For anybody struggling — whether it’s with sickness, relationships, or finishing that last task for your boss — phrases like “but it’s not that bad” and “you’ll be fiiiiiiine” are sometimes more harmful than helpful. Guardian journalist Oliver Burkeman seeks to challenge these frustrating fragments of advice with what he calls “the negative path to…
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Romer’s debut novel is a murder mystery spanning four generations, set against the unique landscape of the Australian outback. It’s an ambitious project, and while it’s not without it’s weaknesses, the end result is an engaging story that would appeal to fans of suspense and stories about family secrets.
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Peter Goldsworthy may be one of Australia’s most accomplished writers, but you wouldn’t know it from the title he’s chosen. Or perhaps you would: this self-deprecating mood colours his memoir — from the bizarre range of childhood obsessions to the first fumblings of adolescence — with sunny, occasionally glaring insight that can only be attained…
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Sexually repressed, separated Greek girl on a rampage. There’s no love here, just fucks. But is she fucking him or fucking herself? Koraly Dimitriadis’ work was first published as a zine in 2011. It quickly sold out of stores. Now reissued as a book with extra poems, her first erotic verse novel strips itself down,…
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Writer Paul Ham gives the history of the Sandakan Death March, a war march that lead to only six survivors. Nothing is spared in this book, which gives details of the gruesome punishments the prisoners went through, how they died and how the very small few survived. Cannibalism, bayonetted, shot, starved, given no illness, medical…
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Welcome to the world of Lola Bensky, born in Germany to parents who survived the Auschwitz death camp. Lola grows up with her parents dodging questions about their past, a dysfunctional family due to the war with a language barrier with unhappy yet loved times. After leaving school Lola found herself travelling to America and…
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I’ll See You Again is a book that will resonate with any person, male or female, with or without kids. A family is pulled into darkness at the awful and sudden loss of their three daughters in a car accident and the parents Jackie and Warren have to come to terms with a house filled…
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In 2008, it hit Mary Beth Ditto that she was now a celebrity (she was 27 years young); it took her raunchy photo gracing the cover of the NME magazine to realise this. Yet it was only after people told her she is a celebrity that she finally believed it. After walks up the red…
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