You take the Princes Highway past Geelong, and keep going west in the direction of Colac. Late in August 2006, soon after I had watched a magistrate commit Robert Farquharson to stand trial before a jury on three charges of murder, I headed out that way on a Sunday morning, across the great volcanic plain. On the evening of 4 September 2005, Father's Day, Robert Farquharson, a separated husband, was driving his three sons home to their mother, Cindy, when his car left the road and plunged into a dam. The boys, aged ten, seven and two, drowned. Was this an act of revenge or a tragic accident? The court case became Helen Garner's obsession. She followed it on its protracted course until the final verdict. In this utterly compelling book, Helen Garner tells the story of a man and his broken life. She presents the theatre of the courtroom with its actors and audience, all gathered for the purpose of bearing witness to the truth, players in the extraordinary and unpredictable drama of the quest for justice. This House of Grief is a heartbreaking and unputdownable book by one of Australia's most admired writers. Helen Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip won the 1978 National Book Council Award, and was adapted for film in 1981. Since then she has published novels, short stories, essays, and feature journalism. In 1995 she published The First Stone, a controversial account of a Melbourne University sexual harassment case. Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004) was a non-fiction study of two murder trials in Canberra. In 2006 Helen Garner received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel, The Spare Room (2008), won the Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, the Queensland Premier's Award for Fiction and the Barbara Jefferis Award, and has been translated into many languages. Helen Garner lives in Melbourne.

    His messages of compassion, altruism, and peace are articulated in a unique secular ethic for our times and supported with techniques and practices that can help us achieve these ideals. He is the Dalai Lama—or simply, His Holiness—the epitome of the Buddhist model of loving-kindness and an incarnation of Avalokitesvara, the bodhisattva of infinite compassion and mercy. Evoking global respect and admiration, he is both a prophet and a statesman for our troubled times, yet he’s intensely human and accessible. He’s an inspiration to millions, yet many feel as if he touches and speaks to them personally. He is a Buddhist but belongs to all humanity. His Holiness is one of the most recognizable—and recognized—faces in the free world.This remarkable book is an edited compilation of mostly personal conversations spanning nearly 20 years between the Dalai Lama and Rajiv Mehrotra, one of his early disciples who’s now the trustee and secretary of the Foundation for Universal Responsibility, which was established with the funds from the Nobel Peace Prize. Here, the Dalai Lama is a teacher to a spiritual aspirant; a divine master and a temporal leader; an ambassador for Tibet and a lovable guru-philosopher to the whole world; a practitioner of the 2,500-year-old teachings of Buddhism; a Tibetan Buddhist and an interfaith ambassador; and an intense practitioner of mind-training and an inveterate optimist. His multiple hats may appear contradictory at times, but he balances them all, living his life with ease and happiness.Within these pages, the Dalai Lama’s disarming candor, his deep empathy for his student’s quest, and his wisdom—garnered not just from texts and scriptures, but also from an active engagement with life—offer invaluable insights to us all on how we may find true happiness in our lives.

    Included are The Very Strange Mr. Fish, The Butcher of Plainfield, From the Pros to the Penitentiary, Nightmare on Elm Drive, The Brown's Chicken Murders, The Kitty Genovese Murder, The Wichita Horror, The Hi Fi Murders, The Poster Boy for Capital Punishment, The Yogurt Shop Murders, The Vampire Rapist, The Murder of James Bulger, Thrill Killers: Leopold and Loeb, The Killing of Anita Cobby, Death in a Bottle: The Tylenol, Excedrin and Sudafed Murders, The Easter Sunday Murders, Murder at McDonald's, The Luby's Massacre, Charles Manson and Helter Skelter. Part Two: Quick Hits holds 13 shorter chapters that include Eric Smith, The Camden Killer, Killed Over a Kiss, The Bed & Breakfast Murders, Who Shot the War Hero?, The Colorado Springs Killings, Joseph Vacher, Jeanne Weber, Michael Hernandez, The Tourniquet Killer, Patricia Johnson and Killed Over Facebook Status. The book ends with I Don't Like Mondays.

    Angelia was fourteen when she and a friend scrawled “Vote for Michael Jackson” on five stop signs. Charged with vandalism and defacing public property, Angelia was sent by Ciavarella to PA Child Care without her epilepsy medication and suffered a grand mal seizure her second night. Fifteen-year-old Charlie, arrested for unknowingly purchasing a stolen motorbike, was convicted of a felony and sent to PA Child Care for six weeks.Matthew, Angelia, and Charlie are just three children among the thousands who appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom between 2003 and 2008 and were sent away—often with no attorney present and after only cursory hearings—to a detention facility in which, it later came to light, Ciavarella had a personal financial stake. As Kids for Cash reveals, this miscarriage of justice underscores a multitude of problems with our juvenile justice system, which too often criminalizes standard adolescent behavior, treats adolescents more harshly than if they were adults, and denies them their most fundamental constitutional rights.William Ecenbarger, a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award–winning investigative journalist who covered the case for the Philadelphia Inquirer, now gives us the first book-length account of this shocking story. In the tradition of true-crime legal thrillers from The Executioner’s Song to A Civil Action, Ecenbarger exposes a deeply corrupt and broken system that ruined the lives of many children and ultimately led to the judge’s conviction on charges of racketeering, fraud, tax violations, money laundering, extortion, and bribery. Fastidiously researched and utterly propulsive, Kids for Cash takes us deep inside a profoundly flawed legal system, revealing the twisted and haunting realities of America’s juvenile justice system.

    Things started to unravel for Gerard Baden-Clay the night his wife Allison vanished. Within days everything private would become public. Behind the façade of happiness their life together was riven with debt, infidelity, unfulfilled dreams, and bitter jealousy. It began with a phone call to police in Brisbane on April 20, 2012. Gerard wanted to report his wife missing. When officers arrived to investigate, they found the real estate agent neatly dressed for work. Weeping welts on the side of his face were simply shaving cuts, he told them. Police weren’t so sure and opened the book on one of Australia’s biggest-ever missing persons investigations, conducted in the heart of one of Brisbane’s wealthiest suburbs. The Baden-Clays had been married 14 years. They had three young daughters and were prominent figures within their well-heeled community. Gerard was the great grandson of Scouting founder Robert Baden-Powell, president of the local chamber of commerce, and vice-president of the school P & C. His wife Allison was a one-time beauty queen who spoke six languages and was global human resources manager for a travel firm when she gave it all away to marry the man of her dreams. Together they made their home in Brookfield, an idyllic semi-rural suburb, but all was not as it seemed. 10 days after Gerard reported her missing, Allison’s body was discovered on a creek bank 14km from her home. This is the definitive story of a crime that captured the nation—the unbelievable twists, turns, secrets, and lies. Written by the journalist who covered the case from the outset, it weaves together exclusive interviews and police and court records to explain how a father with no criminal history came to be on trial for a brutal murder. It’s a story about love, lust, image, ambition, and marriage, and about every day choices and their consequences.

    Resolute, self-possessed and a penetrating thinker on subjects from workplace relations to foreign affairs, she is admired by members of parliament and the public from across the political divide.In this first-ever biography of Penny Wong, acclaimed journalist Margaret Simons traces her story: from her early life in Malaysia, to her student activism in Adelaide, to her entry into the male-dominated chambers of federal parliament, to her leading role as a voice of reason and respect in the polarising campaign to legalise same-sex marriage – and to her current position, poised to become Australia’s future minister for foreign affairs. What emerges is a picture of a leader for modern Australia, a cool-headed, cautious, yet charismatic figure of piercing intelligence and a personal history linking back to Australia’s colonial settlers and through to its multicultural present.Drawing on exclusive interviews with Penny Wong, and her Labor colleagues, parliamentary opponents, close friends and family, this scintillating portrait of an Australian politician without precedence promises to be one of the most talked-about political biographies of the year.

    Indulged and wealthy Kat Fitzhubert is sold in an arranged marriage to a colony across the world. Lady Viola Montefiore is the dark-skinned changeling of a ducal family, kept hidden and then shipped away. Titania Boot is as broad as a carthorse, and as useful.On the long sea voyage from their homeland of England, these three women are fast bonded in an unlikely friendship. In the turmoil of 1850s Australia - which has reinvented itself from convict colony to a land of gold rushes and illusive riches - one woman forges a business empire, while another turns to illegal brewery, working alongside a bushranger as the valleys around her are destroyed. The third vanishes on her wedding day, in a scandal that will intrigue and mystify Sydney's polite society and beyond.In this magnificent and broad-sweeping saga, award-winning author Jackie French defies the myth of colonial women as merely wives, servants, petty thieves or whores. Instead, in this masterful storyteller's hands, these three women will be arbiters of a destiny far richer than the bewitching glitter and lure of gold.

    A man of boundless energy, compassion, intelligence and creativity, he has already achieved enough to fill several lives.From his idyllic childhood growing up in the northern suburbs of Sydney, to an early interest in equality and justice; from the height of 1960s culture shock at ANU to fronting iconic Australian band Midnight Oil; from his time as a galvanising activist for the environment to being the only unaligned Cabinet minister in two Labor governments, Garrett has an extraordinary story to tell.He writes movingly about his lifelong mission to protect the environment and his connection with Aboriginal people, about his love for his family and his passion for our country: what it means to him and what it can become.Provocative, entertaining, impassioned and inspiring, this memoir goes to the heart and soul of a remarkable Australian and raises questions crucial to us all.

    As the final recoil echoes through the paddocks, a revered sheep-breeding dynasty comes to a bloody and inglorious end. No one could have anticipated the orgy of violence that wiped out three generations of the Wettenhall family, much less the lurid scandals about Darcy Wettenhall, the man behind the world famous Stanbury sheep stud, that would emerge from the aftermath. Almost three decades later, the web of secrets and lies that led to this bizarre and seemingly motiveless murder spree are unravelled with the help of Bob Perry, Darcy Wettenhall’s secret lover for a decade prior to his murder. From the bucolic majesty, privilege and snobbery of the Western District’s prized pastoral lands and dynasties to the bleak, loveless underworld of orphanages, rodeo stables and homeless shelters, The Devil’s Grip is a courageous and thought-provoking meditation on the fragility of reputation, the folly of deception and the power of shame.

    Little did they know that underneath his cool exterior lay a twisted desire to kill.Behind the facade of normality lay a psychopathic mind struggling to control its homicidal urges. Having seduced and married his sweetheart Mary Gough, Whelan immediately began planning her brutal murder.While his young wife dreamed of a love-filled marriage, Whelan searched the internet for information on serial killers and the methods they used to strangle their victims.Compelling and disturbing, this book reveals how Whelan murdered his wife to claim a hefty life insurance policy, and how he faked his own suicide when he became the prime suspect for the murder.Till Death Do Us Part offers a fascinating insight into the true motivation behind one of Irelands most notorious murders, and is a horrifying story of love, lust, revenge and murder - all the more shocking because every word is true.

    to create Dreamland, a groundbreaking portrait of the opioid epidemic that awakened the nation. As the nation struggled to put back the pieces, Quinones was among the first to see the dangers that lay ahead: synthetic drugs and a new generation of kingpins whose product could be made in Magic Bullet blenders. In fentanyl, traffickers landed a painkiller a hundred times more powerful than morphine. They laced it into cocaine, meth, and counterfeit pills to cause tens of thousands of deaths—at the same time as Mexican traffickers made methamphetamine cheaper and more potent than ever, creating, Sam argues, swaths of mental illness and a surge in homelessness across the United States.Quinones hit the road to investigate these new threats, discovering how addiction is exacerbated by consumer-product corporations. “In a time when drug traffickers act like corporations and corporations like traffickers,” he writes, “our best defense, perhaps our only defense, lies in bolstering community.” Amid a landscape of despair, Quinones found hope in those embracing the forgotten and ignored, illuminating the striking truth that we are only as strong as our most vulnerable.Weaving analysis of the drug trade into stories of humble communities, The Least of Us delivers an unexpected and awe-inspiring response to the call that shocked the nation in Sam Quinones’s award-winning Dreamland.

    But Philip Markoff, the handsome, clean-cut, twenty-two-year-old med student who hired Brisman on Craigslist, had different plans. On April 14, 2009, guests notified management of a woman screaming on the twentieth floor, and Brisman was found in a pool of blood, with several bullet wounds to her torso and…plastic restraints around her wrist.Hotel surveillance video captured Markoff’s image, and an additional tip helped police connect him to attacks on several other women, including a prostitute who was tied up at a Boston hotel, and the assault of an exotic dancer in Rhode Island, both of which bear a striking similarity to the Brisman murder.A skillful blend of hard journalism and fascinating yet chilling true-crime narrative, this headline-making story will appeal to fans of Ann Rule.

    This is the book that brings you the uncut version of The Killing Season, taking you behind the cameras to reveal the untold stories and candid moments that didn’t go to air. For the first time a more complete version of the truth is revealed.Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard dominate the drama as they strain to claim the narrative of Labor’s years in power. The journey to screen for each of their interviews is telling in itself. Rudd gives his painful account of the period and recalls in vivid detail the events of losing the prime ministership. Gillard is frank and unsparing of her colleagues.More than a hundred people were interviewed for The Killing Season—ministers, backbenchers, staffers, party officials, pollsters and public servants—recording their graphic accounts of the public and private events that made the Rudd and Gillard governments and then brought them undone. It is a damning portrait of a party at war with itself—of the personal rivalries and bitter defeats that have come to define the Rudd-Gillard era.It is also a remarkable insight into the work of Sarah Ferguson, one of Australia’s top journalists.

    His experiences, as he has collected them together in Hell West and Crooked, will surely become an Australian classic.

    It’s not meant to be. It’s one of the biggest financial decisions you’ll make in your life. But it is worth it . . . it’s hard, there will be shit bits, but it’s not impossible.At thirty, journalist Nicole Haddow had unstable income, no financial plan and only credit-card debt to her name. But less than two years’ later she was a home-owner.In Smashed Avocado, Nicole explains the steps she took to purchase her own home, alongside detailed case studies of other people who have found ways to enter the property market. She shares practical tips from financial planners, mortgage brokers, buyers’ agents, real-estate agents and other property experts, and the acquired wisdom of a new generation of homeowners – down to the micro-details. She even thrashes it out with Bernard Salt, the man who said young people should stop splashing out on expensive brunches if they want to own their own home. Buying property remains a worthwhile investment, and young people are inventing innovative ways of achieving it, including rentvesting, flipping, Airbnb, tiny homes, buying regionally and more.Nicole’s story is inspiring and optimistic – but, most importantly, it’s realistic. The home ownership dream might look different today, but it’s still possible to make it a reality.