then I've wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. Breath is a story about the wildness of youth - the lust for excitement and terror, the determination to be extraordinary, the wounds that heal and those that don't - and about learning to live with its passing.In his first novel for seven years, Tim Winton has achieved a new level of mastery. Breath confirms him as one of the world's finest storytellers, a writer of novels that are at the same time simple and profound, relentlessly gripping and deeply moving.

Title: Quarterly Essay 30. Last Drinks – The Impact Of The Northern Territory Intervention, The

Author: Paul Toohey

Binding: ~

Category: Current_Affairs

ISBN: 9781863952156

RRP: $15.95

Our Price: $14.36 incGST BUY

When Mal Brough and John Howard announced the Northern Territory intervention in mid-2007, they proclaimed a child abuse emergency. In this riveting piece of reportage and analysis, Paul Toohey unpicks the rhetoric of emergency and tracks progress. One year on, have children been saved? Will Labor continue with the intervention? What are the reasons for the social crisis – the neglect and the violence – and how might things be different? Toohey argues that the real issue is not sexual abuse, but rather a more general neglect of children. He criticises the way both white courts and black law have viewed violent crime by Aboriginal men. He examines the permit system and the quarantining of welfare money and argues that due to Labor's changes to these, the intervention is now effectively over – though the crisis persists.

Title: Spare Room, The

Author: Helen Garner

Binding: PB

Category:

ISBN: 9781921351396

RRP: $29.95

Our Price: $26.96 incGST BUY

Helen lovingly prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola. She is coming to visit for three weeks, to receive treatment she believes will cure her cancer. From the moment Nicola staggers off the plane, gaunt and hoarse but still somehow grand, Helen becomes her nurse, her guardian angel and her stony judge. The Spare Room tells a story of compassion, humour and rage. The two women—one sceptical, one stubbornly serene—negotiate an unmapped path through Nicola's bizarre therapy, stumbling towards the novel's terrible and transcendent finale.

Title: Household Guide To Dying, The

Author: Debra Adelaide

Binding: ~

Category: Self_Enrichment"

ISBN: 9780330424257

RRP: $29.95

Our Price: $26.96 incGST BUY

When Delia Bennet – author and domestic advice columnist – is diagnosed with cancer, she knows it's time to get her house in order. After all, she's got to secure the future for her husband, their two daughters and their five beloved chickens. But as she writes lists and makes plans, questions both large and small creep in. Should she divulge her best culinary secrets? Read her favourite novels one last time? Plan her daughters' far-off weddings? Complicating her dilemma is the matter of the past, and a remote country town where she fled as a pregnant teenager, only to leave broken-hearted eight years later. Researching and writing her final Household Guide, Delia is forced to confront the pieces of herself she left behind. She learns what matters is not the past but the present – that the art of dying is all about truly living. Fresh, witty, deeply moving – and a celebration of love, family and that place we call home – this unforgettable story will surprise and delight the reader until the very last page.

Title: Lucy Family Alphabet, The

Author: Judith Lucy

Binding: ~

Category: Biography

ISBN: 9780670071326

RRP: $29.95

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Judith Lucy has been cracking jokes about her parents for years. But when a birth relative's casual comment implied that she despised them, Judith was shocked. Sure, she had been talking about Ann and Tony Lucy like they were one-dimensional Irish nutbags who'd ruined her life for years, but there was always more to them and her own feelings than that. So Judith decided it was time to write the full story of her parents and her childhood. And here it is, a reference book on all things Lucy.

Title: Do Travel Writers Go To Hell

Author: Thomas Kohnstamm

Binding: ~

Category:

ISBN: 9781741961119

RRP: $32.95

Our Price: $29.66 incGST BUY

In the next six weeks you have 1000 miles of Brazil's north-eastern coastline to cover by boat, bus and dune buggy. There are no less than59 towns, villages and cities on this particular stretch of coastline. You are responsible for 147 hotel reviews, 152 bar and restaurant reviews and details on everything from bus schedules to border crossings. You spent half of your advance on your plane ticket down here and if you find a way to complete the required research in the next six weeks, you will have eight days to write all 112 pages that are due to your editor. Welcome to life as a professional travel writer.

Title: Book Thief, The

Author: Markus Zusak

Binding: ~

Category: Fiction

ISBN: 9780330423304

RRP: $19.95

Our Price: $17.96 incGST BUY

It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier, and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family outside Munich. Liesel's father was taken away on the breath of a single, unfamiliar word – Kommunist – and Liesel sees the fear of a similar fate in her mother's eyes. On the journey, Death visits the young boy, and notices Liesel. It will be the first of many near encounters. By her brother's graveside, Liesel's life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is The Gravedigger's Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery.So begins a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor's wife's library, wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times. When Liesel's foster family hides a Jewish fist-fighter in their basement, Liesel's world is both opened up, and closed down.

Title: Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, The

Author: Junot Diaz

Binding: ~

Category: Fiction

ISBN: 9780571179558

RRP: $32.95

Our Price: $29.66 incGST BUY

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuk --the ancient curse that has haunted his family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, violent accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. With dazzling energy and insight Diaz immerses us in the tumultuous lives of Oscar; his runaway sister Lola; their beautiful mother Belicia; and in the family's uproarious journey from the Dominican Republic to the US and back. Rendered with uncommon warmth and humour, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao presents an astonishing vision of the endless human capacity to persevere - and to risk it all - in the name of love. A literary triumph, this novel confirms Junot Diaz as one of the funniest, warmest and most exciting writers of our time.

Title: Thousand Splendid Suns, A

Author: Khaled Hosseini

Binding: ~

Category: Fiction

ISBN: 9780747585893

RRP: $32.95

Our Price: $29.66 incGST BUY

Mariam is only fifteen when she is sent to Kabul to marry Rasheed. Nearly two decades later, a friendship grows between Mariam and a local teenager, Laila, as strong as the ties between mother and daughter. When the Taliban take over, life becomes a desperate struggle against starvation, brutality and fear. Yet love can move a person to act in unexpected ways, and lead them to overcome the most daunting obstacles with a startling heroism.