Books

A Food Lover’s Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela by Dee Nolan, Lantern, $100 This book is so beautiful it makes me squeak. That grass-green jacket – the colour, I’m told, of the hills on which you walk during stages of the grand six-week (though many do less) pilgrimage of St James, which ends at the […]

Half a Life by Darin Strauss, Hamish Hamilton, $26.95 “Half my life ago, I killed a girl.” She was just 16. Darin Strauss, the author of this memoir and also an acclaimed novelist, was 18 and soberly driving his father’s Oldsmobile when a freak accident – a girl, a bike, an inexplicable collision – changed […]

Harbour by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Text Publishing, $32.95 A remote Swedish island. A six-year old girl who disappears without a trace. A broken father, who returns to mourn the tragedy two years on – and discovers hers is not the first disappearance from the blighted island of Domaro. It is not just the islanders, nursing […]

Life by Keith Richards, Hachette Australia, $49.99 Who knew the old rogue was so popular? I’d always thought of The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards as a minority taste – yet here’s his autobiography storming the bestseller lists. No small feat given it’s a $50 hardback, huge, and that’s one raunchy life he’s describing. Even allowing […]

The Queen’s Dolls’ House by Lucinda Lambton, Royal Collection Publications, $35 When you’re a royal princess after the ultimate dolls’ house who do you turn to? Who else but the country’s top architect, the guy whose day job is to design stately homes. And so it was that Princess Marie Louise, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter commissioned […]

Fall Girl by Toni Jordan, Text Publishing, $32.95 A favourite passage from this light, bright romantic comedy has Ruby, the matriarch in a family of genteel con-artists, list some “wonderful ideas” for stings. A cream that melts away cellulite. Tablets that fill in wrinkles from the inside. Daily doses of Siberian plant juice to stop […]

Sunset Park by Paul Auster, Faber Fiction, $32.99 I’ve been hooked on Paul Auster for more than 20 years now, since his first novel, the mysterious and haunting New York Trilogy. He writes with simple elegance about complex ideas though his favourite subject, the one he keeps returning to, is the role of chance in […]

Preincarnateby Shaun Micallef, Hardie Grant, $29.95 He’s a funny man, is Shaun Micallef. And I mean that in the best way. His first novel turns out to be exceedingly funny too (in ways both ha-ha and odd) jumbling time travel and a murder mystery in with space ships, Tom Cruise and the Loch Ness monster. […]

One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries by Anne Pender, ABC Books, $35 Get your gladdies and wave them Possums, its time to celebrate the life of Edna Everage and the wild genius of her “manager” Barry Humphries. Intellectual, witty, and flamboyant, Humphries stood out in suburban mid-century Melbourne. At his sport loving private […]

Sisterby Rosamund Lupton, Piatkus Fiction, $32.99 Beatrice thinks of herself as the successful reliable older sister of warm but flaky art student Tess. But when Tess dies and police rush to decide it’s a suicide, Beatrice reevaluates everything about herself and those close to her. What makes this book special is the way the reader […]