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 NIcolaia Rips

“Hysterically droll, touching, elegant, and wise—a coming-of-age story from someone who possibly came of age before her parents” (Patricia Marx, New Yorker writer and bestselling author), Trying to Float is a seventeen-year-old’s darkly funny, big-hearted memoir about growing up in New York City’s legendary Chelsea Hotel.

New York’s Chelsea Hotel may no longer be home to its most famous denizens—Andy Warhol, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, to name a few—but the eccentric spirit of the Chelsea is alive and well. Meet the family Rips: father Michael, a lawyer turned writer with a penchant for fine tailoring; mother Sheila, a former model and renowned artist who matches her welding outfits with couture; and daughter Nicolaia, a precocious high school junior at work on a record of her peculiar seventeen years.

Nicolaia is a perpetual outsider who has struggled to find her place in public schools populated by cliquish girls and loudmouthed boys. But at the Chelsea, Nicolaia need not look far to find her tribe. There’s her neighbor Stormé, a tall woman who keeps a pink handgun strapped to her ankle; her babysitter, Paris, who may or may not have a second career as an escort; her friend Artie, former proprietor of New York’s most famous nightclubs. The kids at school might never understand her, but as Nicolaia endeavors to fit in she begins to understand that the Chelsea’s motley crew could hold the key to surviving the perils of a Manhattan childhood.

Not since Holden Caulfield has there been such a fabulously compelling teen guide to New York City: Nicolaia Rips’s debut is a disarming, humble, heartfelt, and wise tale of coming-of-age amid the contradictions, complexities, and shifting identities of life in New York City. A bohemian Eloise for our times, Trying to Float is a triumphant parable for the power of embracing difference in all its forms.

 Niki Savva

Kevin Rudd was given no warning, but even he lasted longer than Abbott. Julia Gillard had plenty of warnings, but even she lasted longer than Abbott.
Abbott ignored all the warnings, from beginning to end — the public ones, the private ones, from his friends, his colleagues, the media. His colleagues were not being disloyal. They did not feel they had betrayed him; they believed he had betrayed them. Their motives were honourable. They didn’t want him to fail; they wanted the government to succeed, and they wanted the Coalition re-elected.
Abbott and Credlin had played it harder and rougher than anybody else to get where they wanted to be. But they proved incapable of managing their own office, much less the government. Then, when it was over, when it was crystal-clear to everyone that they had failed, when everyone else could see why they had failed, she played the gender card while he played the victim.
In The Road to Ruin, prominent political commentator, author, and columnist for The Australian Niki Savva reveals the ruinous behaviour of former prime minister Tony Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. Based on her unrivalled access to their colleagues, and devastating first-person accounts of what went on behind the scenes, Savva paints an unforgettable picture of a unique duo who wielded power ruthlessly but not well.

 Col Bailey

Covering a century and a half during which the thylacine’s status has changed from being a despised sheep killer to a magnificent survivor, these enthralling stories are for both the curious and the enthusiast.

Speculation by an ever-growing band of Tasmanian tiger devotees that the thylacine still exists has not wavered, despite the dogmatic stance by the scientific fraternity that the animal is extinct. This collection of actual accounts and anecdotal yarns originated from discussions the author had with an old Tasmanian tiger trapper, Reg Trigg, who in the early days of the twentieth century established a mutual friendship with Lucy, a tiger he rescued from a trap.

 Hugh Mackay

What do people actually mean when they say ‘God’?

Around two-thirds of us say we believe in God or some ‘higher power’, but fewer than one in ten Australians attend church weekly. In Beyond Belief , Hugh Mackay presents this discrepancy as one of the great unexamined topics of our time. He argues that while our attachment to a traditional idea of God may be waning, our desire for a life of meaning remains as strong as ever.

Mackay interviews dozens of Australians representing many different points on the spectrum of faith, including some who are part of the emerging ‘spiritual but not religious’ movement. He exposes the deep vein of ambivalence about religion that runs through our society: we may not actively worship, but we still like to see local churches operating in our midst, and we use ‘our’ church to marry, christen our babies, educate our children and commemorate our dead. He points out some uncomfortable truths, such as our tendency to call on God only in a crisis, and unpacks our human need for ‘answers’, even when science can’t find them. He endorses the Christian ideal of the good life – a life lived for others – but acknowledges that there are many pathways to that same goal, not all of them religious.

Written with all the insight and compassion we have come to expect of our leading chronicler of Australian life, Beyond Beliefis an engrossing exploration of the ways we find spiritual fulfilment in an avowedly secular age.

 Roisin Meaney

It’s September 2015 and sisters Caroline and Eleanor Plunkett receive invitations to their twenty year school reunion. But for both, the invitation takes them back to a time they’d rather forget …

For Caroline, it’s a reminder of a night she’s never told anyone about – and the traumatic consequences she had to face on her own. While for Eleanor, who has spent the past fourteen years trying to get over the death of her young daughter, the school reunion is a stark reminder of life before grief.

As the reunion approaches, both sisters face choices and decisions about their lives. Caroline, a successful knitwear designer living in England must choose between love and honesty. Eleanor, who long ago removed herself from the restaurant she started with her husband, must finally make a decision to choose the man she married and the son she has forgotten for so long.

Alexander McCall Smith

When writer Paul Stewart heads to the idyllic Italian town of Montalcino to finish his already late book, it seems like the perfect escape from stressful city life. Upon landing, however, things quickly take a turn for the worse when he discovers his hired car is nowhere to be found. With no record of any reservation and no other cars available it looks like Paul is stuck at the airport. That is, until an enterprising stranger offers him an unexpected alternative. While there may be no cars available there is something else on offer: a bulldozer.
With little choice in the matter, Paul accepts and so begins a series of laugh out loud adventures through the Italian countryside, following in the wake of Paul and his Italian Bulldozer. A story of unexpected circumstance and lesson in making the best of what you have, My Italian Bulldozer is a warm holiday read guaranteed to put a smile on your face.

 Karin Slaughter

A body is discovered in an empty Atlanta warehouse. It’s the body of an ex-cop, and from the moment Special Agent Will Trent walks in he knows this could be the most devastating case of his career. Bloody footprints leading away from the scene reveal that another victim – a woman – has left the scene and vanished into thin air. And, worst of all, the warehouse belongs to the city’s biggest, most politically-connected, most high-profile athlete – a local hero protected by the world’s most expensive lawyers. A local hero Will has spent the last six months investigating on a brutal rape charge.

But for Will – and also for Dr Sara Linton, the GBI’s newest medical examiner – the case is about to get even worse. Because an unexpected discovery at the scene reveals a personal link to Will’s troubled past. The consequences will wreak havoc on his life and the lives of those he loves, those he works with, and those he pursues.

But Sara’s scene-of-the-crime diagnosis is that they only have a few hours to find the missing woman before she bleeds out . . .

 Pierre Lemaitre

Normally happy and well-adjusted, Sophie Duguet doesn’t understand what’s happening to her: she has begun losing things, from her recently delivered mail to the car she parked the night before. She is constantly forgetting things she’s said and done, too . . . only to be reminded of them by her acquaintances. She’s even detained by the police for shoplifting–a crime she has no memory whatsoever of having committed.

But this is just the beginning. As she slowly sinks deeper into dementia and depression, things go from troubling to alarming. Soon she finds herself connected to the deaths of several people around her: a neighbor boy she is babysitting is murdered while in her care; a stranger seeks shelter with her and winds up dead; and finally, her employer is killed in a way that suggests she was responsible. And she doesn’t remember a thing about any of it.

Desperate to escape the nightmare, a confused and horrified Sophie changes her name and relocates, hoping to outrun the demons that have begun to plague her. But this may not be enough to stop the evil that has poisoned her life and begun to claim the lives of everyone around her . . .

 Ariella Van Luyn

In 1920s Brisbane, Lizzie O’Dea wants to get away from her dad and the memories of her mum that haunt her. At the races, she meets attractive, war-scarred Joe. When he says that he wants to marry her and take her away to far-flung Townsville, Lizzie sees her chance to escape.

But Lizzie soon falls through what she’d thought was a safety net. On the fringes of society, she discovers a new sense of independence and sexuality, love and friendship. It’s a precarious life, though. Always on the edge of collapse, eventually it spins out of control. Two decades later, Lizzie is sick and worn out. Lying in a Brisbane lock hospital, she thinks about Joe, who’s been lost to her for twenty years. But she’s a survivor. There’s hope yet.

Treading Air is the remarkably vivid tale of a young Australian working-class rebel who clashed with the expectations of her world, and a powerful debut from award-winning Queensland author Ariella Van Luyn.

 Liam Pieper

A person is defined by the secrets they keep . . .
Adam Kulakov likes his life. He’s on the right side of middle age; the toy company he owns brightens the lives of children around the world; and he has more money than he can ever spend, a wife and child he adores, and as many mistresses as he can reasonably hide from them.
And he is not the only one with secrets. In 1944, Adam’s grandfather, Arkady, was imprisoned in Auschwitz and given an impossible choice. Now, as he’s coming to the end of his life, he has to keep the truth from his family, and hold back the crushing memories of his time with one of history’s greatest monsters.
As a mistake threatens to bring Adam’s world tumbling down around him, the past reaches for Arkady. Everything he’s spent a lifetime building will be threatened, as will everything Adam and his family think they know of the world.
Bold, dark and compelling, The Toymaker is a novel about privilege, fear and the great harm we can do when we are afraid of losing what we hold dear.