Author Archive | admin

 Joseph Wakim

A heartwarming memoir of a widower bringing up his three daughters – and the precious life lessons they taught him along the way.
‘Without a word spoken, mothers effortlessly read a room, gauging its temperature, scanning their children’s faces and measuring their heartbeats … This is the language of love, a language that should not be the monopoly of mothers. It is a language that we men can reclaim and relearn, as it lies dormant within us, waiting to be brought back to life. I was sure that whoever gave women this gift would not have bypassed fathers, in case they ended up like me.’

When Joseph Wakim’s wife died of breast cancer in 2003, his three daughters were only eleven, nine and four years old. Despite well-meaning friends, family and even strangers telling him he would need help to bring up his daughters, Joseph followed his heart and did the job his way, trusting that he – and the girls – would know what to do. To stop himself from succumbing to grief and taking his daughters with him, Joseph relied on humour and honesty as they all learned to live again and celebrate life, while honouring the memory of his beloved wife, Nadia.

Twelve years later, the family is thriving, and Joseph and his daughters have learned hard and valuable truths about each other – and themselves. This moving and engaging memoir will touch the hearts of parents and children everywhere, and may even provide some secrets to family harmony that we can all share.

Duncan McNab

The colourful and exciting story of the larger-than-life characters who have populated Australia’s docks, wharves and ports from the First Fleet to today – and the crime, violence and corruption that has always been present.

Ever since the First Fleet dropped anchor, Australia’s ports have been our opening to the world. They are also the breeding ground for many of Australia’s most notorious criminals, and a magnet for local and overseas criminal syndicates. WATERFRONT is the story of the crimes, the politics, the characters and the corruption in our nation’s ports.

From the time of Phillip and Bligh to today, from the gold rushes to modern-day drug smuggling, a criminal element has always found ways to profit from the rise and dominance of waterfront unions. After a century of Royal Commissions, reports, denials and crackdowns, crime and wrongdoing in Australia’s ports remains organised, entrenched and incredibly profitable.

Investigative journalist and former police detective Duncan McNab lifts the lid on the intriguing and chequered history of Australia’s waterfront.

Helen Walmsley

Sixty is the new forty, we’re constantly told. Or is it that seventy is the new fifty?

Yet fashionable clothes shops cater for little but elfin twenty-year-olds; magazines carry little but articles about appearing younger. Heaven forbid you try to apply for a job…

Older women are permitted to be either part of the slippers and cardigans brigade, or to cling desperately to their youth and insist on being ‘young at heart’. Can’t there be a third way? A way to age with grace, security, beauty and adventure, and a way to keep your identity against a growing tide of voices telling you how you’d be happier if only you looked ten years younger.

Covering topics from family, finances and work to cosmetics, fashion and sex, The Invisible Woman – which is also Helen’s Guardian column nom de plume – is a new sort of book about ageing; one that teaches us not how to avoid it, but how to enjoy it, grow with it, and thrive.

Brigid Keenan

Brigid Keenan was a successful young London fashion journalist when she fell in love with a diplomat and left behind the gilt chairs of the Paris salons for a large chicken shed in Nepal. Her bestselling account of life as a “trailing spouse,” Diplomatic Baggage, won the hearts of thousands in countries all over the world.

Now, in her further adventures, we find Brigid in Kazakhstan, where AW, her husband, contracts Lyme disease from ticks, the local delicacy is horse meat sausage, and Brigid’s visit to a market leads to a full-scale riot from which she requires a police escort. Then, as the prospect of retirement looms, Brigid finds herself on the cusp of a whole new world: shuttling between London, Brussels, and their last posting in Azerbaijan; navigating her daughters’ weddings while coping with a cancer diagnosis; and getting a crash course in grand-motherhood as she helps organize a literature festival in Palestine.

Along the way, dauntless and wildly funny as ever, Brigid learns that packing up doesn’t mean packing in as she discovers that retiring and moving back home could just be her biggest challenge yet.

Warren Brown

When Harold Bell Lasseter disappeared it could have been the end of a mystery that began the day he staggered out of the desert at the turn of the 20th century, almost dead, his pockets bulging with gold, claiming to have found a 15 kilometre gold reef. It was mystery that deepened when he and a surveyor returned to the isolated and mysterious Petermann Ranges where the reef was supposed to be located – and couldn’t find it. It became legendary when the largest inland expedition since Burke and Wills was launched and, from the start, like Burke and Wills, was doomed because the partners only had one thing in common: greed.

In LASSETER’S GOLD, Warren Brown vividly recreates the drama of the search – the characters, the fights, the soaring temperatures, the impossible terrain, the plane crash, the pistol-carrying dingo-skinner who appeared out of nowhere. He also asks just who was this man Lasseter? A one-time sailor, a bigamist, a man who claimed John Bradfield stole his plans for a single span bridge to cross Sydney Harbour – was he also a very, very good liar? The entries in Lasseter’s diaries suggest he did find the gold, but that by then it was too late. The expedition had finished, he was alone and what he needed was food. Or did he? Was the body they found even his? What did happen to his vast, lost treasure? Did it ever exist? Does it still exist?

LASSETER’S GOLD is the gripping story of an outback legend, a myth and, perhaps, a field of gold – there for the taking?