Item category 1: Biographies & Memoirs

The gut-wrenching, heroic story of how one of Australia's finest surfers overcame brain injury and despair to win an Olympic medal.

In 2003, seventeen-year-old Australian exchange student Hannah Kent arrives at Keflavík Airport in the middle of the Icelandic winter. That night she sleeps off her jet lag and bewilderment in the National Archives of Iceland, unaware that, years later, she will return to the same building to wri...

Ella Fitzgerald (1917-1996) possessed one of the twentieth century's most astonishing voices. In this first major biography since Fitzgerald's death, historian Judith Tick offers a sublime portrait of this ambitious risk-taker whose exceptional musical spontaneity made her a transformational arti...

Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony's first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled. Fullagar's account is als...

From her Destiny's Child days through to her Renaissance era and the arrival of Cowboy Carter, Queen Bey's destiny was always to be fashion royalty. Through stunning photographs and expert text, Icons of Style captures Beyonce's most iconic and defining looks from the Met Gala to the Super Bowl a...

A father presents as an English gentleman and war hero to his wife and subsequent children who catch up with the truth of the impoverished Welsh beginnings only after his death. His daughter ponders this singular life in the context of a changing Britain in the 20th century. Major Bill Probert em...

'It was as though England had never really existed'. Budding zoologist Gerald continues to explore the natural wonders around him, enjoying a night fishing trip, receiving a donkey as a birthday present and accidentally bringing a bear home for tea. Here too are more stories of the eccentric crea...

It is daunting to grow old in a time and place that does not value old people, but the age group known as Boomers should not be so easily dismissed. They marched against the Vietnam War and were the first generation to be liberated by the contraceptive pill from the fear of unwanted pregnancy. Th...

The glittering story of April Ashley, model and trans pioneer, and the divorce case which gripped 1960s Britain and defined transgender rights for a generation.

In Bread and Milk, Swedish writer Karolina Ramqvist traces a girlhood through food - that which has the potential to fill her up, but also threatens to consume her. She remember the tangerines eaten in gluttonous longing before her mother's closed bedroom door; her grandmother's rice pudding conn...

Robert Dessaix's testament to a wonderful life is funny, incisive and literary. His voice is completely distinctive and utterly compelling. Robert Dessaix's Chameleon is about everything that matters, a book of memories that flow so freely they seem to happen as we read. Cartwheeling from story t...

The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Samantha grew up surrounded by the noisy, vivid, hot sounds of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. A language that's now on the verge of extinction. The realisation that she won't be able to tell her son he's 'living in the days of the aubergines' or 'chopping onions on my ...

CryBaby is Yamatji author Mabel Gibson's highly anticipated collection of micro memoir. Moving across distinct landscapes in Western Australia, the 56 dreamy and fragmented moments in this collection chronicle Mabel's life from age two to twenty-five. They tell her story as a young First Nations ...

Helen Gibson was a woman willing to do anything to give audiences a thrill. Advertised as "The Most Daring Actress in Pictures," Helen emerged in the early days of the twentieth-century silent film scene as a rodeo rider, background actor, stunt double, and eventually one of the era's biggest act...

What if we could redefine leadership? What if kindness came first? Jacinda Ardern grew up the daughter of a police officer in small-town New Zealand, but as the 40th Prime Minister of her country, she commanded global respect for her empathetic leadership that put people first. This is the remark...

In this vibrant graphic novel, follow the remarkable journey of Ella Fitzgerald, the "First Lady of Song," as she rises from humble beginnings to become one of the greatest jazz vocalists of all time. Through stunning artwork and compelling storytelling, readers are immersed in the world of jazz,...

This is the iconic Josephine Baker in her own words. Funny, candid and unconventional- the wildly famous but elusive Josephine Baker tells her own story in this enchanting memoir. Baker took Paris by storm in the 1920s, dazzling audiences with her humour, beauty and effervescence on stage. She be...

In her early 30s, Katie Treble felt stuck - in her life, in her career as an emergency doctor, and in a dead-end relationship. Moving from her home in England to sunny Byron Bay hadn't been the answer she was hoping for. Wanting to kickstart her life and put her starry-eyed idealism into action, ...

An intimate account -- the first from a trail veterinarian -- of the canines who brave the challenges of the Iditarod. Few events attract as much attention, or create as much spectacle, as the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. Each March, despite subzero temperatures and white-out winds, hundreds of ...

Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa is on a quest to describe how she became an all-round performer after a childhood in a quiet and undramatic migrant family. Where did it all go wrong? Sukhjit Kaur Khalsa knows a thing or two about telling a story. From her experience on stages and in front of live and televis...

It is 1993: a serial killer is loose on the streets of Frankston, Victoria. The community is paralysed by fear and a state's police force and national media come to find a killer. Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Paul Kennedy is searching for something else entirely. He is focused on finishing schoo...

The island of Corfu, where the Durrell family live in agreeable chaos, is paradise for aspiring naturalist Gerald. His battalion of creatures has grown to include eleven puppies, a toad named Deirdre and an unwelcome infestation of scorpions. Yet the human visitors to their sun-drenched villa are...

Over the past six decades, Henry Kissinger has been one of America's most lavishly praised -- and most reviled -- public figures. He was hailed as a "miracle worker" for his peacemaking in the Middle East, pursuit of detente with the Soviet Union, negotiation of an end to the Vietnam War, and sec...

From larger-than-life adventures to vivid and poignant tales of the imagination, Highways and Byways is a collection of 30 stories taking listeners on an enthralling tour (complete with the odd detour) through the raucous, well-lived life of one of this country's most successful and beloved artis...

For over twenty years, Ittay Flescher has worked as an educator, journalist and peacebuilder in Melbourne and Jerusalem. When he woke up on the morning of October 7, 2023 to the sounds of rocket sirens over Jerusalem and later saw the devastation of Gaza in response, the grief and sadness that en...

The wish of Pope Francis was for "hope," on which he has been working for six years, to be published posthumously. However, with the Jubilee Year of Hope coming in 2025 and the pressing needs of our times have urged Pope Francis to share this personal legacy now. "Hope" is the revelatory first-ev...

Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of Erica Jong, author of the feminist autobiographical novel Fear of Flying. A sensational exploration of female sexual desire, it catapulted Erica into the heady world of fame in the early 1970s. Molly grew up with her mother everywhere - on television, in the c...

Learn about the incredible story of Katherine Johnson! The trailblazer whose calculations changed the future of space exploration. Little Katherine loved learning and her favourite subject was maths. In class, she worked so hard that she was able to move up to high school four years early! Due to...

When Jill was four, her father died. He went to play his weekly game of five-a-side football, had a heart attack and never came home. In 2017, in cruelly similar circumstances, Jill's partner Matt went to a gym class, suffered a cardiac arrest and never came home. These two tragic events frame Ji...

Maggie Tabberer was one of Australia's most photographed, most talked about and most loved personalities. Here she tells of her journey from a childhood in suburban Adelaide to the peak of the Australian fashion industry, a journey of stunning professional achievements matched by a rich and often...