Item category 1: Biographies & Memoirs

Traveling full circle to attend her dying father, Brooks stumbles on the old letters in her parents' basement. She embarks on a human treasure hunt to find her pen friends, and to retrieve her own lost memories of the shy Sydney girl who wrote to them. One by one, she finds men and women whose li...

Raising him in a comfortable middle-class home, Nicky Campbell's Scottish Protestant family cared for him and nurtured him as their own, while remaining open about the fact that he'd been adopted. His father - an ex-army man - and his mother helped him to a good school and a good university. Nick...

In this idyllic pastoral setting, unencumbered by the callous father who so quickly abandoned his family responsibilities, Laurie's adoring mother becomes the centre of his world as she struggles to raise a growing family against the backdrop of the Great War. The sophisticated adult author's ret...

An account of the extraordinary life of Josephine Bonaparte, the charming and promiscuous socialite who stole Napoleon's heart.

This is a story of Jelena Dokic's survival. How she survived as a refugee, twice. How she survived on the tennis court to become world No. 4. But, most importantly, how she survived her father, Damir Dokic, the tennis dad from hell.

The story of Arthur Leggett, a young man growing up in Australia's developing years, patriotically serving his country in World War II, and surviving four and a half years in the hands of the Germans as a Prisoner of War. Australian larrikanism shines throughout Arthur's journey from boyhood to m...

Bryant is one of basketball's greatest-ever players, a fascinating and complicated character who says he knew when he was a boy that he would be better than Michael Jordan. Aloof and uncompromising, Bryant is the grand enigma of American professional basketball, easily the most driven player in t...

Sir Hubert Wilkins is truly one of the most remarkable Australians who ever lived. His life was so jam-packed with adventure and achievement it's as though he crammed several lifetimes into one. The son of pioneer pastoralists in South Australia, Hubert studied engineering before moving on to pho...

For years, Amy Thunig thought she knew all the details about the day she was born, often demanding that the story of her birth be retold. Years later, heavily pregnant with her own first child, she learns what really happened that day. It’s a tale that exemplifies many of the events of her early ...

Several years ago, a treasure trove containing some 6,000 original Bob Dylan manuscripts was revealed to exist. Their destination? Tulsa, Oklahoma. The documents, as essential as they are intriguing -- draft lyrics, notebooks, and diverse ephemera -- comprise one of the most important cultural ar...

As the middle of five kids growing up in dire poverty, the odds were low on Katriona O'Sullivan making anything of her life. When she became a mother at 15 and ended up homeless, what followed were five years of barely coping. This is the extraordinary story - moving, funny, brave, and sometimes ...

'The sun is shining through the bars of my window on what must be a glorious summer day. I've been incarcerated in a cell five paces by three for twelve and a half hours, and will not be let out again until midday; eighteen and a half hours of solitary confinement. There is a child of seventeen i...

The definitive biography of Ange Postecoglou, Australia's first Premier League manager and instigator of the 'Angeball' phenomenon that has taken the football world by storm. With unparalleled access to Postecoglou himself and a career spent pitch-side, leading Australian football writer Vince Ru...

Straight off the slopes and into the spotlight, Heather Gay is famous for speaking the gospel truth. Whether as a businesswoman, mother, or television personality, she is unafraid to blaze a new trail, even if it means losing family, friends, and her community. Born and bred to be devout, Heather...

Ina Garten, the author of thirteen cookbooks, beloved Food Network personality, Instagram sensation, and the cultural icon whose face has launched a thousand memes, shares her personal story with readers hungry for a seat at her table.

Scion of the great Quaker chocolate dynasty, Adrian Cadbury (1929-2015) was educated at Eton and Cambridge, yet never quite fitted into the mould of the British establishment. As one of the most influential business personalities of the later 20th-century, he was a committed capitalist, but champ...

"Early in her radio career Susie Ferguson became a war correspondent. The only woman among hundreds of soldiers, in a helmet and flak jacket she was one of the boys. None of them knew she was taking fifteen painkillers a day and relying on opioids to stem the burning and stabbing pain in her uter...

Skin cancer is this country's most common cancer, and melanoma the deadliest form of it. Richard, together with his colleagues at Melanoma Institute Australia, has dedicated years to groundbreaking research and succeeded in transforming even the most advanced forms of melanoma into a largely cura...

By the acclaimed royal biographer and commentator Robert Hardman, Charles III is a brilliant and intimate portrait of the new monarch that draws on unrivalled access to the Royal Family, their close friends and staff, plus previously unseen papers from the Royal Archives. With damaging headlines ...

Submariners are a special breed. Not for them a life on the ocean wave, the fresh air and sunshine of other naval sailors. With stealth and daring they go deep and dark, alone and unseen, in often dangerous waters. They sometimes call themselves the Silent Service, with good reason. Australian su...

The Doctor of Hiroshima is the extraordinary true story of Dr Michihiko Hachiya, whose hospital was less than a mile from the centre of the atomic bomb that hit on that warm August day. Somehow, in immense shock and pain and extremely weak, the doctor and his wife manage to drag themselves to the...

I'm always asked questions - by fans, by other actors and friends, by my grandchildren. They want to know how I've lasted so long, how I handle fame, why I chose to do some of my films, which films and actors I like best and so forth. They also want to know what makes me tick, what makes me get u...

From S Club 7 pop star to Hollywood starlet, Hannah Spearritt has been on the stage, screen and airwaves since her teens. As one seventh of an iconic pop band that provided the soundtrack to so many childhoods, she has spent most of her life in the limelight. Now, for the first time, she's ready ...

A mathematician unlike any other, John Horton Conway (1937-2020) possessed a rock star's charisma, a polymath's promiscuous curiosity, and a sly sense of humour. Conway found fame as a barefoot professor at Cambridge, where he discovered the Conway groups in mathematical symmetry and the aptly na...

It was a perfect Wednesday morning when Alex 'Chumpy' Pullin kissed his partner Ellidy, goodbye to go spearfishing. Most days, Ellidy would go to the beach too, but that day she didn't. Later, there was a knock at the door. A man had been found unconscious on the ocean floor. It was Chumpy. From ...

Alan Edwards, the godfather of British music PR, has worked with some of the most legendary artists of our time, from David Bowie to the Spice Girls via the Rolling Stones, the Stranglers, Prince and Amy Winehouse. A raucous, funny and deeply insightful memoir from the godfather of modern music P...

Comedian Youngmi Mayer recounts her childhood and adolescence as an offbeat biracial kid in Saipan. With humor and irreverence, she shares difficult moments in her past, including her family's struggles during the last century of colonialism, her mother's marriage to a man who looked like "white ...

Intelligencer tells the extraordinary story of Australia's greatest spymaster, Walter Cawthorn. Trained as a teacher in Melbourne, he served at Gallipoli before joining the British Indian Army on the Western Front. From the Middle East to Vietnam, Cawthorn spied for four countries: Britain, India...

This captivating biography delves into the pioneering work of J. Robert Oppenheimer, from his early scientific achievements to leading the Manhattan Project and his complex legacy as the mind behind the atom bomb. The brilliant theoretical physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer is now known primarily f...

This is a story about a boy called Ray who, as a result of his greed and lust for life, became Jumbo both in size and in name. Ray was born into a Jewish family in Perth, Western Australia, shortly after World War II; a family living in a suburban house at a time of growing affluence and cultural...