Debra Adelaide:
The Household Guide to Dying

This is a brilliant, original work which charts one woman’s attempts to make provision for her husband and daughters — from writing lists on the fridge to teaching her 8-year-old to make boiled eggs — and to confront a ghost from the past. Delia has made a living writing an acerbic advice column and a series of wildly successful modern household guides. As the book opens, she has only a short time to live. Going about the ordinary routines of daily life, she is consumed by two things: how to make provision for her husband and daughters — and how to make her peace with the past. She feels the need for the type of manual she has made her living writing; only this time it will be about dying. Not a guide to bereavement, but, as she puts it, a book about the state when you know you’re going to die, but you’re not dying yet.

At the same time, she attempts to return to the places of her past, to lay a ghost and see someone who is very much alive as she prepares to say goodbye. The two stories interweave, and each section opens with very funny snippets from Delia’s acerbic advice column, and, later, her Household Guide to Dying.

Published by Pan Picador Australia.

Launched in May, 2008

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Andrew Riemer:
A Family History of Smoking

A compelling memoir about two European families living through the tragic last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From great-grandfather David, who saw his family’s fortunes decline with the gradual rise of anti-Semitism, to the ultra-modern, glamorous mother who held her family together through World War II, Andrew Riemer paints a beautiful portrait of a now vanished world that literally went up in smoke. Set against the backdrop of the tumult of early twentieth-century Europe, A Family History of Smoking is full of eccentric characters, literary anecdotes and historical drama, and is a moving tribute to a family, its strength and its stories.

“As the bombs fell, they lived underground in the Budapest cellars, and when hostilities ended, she rescued her husband, then near death. Riemer remembers his mother crouching on the floor by his father’s side, watching over him by the faint light of a shoelace floating in oil in the lid of a tin of bootpolish… As an excursion into the past and into the self, it is a fine achievement.”
— The Age.

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Mark Wakely:
Sweet Sorrow: a beginner’s guide to death

Mark’s new book is remarkable: at times heart-breaking, at times humorous, it is dazzling for its profound honesty. Like most of us, Mark Wakely had always put death in the too-hard basket. He was curiously distanced from his own parents’ deaths. Thirty years later, he went on a journey to confront one of the most intensely personal yet universal experiences: our own mortality. With Mark as our guide, we are introduced to morticians and embalmers, rabbis and doctors, coffin makers and gravediggers. He reveals the fashions and the fads, the rituals and the deep emotion in a heartfelt and whimsical investigation into this timeless subject.

Mark Wakely is a Sydney-based writer, and a journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National.

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