'Mirror, mirror, on the grass, what's my future? What's my past?'
A girl and her mother have been on the run for sixteen years, from police and the monster they left in their kitchen with a knife in his throat. They've found themselves a home inside a van with four flat tyres parked in a scrapyard by the edge of the Brisbane River.
The girl has no name because names are dangerous when you're on the run. But the girl has a dream. A vision of a life as an artist of international acclaim. A life outside the grip of the Brisbane underworld drug queen 'Lady' Flora Box. A life of love with the boy who's waiting for her on the bridge that stretches across a flooding, deadly river. A life beyond the bullet that has her name on it. And now that the storm clouds are rising, there's only one person who can help make her dreams come true. That person is Lola and she carries all the answers. But to find Lola, the girl with no name must first do one of the hardest things we can ever do. She must look in the mirror.
From international bestselling author Trent Dalton, Lola in the Mirror is a big, moving, blackly funny, violent, heartbreaking and beautiful novel of love, fate, life and death and all the things we see when we look in the mirror: all our past, all our present, and all our possible futures.
Meet the Blunders: Bertie, Betsy, their children, Brutus and Bunny, along with their beloved grandma Old Lady Blunder, and their pet ostrich, Cedric. An ostrich is not a sensible pet, but then the Blunders are not sensible people.
This family of upper-class twits live in a crumbling country house named Blunder Hall. When their home comes under threat, they must embark on a series of comic misadventures to save it. Absurd and hilarious, The Blunders is David Walliams’ funniest book yet. A laugh-out-loud tale of the most blundering and lovable family in history.
"Never question anything Mat Lindsay does. Ever. He's a true genius, although the word is used so often it's become meaningless. But his particular mixture of sensibility, talent and devotional concentration is rare." Nigella Lawson
make a fire. fake a fire. roast your oysters. dance for pipis. slow it down. raise a toast. take lunch. grill a salad. bake a crab. step outside. burn your pav. pass the salt. eat with your hands. chew on the bone.
Ester is an invitation to play with your food and enjoy the adventure. It's born of an eponymous restaurant in inner Sydney, but it's proudly not a restaurant book. Think of it more as the foundations for some new ideas in your kitchen and at your table; written to be used, shared, read aloud, perhaps burnt.
Mat Lindsay's cooking resists easy labels. Certainly it's a distinct kind of full-flavoured Australian food: generous, mindfully chosen seafood; darkly caramelised wood-fired bread; vegetables cooked to just the right level of doneness; meat that's been treated with respect and, often, time; and the odd burnt pavlova, a true signature. Ester the restaurant is all about its wood-fired oven and the magic it imparts, but the fundamentals don't change at home, and everything in this book can be made delicious wherever you live.
The ethos of Mat's acclaimed and widely beloved Chippendale restaurant has always been to offer guests a no-rules good time and the intention within these pages is just the same. Whether it prompts you to rethink the possibilities of toast, roast your fruit, try the classic cauliflower, or embrace Sunday lunch, the Ester playbook presents many ideas to cook and live by.
Grace is both mysterious and hard to define. It can be found when we create ways to find meaning and dignity in connection with each other, building on our shared humanity, being kinder, bigger, better with each other. If, in its crudest interpretation, karma is getting what you deserve, then grace is the opposite: forgiving the unforgivable, favouring the undeserving, loving the unlovable.
But we live in an era when grace is an increasingly rare currency. The silos in which we consume information dot the media landscape like skyscrapers, and our growing distrust of the media, politicians and public figures has choked our ability to cut each other slack, to allow each other to stumble, to forgive one another.
So what does grace look like in our world, and how do we recognise it, nurture it in ourselves and express it, even in the darkest of times?
From award-winning journalist Julia Baird, author of the acclaimed national bestseller Phosphorescence, comes Bright Shining, a luminously beautiful, deeply insightful and most timely exploration of grace.
