News & Blog
Read the latest news and bulletins, essays, features, opinions from our bestselling authors. Find out what's being said, debated, and discussed in the world of books and ideas.
Choice is a wonderful and sometimes overwhelming thing. If I were a mathematician I could tell you how many variations of lists could be produced for an A – Z of Vintage Classics. I know it would be a very large number. I confess I have taken a few liberties in interpreting the alphabet in this list, thus increasing the possibilities. Oh dear, not very helpful! We hope this list of titles...
After more than 10 years working in weight loss, with children, teens, adults and athletes, I can pick with about 95% accuracy those who will go on to achieve their weight loss goals and those who will not. Call it a dietitians sixth sense, or good intuition in general but I can remember just 2 clients over 10 years with who I got it wrong. That is a pretty good statistic I think? So what...
Of late, great novels have acquired the added allure of the derided and the denied. Though not yet forbidden, children are taught that there are no such things as novels but only texts, or, in a fashionable variant, data; our multi-streaming media constantly repeats that if there are novels they are from the past, dying or dead, exotic strange things like a Himalayan snow leopard or Barbary lion,...
I thought it would be a breeze to write about ten of my favourite Australian books for Australia Day, but each time I have thought about bringing my fingers to the keyboard, I change the books I want to include. One solution is to restrict myself to fiction only. Of course this means I won’t be able to mention Recollections of a Bleeding Heart by Don Watson (but this would be perfect to get...
The 84th Annual Academy Awards® Nominations Announced
by Random House Australia on 25 January 2012
The 84th Annual Academy Awards® nominations were announced earlier today and on the nominations list were many films adapted from well-loved books. The film adaptation of Kaui Hart Hemmings’s THE DESCENDANTS picked up a multitude of nominations, including Best Film, Directing, Film Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor for George Clooney. The animated film,...
I can’t resist the urge to talk about this incredible novel even though it doesn’t release in English until May. HHhH won the prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman in 2010. Mario Vargas Llosa, 2010 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature describes it as, ‘Magnificent … unsurpassable … told with grace and elegance … exerts a hypnotic sway over the reader...
I reluctantly started reading Maggie McKellar’s memoir, WHEN IT RAINS, on our publishing director’s recommendation. Although this was an important and big book for us at Random House I was hesitant because on the face of it this sounded like a really sad story and I didn’t know if that’s what I felt like reading. How wrong was I. WHEN IT RAINS is a magnificent,...
All novels come from somewhere. They start off as a seed of an idea that just grows and grows until it’s a full on tree in desperate need of pruning. That’s what it’s like for me anyway. THE GIRL IN STEEL-CAPPED BOOTS is a story that grew inside of me for nearly ten years before I was forced to put hand to keyboard. It all started when I was sent to the Pilbara to work as a construction...
When THE INFORMATIONIST released in March of 2011, it seemed that the media and book reviewers focused nearly as much on detailing particulars of my own life story as they did on the novel itself. This was understandable. I was born into and raised within The Children of God, a rather controversial and notorious apocalyptic cult spun out of the 1960’s Jesus Movement. In lieu of schooling,...
Yes, it's that time of year again where you pledge to lose weight, get fit, ditch bad habits, and learn to relax. Unfortunately, though, February comes and our enthusiasm and commitment wears thin: you find yourself curled up on the couch in front of the TV, eating pizza from the carton, overwhelmed – and more stressed than ever! Sound familiar? Most of us know what it's like to make...
