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How many Australians born in the 137 years since Truganini's death learnt her legend and scarcely thought deeper about the enormity of the loss she represented, and the history that led to it? Her spirit casts a long shadow over Australian history, but we have nearly all of us found a way to avert our eyes from its meaning. In The War of the Worlds, Noel Pearson considers the most confronting issue of Australian history: the question of genocide, in early Tasmania and elsewhere. With eloquence and passion, he explores the 'emotional convulsions of identification and memory' that he feels on encountering these events. Re-reading Dickens and Darwin, Pearson acknowledges the 'fatal logic' of the colonial project, and seeks to draw out its meaning for Australians today. Noel Pearson is a lawyer and activist, and the founder of the Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership. He is the author of Up from the Mission and two acclaimed Quarterly Essays, Radical Hope and A Rightful Place.

I ask a young 200-kilo patient what he snacks on. "Nothing," he says. I look him in the eye. Nothing? He nods. I ask him about his chronic skin infections, his diabetes. He tears up: "I eat hot chips and fried dim sims and drink three bottles of Coke every afternoon. The truth is I'm addicted to eating. I'm addicted." He punches his thigh. In Fat City, Karen Hitchcock unpicks the idea of obesity as a disease. In a riveting blend of story and analysis, she explores chemistry, psychology and the impulse to excess to explain the West's growing obesity epidemic. Karen Hitchcock is a doctor and writer. She is the author of an acclaimed Quarterly Essay, Dear Life, and an award-winning collection of short stories, Little White Slips. She writes a regular column for The Monthly.

Non-freedom to the Western mind is inevitably linked with images of backwardness - Soviet tractors, East German Trabants, Kim Jong Il's haircut. But non-freedom these days is also iPads, iPhones and a dazzling array of less iconic but ubiquitous consumer goods that flood our stores, our homes and which increasingly are used to define our ideas of worth and happiness. It is a full-lipped smile achieved with the aid of collagen made from skin flensed from dead Chinese convicts. The Australian Disease is Richard Flanagan's perceptive, hilarious, searing exposé of the conformity that afflicts our public life. From Weary Dunlop to Vassily Grossman, from David Hicks to Craig Thomson, Flanagan takes us on a wildly entertaining and unsettling trip. If we are to find hope, he says, we must take our compass more from ourselves and less from the powerful. Richard Flanagan's most recent novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North won the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

The orchestra has tuned, the lights in the hall have dimmed, and the conductor's baton signals the downbeat for the beginning of the romance. Settle back - it's telling you something... The history of classical music is littered with murder, adultery, bigamy, fraud, sado-masochism, riches, poverty, gluttony, nervous breakdowns, bizarre behaviour and terrible, terrible toilet humour (Mozart was the prime exponent of the latter). Classical music -nice? Not at all. It's the most immediate expression of mental and emotional extremes: often deceptive, sometimes dangerous and frequently a discomforting revelation. Swooning documents the all too human flaws in the lives of the great composers by loosely following the sequence of emotions as experienced in a love affair - one that doesn't work out, of course. In this fully revised and updated edition, Christopher Lawrence leads us through the listening experience, from anger and Beethoven to sadness and Tchaikovsky, triumph and Wagner and freedom and Mozart - it's all here in this whimsical guide to the conduct of a romance, with some handy hints on how to make it more, well, harmonious. One of Australia's favourite radio personalities, Christopher Lawrence boasts a career spanning more than 40 years of broadcasting. He is best known for his work with ABC Classic FM. Christopher has written three best-selling books: Swooning; Hymns of the Forefathers, based on his documentary series about the history of hymns seen on ABC TV; and Swing Symphony.

America is fading, and China will soon be the dominant power in our region. What does this mean for Australia's future?

Love-crazed geniuses, a killer soundtrack and a garnish of imagined pillow talk - here are the real love stories of the great composers as you have never heard them before.

Whatever happened to good government? What are the signs of bad government? And can Malcolm Turnbull apply the lessons of the past in a very different world? In this crisp, profound and witty essay, Laura Tingle seeks answers to these questions. She ranges from ancient Rome to the demoralised state of the once-great Australian public service, from the jingoism of the past to the tabloid scandals of the internet age. Drawing on new interviews with key figures, she shows the long-term harm that has come from undermining the public sector as a repository of ideas and experience. She tracks the damage done when responsibility is "contracted out," and when politicians shut out or abuse their traditional sources of advice. This essay about the art of government is part defence, part lament. In Political Amnesia, Laura Tingle examines what has gone wrong with our politics, and how we might put things right. Laura Tingle is political editor of the Australian Financial Review. She won the Paul Lyneham Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism in 2004, and Walkley awards in 2005 and 2011. In 2010 she was shortlisted for the John Button Prize for political writing. She appears regularly on Radio National's Late Night Live and ABC-TV's Insiders.

Ana's in a detention centre and Jono's life is spiralling out of control. Can their growing romance overcome the borders between them?

A delightful look at chance and outrageous fortune In 1968, John Howard missed out on winning the state seat of Drummoyne by just 420 votes. Howard reflects: 'I think back how fortunate I was to have lost.' It left him free to stand for a safe federal seat in 1974 and become one of Australia's longest-serving prime ministers. In The Luck of Politics, Andrew Leigh weaves together numbers and stories to show the many ways luck can change the course of political events. This is a book full of fascinating facts and intriguing findings. Why is politics more like poker than chess? Does the length of your surname affect your political prospects? What about your gender? And who was our unluckiest politician? Charles Griffiths served as the Labor member for Shortland for 23 years. It was an unusually long career, but alas, his service perfectly coincided with federal Labor's longest stint out of power: 1949 to 1972! From Winston Churchill to George Bush, Margaret Thatcher to Paul Keating, this book will persuade you that luck shapes politics - and that maybe, just maybe, we should avoid the temptation to revere the winners and revile the losers. 'A fascinating look at chance, the covert kingmaker in politics.'- Peter Hartcher 'Andrew Leigh takes the simplest idea there is - luck - and threatens to remake your basic understanding of politics with it. Then he succeeds. Lucky for us.'- Waleed Aly 'It's rare to find a politician prepared to acknowledge the role of luck - sheer chance - in political success and failure. Andrew Leigh doesn't just acknowledge it, he interrogates it, using fascinating historical anecdotes to illustrate his tale.'- Lenore Taylor Andrew Leigh is the federal member for Fraser and the Shadow Assistant Treasurer. Before being elected in 2010, he was a professor of economics at the Australian National University. His books include Disconnected (2010), Battlers and Billionaires (2013) and The Economics of Just About Everything (2014).

Last year was a "blood year" in the Middle East - massacres and beheadings, fallen cities, collapsed and collapsing states, the unravelling of a decade of Western strategy. We saw the rise of ISIS, the splintering of government in Iraq, and foreign fighters - many from Europe, Australia and Africa - flowing into Syria at a rate ten times that during the height of the Iraq War. What went wrong? In Blood Year, David Kilcullen calls on twenty-five years' experience to answer that question. This is a vivid, urgent account of the War on Terror by someone who helped shape its strategy, as well as witnessing its evolution on the ground. Kilcullen looks to strategy and history to make sense of the crisis. What are the roots and causes of the global jihad movement? What is ISIS? What threats does it pose to Australia? What does its rise say about the effectiveness of the War on Terror since 9/11, and what does a coherent strategy look like after a disastrous year? "As things stand in mid-2015, Western countries . . . face a larger, more unified, capable, experienced and savage enemy, in a less stable, more fragmented region. It isn't just ISIS - al-Qaeda has emerged from its eclipse and is back in the game in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Syria and Yemen. We're dealing with not one, but two global terrorist organisations, each with its own regional branches, plus a vastly larger radicalised population at home and a massive flow of foreign fighters." David Kilcullen, Blood Year David Kilcullen was a senior advisor to General David Petraeus in 2007 and 2008, when he helped to design and monitor the Iraq War coalition troop "Surge." He was then appointed special advisor for counterinsurgency to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Before this, from 2005 to 2006, he was chief strategist in the Counterterrorism Bureau of the US State Department. He has also been an adviser to the UK and Australian governments, NATO and the International Security Assistance Force. He is a former Australian Army officer and the author of three acclaimed books: The Accidental Guerrilla, Counterinsurgency and Out of the Mountains.

Be delighted, be infuriated, be inspired - but above all be entertained! This is the ultimate puzzle book: a year's worth of Mungo MacCallum's cryptic crosswords from The Saturday Paper, plus a preface from the maestro himself.MUNGO MacCALLUM wrote cryptic crosswords for the Bulletin and the Weekly. He is the author of The Whitlam Mob and The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia's Prime Ministers. He has long been one of Australia's most influential and entertaining political journalists, in a career spanning more than four decades. He has worked with the Australian, the Age, the Financial Review, the Sydney Morning Herald and numerous magazines, as well as the ABC, SBS, Channel Nine and Channel Ten.

In modern Australia, productivity is all that matters, our leaders tell us. Economic growth above all else. But is this really what we, the people, want? Does it make our lives and our communities better?If the high priests of economics want the credit for Australia's economic growth over the last three decades, they must also wear the blame for the social destruction that has accompanied it - the devastation of once prosperous industrial centres and the suburbs they sustained, as factories closed and workers were forced to abandon their trades. The social costs of this 'economic modernisation' have been immense, but today are virtually ignored. The fracturing of communities continues apace.An Economy Is Not a Society is a passionate and personal J'accuse against the people whose abandonment of moral policy making has ripped the guts out of Australia's old industrial communities, robbed the country of manufacturing knowhow, reversed our national ethos of egalitarianism and broken the sense of common purpose that once existed between rulers and ruled.Those in power, Dennis Glover argues, must abandon the idea that a better society is purely about offering individuals more dollars in their pockets. What we desperately need is a conversation about the lives, working conditions, jobs and communities we want for ourselves and our families - and we need to choose a future that is designed to benefit all the Australian people, not just some.DENNIS GLOVER is the son and brother of Dandenong factory workers. He grew up in Doveton before studying at Monash University and King's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in history. He has worked for two decades as an academic, newspaper columnist, political adviser and speechwriter to Labor leaders and senior ministers.

In hardware, petrol, general merchandise and liquor, and above all in groceries, Coles and Woolworths jointly rule Australia's retail landscape. On average, every man, woman and child in this country spends $100 a week across their many outlets. What does such dominance mean for suppliers? And is it good for consumers? In Supermarket Monsters, journalist and author Malcolm Knox shines a light on Australia's twin mega-retailers, exploring how they have built and exploited their market power. Knox reveals the unavoidable and often intimidating tactics both companies use to get their way. In return for cheap milk and bread, he argues, we as consumers are risking much more: quality, diversity and community. Malcolm Knox is a former literary editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and has won a Walkley Award for journalism. His books include Jamaica and The Life.

The eighties were my formative years, and while other teenagers were gyrating to rock 'n' roll, we were praying for revival. We were taking communion, not cocaine. We treated virginity like a wedding present, not a cold sore. And why wouldn't we? We were told we could be, we already were, anything we wanted to be... We were armed and dangerous. Armed with the power of God and dangerous in the eyes of Satan. Tanya Levin grew up in the church that became Hillsong-the country's most ambitious, entrepreneurial and influential religious corporation. People in Glass Houses tells how a small Assemblies of God church in a suburban school hall became a multi-million dollar tax-free enterprise and a powerful force in Australia today - and now the world. Opening up the world of Christian fundamentalism, this is a powerful, personal and at times very funny exploration of an all-singing, all- swaying mega church.

Rosie and Nona are sisters. Yapas. They are also best friends. It doesn't matter that Rosie is white and Nona is Aboriginal: their family connections tie them together for life. Born just five days apart in a remote corner of the Northern Territory, the girls are inseperable, until Nona moves away at the age of nine.

Across the globe, the so-called Big Four accounting and audit firms - Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, and KPMG - are massively influential. Together, they earn more than US$100 billion annually and employ almost one million people. In many profound ways, they have changed how we work, how we manage, how we invest and how we are governed.Stretching back centuries, their history is a fascinating story of wealth, power and luck. But today, the Big Four face an uncertain future - thanks to their push into China; their vulnerability to digital disruption and competition; and the hazards of providing traditional services in a new era of transparency.Both colourful and authoritative, this account of the past, present and likely future of the Big Four is essential reading for anyone perplexed or fascinated by professional services, working in the industry, contemplating joining a professional services firm, or simply curious about the fate of the global economy.

As you travel Africa, you will find the way of ubuntu - the universal bond that connects all of humanity as one. At the age of twenty-eight, while sitting in a friend's backyard in the remote mining township of Jabiru, Heather Ellis has a light-bulb moment: she is going to ride a motorcycle across Africa. The idea just feels right - no matter that she's never done any long-distance motorcycle travelling before, and has never even set foot on the African continent. Twelve months later, Heather unloads her Yamaha TT600 at the docks in Durban, South Africa, and her adventure begins. Her travels take her to the dizzying heights of Mt Kilimanjaro and the Rwenzori Mountains, to the deserts of northern Kenya where she is befriended by armed bandits and rescued by Turkana fishermen, to a stand-off with four Ugandan men intent on harm, and to a voyage on a 'floating village' on the mighty Zaire River. Everywhere she goes Heather is aided by locals and travellers alike, who take her into their homes and hearts, helping her to truly understand the spirit of ubuntu - a Bantu word meaning 'I am because you are'. Ubuntu is the extraordinary story of a young woman who, alone and against all odds, rode a motorcycle to some of the world's most remote, beautiful and dangerous places. Heather Ellis has worked as a radiation safety technician, a motorcycle courier, a journalist for News Ltd and in communications for an NGO. She lives near Melbourne with her three children, and is currently writing the sequel to Ubuntu while working as a freelance journalist and professional speaker. And she still rides motorcycles.

Les Murray's new volume of poems - his first in five years - continues his use of molten language. From 'The Black Beaches' to 'Radiant Pleats, Mulgoa', from 'High Speed Trap Space' to 'The Electric, 1960', this is verse that renews and transforms our sense of the world. 'No poet has ever travelled like this, whether in reality or simply in mind ...Seeing the shape or hearing the sound of one thing in another, he finds forms' - Clive James, The Monthly 'Would somebody please, please give this guy his Nobel Prize?' - John Timpane, The Philadelphia Enquirer.

Something Special, Something Rare presents outstanding short fiction by Australia's finest female writers. These are tales of love, secrets, doubt and torment, the everyday and the extraordinary. A sleepy town is gripped by delusory grief after the movie being filmed there wraps and leaves. A lingering heartbreak is replayed on Facebook. An ordinary family walks a shaky line between hopelessness and redemption. Brilliant, shocking and profound, these tales will leave you reeling in ways that only a great short story can. Kate Grenville * Mandy Sayer * Penni Russon * Favel Parrett * Tegan Bennett Daylight * Sonya Hartnett * Isabelle Li * Gillian Essex * Brenda Walker * Gillian Mears * Fiona MacFarlane * Joan London * Karen Hitchcock * Charlotte Wood * Tara June Winch * Cate Kennedy * Alice Pung * Anna Krien * Delia Falconer * Rebekah Clarkson

In the tradition of Wild and Tracks, one woman's story of how she left the city and found her soul. Disillusioned and burnt out by her job, Claire Dunn quits a comfortable life to spend a year off the grid in a wilderness survival program. Her new forest home swings between ally and enemy as reality - and the rain - sets in. Claire's adventure unfolds over four seasons and in the essential order of survival: shelter, water, fire and food. She arrives in summer, buoyant with idealism, and is initially confronted with physical challenges: building a shelter, escaping the vicious insects and making fire without matches. By winter, however, her emotional landscape has become the toughest terrain of all. Can she connect with her inner spirit to guide her journey onwards? Brimming with earthy charm and hard-won wisdom, My Year Without Matches is one woman's quest for belonging, to the land and to herself. When Claire finally cracks life in the bush wide open, she discovers a wild heart to warm the coldest night. "A brave and adventurous book ... Claire's writing is full of life and profound surprises." - Anne Deveson "An entertaining look at how Dunn survived for four seasons in a 'hundred acres of baking scrubland" - Sun Herald "With earthy, expressive honesty she shares her struggles [and] the swooping highs of crafting life out of a block of unforgiving scrub... by sharing such an intimate journey, Claire has given us all a gift." - WellBeing Magazine

If the goal of our justice system is to reduce crime and create a safer society, then we must do better. According to conventional wisdom, severely punishing offenders reduces the likelihood that they'll offend again. Why, then, do so many who go to prison continue to commit crimes after their release? What do we actually know about offenders and the reasons they break the law? In Crime & Punishment, Russell Marks argues that the lives of most criminal offenders - and indeed of many victims of crime - are marked by often staggering disadvantage. For many offenders, prison only increases their chances of committing further crimes. And despite what some media outlets and politicians want us to believe, harsher sentences do not help most victims to heal. Drawing on his experience as a lawyer, Marks eloquently makes the case for restorative justice and community correction, whereby offenders are obliged to engage with victims and make amends. Crime & Punishment is a provocative call for change to a justice system in desperate need of renewal.

All music is a synthesis of intellectual design and bodily urge. The human soul cannot make do with dancing alone - it will inevitably seek more fantastic musical designs, more complex patterns, more rarefied sounds. Equally, when the intellect dominates for too long, we listen out for music we can tap our feet to, something we can go home humming . . . Minimalism, savagery, the raw and the cooked, the primal and the pre-verbal, Elvis's hips, The Rite of Spring . . . Earth Dances is an original investigation of how music and primitivism intersect - a dazzling journey through music and culture. With alternating chapters of criticism and interviews, including with Liza Lim and Brian Eno, author and broadcaster Andrew Ford explores the relationship between primal forms of music and the most refined examples of the art - between passion and control. He looks at the voice, the drum, the drone and the dance, at 'music that is in touch with something fundamental in our existence'.

How well do you write? Good communication is a skill required by all professionals. Whether you're preparing reports, conducting reviews or simply writing emails, expressing your ideas clearly and persuasively is fundamental to your success in the workplace. Susan McKerihan has spent over twenty years assisting corporate clients to perfect their written communications. In Clear & Concise she shares her secrets, using real-world examples to show how to avoid common writing traps, such as wordiness, ambiguity and repetition. By eliminating these habitual errors from your work and by using a logical top-down structure, you can improve the readability of your writing. And when your words are lucid and focused, your thinking becomes sharper, and you become more impressive and more productive. Clear & Concise is the only writing guide you will ever need.

Over the next two years, Australians will decide if and how Aboriginal people will be recognised in the Constitution. Professor Greg Craven writes: 'We have a committed Prime Minister, and a committed opposition. We have a receptive electorate. There will never be a better time. We have no choice but to address the question.