The chair is the most ubiquitous design element in the domestic environment, and almost everyone who has tackled the world of design has ended up designing one. In Chairs, following a foreword by Terence Conran, one of the world's most celebrated furniture designers, Judith Miller then scrutinises more than 100 of her favourite chairs reflecting on their iconic status, designers, historical facts, overall style, design details and ergonomic properties. More than 100 chairs have been specially photographed on location and are featured in chronological date order, ranging from early antiques such as the 1680 Wainscot Chair and the 1740 Louis XV Chaise Longue, to modern day collectables such as Marc Newson's 1988 'Embryo' and Tom Dixon's 2007 'Wingback'. This is not a catalogue; each chair has earned its place as an emblem of style, status, craft and art and is celebrated in this beautifully designed book.

A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972 - 1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was finding his feet as a writer.

Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him - a married woman with whom he had an affair, his favourite cousin Margot, a Brazilian dancer whose daughter had English lessons with him, former friends and colleagues. From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.

Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, SUMMERTIME shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task.

Australian Tragic is about a nation that began its life as a stage for misfortune - and ever since has struggled to outgrow its birthright. These are gripping tales that take us into the heart of this country: tales of genuine catastrophe, of grand chances gone astray, of fools and their plans pathetically undone, of heartbreaking sadness and violent loss, and of both goodness and human evil. From Aboriginals being curious in an American circus to the story of Martin Bryant at Port Arthur, and from Bob Bungey, who survived The Battle of Britain, but couldn't face life when his young wife suddenly died soon after he came home to the doctor who died minutes before he was to deliver a paper revealing the secret of using monkey glands to improve human health and stamina, and sexual virility - all these stories are told in a gripping narrative style, driven by eyewitness testimony, a solid sense of place, and a mood of impending doom. And we thought we knew our history...

A world that hangs suspended between triumph and catastrophe, between the dismantling of the Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers, frozen in the shadow of suicide terrorism and global financial collapse, such a world requires a firm hand and a guiding light. But does it need the Concern: an all-powerful organisation with a malevolent presiding genius, pervasive influence and numberless invisible operatives in possession of extraordinary powers? On the Concern's books are Temudjin Oh, an un-killable assassin who journeys between the peaks of Nepal, a version of Victorian London and the dark palaces of Venice; and a nameless, faceless torturer known only as the Philosopher. And then there's the renegade Mrs Mulverhill, who recruits rebels to her side; and Patient 8262, hiding out from a dirty past in a forgotten hospital ward. As these vivid, strange and sensuous worlds circle and collide, the implications of turning traitor to the Concern become horribly apparent, and an unstable universe is set on a dizzying course.

In this lavish, beautiful book, editors Kirstie Clements and Lee Tulloch showcase the best of Australia′s leading fashion magazine: photography by Helmut Newton, Norman Parkinson, Deborah de Turbeville, Monty Coles, Graham Shearer and Richard Bailey, and the images of the women who inspired them: Maggie Tabberer, Elle MacPherson, Emma Balfour, Gemma Ward and Catherine McNeil among others; fashion icons from Norma Tullo and Jenny Kee to Collette Dinnigan; artistic collaborations, including the guest editorships of Baz Luhrmann, Karl Lagerfeld and Kylie Minogue, and a spectrum of Australian artists, musicians, actors, writers and thinkers.

Hal Treherne is a young and dedicated soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. Impatient to see action, his other deep commitment is to Clara, his beautiful red, white and blue girl, who sustains him as he rises through the ranks.

When Hal is transferred to the Mediterranean, Clara, now his wife, and their baby daughters join him. But Cyprus is no sunshine posting, and the island is in the heat of the Emergency: the British are defending the colony against Cypriots schoolboys and armed guerrillas alike battling for enosis, union with Greece. The skirmishes are far from glorious and operations often rough and bloody. Still, in serving his country and leading his men, Hal has a taste of triumph.

The prizewinning and bestselling author of The Outcast returns with an emotionally powerful portrait of a marriage in extremis and a world-view in question. Sadie Jones has produced a passionate, gut-wrenching and brilliantly researched depiction of a small wars with devastating consequences; and in doing so, raises important questions that resonate profoundly today.

150 years ago the momentous findings in Charles Darwin’s controversial masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, shook the scientific and religious world to its core. Perhaps more astonishing, the creation-evolution debate sparked by his seminal work of 1859 continues unabated in the 21st century. Now, Richard Dawkins, world renowned evolutionary biologist and famous atheist, takes on the Creationists with a brilliant and uncompromising look at the incontrovertible evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The panoply of data that proves the theory is vast, with scientific fingerprints massively numerous and varied. The logic Dawkins employs to explain it is the same throughout the book: the evidence that we see is exactly what we should expect to see if evolution had happened. He examines the facts from the point of view of domestication, from cabbages to Great Danes. Anatomy yields a raft of clues whether from the common mouse or fish, and molecules underscore the message even more convincingly. With answers to a miscellany of common questions, and detailed descriptions of what our ancestors would have looked like at various landmark dates, Dawkins leaves us with no room for doubt.

New York: the world’s greatest city; the city that never sleeps; the city of opportunity; the gateway to America and freedom for the successive waves of immigrants who have landed on its shores; whose motto is Ever Upwards; a city whose skyscrapers touched the sky and then tragically fell to earth.

Edward Rutherfurd tells the story of this magical city as no other author could, through the interwoven tales of its populace, from its Seventeenth Century origins as a small trading post to the present where it is the centre of world business. The story of New York is also the story of its symbolic buildings and places: Wall Street, the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and the doomed Twin Towers.

And through the lens of New York he tells too the story of all of America: from its Indian Wars, the Revolution, the abolitionists, the mass immigrations from Ireland and Italy, the Civil War, to the coming of the railways and the expansion West, to the fortunes beyond the dreams of avarice that saw its buildings rise higher than any in the world before, to the turmoil of the World Wars and the tragedy of the terrorist attack of 9/11. In all this he never loses sight of the common man: the early English and Dutch traders, the slaves, the migrants, the politicians, society ladies, the whores and publicans, the soldiers, the artists and the financiers.

A gripping blend of fact and fiction in a D-Day novel about how human beings deal with uncertainty.

The D-day landings - the fate of 2.5 million men, 3000 landing craft and the entire future of Europe depends on the right weather conditions on the English Channel on a single day. A team of Allied scientists is charged with agreeing on an accurate forecast five days in advance. But is it even possible to predict the weather so far ahead? And what is the relationship between predictability and turbulence, one of the last great mysteries of modern physics?
Wallace Ryman has devised a system that comprehends all of this - but he is a reclusive pacifist who stubbornly refuses to divulge his secrets. Mark Latchford, a young maths prodigy from the Met Office, is sent to Scotland to discover Ryman's system and apply it to the Normandy landings. But turbulence proves more elusive than anyone could have imagined and events, like the weather, begin to spiral out of control.