Personal Score
Award-winning writer Ellen van Neerven plays football from a young age, learning early on that sport can be a painful and exclusive world. The more they play, the more they realise about sport's troubled relationship with race, gender and sexuality - and question what it means to play sport on stolen, sovereign land, especially in the midst of multiple environmental crises.
With emotional honesty and searing insight, van Neerven shines a light on sport on this continent from a queer First Nations perspective, revealing how some athletes have long challenged mainstream views and used their roles to effect change not only in their own realm, but in society more broadly. Personal Score is a ground-breaking book that confirms, once again, van Neerven's unrivalled talent, courage and originality.
Close to the Subject
This book is a collected works of one of Australia's most accomplished media personalities. Chronicling his career since 2007, Close to the Subject presents a selection of pieces from Daniel Browning's stellar career as a journalist, radio broadcaster, critic and interviewer. Alongside conversations with the likes of the late Archie Roach, Doris Pilkington, and Vernon Ah Kee, the book contains a series of critical essays displaying Browning's talent as an Australian cultural critic and public intellectual. A range of previously unpublished poetry, memoir, art writing and play script is also presented, highlighting his vulnerable and passionate creative side in its own right.
A Hunger of Thorns
Maude is the daughter of witches. She spent her childhood running wild with her best friend, Odette, weaving stories of girls who slayed dragons and saved princes. But Maude grew up and lost her magic.
Then two weeks ago Odette went missing, and everyone believes she is dead. Everyone except Maude.
Maude is sure she can find Odette inside the ruins of an abandoned power plant built over an ancient magical forest - a place nobody else seems to remember is there.
Soon she discovers that wild magic is both deeply enchanting and terrifying. Can she find her friend - and stop the horrors of corrupted magic from overtaking everyone and everything she loves?
Killing for Country
A gripping reckoning with the bloody history of Australia's frontier wars
David Marr was shocked to discover his forebears served with the Native Police, the most brutal force in Australian history. Killing for Country is the result - a personal history of the Frontier Wars.
Marr brings his experience as an investigative journalist, an award-winning biographer and political analyst to the story of a colonial family that seized hundreds of thousands of acres of land and led Aboriginal troopers into bloody massacres in the most violent years of the Native Police.
Killing for Country is a unique history of the making of Australia - a richly detailed and gripping family saga of fortunes made and lost, of politics and power in the colonial world, and the violence let loose by squatters and their London bankers as they began their long war for the possession of this country - a contest still unresolved in today's Australia.
The Palestine Laboratory
Bestselling journalist Antony Loewenstein uncovers the widespread commercialisation and brutal deployment globally of Israel's occupation-enforcing technologies.
For more than 50 years, the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has given the Israeli state invaluable experience in controlling an 'enemy' population, the Palestinians. It's here that they have perfected the architecture of control, using the occupied Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world.
The Palestine Laboratory shows in depth and for the first time how Israel has become a leader in developing spying technology and defence hardware that fuels some of the globe's most brutal conflicts - from the Pegasus software that hacked Jeff Bezos's and Jamal Khashoggi's phones, and the weapons sold to the Myanmar army that has murdered thousands of Rohingyas, to the drones being used by the European Union to monitor refugees in the Mediterranean who are left to drown.
In a global investigation that uncovers secret documents, based on revealing interviews and on-the-ground reporting, Antony Loewenstein shows how, as ethno-nationalism grows in the 21st century, Israel has built the ultimate tools for despots and democracies.
Praiseworthy
Praiseworthy is an epic set in the north of Australia, told with the richness of language and scale of imagery for which Alexis Wright has become renowned. In a small town dominated by a haze cloud, which heralds both an ecological catastrophe and a gathering of the ancestors, a crazed visionary seeks out donkeys as the solution to the global climate crisis and the economic dependency of the Aboriginal people. His wife seeks solace from his madness in following the dance of butterflies and scouring the internet to find out how she can seek repatriation for her Aboriginal/Chinese family to China. One of their sons, called Aboriginal Sovereignty, is determined to commit suicide. The other, Tommyhawk, wishes his brother dead so that he can pursue his dream of becoming white and powerful. This is a novel which pushes allegory and language to its limits, a cry of outrage against oppression and disadvantage, and a fable for the end of days.
The Bee Sting
Irresistibly funny, wise and thought-provoking, The Bee Sting is a tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's once-lucrative car dealership is going under, and while his wife is frantically selling off her jewellery on eBay, he's busy building an apocalypse-proof bunker in the woods. Meanwhile their teenage daughter is veering off the rails, in thrall to a toxic friendship, and her little brother is falling into the black hole of the internet...
Where did it all go wrong? The present is in crisis but the causes lie deep in the past. How long can this unhappy family wait before they have to face the truth? And if the story has already been written, is there still time to find a happy ending?
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Michael
Team Leader Library Resources
A supernatural tale! An intriguing concept with a human-like species that consumes books and absorbs the information from the books they’ve eaten… a librarian’s dream!
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Imma
Branch Supervisor – Albion Park Library
This lively book reveals the clothing and fashion of the world depicted in Jane Austen’s beloved books, focusing on the long Regency between the years 1795 and 1825. Illustrated with paintings, drawings, historic garments, and fashion plates. I found this book fascinating as no matter what page you looked at there was a story attached to the subject.
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Clair
Library Assistant – Albion Park Library
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Galah by Annabelle Hickson
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Sienna
Library Programs Officer
Galah is a fantastic anthology celebrating life, art and creatives in rural and regional Australia. I love it because the images and stories are so beautifully written and woven together in this collection. The original concept of Galah magazine was to shine a light on the full, creative lives of rural Australians after the devastation of the bushfires. Editors Annabel Hickson wanted to remind the country that there are thriving communities who support each other even in the darkest of times, and come back stronger after the damage of natural disaster. After ten issues of Galah Magazine, this amazing book was bound and distributed.
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