Laura Marshall ‘Can you come round?’ Dad says tremulously. ‘Of course. Are you OK? Is it Mum?’ ‘No!’ He almost shouts it. ‘Just come quickly. The garden…the…body… we need you, Penny.’ For women of Penny’s generation, being on hand for elderly parents is just part of life. But for Penny, things have become a little more serious…
When she receives a frantic phone call from her parents one night, with express instructions NOT to call the police, Penny rushes over at once. But they haven’t had a fall. They haven’t forgotten their computer passwords. They’ve killed someone. And his body is lying in the garden, right next to the rose bushes. Everyone is capable of murder. They just need to meet the right person.
Lynda la Plant Lynda La Plante has lived an illustrious life and has the stories to prove it. ‘Screamingly funny and deliciously candid, full of wisdom and joie de vivre, this is memoir with the grip of a thriller’ ERIN KELLY
From her early days in Liverpool to her unexpected acceptance into RADA, joining peers Anthony Hopkins, John Hurt and Ian McShane; from beginning her scriptwriting career with Widows and Prime Suspect and becoming a BAFTA award-winning writer and producer, Lynda’s tales of stage and screen will have you gasping in shock as well as laughing in the aisles.
Lynda has an important story to tell, one of breaking down stereotypes and blazing a trail for others along the way. Starting her writing career in the eighties, an era of entrenched gender inequality both in front of and behind the camera, Lynda faced innumerable obstacles to her vision.
Getting Away with Murder shows how she overcame them to create generation-defining television and become a multi-million-copy Sunday Times bestselling author. Still at the very top of her game, Lynda shares her story on her own terms, in a way that’s guaranteed to make you laugh, cry and be inspired to live a life without limits.
Markus Zusak There’s a madman dog beside me, and the hounds of memory ahead of us. It’s love and beasts and wild mistakes, and regret, but never to change things … What happens when the Zusaks open their family home to three big, wild, pound-hardened dogs – Reuben, a wolf at your door with a hacksaw; Archer, blond, beautiful, deadly; and the rancorously smiling Frosty, who walks like a rolling thunderstorm?
The answer can only be there are street fights, park fights, public shamings, property trashing, bodily injuries, stomach pumping, purest comedy, shocking tragedy, and carnage that needs to be seen to be believed … not to mention the odd police visit at some ungodly hour of the morning.
There is a reckoning of shortcomings and failure, a strengthening of will, but most important of all, an explosion of love – and the joy and recognition of family.
From one of the world’s great storytellers comes a tender, motley and exquisitely written memoir about the human need for both connection and disorder; but it’s also a love letter to the animals who bring hilarity and beauty – but also the visceral truth of the natural world – straight to our doors and into our lives, and change us forever.
Eric Beecher Crikey owner and ex-News Corp and Fairfax editor lifts the lid on the abuse of power by media moguls – from William Randolph Hearst to Elon Musk – and on his own unique experience of working for (and being sued by) the Murdochs. What’s gone wrong with our media? Eric Beecher’s answer its owners, many of the biggest of them at least. They have exploited their privileged position in society to distort journalism and accumulate vast wealth and power.
Few people know the media like Eric Beecher. He has worked at Fairfax and News Corp, founded and sold Text Media, and is currently the biggest shareholder in the news website Crikey. He’s been journalist, editor and media proprietor, and has the rare distinction of having both worked for and recently been sued by (unsuccessfully) the Murdochs.
This is a book only he could a portrait of the rise of media moguls over the past two centuries, and an analysis of how they have destroyed news journalism and undermined truth by using the shield of the ‘freedom of the press’ to cover their quest for personal power. In a year that will see Fox News and Donald Trump fight an election, no book could be more timely and important in our understanding of how the media has become an agent of misinformation.
The Men Who Killed the News is deeply informed by Beecher’s own experience and delivers engaging first-hand insights. His in-depth research takes us from Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst – the first sensationalist newspaper owners in the US, who made fortunes and established dynasties – to their UK successors Lords Northcliffe and Beaverbrook; contemporary media dictators like Conrad Black, Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch; and on to Musk and Zuckerberg, the latest, tech-inflected manifestation of the mogul.
In 2024, more people will vote in elections than ever never has the role of the media been more virulent and of more urgent interest. Eric Beecher is the perfect guide to understanding how media power the players, the techniques, the strategies, the behind-the-scenes machinations.
Andrew Hamilton Andrew Hamilton thought he had life beautiful fiancée, a popular pizza restaurant, two beloved dogs and a thriving side business supplying massive quantities of magic mushrooms and LSD to eager Sydney-siders.
Then one night police raided his Surry Hills home and it all came crashing down. Andrew’s predicament didn’t sink in at first, mainly because he was on a three-day cocaine bender and just wanted to sleep it off. When he was transferred to Parklea Correctional Centre, his prison-inspired existential dilemma began.
The Profound Benefits of a Stint in Prison is a sometimes confronting, more often hilarious insider’s view to life inside. Andrew left prison a changed man, determined to turn his life around. This is the story of what happens when max denial collides with the reality of max security.
J.D. Robb On a hot August night, Lt. Eve Dallas and her husband, Roarke, speed through the streets of Manhattan to the Down and Dirty club, where a joyful, boisterous pre-wedding girls’ night out has turned into a murder scene. One of the brides lies in a pool of blood, garroted in a private room where she was preparing a surprise for her fiancée—two scrimped and saved-for tickets to Hawaii.
Despite the dozens of people present, useful witnesses are hard to come by. It all brings back some bad memories for Eve. In her uniform days, she’d suffered an assault in the very same room—but she’d been able to fight back and survive. She’d gotten justice. And now she needs to provide some for poor young Erin.
Eve knows that the level of violence and the apparent premeditation involved suggest a volatile mix of hidden, heated passion and ice-cold calculation. This is a crime that can be countered only by hard detective work and relentless dedication—and Eve will not stop until she finds the killer who destroyed this couple’s dreams before the honeymoon even began…
Brooke Hardwick Kate arrives on the wild, remote island of Rathlin in the freezing Irish Channel for a ten-day writers’ retreat. Plagued by memories she can’t unravel and desperate to understand the breakdown of her marriage, Kate is determined to leave the retreat with answers.
As the retreat’s director uses techniques that tap into the eerie mythology of the island, Kate becomes increasingly fascinated by him and her surrounds. But as the temperature plummets and the strange therapy intensifies, her memories unspool. Triggered into a series of disturbing flashbacks, Kate realises her past hides a frightening truth, but can she trust her own mind?
Faced with dark secrets and duplicity, Kate must unlock the answers she’s so desperate to find – and survive the danger she has unwittingly walked into.
Sarah Pearse A perpetual drifter, Kier Templer lives her life on the road. Dubbed “the monster’s daughter” after her mother’s infamous crime, Kier has left her hometown and twin behind. Kier is haunted by the past, but one thing has always bound her to her brother, the distinctive maps she designs of the places she’s explored. When Kier abruptly goes off-grid without sending him her latest, Penn knows something is seriously wrong.
Elin Warner is on vacation with her brother Isaac in a rugged national park in Portugal—the last place Kier was seen. It’s supposed to be a time for the siblings to reconnect, but when Elin discovers Kier’s disturbing final map, it seems the park—especially the inhabitants of a camp buried deep in the forest—holds clues to what happened to Kier, and a lot more besides.
After a sinister discovery, Elin is shocked to learn Kier’s disappearance is more personal to her than she’d ever imagined. And as she seeks the truth, Elin soon finds the wilderness hides something far darker than shifting shadows…
Brian Freeman It’s been over a decade since Nash Rollins recruited a brilliant, talented, but disaffected young man named David Webb to join Treadstone. Webb became the agent known as Cain—and later took on the identity of Jason Bourne.
That violent winter—which included Cain’s first mission for Treadstone—was also a story of betrayal in ways that David never knew. So after the injury that erased Bourne’s whole life, Nash lied about the circumstances of David’s recruitment to Treadstone. He was afraid that learning the truth might drive Bourne out of the agency forever.
But now, when Bourne meets a woman who recognizes him as David Webb, the secrets of those days begin to come out—and Bourne is forced to confront the dangerous ghosts of a past he doesn’t even remember.
Susie Dent An anonymous letter arrives at the offices of the Clarendon English Dictionary containing a challenge for the team of lexicographers working there. It’s clear that’s it’s not the usual run-of-the-mill, eccentric enquiry. The letter hints at secrets, lies and a year. 2010. For Martha Thornhill, the new senior editor, that year can mean only one the summer her brilliant, beautiful older sister Charlie went missing.
After a decade living abroad, Martha has returned to her father, her family home and the city whose institutions have defined her family, but the ghosts she thought at rest were only waiting for her to return.
More letters arrive, pointing towards a secret in the heart of the dictionary itself. As Martha and her colleagues start pulling apart the clues, the questions become more insistent and troubling. Charlie’s disappearance is one of a series of secret absences going back centuries, and someone wants to keep those secrets buried.
