Flesh Wounds

Flesh Wounds
Title Flesh Wounds PDF eBook
Author Richard Glover
Publisher HarperCollins Australia
Total Pages 124
Release 2015-09-01
Genre Biography & Autobiography
ISBN 1460705025

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A deluded mother who invented her past, an alcoholic father who couldn't deal with the present, a son who wondered if this could really be his family. Richard Glover's favourite dinner party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest Parents?'. It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob, who made up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee, nudist and stuffed-toy collector. There was his father, a distant alcoholic, who ran through a gamut of wives, yachts and failed dreams. And there was Richard himself, a confused teenager, vulnerable to strange men, trying to find a family he could belong to. As he eventually accepted, the only way to make sense of the present was to go back to the past - but beware of what you might find there. Truth can leave wounds - even if they are only flesh wounds. Part poignant family memoir, part hopeful search for the truth, this is a book for anyone who's wondered if their family is the oddest one on the planet. The answer: 'No'. There is always something stranger out there. PRAISE FOR FLESH WOUNDS 'Both poignant and wildly entertaining' - Sydney Morning Herald 'A new classic ... a breathtaking accomplishment in style and empathy' - The Australian 'Heartbreaking and hilarious ... I couldn't put it down' - Sun Herald 'Engrossing and extremely funny'- The Saturday Paper 'Not since Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James has there been a funnier, more poignant portrait of an Australian childhood.' - Australian Financial Review 'Sad, funny, revealing, optimistic and hopeful' - Jeanette Winterson

Love, Clancy

Love, Clancy
Title Love, Clancy PDF eBook
Author Richard Glover
Publisher HarperCollins Australia
Total Pages 147
Release 2020-10-01
Genre Humor
ISBN 1460712803

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Heartfelt and hilarious, this is a book for anyone who has tried to imagine what their dog was thinking. Human beings often write about their dogs, but the dogs don't usually get a right of reply. In Love, Clancy, Richard Glover has collated the letters sent by Clancy to his parents in the bush. They are full of a young dog's musings about the oddities of human behaviour, life in the big city, and his own attempts to fit in. You'll meet Clancy as a puppy, making his first attempt to train his humans, then see him grow into a mature activist, demanding more attention be paid to a dog's view of the world. Along the way, there are adventures aplenty, involving robotic vacuum cleaners, songs about cheese, trips to the country and stolen legs of ham - all told with a dog's deep wisdom when it comes to what's important in life. Delightfully illustrated by cartoonist Cathy Wilcox. PRAISE FOR RICHARD GLOVER Love, Clancy 'Unnervingly accurate, always funny, Richard Glover effortlessly inhabits the fine mind of a dog' - Julia Baird The Land Before Avocado 'This is vintage Glover - warm, wise and very, very funny. Brimming with excruciating insights into life in the late sixties and early seventies, The Land Before Avocado explains why this was the cultural revolution we had to have' Hugh Mackay 'Hilarious and horrifying, this is the ultimate intergenerational conversation starter' Annabel Crabb 'Richard Glover's just-published The Land Before Avocado is a wonderful and witty journey back in time to life in the early 1970s' Richard Wakelin, Australian Financial Review Flesh Wounds 'A funny, moving, very entertaining memoir' Bill Bryson, New York Times 'The best Australian memoir I've read is Richard Glover's Flesh Wounds' Greg Sheridan, The Australian

The Dreamers

The Dreamers
Title The Dreamers PDF eBook
Author Karen Thompson Walker
Publisher Random House
Total Pages 336
Release 2019-01-15
Genre Fiction
ISBN 0812994175

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NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • An ordinary town is transformed by a mysterious illness that triggers perpetual sleep in this mesmerizing novel from the bestselling author of The Age of Miracles. “Stunning.”—Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven • “A startling, beautiful portrait of a community in peril.”—Entertainment Weekly NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Glamour • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping One night in an isolated college town in the hills of Southern California, a first-year student stumbles into her dorm room, falls asleep—and doesn’t wake up. She sleeps through the morning, into the evening. Her roommate, Mei, cannot rouse her. Neither can the paramedics, nor the perplexed doctors at the hospital. When a second girl falls asleep, and then a third, Mei finds herself thrust together with an eccentric classmate as panic takes hold of the college and spreads to the town. A young couple tries to protect their newborn baby as the once-quiet streets descend into chaos. Two sisters turn to each other for comfort as their survivalist father prepares for disaster. Those affected by the illness, doctors discover, are displaying unusual levels of brain activity, higher than has ever been recorded before. They are dreaming heightened dreams—but of what? Written in luminous prose, The Dreamers is a breathtaking and beautiful novel, startling and provocative, about the possibilities contained within a human life—if only we are awakened to them. Praise for The Dreamers “Walker’s roving fictive eye by turns probes characters’ innermost feelings and zooms out to coolly parse topics like reality versus delusion. . . . [It has] the perfect ambiguous frame for a tense and layered plot.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “[Walker’s] gripping, provocative novel should come with a warning: may cause insomnia.”—People (Book of the Week) “Powerful and moving . . . written with symphonic sweep.”—The New York Times Book Review “2019’s first must-read novel . . . Alternately terrifying and moving . . . The Dreamers is overflowing with humanity.”—Jezebel “This is an exquisite work of intimacy. Walker’s sentences are smooth, emotionally arresting—of a true, ethereal beauty. . . . This book achieves [a] dazzling, aching humanity.”—Entertainment Weekly

Gold, Oil and Avocados

Gold, Oil and Avocados
Title Gold, Oil and Avocados PDF eBook
Author Andy Robinson
Publisher Melville House
Total Pages 353
Release 2021-08-17
Genre History
ISBN 1612199356

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The past decade has seen major political upheaval in Latin America--from Brazil to Chile to Venezuela to Bolivia--but to understand what happened, ask first where your quinoa and lithium batteries came from... The 21st century began optimistically in Latin America. Left-leaning leaders armed with programs to reduce poverty and reclaim national wealth were seeing results—but as the aughts gave way to the teens, they began to fall like dominos. Where did the dreams of this "pink tide" go? Look no further than the original culprits of Latin American disenfranchisement: resource-rich land and unscrupulous extraction. Recounting the story commodity by commodity, Andy Robinson reveals what oxen have to do with the rise of Jair Bolsonaro, how quinoa explains the mob that descended on Evo Morales, and why oil is the culprit behind the protracted coup in Venezuela. In addition to the usual suspects like gold and bananas which underscored the original plunder of the Americas, Robinson also shows how a new generation of valuable resources—like coltan for smartphones, lithium for electric cars, and niobium for SpaceX rockets—have become important players in the fate of Latin America. And as the energy transition sets mineral prices soaring, Latin America remains at the mercy of the rollercoaster of commodity prices. In Gold, Oil, and Avocados, Robinson takes readers from the salt plains of Chile to the depths of the Amazonian jungle to stitch together the story of Latin America's last decade, showing how the imperial plunder of the past carries on today under a new name.

The Whole Bright Year

The Whole Bright Year
Title The Whole Bright Year PDF eBook
Author Debra Oswald
Publisher Penguin Group Australia
Total Pages 304
Release 2018-01-29
Genre Fiction
ISBN 0143788264

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In the summer of 1976 it's picking season on an Australian stone-fruit orchard run by Celia, a hard-working woman in her early forties. Years ago, when her husband was killed as a bystander in an armed robbery, Celia left the city and brought her newborn daughter Zoe to this farm for a secure life. Now sixteen, Zoe is a passionate, intelligent girl, chafing against her mother's protectiveness, yearning to find intensity and a bit of danger. Barging into this world as itinerant fruit-pickers come a desperate brother and sister from Sydney. The hard-bitten Sheena has kidnapped her wild, ebullient eighteen-year-old brother Kieran and dragged him out west, away from trouble in the city. Kieran and Zoe are drawn to each other the instant they meet, sparking excitement, worry, lust, trouble . . . How do we protect people we love? How do we bear watching them go out into the perilous world with no guarantee of safety or happiness? What bargains do people make with darkness in order to survive? From the creator of Offspring and author of Useful, The Whole Bright Year is a gripping, wry and tender novel about how holding on too tightly can cost us what we love.

The Dud Avocado

The Dud Avocado
Title The Dud Avocado PDF eBook
Author Elaine Dundy
Publisher New York Review of Books
Total Pages 280
Release 2010-11-17
Genre Fiction
ISBN 1590174135

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The Dud Avocado follows the romantic and comedic adventures of a young American who heads overseas to conquer Paris in the late 1950s. Edith Wharton and Henry James wrote about the American girl abroad, but it was Elaine Dundy’s Sally Jay Gorce who told us what she was really thinking. Charming, sexy, and hilarious, The Dud Avocado gained instant cult status when it was first published and it remains a timeless portrait of a woman hell-bent on living. “I had to tell someone how much I enjoyed The Dud Avocado. It made me laugh, scream, and guffaw (which, incidentally, is a great name for a law firm).” –Groucho Marx "[The Dud Avocado] is one of the best novels about growing up fast..." -The Guardian

The Land Before Avocado (16pt Large Print Edition)

The Land Before Avocado (16pt Large Print Edition)
Title The Land Before Avocado (16pt Large Print Edition) PDF eBook
Author Richard Glover
Publisher
Total Pages 376
Release 2018-12-04
Genre
ISBN 9780369306180

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The new book from the bestselling author of Flesh Wounds. A funny and frank look at the way Australia used to be - and just how far we have come. 'It was simpler time'. We had more fun back then'. 'Everyone could afford a house'. There's plenty of nostalgia right now for the Australia of the past, but what was it really like? In The Land Before Avocado, Richard Glover takes a journey to an almost unrecognisable Australia. It's a vivid portrait of a quite peculiar land: a place that is scary and weird, dangerous and incomprehensible, and, now and then, surprisingly appealing. It's the Australia of his childhood. The Australia of the late '60s and early '70s. Let's break the news now: they didn't have avocado. It's a place of funny clothing and food that was appalling, but amusingly so. It is also the land of staggeringly awful attitudes - often enshrined in law - towards anybody who didn't fit in. The Land Before Avocado will make you laugh and cry, feel angry and inspired. And leave you wondering how bizarre things were, not so long ago. Most of all, it will make you realise how far we've come - and how much further we can go. PRAISE Richard Glover's just-published The Land Before Avocado is a wonderful and witty journey back in time to life in the early 1970s. For a start, he deftly reclaims the book's title fruit from those who have positioned it as a proxy for all that is wrong with today's supposedly feckless and spendthrift young adults. Rather than maligning the avocado (and young people), he cleverly appropriates the fruit as an exemplar of how far we have come since the 1970s' Richard Wakelin, Australian Financial Review