Dear Girls - Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets and Advice for Living Your Best Life by Ali Wong

$22.99 AUD

Category: Feel Good Non-fiction

In her hit Netflix comedy special Baby Cobra, an eight-month pregnant Ali Wong resonated so strongly that she even became a popular Halloween costume. Wong told the world her remarkably unfiltered thoughts on marriage, sex, Asian culture, working women, and why you never see new mum comics on stage but you sure see plenty of new dads. The sharp insights and humour are even more personal in this completely original collection. She shares the wisdom she's learned from a life in comedy and reveals stories from her life offstage, including the brutal single life in New York (i.e. the inevitable confrontation with erectile dysfunction), reconnecting with her roots (and drinking snake blood) in Vietnam, tales of being a wild child growing up in San Francisco, and parenting war stories. Though addressed to her daughters, Ali Wong's letters are absurdly funny, surprisingly moving, and enlightening (and gross) for all. ...Show more

Senior Moments by Kevin Brumpton; Angus Fitzsimons

$29.99 AUD

Category: Feel Good Non-fiction

The Hungover Games by Sophie Heawood

$35.00 AUD

Category: Biography & Memoir

'The Hungover Games deftly explores expectations of modern womanhood through a beautiful, wild, painfully honest, hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking story. Full of adventure and awe, Sophie Heawood has written a soulful, truthful homage to a life lived with appetite, intensity and wonder.' Dolly Alde rton I had no idea how to commit to another human being. I could barely commit to reading a magazine, and I wrote for magazines for a living. My specialist subject was celebrities, and my own relationships made their marriages look eternal. I'd never paid a household bill that didn't mention bailiffs, and my idea of exercise was to go and stand outside a famous person's house and stare until I'd convinced myself that I lived in it. But my life in LA was happy; free of care and consequence. That was, until I came down to earth - with a bump. So this is the story of how I staggered from partying in Hollywood to bringing up a baby in Piss Alley, Dalston; how I never did find a copy of What To Expect When You Weren't Even Fucking Expecting To Be Expecting, and why paternity testing is not a good topic for a first-date conversation. People always said I'd find love where I least expected it. I always said they were idiots. **AN EVENING STANDARD AND COSMOPOLITAN BEST BOOK OF 2020** **AN OBSERVER NON-FICTION BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2020** ...Show more

The Diary of a Bookseller (PB) by Shaun Bythell

$22.99 AUD

Category: Feel Good Non-fiction

Shaun Bythell owns the Bookshop, Scotland's largest second-hand bookshop. It contains 100,000 books, spread over a mile of shelving, with twisting corridors and roaring fires, and all set in a beautiful, rural town by the edge of the sea. A book-lover's paradise? Well, almost ... In these wry and hilari ous diaries, Shaun provides an inside look at the trials and tribulations of life in the book trade, from struggles with eccentric customers to wrangles with his own staff, who include the ski-suit-wearing, bin-foraging Nicky. He takes us with him on buying trips to old estates and auction houses, recommends books-both lost classics and new discoveries-introduces us to the thrill of the unexpected find, and evokes the rhythms and charms of small-town life, always with a sharp and sympathetic eye. Hilarious, wry, and charming, Shaun Bythell's stories from his second-hand bookshop in remotest Scotland are sure to delight readers of all stripes. ...Show more

Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

$22.99 AUD

Category: Feel Good Non-fiction

Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?"Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to co ntend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices. ...Show more

Kitty Flanagan's 488 Rules for Life by Kitty Flanagan

$29.99 AUD

Category: Feel Good Non-fiction | Reading Level: 4 Non Fiction

RICHARD GLOVER: ''You won’t agree with all her rules – I, for one, am a great believer in the word “pash” – but there is a good laugh, and a lively argument, to be had on every page.'' 488 Rules for Life is Kitty Flanagan's way of making the world a more pleasant place to live. Applying truth and wit to modern problems. An antidote to stupidity. 488 Rules for Life is not a self-help book, because it's not you who needs help, it's other people. Whether they're walking and texting, asphyxiating you on public transport with their noxious perfume cloud, or leaving one useless square of toilet paper on the roll, a lot of people just don't know the rules. But thanks to Kitty Flanagan's comprehensive guide to modern behaviour, our world will soon be a much better place. A place where people don't ruin the fruit salad by putting banana in it … where your co-workers respect your olfactory system and don't reheat their fish curry in the office microwave ... where middle aged men don't have ponytails … What started as a joke on Kitty Flanagan's popular segment on ABC TV's The Weekly, is now a quintessential reference book with the power to change society. (Or, at least, make it a bit less irritating.) What people (okay, Kitty Flanagan) are saying about this book: 'You're welcome everyone. Thank god for me.' 'I'd rather be sad and lonely, but right.' 'There's not actually 488 rules in here but it sure feels like it'. ...Show more

This Is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kay

$18.99 AUD

Category: Feel Good Non-fiction

'Painfully funny. The pain and the funniness somehow add up to something entirely good, entirely noble and entirely loveable.' - Stephen Fry Sunday Times Humour Book of the Year Winner of the Books Are My Bag Non-Fiction Book of the Year Winner of Blackwell's Debut Book of the Year Winner of iBooks' Boo k of the Year Welcome to the life of a junior doctor: 97-hour weeks, life and death decisions, a constant tsunami of bodily fluids, and the hospital parking meter earns more than you. Scribbled in secret after endless days, sleepless nights and missed weekends, Adam Kay's This is Going to Hurt provides a no-holds-barred account of his time on the NHS front line. Hilarious, horrifying and heartbreaking, this diary is everything you wanted to know - and more than a few things you didn't - about life on and off the hospital ward. This audiobook contains an exclusive interview with Adam Kay by comedian and author Mark Watson, an afterword and updated bonus diary entries. ...Show more

Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James

$19.99 AUD

Category: Chat10Looks3 Recommendations | Series: Picador Classic | Reading Level: very good

With an introduction by P. J. O'Rourke 'Do not read this book in public. You will risk severe internal injuries from trying to suppress your laughter.' Sunday Times I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment that did not affect me. I n the first instalment of Clive James's memoirs we follow the young Clive on his journey from boyhood to the cusp of manhood, when his days of wearing short trousers are finally behind him. Battling with school, girls, various relatives and an overwhelming desire to be a superhero, Clive's adventures growing up in the suburbs of post-war Sydney are hair-raising, uproarious and almost too good to be true ...Told with James's unassailable sense of humour and self-effacing charm, Unreliable Memoirs is a hilarious and touching introduction to the story of a national treasure. A million-copy bestseller, this classic memoir is a celebration of life in all its unpredictable glory.   ...Show more

Bridge Burning and Other Hobbies by Kitty Flanagan

$19.99 AUD

Category: Feel Good Non-fiction

Kitty Flanagan has been locked in an industrial freezer in Western Australia, insulted about the size of her lady parts in Singapore and borne witness to the world's most successful wife swap in suburban Sydney. It's these valuable lessons from The University of Life that have taught her so many things, including the fact that cliches like 'The University of Life' are reeeally annoying. In these funny, true stories, Kitty provides advice you didn't even know you needed. Useful tips on how not to get murdered while hitchhiking, how to break up with someone the wrong way, and the right way, why it's important to keep your top on while waitressing, and why women between the ages of 37 and 42 should be banned from internet dating. Bridge Burning and Other Hobbies is a collection of laugh-out-loud, cautionary tales from one of Australia's favourite comedians.   ...Show more

Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs

$24.99 AUD

Category: Feel Good Non-fiction | Series: Film Tie-in S.

In this unforgettable, and by turns hilarious and harrowing memoir, Augusten Burroughs recounts the bizarre events of his childhood. After his parents' divorce, his mother, a delusional poet, left him in the care of her psychiatrist, a man who might have benefited from a little therapy himself. Suddenly , at age twelve, Augusten found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian mansion with the doctor's bizarre family and a few patients. In the psychiatrist's house, there are no rules, only chaos. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, Valium was eaten like Pez and, if things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock-therapy machine under the stairs... RUNNING WITH SCISSORS is a true story, compelling and maniacally funny. Above all, it chronicles an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances. ...Show more

I Feel Bad About My Neck and other thoughts on being a woman by Nora Ephron

$19.99 AUD

Category: Feel Good Non-fiction | Reading Level: very good

'If I said to you “I absolutely cannot stand my neck” , you’d undoubtedly respond by saying something nice, like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You’d be lying, of course, but I forgive you. You can put makeup on your face and concealer under your eyes and dye on your hair, you can shoot coll agen and Botox and Restylane into your wrinkles and creases, but short of surgery, there’s not a damn thing you can do about a neck.' Acclaimed Hollywood filmwriter and director Nora Ephron turns her sharp powers of observation back onto herself in these autobiographical essays as she examines the indignities of ageing for the Baby Boom generation. Filled with witty and biting essays like 'I Hate My Handbag', 'Blind as a Bat' and 'What I Wish I'd Known' this book offers the consolation that no matter how much your neck sags, your boobs droop, your skin wrinkles and your children don't appreciate you, someone has been there before you. Laugh-out-loud funny, irreverent and brutally honest, Nora Ephron captures the essence of what it means to be a woman growing older in a book that will strike chords of empathy, heartbreak, and hilarity with any woman who reads it. ...Show more

Everybody Died, So I Got a Dog by Emily Dean

$22.99 AUD

Category: Feel Good Non-fiction

The funny, heart-breaking story of love, family and overwhelming loss which led one woman to find hope and healing in the dog she always wanted. 'We would never be a dog family. People with dogs represented every aspect of domesticity that seemed right and functional. We represented everything about fa mily life that was curious and unpredictable.' Growing up with the Deans was a fabulous training ground for many things: ignoring unpaid bills, being the most entertaining guest at dinner, deconstructing poetry. It was never home for the dog Emily craved. Emily shared the lively chaos with her beloved older sister Rachael, her rock. Over the years the sisters bond grew ever closer. As Rachael went on to have the cosy family and treasured dog, Giggle, Emily threw herself into unsettled adventure - dog ownership remaining a distant dream. Then, tragically, Rachael is diagnosed with cancer. In just three devastating years Emily loses not only her sister but both her parents as well. This is the funny heart-breaking, wonderfully told story of how Emily discovers that it is possible to overcome the worst that life can throw at you, that it's never too late to make peace with your past, and that the right time is only ever now, as she finally starts again with her very own dog - the adorable Shih-tzu named Raymond. ...Show more