Four hundred years may separate the fictional life of thirty-something Dr Gabriella Mondini, as she battles discrimination in Venice, circa 1590, as a woman physician, and equality today.
The Book of Madness and Cures by Regina O’Melveny, John Murray (Hachette), $29.99
Four hundred years may separate the fictional life of thirty-something Dr Gabriella Mondini, as she battles discrimination in Venice, circa 1590, as a woman physician, and equality today, but some delightful aspects never change in this invigoratingly off-the-wall novel.
When her doctor father and co-compiler of an encyclopaedia of illness, “The Book of Diseases,” fails to come home, plucky Gabi sets off across Europe to find him.
At a time when midwives were condemned as witches, the progressive female doctor uses poultices – and dollops of good old medieval lateral thinking – to treat maladies such as “Lapsus,” (where a woman forgets her place of origin and longs for the world at large).
And when attending “anatomy” for students, at which musicians play a lute and a viol in the amphitheatre alongside the cadaver, it’s tempting to see our Renaissance doc scrubbed up at Seattle Grace (the hospital setting of TV series Grey’s Anatomy), rock classics blaring in surgery!
Set in an idyllic 1957 Melbourne of fruiterers where babies are weighed on the grocery scales, Dickins delights an honorary swearing in to the diminutive Fairyland in this fun adult novel.
Barry And The Fairies of Miller Street by Barry Dickins & Jenny Lee, Hardie Grant, $24.95
“Where’s Pop?” asks Barry, six and three quarters, of no-nonsense Nan, missing sharing a room with his grandpa who listens to the dog races and fills out the form guides at night.
“Your grandfather’s gone,” replies Nan, who cuts the thickest bread for toast and boils the tastiest ever eggs in the world. “I know, but when’s he coming back?” persists the wee lad.
Set in an idyllic 1957 Melbourne of fruiterers where babies are weighed on the grocery scales and magpies land “black and whitely” on the sill at 22 Miller Street, Dickins delights with games of marbles and honorary swearing in to the diminutive Fairyland in this fun adult novel which has more than a hint of the inner child about it.
Similarities to Lewis Carroll’s whimsical Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland begin with the Diminishing Pole and end with the Expansion Fork but author, artist, poet and playwright Dickins adds a gritty dollop of pathos, as frogmarching developers, with dastardly plans for a shopping mall and one thousand parking spaces advance on the world’s flattest city.
Watch out also for the author’s spidery illustrations, which take on an extraordinary life all of their own.
Travel journalist Lee Mylne has done an impressive job with this guidebook combining practical information (including full accommodation pricing), with personal reviews and whimsical historical tales.
Great Australian Pubs by Lee Mylne, Explore Australia, $34.95
Every country town has one and while many are drenched in history, these days – thankfully – the large majority boast modern-day amenities and fabulous tucker.
Travel journalist Lee Mylne has done an impressive job with this guidebook combining practical information (including full accommodation pricing), with personal reviews and whimsical historical tales.
Colour photos of every pub reviewed complete the picture.
All you need to do now is jump in the car and start your road trip.
A Guide for the Advanced Soul by Susan Haywood, Harper Collins, $22.99.
My favourite book of all time is A Guide for the Advanced Soul. It was given to me by my older sister Toni before the 1990 Commonwealth Games to help me get through my first major swimming meet.
The premise of the book is to help with motivation and positive thinking with each page having an inspirational quote or saying.
After performing well at that competition, it then became a superstition that the book had to be packed in my suitcase for every swim meet.
Since retiring, the book continues to be a great source of inspiration and guidance.
Andrew and Monique Ettingshausen. Photography by Alana Landsberry. Styling by Mattie Cronan.
Sporting legend Andrew Ettingshausen’s affair with a team-mate’s wife sent shockwaves through the Australian football community. Here, Andrew reveals the reasons behind his infidelity.
“Why would anyone throw away a life that has everything? A loving wife, a beautiful family, financial security and all the material things that make life work? It simply doesn’t make sense. I suppose my brain was looking for an escape from the pain and so, in my most vulnerable state, I stooped to the lowest depths.”
So reads an email from Andrew Ettingshausen, former professional rugby league player and golden boy of the code. When the email arrives, it’s been three weeks since news of an affair Andrew had with a former team-mate’s wife has made headlines around the country.
Fast-forward a week and I am in the living room of a home in the southern Sydney suburb of Cronulla. Sitting on the couch opposite me is Andrew and his wife, Monique.
During the course of the three-hour conversation that ensues, Andrew is regularly moved to tears. On each occasion, he looks to his wife imploringly, but she can only stare straight ahead. She looks tired, deflated.
“I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to win Monique’s love back,” he says, more to her than me.
“Because I haven’t given it back yet,” Monique says, flatly. “Even though I am here doing this story, I’ve still got a long way to go before I can say I love him.”
It’s only now, after 15 months spent seeing a psychologist and more recently a psychiatrist that Andrew has been diagnosed as having suffered from severe depression and a clinical condition known as “dissociation”.
“It’s a coping mechanism for the brain when extreme stress becomes physically too much to bear,” as his treating psychiatrist told The Weekly, with Andrew’s permission.
“I see many people in this situation and mostly they will either buckle or work to downgrade their stress levels — but Andrew did neither of those things. He just became more and more detached from the world in which he was living. Over a period of four years, he fell into a slow-boil style of depression.”
“You get into a position where you feel you are looking through a very small window and there’s fog all around,” as Andrew remembers it.
“It’s like you are heading down a tunnel and you can only deal with whatever single problem you are fixated on at that moment. Everything and everyone else ceases to exist. There are no ‘red flags’ stopping you from doing things that you would normally never do. You are detached from reality.”
Andrew says he became so desperate at one point he even contemplated suicide. “I remember thinking if I was dead, all of these problems would go away,” he says. “And I thought it would be very easy for me to go fishing one day and just not come home.”
It was around this time that Andrew started having an affair. Except to confirm it happened in 2010 and that it lasted a year, during which time he had “only sporadic contact” with Paul Mellor’s wife, Andrew will only say it was “the biggest mistake of my life”, adding there is nothing to be gained by discussing the details.
What he will discuss, is his remorse. In an email, days after our encounter, Andrew says a day hasn’t passed in the past 15 months that he hasn’t been reduced to tears.
“I have no words to explain the deep regret I feel,” he writes. “I have thrown away my whole life, all that I treasured, all that I was blessed to have. I discarded the most important person in the world to me. My wife, Monique, was my best friend, my soul mate and the love of my life.
“Words can’t describe the pain I feel when I look into Monique’s eyes. Her eyes reflect the disgust, the hurt and the gut-wrenching betrayal that I have brought to her life. I feel far beneath any level of humankind. Every day, I cry tears of shame and my mind aches with an intensity that no medicine can cure.”
There's much more to the particularly disturbing murder of prostitute Bernice Hogan than police are letting on and journalist Jack Gannon is determined to discover the truth.
A beautiful young girl, Amahle, is found dead in the remote foothills of South Africa’s majestic Drakensberg Mountains. She is the daughter of the local Zulu chief and her body has been treated tenderly, garlanded with wildflowers.
Yet no-one seems to know anything about her death – or perhaps her life either. A vast silence has fallen across the community.
Nunn’s novels are set during the 1950s, the years of apartheid, which adds an intriguing complexity to relations between her two favourite sleuths – Englishman Det-Sgt Emmanuel Cooper and his native off-sider and tracker Constable Shabalala.
They’re a great team and Nunn enjoys exploring the way they work around both the legal restrictions on race and skin colour, and the personal contempt of the valley’s religious white farmers, who call Shabalala the kaffir.
But slowly, they penetrate the wall of silence and pry open the secrets surrounding Amahle’s death.
The story of John William Lewin, who left England a nobody and rose to become a respected artist, author and printmaker in the young convict colony of Australia, is a gently inspiring one.
Mr JW Lewin by Richard Neville, New South Books, $39.99
The story of John William Lewin, who left England a nobody and rose to become a respected artist, author and printmaker in the young convict colony of Australia, is a gently inspiring one. It reminds us that our early history was not all about floggings and rum but embraced the dreams of free settlers who came here seeking better lives than the Old Country could offer.
Lewin was one of them.
His passion was natural history, all the rage in the late 18th century, though Lewin was no Darwin or Joseph Banks but a humble foot soldier who, through talent and hard work, created the first illustrated book ever published in Australia (now a valuable rarity) and in 1810 became Sydney’s coroner, entitled to add Gentleman after his name.
Especially impressive given it all started so badly, Lewin having missed his boat in 1798, leaving his poor wife Maria to sail alone to the colony and cool her heels until her husband turned up two years later!
The book is profusely, vividly illustrated and concludes with John Lewin’s happy conclusion that he had found “the finest country in the world”.
Livia Prescott thought she was at rock bottom even before the stalking started. You would think that a failed marriage, a custody battle, and a dying father would be traumatic enough for anyone.
Scared Yet? by Jaye Ford, Random House Australia, $32.95
Livia Prescott thought she was at rock bottom even before the stalking started.
You would think that a failed marriage, a vicious custody battle, a struggling business, and a dying father would be traumatic enough for any woman.
But a blood curdling assault in the office car park turns out to be just the start of a vicious campaign to destroy the Newcastle mum. Jaye Ford cleverly keeps you guessing as to the identity of Livia’s tormentor.
Is it her cruel ex-husband?
Could it be the sexy rescue expert who works in her building who seems determined to help her?
Surely it’s not her best friend’s husband? The menace dogging Liv’s every move creeps into your bones.
You wouldn’t blame her for giving up. Her relentless stalker has almost broken her when she finally gets the chance to fight back.
Scared Yet? is a thriller that’s all too terrifyingly believable.
Sleeping with JFK as a naive nineteen year old wasn’t Mimi Alford’s best idea. But far worse was the fact the intern let the secret affair eat away at her life like a cancer for decades to come.
Once Upon A Secret: My Hidden Affair with JFK by Mimi Alford, Hutchinson, $32.95
Sleeping with JFK as a naive nineteen year old probably wasn’t Mimi Alford’s best idea.
But far worse was the fact the willowy intern let the secret affair eat away at her life like a cancer for decades to come.
In 1962 the glittering Camelot of Kennedy’s White House captivated the sheltered private school girl. Mimi’s perfunctory seduction by the president quickly followed.
Exposure by a Kennedy biographer forced Alford to confront her guilty secret more than 40 years later, and eventually led to her write this fascinating memoir.
Mimi is annoyingly timid, frustratingly square (post-affair), and stubbornly guilt ridden, but despite her continuing admiration for him, it’s John Kennedy’s character that suffers the most in these long hidden reflections.
We all know about his philandering, but some of his actions when it comes to Mimi are shameful. Once
Upon A Secret reveals the sexist, cynical world lurking behind the glittering Kennedy show, but it’s the emotional fall-out suffered by Alford that most intrigues.
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