starnawski...less restless

Leonie's bookshelf

Secret Daughter

Set in the past 30 years in India and the United States, Secret Daughter tells the parallel stories of Asha’s two families – one, her birth parents in India, who after delivering her to an orphanage, go on to have a baby boy and live hard, ...

All That I Am

by Anna Funder

This novel, based on real people and events, is a powerful account of middle-class, educated Germans resistance to Hitler’s regime, in the years between the first and second world wars.

History, delivered with Funder’s personal t...

Her Father's Daughter

by Alice Pung

Alice Pung’s second book complements her first, by providing the background to how her family came to be Australian, and what they had to go through to get here.

A refugee story, told through Alice’s successful first generation A...

The Year Before the Flood: A Story of New Orleans

by Ned Sublette

This book details a great deal of American history in order to explain the origins of the city of New Orleans and it’s many distinctive musical styles.

The purpose of all this is, of course, to celebrate and appreciate this world...

Zeitoun

by Dave Eggers

Zeitoun, the surname of the story’s main protagonist, is a devastating tale of what happened to one New Orleanian family in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Having lived through many such storms and having the resp...

Jandamarra and the Bunuba Resistance

by Howard Pedersen

A collaborative work between historian Howard Pedersen and Kimberley man, Banjo Woorunmurra, this is a story of the “fight for survival against the destructive terror of white colonisation” (Foreword by Peter Yu, Former Executive Director o...

The Songlines

by Bruce Chatwin

Bruce Chatwin takes us on a journey through Central Australia, delving into what Songlines are and what they mean to Indigenous Australians.

Although dry and theoretical in parts, Chatwin’s depictions of characters and experience...

Kings in Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

This is a personal tale, of the Irish migrant family’s toils and troubles in Australian cattle-farming in the mid-1800s.

It doesn’t attempt to present a balanced view of the times, nor honestly present the impact such settlers h...

Thursday, February 03, 2005