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The story of a man wanting to move forward by travelling back to where he was born, the Northern Territory. Finding himself on a merciless cattle station where you weren't taught to be a stockman but broken to fit into the mould, he is caught in the middle of race wars and deadly violence between white station managers and Aboriginal traditional land owners. As black power surges, his sympathy grows for an Indigenous elder and his besieged community...

 

"It was like reading parts of Alex Haley's Roots, only it happened in Australia. The tale of brutality and injustice in an indifferent country."

Geoff McDonald, author of Red Over Black

 

"The writer looked death in the face to protect his Aboriginal friends, we owe it to put our hands up and support his story. Made me angry, sad and proud but couldn't put it down. A must read for all Australian's as it exposes a dark, mostly unknown part of our race relations most people would rather not know, but need to see to remind them standing up to racism demands constant vigil." Reggie Jobuda, Council of Aboriginal Elders and Indigenous Advancement.

The eighth book in the Grafton Everest series sees the hapless ex-President of the Republic of Australia, Dr Professor Grafton Everest, caught up in a web of international espionage and intrigue that he is hopelessly ill-equipped to handle.

Abandoned to his own inadequate devices when his wife Janet departs on a world tour, with his home invaded by his now broke daughter and son-in-law, Grafton accepts an assignment with the United Nations to investigate electoral fraud in Russia. The reason is not only to get out of the house; an old letter from his mother, addressed to someone in the Soviet Union fifty years ago, suggests that Grafton may not be the only child that he always thought he was.

Grafton’s mission to Moscow and his search for this mysterious sibling take him far from the Russian capital, deep into the icy wastes of Siberia and even deeper in a tangled conspiracy whose roots extend back to the Cold War and even as far back as the Russian Revolution.

The Matilda Principle offers a coaching approach that builds positive teams regardless of organisational culture. It builds trust, motivation and positivity without attracting attention and without rocking the boat. In other words, it is covert team building.

As a positive manager, you want people to do more than just show up. You also want people to enjoy working for you. You want them to trust you, to be motivated and loyal. In short, you want a positive team.

But you also know your hands are tied. Decisions about better pay and conditions are made above your pay grade. The HR department determines how performance reviews and job design are managed. And your own boss isn’t going to allow your team to work differently to other teams.

But what if you could create a positive team under the radar? What if team building could be done without permission, as an act of creative subversion?

In this book, Brad Desmond combines his wealth of experience as a psychologist and corporate trainer with cutting-edge studies into coaching and team building.

With The Matilda Principle you will better connect with your people and bring out their best, leaving others to guess your secret.

The Mystery of You is an exciting and thought-provoking look at ourselves and how we live our lives. It contains a rich tapestry of ideas, beliefs and experiences. It challenges the reader in many ways by confronting everyday issues, but always remaining interesting and easy to read. Many questions are discussed, for example:

- What is happening to humanity?

- What kind of individuals and communities are we producing?

- What have morality and ethics got to do with everyday living?

- Where can we find some clues that will give us a head start in our own journey through the maze of living?

The first part of the book is written by Ron Goldschlager, a successful businessman and communal identity who cares deeply about humanity and our world. The second part is a series of articles by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, a philosopher, scholar, educator, advisor to many high-profile international leaders and prolific writer of over 70 books.

Accompanying and complementing the text is a wonderful collection of paintings by Victor Majzner, some produced especially for this work. They are inspiring and colourful illustrations of the important themes in this book. In a positive and easy-to-digest manner, this book explores Jewish thought and belief, and offers a practical and creative perspective on eternal issues.

It consists of seven chapters: Ageing; Belief and Bureaucracy; Continuity; Behaviour; Water and Life with Numbers; This is About Happiness; Science or Religion and Religion or Science.

In this engagingly reflective and deeply passionate collection, Dvir Abramovich takes the reader on a fascinating pilgrimage through the landscapes of the ever-changing Jewish world, an extraordinary tour that demonstrates the full range of his observational powers.

Bristling with the author’s signature eloquence and erudition, this ambitious volume brings together a series of trenchant essays that tackle the momentous political and cultural shifts that have marked the Jewish world in the twenty-first century.

With candour and insight, Abramovich explores an expanse of topics such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, antisemitism, Holocaust trivialisation, the rise of neo-Nazism, education, the nature of extremism, and the role of memory, training his eye on the issues that illuminate the times we live in, and holding nothing back.

A young Australian travelling for academic purposes in Europe visits a monastery in Spain and is waylaid by an old man selling his produce by the roadside at a nearby war cemetery. He innocently asks about the massive eucalypt trees in the monastery grounds and is then entranced by the old man and the story he tells of their history which weaves together the secret 16th-century exploration of Terra Australis, the Emperor Charles V, the dedication of a botanist, fundamentals of gardening and the wonder of Nature.

 

"I found myself translating a story written by someone I hardly knew, about some apparently incomprehensible fantastical old man in the middle of nowhere telling his story involving ancient Spanish historical figures, to an unnamed and bewildered young foreigner with little command of the language." - Irene Esteve Gúrpide - translator

What is the nature of human love? Burt enters his office one day to find a large handwritten folder marked "CONFIDENTIAL". The unexpected package has come from an old university mate: a charming, successful, and well-loved Australian man named Ted Harris. Twenty-five years post-university, Ted seems to have it all: a partnership in a successful law firm, respect, wealth, and the perfect wife.

However, as Burt delves deeper into these documents - which turns out to be an intensely personal confessional - he discovers that things are not what they seem, and that Ted harbours a dark and mysterious past relating to his first wife, peculiar Swiss biochemist Yvonne.

In The Other Wife, Manfred Jurgensen uses his unique writing style and several narrative voices to examine the internal conflicts of disease, our responsibility for those we care for, and the very nature of this undefinable thing we call love.

"The seemingly contradictory senses of menace and sensitivity exist in an uneasy ease in Manfred Jurgensen's writing." - Lily Brett

"...complex and confident, ambitious, yet always assured as it explores our solitariness in the midst of social life." - The Canberra Times

"Manfred Jurgensen is a gifted writer who knows how to surprise the reader." - Elizabeth Jackson, Inkwell New York

'The Poet' is a tale of obsession, art, and the thresholds between day and night. Manfred is a nondescript insurance clerk, inflexibly honest and imbued with a profound sense of order. He is also a prolific poet, but has never tried to publish - until now.

The novella traces the events and experiences that befall Manfred in the wake of a single moment's carelessness, a mistake that will change his life. He enters a maze he must negotiate, between action and paralysis, inspiration and despair, guilt - and the phantom, love.

We encounter an eccentric stranger bent on a terrible mission, the publisher of a deceitful new author, and the city that forms a living, shifting backdrop to the interior drama, as Manfred struggles with his predicament, his muse, and the labyrinth of his implacable honesty. It is a journey from common daylight into a darkness flickering with both hope and oblivion; a journey across the fragile web of what we understand as sanity.

Seventy short, heart-warming stories of acts of kindness by strangers with contributions by prominent Australiana, including comedian Jean Kittson, writer Peter FitzSimons, news presenter Tracey Spicer, Youth Off the Streets' Father Chris Riley, media personality David Richardson, Wayside Chapel's Reverend Graham Long, politician Pru Goward, Pulitzer Prize winner Geraldine Brooks, and many others. This is an inspiring look at the best of humanity.

From small acts of charity to selfless acts of kindness, The Power of Good shows that the human spirit is replete with noble and generous deeds.

Sin City, 1970s. Crooked cops take the cream off the top of crime profits. Judges frequent illegal gambling dens. The winners of races are known before the horses have run. Heroin floods the streets, And the fight for the control of the trade sees men being gunned down left and right. This is the world of George Freeman.

Often portrayed as a charming celebrity gangster, he was in fact a calculated criminal motivated by greed and a lust for power and influence. One of Sydney's most notorious and unforgiving hard men, Freeman preferred others to do his dirty work. He dominated that city's underworld alongside Lennie McPherson, controlling a vast illegal gambling empire while keeping top cops, judges and politicians in his pocket.

Here, at last, we hear the truth about Freeman's links to the Mafia and drug trafficking, his secret addiction and the accusations of murder. In this compelling and unsettling account, award-winning writer Tony Reeves reveals George Freeman without the gloss.

A portrait-painter discovers a terrifying side-effect of his talent. A professor of medicine finds himself romantically involved with a dying patient. The lives of two young people are changed forever by a performance of the Mozart Requiem. A self-styled Messiah tries desperately to persuade a writer that he alone can avert a catastrophe about to engulf the city.

 

Serge Liberman's extraordinary characters rise up off the page like apparitions. Whether in chastened submission to their fates, or in blazing defiance, or in search of meaning and significance, these figures are denizens of real, intimately observed social worlds. Liberman's sinewy, intensely evocative and poignant style, unique in Australian letters, takes us deep into particular lives but always with reference to universal issues of fate, free will, and the moral landscapes of good and evil. His post-Holocaust humanism is passionately committed to the power of storytelling, and enters with special power art's plea for love, compassion, inner freedom, and redemption.

 

This collection of some of Liberman's finest and most characteristic stories draws upon all six of his published volumes of short fiction. It is offered not only as a summation and a tribute, but as a valuable contribution to the diverse field of Australian multicultural writing.

All Souls' Day - the Day of the Dead, 1941. Florence, city of strife. It is Hitler's state visit to Florence and the last of the good times for Mussolini. From now on, he and his lover Clara will cling more closely together, ever more dependent upon each other as their country spirals into civil war and their lives disintegrate.

Annabelle and Enrico, young cousins from an ancient Florentine family, work first with the clandestine resistance, then openly with the partisans. Facing life and death together in the mountains, they forge a passionate life-long bond.

How reliable is memory and can we ever expiate past sins? Are some ghosts better left alone?

'The Sweet Hills of Florence is a sweeping novel spanning time and distance between Italy and Australia, between Mussolini's Italy and that of Berlusconi, between past and present. It is a rich tapestry woven with skilful insight, of the culture and the times. In digging beneath the patina of memory in a search for meaning, it opens doors to the past and raises uncomfortable questions for the present.' - Sandy McCutcheon, author of Black Widow

'I loved how this story brought the contrast of Australia and Italy to life. This is a book that digs deep, as Jan Wallace Dickinson explores the bonds that define us and shape our lives.' - Lisa Clifford, author of The Promise

A fast-moving historical biography with the feel of a thriller... how did an ordinary Jewish man find the courage to impersonate a tough Nazi officer?

 

Gerhard Badrian was a gentle soul – quiet and compassionate, a competent commercial photographer. The Nazi occupation of Holland changed him. To cope with ruthless tyranny, his first reaction was perfectly normal. Keep your head down, stay out of harm’s way.

But that didn’t satisfy him, so he joined the Resistance. He learnt to forge identity papers which saved hundreds of likely Nazi victims: Resistance members, Jews and others.

 

Still not enough. When, in front of his eyes, he saw his parents captured and deported to their deaths, a new persona emerged. He found he had hidden talents. He was a natural-born actor. Armed with forged papers and wearing an SS uniform, he would march into a prison or hospital…

 

Certainly, this is a thrilling war story, an engrossing Holocaust story. But it is also a family story. Gerhard was the author’s mother’s cousin. For Paul Gardner, Gerhard Badrian is his unsung family hero.

 

"A gripping story of how extraordinary times converted ordinary people into heroes ... This book transforms the history of a global war and monstrous crimes against humanity into a personal story of courage, risk and heart-trembling fear." - The Hon. Michael Kirby AC CMG

Southern England. August 1936. An artefact from the dark ages - a wolf carved in jet black - is stolen from the archaeology department of St Matthew's College. A man is murdered in an antique store.

Historian George Haye translates two eighth-century documents for the investigating police, and is very soon nearly murdered himself. What is it about the documents? Aren't they just letters from one Englishman to another? And why does the wolf from St Matthew's seem to be at the black heart of all the evil that unfolds around him?

Haye is desperate. He must find the letters which lead him to the wolf, or he will die.

But Haye will find something else. Something he could never have imagined - something long forgotten, something terrifying...