When Fiona Collins meets Stuart Higgins at a leadership conference in Melbourne, she isn't looking for a relationship, let alone the upheaval of falling in love with an intelligent, eco-friendly cotton farmer from south-east Queensland. But that's exactly what's on the cards. When Stuart sends Fiona a pair of crusty old boots and a declaration of love 16 days into their fledgling relationship, it's the start of a love story that endures – in spite of distance, the strain of Stuart's cotton farm entering its fourth year of drought, and Fiona's issues with commitment. Something's got to give, and eventually Fiona makes the life-changing decision to move from her comfortable Sydney life to Stuart's farm where the nearest township is Jandowae, population 700. Here, Fiona must become accustomed to snakes on the doorstep, frogs in the toilet, feral cats in the roof, and the perils of the bush telegraph. Gradually, she begins to love her life on the land and finds the courage to face her fears. But as Stuart struggles to balance environmental and commercial realities, she realises that farming isn't quite as simple as she first imagined. Ultimately, Fiona has to learn how to cope with the devastating impact of the drought that grips the countryside, and what it means for Stuart, the farm and their future together.

The Roux family is the most influential family associated with food in Britain. Through their various restaurants (Le Gavroche, Waterside Inn, Brasserie Roux) and catering services they have trained many of Britain's top chefs.Albert and Michel Sr brought French high cuisine to Britain in the sixties, much of the produce being brought twice weekly from France by Michel's mother in the family car. Michel grew up in an environment of respect for fine food and ingredients, of never settling for second best and of traditional French family excursions to find wild food. He tells the story of what it was like to grow up as part of this close-knit family.He left school at 16 to start his first apprenticeship with Maitre Patissier Hellegourarche in Paris. He then worked with Alain Chapel at Mionnay before doing his mililtary service at the Elysee Palace cooking for Presidents Giscard d'Estaing and Francois Mitterand. After a stint cooking at the Mandarin Hotel in Hong Kong and catering in London, he took over the running of Le Gavroche in 1994.

This is the enormously entertaining story of how a fraudulent surgeon made a fortune by inserting goats' testes into impotent American men.So-called 'Doctor' John Brinkley became a world renowned authority on sexual rejuvenation in the 1920s, with famous politicians and even royalty asking for his services. His nemesis was Dr Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, but it took him fifteen years to destroy Brinkley in a dramatic courtroom showdown. In the meantime, despite mounting evidence that his quack treatments killed many patients, Brinkley became a millionaire.

Anyone watching the seventeen-year-old Julia Morris singing Bonnie Tyler's 'Holding Out For A Hero' on NEW FACES could tell two things ... she had guts and she had talent. Not too many years later Julia got her big break (alongside Eric Bana) on the Logie award-winning comedy sketch show FULL FRONTAL. From that platform she went on to other television and radio and she soon became one of Australia's most loved female comedians with roles on IN MELBOURNE TONIGHT, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, GREAT AUSSIE BLOOPERS, GLADIATORS, THE MIDDAY SHOW, WHO DARES WINS and GOOD MORNING AUSTRALIA.She was young, successful ... and single, so in 2000, like so many Aussies before her, Julia decided to try her luck overseas and jetted off to the UK. There was no instant success. She had to work hard to find her way in the much larger pond. Julia spent eight years in the UK and ended up claiming both commercial and critical success on stage, radio and television. Her refreshing honesty captured the imagination of British comedy's elite and she worked with the likes of Paul Whitehouse, Stephen Fry, Catherine Tate, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, Graham Norton and her own personal Dalai Llama - the great Dame Edna.But there comes a time when an Aussie girl needs to come home. And what was left? Maybe it was time to bag herself a husband, the title of 'Lady' (bought on the internet by the bagged husband Dan), a baby daughter, and bring her new family back to settle in her beloved homeland.

In 2008, YouTube.com featured an extraordinary two-minute film clip that became an overnight phenomenon. It shows the remarkable, highly moving reunion of two men and their pet lion, Christian, after they had left him in Africa with Born Free's George Adamson, who would introduce him into his rightful home in the wild. A Lion Called Christian tells the backstory, of how John Rendall and Anthony 'Ace' Bourke, visitors to London from Australia in 1969, bought a boisterous lion cub in Harrods for 250 guineas. For a while, the three of them lived together as flatmates in a furniture shop in the King's Road, Chelsea, where Christian quickly became a local celebrity.But the lion cub was growing up, fast, and even the walled church garden in which he exercised wouldn't be big enough for him for much longer.How could John and Ace avoid having to incarcerate him in a zoo for the rest of his life? It was thanks to Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers, stars of Born Free, who dropped into the shop, that Christian was subsequently flown to Kenya and placed under the expert care of Adamson. After settling Christian in, Ace and John did not return to Kenya to see Christian for a full year. Thanks to the internet age, their very special and touching reunion is again being enjoyed by millions.

Andre‚ Brink grew up in the deep interior of South Africa, as his magistrate father moved from one dusty dorp to the next. With searing honesty he describes his conflicting experiences of growing up in a world where innocence was always surrounded by violence. From an early age he found in storytelling the means of reconciling the stark contrasts - between religion and play-acting, between the breathless discovery of a girl called Maureen and the merciless beating of a black boy, between a meeting with a dwarf who lived in a hole in the ground and an encounter with a magician who threatened to teach him what he hadn't bargained for. While living in Paris in the sixties his discovery of a wider artistic life, allied to the exhilaration of the student uprising of 1968, confirmed in him the desire to become a writer. At the same time the tragedy of Sharpeville crystallised his growing political awareness and sparked the decision to return home and oppose the apartheid establishment with all his strength. This resulted in years of harassment by the South African secret police, in censorship, and in fractured relationships with many people close to him. Equally it led to extraordinary friendships sealed by meetings with leaders of the ANC in exile in both Africa and Europe.

In a remote outpost of Now Zad, in Helmand Province, Pen Farthing and his troup of young Royal Marines survive frequent engagements with the Taliban and forge links with the local community. Pen's tour of duty will change his life forever, but for entirely unexpected reasons. Appalled by the horrors of local dog fighting, he intervenes to free three victims. One of these dogs finds his way into the Marine compound - and into Pen's heart. Soon other strays are being drawn to the santuary provided by Pen's makeshift pound, including one young mum who crawls under the compound fence carrying her newborn pups to safety. But as his tour of duty draws to an end, Pen cannot leave the dogs of Now Zad to their own fates. he begins hatching plans to help them escape to a better life. This is Pen's gripping account of his time in Now Zad, the friends he made there and the remarkable journey they - and he - undertook. Above all, it is the story of one man's courage and humanity and his fight to make a difference in the most hostile and dangerous environment - one dog at a time.

James Maskalyk set out for the contested border town of Abyei, Sudan, in 2007 as a Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders/MSF) newest medical doctor in the field. Equipped with his experience as an emergency physician in a downtown hospital and his desire to understand the hardest parts of the world, Maskalyk's days were spent treating malnourished children, fending off a measles epidemic, and staying out of the soldiers' way. Worn raw in the struggle to meet overwhelming needs with inadequate resources, he returned home six months later more affected by the experience, the people, and the place, than he had anticipated. SIX MONTHS IN SUDAN began as a blog that he wrote from his hut in Sudan in an attempt to bring his family and friends closer to his hot, hot days. It is a story about humans: the people of Abyei who suffer its hardship because it is their home, and the doctors, nurses, and countless volunteers who leave their homes with the tools to make another's easier to endure. With great hope and insight, Maskalyk illuminates a distant place - its heat, its people, its poverty, its war - to inspire possibilities for action.

Sophie Delezio has been through more than most of us could imagine. Trapped under a burning car in her childcare centre, resulting in burns to eighty per cent of her body and multiple amputations; a long path to recovery followed by a near-fatal accident on a pedestrian crossing soon after her fifth birthday. With her beautiful smile and unquenchable spirit, Sophie has become a beacon of hope and inspiration in Australia and beyond. Now Sophie's parents, Ron and Carolyn, invite us into their world. Through their private journals Ron and Carolyn reveal a searingly intimate portrait of their life - from the day of Sophie's first horrific accident, to the present and their never-ending challenge to balance Sophie's care with their life together as a family. Sophie has faced death twice before the age of six; she has had innumerable operations over the past five years; her need for special care is intense and lifelong. It is an unthinkably terrifying scenario - yet the Delezio family have not only survived, they have somehow managed to offer hope and joy to others in the process. In reading this book, you will see inside a mother's heart that breaks for her little girl on a daily basis; you will see how it is possible to be knocked to the floor by grief and be lifted up again by the gentle hands of friends and supporters.

NOW IN B FORMAT. Halima Bashir was born into the remote western deserts of Sudan. She grew up in a wonderfully rich environment and later went on to study medicine. At the age of twenty-four she returned to her tribe and began practising as their first ever qualified doctor. But then a dark cloud descended upon her people...Janjaweed Arab militias began savagely assaulting her people. At first, Halima tried not to get involved. But in January 2004 they attacked people in her village. Halima treated the traumatised victims and was sickened by what she saw. She decided to speak out in a Sudanese newspaper and to the UN charities. Then the secret police came for her. For days Halima was interrogated and subjected to unspeakable torture. She finally escaped but the nightmare just seemed to follow her... This inspiring story tells of one woman's determination to survive and her passion to defend her people. For the first time, we can truly understand the personal horrors of Darfur from someone who lived through it.

At the turn from my bedroom into the hallway leading to the kitchen there is an old full-length mirror in a wooden frame. I can't help but catch a glimpse of myself as I pass, and turning myself towards the glass, I consider what I see. This reflected version of myself, wet, shaking, rumpled, slightly stooped, and pinched, would be alarming if it were not for the self-satisfied expression pasted across the face, I would ask the obvious question, 'What are you smiling about?' - but I already know the answer ... it just gets better from here. Struck with Parkinson's - a debilitating, degenerative disease - at the height of his fame, Fox has taken what some people might consider cause for depression and turned it into a beacon of hope for millions. Now, in Always Looking Up, he writes about the personal philosophy that carried him through his darkest hours, and speaks with others who have emerged from difficult periods with optimism to spare. With the humour and wit that dazzled fans and reviewers alike in his bestselling memoir, Lucky Man, Fox shows how he became a happier, more satisfied person by recognising the gifts of everyday life.

The Horse Boy tells the heartbreaking, exhilarating story of Rowan's autism and his parents' journey of hope. As they watch their only child recede into a nightmare of isolation punctuated by episodes of incandescent rage, Rupert discovers two things that seem to pull Rowan back towards them. His uncanny, almost spiritual, connection with horses, and the spontaneous bond he appears to form with some traditional healers visiting from indigenous communities. So a plan begins to form. The desperate, crazy plan of taking Rowan on an expedition to a place where horses and traditional healing-shamanism come together as a cultural whole. Mongolia.

Breaking the Spell is Jane Stork's extraordinary life story. Equally moving and disturbing, it chronicles the rise and fall of the religion Rajneeshism and the Rolls Royce guru, and Jane's part in the events that led to its collapse. Growing up in post-war Western Australia, Jane Stork had a conventional Catholic upbringing, and married her university sweetheart at age 21. Embarking on the familiar path of marriage and raising children, Jane's semblance of a normal life began to unravel as she entered her 30s. She sought answers at a meditation centre, and quickly became devoted to the Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, changing her name, adopting the orange robes of a "sannyasin", and uprooting her family to live first in an ashram in India and then in the Bhagwan-created city of Rajneeshpuram in Oregon, USA. It was here that Bhagwan's behaviour became increasingly bizarre. He began promoting a siege mentality among his followers, ordering them to amass firearms. He encouraged his secretary Sheela to use drastic methods to take over local governments and to punish the local communities who objected to their "utopian" city. For Jane, what started out as a journey seeking spiritual enlightenment began to descend into darkness as she sacrificed her marriage and children, and eventually – through a monstrous act of attempted murder – her freedom.

Poet and prodigy Arthur Rimbaud led a life that was startlingly short, yet dramatically eventful and accomplished. His long poem 'Un Saison d'Enfer' (1873) and his collection Illuminations (1886) are central to the modern canon. Having sworn off writing at the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud drifted around the world, ultimately dying from an infection contracted while gun-running in Africa. He was thirty-seven. Distinguished biographer, novelist, and memoirist Edmund White brilliantly explores the young poet's relationships with his family and his teachers, as well as his notorious affair with the older and more established poet Paul Verlaine. He reveals the sometimes elusive, sometimes blatant, themes of sexual taboo that haunt Rimbaud's works, offering incisive interpretations of the poems and his own artful translations to bring us closer to this great and mercurial poet.

IN THE BOARDING HOUSE IT DOESN'T MATTER who hit you first, or if they miss-hit, you have to get them back. It's kid against kid, dog against dog. We all have rabies. We all have pinks disease. We're all foaming at the mouth. Tit for tat, the strong rule the weak, the weak cry. Only those who can find the mean steak in them survive. I'm a survivor. Briggsy taught me that. If you're weak, unspeakable things happen to you. The bastards won't get me. It is the 1960s in Perth, Western Australia. For Thomas Muir – cool and steady – life is a thing that goes on outside him. But for his brother, hot-headed Jack – believer in honesty and justice – life must be wrestled to be understood. Jack Muir's years of survival and his coming of age in a boys' boarding school are sharply revealed in this dislocated memoir. Jack's story is funny and raw. It will strike a nerve in those who were there – and in anyone who has ever asked how it is that one becomes a man.

NOW IN B FORMAT. Judith Lucy has been cracking jokes about her parents for much of her career. But when a birth relative's casual comment implied that she must despise them, Judith was shocked. Sure, for years she had been talking about Ann and Tony Lucy like they were one-dimensional Irish nut bags who'd ruined her life, but who – in the end – doesn't love their parents? If only she'd been told before the age of 25 that they weren't actually her parents . . .From 'A is for Adoption to Z is for Zorba, this is the full story of one particular family, shown at their best, at their worst, and every letter in between.

NOW IN B FORMAT. Kokichi Nishimura was a member of the 2nd battalion, 144th Regiment of the Japanese Imperial Army. In 1942 he fought along every foot of Kokoda as the Japanese attempted to take Port Moresby. He was the only man from his company to survive the campaign. As he was evacuated to safety he made a promise that one day he would return to his comrades and bring them home to Japan for proper burial. After the war, Nishimura prospered. But under the surface, the driving ambition of his life was to fulfil his promise. In 1979, he shocked his family by returning to New Guinea to search for the remains of Japanese soldiers. For the next 25 years, Nishimura lived alone along the Kokoda Track. Armed only with a metal detector, a mattock and a shovel, he searched for his dead comrades. Over the years he found hundreds of them – some he was able to identify and return their bones to their families; others were unknown, and their remains were sent to Japan's official shrine for its war dead in Tokyo.

Christine is in a purple patch of her life. Recently retired, she has big plans for the future and decides to keep a journal. This is her time: time to pursue her passion for gardening, time to travel with her partner Rex, time to live life to the full...And then time turns on her. Rex is diagnosed as having melanoma and Christine is thrown into the cruel world of cancer. Her journal follows her journey with Rex as the seasons change, as the garden changes and mirrors what is happening in her life, and as winter comes... A heart wrenching read that is ultimately a story of hope and above all – a love story.

After growing up in a privileged and cosmopolitan Iraq during the 1950s and 1960s, Selma Masson is plunged into a world of despair and intrigue when she discovers first-hand the brutality of her country's dictator. While Iraqi Ambassador to Spain, her husband is imprisoned and tortured by the Hussein government - for Selma, securing his freedom will mean an unforgettable encounter with Saddam Hussein. Now an Australian citizen, Selma has told her story to Michelle McDonald - this book grew out of the friendship between these two women from very different cultures. The Kiss of Saddam takes you on Selma's incredible journey, drawing an evocative picture of life in Iraq. It shows just what one woman will do to save the people she loves.

Inspired by an upcoming Channel Ten television series (that has already been sold to various overseas territories, including the UK) TALES FROM A BONDI VET chronicles the daily life of Bondi Vet Dr Chris Brown.Chris is a country boy who grew up with a menagerie of pets and now, along with his failed farm dog, Rusty, has found himself working in a busy urban environment at Bondi caring for all creatures great and small.The book tells Chris's story along with the funny, zany and sometimes heartbreaking tales of his patients and their owners. Dr Brown is on call 24 hours a day for emergency calls, and a typical day for him can see him treat anything from dogs with cancer to a penguin with a cold.

When John Constable fell in love with Maria Bicknell, granddaughter of a Suffolk country neighbour, he little knew how long it would take to make her his wife. The impediment to their marriage was simple: 'that necessary article cash'. He was a painter without sufficient funds to support the daughter of a wealthy London lawyer, and both her father and her grandfather, the formidable (and sometimes comical) Rector of East Bergholt, disapproved of the match. It would be seven long, difficult years before they could marry, but in that time he would become one of the greatest painters of the nineteenth century. Martin Gayford writes superbly about Constable's early years as a painter, and Maria and John's correspondence provides the lively backdrop to the story: one of their lovers' tiffs, London versus country life, encounters with Turner, Byron and Wordsworth, royal Academy. And all the time, John Constable is battling to become a painter who can earn his living and win Maria's hand.

Love stories are not always about hearts and flowers. In this deliciously different celebration of love, romance is all about having a good row (and not always having to say you're sorry). From trivial everyday quarrels, such as a dispute over a bride's new hat in Dorothy Parker's 'Here We Are' and an argument about whether to close the screen door in Lydia Davis's 'Disagreement', to more serious arguments where the truth is in doubt, such in Raymond Carver's 'Intimacy', relationships of every kind - devoted, comfortable, passionate, intimate, bad-tempered - are here.

When Gabrielle Carey's mother, who is usually pedantically punctual and organised, begins to forget basic things like where she put her dentures, Gabrielle knows that something is wrong. Scans reveal a brain tumour, and doctors advise its urgent removal. But there is another urgency at hand. Biding the dreadful passing of time in doctors' waiting rooms, Gabrielle begins to realise how much her mother has left untold, how many questions she still wants to ask her, and how little time there is left for answers. Amid organising appointments, looking after her own children, and battling her mother's stubbornly principled idea that she should be left to die, Gabrielle begins to voice the unasked - to attempt to discover the mother whom she has lived with all her life, but never truly known. In this sharp and honest memoir, we see what it is that families, in all their complex dynamics, can give to each other, and just what they stand to gain when they lay down their arms and let each other in.

David Williamson has been in the public gaze for almost forty years. Plays such as Don's Party, The Removalists, The Club and Emerald City - and films such as Gallipoli - have made him a national treasure. Equally visible on the political stage, Williamson has been famously anti-Vietnam and pro-Whitlam, the confidant of Paul Keating and scourge of John Howard. Paradoxically, though, Williamson's private life has been even more public. He has made his plays out of it. No one knows that better than Kristin, his wife of thirty-five years. In this book she tells us what has gone on behind the scenes. The Williamsons have lived at the heart of their times: from the radical Carlton scene of the 1960s, through the sexual experimentation of the 1970s, to the Emerald City of the 1980s and 1990s, and now as the Queensland seachangers of the new century. Kristen chronicles the events and people that inspired the plays, and tells the backstage stories, from La Mama to Madonna. But she also writes frankly about meeting David and the two divorces that ensued, the anxieties and rewards of raising a blended family, the period of their open marriage, and the challenge of being a working mother while playing peacemaker to Australia's most literary brawler. The result is a picture of remarkable intimacy, vividness and honesty, the portrait not only of a writer, but of a family and a marriage.

In City of Widows, Haifa Zangana tells the story of her country, from the early twentieth century through the US-UK invasion and the current occupation. She brings to light a sense of Iraq as a society mainly of secularists who have been denied, through years of sanctions, war, and occupation, a system within which to build the country according to their own values. She points to the long history of political activism and social participation of Iraqi women, and the fact that, before the recent invasion, they had been among the most liberated of their gender in the Middle East. Finally, she writes about Baghdad today as a city populated by bereaved women and children who have lost their loved ones and their land, but who are still emboldened by the native right to resist and liberate themselves to create an independent Iraq. In 1958, when Haifa Zangana was just eight years old, Iraqis flooded the streets in celebration of their newfound, hard-won freedom from British colonial rule that had begun in 1917. Zangana came of age in one of the most open societies in the Middle East-until it was shut down in the 1970s by the tyrannical, yet secular, Ba'ath Party. Joining in armed struggle against Saddam Hussein, Zangana was captured, imprisoned, and tortured as a young woman. She was released from Abu Ghraib after six months of detention, and has lived in exile ever since. Today, Haifa Zangana is a novelist, a weekly columnist for Al-Quds newspaper, and a political commentator for the Guardian, Red Pepper, and Al-Ahram Weekly. She lives in London.

When Jane Alison was a child, her family met another that seemed like its mirror: a father in the Foreign Service, a beautiful mother, and two little girls, the younger two - one of them Jane - sharing a birthday. With so much in common, the two families became almost instantly inseparable. Within months, affairs had ignited between the adults, and before long the pairs had exchanged partners - divorced, remarried, and moved on. As if in a cataclysm of nature, two families were ripped asunder, and two new ones were formed. Two pairs of girls were left in shock, a 'silent, numb shock, like a crack inside stone, not enough to split it but inside, quietly fissuring'. And Jane and her stepsister were thrown into a state of wordless combat for the love of their fathers. The sisters' contest, recounted by Jane Alison with stunning emotional insight, is waged throughout less-than-innocent childhoods - and ends in a tragedy that is at the same time unthinkable and inevitable.

'I've been given the wisdom of so many people's stories, their real life struggles; I have committed them to memory and treasured them in my heart. And I suppose that is why I am expected not to grieve or even recover quickly from my loss'. These are Caroline Jones' opening words to this moving and deeply personal diary. It was written over several years as she watched her dearly beloved father suffer, and eventually pass away. It is a diary from the heart of this most highly respected radio/television journalist and presenter.