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A deluded mother who invented her past, an alcoholic father who couldn't deal with the present, a son who wondered if this could really be his family. Richard Glover's favourite dinner party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?'. It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob, who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed-toy collector. There was his father, a distant alcoholic, who ran through a gamut of wives, yachts and failed dreams. And there was Richard himself, a confused teenager, vulnerable to strange men, trying to find a family he could belong to. As he eventually accepted, the only way to make sense of the present was to go back to the past - but beware of what you might find there. Truth can leave wounds - even if they are only flesh wounds. Part poignant family memoir, part hopeful search for the truth, this is a book for anyone who's wondered if their family is the oddest one on the planet. The answer: 'No'. There is always something stranger out there. PRAISE FOR FLESH WOUNDS 'Both poignant and wildly entertaining' - Sydney Morning Herald 'A new classic ... a breathtaking accomplishment in style and empathy' - The Australian 'Heartbreaking and hilarious ... I couldn't put it down' - Sun Herald 'Engrossing and extremely funny'- The Saturday Paper 'Not since Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James has there been a funnier, more poignant portrait of an Australian childhood.' - Australian Financial Review 'Sad, funny, revealing, optimistic and hopeful' - Jeanette Winterson
Heartfelt and hilarious, this is a book for anyone who has tried to imagine what their dog was thinking. Human beings often write about their dogs, but the dogs don't usually get a right of reply. In Love, Clancy, Richard Glover has collated the letters sent by Clancy to his parents in the bush. They are full of a young dog's musings about the oddities of human behaviour, life in the big city, and his own attempts to fit in. You'll meet Clancy as a puppy, making his first attempt to train his humans, then see him grow into a mature activist, demanding more attention be paid to a dog's view of the world. Along the way, there are adventures aplenty, involving robotic vacuum cleaners, songs about cheese, trips to the country and stolen legs of ham - all told with a dog's deep wisdom when it comes to what's important in life. Delightfully illustrated by cartoonist Cathy Wilcox. PRAISE FOR RICHARD GLOVER Love, Clancy 'Unnervingly accurate, always funny, Richard Glover effortlessly inhabits the fine mind of a dog' - Julia Baird The Land Before Avocado 'This is vintage Glover - warm, wise and very, very funny. Brimming with excruciating insights into life in the late sixties and early seventies, The Land Before Avocado explains why this was the cultural revolution we had to have' Hugh Mackay 'Hilarious and horrifying, this is the ultimate intergenerational conversation starter' Annabel Crabb 'Richard Glover's just-published The Land Before Avocado is a wonderful and witty journey back in time to life in the early 1970s' Richard Wakelin, Australian Financial Review Flesh Wounds 'A funny, moving, very entertaining memoir' Bill Bryson, New York Times 'The best Australian memoir I've read is Richard Glover's Flesh Wounds' Greg Sheridan, The Australian
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from the bestselling author of The Age of Miracles. “Stunning.”—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven • “A startling, beautiful portrait of a community in peril.”—Entertainment Weekly NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Glamour • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster. Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what? Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—if only we are awakened to them. Praise for The Dreamers “Walker’s roving fictive eye by turns probes characters’ innermost feelings and zooms out to coolly parse topics like reality versus delusion. . . . [It has] the perfect ambiguous frame for a tense and layered plot.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “[Walker’s] gripping, provocative novel should come with a warning: may cause insomnia.”—People (Book of the Week) “Powerful and moving . . . written with symphonic sweep.”—The New York Times Book Review “2019’s first must-read novel . . . Alternately terrifying and moving . . . The Dreamers is overflowing with humanity.”—Jezebel “This is an exquisite work of intimacy. Walker’s sentences are smooth, emotionally arresting—of a true, ethereal beauty. . . . This book achieves [a] dazzling, aching humanity.”—Entertainment Weekly
The past decade has seen major political upheaval in Latin America--from Brazil to Chile to Venezuela to Bolivia--but to understand what happened, ask first where your quinoa and lithium batteries came from... The 21st century began optimistically in Latin America. Left-leaning leaders armed with programs to reduce poverty and reclaim national wealth were seeing results—but as the aughts gave way to the teens, they began to fall like dominos. Where did the dreams of this "pink tide" go? Look no further than the original culprits of Latin American disenfranchisement: resource-rich land and unscrupulous extraction. Recounting the story commodity by commodity, Andy Robinson reveals what oxen have to do with the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, how quinoa explains the mob that descended on Evo Morales, and why oil is the culprit behind the protracted coup in Venezuela. In addition to the usual suspects like gold and bananas which underscored the original plunder of the Americas, Robinson also shows how a new generation of valuable resources—like coltan for smartphones, lithium for electric cars, and niobium for SpaceX rockets—have become important players in the fate of Latin America. And as the energy transition sets mineral prices soaring, Latin America remains at the mercy of the rollercoaster of commodity prices. In Gold, Oil, and Avocados, Robinson takes readers from the salt plains of Chile to the depths of the Amazonian jungle to stitch together the story of Latin America's last decade, showing how the imperial plunder of the past carries on today under a new name.
In the summer of 1976 it’s picking season on an Australian stone-fruit orchard run by Celia, a hard-working woman in her early forties. Years ago, when her husband was killed as a bystander in an armed robbery, Celia left the city and brought her newborn daughter Zoe to this farm for a secure life. Now sixteen, Zoe is a passionate, intelligent girl, chafing against her mother’s protectiveness, yearning to find intensity and a bit of danger. Barging into this world as itinerant fruit-pickers come a desperate brother and sister from Sydney. The hard-bitten Sheena has kidnapped her wild, ebullient eighteen-year-old brother Kieran and dragged him out west, away from trouble in the city. Kieran and Zoe are drawn to each other the instant they meet, sparking excitement, worry, lust, trouble . . . How do we protect people we love? How do we bear watching them go out into the perilous world with no guarantee of safety or happiness? What bargains do people make with darkness in order to survive? From the creator of Offspring and author of Useful, The Whole Bright Year is a gripping, wry and tender novel about how holding on too tightly can cost us what we love.
'Full-on, uncontrollable, laugh-till-you-weep stories. Glover has become the indispensable chronicler of Australian family life' Geraldine Brooks Richard Glover's deeply skewed stories of everyday life are heard each week on ABC radio's 'thank God It's Friday'. He creates a world which is both weird and wry-a world in which Henry VIII provides marriage advice, JD Salinger celebrates tap-water and naked French women bring forth a medical miracle. It's also a world in which shampoo is eschewed, the second-rate is praised and George Clooney's haircut can help save a relationship. Bizarre yet commonplace, funny yet relatable, absurd yet oddly warm-hearted, in Richard Glover's hands you'll experience the true strangeness of the life you are living right now. INCLUDES: the Bin-It List: 25 things to avoid before you die. "Warning: Until you know how Glover's writing affects you, do not read in public. Noisy, convulsive laughter and uncontrollable hilarity among probable side effects..." Geraldine Brooks "Like an Australian Seinfeld, Richard has the great gift of highlighting the ridiculous nature of human beings, and finding delight in this crazy thing the rest of us call life." Wil Anderson
A "must read" debut collection of poetic, linked essays investigating the past and present state of California, its conflicting histories and their impact on a writer's family and life (Los Angeles Times). California has been advertised as a destiny manifested for those ready to pull up their bootstraps and head west across to find wealth on the other side of the Sierra Nevada since the 19th century. Across the seven essays in the debut collection by José Vadi, we hear from the descendants of those not promised that prize. Inter State explores California through many lenses: an aging obsessed skateboarder; a self-appointed dive bar DJ; a laid-off San Francisco tech worker turned rehired contractor; a grandson of Mexican farmworkers pursuing the crops they tilled. Amidst wildfires, high speed rail, housing crises, unprecedented wealth and its underlying decay, Inter State excavates and roots itself inside those necessary stories and places lost in the ever-changing definitions of a selectively golden state.
The new book from the bestselling author of Flesh Wounds. A funny and frank look at the way Australia used to be - and just how far we have come. 'It was simpler time'. We had more fun back then'. 'Everyone could afford a house'. There's plenty of nostalgia right now for the Australia of the past, but what was it really like? In The Land Before Avocado, Richard Glover takes a journey to an almost unrecognisable Australia. It's a vivid portrait of a quite peculiar land: a place that is scary and weird, dangerous and incomprehensible, and, now and then, surprisingly appealing. It's the Australia of his childhood. The Australia of the late '60s and early '70s. Let's break the news now: they didn't have avocado. It's a place of funny clothing and food that was appalling, but amusingly so. It is also the land of staggeringly awful attitudes - often enshrined in law - towards anybody who didn't fit in. The Land Before Avocado will make you laugh and cry, feel angry and inspired. And leave you wondering how bizarre things were, not so long ago. Most of all, it will make you realise how far we've come - and how much further we can go. PRAISE Richard Glover's just-published The Land Before Avocado is a wonderful and witty journey back in time to life in the early 1970s. For a start, he deftly reclaims the book's title fruit from those who have positioned it as a proxy for all that is wrong with today's supposedly feckless and spendthrift young adults. Rather than maligning the avocado (and young people), he cleverly appropriates the fruit as an exemplar of how far we have come since the 1970s' Richard Wakelin, Australian Financial Review 'This is vintage Glover - warm, wise and very, very funny. Brimming with excruciating insights into life in the late sixties and early seventies, The Land Before Avocado explains why this was the cultural revolution we had to have' Hugh Mackay 'Hilarious and horrifying, this is the ultimate intergenerational conversation starter' Annabel Crabb PRAISE FOR FLESH WOUNDS 'A funny, moving, very entertaining memoir' Bill Bryson, New York Times 'The best Australian memoir I've read is Richard Glover's Flesh Wounds' Greg Sheridan, The Australian
'Miriam Sved has woven three generations and two periods of history into a page-turning, emotional rollercoaster to remind us all that families are messy, complicated and that the repercussions of decisions made decades ago can come back to haunt you ... I cannot recommend this book highly enough.' Heather Morris, author of The Tattooist of Auschwitz I have wished so many times that I had acted differently. I wish that I had been more worthy of you... Eventually the war will end, and then we will find each other. Until then, remember me. Budapest, 1938. In a city park, five young Jewish mathematicians gather to share ideas, trade proofs and whisper sedition. Sydney, 2007. Illy has just buried her father, a violent, unpredictable man whose bitterness she never understood. And now Illy's mother has gifted her a curious notebook, its pages a mix of personal story and mathematical discovery, recounted by a woman full of hopes and regrets. Inspired by a true story, Miriam Sved's beautifully crafted novel charts a course through both the light and dark of human relationships: a vivid recreation of 1930s Hungary, a decades-old mystery locked in the story of one enduring friendship, a tribute to the selfless power of the heart. SHORTLISTED FOR THE COLIN RODERICK AWARD 2020 PRAISE FOR A UNIVERSE OF SUFFICIENT SIZE 'A fascinating, compelling, beautifully written novel.' Liane Moriarty, author of Big Little Lies and The Husband's Secret 'A taut, tender novel about family, secrets, genius and survival. Sved shows great insight into the complicated emotional architecture of family created in the aftermath of trauma.' Emily Maguire, author of An Isolated Incident 'A superbly structured novel of family, history, secrets, trauma, and mathematics, stretching from 1930s Budapest to Sydney in the 2000s' Andrea Goldsmith 'Sved's prose is as sinewy and powerful as her characters - beautifully controlled and full of revealing moments that... glow in the memory.' Cate Kennedy 'A beautifully imagined inter-generational portrait of friendship, love and loss, set across three continents.' Julienne van Loon PRAISE FOR MIRIAM SVED 'The best kind of storyteller... hypnotic, startling almost.' Clementine Ford, author of Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys 'At times I found myself being reminded of the American author Jennifer Egan. Both authors share the ability to surprise with character insights, something so traditional yet so mentally refreshing. The prose is limpid yet razor sharp. Highly recommended.' The Australian
The new book from the bestselling author of Flesh Wounds. A funny and frank look at the way Australia used to be - and just how far we have come. 'It was simpler time'. We had more fun back then'. 'Everyone could afford a house'. There's plenty of nostalgia right now for the Australia of the past, but what was it really like? In The Land Before Avocado, Richard Glover takes a journey to an almost unrecognisable Australia. It's a vivid portrait of a quite peculiar land: a place that is scary and weird, dangerous and incomprehensible, and, now and then, surprisingly appealing. It's the Australia of his childhood. The Australia of the late '60s and early '70s. Let's break the news now: they didn't have avocado. It's a place of funny clothing and food that was appalling, but amusingly so. It is also the land of staggeringly awful attitudes - often enshrined in law - towards anybody who didn't fit in. The Land Before Avocado will make you laugh and cry, feel angry and inspired. And leave you wondering how bizarre things were, not so long ago. Most of all, it will make you realise how far we've come - and how much further we can go. PRAISE Richard Glover's just-published The Land Before Avocado is a wonderful and witty journey back in time to life in the early 1970s. For a start, he deftly reclaims the book's title fruit from those who have positioned it as a proxy for all that is wrong with today's supposedly feckless and spendthrift young adults. Rather than maligning the avocado (and young people), he cleverly appropriates the fruit as an exemplar of how far we have come since the 1970s' Richard Wakelin, Australian Financial Review