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 […]

ACCUSED BY MARK GIMENEZ, SPHERE, $32.99. A. Scott Feeney is that rare creature: a top-notch lawyer who loves justice and integrity more than money. At home, he’s in dire financial straits, his wife has left him for a golf-pro and he’s raising their daughter and the orphaned daughter of a prostitute he once represented. Yet […]

THE DOG WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH, POLYGON, $39.95. Those who live in Corduroy Mansions or 44 Scotland Street, or any of the residences dreamed up by the quirky Alexander McCall Smith, generally lead normal lives and have instantly recognisable pretensions and problems. This second instalment of the Corduroy Mansions […]

TRIUMPH BY CAROLYN JESSOP WITH LAURA PALMER, PENGUIN, $32.95. Remember those pasty-faced, pinafore-wearing, high-haired women, who came out of the polygamist Yearning For Zion ranch in Texas, after it was raided over allegations of child abuse? Well, Carolyn Jessop was once one of those women. A sixth-generation polygamist, Carolyn realised at the age of 35, […]

THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA LACKS BY REBECCA SKLOOT, MACMILLAN, $34.99. Until Henrietta Lacks’ cancerous cells grew like wildfire in test-tubes and petri dishes around the world, scientists had been unable to grow human cells for any length of time. Her sturdy cells led to the development of the polio vaccine, were shot into space […]

CITY OF VEILS BY ZÖE FERRARIS, LITTLE, BROWN, $32.99. Who doesn’t love a forensic pathologist? The challenge is making your crime scene expert different. In City Of Veils, Katya Hijazi is a burqa-wearing police lab technician in Saudi Arabia, solving crime despite the disapproval of the religious establishment and her conservative admirer, Rafiq. When a […]