All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton
All Our Shimmering Skies
Author: Trent Dalton
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 451
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0063075636
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From the internationally bestselling and beloved author of the critically acclaimed Boy Swallows Universe, a mesmerizing, uplifting novel of adventure and unlikely friendships in World War II Australia—calling to mind The Wizard of Oz as directed by Baz Luhrmann. Darwin, 1942. As Japanese bombs rain down on her hometown, newly orphaned Molly Hook looks to the skies and runs for her life. Inside a duffel bag, she carries a stone heart and a map that will lead her to Longcoat Bob, the deep-country sorcerer whom she believes cursed her family. Accompanying her are the most unlikely traveling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress, and Yukio, a Japanese fighter pilot who’s abandoned his post. With messages from the skies above to guide them towards treasure, but foes close on their trail, the trio will encounter the beauty and vastness of the Northern Territory and survive in ways they never thought possible. A story about the gifts that fall from the sky, curses we dig from the earth, and secrets we bury inside ourselves, Trent Dalton’s brilliantly imagined novel is an odyssey of true love and grave danger, of darkness and light, of bones and blue heavens. It is a love letter to Australia and an ode to the art of looking up—a buoyant and magical tale, filled to the brim with warmth, wit, and wonder.

Boy Swallows Universe

by Trent Dalton
Boy Swallows Universe
Author: Trent Dalton
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2018-07-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1460708415
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'The best Australian novel I have read in more than a decade' Sydney Morning Herald 'Astonishing, captivating ... a wild, beautiful, heart-exploding ride' Elizabeth Gilbert The bestselling novel that has taken Australia, and the world, by storm. Winner of Book of the Year at the 2019 Indie Book Awards, winner of a record four Australian Book Industry Awards in 2019, including the prestigious Book of the Year Award, and winner of the 2019 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, NSW Premier's Literary Awards Brisbane, 1985: A lost father, a mute brother, a junkie mum, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crim for a babysitter. It's not as if Eli Bell's life isn't complicated enough already. He's just trying to follow his heart and understand what it means to be a good man, but fate keeps throwing obstacles in his way - not the least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary Brisbane drug dealer. But now Eli's life is going to get a whole lot more serious: he's about to meet the father he doesn't remember, break into Boggo Road Gaol on Christmas Day to rescue his mum, come face to face with the criminals who tore his world apart, and fall in love with the girl of his dreams. A story of brotherhood, true love and the most unlikely of friendships, Boy Swallows Universe will be the most heartbreaking, joyous and exhilarating novel you will read all year. Awards: 2019 ABIA Book of the Year Award, Winner 2019 Indie Book Award, Winner 2019 UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Winner 2019 People's Choice Award, NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Winner MUD Literary Prize 2019, Winner 2019 ABIA Matt Richell Award for New Writer of the Year, Winner 2019 ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year, Winner 2019 ABIA Audiobook of the Year, Winner 2019 Miles Franklin Literary Award, Longlisted 2019 Colin Roderick Award, shortlist Reviews: 'Boy Swallows Universe is a wonderful surprise: sharp as a drawer full of knives in terms of subject matter; unrepentantly joyous in its child's-eye view of the world; the best literary debut in a month of Sundays.' The Australian 'Boy Swallows Universe hypnotizes you with wonder, and then hammers you with heartbreak.' Washington Post 'This thrilling novel' New York Times Book Review 'Marvelously plot-rich ... filled with beautifully lyric prose ...At one point Eli wonders if he is good. The answer is "yes," every bit as good as this exceptional novel.' Booklist 'Dalton's splashy, stellar debut makes the typical coming-of-age novel look bland by comparison ... This is an outstanding debut.' Publisher's Weekly (starred review) 'Extraordinary and beautiful storytelling' Guardian

By Sea & Stars

by Trent Dalton
By Sea & Stars
Author: Trent Dalton
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2018
Genre: Australia
ISBN: 9781460757413
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Dazzling, poetic and vivid storytelling from one of Australia's greatest writers, which tells the bloody, brutal and enthralling story of the epic journey of the First Fleet. Originally published as a multi-part serial in The Australian, By Sea and Stars tells the story of the epic voyage which led to the founding of our nation, as told from the point of view of the people who took part - willingly or unwillingly - in it. Drawing from historical sources of the time, including letters and journals, Trent Dalton, one of Australia's best writers, brings this epic voyage, and the people who went on it, to vivid life. This is not dry history of dates and names. These are gripping stories of real people, from the lowest to the highest. From terrified nine year old chimney sweep and convict John Hudson to conscientious Lieutenant Ralph Clark, pining after his wife and son, to the brave and determined Captain-General Arthur Phillip, the brightest star of the British Navy: these are the people who made the voyage, and these are their stories - of death, duty, glory, lust, violence, escape, mutiny - and a great southern land...

Love Stories

by Trent Dalton
Love Stories
Author: Trent Dalton
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1460714032
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WINNER, INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2022 BOOK OF THE YEAR Trent Dalton, Australia's best-loved writer, goes out into the world and asks a simple, direct question: 'Can you please tell me a love story?' A blind man yearns to see the face of his wife of thirty years. A divorced mother has a secret love affair with a priest. A geologist discovers a three-minute video recorded by his wife before she died. A tree lopper's heart falls in a forest. A working mum contemplates taking photographs of her late husband down from her fridge. A girl writes a last letter to the man she loves most, then sets it on fire. A palliative care nurse helps a dying woman converse with the angel at the end of her bed. A renowned 100-year-old scientist ponders the one great earthly puzzle he was never able to solve: 'What is love?' Endless stories. Human stories. Love stories. Inspired by a personal moment of profound love and generosity, Trent Dalton, bestselling author and one of Australia's finest journalists, spent two months in 2021 speaking to people from all walks of life, asking them one simple and direct question: 'Can you please tell me a love story?' The result is an immensely warm, poignant, funny and moving book about love in all its guises, including observations, reflections and stories of people falling into love, falling out of love, and never letting go of the loved ones in their hearts. A heartfelt, deep, wise and tingly tribute to the greatest thing we will never understand and the only thing we will ever really need: love. 'It's the kind of book that has some impact on the reader ... a Chaucerian endeavour, a rich caravanserai of real, living people with something important to tell.' Sydney Morning Herald

Cheat

by Titus O'Reily
Cheat
Author: Titus O'Reily
Publisher: Random House Australia
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2021-11-02
Genre: Athletes
ISBN: 1760894494
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Where there's sport, there's cheating. No sport is immune; athletics, swimming, rugby, American Football, cricket, baseball, badminton, motorsports, tennis and curling. Yes, even that sport on the ice with brooms. Almost as soon as humans started playing sport competitively, they started to cheat. They cheated to win, for the fame, for the money and sometimes for reasons that are hard to understand. From the fiendishly clever to the outright hare brained, the borderline to the blatant, Titus O'Reily takes us through the many and varied ways athletes and countries have tried to cheat over the years. There's the winner of the New York marathon who was driven in a car part of the way, the male basketballer whose drug test revealed he was pregnant, the Tour De France where many of the riders took the train, the Spanish Paralympic basketball team who faked being intellectually disabled to win gold at the 2000 Paralympics. As well as sharing an alarming amount of tales involving swapping bodily fluids, Titus takes you through doping, illegal equipment, bribes, playing dirty, faking injuries, wearing disguises, dodgy referees, ball tampering, eye gouging, itching powder, licking an opponent to distract them and sending a dwarf out to bat to shrink the strike zone. Just as sport has become more sophisticated, so has cheating in sport, from state backed doping programs to tiny motors in Tour De France bikes. What does this say about us, that we cheat with such regularity and creativity? Will technology help stop cheating or will it only make it worse?

City of Incurable Women

by Maud Casey
City of Incurable Women
Author: Maud Casey
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Total Pages: 100
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1942658907
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In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored “City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through “Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues.

All of You Every Single One

by Beatrice Hitchman
All of You Every Single One
Author: Beatrice Hitchman
Publisher: Abrams
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1647004144
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From an acclaimed and powerful talent in historical fiction, a literary historical novel set in a Bohemian enclave of Vienna about love, freedom, and what constitutes a family—now in paperback! Set in Vienna from 1910 to 1946, All of You Every Single One is an atmospheric, original, and deeply moving novel about family, freedom, and how true love might survive impossible odds. Julia Lindqvist, a woman unhappily married to a famous Swedish playwright, leaves her husband to begin a passionate affair with a female tailor named Eve. The pair run away together and settle in the more liberal haven of Vienna, where they fall in love, navigate the challenges of their newfound independence, and find community in the city’s Jewish quarter. But Julia’s yearning for a child throws their fragile happiness into chaos and threatens to destroy her life and the lives of those closest to her. Ada Bauer’s wealthy industrialist family have sent her to Dr. Freud in the hope that he can cure her mutism—and do so without a scandal. But help will soon come for Ada from an unexpected place, changing many lives irrevocably. Through the lives of her queer characters, and against the changing backdrop of one of the greatest cities of the age, Hitchman asks what it’s like to live through oppression, how personal decisions become political, and how far one will go to protect the ones they love. Moving across Europe and through decades, Hitchman’s sophomore novel is an intensely poignant portrait of life and love on the fringes of history.

Boy Swallows Universe Playscript

by Trent Dalton
Boy Swallows Universe Playscript
Author: Trent Dalton
Publisher: HarperCollins Australia
Total Pages: 90
Release: 2022-05-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1460715012
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The bestselling novel, which has taken Australia and the world by storm, now comes alive onstage. Brisbane, 1985: A lost father, a mute brother, a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a notorious crim for a babysitter. It's not as if Eli Bell's life isn't complicated enough already. He's just trying to follow his heart and learn what it takes to be a good man, but life keeps throwing obstacles in his way - not the least of which is Tytus Broz, legendary Brisbane drug dealer. Soon Eli is beset by chaos on all sides, and a run-in with the local crime king and his henchman launches the 13-year-old with the old soul on a journey to find out what kind of man he is going to be. Adapted by Tim McGarry from Trent Dalton's smash-hit novel, Boy Swallows Universe is an exhilarating story of magic and madness, of beauty and brutality, of joy and heartbreak, and of the power of love to triumph over the darkest of circumstances.

Stalin

by Ronald Grigor Suny
Stalin
Author: Ronald Grigor Suny
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 912
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0691202710
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"This biography of the young Stalin is more than the story of how a revolutionary was made: it is the first serious investigation, using the full range of Russian and Georgian archives, to explain Stalin's evolution from a romantic and idealistic youth into a hardened political operative. Suny takes seriously the first half of Stalin's life: his intellectual development, his views on issue of nationalities and nationalism, and his role in the Social Democratic debates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This book narrates an almost tragic downfall; we see Stalin transform from a poor provincial seminarian, who wrote romantic nationalist poetry, into a fearsome and brutal ruler. Many biographers of Stalin turn to shallow psychological analysis in seeking to explain his embrace of revolution, focusing on the beatings he suffered at the hands of his father or his hero-worship of Lenins, or sensationalizing Stalin's involvement in violent activity. Suny seeks to show Stalin in the complex context of the oppressive tsarist police-state in which he lived and debates and party politics that animated the revolutionary circles in which he moved. Though working from fragmentary evidence from disparate sources, Suny is able to place Stalin in his intellectual and political context and reveal, not only a different analysis of the man's psychological and intellectual transformation, but a revisionist history of the revolutionary movements themselves before 1917"--