Buderim Library
Top 50 Books You Can’t Put Down – Get Reading is back with the ultimate guide to the best Australian reads.
Jill Roe
“This biography is an authoritative account of the novelist, journalist, nationalist, feminist and larrikin, Stella Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career and a great literary figure.
This account follows her story from her beginnings in the Australian bush, through her publishing success and time spent working for the women’s labour movement in Chicago, and details her time spent as a nurse in the Balkans during World War I.”–Provided by publisher.
Sean Turnell
For 650 days Sean Turnell was held in Myanmar’s terrifying Insein Prison on the trumped-up charge of being a spy. He recounts how an impossibly cheerful professor of economics, whose idea of an uncomfortable confrontation was having to tell a student that their essay was ‘not really that good’, ended up in one of the most notorious prisons in South-East Asia. And how he not only survived his lengthy incarceration, but left with his sense of humour intact, his spirit unbroken and love in his heart.
Sima Samar
The impassioned memoir of Afghanistan’s Sima medical doctor, public official, founder of schools and hospitals, thorn in the side of the Taliban, nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, and lifelong advocate for girls and women. “I have three strikes against me. I’m a woman, I speak out for women, and I’m Hazara, the most persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan.”
Dr. Sima Samar has been fighting for equality and justice for most of her life. Born into a polygamous family, she learned early that girls had inferior status, and she had to agree to an arranged marriage if she wanted to go to university. By the time she was in medical school, she had a son, Ali, and had become a revolutionary. After her husband was disappeared by the pro-Russian regime, she escaped. With her son and medical degree, she took off into the rural areas—by horseback, by donkey, even on foot—to treat people who had never had medical help before.
Sima Samar’s wide-ranging experiences both in her home country and on the world stage have given her inside access to the dishonesty, the collusion, the corruption, the self-serving leaders, and the hijacking of religion. And as a former Vice President, she knows all the players in this chess game called Afghanistan.
With stories that are at times poignant, at times terrifying, inspiring as well as disheartening, Sima provides an unparalleled view of Afghanistan’s past and its present. Despite being in grave personal danger for many years, she has worked tirelessly for the dream she is convinced is an achievable justice and full human rights for all the citizens of her country.
Barry Shaw
Brisbane and World War II is the Brisbane History Group’s 24th volume of papers. The volume is divided into three sections. The first focuses predominantly on the home front, the second on front line activity and the third on various ways in which the war is recorded and remembered.
Written by amateurs, professionals and academics, the book presents a fascinating insight into Brisbane’s contribution during and after the tumultuous years of World War II.
Glenna Thomson
A missing girl … a cold case … a sister who won’t give up … ‘I was there on the day Rebecca disappeared. I watched her hurry away. If I close my eyes I can still see her…’
When Rebecca Bundy fails to return home after the last day of school in 1984 her father reports her missing. But the teenager has run away before and recently she’s been bragging about going to Queensland, so the police tell the family to wait it out.
Days pass. Rumours swirl. A man seen loitering near the bus stop might have followed her. Was there something going on between Rebecca and a male teacher? What about the sheep farmer on Glen Lochan Road where she babysat? And why is her boyfriend, the rough cattle guy Bull Tennant, so sure something sinister has happened?
Then a shocking murder-suicide at a local farm diverts police attention and Rebecca’s disappearance all too quickly becomes a cold case.
But her younger sister Eliza has never forgotten, and for almost forty years she’s been looking for answers.
Ashley Tate
Phoebe Dean was the most popular girl alive and dead. For the last ten years, the small, claustrophobic town of West Wilmer has been struggling to understand one thing: Why did it take young Grant Dean twenty-seven minutes to call for help on the fateful night of the car accident that took the life of his beloved sister, Phoebe?
Someone knows what really happened the night Phoebe died. Someone who is ready to tell the truth.
With Phoebe’s memorial in just three days, grief, delusion, ambition, and regret tornado together with biting gossip in a town full of people obsessed with a long-gone tragedy with four people at its heart—the caretaker, the secret girlfriend, the missing bad boy, and a former football star. Just kids back then, are forever tied together the fateful rainy night Phoebe died.
Fiona Lowe
A terrible crash… but the facts don’t add up. Worlds converge and two women’s lives are torn apart when a devastating accident uncovers a shocking web of lies. Freya thought she could relax when Ryan’s best mate Jamie got engaged to her best friend Hannah. Two couples, four friends – what could be better than that? But a day before the wedding Freya’s torn between keeping the peace or blowing it up.
Hannah’s perfect wedding is hours away and she’s daydreaming of a honeymoon in Tahiti and starting the family she longs for when she hears the first-responder sirens. Is it a grass fire? Worse? And why aren’t Ryan or Jamie answering their phones?
When a car veers off the road with devastating consequences, the small wheatbelt town of Garringarup is left reeling, but no one’s world is more shattered than Hannah and Freya’s. As disturbing details surrounding the accident emerge and questions pile up, ugly secrets rise to the surface.
Mystery, lies and scandal – it’s soon obvious nothing is as it seems in this small town…
Robert Gold
After a tense birthday celebration in Haddley, journalist Ben Harper watches his boss, Madeline, get into the car that has come to collect her. He walks home, never imagining that by the next morning, Madeline will be missing.
To find Madeline, Ben will have to return to the now infamous murder case that made her journalism career over a decade ago. A case which, Ben quickly discovers, was never as simple as it seemed.
But time is of the essence, and soon it’s not just Madeline’s life on the line . . .
Lee Christine
When Justice Maurice Tempest is murdered in the Glenrock State Conservation Area in Newcastle, local detective Senior Sergeant Callan O’Connor is the first on the scene. News of a second body, found in the same location days later, makes what had looked like a revenge killing into so much more.
Angela Avery, formerly a political journalist, is spending a lot of time at the Hunter Valley Prison interviewing a soon-to-be-released forger, Benjamin Reid. When O’Connor’s investigation reveals an interest in Ben, Angela is determined to protect both her source and her fledgling relationship with O’Connor.
Meanwhile, two young, female lawyers have disappeared after making a devastating discovery in an upcoming case. Can O’Connor unravel the connections before the body count rises further? And how much does Angela Avery really know?’…
C.J. Box
A rogue grizzly bear has gone on a rampage—killing, among others, the fiancee of Joe’s daughter. At the same time, Dallas Cates, who Joe helped lock up years ago, is released from prison with a list of six names tattooed on his skin. He wants revenge on the people who sent him the people he blames for the deaths of his entire family and the loss of his reputation and property.
Targeted are a judge, the county prosecutor, his lawyer, a prison guard—and both Nate Romanowski and Joe Pickett. Using the grizzly attacks as cover, Cates devises a method of violence identical to the bear killings and sets out to methodically check off his list.