2021 Term 4
Relax, rejuvenate and reconnect with some great holiday reading.

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Biographies and Non-Fiction

Here’s the Story is warm, witty, often surprising and relentlessly fascinating: an extraordinarily intimate memoir by one of the most remarkable public figures of our time.

Every day we make choices—about what to buy or eat, about financial investments or our children’s health and education, even about the causes we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. Nudge is about how we make these choices and how we can make better ones. (Publisher)

Lisa Millar has spent her whole life showing up, getting things done and making things happen. As a child growing up in country Queensland, she dreamed of a big life. Working as a foreign correspondent gave her that, but it also meant confronting the worst humanity can bring. Three decades as a journalist witnessing tragedy has a cost. And an ever-escalating fear of flying threatened to rob her of her ability to work at all. (Publisher)

I have decided to write these stories just as I have always done, in my own hand. The joy that I have felt from chronicling these tales is not unlike listening back to a song that I’ve recorded and can’t wait to share with the world, or reading a primitive journal entry from a stained notebook, or even hearing my voice bounce between the Kiss posters on my wall as a child. (Goodreads)

A beautiful, intimate and inspiring investigation into how we can find and nurture within ourselves that essential quality of internal happiness – the ‘light within’ that Julia Baird calls ‘phosphorescence’ – which will sustain us even through the darkest times. (Goodreads)

Narrated by a 13,000-year-old extinct American mastodon, Mammoth is the (mostly) true story of how the skull of a Tyrannosaurus bataar, a pterodactyl, a prehistoric penguin, the severed hand of an Egyptian mummy and the narrator himself came to be on sale at a 2007 natural history auction in Manhattan. (Booktopia)

James Nestor meets cutting-edge scientists at Harvard and experiments on himself in labs at Stanford to see the impact of bad breathing. He revives the lost, and recently scientifically proven, wisdom of swim coaches, mystics, cardiologists, Olympians and choral conductors, the world’s foremost ‘pulmonauts’ to show how breathing in specific patterns can trigger our bodies to absorb more oxygen.
Drama

‘A colourful, engaging story of escape and road-trip adventure … also compellingly cinematic and features an endearing narrator-heroine with plenty of meaty real-world troubles.’ – Sydney Morning HeraldAmy Ephron
Marie Desplechin

Winner of the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award
Erica Marsden’s son, an artist, has been imprisoned for homicidal negligence. In a state of grief, Erica cuts off all ties to family and friends, and retreats to a quiet hamlet on the south-east coast near the prison where he is serving his sentence.

The runaway Australian bestseller about love and loss in wartime Germany, inspired by a true story.
‘Captures the intensity of a brutal and unforgiving war, successfully weaving love, loss, desperation and, finally, hope into a gripping journey of self-discovery.’ The Courier Mail

Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets? (Goodreads)

Inspired by a personal moment of profound love and generosity, bestselling author – and one of Australia’s finest journalists – Trent Dalton spent two months in 2021 pounding city pavements, speaking to Australians from all walks of life and asking them one simple and direct question: ‘Can you please tell me a love story?’ For two straight weeks he sat at a desk with a sky-blue 1960s Olivetti typewriter, on the bustling corner of Adelaide and Albert streets, Brisbane, with a sign saying, ‘Sentimental writer collecting love stories. Do you have one to share?’

Freaky Friday meets Pretty Little Liars – if the Liars were an all-girl punk band from the 1980s – in this highly original soul-swap story from the critically acclaimed author of My Life as a Hashtag.
‘An absolute delight. Funny, clever, compelling, and utterly original.’ NINA KENWOOD, It Sounded Better in My Head

A novel about three women at turning points in their lives, and the one night that changes everything.

The debut novel from the inimitable Madeleine Ryan, A Room Called Earth is a humorous and heartwarming adventure inside the mind of a bright and dynamic woman. This hyper-saturated celebration of love and acceptance, from a neurodiverse writer, is a testament to moving through life without fear, and to opening ourselves up to a new way of relating to one another.
Fantasy

A fantasy series about a kingdom divided by corruption, the prince desperately holding it together, and the girl who will risk everything to bring it crashing down. (Publisher)
Mystery & Crime

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves The Thursday Murder Club. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves. (Booktopia)

Jack West Jr #4
Jack, it seems, has been chosen – along with a dozen other elite soldiers – to compete in a series of deadly challenges designed to fulfill an ancient ritual.
With the fate of the Earth at stake, he will have to traverse diabolical mazes, fight cruel assassins and face unimaginable horrors that will test him like he has never been tested before. (Publisher)
Historical Fiction

This funny, picaresque, clever retelling of Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’ from The Canterbury Tales is a cutting assessment of what happens when male power is left to run unchecked, as well as a recasting of a literary classic that gives a maligned character her own voice, and allows her to tell her own (mostly) true story. (Publisher)

A New York Times Notable Book (2020)
Best Book of 2020: Guardian, Financial Times, Literary Hub, and NPR
Drawing on Maggie O’Farrell’s long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare’s most enigmatic play, HAMNET is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

With The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel brings to a triumphant close the trilogy she began with Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. She traces the final years of Thomas Cromwell, the boy from nowhere who climbs to the heights of power, offering a defining portrait of predator and prey, of a ferocious contest between present and past, between royal will and a common man’s vision: of a modern nation making itself through conflict, passion and courage.
First Nation Resources

Click on the image to take you to our Library Topic Guide on First Nations culture resources. This guide includes links to books, films, interview and websites.
eBooks
Apps | Download via the app on your Phone | Login & password (only need once) | More information |
EPlatform | Same login and password used for your school device | Wheelers ePlatfom | |
SORA | Staff: swipe card number for both login and password Students: school device login number for both login and password | Overdrive: SORA |
Newspapers and Magazines
Full digital copies of The Australian, The Courier Mail and other newspapers are available in digital format via the Library website or click here.

Online copies of CHOICE magazine head to the Library website or click here