Book

Matilda Is Missing by Caroline Overington, Bantam Australia, $32.95. It sounds like it could be dry and grueling content — a novel about a custody fight for a little girl from a family torn apart by divorce. Yet Matilda Is Missing is so much more than that. It is a gripping and emotional tale of […]

Lola’s Secret by Monica McInerny, Penguin, $29.95. Lola Quinlan’s 12-year-old great grand-daughter approvingly likens her to Lady Gaga; kitted out with panache in pink tights and leopard-print dress. Family saga author Monica McInerney’s 84-year-old creation also loves the internet and slips in smiley emoticons on emails like they are going out of fashion. Lola’s secret […]

What The Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam, Sleepers Publishing, $24.95. There’s something fresh and engaging about Steven Amsterdam’s writing — a lightness of touch with some of life’s more troubling human scenarios sprinkled with a frisson of other worldliness; in this instance the idea that we may all have a special power that could reveal […]

Subjected to incalculable child abuse, Kim Noble’s young mind shattered into multiple personalities when she was just three years old. In an exclusive extract from her autobiography, this extraordinarily brave woman explains how she survived, became a mother and what it feels like to live a life literally in pieces. Kim Noble was born on […]

The Hypnotist’s Love Story, by Liane Moriarty, Macmillan Australia, $32.99. Australian author Liane Moriarty is a regular choice for our Great Read and with The Hypnotist’s Love Story she’s done it again. This is a gripping romance with a thriller edge that probes the rather in-vogue subject of stalking in an intriguing way. The tale […]

He said the mysterious death of his two wives was just bad luck, but “evil husband” Tom Keir was finally brought to justice after 15 years, thanks to a tireless police officer and devoted mum. Here, they tell their story to Jordan Baker. She was marrying the man she loved, the man who had been […]

In Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness Alexandra Fuller braids a multilayered narrative around the perfectly lit, Happy Valley-era Africa of her mother’s childhood; the boiled cabbage grimness of her father’s English childhood; and the darker, civil war- torn Africa of her own childhood. At its heart, this is the story of Fuller’s mother, […]

The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, Picador, $32.99. Remember Al “Chainsaw” Dunlap? The Packer family’s corporate cost-cutter of the early ’90s? Well, he’s exhibit A in Jon Ronson’s new investigation into the madness industry — specifically, whether many leading CEOs and politicians are in fact diagnosable psychopaths. Lord knows how Ronson persuaded him but he […]

Amexica: War Along The Borderline by Ed Vulliamy, Random House, $35. A tough, gritty — and most disturbingly, true — report from the Mexican-US border, where drug cartels wage war on each other, and anyone gets in their way. More than 28,000 have been killed since the official war on drugs was declared five years […]

Gilgamesh by Joan London, Random House, $23.95. This is an oldie-but-goody, recommended with such enthusiasm by a fellow reader I felt I had to give it a go — and so enjoyed the experience I am now passing it on. Drawing on the epic of Gilgamesh, the world’s oldest known poem, it is both a […]