With sixteen other POWs, author Charles McCormac broke out from his POW camp in Japanese-occupied Singapore and began a two-thousand-mile escape from Singapore, through the jungles of Indonesia to Australia. The POWs's escape took a staggering five months and only two out of the original seventeen men survived. This is McCormac'ss compelling true account of one of the most horrifying and amazing escapes in World War Two. It is a story of courage, endurance and compassion, and makes for a very gripping read.

One of the 1960s counterculture's most fascinating characters was Kerry Wendell Thornley -- a writer, philosopher, Zen dishwasher, enlightened prankster, and, possibly, an Oswald double with disturbing ties to the Kennedy assassination. A lifelong provocateur, Thornley was linked to many of the fringe elements of the time. He helped create the spoof religion called the Discordian Society and its tract, the Principia Discordia. He coined the term "paganism" to describe various nature religions. And he befriended Robert Anton Wilson,... read more

From Sir Ernest Shackleton on South Georgia Island to currency trader Ron DiFrancesco in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, hundreds of people in life-threatening situations have shared an experience that an unseen being - known as the Third Man - helped them survive apparently insurmountable odds. So who is the Third Man?

A couple who have been united through the horrors of 20-century Europe and the joys of love and family, cannot live up to the vows they made nearly 50 years ago to stay together 'until death do us part'. In 1991, they take their own lives, together. Their granddaughter Johanna Adorjan digs through her family history to piece together the puzzle.

The only thing a worthy criminal takes from the cops is a beating, and even that he gives back, when the right moment comes. Siberian Education is the story of a tiny, tightly knit community of 'honest' and 'dishonest' criminals in Transnistria, a remote region between Moldovia and the Ukraine. This is a place with a strict code of honour, a complex hierarchy, and a deep distrust of outsiders - and especially police. Transgressions bring swift and severe retribution, and weapons are treated almost as religious icons. Nicolai Lilin'... read more

A coming-of-age memoir wrapped around a discussion of America's most taboo subject - social class. Set between 1950 and 1963, Joe uses members of his rambunctious Scots Irish family to chronicle the often heartbreaking post-war journey of 22 million rural Americans into the cities, where they became the foundation of a permanent white underclass.

At 19, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquility. What he got was a life of crime - crime reporting, that is, at the prestigious Yomiuri Shinbun. For twelve years of 80-hour work weeks, he covered the seedy side of Japan, where extortion, murder, human trafficking, and corruption are as familiar as ramen noodles and sake. But when his final scoop brought him face to face with Japan's most infamous yakuza boss - and the threat of death for him and his family - Adelstein decided to step down, momentarily. Then, ... read more

General Kamel Sachet was one of Saddam Hussein's commanders in his Special Forces, in charge of Kuwait City during Desert Storm, and a Governor in the province of Maysan. Over the course of four years in Baghdad, Wendell Steavenson came to know Sachet, his wife, and their nine children closely, and began to unravel their stories. The Weight of A Mustard Seed tells of a father with a glittering military career, a decorated hero with a private conscience; of a wife, once free-thinking and ambitious, who becomes progressively shuttere... read more

A candid occasionally unpleasant but frequently hilarious true story of a newly married man's journey through the terrors of being diagnosed with cancer and all that follows.When Ben Peacock, a young advertising writer, is unexpectedly diagnosed with testicular cancer, his life morphs into one darkly humorous rollercoaster ride of survival, which plunges through immediate lifesaving surgery, the prospect of imminent death, the ravages of chemotherapy, and the uncertainties of his future. Ben Peacock writes: Lessons From My Left Tes... read more

Born to an Iraqi Christian father and a British mother, and raised in Britain and Canada, Leilah Nadir has never set foot on Iraqi soil. Distanced from her Iraqi roots through immigration and now cut off by war, the closest link she has to the nation is through her father, who left Baghdad in the 1960s to pursue his studies in England. His Iraq is of mythical origins; his beginnings are in a garden at the family home that is now vacant. Through her father's memories, Leilah recounts her family's lost story, from Iraq at the turn of... read more

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident.

In this compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. This edition first poublished 2004.

In this beautifully written and thrillingly told true story of one man's heroic odyssey from blindness into sight, critically acclaimed author Robert Kurson takes us on a journey of suspense, daring, romance, and insight into the mysteries of vision and the brain.

This is the extraordinary true adventure story of how Sue Dockar survived for two days and two nights lost alone at sea after being swept away during a spearfishing contest in the shark-infested waters off the Queensland coast. The Lonely Sea shows how a series of small and individually avoidable errors dominoed into inevitable disaster. James Cameron, director of Titanic, describes it as "exactly the kind of true grit survival story that I thrive on".

Heinrich Harrer, traveller, explorer and mountaineer led one of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth century. He famously spent Seven Years in Tibet (made into the film starring Brad Pitt) and was tutor, mentor and a lifelong friend of the Dalai Lama. He made the first ascent of the notorious North Face of the Eiger (told in his book "The White Spider") and summited unclimbed peaks in Alaska, the Himalaya and South America. In this dramatic autobiography, he brings to life all of his adventures, from the early days of clim... read more

The precocious and artistic daughter of an Australian Chinese businessman-gambler, and grand-daughter of an Italian chef, the young Jenny was quickly absorbed into the sixties creative and libertarian circles of Sydney and then London. Part of the expatriate larrikin tribe that revolved around Oz Magazine, she mixed with kings & stars.

Country is a panoramic book about a scientist and a continent. In this, his most thrilling and personal book yet, Tim Flannery writes a love letter to our great land, drawing on three decades of extensive travel, research and field work to reveal its unique nature. As he describes his own passionate encounters with the land and its people, Flannery pays particular attention to the evolution of Australia

In 1942, eleven-year-old Emil Braun cheated death for the first time, when he escaped the clutches of Dr Mengele in a selection queue at Birkenau. In the next three years, and at other concentration camps, he did so time and again, often through the kindness of strangers.Many years later, after making a new life for himself in Australia, Emil and his daughter Suzy face the greatest trial of all. Suzy and her father love each other in the way most fathers and daughters do: they are too lazy to ask questions, too busy to listen, and ... read more

Herbert Dyce Murphy inspired Patrick White's The Twyborn Affair; he appears as a woman in one of E. Phillips Fox's best-known paintings; he prevented Douglas Mawson's Antarctic expedition from imploding.Lady Spy, Gentleman Explorer tells the story of one man's fascinating double life - a gentleman adventurer who also dressed in drag to spy for British Military Intelligence in pre-World War I Europe.In 1911 Murphy sailed to the Antarctic with the Mawson expedition for a gruelling exploration of the frozen continent, a trip of terrib... read more

From the early sixties to the mid-eighties as the editor of Dempster's Diary on the Daily Mail, Dempster was the man perfectly placed and qualified to record - and accelerate - the end of the age of deference. For many years, for many people, Dempster was the Daily Mail. His diary, with its scurrilous revelations about the great, the good, and the not-so good, was the only page to read. In his kipper ties and natty blazers, he brought a raffish sparkle to a dull decade, exposing the infidelities of Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia F... read more