National Network for Equitable Library Service

Winner of Australia’s richest literary award, No Friend but the Mountains is Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee Behrouz Boochani’s account of his detainment on Australia’s notorious Manus Island prison. Composed entirely by text message, this work represents the harrowing experience of stateless and imprisoned refugees and migrants around the world.

Children of a Faraway War tells the story of Wendy and Robbie, two Australian-born sisters, now in their seventies, and their life-changing quest to learn the truth about their father who died in England in World War II while serving in Bomber Command. Because of their mother's reticence and their reluctance to probe her grief, they grow up knowing very little about the man who could have been a father to them. Separated by half a world, Robbie in Australia, Wendy in Canada, they plan a trip to England as a kind of homage to this missing dad.

When the biggest legal case of her career brings Eliza Carmody back to Kinsale, the hometown she thought she had left forever, she witnesses an old friend commit a crime that sends her on a dangerous quest to uncover the mysteries of her childhood that the rest of the town seems willing to ignore. With her friend on the run and the police investigating the bones of an unidentified dead body at a historic homestead near town, Eliza becomes convinced that the truth lies in her memories of the New Year's Eve years ago when her friend Grace disappeared from Kinsale forever.

American Angie Donovan has never wanted much. When you grow up getting bounced from foster home to foster home, you learn not to become attached to anything, anyone, or any place. But it only took her two days to fall in love with Australia. With her visa clock ticking, surely she can fall in love with an Australian-and get hitched-in two months…especially if he's as hot and funny as her next-door neighbor. Jace Walters has never wanted much-except a bathroom he didn't have to share, the last cookie all to himself, and solitude.

Thomas Keneally, the bestselling author of The Daughters of Mars and Schindler's List, returns with an exquisite exploration of community and country, love and morality, taking place in both prehistoric and modern Australia. An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Shelby Apple is obsessed with reimagining the full story of the Learned Man'a prehistoric man whose remains are believed to be the link between Africa and ancient Australia.

With candor, humor, and warmth, legendary musician, actress, activist, and icon Olivia Newton-John reveals her life story'from her unforgettable rise to fame in the classic musical Grease to her passionate advocacy for health and wellness in light of her battles with cancer. Perfect for fans of Tina Turner's My Love Story and Sally Field's In Pieces, this international bestseller is an extraordinary can't-miss memoir. For more than five decades, Olivia Newton-John has been one of our most successful and adored entertainers.

Bestselling writer and psychotherapist Irvin D. Yalom has made a career of investigating the lives of others. In this memoir, he turns his writing and his therapeutic eye on himself. Not simply a man's life story, this is Yalom's reflections on his life and development and an invitation for us to reflect on our origins and the meanings of our lives.

In these powerful stories the verandah people are Jonathan Bennett's own compatriots: Australians for whom the ever-present verandah is both stage and shelter, a retreat from hostile bushland or city street and a seductive barrier to participation in the wider world.

The death of Bon Scott is the Da Vinci Code of rock

In death, AC/DC’s trailblazing frontman has become a rock icon, and the legend of the man known around the world simply as “Bon” grows with each passing year. But how much of it is myth?

Being homeless in one’s homeland is a colonial legacy for many Indigenous people in settler societies. The construction of Commonwealth nation-states from colonial settler societies depended on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. The legacy of that dispossession and related attempts at assimilation that disrupted Indigenous practices, languages, and cultures—including patterns of housing and land use—can be seen today in the disproportionate number of Indigenous people affected by homelessness in both rural and urban settings.