Item category 1: Biographies & Memoirs

In this first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world. Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory th...

This is the first of four books by Rick Fenny. It is the first era of four eras of his life punctuated by four red kelpie dogs. This story is about his life growing up, firstly on a small farm and orchard in the Hills region on the outskirts of Perth, and later, with his dog Pip, in Albany Wester...

Successful romance author Gaia Anders has a secret: anything she dreams at night is magically written into her novels. After a lonely childhood in foster care, her dream life is the only one she trusts. Gaia's waking life just can't compare -- until she gets caught in one utterly surprising, craz...

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...

'Living in Corfu was rather like living in one of the more flamboyant and slapstick comic operas.' It is 1935 and the Durrells have escaped the leaden summer skies of Bournemouth to arrive 'like a troupe of medieval tumblers' on the sun-drenched island of Corfu for a new life. Gerald Durrell's be...

'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...

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...

Michael Cannon is best known as the author of landmark and popular works of Australian history, including The Land Boomers (1966), and as the founding editor of Historical Records of Victoria. But Cannon, the child and grandchild of important figures in Australian independent journalism, develope...

A great-aunt's bequest - a 200-year-old grandfather clock - sends historian Graeme Davison on a journey deep into his father's family's past. From their tribal homeland in the Scottish Borders he follows them to the garrison town of Carlisle, from industrial Birmingham to Edwardian Australia, and...

2nd part of autobiographical trilogy; moves on from her childhood in Townsville to the big wide world of Sydney during the 70s including her major period of activism in Aboriginal politics, for which she is most remembered today.

The beautifully illustrated fourth volume of Picasso's life -- set in France and Spain during the Spanish Civil War and World War II -- covers friendships with the surrealist painters; artistic inspiration around Guernica and the Minotaur; and his muses Marie-Thérèse, Dora Maar, and Françoise Gil...

On 28 June 1915, young James Martin sailed from Melbourne aboard the troopship Berrima - bound, ultimately, for Gallipoli. He was just fourteen years old. "Soldier Boy" is Jim's extraordinary true story, the story of a young and enthusiastic school boy who became Australia's youngest known Anzac....

In 1914 Vera Brittain was eighteen and, as war was declared, she was preparing to study at Oxford. Four years later her life - and the life of her whole generation - had changed in a way that was unimaginable in the tranquil pre-war era. Testament of Youth, one of the most famous autobiographies ...

American-born Larissa Babij is at home in Kyiv when Russia launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Her grandparents left Ukraine amidst the violence of World War II, and nearly 80 years later, she is fleeing the advancing Russian army. A Kind of Refugee chronicles the fi...

Writer, journalist and activist Katharine Susannah Prichard won fame for vivid novels that broke new ground depicting distinctly Australian ways of life and work -- from Gippsland pioneers and West Australian prospectors to Pilbara station hands and outback opal miners. Her debut The Pioneers mad...

This is the story of Robert Rice Howard (1832-1906), the man known as Nosey Bob. It is also an important chapter in the story of the changing attitudes towards capital punishment in Australia, as the country transformed from generally enthusiastic spectators at executions into campaigners for the...

Izzy Young was a distinctive figure in the folk music and beatnik world. He set up the Folklore Center in New York's Greenwich Village, where Patti Smith, Emmylou Harris and Allen Ginsburg performed, and he produced Bob Dylan's first show in New York in the 1960s. In 1973, Izzy moved to Sweden, w...

In the UK black people are four times more likely to be in prison than white people. black people under the age of eighteen are nine times more likely to be locked up in young offender institutions, secure training centres or secure children's homes in England and Wales than white people of the s...

At only five months old, John Cameron was abandoned in a Dublin orphanage and fostered out as a child labourer by age three. In 1944 when he turned eight, he was incarcerated in Artane Industrial School, where he became boy 11963. Now in his mid-eighties, he tells his shocking but inspirational s...

An authority on the human mind reflects on his intellectual development, his groundbreaking work, and different types of intelligences -- including his own. Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind was that rare publishing phenomenon -- a mind-changer. Widely read by the general public as well as by educa...

This book is a classic of the Black Power era which resonates just as powerfully today. Long hard to find, it is reissued now with a new introduction, for a new audience inspired and galvanised by her ongoing activism and her extraordinary example. In the book, she describes her journey from a ch...

When Lily Dunn was just six years old, her father left the family home to follow his guru to India, trading domestic life for clothes dyed in oranges and reds and the promise of enlightenment with the cult of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Since then he has been a mystery to her. She grew up enthralled ...

"An intensely dramatic story of how God took a young, half-starved boy from a poor village in Henan Province and used him mightily to preach the gospel despite horrific opposition."--Back cover.

Meticulously researched and drawing on many original interviews with close friends and associates, Elton John: The Biography is a serious and weighty, but also page-turningly entertaining, biography of one of the most important musical icons of the 20th century. His enormous influence on the musi...

Some secrets should never be kept - a candid and heartfelt memoir about authenticity, difference, resilience, hope and love by an exciting new Australian voice. When Jason Om was just twelve, he witnessed his mother die of a heart attack. No one else was home and he blamed himself for her death. ...

A comprehensive biography that documents how Keith Urban lived out his childhood dream and the price he's had to pay to reach the top.

Triple Olympian and wellness entrepreneur Lisa Curry has lived her life in the public eye for four decades. In this very personal memoir, she shares the untold story of being Lisa. A swimming protegee who became one of Australia's first fitness entrepreneurs, Lisa Curry swam to Olympic fame in th...

Three women, three voices, three generations: the Silbery family share their most personal memories and the lessons they've learned.You know them as Isabelle, Kerry and Emmie Silbery from Foxtel's and Channel 10's series Gogglebox, in which they share their thoughts on the week's TV highlights, a...

In "Strangers on a Pier", acclaimed author Tash Aw explores the panoramic cultural vitality of modern Asia through his own complicated family story of migration and adaptation, which is reflected in his own face.