Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation - as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love - that arises from its loss. From local bars to trainyards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.
Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend and former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.
Evoking John Steinbeck's novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.

On 24 November 2007 Australia resoundingly changed government. If you think you know what really happened during that tumultuous year behind the closed doors of the Liberal Party, in the back rooms of the ACTU and deep in the campaign war room of the Labor Party, think again.
2007 was a year to remember in Australian politics. It saw the dramatic fall of John Howard and the unexpected rise of Kevin Rudd. It saw the Liberal Party buckle under the inertia of incumbency and the Labor Party find new discipline and energy. It also saw the union movement at the centre of one of the most effective and powerful political campaign the country has ever seen.
With unprecedented access to the key players and countless hours of confidential interviews, Peter Hartcher reveals how Kevin Rudd secretly forged his alliance with Julia Gillard to topple Kim Beazley. He exposes the way Labor' s factions intimidated Rudd. He lays bare the raging, unending struggle between John Howard and Peter Costello for control of the national budget. And he explains why Peter Costello believes Howard's defeat was the greatest humiliation of any prime minister in Australia's history.
To the Bitter End is a penetrating, riveting and above all revealing exploration of a year when the political stakes had never been higher.

New in the bestselling Way We Live series is this visually thrilling exploration of the way people around the world live with the things they love. Divided into seven main sections, the book showcases Gilles de Chabaneixs eagle-eye for a good idea or intriguing detail, offering an international tour of how people frame, hang and place objects, as well showing the best ways of combining and balancing them, and displaying them with wit or irony. Every opportunity to make cross cultural comparisons and connections is taken within this book to provide a truly international vision of the ways in which our lives are reflected by the things we love.

In a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the Piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning.
Gentle, intimate and witty, Nocturnes is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older, relationships flounder and youthful hopes recede.

Late on a hot summer night in the tail end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant figure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steals into the night by his side, terribly afraid but desperate to impress.
Jasper takes him through town and to his secret glade in the bush, and it's here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper's horrible discovery. With his secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion as he locks horns with his tempestuous mother; falls nervously in love and battles to keep a lid on his zealous best friend, Jeffrey Lu.
And in vainly attempting to restore the parts that have been shaken loose, Charlie learns to discern the truth from the myth, and why white lies creep like a curse. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.