Author Archive | admin

Rhui Lee
Long before Ruhi fell pregnant, she knew she was never going to be the ‘good Indian daughter’ her parents demanded. But when the discovery that she is having a girl sends her into a slump of disappointment, it becomes clear she’s getting weighed down by emotional baggage that needs to be unpacked, quickly.

So Ruhi sets herself a mission to deal with the potholes in her past before her baby is born. Delving into her youth in suburban Melbourne, she draws a heartrending yet often hilarious picture of a family in crisis, struggling to connect across generational, cultural and personal divides.

Sifting through her own shattered self-esteem, Ruhi confronts the abuse threaded through her childhood. How can she hold on to the family and culture she has known and loved her whole life, when they are the reason for her scars?

Good Indian Daughter is a brutally honest yet brilliantly funny memoir for anyone who’s ever felt like a let-down.

Rick Moreton
In early 2019, Rick Morton, author of acclaimed, bestselling memoir One Hundred Years of Dirt, was diagnosed with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder – which, as he says, is just a fancy way of saying that one of the people who should have loved him the most during childhood didn’t.

So, over the course of twelve months, he went on a journey to rediscover love. To get better. Not cured, not fixed. Just, better. This is a book about his journey to betterness, his year of living vulnerably. It’s a book about love. What love is, how we see it, what forms it takes, how we practice it in our lives, what it means to us, and how we really, really can’t live without it, even if, like Rick for many years, we think we can.

As he says: ‘People think they want cars, and they will, to get to jobs and appointments in cities and regions where public transport has failed them. But what gets them into those cars, out of the house, out of bed for God’s sake, is love.’

Helene Cronin

This book celebrates the history of Buderim from its early days as a little village, starting with the original settlers to the “Near North Coast”, as the region was then known. It tells how Buderim developed and changed over time, providing dates, locations, events, and personal observations, particularly of its tramway and the role the tramway played in shaping the development of Buderim and district.

The book delves into the town’s rich history and is something the author hopes will preserve the legacy of the tramway, and Buderim, for generations to come.

“It’s 10 years of research and a culmination of photographs, historical documents and memoirs,” Ms Cronin says. “It started off as notes for me to learn more about the tramway and then turned into this.”

Roland Perry

The 1932-33 Ashes was the most notorious and polarising series in the history of cricket. The events of that turbulent summer centred around Don Bradman, the greatest batsman ever to play the game.

With him in their side, Australia appeared unbeatable. And yet England alleged they had found the one shortcoming in Bradman’s extraordinary technique. Their ruthless attempts to exploit that real or imagined vulnerability created an international crisis that threatened the very fabric of the Empire.

Using new material and his previous unparalleled access to Sir Donald Bradman, Roland Perry has written the definitive account of Bradman and the Bodyline series. Compelling, extensively researched and full of new insights, Bradman vs Bodyline takes us behind the scenes as first Arthur Carr then Douglas Jardine planned a ‘fast leg theory’ attack designed to potentially injure Australia’s unstoppable batsman, and the rest of the team, to allow England to retake the Ashes.

From Bodyline’s genesis in English county cricket to the key protagonists of Jardine, Harold Larwood and Bradman himself, Roland Perry has written the complete and captivating story of a sporting outrage that came closer to destroying the relationship between Australia and England than anything before or since.

Dan Liebke

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them by virtue of their skills with ball and bat. This book is about the latter.

Australia’s favourite sport has a proud history of turning nobodies into somebodies and ordinary men and women into heroes of international renown. From the black-and-white belligerence of Ian Chappell to the colourful celebrity of Shane Warne, the diplomacy of Adam Gilchrist to the ruthlessness of Meg Lanning, the pantheon of Australia’s greatest cricketers is as mottled as the crowds that cheer them on. But who is the greatest of them all?

In The 50 Greatest Australian Cricketers, sports journalist and comedy writer Dan Liebke relives the careers, characteristics and enduring legacies of the finest Australian cricket players of the past 50 years.

Cindy Solonec

This extraordinary and heartfelt story chronicles the lives of the Rodriguez family of Debesa Station in the West Kimberley; their livelihood through difficult times, love of family, place and culture, and the challenges of day-to-day living on a small sheep station amid huge pastoral properties.

Spanning four generations from the 1880s when the author’s maternal great-grandfather, Indian deckhand, Jimmy Casim, met and lived with Nigena woman, Lucy Muninga on Yeeda Station near Derby, Debesa centres on the unlikely partnership of Cindy’s parents: Frank Rodriguez, once a Benedictine novice monk from Spain, and Katie Fraser, who had been a novitiate in a very different sort of abbey – a convent for ‘black’ women at Beagle Bay Mission, 130 kilometres north of Broome.

Together, Frank and Katie Rodriguez established Debesa, where Cindy and her three siblings grew up with the rich cultural heritage of their Spanish, Nigena and English ancestors.

Debesa is a sweeping social history of one family’s struggles and triumphs set against the backdrop of the beauty of the West Kimberley.

Guy Hull

Dangerous predators and ravenous herbivores: the story of Australia’s feral nightmare. Isolation was once the impenetrable barrier that protected Australia and its unique fauna. But a little over two hundred years ago a foreign power took possession and brought with it the foreign animals that now dominate the country’s ecosystem. They are the enemy within.

Since that time, around 10 per cent of Australia’s endemic terrestrial mammalian species have become extinct. Today Australia is dealing with the damage caused by all hard-hoofed animals, domestic and feral.

Yet the bigger feral story is the ravages of acclimatisation, caused as new settlers tried to make the colony more like their homeland and released the rabbit, the fox, the hare, feral cats, common mynas, starlings, sparrows, redfin perch, and the many other invasive species that have brought native Australia to its knees.

In this book, Guy Hull details the history and toll of the numerous animal species that have contributed to the decimation of Australian species, their assault on land and agriculture, and the modern strategies that are – hopefully – reclaiming the country for our native fauna and its human population.

Garry Disher

Set in a beach-shack town an hour from Melbourne, The Way It Is Now tells the story of a burnt-out cop named Charlie Deravin. Charlie is living in his family’s holiday house, on forced leave since he made a mess of things at work.

Things have never been easy for Charlie. Twenty years earlier his mother went missing in the area, believed murdered. His father has always been the main suspect, though her body was never found.

Until now: the foundations are being dug for a new house on a vacant block. The skeletal remains of a child and an adult are found—and Charlie’s past comes crashing in on him.

The Way It Is Now is the enthralling new novel by Garry Disher, one of Australia’s most loved and celebrated crime writers.