Anxious travel

 

Mint condition. PB. Rare book. 280 pp. Amazon sells for over $50. Our price $30 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Journalist-about-town Phil Brown has travelled widely but always reluctantly. Whether pursuing a tailor-made suit in the back alleys of Hong Kong, souvenir hunting in Ubud or dodging potholes on the road to Kathmandu, he shoulders a veritable kitbag of travel phobias.

With his more adventurous wife Sandra, Phil worries his way around the world, seeking the comfort of cable TV and 24-hour room service. Against his better judgment, he tackles the rainswept peaks of Scotland, the icy alienation of the Rockies and even the high Himalayas.

A primer on depression

 

Mint condition. PB. 190pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

These guides from People's Medical Society address the most common medical concerns in an accessible question-and-answer format. In a departure from conventional references, these books present both traditional and alternative methods of treatment, and offer pro and con points of view for each

A guide to managing depression

 

Rare book. Good condition. PB. 256pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia

... the book is also stacked with advice for the friends and family of the sufferers, and there’s information about every type of depression imaginable, from manic depression and anxiety disorders to postnatal depression and the reactive depression that’s common amongst people undergoing a traumatic event, like the death of a spouse or a parent.

So despite its age, I’d still recommend this book if you want to learn more about depression, whether it’s for yourself or for a loved one. In fact, it’s the best overall guide to the condition that I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a few of them.

Good health for blokes

 

Excellent condition. PB. 372pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This informed and sympathetic guide to men's health is a book that every man should own. It provides detailed information for on-site maintenance of the average four- to six-cylinder adult male- in bed, in the bathroom, at the table, at the doctor, in marriage, in crisis, in mid-life and after.

Memoirs of a fat bastard

 

Mint condition. PB. 281pp. $20 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Chris Gibson, is one fat, drunk, angry bastard.

He's tried every diet: Atkins, South Beach, Pritikin... Problem is he still can't get his pants on in the morning. And he got none of the genes of his movie star brother Mel. In his early 40s with a job he hates and a lifestyle that is killing him, Chris is having more than a mid-life crisis. He's having a life and death crisis..

Memoirs of a Fat Bastard is a bittersweet account of how a middle-aged man on the road to destruction turned his life and health around on his own terms. It's a telling and frequently hilarious story of the ways in which some men can lose their way, and the way back to finding meaning and happiness amid the competing pressures of being provider, family man, and all-round good Aussie bloke.

A memoir of surviving the grief of a suicide

 

Mint condition. PB. 211pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

A suicide loss survivor tells her story.

Tara Lal’s childhood was battered by her father’s mental illness and by her mother’s death when she was thirteen.

Caught up in grief and despair, she developed a deep, caring bond with her charismatic and kind older brother Adam, though he struggled silently with growing anxiety and depression.

Four years after their mother’s death, Adam committed suicide.

Grief and insecurity threatened to engulf Tara, but eventually she found, through a dialogue with the words her brother left behind in his diaries, her reason to live.

The book includes an Afterword on the possibilities for recovery and growth following a tragedy, written by Miriam Akhtar, author of Positive Psychology for Overcoming Depression.

About the Author

Tara J Lal was born in London and now lives in Sydney, Australia. A firefighter and Mental Health First Aid Instructor, she is trained in suicide prevention and researches suicide and mental health in firefighters, as well as speaking on behalf of leading charities to raise awareness of suicide and mental illness.

Growing up for girls

 

Mint condition. PB. 280pp. $15 including postage anywhere in Australia.

This book prepares girls for what to expect from puberty and offers advice on what they can do to cope with the emotional, psychological and physical changes and stay happy and confident as they go through their early teens. 

It covers all the topics that girls want to find out about, including moods and feelings, periods and how to survive them, what happens to boys, diet, eating disorders, exercise, body image, sex and relationships, contraception, sexual health, self-confidence, drink and drugs, exam stress, cyberbullying, and staying safe - both out and about and online. 

It guides young teenagers through this exciting and sometimes daunting stage as they start taking full responsibility for many aspects of their own lives for the first time.

Pulitzer prize-winning fiction

 

Excellent condition. PB. 368pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Los Angeles Times Book Award, National Book Circle Critics Award for fiction in the US and Longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Jennifer Egan’s spelling binding novel circles the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varies as New York, San Francisco, Naples and Africa.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to Powerpoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both- and escape the merciless progress of time, in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.

About The Author

Jennifer Egan is the author of The Keep, Look at Me, The Invisible Circus, and the story collection Emerald City. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, GQ, Zoetrope, All-Story, and Ploughshares, and her non-fiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She lives with her husband and sons in Brooklyn.