Item category 1: Biographies & Memoirs

"Based on the wildly popular Instagram account @CrazyJewishMom, Kate Siegel's essay collection is about life with the woman who redefined the term "helicopter mom." There is nothing more wonderful than a mother's love. There is also nothing more annoying. Who else can proudly insist that you're ...

"It's 1989 and Rae Earl is a fat, boy-mad seventeen-year-old girl, living in Stamford, Lincolnshire, with her mum and their deaf white cat in a council house with a mint-green bathroom and a refrigerator Rae can't keep away from. She's also just been released from a psychiatric ward. My Mad Fat D...

"The dust, the flies, the dingoes are the only company, sometimes for weeks, the occasional crackle of a voice over a wireless radio from far-flung places - this was the world of Val Oldfield for 10 years when living on Australia's infamous Birdsville Track. ... Val Oldfield was flung into this w...

In April 1925, Jean Lucey Pratt began writing a journal. She continued to write until just a few days before her death in 1986, producing well over a million words in 45 exercise books over the course of her lifetime. For sixty years, no one had an inkling of her diaries' existence, and they have...

Penguin the Magpie is a global social media sensation with over 113,000 followers on Instagram. People the world over have fallen in love with the stunning and deeply personal images of this rescued bird and her human family. It begins with a shocking accident, in which Cameron's wife, Sam, suffe...

'Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I'm sitting now.' From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to...

When Kurt Fearnley was a kid, he would leave his wheelchair at the front gate and go exploring with his brothers and sisters. 'You're going to have to be stronger than we are,' they told him, 'and we know you will be.' The boy from Carcoar was raised to believe he could do anything. At fifteen, h...

Ringo: With a Little Help is the first in-depth biography of Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, who kept the beat for an entire generation and who remains a rock icon over fifty years since the Beatles took the world by storm. With a Little Help traces the entire arc of Ringo's remarkable life and care...

The verdict is guilty. On 20 May 2014, former New South Wales police officers Roger Rogerson and Glen McNamara murdered student Jamie Gao in cold blood. Both have been found guilty of murder and possession of 2.78 kilograms of methamphetamine, and sentenced to life imprisonment. But this wasn't R...

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) and her daughter Mary Shelley (1797-1851) have each been the subject of numerous biographies by top tier writers, yet no author has ever examined their lives in tandem. Perhaps this is because these two amazing women never knew each other--Wollstonecraft died of in...

Joe and Rose Kennedy's strikingly beautiful daughter Rosemary attended exclusive schools, was presented as a debutante to the queen of England, and traveled the world with her high-spirited sisters. Yet Rosemary was intellectually disabled, a secret fiercely guarded by her powerful and glamorous ...

"Beginning with the disastrous events of the night before her fortieth birthday, Drusilla Modjeska looks back on the past thirty years. In asking the candid questions so many of us face - about love and independence, growing older, the bonds of friendship and family - she reasses the experiences ...

Some people's lives are entirely their own creations. James Rebanks' isn't. The first son of a shepherd, who was the first son of a shepherd himself, he and his family have lived and worked in and around the Lake District for generations. Their way of life is ordered by the seasons and the work t...

In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, N...

Toni Tapp grew up on the massive Killarney Station, where her stepfather, Bill Tapp, was a cattle king. But there was no 'big house' here - Toni did not grow up in a large homestead. She lived in a shack that had no electricity and no running water. The oppressive climate of the Territory - eithe...

The Enrolled Pensioner Force served as a military unit in Western Australia from 1850 to 1880. The unit consisted of warrant officers, non-commissioned officers, and fighting soldiers. They had seen action in the Crimea, India before and during the mutiny, in Afghanistan, China or the Kaffir War....

A compelling and beautifully written memoir about dark and shameful family secrets, and one young woman's pilgrimage to Australia to attempt to lay the past to rest. British journalist Cal Flyn was holidaying in her childhood home in the Highlands of Scotland, when she stumbled upon a dark family...

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: GENERAL. When the boundaries between the real world and the unseen world overlap and you begin getting cooking tips and dating advice from your ghostly grannies, life itself can never be the same. What do you do when you suddenly realise that there is a whole other world out there ...

William the Conqueror was a formidable personality whose political imagination and ruthless will were the driving force of the Norman Conquest of England. In this biography, David Bates describes the full scope of William's achievements in both Normandy and England, setting them firmly in the con...

Robert Staffanson led an exemplary life. His unique journey started out as a "real" cowboy in Montana, then he was moved by music to start the Billings Symphony. He then moved to Massachusetts to serve as conductor of the Springfield Symphony. Returning home, Staffanson went on to co-found the Am...

An extraordinary story about Henri Tovell who was known as 'Young Digger'. Orphaned, homeless and no more than seven years old, he attached himself to several British Army fighting units, until he was eventually smuggled back to Australia where he was raised by an airman as his own son. Ages 14+.

In 1954, aged three, Rhonda Collard-Spratt was taken from her Aboriginal family and placed on Carnarvon Native Mission, Western Australia. Growing up in the white world of chores and aprons, religious teachings and cruel beatings, Rhonda drew strength and healing from her mission brothers and sis...

The story begins in a public square in New Delhi. On a cold December evening a young European woman of noble descent appears before an Indian street artist known locally as PK and asks him to paint her portrait--it is an encounter that will change their lives irrevocably. PK was not born in the c...

The life, work and history of Aphra Behn : seventeenth ­century dramatist, poet of the erotic and bisexual, novelist, political propagandist, spy. Aphra Behn, a spy in the Netherlands and the Americas, was the first professional woman writer. The most prolific dramatist of her age, innovative nov...

When Norm Macdonald, one of the greatest stand-up comics of all time, was approached to write a celebrity memoir, he flatly refused, calling the genre "one step below instruction manuals." Norm then promptly took a two-year hiatus from stand-up comedy to live on a farm in northern Canada. When he...

This anthology contains separate memoirs -- poems, literary pieces, diaries -- by twenty different Jewish women that describe their persecution under the Nazi regime during World War II. Separated into four sections -- women who survived in hiding, by passing, in the camps and in the Soviet Union...

The saga of the Brooks family on their isolated station on the edge of the Nullarbor shows the great spirit of settlers in opening hard new land. John Paul Brooks, his sister Sarah, and mother Emily, spent most of their life in physical isolation but kept up international correspondence and co-op...

David Bowie released an incredible 27 studio albums, beginning with his eponymous 1967 debut and ending with Blackstar, released just two days before his death in January 2016. Widely regarded as one of the most influential musicians and performers of the previous five decades, Bowie demolished w...

Captain Fantastic is an intimate look at the rise, fall and rise again of John's fame-and-drug fuelled decade, with a final section bringing his life up to the present.