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Scribe Catalogue, January–June 2024

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Life Skills for a Broken World

Ahona Guha

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We All Lived in Bondi Then

Georgia Blain

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An American Dreamer

David Finkel

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The Extinction of Irena Rey

Jennifer Croft

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Thunderhead

Miranda Darling

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12 Rules for Strife

Jeff SparrowSam Wallman

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BETWEEN A WOLF AND A DOG

Georgia Blain

WINNER OF THE 2017 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION
WINNER OF THE 2016 UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND FICTION BOOK AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2017 STELLA PRIZE

‘Whenever I need reminding of the preciousness of ordinary life I return to this stunning novel of forgiveness and family, which gives clear, beautiful voice to the fierce luck of being alive.’
Charlotte Wood

Ester is a family therapist with an appointment book that catalogues the anxieties of the middle class: loneliness, relationships, death. She spends her days helping others find happiness, but her own family relationships are tense and frayed. Estranged from both her sister, April, and her ex-husband, Lawrence, Ester wants to fall in love again. Meanwhile, April is struggling through her own directionless life; Lawrence’s reckless past decisions are catching up with him; and Ester and April's mother, Hilary, is about to make a choice that will profoundly affect them all.

Taking place largely over one rainy day in Sydney, and rendered with evocative and powerful prose, the multi-award-winning Between a Wolf and a Dog is a celebration of the best in all of us — our capacity to live in the face of ordinary sorrows, and to draw strength from the transformative power of art.

PRAISE FOR GEORGIA BLAIN

‘[An] elegant, intelligent and affecting novel from a writer at the height of her powers.’ The Saturday Paper

‘Like all her novels, Between a Wolf and a Dog explores the often unarticulated complexities of the intersection of the personal and the political with exquisite grace and intelligence.’ Australian Book Review

‘Blain just gets better and better. The clarity, warmth, and precision of Between a Wolf and a Dog brings to mind the formal beauty of an exquisitely cut gemstone. Blain looks at the big questions — mortality, grief, forgiveness — through the lens of one family’s everyday struggle to love each other. This portrait of marriage and work, of sisterhood, mothers, and daughters is resolute and clear-eyed; so commanding and beautifully written it made me cry.’

Charlotte Wood, author of The Natural Way of Things

Georgia Blain

Georgia Blain published novels for adults and young adults, essays, short stories, and a memoir. Her first novel was the bestselling Closed for Winter, which was made into a feature film. Her books have been shortlisted for numerous awards including the NSW, Victorian, and SA Premiers’ Literary Awards, the ALS Gold Medal, the Stella Prize, and the Nita B. Kibble Award for her memoir Births Deaths Marriages. Georgia’s works include The Secret Lives of Men, Too Close to Home, and the YA novel Darkwater. In 2016, Georgia published Between a Wolf and a Dog and the YA novel Special (Penguin Random House Australia). Between a Wolf and a Dog was shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize, and was awarded the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction and the 2016 University of Queensland Fiction Book Award. Georgia passed away in December 2016.

LIFE SKILLS FOR A BROKEN WORLD

Ahona Guha

A revolutionary framework for living well in a broken world, from acclaimed author and psychologist.

How can I manage heartbreak? How do I cope with death? How can I learn to tolerate anxiety and have hope?

In this helpful, practical, and realistic guide to good psychological health, Dr Ahona Guha shows us how to cope, thrive, and still feel hopeful for the future. Combining techniques from a range of therapeutic modalities, she demonstrates how we can build a range of essential psychological skills, and apply them to live a more tranquil and joyful life.

Life Skills for a Broken World is a breath of fresh air, cutting through the confusion to provide solid, practical, and evidence-based answers to existential questions, big and small.

‘An easily digestible book showing how to build a better framework for mental health, plus useful chapters on the concepts of radical acceptance and setting boundaries. It’s an easy read without being full of woo-woo nonsense: a rare feat for a self-care manual.’

Isabel Berwick, Financial Times

Ahona Guha

Dr Ahona Guha is a clinical and forensic psychologist. Her first book, Reclaim: understanding complex trauma and those who abuse was published by Scribe Publications in 2023. She works with victims of abuse and trauma, and clients with a range of other difficulties — such as anxiety, depression, perfectionism, burn-out, and relationship problems. She also works with perpetrators of harmful behaviours to assess risk, and provides treatment to reduce the risk they pose to others. She writes widely for the media on matters related to mental health, health, social justice, and equity. Her work has appeared in The Age, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, Breathe Magazine, SBS, and ABC. You can find out more about her work at www.ahonaguha.com.

THE NIGHT PARADE

a speculative memoir Jami Nakamura Lin (illus. Cori Nakamura Lin)

In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias, a gorgeously illustrated lyrical memoir that draws upon the Japanese myth of the Hyakki Yagyo — the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons — to shift the cultural narrative around mental illness, grief, and remembrance.

‘Are these the only two stories? The one where you defeat your monster, and the other where you succumb to it?’

Jami Nakamura Lin spent much of her life feeling monstrous for reasons outside of her control. As a Japanese Taiwanese American woman with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, her adolescence was marked by periods of extreme rage and self-medicating, an ever-evolving array of psychiatric treatments, and her relationships with those she loved — especially her father — suffered as a result.

Frustrated with the tidy arc of the typical mental illness memoir, the kind whose trajectory leads toward being ‘better’, Lin sought comfort in the Japanese folklore she’d loved as a child, tales of supernatural creatures known to terrify in the night. Through the lens of the yokai and other East Asian mythology, she set out to interrogate the Western notion of conflict and resolution, grief, loss, mental illness, and the myriad ways fear of difference shapes who we are as a people.

Divided into four acts in the traditional Japanese narrative structure and featuring stunning watercolour illustrations, Jami Nakamura Lin has crafted an innovative, genre-bending, and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between worlds. Braiding her experience of mental illness, the death of her father, and other haunted topics with the folkloric tradition, The Night Parade shines a light into dark corners in search of a new way, driven by the question: How do we learn to live with the things that haunt us?

The Night Parade is a stunning excavation of personal and collective histories, filled with the endless alchemy of storytelling. Jami Nakamura Lin writes with meditative precision and expansive empathy, challenging and reaffirming what communal stories can make possible. Exploring the many worlds that flourish beyond certain knowledge, this boundary-blurring memoir finds power in the undefinable. It reveals to us that the fracturing of a story can be beautifully fruitful. Teeming with language that is transformative and fully embodied, and gorgeously illustrated by Cori Nakamura Lin, The Night Parade is a generous and abundant feast for our living and our dead, our salvaged lineages, and our continuing stories.’

K-Ming Chang, award-winning author of Bestiary

Jami Nakamura Lin

Jami Nakamura Lin is a Japanese Taiwanese Okinawan American author based outside Chicago. She is a former Catapult essay columnist, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Passages North, and other publications. She is a 2022 Sustainable Arts Foundation finalist and her work was shortlisted for the 2021 Chicago Review of Books Awards. She received her MFA in nonfiction from the Pennsylvania State University. https://jaminakamuralin.com/the-night-parade/

BIRD LIFE

a novel Anna Smaill

The second novel by Booker Prize longlisted author Anna Smaill. A lyrical and ambitious exploration of madness and what it is like to experience the world differently.

In Ueno Park, Tokyo, as workers and tourists gather for lunch, the pollen blows, a fountain erupts, pigeons scatter, and two women meet, changing the course of one another’s lives.

Dinah has come to Japan from New Zealand to teach English and grieve the death of her brother, Michael, a troubled genius who was able to channel his problems into music as a classical pianist — until he wasn’t. In the seemingly empty, eerie apartment block where Dinah has been housed, she sees Michael everywhere, even as she feels his absence sharply.

Yasuko is polished, precise, and keenly observant — of her students and colleagues at the language school, and of the natural world. When she was thirteen, animals began to speak to her, to tell her things she did not always want to hear. She has suppressed these powers for many years, but sometimes she allows them to resurface, to the dismay of her adult son, Jun. One day, she returns home, and Jun has gone. Even her special gifts cannot bring him back.

As these two women deal with their individual trauma, they form an unlikely friendship in which each will help the other to see a different possible world, as Smaill teases out the tension between our internal and external lives and asks what we lose by having to choose between them.

‘Magic, mental illness, and sorrow drive this powerful offering … Smaill excels equally at emotional drama, magical realism, and horror. Readers will find much to love.’

Publishers Weekly, starred review

Anna Smaill

Anna Smaill is a poet and novelist. She was born in Auckland, New Zealand and lived in Tokyo for two years before moving to the United Kingdom where she completed a PhD at University College London. In 2015, she published her debut novel, The Chimes, which won the World Fantasy Award and was longlisted for the Booker Prize. She lives on Wellington’s south coast with her husband and their two children.

THE NEW WORLD DISORDER

how the West is destroying itself Peter R. Neumann (trans. David Shaw)

A coruscating analysis of current international relations, setting out the dangers the world will face if the West does not succeed in reinventing itself.

The West is facing an unprecedented crisis. Russia has launched a war of aggression against Ukraine — just months after the USA suffered a foreign policy debacle in Afghanistan. And China, the West’s rival in the battle for system superiority, has long since become a decisive superpower.

Yet the triumph of the West had seemed unstoppable not that long ago. After the end of the Cold War, the democratic market economy took hold in the former Eastern Bloc, Russia went from being an enemy to a partner, and even China turned to capitalism. Then came the major turning point: the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that shook the West. The American War on Terror destabilised an entire region of the world; the Arab Spring only brought forth new autocracies; and, following the annexation of Crimea, the confrontation with Russia intensified. Instead of a liberal world order, a new world disorder has emerged.

Peter R. Neumann, an internationally acclaimed expert on terrorism and geopolitics, shows how this transpired and what must happen now. He offers an unsparing critique of the current situation of the West, which has fatally overestimated itself.

‘A far-sighted analysis of the world order, and an urgent warning of what the future may hold in store.’

Peter Frankopan, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Silk Roads

Peter R. Neumann

Peter R. Neumann is Professor of Security Studies at King’s College London, where he directed the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) for many years. As an internationally sought-after expert, Neumann served as advisor to the USA at the United Nations in 2014. In 2017 he was special representative to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). He also writes for The New York Times and Der Spiegel, among others. His book The New Jihadists was a bestseller. He lives in Oxford. 

THE PULLING

Adele Dumont

When I’ve been overtaken, I have stood and watched the water in my porridge simmer away into the air, and then the oats turn black and crackle with dryness, and my ears fill with the smoke alarm’s shriek.

When Adele Dumont is diagnosed with trichotillomania — compulsive hair-pulling — it makes sense of much of her life to date. The seemingly harmless quirk of her late teens, which rapidly developed into almost uncontrollable urges and then into trance-like episodes, is a hallmark of the disease, as is the secrecy with which she guarded her condition from her family, friends, and the world at large.

The diagnosis also opens up a rich line of inquiry. Where might the origins of this condition be found? How can we distinguish between a nervous habit and a compulsion? And how do we balance the relief of being ‘seen’ by others with our experience of shame?

The Pulling is a fascinating exploration of the inner workings of a mind. In perfectly judged prose, both probing and affecting, Dumont illuminates how easily ritual can slide into obsession, and how close beneath the surface horror and darkness can lie.

The Pulling is an intimate and intricately crafted book, a meditation on privacy and the intensity and complexity of interiority, and the ways in which we might maintain this against and within — without losing — the world. It resists the easy narratives and language of illness, and all that these reduce, and is interested instead in the fascination of compulsion, what it offers and might mean. Dumont’s writing is both vulnerable and fierce, critical and beautifully detailed, and generous above all else.’

Fiona Wright, author of Small Acts of Disappearance

Adele Dumont

Adele Dumont is an Australian writer and critic. Her work has appeared in Griffith Review, Meanjin, Southerly, ABR, and Sydney Review of Books. Adele’s first book, No Man is an Island, is an account of her experiences teaching English to asylum seekers in detention. Adele lives in Sydney, where she works as an English language teacher and examiner. When she needs a break from text and from screens, she enjoys baking, bushwalking, and eavesdropping.

YOUR UTOPIA

Bora Chung (trans. Anton Hur)

By the internationally acclaimed author of Cursed Bunny, in another thrilling translation from the Korean by Anton Hur, Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. “Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung’s terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts” (Vulture), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humour and surprisingly tender moments, too — often between unexpected subjects.

In ‘The Center for Immortality Research’, a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors, only to be blamed for a crime she witnessed during the event, under the noses of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. But she can’t be fired — no one can. In ‘A Song for Sleep’, a tender, one-sided love blooms in the AI-elevator of an apartment complex; as in, the elevator develops a profound affection for one of the residents. In ‘Seeds’, we see the final frontier of capitalism’s destruction of the planet and the GMO companies who rule the agricultural industry in this bleak future, but nature has ways of creeping back to life.

Chung’s writing is “haunting, funny, gross, terrifying — and yet when we reach the end, we just want more” (Alexander Chee). If you haven’t yet experienced the fruits of this singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.

‘Unexpected, funny, thrillingly original. These stories will stick with me.’

Ainslie Hogarth, author of the New York Times Best Book of the Year, Motherthing, and Normal Women

Bora Chung

Bora Chung has written three novels and three collections of short stories. She has an MA in Russian and East European area studies from Yale University, and a PhD in Slavic literature from Indiana University. She currently teaches Russian language and literature and science fiction studies at Yonsei University, and translates modern literary works from Russian and Polish into Korean.

WE ALL LIVED IN BONDI THEN

Georgia Blain

From the author of the multi-award-winning bestseller Between a Wolf and a Dog, a powerful collection of previously unpublished stories.

A sister is haunted by the consequences of a simple mistake. A daughter searches for certainty as her mother’s memory degrades. An encounter at a house party changes the course of a life.

In We All Lived in Bondi Then, beloved Australian author Georgia Blain returns to her resonant themes of relationships and family, illness and health, love and death. Composed in Blain’s final years, these nine stories grapple with large questions on a human scale, brimming with her trademark acuity, nuance, and warmth.

‘With the gift of these nine moving and shapely stories comes the bonus of an elegant and elegiac foreword by Charlotte Wood, who knew the author well … Each story is an intricate masterpiece of suspense, rendered in clean and graceful prose. Each is agonising, haunting, harrowing, the characters grounded in sharp reality … The collection is concerned with facing reality, with looking death in the eye. As grim as this sounds, the stories are composed with a lyrical honesty and an unforgettable strength … This is a powerful and vivid tapestry of life and love and the brutal quirks of human destiny.’

Carmel Bird, The Sydney Morning Herald

Georgia Blain

Georgia Blain published novels for adults and young adults, essays, short stories, and a memoir. Her first novel was the bestselling Closed for Winter, which was made into a feature film. Her books have been shortlisted for numerous awards including the NSW, Victorian, and SA Premiers’ Literary Awards, the ALS Gold Medal, the Stella Prize, and the Nita B. Kibble Award for her memoir Births Deaths Marriages. Georgia’s works include The Secret Lives of Men, Too Close to Home, and the YA novel Darkwater. In 2016, Georgia published Between a Wolf and a Dog and the YA novel Special (Penguin Random House Australia). Between a Wolf and a Dog was shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize, and was awarded the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction and the 2016 University of Queensland Fiction Book Award. Georgia passed away in December 2016.

DEATH AS TOLD BY A SAPIENS TO A NEANDERTHAL

Juan José Millás, Juan Luis Arsuaga (trans. Thomas Bunstead, Daniel Hahn)

A dazzling follow-up to Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal.

‘We would love to discover that each species has a biological clock in its cells, because, if that clock existed and if we were able to find it, perhaps we could stop it and thus become eternal,’ Arsuaga tells Millás in this book, in which science is intertwined with literature. The paleontologist reveals essential aspects of our existence to the writer, and debates the advisability of transmitting his random vision of life to a dieting Millás, who discovers that old age is a country in which he still feels like a foreigner.

After the extraordinary international reception of Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal, the most brilliant double act in Spanish literature once again dazzle the reader by addressing topics such as death and eternity, longevity, disease, ageing, natural selection, programmed death, and survival.

Here you will find humour, biology, nature, life, a lot of life … and two fascinating characters, the Sapiens and the Neanderthal, who surprise us on every page with their sharp reflections on how evolution has treated us as a species. And also as individuals.

‘Dazzling.’ New Scientist

‘A very special book indeed.’ The Telegraph

‘A fascinating journey.’ Helen Gordon

‘No doubt comparisons will be made to Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, but Life as Told By a Sapiens to a Neanderthal, is much more fun ... Roll on Life as Told By a Sapiens to a Neanderthal volume 2.’ Irish Examiner

Praise for Life As Told by a Sapiens to a Neanderthal :‘Absorbing, amusing, and enlightening; a charming exploration not only of evolution, but of human enquiry and wonder.’

Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of Kindred: Neanderthal life, love, death and art

Juan José Millás

Juan José Millás is a bestselling and multi award–winning Spanish novelist and short-story writer, and an award-winning regular contributor to major Spanish newspapers. His narrative works have been translated into more than 20 languages, and include the novels From the Shadows and None Shall Sleep.

Juan Luis Arsuaga

Juan Luis Arsuaga is a professor of paleontology at the Complutense University of Madrid and the director of the Human Evolution and Behaviour Institute. He is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences and of the Musée de l’Homme of Paris, a visiting professor at University College London, and a co-director of excavations at the Sierra de Atapuerca World Heritage site. He is a regular contributor to Nature, Science, and the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, is the editor of the Journal of Human Evolution, and is a regular lecturer at the universities of London, Cambridge, Berkeley, New York, Tel Aviv, and Zurich, among others. The recipient of many national and international awards, he is the author of more than a dozen works.

THE EXTINCTION OF IRENA REY

Jennifer Croft

From the International Booker Prize–winning translator and Women's Prize finalist, a propulsive, beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest.

Eight translators arrive at a house in a forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens, and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets — and deceptions — of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking second outing by award-winning translator and author Jennifer Croft is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe’s last great wildernesses.

The Extinction of Irena Rey could only be written by master of language, a tamer of different tongues. It is brilliant, fun and absolutely alive.’

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain Gang All Stars

Jennifer Croft

Jennifer Croft won a Guggenheim Fellowship for The Extinction of Irena Rey, and her debut Homesick won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, while for her translation of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights won the International Booker Prize. She is the translator of Federico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Romina Paula’s August, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob. She has also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. She lives in Los Angeles.

AN AMERICAN DREAMER

life in a divided country David Finkel

A man navigates the deep divisions in America today and discovers that sometimes change can start by finding common ground with your neighbours, in this immersive account by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Thank You for Your Service and The Good Soldiers.

As this powerful book begins, Brent Cummings finds himself coping with the feeling that the country he loves is fracturing in front of his eyes. An Iraq war veteran, raised to believe in a vision of America that values fairness, honesty, and respect, Cummings is increasingly surprised by the behaviour and beliefs of others, and engulfed by the fear, anger, and confusion that are sweeping through his beloved country as he tries to hold on to his values and his hope for America’s future.

David Finkel, known for his unique, in-depth reporting, spent fourteen years inside Brent Cummings’s world to create this intimate and vivid portrait of a man’s life — his work, family, community, and thoughts — and his quest for connection as America becomes ever more divided. Cummings was one of the unforgettable figures in Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, a book about which The New York Times stated, 'Finkel has made art out of a defining moment in history. You will be able to take this book down from the shelf years from now, and say: This is what happened. This is what it felt like.

An American Dreamer illuminates, with profound empathy, the feelings and lives of many people in America today. It is a brilliant chronicle of one person’s everyday experiences of frustration, confusion, and hope.

‘Brilliantly reported and staggeringly important, An American Dreamer delivers a gripping story that is as illuminating and poignant as it is a punch in the gut.’

Beth Macy, New York Times bestselling author of Dopesick

David Finkel

David Finkel is the author of The Good Soldiers, the bestselling, critically acclaimed account of the US ‘surge’ during the Iraq War and a New York Times Best Book of the Year.
An editor and writer for The Washington Post, Finkel has reported from Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe, and across the United States, and has covered wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
Among Finkel’s honours are a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 and a MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant in 2012. He lives in the Washington, DC, area.

TOKYO VICE

a western reporter on the police beat in Japan: TV tie-in edition Jake Adelstein

Now a hit HBO Max TV series starring Ansel Elgort, Ken Watanabe & Rachel Keller

From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police Press Club, here is a unique, firsthand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up.

At the age of nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquillity. What he got was a life of crime … crime reporting, that is, at the prestigious Yomiuri Shimbun. For twelve years of eighty-hour work weeks, he covered the seedy side of Japan, where extortion, murder, human trafficking, and corruption are as familiar as ramen noodles and sake. But when his final scoop brought him face to face with Japan’s most infamous yakuza boss — and with the threat of death for him and his family — Adelstein decided to step down … momentarily. Then, he fought back.

In Tokyo Vice, Adelstein tells the riveting, often humorous tale of his transformation from an inexperienced cub reporter to a daring investigative journalist with a price on his head. With its vivid, visceral descriptions of crime in Japan and candid exploration of the world of modern-day yakuza that even few Japanese ever see, Tokyo Vice is a fascination, and an education, from first to last.

‘Mr Adelstein’s book expertly melds classic writing about the police beat — replete with its public corpses, clean or rotten cops, smoky rooms and gangsters who eventually seek redemption — with a candid journalistic memoir that details this profession’s moral and mental dilemmas. At the centre is a complex protagonist — both jaded and emotionally deep — whose drive and positive impact win respect as he offers, perhaps, something as rare and fascinating as a black pearl, namely the most compelling insider’s expose yet of Japan’s opaque society.’

Washington Times

Jake Adelstein

Jake Adelstein has been an investigative journalist in Japan since 1993, reporting in both Japanese and English. From 2006 to 2007 he was the chief investigator for a US State Department-sponsored study of human trafficking in Japan. He has been writing for The Daily Beast, The Japan Times, and other publications since 2011, and was a special correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. Considered one of the foremost experts on organised crime in Japan, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the United States. He co-hosted and co-wrote the award-winning podcast about missing people in Nippon, The Evaporated: gone with the gods in 2023. He is the author of Tokyo Vice: a western reporter on the police beat in Japan, which is now a series on HBO Max, and also The Last Yakuza: life and death in the Japanese underworld (2023).He has appeared on CNN, NPR, the BBC, France 24, and other media outlets as a commentator on social issues in Japan, as well as its criminal justice system, politics, and nuclear industry giant, TEPCO.

THUNDERHEAD

Miranda Darling

A black comedy, set in suburbia, about one woman’s struggle to be free.

When Winona Dalloway begins her day — in the peaceful early hours before her children, that ‘tiny tornado of little hands and feet’, wake up — she doesn’t know that by the end of it, everything in her world will have changed.

On the outside, Winona is a seemingly unremarkable young mother: unobtrusive, quietly going about her tasks. But within is a vivid, chaotic self, teeming with voices — a mind both wild and precise.

And meanwhile, a storm is brewing …

‘Set over one fever-pitched day … It's a daring book, adopting the aesthetics of Deborah Levy with the velocity of a crime thriller and an off-kilter voice, deeply internal, darkly comic, clipped, and Woolfish … Thunderhead brims with magazine-style musings — all those dizzying top notes, that intertextuality, the style. It's a strong, complex and self-aware voice, and it is the primary vehicle through which we gauge Winona's resilience and determination. If The Catcher in the Rye were instead penned by a domestic violence survivor, it might read a little like Thunderhead. For fans of Melissa Broder, Elizabeth Hardwick and Edwina Preston.’

Mel Fulton, Books+Publishing

Miranda Darling

Miranda Darling is a writer, poet, and co-founder of Vanishing Pictures. She read English and Modern Languages at Oxford then took a Masters in Strategic Studies and Defence from the ANU (GSSD). She became an adjunct scholar at a public policy think tank, specialising in non-traditional security threats. She has published both fiction and nonfiction; Thunderhead is her fifth book.

VLADIVOSTOK CIRCUS

Elisa Shua Dusapin (trans. Aneesa Abbas Higgins)

Tonight is the opening night. There are birds perched everywhere, on the power lines, the guy ropes, the strings of light that festoon the tent … when I think of all those little bodies suspended between earth and sky, it makes me smile to remind myself that for some of them, their first flight begins with a fall.

Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of fashion school in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar.

As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok is winding down, leaving the windy port city empty as the performers rush off to catch trains, boats, and buses home; all except the Russian bar trio and their manager. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Ulan Ude, just before Christmas.

What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. This is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion, set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean and immersing the reader in Dusapin’s trademark dreamlike prose.

Praise for The Pachinko Parlour:‘Dusapin explores the blurrier borders of language … the novel is a slow, meditative portrait of one woman finding herself, as well as a moving reflection on language’s capacity to divide us from others — and ourselves … while Dusapin’s prose is spare, it is not minimal at all. Her descriptions are lovely and moody, often bouncing obliquely off Claire’s inner state … Of course, much of the pleasure of reading … in English comes from Higgins’s delicate translation. It’s a formidable challenge to translate a novel that deals so centrally with language, and Higgins manages to call the reader’s attention to both the beauty of the writing and the linguistic and cultural switching that demands so much of Claire’s energy.’

Lily Meyer, The New York Times

Elisa Shua Dusapin

Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France in 1992 and raised in Paris, Seoul, and Switzerland. Her first novel, Winter in Sokcho, was published in 2016 to wide acclaim and was awarded the Prix Robert Walser, the Prix Régine Desforges, and, after its translation into English, the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature.

WE CAN DO BETTER

a departure into the world of tomorrow Maja Göpel (trans. David Shaw)

After her previous book, Rethinking Our World, eloquently untangled the complex world we live in, Maja Göpel delivers the encouragement and the tools we need to go into action and build the world we want to live in.

Humanity is undergoing a massive process of transformation, and the way we live will change fundamentally, because things we have taken for granted about the environment, the economy, politics, society, and technology are crumbling. In We Can Do Better, Maja Göpel explains how we can understand such complex developments and use this knowledge to achieve a better world.

There have always been great transformations in history, triggered by humans — thus, we can also shape them. Our window to the future is open as never before. With this attitude, structural change is not an imposition, but an opportunity. It is time that we — each of us individually, but also society as a whole — allowed ourselves to think anew, to dream, and to ask two related, radical questions: Who do we want to be, and how do we want to live?

‘A profound diagnosis and wake-up call.’

Ralph Gerstenberg, Deutschlandfunk Kultur Book Review

Maja Göpel

Dr Maja Göpel is a political economist and an important voice for a sustainable transformation of society, working at the intersection of the economy, politics, and society. From 2017 to 2020, she was secretary-general of the German Advisory Council on Global Change, and in 2019 was appointed honorary professor at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. She is a member of the Club of Rome, the World Future Council, the Balaton Group, the German government’s Bioeconomy Council, and a co-founder of the Scientists for Future network.

THE RARE METALS WAR

the dark side of clean energy and digital technologies: updated edition Guillaume Pitron (trans. Bianca Jacobsohn)

The resources race is on. Powering our digital lives and green technologies are some of the Earth’s most precious metals — but they are running out. And what will happen when they do?

The green-tech revolution has been lauded as the silver bullet to a new world. One that is at last free of oil, pollution, shortages, and cross-border tensions. Now updated after several years of research across a dozen countries, this book cuts across conventional green thinking to probe the hidden, dark side of green technology.

By breaking free of fossil fuels, we are in fact setting ourselves up for a new dependence — on rare metals such as cobalt, gold, and palladium. They are essential to electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, our smartphones, computers, tablets, and other everyday connected objects. China has captured the lion’s share of the rare metals industry, but consumers know very little about how they are mined and traded, or their environmental, economic, and geopolitical costs.

The Rare Metals War is a vital exposé of the ticking time-bomb that lies beneath our new technological order. It uncovers the reality of our lavish and ambitious environmental quest that involves risks as formidable as those it seeks to resolve.

‘[T]he journalist and filmmaker warns against the optimistic belief that technology is the solution … At a time when many claim to be “citizens of the world” or retreat into naive or hypocritical protectionism, Pitron’s book is an attempt to open people’s eyes to the consequences of their societal choices and lifestyles.’

Green European Journal

Guillaume Pitron

Guillaume Pitron, born in 1980, is a French award-winning journalist and documentary-maker for France’s leading television channels. His work focuses on commodities and on the economic, political, and environmental issues associated with their use. The Rare Metals War, his first book, sold 80,000 copies in France and has been translated into ten languages. Guillaume Pitron holds a master’s degree in international law from the University of Georgetown (Washington, DC), and is a TEDx speaker. More information at www.en-guillaumepitron.com.

REBEL ISLAND

the incredible history of Taiwan Jonathan Clements

The gripping history of Taiwan, from the flood myths of indigenous legend to its Asian Tiger economic miracle — and the renewed threat of invasion by China.

Once dismissed by the Kangxi Emperor as nothing but a ‘ball of mud’, Taiwan has a modern GDP larger than that of Sweden, in a land area smaller than Indiana. It is the last surviving enclave of the Republic of China, a lost colony of Japan, and claimed by Beijing as a rogue province — merely the latest chapters in its long history as a refuge for pirates, rebels, settlers, and outcasts.

Jonathan Clements examines the unique conditions of Taiwan’s archaeology and indigenous history, and its days as a Dutch and Spanish trading post. He delves into its periods as an independent kingdom, Chinese province, and short-lived republic, and the transformations wrought by 50 years as part of the Japanese Empire. He examines the traumatic effects of its role as a lifeboat in 1949 for two million refugees from Communism, and the conflicts emerging after the suspension of four decades of martial law, as its people debate issues of self-determination, independence, and home rule.

‘Clements’s pacy and engaging account offers a valuable counterpoint to today’s news coverage of Taiwan. Rebel Island offers a compelling portrait of a perennially fragmented place, subject across centuries to a succession of claims on its territory, resources and identity — of which Xi’s is but the latest.’

Christopher Harding, The Telegraph

Jonathan Clements

Jonathan Clements presented several seasons of Route Awakening (National Geographic), an award-winning TV series about Chinese history and culture. He is the author of many acclaimed books, including Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, Confucius: A Biography, and The Emperor’s Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals. He has written histories of both China and Japan, two countries that have, at some point, claimed Taiwan as their own. He was a visiting professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University from 2013 to 2019. He was born in the East of England and lives in Finland.

WHAT EVERY RADICAL SHOULD KNOW ABOUT STATE REPRESSION

a guide for activists Victor Serge

This classic manual on repression by revolutionary activist Victor Serge offers fascinating anecdotes about the tactics of police provocateurs and an analysis of the documents of the tsarist secret police in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

With a new introduction by Howard Zinn collaborator and Noam Chomsky’s literary agent, Anthony Arnove.

As we approach the 100th anniversary of Victor Serge’s classic 1926 exposé of political repression, the spectre of fear as a tool of political repression is chillingly familiar to us in a world increasingly threatened by totalitarianism. Serge’s exposé of the surveillance methods used by the tsarist police reads like a spy thriller. An irrepressible rebel, Serge wrote this manual for political activists, describing the structures of state repression and how to dodge them — including how to avoid being followed, what to do if arrested, and tips on securing correspondence. He also explains how such repression is ultimately ineffective.

‘Repression can really only live off fear. But is fear enough to remove need, thirst for justice, intelligence, reason, idealism … ? Relying on intimidation, the reactionaries forget that they will cause more indignation, more hatred, more thirst for martyrdom, than real fear. They only intimidate the weak; they exasperate the best forces and temper the resolution of the strongest.’ — Victor Serge

‘Victor Serge is one of the unsung heroes of a corrupt century.’

Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost

Victor Serge

Victor Serge was born to Russian émigré parents in Belgium in 1890. He became active at an early age in revolutionary activities, for which he was imprisoned for five years in France. On his release he returned to revolutionary Russia, where he threw himself into the defence of the fledgling government. After Lenin’s death he became increasingly alienated from Stalin’s clique and was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1936 for speaking out against the purges. He wrote numerous novels, poems, memoirs, and political essays, and died in exile in Mexico in 1947.

THE NAMELESS NAMES

recovering the missing Anzacs Scott Bennett

Few Australians realise that of the 62,000 Anzac soldiers who died in the Great War, over one-third are still listed as missing. With no marked graves, the only reminders of their sacrifice are the many names inscribed on ageing war memorials around the world.

Scott Bennett deftly tells the story of such missing Anzacs through the personal experience of three sets of brothers — the Reids, Pflaums, and Allens — whose names he selected from the Memorials to the Missing. Bennett traces their paths from small, peaceful towns to three devastating battlefields of the Great War: Gallipoli, Fromelles, and Ypres. He reveals the carnage that led to their disappearance, and their families’ subsequent grief and endless search for elusive facts.

Bennett’s unflinching account addresses many painful questions. What circumstances resulted in the disappearance of so many soldiers? Why did the Australian government fail in its solemn pledge to recover the missing? Why were so many families left without answers about the fate of their loved ones — despite the dedicated efforts of Vera Deakin and her co-workers at the Australian Red Cross inquiry bureau, first in Cairo and then in London? Vera, a daughter of Australia’s second prime minister, had had a privileged upbringing, and yet devoted herself tirelessly to seeking answers for the families of the missing.

The Nameless Names lays bare the emotional toll inflicted upon families, describing those caught between clinging to hope and letting go, those who felt compelled to journey to distant battlefields for answers, and those who shunned conventional religion and resorted to spiritualism for solace.

‘This admirable book, superbly researched and insightfully written, illuminates the profound and enduring consequences for so many Australian families whose loved ones were among the missing in World War I.’

Ross McMullin, author of Farewell, Dear People

Scott Bennett

Scott Bennett was born in Bairnsdale, Victoria, in 1966, and holds an Executive Master of Business Administration from the Australian Graduate School of Management at the University of Sydney. Over the last ten years, he has worked for many of Australia’s most recognised retail companies as a management consultant or an executive manager. In 2003, he visited the Great War battlefields in France and Belgium to retrace the steps of his great-uncles, who had fought there. The experience led him to question the many ‘truths’ that have developed around the Anzac legend. The result was the writing of Pozières, which re-examines the battle of Pozières and the Anzac legend.

THE MOUNTAINS ARE HIGH

a year of escape and discovery in rural China Alec Ash

What is it like to radically change your life? Writer Alec Ash meets the Chinese who are doing just this, ‘reverse migrating’ from the cities to the remote countryside of southwest China — and joins them himself, in an extraordinary and inspiring journey of self-discovery.

In 2020, Alec Ash left behind his old life as a journalist in buzzy Beijing, and moved to Dali, a rural valley in China’s Yunnan province, centred around a great lake shaped like an ear and overlooked by the Cang mountain range. Here, he hoped to find the space and perspective to mend heartbreak and escape the trappings of fast-paced, high-pressured city life.

Originally home to the Bai people, Dali has become a richly diverse community of people of all ages and backgrounds, with one shared goal: to reject the worst parts of modernity and live more simply, in tune with the natural world and away from the nexus of authoritarian power. It is into this community that Alec embeds himself, from political dissidents to bohemian hippies, charting his first year of life in Dali among these fascinating neighbours.

The Mountains Are High is a beautifully written, candid memoir about how reevaluating what is really important and taking a leap of faith to reach it can genuinely transform your life. As one of the ‘new migrants’ tells Alec when he arrives: it is easy to change your environment, far more difficult to change your mind.

‘I am deeply impressed that Alec was able to create a new life for himself in this remote corner of rural China where “the mountains are high and the emperor far away,” and indeed, to gain a new perspective on life. Beautifully crafted, The Mountains are High was a joy to read.’

Lijia Zhang, author of Lotus

Alec Ash

Alec Ash is a writer and editor focused on China, where he lived from 2008–2022. He is the author of Wish Lanterns (Picador, 2016), literary nonfiction about the lives of six young Chinese people, a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. His long-form articles have appeared in NYRB, LARB, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and elsewhere, and he was a stringer for The Sunday Times and The Economist. He was previously editor of LARB China Channel, founder of the writers’ collective The Anthill, and contributed to two anthologies of literary reportage, Chinese Characters, and While We’re Here. Currently he is editor of the China Books Review.

12 RULES FOR STRIFE

Jeff Sparrow, Sam Wallman

This is a handbook for change. Because we all know ways in which life could be better. And it can be better. We can make it better.

We don’t need to wait for a leader or saviour. We don’t need to limit ourselves to comments and clicks. In this stunningly original comic-book tour of a serious topic, Jeff Sparrow and Sam Wallman explore 12 powerful ideas distilled from the history of struggle for better lives, better working conditions, and a better world. They show how solidarity can be built across growing divisions — without compromising our values.

‘Strife’ is just another word for making yourself heard. In fun, short, shareable chapters, 12 Rules for Strife shows how together we can change everything.

Praise for Our Members Be Unlimited:‘Activist and comics journalist Wallman debuts with a convincing, transfixing graphic history of the impact and future potential of unions … This is a dynamic, persuasive look at labor power.’

Publishers Weekly

Jeff Sparrow

Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor, broadcaster, and Walkley Award–winning journalist. He is a columnist for The Guardian Australia, a former Breakfaster at Melbourne’s 3RRR, and a past editor of Overland literary journal. His most recent books are Fascists Among Us: online hate and the Christchurch massacre; Trigger Warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right; and No Way But This: in search of Paul Robeson. He lectures at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at The University of Melbourne.

Sam Wallman

Sam Wallman is a comics journalist and cartoonist based in Melbourne, Australia. His drawings have been published in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Age, the ABC, and SBS.

ANTIQUITY

Hanna Johansson (trans. Kira Josefsson)

Elegant, slippery, and provocative, Antiquity is a queer Lolita story by prize-winning Swedish author Hanna Johansson — a story of desire, power, obsession, observation, and taboo.

Antiquity follows its unnamed narrator, a lonely woman in her thirties who becomes enamoured of a chic older artist, Helena, after interviewing her for a magazine. Helena invites the narrator to join her in the Greek city of Ermoupoli where she summers with her teenage daughter Olga. At first an object of jealousy, Olga morphs into an object of desire as the pull of Helena is transposed onto her daughter and the prospect of becoming someone’s first, if perverse, lover.

With echoes of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, The Lover, and Lolita, but wholly original and contemporary, Antiquity probes the depths of memory, power, and the narratives that arrange our experience of the world.

‘Entrancing and calamitous, Antiquity dreams deeply into the shadows of desire and obsession. A precise and mysterious spell of a book.’

Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

Hanna Johansson

Hanna Johansson began her writing career as a critic and essayist covering topics like fashion, literature, art, and performance, and currently works as the art editor at the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet. Her debut novel, Antiquity, was awarded the Katapultpriset Prize in 2021.

THE INTERNET OF ANIMALS

discovering the collective intelligence of life on Earth Martin Wikelski

For readers of An Immense World, this thrilling book unveils a new scientific technology that tracks animal movements from space and ‘could fundamentally reshape the way we understand the role of mobility on our changing planet’. —The New York Times

Animal senses are finely tuned to their environments. Rats are known to flee hours before an earthquake and birds to take flight before a tornado. Yet animal movements themselves are rarely glimpsed by humans, save for a flattened patch of grass here or a snapped twig there. What if we could track secret animal movements all over the world? What would they tell us about how our planet is changing? Would humans be more prepared for natural disasters and disease? Could we prevent further species loss and climate catastrophe?

These questions are closer to being answered than ever before. As part of a groundbreaking new project called ICARUS, scientists all over the world have begun equipping animals with tracking devices that weigh less than 5 grams and are solar-powered. The data they collect feeds up to satellites and back to computers on the ground, creating a living map of animal behaviour previously thought impossible to obtain. In this page-turning book, the founder of ICARUS, Martin Wikelski, shares this compelling story for the first time.

In witty, heartfelt prose, Wikelski reveals intimate and delightful insights into the behaviour of animals, from lone foxes in the Arctic to wild elephants in Thailand. He describes the exciting process of getting his project off the ground, from securing funding from NASA to tagging animals himself in remote corners of the world. Finally, he reveals what his research means for our future. ICARUS may usher in a new epoch more hopeful than the Anthropocene — an epoch that Wikelski calls the Interspecies, when humans finally listen to animals and respond to what they have to say about the health of our world.

‘Wildlife is in steep decline on every continent. New tools like the marvels described in this book will help, and so will a new consciousness those tools might create: the real sense of what an honour and privilege it is to share our planet with the wondrous rest of creation.’

Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

Martin Wikelski

Martin Wikelski is the director of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and honorary professor of ornithology at the University of Konstanz. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, assistant professor at the University of Illinois and associate professor at Princeton.

NEW COLD WARS

China’s rise, Russia’s invasion, and America’s struggle to defend the West David E. Sanger

A fast-paced account of America’s plunge into simultaneous Cold Wars against two very different adversaries — Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia — based on deep reporting.

New Cold Wars— the latest from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon, David E. Sanger — tells the riveting story of America at a crossroads. At the turn of the millennium, the United States was confident that a democratic Russia and a newly wealthy China could gradually be pulled into the Western-led order. That proved a fantasy. By the time Washington emerged from the age of terrorism, the three nuclear powers were engaged in a new, high-stakes struggle for military, economic, and technological supremacy — with nations around the world forced to take sides.

Interviewing a remarkable array of top officials in the United States, foreign leaders, and tech companies thrust onto the front lines, Sanger unfolds a riveting narrative spun around the era’s critical questions. Will the mistakes Putin made in his ill-considered invasion of Ukraine prove his undoing, and will he reach for his nuclear arsenal? Will China strike back at the US chip embargo, or seize Taiwan, the world’s semiconductor capital?

Taking readers from the battlefields of Ukraine — where trench warfare and cyberwarfare are fought side by side — to the back rooms and boardrooms where diplomats, spies, and tech executives jockey for geopolitical advantage, New Cold Wars is a remarkable first-draft history chronicling America’s return to superpower conflict, the choices that lie ahead, and what is at stake for the United States and the world.

‘We have just been hurtled into a new and far more dangerous world, and David E. Sanger has been present at its creation. Sanger's brilliant book is a masterpiece of reporting, revelations, and analysis. It takes us into hidden rooms and lets us eavesdrop on secret conversations that address up-to-the-minute struggles over Russia, China, Ukraine, the Middle East, and other flashpoints, as well as crucial technological innovations. Sanger’s mesmerising inside story of a world transformed will inspire and disturb, but as the author makes abundantly clear, no one who lives on this planet can ignore what is happening.’

Michael Beschloss, New York Times–bestselling author of Presidents of War

David E. Sanger

David E. Sanger is national security correspondent for The New York Times and the bestselling author of The Inheritance, Confront and Conceal, and The Perfect Weapon. He has been a member of three teams that won the Pulitzer Prize, including in 2017 for international reporting. A regular contributor to CNN, he also teaches national security policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

THE GENTLE ART OF SWEDISH DEATH CLEANING

how to free yourself and your family from a lifetime of clutter Margareta Magnusson

The basis for the wonderfully funny and moving TV series developed by Amy Poehler and Scout Productions.

A charming approach to putting your life in order so your loved ones won’t have to. There’s a word for it in Swedish: döstädning, literally, ‘death cleaning’.

Swedish-born Margareta Magnusson is, in her words, ‘aged between 80 and 100’. When her husband died, she had to downsize her home. The experience forced her to recognise the power of ‘death cleaning’ and the concerns that must be addressed in order to do it with thought and care. Done well, the approach not only makes things easier for your loved ones later on, it allows you to revisit the lifetime of memories accumulated with your things.

From clothes and books to stuff you just can’t get rid of, stuff that only matters to you, The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning offers indispensable advice on questions you will inevitably face when sorting through a lifetime of objects: How do you deal with your secrets? Tackle photographs and letters? Avoid heirs fighting over your belongings after you are gone? This charming, practical book based on personal experience and anecdotes will guide you in making the process uplifting rather than overwhelming: it focuses on the importance of living — even through death cleaning.

‘Keep only what you love and what makes you happy in the moment. It’s like Marie Kondo, but with an added sense of the transience and futility of this mortal existence.’

The New York Post

Margareta Magnusson

Margareta Magnusson says she is ‘somewhere between 80 and 100 years old’. She was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, on New Year’s Eve, and graduated from Beckman’s College of Design in Stockholm. After working as a fashion and advertisement designer, she embarked on a career as a painter. Her first solo exhibition was held in Gothenburg in 1979. Later, she exhibited in Stockolm, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and widely around Sweden. She has moved house 17 times within Sweden and abroad, which is why she says, ‘I should know what I am talking about when it comes to deciding what to keep and what to throw away’.

TOKYO NOIR

in and out of Japan's underworld Jake Adelstein

A darkly comic sequel to Tokyo Vice that is equal parts history lesson, true-crime exposé, and memoir.

It’s 2008, and it’s been a while since Jake Adelstein was the only gaijin crime reporter for the Yomiuri Shimbun. The global economy is in shambles, Jake is off the police beat but still chain-smoking clove cigarettes, and Tadamasa Goto, the most powerful boss in the Japanese organised-crime world, has been banished from the yakuza, giving Adelstein one less enemy to worry about — for the time being. But as he puts his life back together, he discovers that he may be no match for his greatest enemy — himself.

And Adelstein has a different gig these days: due-diligence work, or using his investigative skills to dig up information on entities whose bosses would prefer that some things stay hidden.

The underworld isn’t what it used to be. Underneath layers of paperwork, corporations are thinly veiled fronts for the yakuza. Pachinko parlours are a hidden battleground between disenfranchised Japanese Koreans and North Korean extortion plots. TEPCO, the electric power corporation keeping the lights on for all of Tokyo, scrambles to hide its willful oversights that ultimately led to the 2011 Fukushima meltdown. And the Japanese government shows levels of corruption that make the yakuza look like philanthropists in comparison. All this is punctuated by personal tragedies no one could have seen coming.

In this ambitious and riveting work, Jake Adelstein explores what it’s like when you’re in too deep to distinguish the story you chase from the life you live.

Praise for The Last Yakuza:‘Journalist Adelstein parlays decades of reporting on Japanese organised crime into a propulsive history of the yakuza. Drawing on interviews with both his yakuza and Japanese law enforcement contacts, he examines how yakuza groups obtained power … He’s especially good at tracing the yakuza’s political influence in Japan, explaining how they bribed and blackmailed legislators into opposing bills that would have curbed their influence. Painstakingly reported and paced like a thriller, this is a must read for anyone interested in organised crime.’

Publishers Weekly

Jake Adelstein

Jake Adelstein has been an investigative journalist in Japan since 1993, reporting in both Japanese and English. From 2006 to 2007 he was the chief investigator for a US State Department-sponsored study of human trafficking in Japan. He has been writing for The Daily Beast, The Japan Times, and other publications since 2011, and was a special correspondent for The Los Angeles Times. Considered one of the foremost experts on organised crime in Japan, he works as a writer and consultant in Japan and the United States. He co-hosted and co-wrote the award-winning podcast about missing people in Nippon, The Evaporated: gone with the gods in 2023. He is the author of Tokyo Vice: a western reporter on the police beat in Japan, which is now a series on HBO Max, and also The Last Yakuza: life and death in the Japanese underworld (2023).He has appeared on CNN, NPR, the BBC, France 24, and other media outlets as a commentator on social issues in Japan, as well as its criminal justice system, politics, and nuclear industry giant, TEPCO.

MANNY AND THE BABY

Varaidzo

London, 1936. Two sisters are ready to take the city and the world by storm.
Bath, 2012. Two young Black men are figuring out who they are, and who they want to become.

Manny is forthright, intellectual, and determined to make her mark on the London literary scene. Her younger sister Rita, the Baby, just wants to dance. In the smoky clubs that pulsate underneath Soho’s vibrant streets, Rita finds herself drawn into a new world of Black ambition, along with the masterful mimic and trumpeter, Ezekiel Brown, from Jamaica. As tensions rise and the shadow of fascism and war snaps at their heels, the two sisters are faced with choices that will alter their lives forever.

Itai has fled London to his late father’s flat in Bath. Listening to cassette tapes his father made, he feels both drawn in and shut out of his former life — who is Rita? Why did his father record her life story? And where can he find her now, to return the tapes? Meanwhile, his developing friendship with Josh, a young athlete who moonlights as a dealer to fund his training for the next Olympics, is on unsteady ground, as Josh has been sent by his bosses to find out what the hell Itai is doing in Bath.

Manny and the Baby is a character-driven debut novel, full of heart, about what it means to be Black and British, now and in the past.

Manny and the Baby stood out for me from the first few lines. The beautifully balanced prose, the wonderful story, and sumptuous detail are constructed with poetic precision and held my attention right until the very end.’

Jacqueline Crooks, author of Fire Rush

Varaidzo

Varaidzo is a writer and artist. Her short story ‘Bus Stop’ was shortlisted for the 4thWrite Prize 2018. She is a contributor to the best-selling anthology The Good Immigrant (Unbound, 2016) and the romance anthology Who’s Loving You (Trapeze, 2021). She was previously the Digital Editor at Wasafiri, and the Arts & Culture Editor at gal-dem.

THE CONSCIOUS STYLE GUIDE

a flexible approach to language that includes, respects, and empowers Karen Yin

An adaptable guide for anyone who wants to communicate with compassion in a rapidly changing environment.

Most of us want to choose inclusive, respectful, and empowering language when communicating with or about others. But language — and how we use it — continually evolves, along with cultural norms. When contradictory opinions muddle our purpose, how do we align our word choices with our beliefs? Who has the final say when people disagree? And why is it so hard to let go of certain words? Afraid of getting something wrong or offending, we too often treat specific words as right or wrong, regardless of context and nuance.

Thankfully, The Conscious Style Guide provides a roadmap for communicating with sensitivity and awareness — no matter how the world around us progresses. Readers will learn:

  • How to identify biased language
  • How to implement the overarching principles that guide us toward conscious language
  • How to adopt conscious language as a tool for self-awareness and empowerment
  • How to alleviate the stress of experiencing exclusionary language
  • How to create a style sheet and reference stack to help support your practice
  • And much more

With practical advice and hundreds of relatable examples, The Conscious Style Guide invites us to weigh contradictions, examine the pitfalls of binary thinking, and explore truly effective communication — in all aspects of our lives.

‘Karen Yin is no language cop, ready to arrest us for our word crimes. Instead, in The Conscious Style Guide, she is the beloved school crossing guard, protecting us, guiding us, reminding us to look both ways.’

Roy Peter Clark, author of Tell It Like It Is

Karen Yin

Karen Yin is the founder of ConsciousStyleGuide.com and other resources for writers and editors, including The Conscious Language Newsletter and the Editors of Color Database. Named by Poynter as one of the top tools for journalists, ConsciousStyleGuide.com is an official reference for countless schools, businesses, media outlets, organisations, and government agencies. Yin is a member of the Chicago Manual of Style advisory board and has been consulted by The Associated Press Stylebook and other industry leaders.

SING LIKE FISH

how sound rules life under water Amorina Kingdon

A captivating exploration of how underwater animals tap into sound to survive, and a clarion call for humans to address the ways we invade these critical soundscapes — from an award-winning science writer.

For centuries humans ignored sound in the ‘silent world’ of the ocean, assuming that what we couldn’t perceive, didn’t exist. But we couldn’t have been more wrong. Marine scientists now have the technology to record and study the complex interplay of the myriad sounds in the sea. Finally, we can trace how sounds travel with the currents, bounce from the seafloor and surface, bend with temperature, and even saltiness; how sounds help marine life survive; and how human noise can transform entire marine ecosystems.

In Sing Like Fish, award-winning science journalist Amorina Kingdon synthesises historical discoveries with the latest research in a clear and compelling portrait of this sonic undersea world. From plainfin midshipman fish, whose swim-bladder drumming is so loud it keeps houseboat-dwellers awake, to the syntax of whalesong, from the deafening crackle of snapping shrimp, to underwater earthquakes and volcanoes, sound plays a vital role in feeding, mating, parenting, navigating, and warning. Meanwhile, our seas also echo with human-made sound, and we are only just learning how these pervasive noises can mask mating calls, chase animals from their food, and even wound creatures.

Intimate and artful, Sing Like Fish tells a uniquely complete story of ocean animals’ submerged sounds, envisions a quieter future, and offers a profound new understanding of the world below the surface.

‘Brilliant, poetic and poignant. Kingdon opens a world of sound to her readers that most will never hear themselves … How many of us knew fish were singing in the watery depths or that coral reefs are some of the loudest places on our planet, continually rocked by the near-deafening pops of snapping shrimp? … Scientists only began to study the songs of fishes, whales and shrimp in the last century. May we celebrate this underwater symphony, not destroy it.’

Virginia Morell, author of New York Times bestseller, Animal Wise: how we know animals think and feel

Amorina Kingdon

Amorina Kingdon is a science writer whose work has been anthologised in Best Canadian Essays and received honours including a Digital Publishing Award, a Jack Webster Award, and a Best New Magazine Writer from the National Magazine Awards. Previously, she was a staff writer for Hakai Magazine, and a science writer for the University of Victoria and the Science Media Center of Canada. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

THE HAIRDRESSER’S SON

Gerbrand Bakker (trans. David Colmer)

Multi–award winning Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker’s phenomenal new novel about grief and the unavoidable power of family ties.

Simon never knew his father, Cornelis. When his wife told him she was pregnant, Cornelis packed his bags, and a day later he was dead. Or everyone assumed he was dead; after all, he was on the passenger list of the KLM plane that crashed in Tenerife in 1977.

Simon is a hairdresser, just like his father and grandfather before him, but he is not passionate about cutting and shaving. ‘Closed’ appears on his shop’s front door more often than ‘open’, because every customer is a person, and people suck the energy from him. But there is one client he regularly interacts with: the writer. The writer is looking for a subject for his next book, and becomes captivated by the story of Simon’s father.

As Simon probes the mystery of what happened to his father, a deeply humane and beautifully observed portrait of loneliness emerges in another captivating novel from one of Europe’s greatest storytellers.

‘To say that Gerbrand Bakker hasn’t forgotten how to write a novel would be an understatement. With The Hairdresser’s Son, he presents himself as one of the very best writers the Netherlands has to offer … With this vivid prose, he makes Simon fascinating, he makes him someone — perhaps the greatest and most loving thing a writer can do. For the reader this results in the almost magical illusion that is the most extraordinary (and, I believe, unforgettable) thing about this novel: the sense of having really seen someone. Gerbrand Bakker has written his characters to life.’

NRC

Gerbrand Bakker

Gerbrand Bakker was born in 1962. He studied Dutch language and literature and worked as a subtitler for nature films before becoming a gardener. Bakker won the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel The Twin (Vintage, 2009) and the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his novel The Detour (Vintage, 2013).

MANNY AND THE BABY

Varaidzo

London, 1936. Two sisters are ready to take the city and the world by storm.
Bath, 2012. Two young Black men are figuring out who they are, and who they want to become.

Manny is forthright, intellectual, and determined to make her mark on the London literary scene. Her younger sister Rita, the Baby, just wants to dance. In the smoky clubs that pulsate underneath Soho’s vibrant streets, Rita finds herself drawn into a new world of Black ambition, along with the masterful mimic and trumpeter, Ezekiel Brown, from Jamaica. As tensions rise and the shadow of fascism and war snaps at their heels, the two sisters are faced with choices that will alter their lives forever.

Itai has fled London to his late father’s flat in Bath. Listening to cassette tapes his father made, he feels both drawn in and shut out of his former life — who is Rita? Why did his father record her life story? And where can he find her now, to return the tapes? Meanwhile, his developing friendship with Josh, a young athlete who moonlights as a dealer to fund his training for the next Olympics, is on unsteady ground, as Josh has been sent by his bosses to find out what the hell Itai is doing in Bath.

Manny and the Baby is a character-driven debut novel, full of heart, about what it means to be Black and British, now and in the past.

Manny and the Baby stood out for me from the first few lines. The beautifully balanced prose, the wonderful story, and sumptuous detail are constructed with poetic precision and held my attention right until the very end.’

Jacqueline Crooks, author of Fire Rush

Varaidzo

Varaidzo is a writer and artist. Her short story ‘Bus Stop’ was shortlisted for the 4thWrite Prize 2018. She is a contributor to the best-selling anthology The Good Immigrant (Unbound, 2016) and the romance anthology Who’s Loving You (Trapeze, 2021). She was previously the Digital Editor at Wasafiri, and the Arts & Culture Editor at gal-dem.

UNDERESTIMATED

the wisdom and power of teenage girls Chelsey Goodan

A fresh, surprising, and empowering guide to better understanding teenage girls.

Written with warmth and humour, Underestimated is the first book to invite us into a teenage girl’s brain and heart, as told from the point of view of a beloved and trusted mentor. Chelsey Goodan is a highly sought-after academic tutor who has worked with hundreds of girls from all different backgrounds, earning their trust, confidence, and friendship. They in turn have shared with her their innermost concerns, doubts, and what they wish they could communicate to their parents and the world at large.

With topics and language directly chosen by the girls, Goodan reveals how the solutions to a girl’s well-being lie within her. She offers parents the exact words they can use to help her discover these solutions and demonstrates how adults can better support a teenage girl’s voice to create positive change.

Rather than dismissing teenage girls based on our own fears or treating them as problems that need to be solved, Goodan encourages us as parents, and as a society, to help girls unleash their power and celebrate their intrinsic wisdom, creating more healing and connection for everyone. With inspiring ease, Underestimated shows us how to do this with accessible advice, entertaining narratives, and profound wisdom.

‘I’ve personally witnessed how Chelsey changes the lives of teenage girls for the better by deepening connections and helping everyone feel more heard and understood. With passion and enthusiasm, Chelsey empowers girls to discover their voices in both the most practical and deepest of ways. This book is exactly what we all need right now, for our families and for our future voices in the world.’

Laura Dern, Academy Award-winning actress and New York Times bestselling author of Honey, Baby, Mine

Chelsey Goodan

Chelsey Goodan has been an academic tutor and mentor for sixteen years, with a particular emphasis on the empowerment of teenage girls. She speaks regularly to audiences about gender justice, conducts workshops, and coaches parents on how to better understand and connect with their daughters. She is the mentorship director of the nonprofit DemocraShe, and founder of The Activist Cartel. As an activist, she advises public figures, galvanises volunteers, and organises large-scale events for national nonprofits, while also serving on the board of A Call to Men. Her passion to explore humanity’s potential for authenticity, liberation, and empowerment permeates all of her work. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Chelsey lives in Los Angeles.

ESCAPE FROM SHADOW PHYSICS

the quest to end the dark ages of quantum theory Adam Forrest Kay

An engaging and razor-sharp attack on the orthodoxy of modern physics, and a bold new idea about the structure of reality.

For 70 years, mathematical physicist Adam Kay argues, physics has laboured under delusions. ‘When it comes to atoms,’ the founding quantum physicist Neils Bohr once wrote, ‘language can only be used as in poetry.’ Since the earliest days of quantum mechanics, its founders have firmly stressed that what goes on inside an atom is impossible to rationally describe. Kay fundamentally disagrees. Escape from Shadow Physics is his fiery rebuke to Bohr’s mentality and his theory, arguing that quantum physics is as logical, reasonable, and intuitive as any other scientific theory — or at least it will be, if scientists will let it.

Kay aims to free us from the shackles of Bohr’s obscure theorising — which Bertrand Russell referred to as ‘the shadow physics of our time’ — and to restore the basic principles of scientific inquiry to quantum mechanics. Thanks to Kay’s cutting-edge work at MIT, a genuine understanding of quantum mechanics may be just around the corner. Building on his research and from the original ideas of pioneers such as Einstein and de Broglie, Kay calls for a new understanding of quantum physics: the Ensemble Interpretation. Through bouncing droplets of oil, his team has observed quantum mechanical behaviour emerging on a macroscopic scale — a stunning breakthrough, indicating that quantum and classical physics are not as irreconcilable as we have been led to think.

Adam Forrest Kay

Adam Forrest Kay studied classics and physics at the University of Colorado, and did his graduate work in England and France. He is the recipient of many scholarships and academic distinctions. He has two PhDs, one in literature from the University of Cambridge and the other in mathematics from the University of Oxford. His maths dissertation discussed the possibility of three-dimensional hydrodynamic quantum analogues. Adam’s current research interests centre around realist models of quantum mechanics, relativity theory, and partial differential equations, particularly variable coefficient wave equations.

THE GOOD WOMEN OF FUDI

Liu Hong

Imperial China meets Edwardian England in this epic story of loves lost and gained, set during the aftermath of the Opium Wars.

Best friends Jiali and Wu Fang know that no man is a match for them. In their small harbour town of Fudi, they practise sword fighting, write couplets to one another, and strut around dressed as men. Jiali is a renowned poet and Wu Fang is going to be China’s first female surgeon. But when Wu Fang returns from medical training in Japan, she is horrified to hear of Jiali’s marriage to a man who cannot even match her couplets, and confused by her intense feelings of jealousy towards her friend’s new husband, Yanbu.

Ocean man Charles has arrived in Fudi to start a new life. He eschews the company of his fellow foreigners, preferring to spend time with new colleague Yanbu, his wife, Jiali, and her friend, Wu Fang. Over the course of several months, he grows close to them all, in increasingly confusing ways, but what will happen when he is forced to choose between his country and his friends?

As tensions between the Manchu rulers and the people rise, and foreign battleships gather out at sea, loyalties will be tested in more ways than Jiali, Wu Fang, Yanbu, and Charles can possibly imagine.

Praise for Wives of the East Wind:‘A fine combination of delicacy and steeliness … the yin and yang of marriage, Weyna’s barbed relationship with her widowed mother, loyalty misplaced and rediscovered-makes for a warm and understated novel.’

The Guardian

Liu Hong

Liu Hong grew up in the North East of China, near the Chinese-North Korean border. She came to Britain in 1989. Since then she has worked here as a writer, teacher, and as a translator. Her writing career began with four novels published by Headline Review: Startling Moon (2002), The Magpie Bridge (2004), The Touch (2006), and Wives of the East Wind (2007). She is also the author of Nas folhas do Cha, a children’s book co-written with Flavia Lins e Silva, published by ZAHAR (2012). She took a break from writing to raise children, chickens, and chives; she returns now with The Good Women of Fudi. She lives in Wiltshire.

BEAR

Julia Phillips

A mesmerising novel of two sisters on a Pacific Northwest island whose lives are upended by an unexpected visitor — a tale of family, obsession, and a mysterious creature in the woods, by the celebrated, bestselling author of Disappearing Earth.

They were sisters and they would last past the end of time.

Sam and her sister, Elena, dream of another life. On the island off the coast of Washington where they were born and raised, they and their mother struggle to survive. Sam works long days on the ferry that delivers wealthy mainlanders to their vacation homes while Elena bartends at the local golf club, but even together they can’t earn enough to get by, stirring their frustration about the limits that shape their existence.

Then one night on the boat, Sam spots a bear swimming the dark waters of the channel. Where is it going? What does it want? When the bear turns up by their home, Sam, terrified, is more convinced than ever that it’s time to leave the island. But Elena responds differently to the massive beast. Enchanted by its presence, she throws into doubt the plan to escape and puts their long-held dream in danger.

A story about the bonds of sisterhood and the mysteries of the animals that live among us — and within us — Bear is a propulsive, mythical, rich novel from one of the most acclaimed young writers in America.

‘[T]he beautiful and haunting latest from Phillips (Disappearing Earth) … The bear provides a vehicle for the author’s masterful characterisation, as the sisters clash over their perception of the grizzly’s meaning in their lives, and for the increasingly suspenseful plot. Phillips prefaces the story with an excerpt from the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Snow-White and Rose-Red”, about two sisters who play with a bear, which sets a simultaneously playful and ominous tone and contrasts powerfully with the novel’s supremely executed realism. This is brilliant.’

Publishers Weekly, starred review

Julia Phillips

Julia Phillips is a Fulbright Fellow whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Moscow Times, and The Paris Review. She lives in Brooklyn.

THE ISLANDS WHERE WE LEFT OUR ANCESTORS

Joshua Santospirito

The beautifully hand-drawn true story of artist Joshua Santospirito’s visit to the Aeolian Islands of Italy with his parents to seek out past connections and family roots.

Joshua and his father hope to locate the burial place of Joshua’s great-great-grandfather on the island of Salina. But it’s not always so easy to find the past you’re looking for, nor to travel with your parents.

As Joshua learns more about the sun-drenched volcanic archipelago, its people, and their history, he also explores the mysteries of family — and the magic of creating your own place in the world.

This is a tale of migration and return, of the rise to stardom of actress Ingrid Bergman, of the cheeky wind god Aeolus, of ancestry, place, and belonging, and of so much more. Told from Joshua’s unique and charming perspective, there is something here for everyone.

Joshua Santospirito

Joshua (he/him) is a graphic novelist, multimedia artist and organic veggie farmer living in nipaluna, lutruwita (Tasmania). His expansive art practice, which includes painting, performance, music, sound and comics, often focuses on identity and modern Australia.Joshua’s writing, comics and illustrations have appeared in The Monthly, Island Magazine, Meanjin and The Suburban Review. He is the creator of two previous graphic novels: The Long Weekend in Alice Springs (2013) adapted from the writing of Craig San Roque and Swallows Part One (2015) about Joshua's family’s migration story in the city of Melbourne.He is one half of the beloved Tasmanian experimental soundscaping band Bing/Santospirito. Audiovisual performances created by Josh have featured at major festivals across Australia and he has toured as a solo guitarist across Europe.In his art practice he is represented by Penny Contemporary gallery in nipaluna.

BROTHERS AND GHOSTS

Khuê Ph?m (trans. Daryl Lindsey, Charles Hawley)

A young woman, torn between two cultures, belonging to neither. A family, torn apart by a war they had no choice about.

Kiều, who calls herself Kim because it’s easier for Europeans to pronounce, knows little about her Vietnamese family’s history until she receives a Facebook message from her estranged uncle Sơn in America, telling her that her grandmother, her father’s mother, is dying. The two brothers haven’t spoken since the end of the Vietnam War. Minh, Kiều’s father, supported the Vietcong, while Sơn sided with the Americans.

When Kiều and her parents travel to America to join the rest of the family in California for the funeral, questions relating to their past — to what has been suppressed — resurface and demand to be addressed.

‘A groundbreaking work in German literature, Phạm’s novel marks a seminal accomplishment that tells the dignified, thorough, and epic story of a Vietnamese family through clear, gem-like sentences and unflinching observations. With Phạm’s vision, nothing is left unturned and all things are salvaged and lost at once. A courageous and bold achievement by a bright new voice.’

Ocean Vuong

Khuê Ph?m

Khuê Ph?m is an award-winning Vietnamese-German writer. A graduate of the London School of Economics, she worked for The Guardian and NPR’s Berlin bureau before becoming an editor at the renowned German weekly Die Zeit. Specialising in long-form journalism, she profiled Kevin Spacey before his sexual assault trial and co-wrote an investigation into the Essex lorry deaths that earned her the nomination for Germany’s version of the Pulitzer Prize. In 2012, she co-wrote Wir neuen Deutschen, a non-fiction book about second-generation immigrants in Germany. Her debut novel, Brothers and Ghosts, is loosely inspired by her own family, whose journey she traces over the course of five decades. Ph?m lives in Berlin. Read more at https://www.khuepham.de/english.

BONJOUR, MADEMOISELLE!

April Ashley and the pursuit of a lovely life Jacqueline Kent, Tom Roberts

The glittering story of April Ashley, model and trans pioneer, and the divorce case which gripped 1960s Britain and defined transgender rights for a generation.

As Britain emerged from post-war austerity in the 1960s, no one embodied its newfound spirit of hedonism and glamour like April Ashley. A fashion model and socialite who rose from poverty in Liverpool to the heights of London society via Le Carrousel nightclub in Paris, she was also one of the first Britons to undergo gender-affirming surgery.

Ashley was appointed MBE for services to transgender equality in 2012, but her journey towards acceptance was hard-won and bitterly contested. In 1961, a friend sold her story to a tabloid and she was told that she would never work in the UK again. Her brief marriage to Arthur Corbett, the son of a baron, set off a high-profile divorce battle, resulting in a landmark 1970 decision denying transgender women legal status as women — and denying Ashley her husband’s inheritance.

Drawing on a wide variety of sources, award-winning biographers Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts tell the full story of April Ashley’s extraordinary life at the vanguard of the sexual revolution and the movement for trans equality.

Praise for A Certain Style: Beatrice Davis, a literary life:‘A sharp-eyed and warm-hearted biography … the pleasure of Davis’ company is further enlivened by Kent’s own quietly witty take on her material.’

Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Age

Jacqueline Kent

Jacqueline Kent is the author of five acclaimed biographies. A Certain Style, her biography of pioneering editor Beatrice Davis, won the National Biography Award, Australia’s premier prize for life writing. She is also an award-winning book editor and reviewer.

Tom Roberts

Tom Roberts is an author and historian. He holds master’s degrees from the universities of Westminster and Cambridge and a PhD in modern history from Macquarie University. His books include Before Rupert, winner of the 2017 National Biography Award, and How Trump Thinks, co-written with Peter Oborne.

WHEN COPS ARE CRIMINALS

ed. Veronica Gorrie

A powerful indictment of the criminal behaviour of police officers, and a call for institutional reform, edited by the multi-award-winning author of Black and Blue.

When Cops Are Criminals examines the widespread problem of police brutality and corruption from the perspectives of those who understand it in depth. Pulling together the accounts of survivors, campaigners, and academics, it explores different forms of criminal behaviour by police, the factors that contribute to it, the impact it has on victims, and the challenges of holding perpetrators accountable.

Told with candour, honesty, bravery, and rage, these stories will challenge readers to reflect on the institutions that so many people take for granted. Whose interests are they really serving? And where can people turn when the institutions that are supposed to protect them are the ones doing the damage?

Praise for Black and Blue:‘Gorrie’s distinctly Indigenous storytelling makes us feel like we are sitting with her by the fire in the backyard listening to the resounding immediacy of her words. Her warmth and love and care for her readers is felt throughout the book … [Black and Blue] is especially crucial at this moment in time. It challenges us to think about power and society, and the possibility of changing the world we live in.’

2022 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Judges’ Comments

Veronica Gorrie

Veronica Gorrie is a Gunai/Kurnai woman who lives and writes in Victoria. Her first book, Black and Blue (2021), won the 2022 Victorian Premier's Prize for Literature and the 2022 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Indigenous Writing, as well as being shortlisted for the 2022 Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction and the 2022 ABIA Small Publishers’ Book of the Year. She is also the Executive Officer of the grassroots Aboriginal organisation Pay the Rent.

THE AUTIST’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

navigating the world of ‘normal’ people Clara Törnvall (trans. Alice E. Olsson)

A playful guide to understanding the ways of ‘normal people’, The Autist’s Guide to the Galaxy flips our usual scripts about neurodiversity.

Following on from her internationally successful memoir, The Autists, Clara Törnvall has written a fun, comprehensive, and accessible explanation of neurotypical, or ‘normal’, behaviour. Full of facts, tips, and tests, and developed with input from other autists, this book places the difficulties autists face in the context of a world built for the neurotypical majority. It will help neurodiverse people — and their families, friends, and loved ones — navigate this world, nurture stronger relationships, and thrive.

Praise for The Autists:‘Törnvall has written an important, illuminating first book, one that deserves to sit alongside the best insider accounts of autism … [The Autists] should be required reading for all parents, partners, friends and colleagues of anyone on the autism spectrum, as well as a road map for autistic women navigating the neurotypical world.’

James Cook, Times Literary Supplement

Clara Törnvall

Clara Törnvall has been a journalist and producer since the early 2000s. She’s produced programs for Swedish radio and TV, as well as written articles/chronicles for various media outlets. The Autists: women on the spectrum is her first book, and was written after her diagnosis with autism at the age of 42.

HATED BY ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE

Tucker Carlson and the unravelling of the conservative mind Jason Zengerle

A revelatory, jaw-dropping portrait of Tucker Carlson’s career and a Zelig-like story of reinvention: from insider to populist, from respectability to insanity, the story of how the right-wing media lost its mind.

New York Magazine writer Jason Zengerle’s eye-opening narrative follows Tucker Carlson's infamous journey from gifted young intern at The New Republic to the noxious talking head we've all witnessed on Fox News. In the tradition of Our Man and The Loudest Voice in the Room, Zengerle examines how Tucker Carlson’s career offers a unique lens into the confusing, myopic, and utterly shameless evolution of American conservatism, its media presence and punditry, from the 1990s to the present.

Jason Zengerle

Jason Zengerle, National Fellow, is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, where he covers politics and national affairs.Zengerle previously worked at GQ, New York Magazine, and the New Republic. His writing has been anthologised in several books, including The Best American Political Writing, The Best American Medical Writing, and Next Wave: America's new generation of great literary journalists. He was the winner of the 2019 Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting.

IT’S NOT FAIR

why it's time for a grown-up conversation about how adults treat children Eloise Rickman

A radical yet practical manifesto on why it’s time to rethink our treatment of children and their place in society.

In It’s Not Fair, author and educator Eloise Rickman argues that we need to urgently rethink how we raise, educate, include children in public life and uphold their rights if we want a better world — and that the positive changes we need are closer than we think.

Rickman shows the ways in which children are ignored, repressed, or actively harmed in many aspects of our society, considering everything from smacking and public shaming, to the way in which the school system disadvantages certain children, and the governmental failure to confront air pollution.

Drawing on sociology, psychology, philosophy, educational history, and the latest parenting advice, It’s Not Fair is at once a rousing call-to-arms and a hopeful book, featuring practical solutions and the voices of people who are working towards them, from educators developing new styles of communication to political campaigners advocating for change.

Praise for Extraordinary Parenting:‘This timely book has something to offer all parents — seasoned homeschoolers, those thrust into homeschooling unexpectedly, and those who wish to improve their relationships with children educated at school. Insightful, empowering, and accessible, Extraordinary Parenting is a well-informed practical guide to educating children at home that, crucially, helps parents understand their children’s challenging behaviour and how to make it better.’

Professor Susan Golombok, Director of the University of Cambridge Centre for Family Research, and author of We Are Family: what really matters for parents and children

Eloise Rickman

Eloise Rickman is a writer and parent educator. Her work focuses on challenging adultism (the discrimination children face), championing rights-based parenting and alternative education, and helping parents and educators rethink how they see and treat children. She is studying for an MA in Children’s Rights at UCL’s Institute of Education and has a degree in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University, where she first became interested in how family practices shape society. Her first book, Extraordinary Parenting, was published in 2020. She lives in London with her husband and daughter.

IT’S NOT FAIR

why it's time for a grown-up conversation about how adults treat children Eloise Rickman

A radical yet practical manifesto on why it’s time to rethink our treatment of children and their place in society.

In It’s Not Fair, author and educator Eloise Rickman argues that we need to urgently rethink how we raise, educate, and treat children, and that the discrimination they face is a political and social justice issue that has been ignored for too long. Upholding children’s rights is crucial if we want a better world for us all — a future that could be within our grasp.

Rickman demonstrates the ways in which children are ignored, repressed, or actively harmed in many aspects of our society, including smacking and public shaming, a school system that disadvantages children, and the governmental failure to confront air pollution. Children are not passive victims though, and It’s Not Fair highlights examples of children’s resistance, from staging climate protests to ‘bad behaviour’.

Drawing on sociology, philosophy, children’s rights, and educational theory, It’s Not Fair is at once a rousing call-to-arms and a hopeful book, featuring practical solutions and the voices of people who are working towards them. From educators creating schools where children are free to be themselves to the political campaigners advocating for children’s right to vote, Rickman shows that the positive changes we need are closer than we think.

‘There’s plenty to learn about and be inspired by in this impressive book. Read it, absorb it, share it, and then get busy making change!'

carla joy bergman, editor of Trust Kids and co-author of Joyful Militancy

Eloise Rickman

Eloise Rickman is a writer and parent educator. Her work focuses on challenging adultism (the discrimination children face), championing rights-based parenting and alternative education, and helping parents and educators rethink how they see and treat children. She is studying for an MA in Children’s Rights at UCL’s Institute of Education and has a degree in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University, where she first became interested in how family practices shape society. Her first book, Extraordinary Parenting, was published in 2020. She lives in London with her husband and daughter.

DIVING, FALLING

Kylie Mirmohamadi

For years, Leila Whittaker has been the mediator in her family. She smoothes ruffled feathers between her sons; endures the volatile moods of their father, the acclaimed Australian artist Ken Black; and even swallows the bitter pill of Ken's endless affairs. All this, for the quiet hum of creative freedom her marriage provides. Or so she tells herself.

When Ken dies, leaving his artist’s estate to their two sons, and the pointed amount of sixty-nine thousand dollars to his muse, Anita, Leila decides she’s had enough. It’s time to seek some peace (and pleasure) of her own …

Diving, Falling is an elegant, exhilarating journey through grief, betrayal, and the intoxicating rediscovery of joy. Ripe with wickedly wry observations, unashamedly bold and sexy, it examines the calculations and sacrifices women make to keep the peace, escape their pasts, and find the agency to pursue their own passions.

Kylie Mirmohamadi

Kylie Mirmohamadi is a writer and academic whose work and research spans domestic Australian landscapes, online fan fiction, and 19th century English literature. She has a PhD in History and is currently an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in English and Creative Writing at La Trobe University.Kylie lives with her family in Melbourne where she often finds ideas for writing when walking among the tree-lined creeks of her inner suburb with her poodle.Kylie has published widely in the academic sector, most recently on the long afterlives of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters.She was the recipient of a Wheeler Centre Hot Desk Fellowship in 2022 and her unpublished manuscripts have been highly commended in the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award (2020).Diving, Falling is her first novel.

THE CHINESE PHANTOM

the hunt for the world’s most dangerous arms dealer Christoph Giesen, Philipp Grüll, Frederik Obermaier, Bastian Obermayer (trans. Simon Pare)

A gripping, real-life thriller following the authors’ attempt to uncover the truth about one of the world’s most wanted men.

Karl Lee, alias Li Fangwei, plays a key role in the secret struggle between the world powers, bypassing Western sanctions to supply dictators with the weapons they need to wipe out their neighbouring countries — or even to trigger a third world war.

For almost two decades, intelligence agencies have been hunting for Karl Lee. The FBI has put a five-million-dollar bounty on his head, but nobody has been able to catch him. Now, four award-winning investigative journalists have set out to find him. Following the routes of his deliveries and his money, the authors track down his companies in China and uncover his network of shell companies. During their investigation, they get embroiled deeper and deeper in the games of international secret services and realise that Karl Lee is just a pawn in a much bigger game of modern warfare and international espionage.

‘A thrilling and globe-spanning account of the search for the world’s most wanted man. The authors delve into the murky worlds of arms smuggling, sanctions-busting and espionage. In their hunt for the Chinese phantom, they encounter suspicious police, atomic experts, and former spies, as well as a perplexing wall of silence from the Israeli and US governments. The book delves into international rivalries, and explores a shifting game of realpolitik featuring Beijing and Washington, Tehran and Moscow, London and Munich. Lucid, compelling, and vividly written.’

Luke Harding, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Invasion

Christoph Giesen

Christoph Giesen is the China correspondent of the German magazine Der Spiegel.

Philipp Grüll

Philipp Grüll is a weapons expert and editor at Germany’s leading public broadcaster ARD.

Frederik Obermaier

Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer won the Pulitzer Prize for their ground-breaking reporting on the Panama Papers.

Bastian Obermayer

Frederik Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer won the Pulitzer Prize for their ground-breaking reporting on the Panama Papers.

NATURE, CULTURE, AND INEQUALITY

Thomas Piketty (trans. Willard Wood)

An insightful exploration of the nature of inequality.

In his new work, Thomas Piketty explores how social inequality manifests itself very differently depending on society and epoch in which it arises. History and culture play a central role, inequality being strongly linked to various socio-economic, political, civilisational, and religious developments. So it is culture in the broadest sense that makes it possible to explain the diversity, extent, and structure of the social inequality that we observe every day. Piketty briefly and concisely presents a lively synthesis of his work, taking up such diverse topics as education, inheritance, taxes, and the climate crisis, and provides exciting food for thought for a highly topical debate: Does natural inequality exist?

Praise for A Brief History of Equality:‘A profound and optimistic call to action and reflection. For Piketty, the arc of history is long, but it does bend toward equality. There is nothing automatic about it, however: as citizens, we must be ready to fight for it, and constantly (re)invent the myriad of institutions that will bring it about. This book is here to help.’

Esther Duflo, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences

Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty is Professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Paris School of Economics, and co-director of the World Inequality Lab. Best known for his bestselling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he is also the author of Capital and Ideology and A Brief History of Equality, among other works.

RESERVOIR BITCHES

Dahlia de la Cerda (trans. Julia Sanches, Heather Cleary)

A debut linked story collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny fiction from Mexico.

Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.

In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.

‘This book has the force of an ocean gully: it sucks you in, it drags you through the mud and it cleans you in equal measure.’

Andrea Abreu, author of Dogs of Summer

Dahlia de la Cerda

Dahlia de la Cerda is a Mexican writer and activist. She has a BA in Philosophy and won the Comala Young National Short Story Award for Reservoir Bitches. She is also the author of the essay ‘Feminismo sin cuarto propio’, which is included in the anthology Tsunami 2, and co-founder of the feminist organisation Morras Help Morras. Her short story ‘The Smile’ was included in the first issue of Astra Magazine, and Reservoir Bitches is currently being developed as a series by Amazon Studios and Perro Azul.

FOLLOW YOUR GUT

a story from the microbes that make you Ailsa Wild, Lisa Stinson, Briony Barr, Gregory Crocetti (illus. Ben Hutchings)

Meet the ecosystem inside you …

A timid Bifidobacterium named Biffy is forced to leave their family and become part of a new community, in the gut of a newborn human baby.

Follow Your Gut is a comic that ate a biology textbook. It’s an epic adventure set over the first three years of a new life, exploring one of the most important relationships you will ever have — the one with your gut microbiome.

Created by artists, scientists, and educators, this story is for anyone who’s curious about the human–microbe symbiosis, and what all those trillions of bacteria are doing down there in your intestines!

Inspired by the latest research, Follow Your Gut includes a fascinating and detailed appendix that explains the amazing science behind the story.

‘We fell in love with Biffy, the adorable Bifidobacterium. We also learnt about the scientific process of growing up, and the not-so-secret universe that we have inside us!’ — Kira and Catherine, Year 7, University High School, Melbourne

‘A wildly entertaining science lesson that will change how you see your own body.’ — Dr Nat Bannan, high school science teacher

Praise for The Invisible War:‘What a great way to learn some pretty extensive science.’

David Suzuki, scientist, environmentalist, and broadcaster

Ailsa Wild

Ailsa Wild is an author and performer with a history of circus performance and deep collaboration. She has written two junior fiction series, the Squishy Taylor books and the Naughtiest Pixie books, and is the lead writer for Scale Free Network, where she works with scientists to translate complex science into compelling illustrated narratives.
Ailsa has two nonfiction books for adults, You’ll Be a Wonderful Dad: advice on becoming the best father you can be and The Care Factor: a story of nursing and connection in the time of social distancing. She has been published in Spain, Brazil, the US, the UK, Egypt, South Korea, Israel, and China.

Lisa Stinson

Dr Lisa Stinson is a perinatal microbial ecologist at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests include the infant and human milk microbiomes and the developmental origins of health and disease. In 2020, she was selected as one of the ABC’s Top 5 Scientists. Lisa is currently a Research Fellow in the Australian Breastfeeding and Lactation Research and Science Translation (ABREAST) group, where she co-directs the Human Milk Biobank and the BLOSOM birth cohort. Lisa’s work aims to support and improve early microbial assembly for lifelong health.

Briony Barr

Briony Barr is a visual artist who uses process-based drawing to explore ideas around structure, emergence, and the impact of different boundaries and generative limits. She regularly collaborates with scientists, writers, musicians, and dancers on a diverse range of interdisciplinary projects including making picture books and graphic novels about symbiotic microbes, designing large-scale, participatory drawings exploring complex systems, and performing live drawing to improvised music. She is co-founder of Scale Free Network.

Gregory Crocetti

Dr Gregory Crocetti is a microbial ecologist, science educator, writer, and advocate for microbes. His PhD and post-doctoral research explored the roles of different populations of bacteria in a range of environments — including those found in mouse intestines, sponges, seaweed, stromatolites, and sewage — with his peer-reviewed scientific articles having been cited over 1,000 times. He is co-founder of Scale Free Network.
Gregory also co-creates award-winning picture books and graphic novels about microbes and their symbiotic partnerships with larger forms of life, including the Small Friends Books series (www.smallfriendsbooks.com).

BARK!

the science of helping your anxious, fearful, or reactive dog Zazie Todd

The must-have guide to addressing anxious, fearful, or reactive behaviours in your dog through positive reinforcement, from certified dog trainer and animal behaviourist Zazie Todd.

Is your dog showing signs of fear, anxiety, or reactivity, such as biting, food guarding, shyness, or aggressive barking? You’re not alone. Close to 75% of dogs struggle with fear-based behaviours, and require our support and understanding to feel safe and secure.

In Bark!, Zazie Todd provides solutions for these behaviours. Decoding the latest canine science, she shows readers how to address the root cause of your dog’s fears, with expert advice and practical tips on:

  • How to tackle common canine fears, such as loud noises, the vet, separation anxiety, and other dogs.
  • How to manage a dog’s natural fear responses through positive reinforcement.
  • How to keep your dog, yourself, and others safe when they are fearful or reactive.
  • How to create safe havens for your dog, and make yourself a secure base for them no matter where they are.

Compassionate, practical, and rooted in science, Bark! helps dog owners understand the many factors that might be causing fear within your dog, and how you can help them lead a safe and happy life.

Praise for Wag:‘[A] must-have guide to improving your dog's life.’

Modern Dog Magazine

Zazie Todd

Zazie Todd is the author of the critically acclaimed books Wag and Purr, and writes Companion Animal Psychology, an award-winning blog that shares the latest science about our animal companions and evidence-based ways to care for them. She has a PhD in Psychology, and is an honours graduate of the Academy for Dog Trainers, affiliate member of the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behaviour, and adjunct professor at Canisius College.

THE GATES OF GAZA

a story of betrayal, survival, and hope in Israel’s bordertowns Amir Tibon

The gripping, true story of how leading Israeli journalist Amir Tibon, along with his wife and their two young children, were rescued on 7 October 2023 by Tibon’s father — an incredible tale of survival that also reveals the tensions and failures that led to Hamas’s attacks that day.

Some 45 miles to the north, on the shores of Tel Aviv, Amir’s parents saw the news at the same time as they received Amir’s note. Immediately, they jumped in their car and raced toward Nahal Oz, armed only with a pistol — but intent on saving their family at all costs.

In The Gates of Gaza, Tibon tells his family’s harrowing story, describing their terrifying ordeal — and the bravery that led to their rescue — alongside the histories of the place they call home and the systems of power that have kept them and their neighbours in Gaza in harm’s way for decades. With sensitivity, and drawing on Israeli and Palestinian sources, Tibon offers an unsparing but ultimately hopeful view of this seemingly intractable conflict and its global reverberations.

Praise for The Last Palestinian:The Last Palestinian is a gripping story, compellingly told. It is required reading for anybody who wants to understand the crisis of the Palestinian national movement and the failure of the peace process.’

Walter Russell Mead, Distinguished Scholar at Hudson Institute and author of Special Providence

Amir Tibon

Amir Tibon is an award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, Israel’s paper of record, and the author of The Last Palestinian: the rise and reign of Mahmoud Abbas (co-authored with Grant Rumley), the first-ever biography of the leader of the Palestinian Authority. From 2017–2020, Tibon was based in Washington, DC as a foreign correspondent for Haaretz, and he also has served as a senior editor for the newspaper’s English edition. He, his wife, and their two young daughters are former residents of Kibbutz Nahal Oz but are currently living as internal refugees in northern Israel.

BALTIC SOULS

fate in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania Jan Brokken (trans. David Doherty)

A monumental journey through Baltic history and culture, in which we encounter well-known personalities and forgotten ones, and a disconcerting picture of Europe in the twentieth century.

From 1999 to 2010, Jan Brokken explored life stories in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The result was his masterly Baltic Souls, available here for the first time in English. Brokken uncovered the stories of famous artists and writers such as Mark Rothko, Sergei Eisenstein, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Lipchitz, who were all born in the regions bordering the Baltic Sea before leaving to build their work abroad, spreading a bit of the Baltic soul across Europe and America.

Less well known were the stories of people such as the Rozes and their family bookstore in Riga, or the von Wrangels, the ultimate descendants of the Baltic barons. Or the story of the titanic struggle that violist Gidon Kremer fought with his father in Riga, who was burdened by the death of thirty-five family members in concentration camps. Or the story of Loreta Asanavic?iu¯te?, who was run over by a Russian tank in 1991.

It is this melancholy imbued with fatalism, this vitality forged by the upheavals of history, this appetite for reading, music, and art, that enriches the portraits painted by Jan Brokken.

Conducted in the style of a travel diary where chance encounters and biographical sketches mingle, Baltic Souls makes us feel the cruelty and violence of an era, but also the tenderness and solidarity of an entire people, united across borders.

Jan Brokken

Jan Brokken is a writer of fiction, travel, and literary nonfiction. He gained international fame with The Rainbird, The Blind Passengers, My Little Madness, Baltic Souls, In the House of the Poet, The Reprisal, and The Cossack Garden, and his books have been translated into ten languages. The Just is his latest book.

WORKING FOR THE BRAND

how corporations are destroying free speech Josh Bornstein

Josh Bornstein asks how our major corporations have come to exercise repressive control over the lives of their employees, and explores what can be done to repair the greatest threat to democracy — the out-of-control corporation.

When you go to work, you agree to exchange your labour in exchange for your pay packet, right? Actually, you may not realise it, but you are also selling your rights to free speech and to participate in democracy. Welcome to corporate cancel culture, a burgeoning phenomenon that is routinely ignored in debates about free speech. If you work for a large company, it will not allow you to say or do anything that harms its brand — at or outside work. If you transgress and attract controversy — whether for cracking a joke, a Facebook like, or a political post on Tik Tok, you can be shamed, sacked, and blacklisted.

In the twenty-first century, major corporations have become the most powerful institution in the world — more powerful than many nations. That unchecked, anti-democratic power is reflected in the gaming of the political system, the weakening of governments, and the repressive control of the lives of employees. While their behaviour has deteriorated, corporations have invested heavily in ethically washed brands, claiming to be saving the planet and doing good. As Josh Bornstein argues, we would not tolerate a government that censored, controlled, and punished us in this way, so why do we meekly accept the growing authoritarianism of the companies that we work for

Josh Bornstein

Josh Bornstein is an award winning workplace lawyer who has represented employees and trade unions in some of Australia's most notorious disputes. He has been instrumental in cases that have blocked a government backed plot to de-unionise the waterfront, exposed sexual harassment against judges in Australia's federal and state courts and obtained record breaking compensation for intellectually disabled workers who were paid less than $1 per hour. Along the way he has cornered the market in representing sacked rabbis and women in media and journalism. He has written for most major media outlets in Australia and is a contributing author of The Wages Crisis in Australia, 2018. To try to stay sane, he surfs and listens to too much punk music.

TWENTY-TWO IMPRESSIONS

notes from the Major Arcana Jessica Friedmann

A poetic new essay collection in which the symbols of Renaissance-era tarot brush up against life in a changing world.

In 2018, author Jessica Friedmann bought her first deck of tarot cards, a facsimile copy of the Tarot de Marseille. This 15th-century deck, with its unfamiliar images, sparked a deep immersion in the art, symbols, myths, and misrepresentations of Renaissance-era tarot.

Over the years that followed, and as tarot became a part of her daily rhythm, Friedmann’s life in country New South Wales was touched by floods and by drought, by bushfires and the pandemic, creating an environment in which the only constant was change.

Twenty-Two Impressions: notes from the major arcana uses the Tarot de Marseille as a touchstone for these years, blending historical research, art history, and critical insights with personal reflections. In these essays, Friedmann demonstrates how the cards of the major arcana can be used as a lens through which to examine the unexpectedness — and subtle beauty — of 21st-century life.

Praise for Things That Helped:Things That Helped is a beautiful book — heartfelt, fiercely intelligent, and urgent. It is a powerful affirmation of friendship, family, art, and love, and how these things might shape a life, and give it strength, and it does not shy away from the complex, often painful, and sometimes bloody experiences of womanhood and motherhood. It is fascinating, luscious, and engrossing, and, despite its difficult subject matter, an absolute joy to read.’

Fiona Wright, author of Small Acts of Disappearance

Jessica Friedmann

Born in 1987, Jessica Friedmann is a writer and editor. Her first essay collection, Things That Helped, was published by Scribe (2017) and FSG (2018).

GIFTED

Suzumi Suzuki (trans. Allison Markin Powell)

A moving portrayal of a troubled mother–daughter relationship, shortlisted for Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize.

In 2008, the unnamed narrator of Gifted is working as a hostess and living in Tokyo’s nightlife district. One day, her estranged mother, who is seriously ill, suddenly turns up at her door.

As the mother approaches the end of her life, the two women must navigate their strained relationship, while the narrator also reckons with events happening in her own life, including the death of a close friend — all under the bright lights of Tokyo‘s ‘sleepless town’, Kabukicho.

In sharp, elegant prose, and based on the author’s own experiences as a sex worker, Gifted heralds the breakthrough of an exciting new literary talent.

‘Demonstrates that death is the only way forward. Oozes with maternal cruelty.’ — Yoko Ogawa, author of The Memory Police

Suzumi Suzuki

Suzumi Suzuki is an acclaimed Japanese sociologist and columnist. She graduated from Keio University majoring in Environment and Information Studies, and later received a master’s degree from Tokyo University. She worked as an adult video actress before becoming a journalist for Nikkei Inc. She is also the author of Sell Your Body, and It's Goodbye (2016), Flowers for Love and the Womb (2017), A Prostitute’s Bookshelf (2022), and Letters of Correspondence (2021), co-written with Japan's most acclaimed feminist scholar Chizuko Ueno. Gifted is her debut novel.

OPUS

dark money, a secretive cult, and its mission to remake our world Gareth Gore

A thrilling exposé recounting how members of Opus Dei — a secretive, ultra-conservative Catholic sect — pushed its radical agenda within the Church and around the globe, using billions of dollars siphoned from one of the world’s largest banks.

For over half a century, Banco Popular was one of the most profitable banks in the world — until one day in 2017, when the Spanish bank suddenly collapsed overnight. When investigative journalist Gareth Gore was dispatched to report on the story, he expected to find yet another case of unbridled capitalist ambition gone wrong. Instead, he uncovered decades of deception that hid one of the most brazen cases of corporate pillaging in history, perpetrated by a group of men sworn to celibacy and self-flagellation who had secretly controlled Popular and abused their positions there to help spread Opus Dei to every corner of the world.

Drawing on unparalleled access to bank records, insider accounts, and exclusive interviews with whistleblowers from within Opus Dei, Gore reveals how money from the bank was used to lure unsuspecting recruits — some of them only children — into a life of servitude. He also tracks the ascent of Opus Dei around the globe, exposing its role in bankrolling many right-wing causes, including the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

In an era of disinformation and deep fakes, here is a real-life conspiracy which hid in plain sight for more than sixty years. Gore tells a shocking story of money and power that spans decades and continents. Documenting Opus Dei’s secret history for the first time, this thrilling work of investigative storytelling raises important questions about the dark forces that shape our society.

Gareth Gore

Gareth Gore is a financial journalist and editor with close to two decades of experience, having reported from over 25 countries and covered some of the biggest financial stories. His writing has been published by Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, and International Financing Review. He is the host of The Syndicate, which tells the behind-the-scenes stories of the biggest financial deals in history.

THIRST

Marina Yuszczuk (trans. Heather Cleary)

Across two different time periods, two women confront fear, loneliness, mortality, and a haunting yearning that will not let them rest. A breakout, genre-blurring novel from one of the most exciting new voices of Latin America’s feminist Gothic.

In the nineteenth century, a vampire arrives from Europe to the coast of Buenos Aires, on the run from the Church. She must adapt, intermingle with humans, and, most importantly, be discreet.

In present-day Buenos Aires, a woman finds herself at an impasse as she grapples with her mother’s terminal illness and her own relationship with motherhood. When she first encounters the vampire in a cemetery, something ignites within the two women — and they cross a threshold from which there’s no turning back.

With echoes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and written in the vein of feminist Gothic writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado, Thirst plays with the boundaries of genre while exploring the limits of female agency, the consuming power of desire, and the fragile vitality of even the most immortal of creatures.

‘It takes courage to write about vampires: they are the greatest of monsters, but also the most trivialised. Marina Yuszczuk manages to bring hers to life in this intimate take on the genre, which also weaves together grief, the history of Buenos Aires, and the voracity of desire.’

Mariana Enriquez, author of Our Share of Night

Marina Yuszczuk

Marina Yuszczuk was born in Argentina in 1978. She is a writer and founding editor of Rosa Iceberg, a press focused on publishing writing by women. She is the author of multiple books of poetry, short-story collections, and novels. She has a PhD in literature from Universidad Nacional de la Plata and is a film critic for one of Argentina’s top newspapers.

FORTY DAYS IN THE JUNGLE

the true story behind how four children survived a plane crash in the Amazon Mat Youkee

An extraordinary, gripping survival story that also reveals the struggles for social justice of the indigenous people of Colombia and the Amazon.

In June 2023, four children — Lesly, Soleiny, Tien, and Crispin — were found alive in the Colombian Amazon, forty days after the aircraft they were travelling in had crashed and killed the three adults on board (the pilot, the co-pilot, and the children’s mother). The eldest child, thirteen-year-old Lesly, took the decision to leave her dying mother, gather her siblings — aged 9, 5, and 11 months — and head into the jungle. She kept herself and her siblings alive for 40 days and nights, finally emerging when heavily armed soldiers closed in, yelling her name above the sound of barking dogs.

Forty Days in the Jungle follows the compelling characters involved in the crash and what followed: Maria Fatima Valencia, the children’s grandmother, who had taught Lesly how to survive in the jungle; General Pedro Sánchez who led the rescue team; the shady figure of Manuel Ranoque, the father of the two youngest children; and even the Colombian president, Gustavo Petro.

But there is much more to this than an extraordinary survival story. Interwoven chapters address key questions about Colombian and Latin American history, society, and political economy — the answers to which shed light on the socio-political state of much of the world today. Colombia’s problems mirror, in many ways, the rising Global South in its twenty-first-century struggles against colonial histories and a globalised world.

Mat Youkee

Mat Youkee (London, 1981) has been living in Colombia since 2010, working as a freelance journalist and professional investigator. He has an extensive on-the-ground knowledge of Colombia, as well as a wide network of relationships and connections, having worked with many international consultancies, government organisations, and private clients during his reporting for media outlets such as The Guardian, The Economist, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, Americas Quarterly, Foreign Policy, and other local and international publications.

HOUR OF THE HEART

empathy and connection in the here-and-now Irvin D. Yalom

'After some six decades of therapeutic practice and writing, I learned in a new and meaningful way how we humans — whether we’re in the cool, distanced medium of Zoom, or in the heat of real life — can create a startlingly honest and heartfelt connection that in a single hour can change one’s life.’

What does the father of group therapy' do at the age of 90, when he is still advising patients in the therapy sessions that have been his life’s work, and yet must face his increasing frailties, and even his own mortality? Rather than melt into retirement instead, Dr Yalom develops another revolutionary approach.

In Hour Of The Heart, Dr Yalom captures profound moments with his patients, which happen in the span of just one hour, with people he will never see again. Taking place over two years before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, and in the midst of Dr Yalom’s grief over losing his wife, these one-time sessions would, as Dr Yalom writes, 'help to sustain my client and would profoundly alter my vision of what psychotherapy can do’.

For those who love reading stories of human connection, for therapists and for those in training, and for any fans of Dr Yalom’s work, Hour Of The Heart is a collection of deeply moving personal stories that will tap into how powerful authentic human connection can be. While these one-hour sessions are, in many cases, just the start of these patients’ journeys, Dr Yalom’s insights, and his willingness to open himself up to his patients in a way rarely seen in therapy, are truly illuminating.

Praise for A Matter of Death and Life:‘For over half a century, the eminent psychiatrist Irvin Yalom has dazzled the world with his stories of the human psyche packed with wisdom, insight, and humour. Now, with stunning candour and courage, he shares with us the most difficult experience of his life: the loss of his wife and steadfast companion since adolescence. Partners to the end, including in the co-writing of this book, they share an indelible portrait of bereavement — the terror, pain, denial, and reluctant acceptance. But what we are left with is much more than a profound story of enduring loss — it's an unforgettable and achingly beautiful story of enduring love. I will be thinking about this for years to come.’

Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

Irvin D. Yalom

Irvin D. Yalom is emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. The author of two definitive psychotherapy textbooks, Dr Yalom has written several books for the general reader, including Love’s Executioner, Staring at the Sun, Creatures of a Day, and Becoming Myself; and the novels When Nietzsche Wept; The Schopenhauer Cure, and The Spinoza Problem. Dr Yalom lives in Palo Alto and San Francisco, California.

NOBLE FRAGMENTS

the maverick who broke up the world’s greatest book Michael Visontay

One hundred years ago, Gabriel Wells, a New York bookseller, committed a crime against history. He broke up the world’s greatest book, the Gutenberg Bible, and sold it off in individual pages. This is the story of an Australian man’s hunt for those fragments and his family’s debt to an act of literary vandalism.

In 1921, Well’s audacity scandalised the rare-book world. The Gutenberg was the first substantial book in Europe to have been printed on a printing press. It represented the democratisation of knowledge and was the Holy Grail of rare books.

Was the break-up a sacrilege or a canny deal? New Yorkers were divided. For every frown of disapproval, there was a lick of the lips. It was the Roaring Twenties, the Gatsby era of fabulous wealth. Tycoons were in a feeding frenzy to acquire items that would demonstrate their refinement. Wells marketed the pages as ‘Noble Fragments’, they sold like hot cakes, and he died a rich man.

Half a century later, Sydney journalist Michael Visontay stumbled upon a mysterious legal document that linked Wells to his own family. He became obsessed by the Gutenberg’s invisible imprint on his life, and set out to track down the pages of the broken bible.

Part detective story and part memoir, Noble Fragments is an expedition into the arcane world of book collectors and their eccentric passions, and a journey of discovery about how Wells’s gamble set off a chain of events that changed a family’s destiny.

Michael Visontay

Michael Visontay has worked as a journalist and senior editor at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, and taught journalism at university. He is the author of several nonfiction books, including Welcome to Wanderland, Who Gave You Permission? (with Manny Waks), and Undies to Equities: the remarkable life of Henri Aram.

MELBOURNE GHOST SIGNS

Sean Reynolds

Sean Reynolds

Multi-time winner of the Australian Small Publisher of the Year Award

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