Book

Friends Like These by Wendy Harmer, Allen & Unwin, $32.99. Write what you know, is the standard advice to authors. And as a top-rating and high-earning radio presenter, Wendy Harmer spent long enough on Sydney’s so-called A-list to know it inside out. Now she’s “ratting on it”, as she puts it, and a highly amusing […]

Exposed by Liza Marklund, Bantam Press, $32.95. Annika Bengtzon is a young journalist eager to leave her dead-end relationship and quiet hometown and earn a full-time job on Stockholm’s tabloid Evening Post. Josefin Liljeberg also wants to be a reporter, but she’s a stripper in a seedy club owned by her violent boyfriend and, before […]

An Uncertain Place by Fred Vargas, Harvill/Secker, $32.95. Commissaire Adamsberg, chief of Paris’ Serious Crimes Squad, will live to rue the day he discovers 17 severed feet outside London’s Highgate Cemetery. Like all good fictional detectives, he’s a bit of a loner, quietly rebellious and loved by all his (mostly) loyal officers. The feet will […]

The Voyagers by Mardi McConnochie, Viking, $29.95. Shore leave, Sydney, 1943, and quietly determined US sailor Stead heads straight for the home of the girl he met and fell in love with during three magical days in 1938. Back then, Marina was a sheltered girl on the verge of a career as a world-famous pianist. […]

Madeleineby Kate McCann, Bantam Press, $35. She loved Harry Potter,Dr Whoand her favourite toy Cuddle Cat, and when four-year-old Madeleine McCann was abducted on Thursday, May 3, 2007, in Portugal, the whole world knew who she was. Ever since that day, her British doctor parents Kate and Gerry have fought to find her and clear […]

The Chicken Chronicles: A Memoir by Alice Walker, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, $35. Hatched as a blog and raised by her agent into a book, Alice Walker’s (of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple fame) The Chicken Chronicles, is both a practical day-in-the-yard guide to caring for her “girls” — bullied Gertrude Stein, rebellious Hortensia and sensuous […]

Never A Dull Moment by Sarah Baker, Murdoch Books, $39.99. Do you remember the time when TVs, iPads, Facebook, Gameboys and all that jazz weren’t the only way to while away an evening? In fact, back in those days, families and friends would come together to play games and have fun. Take a journey back […]

The Colour Of Tea by Hannah Tunnicliffe, Pan Macmillan, $32.99. Grace’s life is unravelling. She feels lost in eclectic, buzzing Macau, where her husband Pete is managing the opening of a casino. Devastated that her dream to have children is cut short, her marriage becomes strained and their sadness remains unsaid, causing them to drift […]

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, Random House Australia, $24.95. My husband recommended this to me after he had read it when we were away travelling two years ago. It shattered me! The central character makes a massive error in judgement and is literally disgraced and cast out of his place of work, and goes away to […]

To Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal, Little, Brown, $29.99. Judith Whitman believes in the sort of love that “picks you up in Akron, Ohio, and sets you down in Rio de Janeiro”. Yet after finding just that kind of love as a teenager, she ended up marrying someone else instead. Now in her 40s, […]