Author Archive | admin

Latika Bourke

Latika Bourke was adopted from India, aged eight months. Growing up in Bathurst, New South Wales she felt a deep connection to her Australian home and her Australian family. It wasn’t until she heard her name uttered in the hit movie Slumdog Millionaire that Latika recognised she knew nothing of her Indian roots, the world she was born into and what she could have become had she not been brought to Australia as a baby.

As Latika carved out a successful career for herself as an award-winning political journalist, she became more and more curious about her heritage and what it meant to be born in India and raised in Australia. And so began a deeply personal and sometimes confronting journey back to her birthplace to unravel the mysteries of her heritage.

From India with Love is a beautiful story of finding your place in the world and finding peace with the path that led you there.

Wendy Holden

The Nazis murdered their husbands but concentration camp prisoners Priska, Rachel, and Anka would not let evil take their unborn children too—a remarkable true story that will appeal to readers of The Lost and The Nazi Officer’s Wife, Born Survivors celebrates three mothers who defied death to give their children life.

Eastern Europe, 1944: Three women believe they are pregnant, but are torn from their husbands before they can be certain. Rachel is sent to Auschwitz, unaware that her husband has been shot. Priska and her husband travel there together, but are immediately separated. Also at Auschwitz, Anka hopes in vain to be reunited with her husband. With the rest of their families gassed, these young wives are determined to hold on to all they have left—their lives, and those of their unborn babies. Having concealed their condition from infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, they are forced to work and almost starved to death, living in daily fear of their pregnancies being detected by the SS. In April 1945, as the Allies close in, the inmates are sent to Mauthausen concentration camp on a hellish seventeen-day train journey.

On the seventieth anniversary of Mauthausen’s liberation from the Nazis by American soldiers, renowned biographer Wendy Holden recounts this extraordinary story of three children united by their mothers’ unbelievable—yet ultimately successful—fight for survival.

Libby Connors

The fascinating story of one of the great Aboriginal resistance fighters of the colonial frontier and a compelling portrait of life in early Brisbane. ‘Connors lays down the hard truth. Not all our warriors were Anzacs. Not all our wars were just.’ – John Birmingham, author and columnist. In the 1840s, white settlement in the north was under attack. European settlers were in awe of Aboriginal physical fitness and fighting prowess, and a series of deadly raids on homesteads made even the townspeople of Brisbane anxious.

Young warrior Dundalli was renowned for his size and strength, and his elders gave him the task of leading the resistance against the Europeans’ ever increasing incursions on their traditional lands. Their response was embedded in Aboriginal law and Dundalli became one of their greatest lawmen. With his band of warriors, he had the settlers in thrall for twelve years, evading capture again and again, until he was finally arrested and publicly executed.

Warrior is the extraordinary story of one of Australia’s little-known heroes, one of many Aboriginal men to die protecting their country. It is also a fresh and compelling portrait of life in the early days of white settlement of Brisbane and south east Queensland.

Paul Kelly

Drawing on more than sixty on-the-record interviews with all the major players, Triumph and Demise is full of remarkable disclosures. It is the inside account of the hopes, achievements and bitter failures of the Labor Government from 2007 to 2013. Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard came together to defeat John Howard, formed a brilliant partnership and raised the hopes of the nation. Yet they fell into tension and then hostility under the pressures of politics and policy.

Veteran journalist Paul Kelly probes the dynamics of the Rudd–Gillard partnership and dissects what tore them apart. He tells the full story of Julia Gillard’s tragedy as our first female prime minister – her character, Rudd’s destabilisation, the carbon tax saga and how Gillard was finally pulled down on the eve of the 2013 election.

Kelly documents the most misunderstood event in these years – the rise of Tony Abbott and the reason for his success. It was Abbott’s performance that denied Rudd and Gillard the chance to recover. Labor misjudged Abbott and paid the price.

Kelly writes with a keen eye and fearless determination. His central theme is that Australian politics has entered a crisis of the system that, unless corrected, will diminish the lives of all Australians.

Katherine Barnes

Based on the wartime diaries of Allied soldier and saboteur Tom Barnes, this account of thrilling WWII wartime deeds deep behind enemy lines in Greece is based on fact but reads like fiction.

A thrilling read of wartime exploits, daring, intrigue and resourcefulness, The Sabotage Diaries is the astonishing true story of Allied engineer Tom Barnes, who was parachuted behind enemy lines in Greece in October 1942 with a small team of sappers and special operations officers. Their brief was to work with the Greek resistance in sabotage operations against the German and Italian occupation forces. Under-equipped and under-prepared but with courage to spare, their initial mission was to blow up a key railway bridge, cutting Rommel’s supply lines to North Africa, where the battle of El Alamein was about to begin. But Operation Harling-as it was known-was only the start of a lengthy and perilous clandestine mission.

Beth McRae

Outback Midwife is the story of Beth McRae’s 40 years as a midwife, from her terrifying first day witnessing a birth as a naïve student nurse to her training as a midwife – the days when the words ‘birth plan’ were unheard of and what women wanted was a long way from being part of any plan – to the outback.

Beth’s career of catching babies takes her from the city to the bush, bonding with people from all walks of life at one of the most important moments in their lives. But there was one more frontier she was determined to conquer.

At a time when most people are thinking about slowing down, Beth decides to move to a remote Aboriginal community in Arnhem Land to embark on a whole other adventure.

Mona Eltahawy

When the Egyptian journalist Mona Eltahawy published an article inForeign Policy magazine in 2012 titled “Why Do They Hate Us?” it provoked a firestorm of controversy. The response it generated, with more than four thousand posts on the website, broke all records for the magazine, prompted dozens of follow-up interviews on radio and television, and made it clear that misogyny in the Arab world is an explosive issue, one that engages and often enrages the public.
In Headscarves and Hymens, Eltahawy takes her argument further. Drawing on her years as a campaigner and commentator on women’s issues in the Middle East, she explains that since the Arab Spring began, women in the Arab world have had two revolutions to undertake: one fought with men against oppressive regimes, and another fought against an entire political and economic system that treats women in countries from Yemen and Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya as second-class citizens.
Eltahawy has traveled across the Middle East and North Africa, meeting with women and listening to their stories. Her book is a plea for outrage and action on their behalf, confronting the “toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend.” A manifesto motivated by hope and fury in equal measure,Headscarves and Hymens is as illuminating as it is incendiary.

Ramona Kopval

Ramona Koval’s parents fled Poland and settled in Melbourne. As a child, Koval learned little about their lives—only snippets from traumatic tales of destruction and escape. But she always suspected that the man who raised her was not her biological father.

One day in the 1990s, long after her mother’s death, she decided she must know the truth. A phone call led to a photograph in the mail, then tea with strangers. Before long Koval was interrogating a nursing-home patient, meeting a horse whisperer in tropical Queensland, journeying to rural Poland, learning other languages, and dealing with Kafkaesque bureaucracy, all in the hope of finding an answer.

A quest for identity recounted with Koval’s customary humor, Bloodhoundtakes hold of the reader and never lets go. It is a moving story of the terrible cost of war and of family secrets.

Carolyn Press-McKenzie

This charming, warm, and touching memoir from inspirational animal whisperer Carolyn Press-McKenzie is written in a style reminiscent of a modern-day James Herriot. Heart-warming, funny, and moving, this is the inspirational story of one woman’s work with animals, first training them for film-work, and then developing a sanctuary for abandoned animals and rescuing them. Carolyn Press-McKenzie runs an organization called HUHA “Helping You Help Animals,” as well as two animal sanctuaries, and she has lots of warm, funny, and sad stories to tell. This memoir tells her story, and is interwoven with heart-warming stories of animals she has rescued, trained, and loved. She writes with a lovely gentle sense of humor and perfectly pitched comic timing. It’s a charming mix of one woman’s drive to follow her passion, along with great animal stories both happy and sad—but that are ultimately happy-ever-after stories.

Josuhua Funder

Stan Watson was among the first ashore at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, and survived battle, fear and disease to build the pier at Anzac Cove from which so many men later escaped. He faced what seemed like an impossible mission: to get every man out alive. Watson never claimed to be the last man to leave Gallipoli, but through to the very end he played his part and became a hero.

Sixty-two years to the day after he stepped away from that fatal shore, Watson took a slow train to visit his family for Christmas and decided to finally tell his life story.

A beautifully told mixture of fact and fiction, Watson’s Pier traces not just one man’s journey, but the history of a nation. It also challenges the historical record of what happened in the final moments at Anzac Cove. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on the meaning of Gallipoli.