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Description: With her Cook's Companion front and centre in half a million kitchens, Stephanie Alexander is the very definition of a household name. Each day thousands turn to this 'food Bible' for definitive recipes, encouragement and advice. But before Stephanie Alexander penned a word for the emerging food media - let alone for The Cook's Companion - she had spent decades avidly documenting food experiences. Shaped by her mother's dedication to good food and her father's love of reading, she trained as a librarian and all the while observed, notated, assessed and re-created the dishes she loved. Her monthly university allowance rarely lasted more than a week - all spent on pan-fried flounder and chestnut Mont Blanc. She was seduced over pain Poilane while working as an au pair in Paris, and later over ackee and saltfish in London. In 1966, with no formal training and a newborn baby, but brimming with confidence and sheer determination, she opened Jamaica House with her first husband. The personal toll was great and it was eight years until she emerged on the restaurant scene again. Stephanie's Restaurant has become part of Melbourne food folklore, permanently raising the bar for restaurant dining in Australia. At the time of its opening, in 1976, a salad to most people meant iceberg lettuce, no one had heard of goat's cheese and ginger came in a tin. Over the next twenty-one years, in order to obtain the best possible produce, the likes of which she had enjoyed while travelling in Europe, Stephanie championed small local suppliers or grew it herself. Her indefatigable determination and single-minded vision have influenced - and sometimes intimidated - a generation of chefs, cooks and diners. And now her Kitchen Garden Foundation is inspiring tens of thousands of primary school children across Australia to grow and cook their own food. A Cook's Life is a very personal account of one woman's uncompromising dedication to good food, of how it shaped her life and changed the eating habits of a nation.

Author Biography: Stephanie Alexander is one of Australia's most highly regarded food writers. She has written numerous influential food books, including Stephanie Alexander's Kitchen Garden Companion, Cooking and Travelling in South-West France and Kitchen Garden Cooking with Kids.

 

ISBN: 9781921382789

Title: A COOK'S LIFE
Author: ALEXANDER, STEPHANIE
RRP: $50.00

Description: The sequel to the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall. 'My boy Thomas, give him a dirty look and he'll gouge your eye out. Trip him, and he'll cut off your leg,' says Walter Cromwell in the year 1500. 'But if you don't cut across him he's a very gentleman. And he'll stand anyone a drink.' By 1535 Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith's son, is far from his humble origins. Chief Minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes have risen with those of Anne Boleyn, Henry's second wife, for whose sake Henry has broken with Rome and created his own church. But Henry's actions have forced England into dangerous isolation, and Anne has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. When Henry visits Wolf Hall, Cromwell watches as Henry falls in love with the silent, plain Jane Seymour. The minister sees what is at stake: not just the king's pleasure, but the safety of the nation. As he eases a way through the sexual politics of the court, its miasma of gossip, he must negotiate a 'truth' that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge undamaged from the bloody theatre of Anne's final days. In 'Bring up the Bodies', sequel to the Man Booker Prize-winning 'Wolf Hall', Hilary Mantel explores one of the most mystifying and frightening episodes in English history: the destruction of Anne Boleyn. This new novel is a speaking picture, an audacious vision of Tudor England that sheds its light on the modern world. It is the work of one of our great writers at the height of her powers.

ISBN: 9780007353583
Title: Bring Up the Bodies
Author: MANTEL, HILARY
Publication date: 10/05/2012
RRP: $40.00

Description: A powerful story of doomed love against the backdrop of Africa ...Wangira is caught between the traditions of his Kikuyu tribe and the disturbing new ideas of the missionaries. When, as a young warrior, he saves the life of a wealthy American photographer, he is offered the chance of a new life far away in the white man's world. Between the wars, Kenya is a land of boundless opportunity where the rich engage in hunting safaris, horse racing, outrageous parties and all the pleasures that money can buy. Dana Northcote is a celebrated socialite, living the high life, but when Wangira uses her husband's farm in the Kenyan highlands to hide some contraband, she embarks on a dangerous, passionate affair. Ultimately, she is forced to make a heart-rending decision that will tear her life apart and has consequences which will echo through the generations. Spanning the first half of the twentieth century and culminating in Kenya's fight for independence from the British Empire, ECHOES FROM A DISTANT LAND is a vivid evocation of a nation in turmoil, and a story of a love that dared to cross the divide. praise for frank coates's novels: 'remarkable ...adventuresome ...suffused with tenderness' AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW 'powerfully recreates the turbulent past' COURIER-MAIL 'blockbuster adventure with authenticity' WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN 'an enthralling, multi-layered tale' GOOD READING

ISBN: 9780732292300
Title: ECHOES FROM A DISTANT LAND
Author: COATES, FRANK
Publication date: 01/04/2012
RRP: $40.00

* The extraordinary story of Pannonica - a British-born Rothschild daughter who abandoned her children to live in New York among the Jazz artists

ISBN: 9781844086047
Title: The Baroness: The Search for Nica the Rebellious Rothschild
Author: ROTHSCHILD, HANNAH
Publication date: 03/05/2012
RRP: $40.00

Description: This is a unique and heartbreaking memoir of a child's imprisonment in a Japanese POW camp during World War II. '1942: It was towards the middle of the year when my friends started disappearing...' On the island of Java, the stirrings of the Second World War in Europe and the angry-looking man called Hitler seem a million miles away from Norwegian-born Lise and her siblings. Then one day, her friends and neighbours start to disappear, and she begins to realise that they are not safe after all. Through ten-year-old eyes, Lise tells of her family's two-year imprisonment in POW camps and the brutal treatment received at the hands of their Japanese captors. For respite from the rat-infested floor of their shelter they adopt a blue door, which sits on concrete posts in the ground. They live on it during the day as young Lise plots ways to protect her family from disease, starvation and the desperate behaviour of fellow prisoners. This is a little girl's heartbreaking tale of survival.

Author Biography: Lise Kristensen was born Lise Gronn-Nielsen in Java, Indonesia 1934, of Norwegian parents. During the Second World War, she and her family were held for over two years in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. After the war they moved to Norway. She was educated in Norway and Germany before qualifying and working as a secretary and then a gymnastics teacher. She went on to study art and became a painter, exhibiting and selling her work in Europe, the USA and Japan. She now lives in Spain with her husband.

 

ISBN: 9780230766976

Title: THE BLUE DOOR: A LIITLE GIRL'S INCREDIBLE STORY OF SURVIVAL IN THE JAPANESE POW CAMPS OF JAVA
Author: KRISTENSEN, LISE
Publication date: 01/03/2012
RRP: $35.00

Description: When her widower father drowns at sea, ten-year-old Gemma Hardy, an only child, is taken from her native Iceland to Scotland, to live with her uncle's family. But the death of her doting guardian soon after leaves Gemma under the resentful eye of her aunt, and Gemma, her aunt quickly makes clear, is an unwelcome guest. When she receives a scholarship to a private school, Gemma believes she's found the perfect solution, and she eagerly sets out again to a new home; but at Claypoole she finds herself treated as an unpaid servant. To Gemma's delight, the school finally goes bankrupt in 1959 and she takes a job as an au pair on the Orkney Islands. The remote Blackbird Hall belongs to Mr. Sinclair, a London businessman; his eight-year-old niece is Gemma's charge. Even before their first meeting Gemma is, like everyone on the island, intrigued by Mr. Sinclair. Rich (by her standards), single, flying in from London when he pleases, Hugh Sinclair fills the house with life. The unlikely pair are drawn to one another, but their courtship is cut short by Gemma's discovery of a secret that has shadowed her employer's life; soon after, she resolves to flee to mainland Scotland and vows to forget Mr. Sinclair. But as she rebuilds her life she wonders with increasing intensity whether she may still have a family in Iceland. As for her vow, that proves harder to keep than she imagines. Set in Scotland and Iceland in the 1950s and 60s, THE FLIGHT OF GEMMA HARDY is a captivating homage to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre - a sweeping saga that resurrects the timeless themes of the original, but is destined to become a classic all its own.

Author Biography: Margot Livesey grew up in Scotland. After taking a B.A. in English and philosophy at the University of York in England she spent most of her twenties working in shops and restaurants and learning to write. She is currently a distinguished writer in residence at Emerson College. She lives with her husband, a painter, in Cambridge, MA, and goes back to London and Scotland whenever she can.


ISBN: 9780062189035
Title: The Flight of Gemma Hardy: A Novel
Author: LIVESEY, MARGOT
Publication date: 01/04/2012
RRP: $29.99

Fat and ostracized as a kid, Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. When he's offered the post of foreign correspondent in a Portuguese backwater that has sprouted a homegrown terrorist movement, Edgar recognizes the disappeared larger-than-life reporter he's been sent to replace, Barrington Saddler, as exactly the outsize character he longs to emulate. Infuriatingly, all his fellow journalists cannot stop talking about the beloved Bear, who is no longer lighting up their work lives. Yet all is not as it appears. Os Soldados Ousados de Barba - The Daring Soldiers of Barba - have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for a province so dismal, backward, and windblown that you couldn't give the rat hole away. So why, with Barrington vanished, do terrorist incidents claimed by the SOB suddenly dry up? A droll, playful novel set in an alternative past on a fictional European peninsula,THE NEW REPUBLIC is a fast-paced, plot-driven thriller.
Addressing weighty issues like terrorism with a deft, tongue-in-cheek touch, Shriver presses the more intimate question: What makes charismatic people so magnetic, while the rest of us inspire a shrug? What's their secret? And in the end, who has the better life - the admired, or the admirer?

ISBN: 9780732287054
Title: THE NEW REPUBLIC
Author: SHRIVER, LIONEL
Publication date: 01/04/2012
RRP: $40.00

Having had a traumatic experience 12 years prior, Abigail Lowery lives in a remote area, holed up on a house with high-tech security measures, a fierce guard dog and a cache of weapons, but this only serves to further inrtrigue police chief Brooks Gleason, who aims to protect Abigail from what she fears.

ISBN: 9780749955168
Title: The Witness
Author: ROBERTS, NORA
Publication date: 17/04/2012
RRP: $37.00