Form/Genre: Autobiographies

After the unexpected death of her husband, Joanne Huist Smith had no idea how she would keep herself together and be strong for her three children - especially with the holidays approaching. The cheerfulness of the season made her feel more alone than ever, no matter how much she wanted to reach ...

From the time she is nine years old, biking to the farmland outside her suburban home, where she discovers a disquieting world of sleeping cows and a “Private Way” full of the wondrous and creepy creatures of the wild—spiders, deer, moles, chipmunks, and foxes—Lauren Slater finds in animals a ref...

‘I pictured myself a wine-dark streak in a TV desert, ears too full of the summer wind to hear that ominous ticking in the sky: the sound of a cultural clock counting me out of youth.’Briohny Doyle turned thirty without a clear idea of what her adult life should look like. The world she lived in,...

Mike Harding was born into a working-class Irish-Catholic family in Crumpsall, Manchester, in 1944. His father, a navigator in the RAF, was killed returning from a bombing mission four weeks before Mike was born, so it was Mike’s mother – along with her mother and sisters – who were the dominant ...

In After Romulus, Gaita revisits the world of his classic memoir Romulus, My Father. He writes about the making of the acclaimed film starring Eric Bana, ideas of truth, the limits of character, and the conflict between love and morality. And, most movingly, about his mother Christine.

In 2004 Garth Callender, a junior cavalry officer, was deployed to Iraq. He quickly found his feet leading convoys of armoured vehicles through the streets of Baghdad and into the desert beyond. But one morning his crew was targeted in a roadside bomb attack. Garth became Australia’s first seriou...

I remember crusty just-baked bread, rubbed with juicy tomato flesh, swimming in a puddle of thick green olive oil. I am seven years old. I sit on a stool in my grandmother's house. It is the height of summer in a seaside village in the south of Greece. We little Aussies devour 'tomato sandwiches'...

"Mary's book is a reminder that we don't have to be alone with grief. Her heartbreak and inspiring story is a lesson to all of us on how to live life to the fullest even in our most difficult moments. I loved it." Naomi WattsStarting with a colourful childhood in Collingwood and Doncaster, under ...

Rocked by Whitey Bulger's crime schemes and busing riots, MacDonald's Southie is populated by sharply hewn characters like his Ma, a miniskirted, accordion-playing single mother who endures the deaths of four of her eleven children. Nearly suffocated by his grief and his community's code of silen...

For more than thirty years Nicholas Lee was a cameraman on 60 Minutes, Australia's most respected and watched current affairs program, alongside Ray Martin, George Negus, Ian Leslie, Richard Carleton, Mike Munro, Jennifer Byrne, Liz Hayes and Tara Brown, among others. All This in 60 Minutes is th...

But Annandale was changing. New words like ‘architect’ and ‘labradoodle’ drifted out of the overabundance of cafés – and eventually entire weeks would go by with no backyard bomb explosions.These stories of neighbourhood warfare, unsound relations, quashed dreams and facial disfigurement are told...

In her passionate, unflinchingly honest memoir of two outsize lives entwined, Theodora "Teddy" Getty Gaston—now one hundred years old—reveals the glamorous yet painful story of her marriage to Getty. As formidable as he was, Teddy was equally strong-minded and flamboyant, and their clutches and c...

Australia's best loved morning TV presenter, Mel Doyle, invites you inside her home and her life. Now, for the first time, Mel shares what it is like to juggle a high profile TV career with the full time job of being a Mum.In Alphabet Soup, she has collected together some of her favourite memorie...

No one thought Sara James, a 30 Rock habitue and Manhattanite through and through, would move to Australia after a long and successful fast-track career reporting from around the globe. But move she did, when her Australian husband Andrew wanted to come home, in a journey that sees her morph from...

James Carroll grew up in a Catholic family that seemed blessed. His father, who had once dreamed of becoming a priest, instead began a career in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, rising through the ranks and eventually becoming one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, the founder of the Defense Intelli...

In early 2013, Taya Kyle and her husband, Chris, were the happiest they ever had been. Their decade-long marriage had survived years of war that took Chris, a U.S. Navy SEAL, away from Taya and their two children for agonisingly long stretches while he put his life on the line in many major battl...

Heart-warming and funny, Animal Magic tells the moving and inspirational story of one woman's work with animals. Carolyn's organisation HUHA (Helping You Help Animals) is a thriving network that rehabilitates and rehomes domestic and farm animals and wildlife all over the country. It is New Zeala...

In 1966, at just twenty-two, Richard Goldstein approached the Village Voice with a novel idea. 'I want to be a rock critic,' he said. 'What's that?' the editor replied. It was a logical question, since rock criticism didn't yet exist. In the weekly column he would produce for the Voice, Goldstein...

Cosentino is Australia's premier illusionist and escapologist - a magician to his fingertips, a man who constantly challenges our notions of what is possible. The LA Times has said of him that 'Cosentino mirrors the legendary Harry Houdini' - and like Houdini, he is a true pioneer and trail blaze...

The FBI kept a secret dossier on him. He was a confidante to stars; adviser to politicians; and lawyer to the likes of William Randolph Hearst, Rita Hayworth, and the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, whom he defended during the House Un-American Activities Committee trials of 1947. Bartley C. Crum was ...