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HarperCollins Publishers Australia

From the ill-fated explorations of Leichhardt and Burke and Wills through to the Beaumont children, Azaria Chamberlain, and the backpacker murders in New South Wales, the history of Australia is peppered with tales and images of people going missing. And, as the First Peoples might well have been able to warn us, few of those stories turn out well ...

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To complement our ‘Books of the Year’ feature, which appeared in the December 2018 issue, we invited some senior publishers to nominate their favourite books of 2018 – all published by other companies.

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John Howard has long been concerned with countering what he regards as the domination of Australian historical writing by the left. His project was initiated before he gained the prime ministership, most notably in his Menzies Lecture of 1996, in which he claimed that most of the distinctiveness and achievements of Australian politics were grounded in the liberal tradition. It continued during the ‘history wars’ from 1996 to 2007 – a subsidiary element in his largely successful attempt to reshape the contemporary understanding of liberal individualism. His massive new book on Menzies and his times is the summa of this enterprise.

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Wild Things by Brigid Delaney

by
August 2014, no. 363

‘The boys are behaving badly’ is the coy tagline for journalist Brigid Delaney’s début novel, about an élite Australian university’s cricket team subjecting a Malaysian exchange student to a grisly hazing ritual that goes too far. Such understatement isn’t indicative of the book itself, which follows a group of thinly drawn characters through pained, often melodramatic soul-searching.

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Among the diaspora of European-born Jewish artists, architects, academics, and intellectuals who made a life on Australian shores pre- and post-World War II, Harry Seidler (1923–2006) was, arguably, the most successful and at various times during his life, one of the most visible and most controversial. As an architect, he left behind signature office buildings in five state capital cities, a brace of stunning modernist houses in Sydney, Canberra, and Darwin from the 1950s to the 1990s, the much-acclaimed Australian Embassy in Paris, as well as buildings in Acapulco, Hong Kong, and Vienna. He also made sure he was remembered. He published Houses, Interiors, and Projects, the first book on his work, in 1953 and then, almost without fail, every ten years a book on his architecture would appear, culminating in 1992 with the magnum opus, Harry Seidler: Four Decades of Architecture, complete with essays by architectural historians Philip Drew and Kenneth Frampton. The last word? Certainly not. Four more books followed, and now, in the tradition of marking each decade, another book has appeared on Seidler, this time by journalist and author Helen O’Neill.

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A young man wakes up in an unfamiliar world, with almost no knowledge of his previous life. He remembers committing suicide, but doesn’t remember why. This isn’t heaven or hell, though: as Aden explores his new surroundings, he soon realises that he has ended up in the fictional world created by his grandfather, an aspiring but unpublished author of epic fantasy.

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Jackie French, a prolific author, is best known for her children’s books, with variations on historical themes clearly something of a specialty. A Waltz for Matilda, which seems to be aimed at a broader market, builds on the premise that the Jolly Swagman of Banjo Paterson’s song is not alone. His twelve-year-old daughter, Matilda, is with him and witne ...

John Howard and Tony Blair both came to the prime ministership in landslides, Howard in 1996, Blair in 1997. They were on opposite sides of the traditional political divide, Howard leading a Liberal Party opposed to Australian Labor and Blair leading the British Labour Party ...

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The first book I ever properly owned – pored over, slept with, inscribed – was an elaborately illustrated hardback copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. One can imagine the producers of the attractively packaged Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children hoping it might assume similar significance for a contemporary seven-year-old boy. Conn Iggulden’s secret and quirky world of the Tollins involves old, greybearded men, intricate maps and plenty of adventures and derring-do by the book’s unlikely hero, Sparkler.

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A good detective series depends on the author’s ability to devise canny plots with attendant clues and blind alleys, but of greater importance is the central detective who acts as a charismatic guide through the miasma of murder and mystery. There are many compelling detectives in crime fiction: think of Inspector Maigret, Hercule Poirot, Adam Dalgliesh, Kay Scarpetta and Stephanie Plum. However, with the exception of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, and, more recently, Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist, memorable couples are rare in the sleuthing game.

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