Left Neglected by Lisa Genova, Simon & Schuster, $32.99

Sarah, the main character in Left Neglected (Lisa Genova’s follow up to Still Alice) has a husband she loves, three happy children and is a high powered executive at the top of the corporate food chain.

Some would say she has it all, but not the time to enjoy it. A careless moment while driving changes her life in an instant and she is left dealing with a little known or understood traumatic brain injury.

Her journey to rehabilitation is simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting as Sarah is forced to address the things she has neglected in life.

You will read Genova’s book constantly on the verge of tears but at the same time unable to tear yourself away and ultimately enriched.

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The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, Faber & Faber, $23.99

My current literary love affair is with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna. The story of Diego Rivera and Frida Khalo’s cook, it begins in 1930’s Mexico and ends in post-War America, taking in the hero’s ever-hopeful femme fatale mother, the exiled Trotsky and the ghoulish functionaries of the Un-American Activities persecutions.

The scholarship is lightly worn. Its vivid characters, its humour, its language, its geography, its breathtaking range, all make it un-put-downable. If I’d written this book, I’d die happy.

Sex And Stravinsky by Barbara Trapido , Bloomsbury, $32.99, is in stores now.

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A Guide to Australian Etiquette by Ita Buttrose, Viking, $29.95

“There are those who claim manners no longer matter, but I don’t agree,” writes Ita Buttrose. “Times may have changed but good manners never go out of fashion.” Neither does Ita Buttrose.

Many may remember Ita’s original The Guide to Modern Etiquette published in 1985, and the doyenne of magazines and one time editor of The Weekly is back on form with this new comprehensive manual which covers everything from Muslim weddings, to same-sex unions, workplace dress codes, “netiquette” (internet etiquette) and even perfect canine behaviour.

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The Discovery of Jeanne Baret by Glynis Ridley, Fourth Estate, $29.99

An extraordinary true-life tale of a remarkable “herb woman” from an impoverished peasant family in the Loire Valley region of France, destined to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world — and more importantly to fight eighteenth century moral codes, to blossom as a brilliant botanist, all the while dressed as a teenage boy.

Jeanne Baret bore French expedition naturalist Philibert Commerson a son, before giving the child up as a foundling, and accompanying him on a treacherous 1766 two-year sea passage with more than 100 men, her chest painfully bound to cover her womanhood.

Under constant suspicion, Baret is believed to have survived a horrific gang rape, and the barbaric ritual “baptism” (tarring and feathering) of an ordinary seaman, against a backcloth of the tantalising first sighting of the Great Barrier Reef (in 1768) and the personal discovery of medicinal Bougainvillea (named after the expedition’s commander).

Ridley pieces together a unique slice of geography, history, discovery and adventure, recording one woman’s courageous stand to experience all the “new world” had to reveal, at a time when traditional sexual roles were at their most limited.

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The Lightkeeper’s Wife by Karen Viggers, Allen & Unwin, $29.99

Nature can both isolate and enlighten; inspire and depress. Battling the elements can be as much about battling the storms within yourself. In The Lightkeeper’s Wife, there are characters who find nature healing and those who are desperate to escape it.

The novel’s eye of the storm is Mary, who was the lightkeeper’s wife at Cape Bruny, Tasmania. Young and enchanted by a new life with her husband, she raises her children in isolation in harsh, windswept climes, surviving on provisions brought in by boat and the meagre offerings of a sandy garden patch.

What she didn’t realise was that love too would become an emotion frozen by the desolate environment. In the twilight of her life now, she prepares herself to die – and along with her, the secret she’s kept for most of her life.

Meanwhile, her son Tom also struggles with his emotions. Much younger than his two older siblings, he grows up alone and cared for by Mary; his father an impenetrable tower, like the lighthouse he kept.

Tom has also chosen a solitary vocation and spends 18 months as a “dieso” at an Antarctic research station — reachable only via icebreaker. When his wife calls to say she is leaving him, he has no way of getting back to her as winter on the cold continent sets in and no ship will be arriving for months.

Melbourne author Karen Viggers, who’s been “south” twice, sets the scene in a family dynamic filled with regret, loss and love. Poetic in its treatment, it’s a novel of parallels and, ultimately, hope.

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Anne Frank’s Tales From The Secret Annex, Cassell Reference, $27.99

The posthumously published diary of Anne Frank is world famous; 40 million copies published in 70 languages, ranking the inner thoughts of the 13-year-old Jewish chatterbox and would-be journalist, kept in captivity with her family during Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.

What this latest collection of “daydreams”, fables and an unfinished novel (written at the same time as the diary, but out of print for many years) adds, is a wistful window onto the world outside “Villa Annexe” — as the ever cheerful Anne dubbed the rooms above her father’s offices, where evening black-out and the ritual grind of Sundays became almost unbearable — as seen through Anne’s hopeful eyes.

In her essay The Battle of the Potatoes, Anne counts her blessings — “In a labour camp you have to do a whole lot more than peel potatoes…” while in her short story The Caretaker’s Family (who ignore the blackout) she dreams of the mother “…who doesn’t want to hear the ack-ack guns, so … she sits in the shower and listens to her loudest jazz record.”

In her unfinished novel Cady’s Life, convalescing Cady, bedridden in hospital as war is declared, debates immense subjects of parental love and trust, of equality and cruelty — just as Anne did from her cramped attic.

Anne Frank and her elder sister Margot both died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945.

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In Bligh’s Hand by Jennifer Gall, National Library of Australia, $34.95

William Bligh’s water-stained pocket notebook, kept by the sea captain following the mutiny on The Bounty, when he was cast adrift with 18 crew in a 7-metre open boat, is one of our most important historical documents.

For years the Bligh family retained the notebook, but it was bought at auction in London in 1976 by the National Library of Australia for $73,000.

This fascinating, beautifully illustrated book features extracts from that notebook, as well as other accounts of the mutiny and subsequent events which show that even with his loyalist crew, a difficult and temperamental Bligh constantly battled fear of new rebellion.

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Lyrics Alley by Leila Aboulela, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $32.99

Nur Abuzeid has it all, he’s the heir to his father’s business empire, and he’s betrothed to Soraya, the girl he loves. He’s a gentle, optimistic soul, and this is a gentle story of love and growth.

When poor Nur is badly injured in an accident, its repercussions ripple through his wealthy Sudanese family. His father, Mahmoud Abuzeid, struggles to cope, and his relationships with both of his wives change greatly.

His younger Egyptian wife yearns for a sophisticated life in Cairo, away from the ignorant influence of wife number one, Hajjah Waheeba. Soraya’s future changes dramatically, but not necessarily for the worse.

Lyrics Alley is set in the heat and dust of 1950s Sudan, as it emerges from beneath British colonial rule. But Sudan and its history never intrude on what is at heart a domestic story, the story of a family and its prejudices, difficulties, and love for each other. It’s exotic and humble, sad and uplifting, exotic and familiar.

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Mennonite In A Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen, Allen & Unwin, $29.99

Rhoda Janzen writes with wit and fondness of growing up in a “painfully uncool”, but happy and supportive community of Mennonites; they’re the less picturesque cousins of the better-known Amish people.

Years later her glamorous and sophisticated life in the city falls apart when her husband leaves her for a man called Bob, a chap he meets on Gay.com. After the triple-blow of the Bob incident, a major operation, and a bad car accident, Rhoda goes home to her Mennonite family.

It sounds like grim stuff, but Rhoda’s family is comedy gold, and she has gift a for milking her (real) life of clashing cultures for genuine belly laughs. She’s welcomed home with lashings of the kind of food that rings of the 16th century German origins of the Mennonite church, kartoffelsalat anyone? And there’s relationship advice you won’t hear from Dr Phil: “Why not date your first cousin? He has his own tractor.”

It’s a fascinating and entertaining memoir of an unconventional life.

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We Had It So Good, by Linda Grant, Virago, $29.99

The title sums it all up, We Had It So Good, and oh yes they did. This is the familiar but fascinating story of the baby boomers, and their journey from sweet self-absorbed hippies to a lost self-absorbed middle age.

It’s 1968 and Californian Stephen Newman travels to Oxford on a science scholarship, bright, confident and eager for adventure. There he meets two beauties on campus, Andrea and Grace, who fancy themselves as the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

We Had It So Good follows them through the drug-induced hallucinations of the ’60s, the dirty squats of the ’70s, and the emerging family life and career aspirations of the ’80s.

This is a bold book about life with a capital L, but it is written close-up — life in lower case. Linda Grant succeeds in showing us the inner lives of three compelling characters, while looking at them, and their generation, from afar.

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