Chronicles social media over two millennia, from papyrus letters that Cicero used to exchange news across the Empire to today, reminding us how modern behavior echoes that of prior centuries and encouraging debate and discussion about how we'll communicate in the future.

'Memoirs such as this will ensure we do not lose the struggle against "forgetting" - that sly accomplice of tyranny' Magda Szubanski 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 some way. She longed to have relatives and knew precious little about her Czech father's childhood as a refugee. On the night before Juliet's father died, in 2006, Juliet's father suddenly looked up and said: 'The plane is in the hangar.' In the years after his death, Juliet comes to truly understand the significance of these words. On a trip to Prague she is shocked to see the Rieden name written many times over on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue memorial. These names become the catalyst for a life-changing journey that uncovers a personal Holocaust tragedy of epic proportions. Juliet traces the grim fate of her father's cousins, aunts and uncles on visits to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt concentration camps and learns about the extremes of cruelty, courage and kindness. Then in a locked box in Britain's National Archives, she discovers a stash of documents including letters from her father that reveal intimate details of his struggle. Meticulously researched and beautifully told, this is the moving story of a woman's quest to piece together the hidden parts of her father's life and the unimaginable losses he was determined to protect his children from. PRAISE FOR THE WRITING ON THE WALL 'Rieden sets out to chart her story with a journalist's rigour: facts, timelines, archival material. She does it brilliantly. But it is the small, powerful resonant moments within a harrowing arc that bring her story alive.' The Australian

Peter Bayer was seventy-three. He’d taught at the school just up the road for most of his life and, when the wall came down, saw no reason to move. Nobody could say life had been easy, and when it was built, he’d lost contact with many friends, but he’d learnt to enjoy life as best he could and had had the good fortune of a happy marriage to Elsa. It’s 2006. Peter Bayer and his wife, Elsa, live on the East side of Berlin, as they’ve always done, even when that wasn’t an attractive proposition. What limits Peter’s freedom nowadays isn’t a concrete wall but often feels like one. Elsa has dementia and barely recognises him, so his life is not only hard work, but it’s lonely. What makes it lonelier is that his wife’s illness has given her a distorted view of the past and one that would horrify the woman he married. When Helen, a recently widowed English woman, rents the flat Peter owns nearby, he experiences the kinds of conversations that used to be normal for him, which makes his current reality all the more painful. Helen’s come to Berlin to find out more about her husband’s past in the city and learns things from their German friends that she was unaware of when he was alive. During her struggle to come to terms with her present life, Helen sees that the terrible demands on Peter’s life are almost impossible to endure. Other stories in the book show the toll of war, as fear is passed from one generation to another and we see how the power of secrecy never disappears. They also reveal how gratitude can take various forms and how intergenerational friendships really are all they’re cracked up to be. The Writing on the Wall and Other Stories is a collection of tales, spanning the 1980s to the present day, that will appeal to fans of Anne Tyler, Alan Bennett and Alice Munro, whom Penny Edwards takes inspiration from.

A critical analysis of Israel's control of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, advocating a normative and functional approach.

A Depression-era Appalachian farm wife is branded as a witch by her fundamentalist husband when she bonds with a USDA agent who has traveled to the North Carolina mountains to instruct regional families on how to modernize their homes and farms.

Fleeing to a New England countryside house after receiving devastating news about her daughter, Vera discovers the writings of three women who endured tragedy, war and secrets in the house in respective 20th-century historical periods. By the author of Chekhov's Sister.