Now to Love

The Book of Lies by Mary Horlock, Text Publishing, $32.95. Like many 15-year-old girls, Catherine Rozier has a flare for the dramatic and a loose association with the truth, so did she really, as she claims, kill her best friend? It’s 1985 and Catherine lives on the island of Guernsey, a place that suffered terribly […]

The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, Picador, $32.99. Seven years after British author Alan Hollinghurst won the Booker Prize, his follow-up novel displays much of that playful quality of writing and engrossing acuteness of characterisation, but in a new world which spans several decades. This well-made tale starts just before the World War I and […]

Pictures Of You by Caroline Leavitt, Allen & Unwin, $27.99. There’s something rather satisfying about a book you can’t instantly classify, that can’t be neatly filed away as a romance, a mystery or an emotional drama. That is the very joy you’ll find in Pictures Of You, which magically combines all three. The tipping point […]

A Field Full of Butterflies: Memories of a Romany Childhood by Rosemary Penfold, Orion, $22.99. When Rosemary Penfold’s mother left her “gadje” (non-roaming) life to marry a Romany, who could not read or write, she never looked back. “We were her life,” writes UK-born gypsy Rosemary, now 73, who along with her three brothers, was […]

Boat People: Personal Stories From The Vietnamese Exodus 1975-1996 edited By Carina Hoang, Freemantle Press, $45. In 1979, Carina Hoang, then 16, fled her Vietnamese homeland with her younger brother and sister in a 25-metre wooden boat crammed with 373 others. They were part of the greatest mass exodus in human history as 1.5 million […]

IMPROby Keith Johnstone, Bloomsbury Publishing, $29.95 The improvisation training I did in my 20s has made me the performer I am today. It taught me to be open, to listen, to act with spontaneity. The book that literally changed my life in this domain was, and still is,IMPROby Keith Johnstone. He’s a teacher with great […]

The Vault by Ruth Rendell, Random House, $32.95. Ruth Rendell’s latest outing sees the return of her much-loved detective Inspector Wexford. Now retired, Wexford is enjoying the quiet life with his wife and his books, until a chance meeting with an old acquaintance on a London street sees him drawn into a case involving the […]

Everyone remembers what they were doing on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, but Gwyneth Paltrow only recently discovered that her simple actions saved another person’s life. Talking at the Venice Film Festival the Contagion star explained the moment she had an awkward moment with a woman on the street in Manhattan US Weekly reported. “Basically, what […]

Are Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel the friendliest exes in Hollywood or are they back together? According to sources the pair are apparently back on after they were spotted attending a friend’s wedding together over the weekend. The pair, who stepped out together in Colorado, were first spotted at Steamboat Springs restaurant The Tugboat, where […]

Jessica was diagnosed with cancer in 2008 at age 22. After leaving her job to focus on her health, she now spends her time learning everything she can about healing. Here are her six tips on helping your body to fight cancer. “It’s cancer”. These are two words you never want to hear, but with […]