In the early years of his music career, John Farnham’s life was dominated by a manipulative, egomaniacal manager whose control over the young star was so absolute that he was secretly plying him with drugs: amphetamines to keep him working all night, followed by sleeping pills in his morning coffee to knock him out cold.
This alternate history of the first moon landing aims for the impossible – and it’s done with style.
Mark Raphael Baker died of cancer last year. His family has ushered his stirring memoir toward publication.
When I tell people the story of my misdiagnosis they are furious, and urge me to sue for malpractice. But I refuse to face the challenges ahead of me filled with bile.
The highest-paying Australian literary prize has selected Melissa Lucashenko’s chronicle of Brisbane’s colonial conflicts as the recipient of its greatest honour.
A silly, sexy, salacious romp called Rivals is based on Jilly Cooper’s famous book, plus South Korea’s dying breed of haenyeo – women divers.
John Safran joined the Palestinian-flag waving crowds gathered at the Sydney Opera House after the October 7 attacks – specifically because police warned Jews to stay away. But he still doesn’t know what was chanted.
You might think Saturday Night Fever begins with John Travolta and ‘Stayin’ Alive’, or with Barry Gibb’s right hand. But where it really begins – and ends – is with Robert Stigwood.
Sri Lanka is a subtropical island which has been a favourite for Australian surfers for years – a ‘pristine, sultry and as yet undeveloped paradise’. But it has a dark underside.
Even if you buy into the premise that finding the ‘holy grail of [hair] texture’ is worth so much personal and financial risk, too often this book reads as though GenAI has been asked to write a series of annual reports in the guise of chick lit.
Imagine growing up in a family in East Germany, in the 1960s and ’70s, in which your father works for the Stasi on secret missions in the West that he will not talk about. Your mother won’t talk about them either. Then the past breaks open.
Author Han Kang became on Thursday the first South Korean to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The MI5 drama Slow Horses brilliantly captures the truth about the British Security Service – it’s full of ordinary, flawed people doing extraordinary things.
It is popular to sneer at Harari et al for their sweep and scope but they help to illuminate our age of big questions.
No one was photographed and filmed more than Queen Elizabeth II, who spent a record-setting 70 years on the British throne. No face was more familiar than hers, yet no one remained less known.
This brilliantly staged Shake and Stir production takes the audience to the heart of a tragic tale of unnatural acts, obsession and madness.
Harry Bosch creator Michael Connelly talks family, podcasts and handing on the baton to a new generation of fictional cops.
Dennis Glover’s Repeat makes the case that those who support Trump are wrong. Again.
The looting of state-owned assets in Russia was just the start of the crime rush.
Broadcaster Tony Armstrong, 34, on why he left ABC News Breakfast, playing AFL and the biggest myth about hard work.
Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/books/page/5