Olive, Again (HB) by Elizabeth Strout

$29.99 AUD

Category: General | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

An extraordinary new novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Number One New York Times bestselling author of Olive Kitteridge and My Name is Lucy Barton . Olive, Again follows the blunt, contradictory yet deeply loveable Olive Kitteridge as she grows older, navigating the second half of her life as she com es to terms with the changes - sometimes welcome, sometimes not - in her own existence and in those around her. Olive adjusts to her new life with her second husband, challenges her estranged son and his family to accept him, experiences loss and loneliness, witnesses the triumphs and heartbreaks of her friends and neighbours in the small coastal town of Crosby, Maine - and, finally, opens herself to new lessons about life. 'A powerful storyteller immersed in the nuances of human relationships' Observer 'Writing of this quality comes from an attention to reality so exact that it goes beyond a skill and becomes a virtue' Hilary Mantel  ...Show more

Any Ordinary Day: Blindsides, Resilience and What Happens after the Worst Day of Your Life by Leigh Sales

$24.99 AUD

Category: General

As a journalist, Leigh Sales often encounters people experiencing the worst moments of their lives in the full glare of the media. But one particular string of bad news stories - and a terrifying brush with her own mortality - sent her looking for answers about how vulnerable each of us is to a life-cha nging event. What are our chances of actually experiencing one? What do we fear most and why? And when the worst does happen, what comes next? In this wise and layered book, Leigh talks intimately with people who've faced the unimaginable, from terrorism to natural disaster to simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Expecting broken lives, she instead finds strength, hope, even humour. Leigh brilliantly condenses the cutting-edge research on the way the human brain processes fear and grief, and poses the questions we too often ignore out of awkwardness. Along the way, she offers an unguarded account of her own challenges and what she's learned about coping with life's unexpected blows. Warm, candid and empathetic, this bookis about what happens when ordinary people, on ordinary days, are forced to suddenly find the resilience most of us don't know we have. ...Show more

Grandmothers by Salley Vickers

$32.99 AUD

Category: General | Reading Level: 1 Fiction

Grandmothers follows four grandmothers - Blanche, who can't seem to stop stealing things from the local pharmacy; Minna, who just wants a quiet life in her shepherd's hut, though the local children have other ideas; Cherry, who's adjusting to life in a care home; and Nan, whose favourite occupation is r esearching funerals - whose lives and grandchildren become unexpectedly entangled. ...Show more

Leadership in War: Lessons from Those Who Made History by Andrew Roberts

$55.00 AUD

Category: Military/War

Taking us from the French Revolution to the Cold War and the Falklands, Andrew Roberts presents us with a bracingly honest and insightful look at nine major figures in modern history- Napoleon Bonaparte, Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, George C. Marshall, Charles de Gaull e, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Margaret Thatcher. Each of these leaders fundamentally shaped the outcome of the war their nation was embroiled in. How were they alike, and in what ways did they differ? Was their war leadership unique, or did these leaders have something in common, traits and techniques that transcend time and place and can be applied to the fundamental nature of conflict? Meticulously researched and compellingly written, Leadership in War presents readers with fresh, complex portraits of leaders who approached war with different tactics and different weapons, but with the common goal of success in the face of battle. Both inspiring and cautionary, these portraits offer important lessons on leadership in times of struggle. With his trademark verve and incisive observation, Roberts reveals the qualities that doom even the most promising leaders to failure, and the qualities that lead to victory. ...Show more

Love Is Strong As Death: Poems Chosen by Paul Kelly (HB) by Paul Kelly

$39.99 AUD

Category: Poetry | Reading Level: 3 Biography

Paul Kelly's songs are steeped in poetry. And now he has gathered from around the world the poems he loves - poems that have inspired and challenged him over the years, a number of which he has set to music. This wide-ranging and deeply moving anthology combines the ancient and the modern, the hallowed and the profane, the famous and the little known, to speak to two of literature's great themes that have proven so powerful in his music- love and death - plus everything in between. Here are poems by Yehuda Amichai, W.H. Auden, Tusiata Avia, Hera Lindsay Bird, William Blake, Bertolt Brecht, Constantine Cavafy, Alison Croggon, Mahmoud Darwish, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Ali Cobby Eckermann, James Fenton, Thomas Hardy, Kevin Hart, Gwen Harwood, Seamus Heaney, Philip Hodgins, Homer, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Ono No Komachi, Maxine Kumin, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Norman MacCaig, Paula Meehan, Czeslaw Milosz, Les Murray, Pablo Neruda, Sharon Olds, Ovid, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Porter, Rumi, Anne Sexton, William Shakespeare, Izumi Shikibu, Warsan Shire, Kenneth Slessor, Wislawa Szymborska, Maire Mhac an tSaoi, Ko Un, Walt Whitman, Judith Wright, W.B. Yeats and many more. ...Show more

Rhyme Cordial by PESENTI ANTONIA

$17.99 AUD

Category: Board Books

From Alarm Croc to Cheepy Head, you'll enjoy Rhyme Cordial all day long! A fun, new take on wordplay from bestselling illustrator Antonia Pesenti. Open the pages to reveal unexpected rhymes and bold, bright illustrations.

Hundred: What You Learn in a Lifetime by Heike Faller & Valerio Vidali

$39.99 AUD

Category: Gift Books

5- You learn that boys and girls fall in love. Incredible! 13- When will your parents learn? Not in front of your friends. 36- A dream came true, but it feels different than you thought. 45- Do you like yourself as you are? 75- You learn to unlearn things. Can you still do a somersault? 86- Everything c an be different in every moment. How does our perception of the world change in the course of a lifetime? When Heike Faller's niece was born she began to wonder what we learn in life, and how we can talk about what we have learnt with those we love. And so she began to ask everyone she met, what did you learn in life? Out of the answers of children's writers and refugees, teenagers and artists, mothers and friends, came 99 lessons- that those who have had a difficult time appreciate the good moments more. That those who have had it easy find it harder getting old. That a lot of getting old is about accepting boundaries. And of course, as one 94 year old said to her, 'sometimes I feel like that little girl I once was, and I wonder if I have learned anything at all.' A bestseller in Germany, HUNDRED is a book given by children to grandparents and the other way around, for christenings and Mother's days, significant birthdays and times of celebration. With every age beautifully illustrated by Valerio Vidali, Hundred cannot simply be read because, like life itself, it must be experienced. ...Show more

Ness by Robert Macfarlane; Stanley Donwood

$29.99 AUD

Category: General

Eerie, unsettling and hauntingly beautiful - a new collaboration from the bestselling creators of Holloway 'Ness goes beyond what we expect books to do. Beyond poetry, beyond the word, beyond the bomb -- it is an aftertime song. It is dark, ever so dark, nimble and lethal. It is a triumphant libretto of mythic modernism for our poisoned age. Ness is something else, and feels like it always has been' Max Porter, author of Lanny Somewhere on a salt-and-shingle island, inside a ruined concrete structure known as The Green Chapel, a figure called The Armourer is leading a black mass with terrible intent. But something is coming to stop him. Five more-than-human forms are traversing land, sea and time towards The Green Chapel, moving towards the point where they will converge and become Ness. Ness has lichen skin and willow-bones. Ness is made of tidal drift, green moss and deep time. Ness has hagstones for eyes and speaks only in birds. And Ness has come to take this island back. What happens when land comes to life? What would it take for land to need to come to life? Using word and image, Robert Macfarlane and Stanley Donwood have together made a minor modern myth. Part-novella, part-prose-poem, part-mystery play, in Ness their skills combine to dazzling, troubling effect. Robert Macfarlane is the author of The Lost Words, The Old Ways and Underland, among other books. Stanley Donwood is an artist and the author of Slowly Downward and Household Worms. His next books are There Will Be No Quiet and Bad Island. ...Show more

Final Option (#14 Oregon Files) by Clive Cussler

$32.99 AUD

Category: Crime/Thriller

Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon are back with a new adventure in this thrilling suspense novel in Clive Cussler's #1 New York Times bestselling series. Juan Cabrillo and his team of expert operatives return in this latest entry in Clive Cussler's Oregon Files series. Aboard the Oregon, one of t he most advanced spy ships ever built, they face new challenges and nemeses as they undertake another dangerous mission. ...Show more

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

$32.99 AUD

Category: Essays

'Magical' - Mindy Kaling 'Delicious' - Amy Sedaris 'Funny and poignant and beautiful' - John Mulaney 'It made me remember I was alive' - George Saunders To see the world through Jenny Slate's eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility. As she will rem ind you, we live on an ancient ball that rotates around a bigger ball made up of lights and gases that are science gases, not farts (don't be immature). Heartbreak, confusion and misogyny stalk this blue-green sphere, yes, but it is also a place of wild delight and unconstrained vitality, a place where we can start living as soon as we are born, and we can be born at any time. In her dazzling, impossible-to-categorize debut, Jenny channels the pain and beauty of life in writing so fresh, so new and so burstingly alive, we catch her vision like a fever and bring it back out into the bright day with us, and everything has changed. ...Show more

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

$32.99 AUD

Category: General

  An extraordinary new novel about the influence of history on a contemporary family, from the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming. It's 2001, the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandpare nts' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer, Melody's mother, for her own ceremony - a celebration that ultimately never took place. Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives - even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be. PRAISE FOR JACQUELINE WOODSON ''Woodson explores class, race and death with unflinching honesty and emotional depth... She manages to remember what cannot be documented, to suggest what cannot be said'' Washington Post ''You can smell the bubble gum on Woodson's characters breath and feel their lips as they brush against your ear... The present, we are repeatedly reminded, is no balm for the wounds of the past'' New York Times ''Woodson writes lyrically about what it means to be a girl in America, and what it means to be black in America'' Huffington Post ''One of the quietly great masters of our time'' Kirkus ''Woodson does for young black girls what short story master Alice Munro does for poor rural ones: she imbues their everyday lives with significance'' Elle ''Woodson makes us want to reach into the mirror she holds up and make the words and the worlds she explores our own'' New York Times Book Review ''A gorgeous writer... Lyrical prose, really, really beautiful'' Emma Straub ''A master storyteller'' Angela Flournoy ''Jacqueline Woodson has a poet's soul and a poet's eye for image and ear for lyrical language... I'll go anywhere she leads me'' Naomi Jackson   ...Show more

How to Stop Losing Your Sh*t with Your Kids: Effective Strategies for Stressed Out Parents by Carla Naumburg

$29.99 AUD

Category: Parenting/Adolescence