5 Star Reads

John Cleese shows in this short, practical and often amusing guide, that creativity is a skill that anyone can acquire. Drawing on his lifelong experience as a writer, he shares his insights into the nature of the creative process, and offers advice on how to get your own inventive juices flowing...

ASSISTANT WANTED: Notorious, high-ranking villain seeks loyal, level-headed assistant for unspecified office duties, supporting staff for random mayhem, terror, and other Dark Things in General. Discretion a must. Excellent benefits. With ailing family to support, Evie Sage's employment status is...

When DS Cormac Reilly's girlfriend, Emma, stumbles across the victim of a hit and run early one morning outside the laboratory at Galway University, he is first on the scene of a murder that would otherwise never have been assigned to him. The dead girl is carrying an ID, that of Carline Darcy, h...

The news of her mother’s death hits Nell as if she’s been shot. The letter must be some kind of prank, but who could be so cruel? Because Nell’s mother died nearly 30 years ago. When Nell was just a tiny baby, her parents died in a car crash, leaving her to be raised by her devoted grandmother, L...

Trixie and her fellow lumberjills are back in Scotland, newly stationed at the MacKay estate. When they arrive, they are shocked to find the place dilapidated and neglected and the taciturn and secretive Noah MacKay not at all happy to be meeting them. It quickly becomes apparent that MacKay was ...

A small bushfire, but nasty enough for ice cooks to abandon their lab. Fatal, too. But when the bodies in the burnt-out Mercedes prove to be a pair of Sydney hitmen, D.I. Hal Challis's inquiries into a local ice epidemic take a darker turn. Meanwhile, Ellen Destry, head of the new sex crimes unit...

'I grew up on the world's largest island.' This apparently simple fact is the starting point for Tim Winton's beautiful, evocative and sometimes provocative memoir of how this unique landscape has shaped him and his writing. For over thirty years, Winton has written novels in which the natural wo...

The last time the dream came, Sam was seven years old; and that was the night her parents were to die. Twenty-five years later, Sam's nightmares are starting to come true once more. Now a successful TV commercials producer, juggling her roles of career woman, wife and mother, she attempts to shut...

It's 1929, and the world is changing. Cars are no longer the privilege of the rich. Hemlines are rising. Movies are talking. And more and more women are entering the workforce. For Edwina Baker, however, life on her family's farm in Western Queensland offers little opportunity to be anything othe...