Now to Love

She’s had both good times and bad. Rebecca Gibney tells Bryce Corbett her six secret rules for a happy life. In the great backstage dressing room of the Australian TV industry, there are those who affect nice, those who are nice – and then there’s Rebecca Gibney. She is so consistently lovely and so effortlessly […]

Read our review of Nicky Pellegrino’s Recipe For Lifethen tell us what you think on the form below for a chance to win a copy of the AWW Cooking School cook book and have your critique printed in The Australian Women’s Weekly books pages. Mediterranean turquoise cover, splashed with a couple of ripe lemons and […]

This Party’s Got To Stopby Rupert Thomson, Granta, $29.99. This is British novelist Rupert Thomson’s first foray into non-fiction, an absorbing memoir that explores the impact of his father’s death on Rupert and his two younger brothers. They’re in their 20s, already motherless, and having come together for the funeral, the brothers stay on for […]

The Last American Manby Elizabeth Gilbert, Bloomsbury, $24.99. She inspired millions of women withEat Pray LoveandCommitted. How fascinating that Elizabeth Gilbert should have tackled men first, or rather manhood, through the story of a modern-day frontiersman called Eustace Conway, who could throw a knife with pinpoint accuracy at seven, and by 17 was living alone […]

Mayaby Alastair Campbell, Hutchinson, $32.95. Everything’s going right for Steve Watkins. He’s got a good job, lovely wife, even a touch of tinsel in his life because his best friend is the glamorous Maya, one of the world’s most famous film stars. No one quite understands what she sees in him, but Steve is always […]

What’s Happening To Our Boys?by Maggie Hamilton, Penguin, $29.95. Let’s say it up front – I feel for today’s teenagers. Tricky enough that they have to find a path through the challenges particular to this stage of human evolution and Maggie Hamilton’s book canvasses them all – drugs and alcohol, peer pressure, porn, manipulation by […]

Book Of Lost ThreadsBY TESS EVANS, ALLEN & UNWIN, $27.99. Taunted at school because she has two mums, choral prodigy Miranda Ophelia Sinclair – “Moss” – is the first lost soul in this study of needy hearts forming unlikely friendships in lonely places. Finn is tormented by his involvement in a fatal car crash and […]

Oprah: A Biography BY KITTY KELLEY, ALLEN & UNWIN, $35. By the age of 19, the illegitimate girl, born to a teen single mum in the segregated Southern state of Mississippi in the ’50s, had already conquered mountains as Nashville’s first black woman TV news reporter. She was raised for her first six years by […]

The Acceptance World by Anthony Powell, Random House, $31.95. Nick is a young man beginning to make his way in the world. The book’s opening – a meeting with his bachelor uncle in a dingy, deserted hotel in the presence of a mysterious female clairvoyant – is unforgettable. This is the third in a series […]

The Surprising Life Of Constance Spry BY SUE SHEPHARD, MACMILLAN, $56.99. In the early 1900s, enigmatic Englishwoman Constance Spry, a young health lecturer, travelled the Irish countryside in a caravan preaching hygiene and sanitation to poor families. Cheery “Connie” in her elegant attire was as loved by urchin children as she would be feted in […]