Collection: Non Fiction Lifestories

They didn't say anything about this in the books, I thought, as the snow blew in through the gaping doorway and settled on my naked back. I lay face down on the cobbled floor in a pool of nameless muck, my arm deep inside the straining cow... 1937: Newly-qualified veterinary surgeon James Herriot...

The hilarious true adventures of two young vets dealing with all creatures (and humans!) great and small in country Australia. The life of a country vet is far from glamorous. There's no such thing as a nine-to-five working day. You're out in all weathers, at all times of the day and night. More ...

St Lucia, the Brisbane suburb famed for its university campus, emerged despite world wars, Spanish Influenza and Depression. In the 1950s, kangaroos hopped across open paddocks; snakes slithered through scrub and sugar cane fields. The sanitary cart, ice man, milkman and whistle-tooting postman t...

These days, you might know him better as a tractor-driving Gentleman Farmer, but Jeremy Clarkson wasn't always a horny-handed son of the soil. Not at all... Back in the day Jeremy was far more likely to be found gunning around the world in a haze of burnt rubber and petrol fumes. But life as a gl...

The extraordinary biography of a young Chinese peasant boy who emerged from abject poverty, defected to the USA, and became principal dancer for the Houston ballet, a star in the US, friend to George and Barbara Bush, and a star of the Australian ballet as well.

Annotation. Book one in the Inland Writers-short reads from the Centre of Australia. The killing times were barely over in the Kimberley. What I knew, even as a small boy, was that no-one argued with a whitefella. People talked in whispers. I was still so small. This is the story of the early yea...

Gabe Brown didn't set out to change the world when he first started working alongside his father-in-law on the family farm in North Dakota. But as a series of weather-related crop disasters put Brown and his wife, Shelly, in desperate financial straits, they started making bold changes to their f...

The powerful, heart-breaking memoir of Dita Kraus, THE LIBRARIAN OF AUSCHWITZ Dita Kraus was born in Prague in 1929 - in her powerful new memoir she writes about her childhood before the war and then during the Nazi-occupation that saw her and her family sent to the Jewish ghetto at Terezin and f...

The heart-warming Australian story Penguin Bloom - the miraculous tale of a baby magpie that helped save a young mother and her family - is a homegrown and international bestseller; soon to be a major Hollywood movie, starring Naomi Watts and Andrew Lincoln. Sam's personal message at the end of t...

Andrew Kwong was only seven when he witnessed his first execution. The grim scene left him sleepless, anxious and doubtful about his fervour as a revolutionary in Mao's New China. Yet he knew if he devoted himself to the Party and its Chairman he would be saved. That's what his teacher told him. ...