Books for Mother’s Day

Why not get your mum a book for Mother’s Day? We all know everyone loves books! Here are our picks for Mother’s Day.


Night Games

Sex, Power and Sport
By Anna Krien

In the tradition of Helen Garner’s The First Stone comes a closely observed, controversial book about sex, consent and power.

Both a courtroom drama and a riveting work of narrative journalism, Anna Krien takes a balanced and fearless look at the dark side of footy culture.

‘One of the most anticipated books of the year’ – Books+Publishing

Why your mum will love it
Readers who enjoy narrative journalism such as Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man, Anna Funder’s Stasiland and Helen Garner’s non-fiction will love this fearless investigation into the dark side of footy culture, sex, consent and power.

Welcome to Your New Life
By Anna Goldsworthy

Welcome to Your New Life is Anna Goldsworthy’s humorous and heartfelt memoir about having her first child. Should she indulge her craving for sausage after sixteen years of not eating meat? Will her birth plan involve Enya or hypnosis, or neither? And just how worried should she be about her baby falling into a composting toilet?

‘so funny and moving that you feel you are living more vividly’ – Anna Funder
‘A keen-eyed, funny, tender, wonderful book.’ – Chloe Hooper

Why your mum will love it
Self-deprecating, humorous and beautifully written, this memoir evokes the journey of parenthood, the shock of the new, and the love that binds families together.

Political Animal
The Making of Tony Abbott 
By David Marr

Tony Abbott is poised to become the nation’s next Prime Minister, and, more than ever, Australians are asking: what kind of man is he and how might he run the country?

‘A more fair-minded and more generous assessment than many people, perhaps myself included, had expected.’ – Tony Abbott

Why your mum will love it
Political Animal is an illuminating portrait of Tony Abbott the man and the politician. And besides, everyone’s mum loves David Marr!

Unsuitable for Publication
Editing Queen Victoria
By Yvonne M. Ward

Unsuitable for Publication reveals the real story of Queen Victoria, based on unprecedented access to the royal archives. For the first time, readers can gain insight into Queen Victoria’s experiences of motherhood and her struggle to combine the roles of ruler and wife.

Why your mum will love it
It’s a fascinating piece of historical detective work about one of the most influential women of the nineteenth century.

Animal Wise
The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures
By Virginia Morell

Did you know that crows improvise tools, chimps grieve, ants teach, earthworms make decisions and birds practise songs in their sleep? Animal Wise is a dazzling odyssey into the inner world of animals.

‘A journey to the centre of the animal mind’ – Temple Grandin

Why your mum will love it
Elephants, wolves, dolphins, parrots and more, Animal Wise is a fascinating account of animals and their many talents.

Ghost Wife
A Memoir of Love and Defiance
By Michelle Dicinoski

Ghost Wife is the heartwarming account of Michelle Dicinoski’s marriage to her wife, Heather.

‘Insightful, supple and gorgeously written’ – Benjamin Law

‘Moving, irresistible and new, this memoir will inspire readers to honour all that is hidden in the past – and within ourselves.’ – Gloria Steinem

Why your mum will love it
Ghost Wife is a stunningly written memoir about love, family secrets, acceptance and the hidden world of people who live outside social norms, sometimes illegally.

The Happiness Show
A Novel 
By Catherine Deveny

The Happiness Show is Catherine Deveny’s smart, funny and heartbreaking novel about love and marriage, sex and friendship, and the messiness of second chances.

‘A fun, feisty read. I was hooked from the first page.’ – Mia Freedman

Why your mum will love it
Sexy, hilarious, outrageous and moving, The Happiness Show explores the rules and taboos of contemporary relationships and the pursuit of happiness.

Toyo
A Memoir
By Lily Chan

In Toyo, Lily Chan tells the story of her grandmother’s remarkable life. Set across Japan, India and Australia, it follows Toyo from her unusual upbringing in Japan to her experience of the war and her eventual journey to Australia.

‘This is a beautifully lyrical and compelling voice, infused with deep insight and love’ – Alice Pung

Why your mum will love it
Toyo is the story of a strong and resilient woman who rose to the challenges she faced, to live an extraordinary life.

Q&A with Anna Goldsworthy, author of Welcome to Your New Life

Anna Goldsworthy speaks to us about her new memoir Welcome to Your New Life.

What’s your new book Welcome to Your New Life about?

It’s a book addressed to my first child, mapping the months of his gestation and the first two years of his life, for which he retains no memory of his own. I hoped to write a small tale and a large one at the same time: nothing and everything happens.

What was the most surprising thing for you about having your first child?

It has been a non-ending sequence of surprises. But perhaps the greatest surprise was how completely my baby was his own person, from the very first moment. I had previously imagined parenthood as a version of self-love, fuelled by narcissism. The surprise was that it is about loving somebody completely other, at a level that transcends self-regard.

Welcome to Your New Life is your second memoir. Did you always plan to write another memoir after Piano Lessons?

Absolutely not. After writing Piano Lessons and then talking about it exhaustively, I was thoroughly bored by ‘Anna Goldsworthy’, and had grander projects in mind. But over the course of my pregnancy and the early months of my son’s life, I jotted things in my notebook, until I realised I was accidentally writing another book.   

Welcome to Your New Life

In this second part of a three-part series, Anna Goldsworthy writes about obsession and finding the right voice for her new memoir Welcome to Your New Life.

I never planned to become a memoirist, let alone a serial memoirist. After the publication of my first book, Piano Lessons, I intended to plunge into fiction, or biography, or anything else that was not memoir (graphic novels? encyclopaedia?) – if only to shed the taint of the word. But there was another project closer to hand: my baby. And a small problem: I couldn’t think of anything else.

Piano Lessons is generated by an obsession with music; Welcome to Your New Life by an obsession with a child. Each book seeks to transcribe an experience that is largely inarticulate, but in many ways Welcome was more difficult. Someone once told me that experience should be allowed to mature for a decade before being transformed into art. I’m not sure if this is true, but it had the ring of authority about it. In Piano Lessons I notated my adolescent foibles with serenity, confident that a statute of limitations applied.

Welcome to Your New Life enjoys no such vintage. It is a book hewed out of the desperate present, and as such is written in present tense. Babies live exclusively in the present, and parenthood is such an act of empathy that you find yourself doing the same. (Sleep deprivation takes care of the rest, shoring away both memory and aspiration.) In prose, there are clear advantages to present tense – immediacy, intensity – but it also offers less perspective, and less digressive ease. A friend described Welcome as a ‘photo album of emotion’, and my original notes – dashed down while breastfeeding, or during nap-time – were almost exclusively impressionistic. The challenge was binding them into some sort of narrative. Piano Lessons settled comfortably into the template of bildungsroman, but my life as a mother had no clear structure. Or if it did, I was so stuck in the present moment that I could not see it. It took me some time, and some living, to discover it: a descent into chaos, and partial re-emergence.

As I wrote, the book automatically fell into second person. I thought it might switch to third person when my baby was born, and for his first half hour, when he was still a stranger to me, it did. Then it immediately swivelled back to you. Okay, I thought, gritting my teeth: an entire book in second person present tense. That sounds about like my life at present. And so the book is addressed to my son, as a record of those early years in which he was not yet laying down his own stories.

The memoirs I like best are those least fascinated by their authors: memoirs that gaze outward, rather than towards their own navels. Inevitably, there is a lot of navel-gazing in the first part of this book, but I hope it is less about this particular mother than about motherhood: a type of travel writing from a terrifying, wonderful, foreign land.

Welcome to Your New Life will be released in April.

Welcome to Your New Life

We’re very excited about Anna Goldsworthy’s second memoir, Welcome to Your New Life, which will be released in April. Here, in the first of three parts, Anna writes about how Welcome to Your New Life came about.

‘So, what are you working on now?’
‘A memoir of motherhood. It’s sort of comic, sort of deadly serious...’

But the smile has already frozen; the eyes glazed over. Or worse: there’s the knowing chuckle. ‘Another motherhood memoir! Every generation thinks it invents motherhood, doesn’t it?’

Are there really so many motherhood memoirs? Because when I fell pregnant, I felt ill-equipped by my reading for what was to follow. I had enjoyed a much more thorough apprenticeship in the male midlife crisis, and could more readily imagine wielding a penis than a belly full of child or a breast full of milk.

‘English literature had never interested itself in mothers or motherhood,’ wrote Germaine Greer in 1999. ‘Until recently women have written little or nothing about the emotional cataclysm of becoming a mother.’ There are notable exceptions, such as the brilliant memoirs of Rachel Cusk and Anne Enright, but I am yet to discover these alleged libraries of them. Perhaps motherhood has been deemed too lowly a subject for capital L Literature.