The Australian Book Industry Awards (ABIA) celebrate the achievements of authors and publishers in bringing Australian books to readers. The Awards are a way to say hooray to the successes in making books and being in the book business.
With the ABIA 2020 Award Winners recently announced, check out the titles from Western Downs Libraries that should be sitting on your ‘must read’ list:
People went on about death bringing friends together, but it wasn’t true. The graveyard, the stony dirt – that’s what it was like now . . . Despite the three women knowing each other better than their own siblings, Sylvie’s death had opened up strange caverns of distance between them. Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three. Can they survive together without her?
What happens when global systems are viewed from an Indigenous perspective? How does it affect the way we see history, money, power and learning? Could it change the world? This remarkable book is about everything from echidnas to evolution, cosmology to cooking, sex and science and spirits to Schrodinger’s cat.
This is the story I promised myself, aged twenty-one, that I would one day be brave enough – and well enough – to write. Clare Bowditch has always had a knack for telling stories. Through her music and performing, this beloved Australian artist has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. But what of the stories she used to tell herself? That ‘real life’ only begins once you’re thin or beautiful, that good things only happen to other people.
We all want toeat more fish, but who wants to bother spending the time, effort and money cooking that same old salmon fillet on repeat when you could be trying something newand utterly delicious? In TheWholeFishCookbook, Sydney’s groundbreaking seafood chef Josh Niland reveals a completely new way tothink about all aspects of fish cookery.
488RulesforLife is Kitty Flanagan’s way of making the world a more pleasant place to live. Providing you with the antidote to every annoying little thing, these rules are not made to be broken. 488RulesforLife is not a self-help book, because it’s not you who needs help, it’s other people.
When the van door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of The handmaid’s tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead. With Thetestaments, the wait is over. Margaret Atwood’s sequel picks up the story more than 15 years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.
How far would your government go? A right-wing US president has withdrawn America from the Middle East and the UN. Daesh has a thoroughfare to the sea and China is Australia’s newest ally. When a bomb goes off in remote Tasmania, Astrid Coleman agrees to return home to help her brother before an upcoming election. But this is no simple task. Her brother and sister are on either side of politics, the community is full of conspiracy theories, and her father is quoting Shakespeare. Only on Bruny does the world seem sane. Until Astrid discovers how far the government is willing to go.
Andy and Terry’s treehouse now has 13 new storeys, including a tiny-horse level, a pyjama-party room, an Underpants Museum, a photo-bombing booth, a waiting room, a Door of Doom, a circus, a giant-robot-fighting arena, a traffic school, a water-ski park filled with flesh-eating piranhas and a treehouse visitor centre with a 24-hour information desk, a penguin-powered flying treehouse tour bus and a gift shop. Well, what are you waiting for? Come on up!
Neale Daniher sat down to pen a letter to the grandchildren he’ll never get to know. And then he kept on writing… In 2013, the AFL legend was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease — a cruel and incurable disease. He knew he had a choice. He could spend his remaining time on earth focused on himself, or he could seize the opportunity to make a better future for others.
