Books

The Girl From Baghdad by Michelle Nouri, William Heinemann Australia, $29.95. Born to a wealthy Iraqi father and a beautiful Czech mother, Michelle Nouri experienced the best and worst of Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad and Communist Eastern Europe. From her spoiled childhood as her father’s princess to her grotty Prague flat, Michelle’s true life story has […]

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 […]

The Language Of Flowers, by Vanessa Diffenbaugh, Picador Australia, $32.99. This debut novel by an American foster mum and art teacher sparked a bidding war last year, with Picador winning the coveted title. It’s now set to be published in more than 30 countries, with a heavy-handed drum roll that is in danger of putting […]

Will Munsie’s cheery smile hides painful stories of life in the Aussie bush. Don’t be fooled. Although he’s known for his high spirits and taking girls for a twirl on the dance floor, The Farmer Wants A Wife contestant Will Munsie knows first-hand the toll that isolated country life can take on relationships, and the […]