Mother’s Day is right around the corner, and the perfect gift for the mum in your life is, quite obviously we think, a book (or two). We’ve handpicked some books to suit all kinds of readers, or you can explore more here. Time is running out, find a book shop near you!
Fiction
Hare’s Fur by Trevor Shearston is a jewel of a novel about grief, art, and beginning again. Russell Bass is a potter living alone in the Blue Mountains. One autumn morning, he finds a chocolate wrapper on the path. His curiosity leads him to a cave where three siblings — two young children and a teenage girl — are camped out, hiding from social services and the police. Little by little, this unlikely group of outsiders begin to form a fragile bond.
Andrea Goldsmith’s latest novel, Invented Lives, follows Russian illustrator Galina Kogan as she emigrates to Australia in the mid-1980s. Once settled in Melbourne, Galina is befriended by Sylvie and Leonard Morrow, and their adult son, Andrew. The Morrow marriage of thirty years balances on secrets. Leonard is a man with conflicted desires and passions, while Sylvie chafes against the confines of domestic life. Their son, Andrew, a successful mosaicist, is a deeply shy man. He is content with his life and work — until he finds himself increasingly drawn to Galina. Invented Lives is a story of exile: exile from country, exile at home, and exile from one’s true self.
Lux by Elizabeth Cook is a gripping story of love, fidelity, faith, power, and its abuses in the courts of King Henry VIII and the biblical King David. A historical fiction epic to really get caught up in. David wants Bathsheba. Henry too must have what he wants. He wants Ann, a divorce, a son. He looks up at his tapestry of David and sees a mighty predecessor who defended his faith and took what he liked. But he leaves it to others to count the costs.
Memoir
Women’s Work by Megan K. Stack is an unflinching look at motherhood and outsourced domestic labour — the global and personal implications of wages paid, services received, and emotional boundaries drawn in the home.
‘It’s easy and convenient to dismiss this subject, but there’s no dismissing this riveting book. The people Stack writes about are unforgettable; the places she evokes are tangible. Her insights are shocking, often disarming, and, frequently, both.’ — Readings
Casey Legler is an artist, restaurateur, former Olympic swimmer, and the first woman signed to Ford Models to exclusively model men’s clothes. Godspeed is their memoir. In searing, evocative, visceral prose, Casey gives language to loneliness in this startling story of survival, defiance, and of the embers that still burn when everything else in us goes dark.
Biography and History
An Unconventional Wife by Mary Hoban is a page-turning biography of an Australian woman who refused to bend to the expectations of her husband and her time. Told with the pace, depth, and psychological richness of a great novel, An Unconventional Wife is a riveting biography that shines a shaft of light on a hidden but captivating life.
In 1941, a thirty-one-year-old Frenchwoman, a young mother born to privilege and known for her beauty and glamour, became the leader of Alliance, a vast Resistance organisation — the only woman to hold such a role. Brave, independent, and a lifelong rebel against her country’s conservative, patriarchal society, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was temperamentally made for the job. Lynne Olson’s Madame Fourcade’s Secret War is the little-known true story of the woman who headed the largest spy network in Vichy France during World War II.
Therapy and Wellness
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb is about the practice of psychotherapy, and it’s a memoir, and its heartbreaking, and it is hilarious. Maybe You Should Talk To Someone is the story of an incredible relationship — between Lori, a therapist at a critical life juncture, and her own therapist, Wendell, a veteran therapist with an unconventional style. Through their sessions, Wendell teaches Lori how to become a better person and a better therapist, as she goes about the business of helping her own patients — the couple who are struggling after having a baby, the narcissist TV producer, the older woman who feels she has nothing to live for, the self-destructive alcoholic young woman, the terminally ill 35-year-old newlywed.
Energy Medicine by Jill Blakeway is the first comprehensive look at the ground-breaking field of energy medicine and how it can be used to diagnose and treat illness, from one of the world’s foremost practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
