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  1. BIOGRAPHY

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BIOGRAPHY

Large 9781786580481

Stories of Hope: Finding Inspiration in Everyday Lives by Heather Morris

$29.99 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY

Heather Morris, author of the internationally bestselling novels The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka's Journey, grew up on a farm in rural New Zealand. On her way back across the paddocks from school, Heather would visit her great-grandfather and listen to his experiences of war - stories he told only Heather. From a young age Heather discovered that people would tell her their stories if she stopped and listened. In Stories of Hope, Heather Morris will explore the art of listening - a skill she employed when she met Lale Sokolov, the Tattooist of Auschwitz. It was her ability to listen that led him to entrust her with his story. Stories of Hope will examine Heather's extraordinary journey, in the form of a series of beautifully rendered tales of the people she has met, the remarkable stories they have shared with her, and the lessons they hold for us all.   ...Show more

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Large 9781784701994

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

$19.99 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY

THE NEW YORK TIMESNUMBER ONE BESTSELLERTHESUNDAY TIMESNUMBER ONE BESTSELLERSHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE 2017 'Finishing this book and then forgetting about it is simply not an option...Unmissable' New York TimesAt the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade?s training as a neur osurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi?s transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father.What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when when life is catastrophically interrupted? What does it mean to have a child as your own life fades away? Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Airis a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. ...Show more

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Large 9780143794974

How I Clawed My Way to the Middle by John Wood

$34.99 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY

'Your job is to go out there, grab the audience by the balls, and drag them up on stage with you!' I was flabbergasted. This I understood. A language that I spoke - had spoken most of my life. It was the best acting note I ever got. John Wood grew up in working-class Melbourne; when he failed out of hig h school, an employment officer told him, 'You have the mind of an artist and the body of a labourer.' And so John continued to pursue his acting dreams in amateur theatre, sustaining himself by working jobs as a bricklayer, a railway clerk and even in the same abattoir as his father. When he won a scholarship to NIDA, in Sydney, it moved John into a new and at times baffling world, full of extraordinary characters. It was the start of a decades-long acting career, most famously on shows such as Rafferty's Rules and Blue Heelers, where his charm made him beloved in households across the country. His popularity was such that he was nominated for a Gold Logie nine times in a row, finally culminating in a win in 2006. How I Clawed My Way to the Middle is a beguiling memoir from one of Australia's most cherished actors on both stage and screen. Full of humility, warmth and humour, it tells of the perilous reality of life as a professional actor and the wondrous personalities John encountered along the way. ...Show more

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Large 9780008359591

Meghan Misunderstood by Sean Smith

$34.99 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY

Meghan Misunderstood is a pioneering book that sets the record straight on the most talked about, unfairly vilified and misrepresented woman in the world. Meghan was eleven when she first advocated for women's rights; a teenager when she worked in a soup kitchen feeding the homeless; a popular actress when she campaigned for clean water in Africa and passionately championed gender equality in a speech to a United Nations Women's Conference. Even before she met Prince Harry, hers was an extraordinarily accomplished life. Meghan's wedding to Harry was a joyful occasion, marking happiness at last for the Queen's grandson who had captured our hearts twenty years earlier when he bravely walked behind his mother Diana's coffin. Theirs was a story that the screenwriters of Hollywood - where Meghan had made her name - could scarcely have imagined. The rom-com fantasy, however, soon turned into disturbing drama: any expectation of a life happily-ever-after was cruelly dashed by bullying tabloid newspapers and their allies, both on social media and within the walls of the Palace itself. Meghan was targeted for her gender, her race, her nationality and her profession. The abuse became so bad that seventy-two female MPs signed a letter of solidarity against the 'often distasteful and misleading press', calling out the 'outdated colonial undertones' of the stories. Now, Sean Smith, the UK's leading celebrity biographer, pulls no punches as he reveals the remarkable and powerful story of this self-made, intelligent American woman with a strong social conscience who has made such an impact on our lives. ...Show more

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Large 9781846685828

Being Mortal : Illness Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande

$22.99 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY | Series: Wellcome Ser. | Reading Level: very good

For most of human history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn't matter whether you were five or fifty - every day was a roll of the dice. But now, as medical advances push the boundaries of survival further each year, we have become increasingly detached from the reality of being mort al. So here is a book about the modern experience of mortality - about what it's like to get old and die, how medicine has changed this and how it hasn't, where our ideas about death have gone wrong. With his trademark mix of perceptiveness and sensitivity, Atul Gawande outlines a story that crosses the globe, as he examines his experiences as a surgeon and those of his patients and family, and learns to accept the limits of what he can do.Never before has aging been such an important topic. The systems that we have put in place to manage our mortality are manifestly failing; but, as Gawande reveals, it doesn't have to be this way. The ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death, but a good life - all the way to the very end.Published in partnership with the Wellcome Collection.WELLCOME COLLECTIONWellcome Collection is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we think and feel about health. Inspired by the medical objects and curiosities collected by Henry Wellcome, it connects science, medicine, life and art. Wellcome Collection exhibitions, events and books explore a diverse range of subjects, including consciousness, forensic medicine, emotions, sexology, identity and death. Wellcome Collection is part of Wellcome, a global charitable foundation that exists to improve health for everyone by helping great ideas to thrive, funding over 14,000 researchers and projects in more than 70 countries.wellcomecollection.org ...Show more

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Large 9780241401460

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn

$35.00 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY

Raynor Winn's magical and life-affirming new book, The Wild Silence - the follow-up to the uplifting, Sunday Times, internationally bestselling, Wainwright prize shortlisted, and Costa shortlisted, The Salt Path. In The Salt Path, Raynor and Moth go out to find the sea, the windswept and wild coastline, to find a way through homelessness, to find themselves again. Now, in The Wild Silence, they come back to what should be home, but four walls no longer feel that way. For Raynor, recovering self-esteem and trust in herself, and in others, is harder than she expected. She continues to face Moth's debilitating illness and struggles to find a way to adjust to a life in one place, unmoving. Until an incredible gesture by someone who read their story changes everything . . . Praise for The Salt Path: 'A beautiful book, it really lives up to the hype . . . an enjoyable, gentle yet moving read' Pandora Sykes on The High Low 'A beautiful, thoughtful, lyrical story of homelessness, human strength and endurance' Guardian 'Mesmerising. It is one of the most uplifting, inspiring books that I've ever read' i ...Show more

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Large 9781786090508

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After (PB) by Clemantine Wamariya; Elizabeth Weil

$22.99 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY

____________________ 'Sharp, moving memoir . . . Wamariya tells her own story with feeling, in vivid prose. She has remade herself, as she explains was necessary to do, on her own terms.' New York Times A riveting tale of dislocation, survival, and the power of stories to break or save us Clemantine Wam ariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbours began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years wandering through seven African countries, searching for safety--perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive. When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States, where she embarked on another journey, ultimately graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old. In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of 'victim' and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms. ...Show more

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Large 9781922268556

The Watermill by Arnold Zable

$32.99 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY | Reading Level: near fine

Ranging from remote provinces in China and Cambodia to pre- and post-war Yiddish Poland, Kurdish Iraq and Iran, and Indigenous and present-day Melbourne, Arnold Zable's quartet of stories depicts the ebbs and flows of trauma and healing, memory and forgetting, the ancient and the contemporary. And ever- recurring journeys in search of belonging. Arnold Zable is a highly acclaimed novelist, storyteller and human rights advocate. His works include Cafe Scheherazade, Scraps of Heaven, Violin Lessonsand The Fighter, which was shortlisted for a Victorian Premier's Literary Award and a New South Wales Premier's Literary Award. Zable lives in Melbourne. 'Zable elevates history into near mythical tales of wonder.' Australian 'This is a man who truly believes in the power of stories.' Age ...Show more

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Large 9780143002154

The Shark Net - United by Robert Drewe

$24.99 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY

"Robert Drew has written a moving and unpretentious memoir of a precocious youth, a bittersweet tribute to youth's optimism."--Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books A "spiced and savory memoir" (The New York Times) of the dark life hidden in a sunny seaside Australian community. Written with t he same lyrical intensity and spellbinding prose that has won Robert Drewe's fiction international acclaim, The Shark Net is set in a city haunted by the menace of an elusive serial killer. Drewe's middle class youth in the seaside suburbs of Perth, Australia--often described as the most isolated city in the world--takes a sinister turn when a social outcast (who turns out to be an employee of Drewe's father) embarks on a five-year murder spree. This unusual memoir brilliantly evokes the confluence of adolescent innocence and sexual awakening, while a killer who eventually murders eight people--including several of Drewe's friends--lurks in the shadows. ...Show more

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Large temp img

English Pastoral: An Inheritance - The Sunday Times bestseller from the author of The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks

$35.00 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY

The author of the beloved No.1 bestseller The Shepherd's Life returns with a stirring history of family, loss and the land over three generations on a Lake District farm 'A beautifully-written story of a family, a home and a changing landscape.' - Nigel Slater 'Just about perfect.' - Wendell Berry James Rebanks was taught by his grandfather to work the land the old way. Their family farm in the Lake District hills was part of an ancient agricultural landscape: a patchwork of crops and meadows, of pastures grazed with livestock, and hedgerows teeming with wildlife. And yet, by the time James inherited the farm, that landscape had profoundly changed. The men and women had vanished from the fields; the old stone barns had crumbled; the skies had emptied of birds and their wind-blown song. English Pastoral is the story of an inheritance: one that affects us all. It tells of how rural landscapes around the world were brought close to collapse, and how the age-old rhythms of work, weather, community and wild things were lost. But this elegy from the northern fells is also a song of hope: of how, guided by the past, one farmer began to salvage a tiny corner of England that was now his, doing his best to restore the life that had vanished and to leave a legacy for the future. This is a book about what it means to have love and pride in a place, and how, against the odds, it may still be possible to build a new pastoral: not a utopia, but somewhere decent for us all.   ...Show more

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Large 9781760878160

Max by Alex Miller

$29.99 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY

An astonishing, moving tribute to Alex's friend, Max Blatt, that is at once a meditation on memory itself, on friendship and a reminder to the reader that history belongs to humanity. 'This book so beautifully evokes the power of places in shaping our consciousness and perception…As readers of Alex Mill er, we feel ourselves to be in the presence of a great heart and a penetrating sensibility, and in the thrall of one of our nation's most beloved writers.' Tom Griffiths, Emeritus Professor of History, ANU 'Max tells of Alex Miller's search - in turns fearful and elated - for the elusive past of Max Blatt, a man he loves, who loved him and who taught him that he must write with love. Miller discovers that he is also searching for a defining part of himself, formed by his relation to Max Blatt, but whose significance will remain obscure until he finds Max, complete, in his history. With Max, Miller the novelist has written a wonderful work of non-fiction, as fine as the best of his novels. Always a truth-seeker, he has rendered himself vulnerable, unprotected by the liberties permitted to fiction. Max is perhaps his most moving book, a poignant expression of piety, true to his mentor's injunction to write with love.' Raimond Gaita, award-winning author of Romulus, My Father I began to see that whatever I might write about Max, discover about him, piece together with those old shards of memory, it would be his influence on the friendships of the living that would frame his story in the present. According to your 1939 Gestapo file, you adopted the cover names Landau and Maxim. The name your mother and father gave you was Moses. We knew you as Max. You had worked in secret. From an early age you concealed yourself - like the grey box beetle in the final country of your exile, maturing on its journey out of sight beneath the bark of the tree. You risked death every day. And when at last the struggle became hopeless, you escaped the hell and found a haven in China first, and then Australia, where you became one of those refugees who, in their final place of exile, chose not death but silence and obscurity. Alex Miller followed the faint trail of Max Blatt's early life for five years. Max's story unfolded, slowly at first, from the Melbourne Holocaust Centre's records then to Berlin's Federal Archives. From Berlin, Miller travelled to Max's old home town of Wroclaw in Poland. And finally in Israel with Max's niece, Liat Shoham, and her brother Yossi Blatt, at Liat's home in the moshav Shadmot Dvora in the Lower Galilee, the circle of friendship was closed and the mystery of Max's legendary silence was unmasked.  'A wonderful book. It is a story that needs to be heard.' Jay Winter, Charles J. Stille Professor of History, Yale University ...Show more

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Large 9780008254780

The Court of Miracles (#1) by Kester Grant

$29.99 AUD

Category: BIOGRAPHY | Series: The\Court of Miracles Trilogy Ser.

Les Misérables meets Six of Crows in this page-turning adventure as a young thief finds herself going head to head with leaders of Paris's criminal underground in the wake of the French Revolution. In the violent urban jungle of an alternate 1828 Paris, the French Revolution has failed and the city is d ivided between merciless royalty and nine underworld criminal guilds, known as the Court of Miracles. Eponine (Nina) Thénardier is a talented cat burglar and member of the Thieves Guild. Nina's life is midnight robberies, avoiding her father's fists, and watching over her naïve adopted sister, Cosette (Ettie). When Ettie attracts the eye of the Tiger - the ruthless lord of the Guild of Flesh - Nina is caught in a desperate race to keep the younger girl safe. Her vow takes her from the city's dark underbelly to the glittering court of Louis XVII. And it also forces Nina to make a terrible choice - protect Ettie and set off a brutal war between the guilds, or forever lose her sister to the Tiger.   ...Show more

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