Six extraordinary lives between covers this week – a New York Times bestseller that finds joy in the mess of life without pretending it’s fine, the explosive latest on Harry and Meghan, an Arkansas woman who buried a thousand men no one else would touch, and an Australian nurse who rowed away from a sinking ship while hoping her fiancé was still alive. Plus the Queensland premier who proved everyone wrong, and a teacher asking the questions about childhood we all should be asking.
Joyful Anyway – Kate Bowler
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Kate Bowler survived Stage Four bowel cancer and emerged from the experience with an unexpected question: is this it? A New York Times bestseller and professor who studies the “prosperity gospel”, the American belief that good things happen to good people, Bowler has made a career of puncturing toxic positivity, and Joyful Anyway is her most personal reckoning yet. Her thesis is simple and genuinely radical: joy does not have to depend on things getting better, because often they will not. The book is funny, honest and bracingly unsentimental, taking in lemurs, paragliding and wisdom that cuts right through “Life = the Ache + Joy” before arriving at her inspiring conclusion: “There is More.” A book for anyone who has ever found forced cheerfulness more exhausting than the difficulty itself.
The verdict
Hilarious, warm and life changing. The antidote to every wellness book that tells you to look on the bright side. Read it and feel understood.
Betrayal – Tom Bower
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Britain’s most relentless investigative biographer returns to the Sussex saga with fresh ammunition. Bower, who has trained his forensic sights on everyone from Tony Blair to Robert Maxwell, picks up the story five years after Megxit, with the Sussexes’ Netflix deals collapsed, their Spotify partnership dissolved and their financial future murkier than their supporters might admit. Drawing on insider interviews, the book details the breaking point between Harry and William, Meghan’s increasing influence over Harry’s decisions, and a royal family trying to contain a crisis that keeps finding new ways to escalate. Serialised in The Times before publication and an instant Sunday Times bestseller, this is Bower doing what he does best: connecting the dots others miss, with characteristic cool.
The verdict
Essential reading if you have been following this story. Whether you sympathise with Harry and Meghan or not, Bower’s research is thorough and the picture he paints is compelling.
All the Young Men – Ruth Coker Burks
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In 1986, 26-year-old Ruth Coker Burks walked through a red painted hospital door in Hot Springs, Arkansas, that the nurses were drawing straws to avoid. Inside was a young man dying of AIDS, crying for his mother. She held his hand. Word spread, and for the next decade Ruth, a single mother with no medical background and no money, became the only person in her deeply conservative community willing to care for gay men dying of the virus. She buried nearly a thousand of them, often in her own family’s cemetery plot, and eventually advised Governor Bill Clinton on the AIDS crisis. Praised by Clinton himself and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, this memoir is told with ferocious compassion and a dark, survival forged wit. It is, simply, one of the great human stories you will read this year.
The verdict
Devastating and life affirming in equal measure. The kind of book that makes you want to be a better person. Do not miss it.
The Titanic Story of Evelyn – Lisa Wilkinson
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Few Australians know that one of their own was aboard the Titanic and survived. Evelyn Marsden was a young South Australian nurse working the ocean liner circuit when she and her fiancé, a ship’s doctor, were both accepted for positions on the Titanic’s maiden voyage. A last minute scheduling change pulled him to another vessel. Evelyn sailed alone, and when the ship struck ice just before midnight on 14 April 1912, she calmly helped passengers to the lifeboats before climbing into one herself and taking the oars. Lisa Wilkinson, who travelled from Evelyn’s tiny hometown to Southampton to research the book, tells the story with the pace of a novel and the emotional intelligence of a journalist who knows what makes a story matter. The love story at its heart is wrenching.
The verdict
Exhaustively researched and beautifully told. A piece of Australian history hiding in plain sight, finally given the book it deserves.
Annastacia Palaszczuk: The Politics of Being Me – Annastacia Palaszczuk
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When Annastacia Palaszczuk took over as Queensland Labor leader, her party’s caucus was so depleted it could fit in a seven seat Toyota. Three election wins later, she had become Australia’s longest serving female premier and the first woman in Australian history to win a state premiership from opposition. Her memoir takes readers behind the scenes of those victories and the grinding reality of leading through a pandemic, the 2022 floods and the Brisbane Olympics bid all while navigating the particular scrutiny reserved for women in public life. She is candid about the personal cost, including her very public battle with IVF, and writes with the directness of someone who spent decades proving people wrong. Warm and unvarnished, very much the woman herself.
The verdict
A must for anyone interested in Australian politics or what it takes to lead as a woman. Frank, accessible and genuinely moving in places.
Childhood – Brendan James Murray
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Brendan James Murray an award winning author, high school teacher and father has written something genuinely hard to categorise. Part memoir, part investigation, Childhood begins with a silhouette on a freeway overpass that forces him to confront the ghosts of his own early years: vivid imaginative adventures alongside disadvantage, fear and a school he spent months refusing to attend. The book asks why some children flourish and others never make it, arriving at a surprising and urgent answer: imagination, neglected and undervalued, is the thing that saves us. Murray writes with the same clear-eyed compassion that made The School a Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List pick. Haunting and radical, it is the kind of book that lingers.
The verdict
Essential reading for parents, teachers, grandparents and anyone willing to look honestly at their own childhood. Murray is one of the most important voices in Australian non-fiction.