Books

A magnificently illustrated guide to the bryophyte species found across the worldBryophytes are a highly diverse group of plants found in nearly all parts of the world and across a range of habitats. The term "bryophyte" describes plants of three closely...

Should we really ever bring our whole selves to work?In a London call centre, Jimmie helps holiday makers with myriad problems, but he is hardly a model employee. He doesn't simply provide customer service to his clients and advice to his colleagues, he...

From the fungus-webbed House of Usher to the maddening, fungus-like wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic tale of madness, and Ray Bradbury's account of insidious mushroom dispersal via the US postal system, weird fiction has harboured a...

A fascinating collection of questions and answers about courtship, marriage, love, and sex from a seventeenth-century periodicalThe Athenian Mercury a one-page, two-sided periodical published in 1690s London included the world's first personal advice...

From one of today's most innovative ancient historians, a provocative new vision of why ancient history matters and why it needs to be told in a radically different, global wayIt's easy to think that ancient history is, well, ancient history obsolete,...

A poignant reflection on grief, empowerment and feminism through the lives of three women who shaped Ziauddin Sardar's destiny.Three Begums revolves around the lives of three ordinary women Hamida, Merryl and Saliha who lived extraordinary, interwoven...

In this haunting, probing book, an award-winning journalist interviews ordinary Kashmiris about the tales of war told in their homes and shaping their communities.In Kashmir, folktales often begin with the word dapaan 'it is said'. So too do local...

Thanks to his prolific movie career (seventy-eight movies as of 2023) and endearing real-life persona, Keanu Reeves has become the universal screen saver of pop culture-nobody can go a few days without some reference to Keanu or his movies popping up...

Internationally-bestselling author Daniel Pinkwater (The Big Orange Splot) brings his zany wit and wisdom to the magical adventures of a clever girl and her brave dog. Told with warmth and wit, this is a delightful exploration of growing up, the power of...

Exploring death, religion, science and social crisis, a startling history of the occult between the world wars, when Spiritualism was truly an international obsession.The interwar period was a golden age of the uncanny. Clairvoyants, fakirs,...

What our failures during the pandemic cost us, and why we must do betterThe Covid pandemic quickly led to the greatest mobilization of emergency powers in human history. By early April 2020, half the world's population-3.9 billion people-were living...

Was Menzies's unprecedented electoral success merely a matter of luck, or did he make fortune bend to his will? On 30 November 1954, Robert Menzies became Australia's longest serving prime minister. Between the closely fought 1954 and 1961 elections, the...

Fred Williams kept a daily diary from 1963 until his death in 1982. Disciplined and meticulous, he recorded life in the studio, family life and his contact with artists, dealers and the art world-a page per day. At the beginning and end of each year,...

Monte grew up in a secretive century. She lived in a society where appearances mattered, and keeping them up often involved creating silence around ancestral origins, painful memories and personal desires. Monte Punshon refused to be labelled. She was,...

The eleven years that passed between the 1943 and the 1954 elections were arguably some of the most pivotal in Australian history. This was a period of intense political, policy and strategic transition, which saw a popular Labor Government and its...

Novelist, 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...

Melbourne's aborted East-West Link - the massive, multi-billion-dollar inner-city toll road project that promised to knit Melbourne closer together-was divisive from the start. Intense picketing and protests, multiple court challenges, breathless media...

Climate and energy. Work/life balance. Mining taxes. Progress on policy issues like these is essential, and yet they have become subject to the most rancorous partisanship, the precipitation of culture wars, and have brought down governments. It is...

Prose poetry is a resurgent literary form in the English-speaking world and has been rapidly gaining popularity in Australia. Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington have gathered a broad and representative selection of the best Australian prose poems...

From the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1770 to classic children's tale Dot and the Kangaroo, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver examine hunting narratives in novels, visual art and memoirs to discover how the kangaroo became a favourite quarry, a relished...

The Man Who Loved Children is Christina Stead's masterpiece about family life. Set in Washington during the 1930s, Sam and Henny Pollit are a warring husband and wife. Their tempestuous marriage, aggravated by too little money, lies at the centre of...