Collection: Adult Non Fiction - Biography

Helen Garner is one of Australia's most important and most admired writers. She is revered for her fearless honesty in the pursuit of her craft. But Garner also courts controversy, not least because she refuses to be constrained by the rules of literary form. She has never been afraid to write he...

"In 1939, as Hitler's troops march on Prague, a Jewish couple makes a heartbreaking decision that will save their eight-year-old son's life but change their family forever. Australian journalist Juliet Rieden grew up in England in the 1960s and 70s always sensing that her family was different in ...

During WW2, a group of Jewish refugees (intellectuals, writers, artists and athletes - most from Germany and Austria) escaped to Britain and were interned as 'enemy aliens'. In 1942, they were selected and trained to form a special unit of commandoes who would be sent back into Europe to play a s...

If China seems unstoppable, so too does its leader Xi Jinping. As General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and President of China, he commands over 1.4 billion people, in a vast country that spans the prosperous megacities of Beijing and Shanghai and desperately poor rural regions where f...

The remarkable life of history's first foreign-born samurai, and his astonishing journey from Northeast Africa to the heights of Japanese society. The man who came to be known as Yasuke arrived in Japan in the 16th century, an indentured mercenary arriving upon one of the Portuguese ships carryin...

This fully illustrated book is a celebration of Kate Middleton's first year as the Duchess of Cambridge. Includes events up until March 2012.

A laugh-out-loud account of a young family's misplaced confidence in themselves to become hobby farmers in rural Adelaide Hills, where their fantasies about life in the country are progressively destroyed and their almost total ignorance about everything agricultural is revealed... After buying ...

Cynthia Dearborn is struggling to convince her father, who has vascular dementia, to move into an aged care facility. He won't budge. Further complicating matters is the fact that Cynthia lives in Sydney, and her father in Seattle. Truth be told, it suits her to live halfway around the world from...

Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived here since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world - describing himself as a "mongrel," someone born out of diverse ...

John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their daughter fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then she was placed on life support. Days later, the Dunnes were sitting down to dinner when John suffered a massive and fatal coronary. This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the we...