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Tony Windsor

Traitor or saviour? Tony Windsor has been called both in his 22-year political career but never more often than when he supported Julia Gillard to form government in 2010. Born and bred in north-west New South Wales, Tony has held the balance of power in state and federal parliaments for nearly a third of his public life. He has always stood as an independent, believing it was the only way he could achieve the attention country voters deserved from the major parties.

Windsor’s Way reveals Tony Windsor’s courageous political path. He was the only National member to move a no-confidence motion against its leader. He undertook a 17-day assessment period of what Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard offered following the indecisive election in 2010 and seized the opportunity of the subsequent hung parliament. By staying true to his values and beliefs in difficult and challenging times, Tony Windsor has come to stand for integrity and decency in Australian politics.

Helen Garner

On the evening of 4 September 2005, Robert Farquharson, a separated husband, was driving his three sons home to their mother when his car plunged into a dam. The boys, aged ten, seven, and two, drowned. Was this an act of deliberate revenge or a tragic accident? The court case became Helen Garner’s obsession. She was in the courtroom every day of Farquharson’s trial and subsequent retrial, along with countless journalists and the families of both the accused and his former wife.

In this utterly compelling book, Helen Garner tells the story of a man and his broken life. At its core is a search for truth that takes author and reader through complex psychological terrain. Garner exposes, with great compassion, that truth and justice are as complex as human frailty and morality.
Part of a nonfiction tradition that began with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and continues in the works of Janet Malcolm, Erroll Morris, and others.

Simon Fenton

The tale of an Englishman making a life for himself in Senegal. Khady pulled out a breast and with a deadly aim fired milk at the chameleon. “If I don’t offer it milk, our son will grow up to look like a lizard,” she explained. Clearly I had a lot to learn about life in Africa.

On the cusp of middle age, Simon Fenton leaves Britain in search of adventure and finds Senegal, love, fatherhood, witch doctors—and a piece of land that could make a perfect guest house, if only he knew how to build one. The Casamance is an undiscovered paradise here mystic Africa governs life, people walk to the beat of the djembe, when it rains it pours, and the mangoes are free. But the fact that his name translates to “vampire” and he has had a curse placed on him via the medium of eggs could mean Simon’s new life may not be so easy.

David Greene

Far away from the trendy cafes, designer boutiques, and political protests and crackdowns in Moscow, the real Russia exists. Midnight in Siberia chronicles David Greene’s journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, a 6,000-mile cross-country trip from Moscow to the Pacific port of Vladivostok. In quadruple-bunked cabins and stopover towns sprinkled across the country s snowy landscape, Greene speaks with ordinary Russians about how their lives have changed in the post-Soviet years. These travels offer a glimpse of the new Russia a nation that boasts open elections and newfound prosperity but continues to endure oppression, corruption, a dwindling population, and stark inequality.

We follow Greene as he finds opportunity and hardship embodied in his fellow train travelers and in conversations with residents of towns throughout Siberia. We meet Svetlana, an entrepreneur who runs a small hotel in Ishim, fighting through corrupt layers of bureaucracy every day. Greene spends a joyous evening with a group of babushkas who made international headlines as runners-up at the Eurovision singing competition. They sing Beatles covers, alongside their traditional songs, finding that music and companionship can heal wounds from the past. In Novosibirsk, Greene has tea with Alexei, who runs the carpet company his mother began after the Soviet collapse and has mixed feelings about a government in which his family has done quite well. And in Chelyabinsk, a hunt for space debris after a meteorite landing leads Greene to a young man orphaned as a teenager, forced into military service, and now figuring out if any of his dreams are possible.

Midnight in Siberia is a lively travel narrative filled with humor, adventure, and insight. It opens a window onto that country s complicated relationship with democracy and offers a rare look into the soul of twenty-first-century Russia.”

Zarqa Nawaz

A hilarious memoir about growing up Muslim from the creator of Little Mosque on the Prairie. Zarqa Nawaz has always straddled two cultures. She’s just as likely to be agonizing over which sparkly earrings will ‘pimp’ out her hijab as to be flirting with the Walmart meat manager in a futile attempt to secure halal chicken the day before Eid. Little Mosque on the Prairie brought Zarqa’s own laugh-out-loud take on her everyday culture clash to viewers around the world. And now, in Laughing All the Way to the Mosque, she tells the sometimes-absurd, sometimes-challenging, always funny stories of being Zarqa in a western society. From explaining to the plumber why the toilet must be within sitting arm’s reach of the water tap (hint: it involves a watering can and a Muslim obsession with cleanliness “down there”) to urging the electrician to place an eye-height electrical socket for her father-in-law’s epilepsy-inducing light-up picture of the Kaba, Zarqa paints a hilarious portrait of growing up in a household where, according to her father, the Qu’ran says it’s okay to eat at McDonalds–but only if you order the McFish.

Helen MacDonald

When Helen Macdonald’s father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer, Helen had never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk, but in her grief, she saw that the goshawk’s fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own. Resolving to purchase and raise the deadly creature as a means to cope with her loss, she adopted Mabel, and turned to the guidance of The Once and Future King author T.H. White’s chronicle The Goshawk to begin her challenging endeavor. Projecting herself “in the hawk’s wild mind to tame her” tested the limits of Macdonald’s humanity and changed her life.

Heart-wrenching and humorous, this book is an unflinching account of bereavement and a unique look at the magnetism of an extraordinary beast, with a parallel examination of a legendary writer’s eccentric falconry. Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.