Memoirs Books

An icon. A household name. One of our best-loved actors. Noni Hazlehurst is finally telling a story of her own. A fourth-generation performer, Noni Hazlehurst has storytelling in her blood. She has graced our screens, stages and airwaves for fifty years...

'A story of grit and determination from a woman who writes the way she lives - fiercely, with passion and in full colour.' - Michele A'Court 'There are times, admittedly rare, when a book comes along that needs only one word to evaluate it. In the case...

The 32nd fostering memoir from international bestseller Cathy Glass Struggling to cope with three young children, Janie turns to experienced foster carer Cathy Glass. Helping the family each morning, Cathy soon uncovers how dangerous their situation has...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“Paul Scheer delivers a deeply funny, personal and moving account of how joy and pain are the perfect ingredients for a happy and funny life.”—Amy Poehler"It's a hilarious essay collection about trauma. Yes, really."—People...

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE‘The bothy embrace is addictive’ ADAM NICOLSON'Will have you reaching for your boots’ CAL FLYNThe door to the bothy is always unlocked, you just need to step inside. You will find them in the mountains. You will find...

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A TIMES BEST MEMOIR OF 2023‘Grippingly vivid and pacey’ THE TIMES‘A seven-year old girl on a seventy-foot yacht, for ten years, over fifty thousand miles of sailing’ SIMON WINCHESTER 'An astonishing almost day-by-day...

‘[A] moving, beautifully written book about love and mental health and life’ BOB ODENKIRK‘Fiercely intelligent, humane and necessary’ NATHAN FILER, author of THE SHOCK OF THE FALL'At its heart a story about love … an astonishing new voice' ALI MILLAR,...

‘A lyrical investigation … both powerful and transcendent’ CHIGOZIE OBIOMA‘Acutely observed, hauntingly rendered and deeply affecting’ AMINATTA FORNA‘Both epic and intimate’ MARGO JEFFERSONAn astonishing search for a missing person, the hidden tragedies...

Scott Morrison, Australia's 30th Prime Minister (2018-2022), offers a unique insider's account of a Christian who was open about his faith and operated at the top level of politics for more than a decade. During one of the toughest periods since the...

A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 from: LA Times * Boston Globe * The Millions * LitHub * ShondalandBy the New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning AFTERPARTIES comes a collection like none other: sharply funny, emotionally...

The long-awaited next book from actress and New York Times bestselling author of The Rural Diaries, Hilarie Burton Morgan. Through memoir essays and magical practices, Grimoire Girl connects us to the enchantment that exists inside us all.Since...

The Iraq War’s only living Medal of Honor recipient reveals the untold story of the remarkable brotherhood behind one of the war’s legendary acts of valor In 2004, he stormed an enemy stronghold to save his platoon. Fourteen years later, his unit...

AN NPR BOOK-OF-THE-DAY • A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY STAFF PICK • A NYLON MUST-READ • A FORTUNE NEW BOOK TO READ IN AUGUST“And, at the center of it all, am I actually nice or am I just performing a role I think I’m expected to play” Mia Mercado is a...

Finding Stevie is a dark and poignant true story that highlights the dangers lurking online. When Stevie’s social worker tells Cathy, an experienced foster carer, that Stevie, 14, is gender fluid she isn’t sure what that term means and looks it up...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER‘Impossible to read with dry eyes or an unaltered mindset’ Sunday Times‘Illuminating and beautiful’ Cathy Rentzenbrink What if everything you thought you knew about death was wrong?How should we prepare for the facts of dying...

One of the most talked-about and best-selling books of last year, this is the no-holds-barred autobiography of a sporting legend driven to the brink of self-destruction The bestseller that has everyone talking. In this, his first, autobiography, ‘Iron’...

On the same day that his wife gave birth to twins, Anthony Doerr received the Rome Prize, an award that gave him a year-long stipend and studio in Rome… ‘Four Seasons in Rome’ charts the repercussions of that day, describing Doerr's varied adventures in...

‘I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals’ Carl Jung An eye-opening biography of one of the most influential psychiatrists of the modern...

A captivating true story that will speak to generations of Australians, from the author of Mezza Italiana.  'Nonno Anni gives me a nudge. "You know, when I first came to Australia, I knew that my life would change forever."' Leaving the small...

The fifteenth fostering memoir by Cathy Glass. Danny was petrified and clung to me in desperation as I carried him to my car. Trapped in his own dark world, he couldn't understand why his parents no longer loved or wanted him, and were sending him away...

‘I’m going to love my baby and give her lots of attention,’ Jade said. ‘I’ll show my mum she’s wrong.’Jade, 17, is pregnant, homeless and alone when she’s brought to live with Cathy. Jade is desperate to keep her baby, but little more than a child...

David Mitchell, who you may know for his inappropriate anger on every TV panel show except Never Mind the Buzzcocks, his look of permanent discomfort on C4 sex comedy Peep Show, his online commenter-baiting in The Observer or just for wearing a stick-on...

A classic memoir of prison breaks and adventure – a bestselling phenomenon of the 1960s Condemned for a murder he had not committed, Henri Charrière (nicknamed Papillon) was sent to the penal colony of French Guiana. Forty-two days after his arrival he...

An extraordinary life, from ordinary beginnings.Optimism, resilience, audacity, hope, surviving daily challenges for themselves and those they love; carers embody all of these qualities. Cheryl Koenig's fifth book, a memoir, deals with all those human...

This is a memoir of an Aboriginal woman, Tjanara Goreng Goreng, who began life without any of the advantages of her fellow non-Indigenous Australians except for grit, humour and diverse talent in spades. Through one woman's story, this book...

'Alex Creece's Potty Mouth, Potty Mouth is a reckless, glorious, grotty revolution. It's an insubordinate 'kissyface of cobwebs' that sticks it to capitalism, heteronormativity and the patriarchy.Quotably horny and delightfully vulgar, Potty...

'What we now want from a biography, or autobiography, is the very thing that Virginia Woolf said that we have no right to want: art. Not only art, obviously, but art nevertheless. And we love the illumination of dark corners of the soul, having...

Surveyor Thomas Scott Townsend (18121869) is an elusive, almost legendary figure, closer to folklore than to history. His name is given to the country's second highest mountain, but the details of his career are obscure and his personal identity has...

Margaret Lilardia Tucker MBE (affectionately known as Aunty Marge) was a significant Aboriginal activist and one of the first Aboriginal women to publish for mainstream audiences. If Everyone Cared (1977) was a landmark publication. In that first...

Enjoy all of Al Clark's absorbing recollections in this combined bundle of both of his memoirs.Time FliesTime Fliesis an idiosyncratic memoir with a distinctive voice and a sense of the absurd: a wistful, reflective, sometimes comic view of a...

Two men, Robert and Vras, met in 1993 and formed a committed relationship until Robert's death of leukemia in May, 2022. This short book is a farewell letter to Robert, a long lamentation and a threnody, exploring the nature of their friendship, their...

Time Flies Too is the sequel to 2021's beguiling and absorbing memoir Time Flies by Al Clark, who in its last paragraph married and settled in Australia after a Spanish village childhood, a Scottish boarding school education and nearly two decades of...

'Oodnadatta Country I can still see it, in my mind's eye, exactly as it was back in my time. The 'There are so many stories to tell of my life, and sometimes I think they are not of importance, but they are, because often it is the little details that...

'I was confined, locked into my library, tracing my heartbeats from way, way back.'In Telltale, Carmel Bird seizes on an enforced isolation to re-read a rich dispensary of books from her past. A rule she sets herself is that she can consult only...

From the authorof Travels with My Angst andAny Guru Will Do, a vivid, nostalgic, and funny memoir of growing upin Hong Kong in the 1960s.Phil Brown's lifebegins in small town Australia - Maitland, NSW to be precise - but in 1963...

When she is four yearsold Amra Pajali realises that her mother is different. Fatima is loving butsometimes hears strange voices that tell her to do bizarre things. She isfrequently sent to hospital and Amra and her brother are passed around tofamily...

In the spirit of Patti Smith's M Train, Road Series is both love story and elegy. Renowned musician Hugo Race's evocations of Melbourne, Sydney, the USA, Europe and Mali, and the life of a rock musician on the road are revealing, incisive and exquisitely...

This is the story of two flawed eccentrics. Everything they do subverts their firm intention of keeping up appearances. They meet just after the war in liberated Paris but they cannot quite free themselves from the many strings attached to them the old...

'Nanna was an imposing woman. She was large and dark, with strong arms and silver hair that fell to her waist ... Her scars bore testament to her physical adventures...yet she remained the epitome of femininity and strength.' - Gail Hunt, youngest...

An important literary memoir which views white settler family history against the impacts on the Indigenous people with whom they interact. is poet and critic Bonny Cassidy's fourth book. Moving seamlessly through genres in its recovery of the past -...

*Shortlisted for the 2022 Stella Prize*No Documentis an elegy for a friendship cut short prematurely by death. The memory of this friendship becomes a model for how we might relate to others in sympathy, solidarity and rebellion. At once intimate and...

A Novel Idea is a memoir in photoessay form that follows Fiona McGregor's life as shewrites her award-winning novel Indelible Ink. It is a tongue-in-cheekrumination on the monotony and loneliness of the novelist's daily life, and theact...

Shortlisted for the 2020 NSW Premier's Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-fictionLonglisted for the 2019 Stella PrizeThe follow-up to Fiona Wright's essaycollection Small Acts of Disappearance winner of the Nita B. Kibble...

When Zo Norton Lodge was growing up in Annandale in the eighties and nineties, the self-proclaimed Heartland of the Inner West was a heady brew of somewhat maladjusted and genuinely unsettling residents. But Annandale was changing. New words like...

Warm and wry, mixing high culture and suburban realism, the laconic and the artful, Anything Can Happen is a memoir from one of Australia's literary trailblazers. Funny, heartbreaking, it has exactly the arc of a good story, with a theme about...

What's a life look like when the reader only gets to see the birthdays? The Birthday Scrolls is a memoir of Newcastle bohemian Geoff Nicholls' birthdays between the ages of 21 and 60. Pre-gentrification Newcastle, bands and parties mingle with visits to...