In 1979, Nam Le’s family left Vietnam for Australia, an experience that inspires the first and last stories in The Boat. In between, however, Le’s imagination lays claim to the world.

The Boat takes us from a tourist in Tehran to a teenage hit man in Columbia; from an aging New York artist to a boy coming of age in a small Victorian fishing town; from the city of Hiroshima just before the bomb is dropped to the haunting waste of the South China Sea in the wake of another war.

Each story uncovers a raw human truth. Each story is absorbing and fully realised as a novel. Together, the make up a collection of astonishing diversity and achievement.

The true story of the woman who shocked a generation. On Friday 25th May, 1934, a forty-one-year-old woman walked into the lobby of Claridge’s Hotel to meet the nineteen-year-old son whose face she did not know. Fifteen years earlier, as the First World War ended, Idina Sackville shocked high society by leaving her multimillionaire father to run off to Africa with a near penniless man. Inspiration for Nancy Mitford’s character The Bolter, painted by William Orpen, and photographed by Cecil Beaton, Sackville went on to divorce a total of five times, yet died with a picture of her first love by her bed. Her struggle to reinvent her life with each new marriage left one husband murdered and branded her the ‘high priestess’ of White Mischief’s bed-hopping Happy Valley in Kenya. Sackville’s life was so scandalous that it was kept a secret from her great-granddaughter Frances Osborne. Now, Osborne tells the moving tale of betrayal and heartbreak behind Sackville’s road to scandal and return, painting a dazzling portrait of high society in the early twentieth century.

One summer morning in 1970, Peter van Rijn, proprietor of the television and wireless shop, pronounces his Melbourne suburb one hundred years old.

That same morning, Rita is awakened by a dream of her husband’s snores, yet it is years since Vic moved north. Their son, Michael, has left for the city, and is entering the awkward terrain of first love.

As the suburb prepares to celebrate progress, Michael’s friend Mulligan is commissioned to paint a mural of the area’s history. But what vision of the past will his painting reveal?

Meanwhile, Rita’s sometime friend Mrs Webster confronts the mystery of her husband’s death. And Michael discovers that innocence can only be sustained for so long.

‘That exotic tribe was us. And the time we have taken, our moment.’

The Time We Have Taken is both a meditation on the rhythms of suburban life and a luminous exploration of public and private reckoning during a time of radical change.

“More than once since then I’ve wondered whether the life-threatening high jinx that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath.”

Breath is a story about the wildness of youth — the lust for excitement and terror, the determination to be extraordinary, the wounds that heal and those that don’t — and about learning to live with its passing.

In his first novel for seven years, Tim Winton has achieved a new level of mastery. Breath confirms him as one of the world’s finest storytellers, a writer of novels that are at the same time simple and profound, relentlessly gripping and deeply moving.

Growing up in Melbourne, Nellie Mitchell showed musical promise and dreamed of fame, but her father had more orthodox plans in mind. Early marriage took her to the Queensland cane-fields — but her ambitions remained, and she soon fled to London, trusting in talent and luck to get her by.

Within a few years, reborn as Nellie Melba, she was performing to overflowing concert halls, hobnobbing with royalty and collaborating with Europe’s most renowned musicians. When her affair with the heir to the defunct French throne was discovered, the press chased them from Paris to St Petersburg and back again, desperate for a glimpse of “the Voice” and her royal conquest.

Feted and condemned by critics, relentlessly pursued by the press and mobbed by adoring fans, Dame Nellie Melba was Australia’s first superstar. Behind the scenes, she was a canny businesswoman, an affectionate mother and a playful practical joker. When she died — apparently after a botched face-lift — flags were flown at half-mast and thousands turned out to see her funeral cortege.

In this definitive biography, Ann Blainey captures the exuberance, controversy and pathos of a remarkable Australian life.

A brilliant, discursive, very funny book about death and the fear of death, god, nature, nurture and the author’s childhood. The closest thing to a memoir Barnes will ever write.

‘I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.’ Julian Barnes’ new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on mortality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that ‘this is not my autobiography’, the result is like a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers.

 

In this beautifully written collection, Vincent Lam weaves together black humour, investigations of both common and extraordinary moral dilemmas, and a sometimes shockingly realistic portrait of today’s medical profession. Twelve interlinked stories introduce us to a group of medical students over ten years, as they make the transition from medical school to hospital life.

The stories span the unique challenges faced by young, inexperienced doctors – having to decide during a first human dissection whether it is more important to follow the anatomy textbook or keep a tattoo intact – but also delve into their private lives, their relationships and family histories, their fears and motivations.

Riveting, convincing and precise, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures looks with rigorous honesty at the specificities of the lives of doctors and their patients and brings us to a deeper understanding of the challenges and temptations that surge around us all.