Author Archive | admin

John Clarke

The sudden death of John Clarke in April 2017 cut short the life of a man who was not only a great and much loved entertainer and satirist but a wonderful writer.
Tinkering: The Complete Book of John Clarke represents his work from the 1970s in both Australia and New Zealand, and includes his writing for radio, television, stage and screen, as well some previously unpublished pieces.

This collection includes the irresistible commentaries of Fred Dagg, the hilarious and unforgettable absurdities of farnarkeling and selections of his famous quizzes where he gave the answers and readers had to guess the questions. There are also moving recollections of people and places, many of which he wrote towards the end of his life.

To be introduced by John Clarke’s daughter, Lorin Clarke.
Illustrated, and published in jacketed hardcover TINKERING is the perfect way to remember the genius who made us all laugh at ourselves and our society for so many years.

 Pip Williams

Pip and Shannon dreamed of living the good life. They wanted to slow down, grow their own food, and spend more time with the people they love. But jobs and responsibilities got in the way: their chooks died, their fruit rotted, and Pip ended up depressed and in therapy. So they did the only reasonable thing – they quit their jobs, pulled the children out of school and went searching for la dolce vita in Italy.

One Italian Summer is a warm, funny and often poignant story of a family’s search for a better way of living in the homes and on the farms of strangers. Pip sleeps in a woodshed, feasts under a Tuscan sun, works like a tractor in Calabria and, eventually, finds her dream – though it’s not at all the one she expected.

 Titus O’Reilly

Can you not like sport and be Australian?

When it comes to sport, Australians are mad. Completely, irrationally insane. It’s the closest thing we have to a culture. From Don Bradman’s singular focus to Steven Bradbury’s heroic not falling over, sport has shaped our sense of self.

But how did we get here? Part history, part social commentary and a lot of nonsense, Titus O’Reily, Australia’s least insightful sports writer, explains.

Covering Australian Rules, League, Union, soccer, cricket, the Olympics and much more, Titus tackles the big topics, like:

• How not to cheat the salary cap
• The importance of kicking people in the shins
• The many shortcomings of the English

Titus takes you through the characters, the pub meetings, the endless acronyms, the corruption and the alarming number of footballers caught urinating in public.

Sport is important – gloriously stupid, but important. To understand Australia you must understand its sporting history. With this guide you sort of, kind of, will.

 Hannah Jewell

These are the women who were deemed too nasty for their times – too nasty to be recognised, too nasty to be paid for their work and sometimes too nasty to be allowed to live. When you learn about women in history, it’s hard not to wonder: why do they all seem so prim and proper? The truth is, you’re probably not being told the whole story. Also, (mostly male) historians keep leaving out or glossing over some of the most badass women who ever walked the surface of this planet. Fake news!

But fret not. Former Buzzfeed senior writer and Washington Post pop culture host Hannah Jewell has got you covered. In 100 Nasty Women of History, Hannah will spill the tea on:

-the women with impressive kill counts
-the women who wrote dangerous things
-the women who fought empires and racists
-the women who knew how to have a good-ass time
-the women who punched Nazis (metaphorically but also not)

And that’s just half of the women in this book. That’s pretty metal.

So, if you think that Nasty Women are a new thing, think again. They’ve always been around – you just haven’t always heard of them. Take these stories and tell them to your friends. Write them on a wall. Sneakily tell them to your niece (who’s old enough to hear the bad words, of course). Post them to your local MP (especially if it’s a man). Make your friends dress up as Nasty Women for Halloween. These are the 100 Nasty Women of History who gave zero f*cks whatsoever. These are the 100 Nasty Women of History who made a difference.

 Stuart Macbride

From the No. 1 bestselling author of the Logan McRae series, comes a standalone spinoff featuring DS Roberta Steel
Sergeant Roberta Steel has recently been demoted after being caught fitting up a suspect. The trouble is, the man she got sent down has had his sentence quashed now he’s back on the streets. And women are being attacked again. But if DS Steel goes anywhere near him his lawyers will get her thrown off the force for good.

The Powers That Be won’t listen to her not after what happened last time. Besides, she’s got more than enough ongoing cases to keep her busy perhaps she should focus on solving them instead of harassing an innocent man?

But Steel knows he’s guilty and the longer he gets away with it, the more women will suffer. The question is: how much is she willing to sacrifice to stop him?

 Janet Evanovich

Trouble comes in bunches for Stephanie Plum. First, professional grave robber and semi-professional loon, Simon Diggery, won’t let her take him in until she agrees to care for his boa constrictor, Ethel. Stephanie’s main qualification for babysitting an extremely large snake is that she owns a stun gun—whether that’s for use on the wandering serpent or the petrified neighbors remains to be seen.

Events take a dark turn when headless bodies start appearing across town. At first, it’s just corpses from a funeral home and the morgue that have had the heads removed. But when a homeless man is murdered and dumped behind a church Stephanie knows that she’s the only one with a prayer of catching this killer.

If all that’s not enough, Diesel’s back in town. The 6-foot-tall, blonde-haired hunk is a man who accepts no limits—that includes locked doors, closed windows and underwear. Trenton’s hottest cop, Joe Morelli isn’t pleased at this unexpected arrival nor is Ranger, the high-powered security consultant who has his own plans for Stephanie.

As usual Jersey’s favorite bounty hunter is stuck in the middle with more questions than answers. What’s the deal with Grandma Mazur’s latest online paramour? Who is behind the startling epidemic of mutilated corpses? And is the enigmatic Diesel’s sudden appearance a coincidence or the cause of recent deadly events?

 Jackie French

There have been fires before, but not like this. In 1978, as the hot wind howls and the grass dries, all who live at Gibber’s Creek know their land can burn. But when you love your land, you fight for it.
For Jed Kelly, an even more menacing danger looms: a man from her past determined to destroy her. Finding herself alone, trapped and desperate to save her unborn child, Jed’s only choice is to flee – into the flames.
Heartbreaking and powerful, Facing the Flame celebrates the triumph of courage and community, and a love for the land so deep that not even bushfire can erode it.

 John Grisham

Mark, Todd, and Zola came to law school to change the world, to make it a better place. But now, as third-year students, these close friends realize they have been duped. They all borrowed heavily to attend a third-tier, for-profit law school so mediocre that its graduates rarely pass the bar exam, let alone get good jobs. And when they learn that their school is one of a chain owned by a shady New York hedge-fund operator who also happens to own a bank specializing in student loans, the three know they have been caught up in The Great Law School Scam.

But maybe there’s a way out. Maybe there’s a way to escape their crushing debt, expose the bank and the scam, and make a few bucks in the process. But to do so, they would first have to quit school. And leaving law school a few short months before graduation would be completely crazy, right? Well, yes and no . .

  Sigerson Clifford

This collection of stories presents brief glimpses of Irish country life. Sigerson Clifford is the author of The Great Pacificator, Death Sails and the Shannon, The Glassy Man, The Wild Colonial Boy, Travelling Tinkers, Ballads of Bogman and Lascar’s Rock.

 Dominic Smith

Smith’s compassionate and thought-provoking novel reinvents a famous life with delicacy and precision. At the age of 12, Louis Daguerre fell in love with women and light on the same day. Several decades later, the founder of modern photography invented a process that ignited 19th-century Paris and secured his wealth and fame. But the years following find him delusional and ill, racked with terrible fevers. Slowly dying from repeated exposure to mercury, the very means by which he was able to capture image and light, Daguerre is now convinced the world will soon end. Fashioning a “Doomsday List” of ten photographs he must take before “The End,” perhaps none is more urgent that that of Isobel Le Fournier, the object of a youthful crush, lost to Daguerre years ago.

Navigating the Paris streets with his friend Charles Baudelaire and a mysterious prostitute named Pigeon, Daguerre encounters a city awash in excess, cafes charged with the talk of revolution, and a countryside blanketed by the smell of gunpowder. As the search for his doomsday subjects intensifies and his health grows more precarious, Daguerre learns, quite improbably, that he may actually have one last chance at love.