Chanel: An Intimate Life by Lisa Chaney, Fig Tree, $39.95

By the end of this biography I didn’t know whether to love or hate Gabrielle Chanel. The designer helped liberate women from being purely decorative, giving them freedom to move for work and play, and became one of the world’s first female business moguls.

But she also lived with a Nazi spy during the occupation of Paris, forcing her to flee France after the war and resettle in Switzerland.

Lisa Chaney is not the kind of writer who digs for dirt, but Chanel’s life offers up a wealth of scandal, including lesbian affairs and a drug addiction.

The mistress of a playboy during her youth, Chanel went on to become muse or mistress to the 20th century’s greatest artists, and yearned for a child with the Duke of Devonshire, one of the world’s richest men.

Despite her many loves she was fiercely independent until the day she died. Chaney gives new insights into the life of the first truly modern woman.

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Hazel: My Mother’s Story by Sue Pieters-Hawke, Macmillan Australia, $49.99

This book is hard to put down even though we all know the story of Hazel Hawke.

Her daughter painstakingly tells the story of Hazel’s humble origins, the highs of her life in the Lodge and the traumatic breakdown of her marriage.

The reader gets the sense that Sue Pieters-Hawke does not want to blame her father but she still leaves a strong impression of a man with many failings as a husband and a father.

In contrast Hazel is a saint with a wealth of admirable characteristics. This is as easy to read as it is compelling.

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The Next Always by Nora Roberts, Hachette, $29.99

Book one of the Inn at Boonsboro Trilogy has all the sizzling ingredients of a bubbling slice served at the local pizzeria, where the long-legged Montgomery brothers — Ryder, Owen and Beckett — get their strong calloused hands round a bottle of beer, after a day gently smoothing “her” curves and laying “her” floors …

This is bestselling American novelist Nora Roberts at her slow and saucy best, as she allegorises the renovation of historic haunted inn Boonsboro (which Roberts fans will know really does exist and Roberts refurbed), comparing it to the southern single siblings (men do the plumbing and take care of their women) romantic pursuits.

Beckett likes to browse the paperbacks at the bookstore run by old school pal Clare, an Iraqi widow and mother to three boisterous Power Ranging meatball hurling (seriously!) sons.

This book follows patient Beckett’s pent-up courtship of Clare over kiddy sleepovers and sick days in bed with their mom.

In the author’s finely tuned balance of homespun mouth-watering attention to detail — Clare quartering olive oil coated potatoes for the roast, all the while longing to kiss her man — she links bolts of fabric and bolts of passion.

Never did exposed brick evoke so much jealousy or nail guns so much pulling power!

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Foal’s Bread by Gillian Mears, Allen & Unwin, $32.99

” ‘Hope on, hope ever,’ repeated Noah as [husband] Roley carefully hammered two tiny holes into the top of each side of the foal’s-bread heart and hung it by some string on a nail on the door of their hut…’

And herein hangs the powerful thread of Gillian Mears’ triumphant tale of eternal hope, born of endless torment, as pig herdsgirl and country showground jumper Noah — “someone left out the ‘r’ they reckon… her mother died just after she was born…” pins this extraordinary book’s eponymous lucky charm (a foal’s bread is a meat sometimes found in the mare’s placenta) and all her hopes above the outhouse at her in-law’s property in country NSW in the early 1930s.

Biting on a cob to give birth alone to her abusive Uncle Nipper’s baby at fourteen, bedding ‘Little Mister’ in a wooden butter box and sending him hurtling off down Flaggy Creek — “the lighthouse failing to detect anything that small…”

Mears’ torrential introduction to Noah, plunges us into an ever spinning current of hope and survival, versus despair and self-destruct, from chapter one.

We three only (the reader, Mears and Noah) carry this secret burden throughout the book as it hurtles towards a harrowing but captivating climax.

Foal’s Bread is an extraordinary piece of writing and 47-year-old Gillian Mears’ first novel in sixteen years.

Contemporary Australian classics The Mint Lawn and The Grass Sister were published when she was in her twenties.

It was written by wheelchair-bound Mears while battling Multiple Sclerosis, which onset when she was 31, and its poetry is spellbinding and spiritual, energising and awe-inspiring and surely stems from the freedom to “put ponies into a gallop and for home again”… for survivor Gillian, a passionate horsewoman.

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A Nation in the Making: Australia at the Dawn of the Modern Era by Alisdair McGregor, Australian Geographic, $59.95

This collection of 205 photographs showcasing urban and rural life during the years leading up to Federation in 1901 is not just a compelling social history, it’s a rare chance to see one of the most significant photographic collections of early Australia.

The Tyrell Collection, assembled by Sydney bookseller James R Tyrell was sold to Australian Consolidated Press, then under Kerry Packer’s ownership, who transferred the images to copy negative and gifted nearly 8000 plates to Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum.

This anthology reveals the best of that collection including some telling images of women and children, showing just how far we have come.

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The Submission, by Amy Waldman, William Heineman, $29.95

New York, 2003. A citizens’ jury must decide which — of 5000 anonymous submissions — is the best design for a healing, heart-lifting memorial to the victims of 9/11.

They declare a winner, open the envelope … his name is Mohammed Khan. For this most sensitive job, they have picked a Muslim architect.

And his design can be interpreted as a tribute to Islam as much as to those who died at Ground Zero. So, can the jury recant? Should they? And why, given he’s a loyal American who’s won fair and square?

As Tsiolkas did with The Slap, Waldman explores how a single event can ignite a firestorm of grief, fury and conflicting principle, setting liberals against bigots, victims’ families against civil rights activists.

The result is a kaleidoscopic picture of a pivotal moment of American history — though told so personally, even the least likeable characters always feel real as they grapple with ambition and pain, race and politics.

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Fifty Animals that Changed the Course of History, by Eric Chaline, Crows Nest, $35

The plus of this beautifully-packaged book on the impact of animals on human history is that it will help you blitz your next trivia night and blind-side your friends; the minus, it could turn you into a crashing bore, arming you with irresistibly fabulous factoids on creatures ranging from the leech and the mosquito, to the pigeon and the seal, not forgetting the tiny cochineal insect which provided pre-Columbian people with the means to dye cloth a rich carmine-red.

Who knew that these birds, insects and beasties so shaped our own story? And a wonderful tale it is, mixing history with myth, poetry with fairy tales, giving us a kaleidoscopic picture of the 49 animals which both helped and harmed humans but with which, finally, we made our peace.

Even the last and longest chapter, on humans themselves, is upbeat on our ability to overcome self-inflicted challenges like global warming.

Right or wrong, it’s a book to make you happy — and who would argue with that?

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Review by Jennifer Byrn

Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour, by Michael Lewis, Allen Lane; $39.95

Michael Lewis is the master of making financial journalism accessible. And — perhaps his best trick — funny as well.

This tragi-comic romp through European’s current economic disaster is a worthy successor to past hits such as Liar’s Poker and Moneyball, reducing the complexity of Europe’s debt disaster to a shrewd, biting analysis of the kind of people — the kind of countries — that would manifest such idiotic folly.

It’s full of mean, merciless but wildly enjoyable generalisations as to national character — the greedy, slothful, tax-shirking Greeks; the stolid Germans, obsessed with cleanliness and order yet harbouring “a secret fascination with filth and chaos”; and of course the Irish, who to the end thought that a ramshackle house built in the middle of a peat bog would — might — yield sound returns.

Though my favourite remain the Icelanders, who after centuries as successful and prosperous fishermen, became convinced overnight that they were born to be hedge fund managers.

Lewis gives us juicy details of what was clearly a great party, what went wrong, and who’s to blame for the hangover. A book to make you laugh until you cry.

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The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides, Fourth Estate $29.95

The marriage plot was the staple of the great English novels of the 19th century so what, you might wonder, is the thoroughly modern author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Middlesex doing re-tilling this field?

Subverting it, is the answer. Setting the ideals of happy-ever-after love against the realities of courtship and romance in the 1980s, the era of feminism, sexual liberation and the pre-nup.

His chief characters — specimens, really — are three young American college students: uptown girl and Jane Austen admirer Madeleine; her lover, the brilliant but mentally unstable Leonard, and her friend Mitchell, struggling with own his spirituality though convinced that Madeleine’s true destiny is to be his wife.

They’re a clever, bookish trio but, of course, the path does not run smooth — not for any of them. Eugenides’ real story turns out to be less about love than about the eternal drama of growing up and discovering where the plots and plans of youth end, real life begins.

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Shadow of the Titanic by Andrew Wilson, Simon & Schuster UK, $40

For 705 passengers on the Titanic the sinking wasn’t the end of the story but the beginning of their new lives as “survivors”.

Most had suffered the loss of husbands or children, some had to answer for their actions that night, and others simply couldn’t live with the memory of the trauma they’d experienced.

Pretty eighteen-year-old Madeleine Astor became a very wealthy widow overnight, but threw it all away for love, ending up with a penniless boxer who beat her badly.

Was she punishing herself out of guilt at her survival? Was the irrepressible Lady Duff Gordon lying when she told an inquiry that when safely aboard her lifeboat with just four other passengers, she couldn’t hear the cries of those drowning around her?

And what drove ten survivors to suicide? Andrew Wilson’s gripping and perceptive account shows just what a long dark shadow the Titanic cast over the lives of all the survivors.

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