Books for Adults

Booklist – General Adult

1. Sapiens – a brief history of humankind is by historian Yuval Noah Harari spent 44 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. If you have any interest at all in what makes you ‘you’, grab a hold of this book. Did you know homo sapiens were simply one type of human roaming the earth tens of thousands of years ago? There were at least six others, including the ones we know most about, the Neanderthals. Harari walks us right through our history, from hunter gatherers, through the agricultural period, right up to our current digitally-connected selves today. It’s highly readable and absolutely engrossing.

2. Banks by journalist and author Grantlee Keiza, is described as ‘a rich and rollicking biography of one of the most colourful and intriguing characters in the history of exploration’. Sir Joseph Banks was one of the richest young men in England, but rather than blow it away on the gaming tables like many of his contemporaries, Banks put his money into his passion for science, in particular botany. He travelled with Sir James Cook on the Endeavour, a three year dangerous journey to see the Transit of Venus and to explore the south Pacific and the territory now known as Australia.

3. The Testament of Mary is a novella by best-selling Irish author Colm Toibin. It is a fascinating re-telling of events leading up to and surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus. Told through the eyes of Jesus’s mother, Mary doesn’t believe her son was the ‘Son of God, or that his death was ‘worth it’. She calls his followers ‘misfits, fools, twitchers, malcontents, stammerers’. This novella is described as ‘fearsomely strange and deeply thoughtful’ – it can be completed in a couple of hours.

4. If you liked Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, you will love Sorrow and Bliss by Sydney-based writer Meg Mason. This sad, funny best seller is set in London and Oxford and centres on the life of Martha, a troubled young women with a mysterious mental illness, trying to survive in a world into which she doesn’t quite fit. London’s Sunday Times describes the book as ‘both fantastically dark and almost unbearably funny, so funny that you often have to put it down for a bit and laugh out loud, sometimes to the point of tears’.

5. Notes to Self by Emilie Pine is a small collection of six essays which won Book of the Year at the 2018 Irish Book Awards. Pine writes ‘with radical honesty on the unspeakable grief of infertility, on caring for an alcoholic parent, on taboos around female bodies and female pain, on sexual violence and violence against the self. This is the story of one woman, and of all women’.

6. While The Frenchman by Jack Beaumont is described as a ‘work of fiction’, its author – himself a former spy with the French agency, the DGSE – uses all his knowledge of the ancient trade to weave a thrilling and deeply-plausible tale around his central character, Alec De Payns. Beaumont now lives in Sydney.

7. Figures in the Landscape by Sydney writer Vashti Farrer is a newly-released collection of short stories that ‘places characters in their historical settings or quirky, timeless situations, and explores the power of human interaction with humour, poignancy and compassion.’ For those wanting something powerful and brief, these stand- alone stories are a great read.

Compiled by WestWords board member and Metropolis Consulting Principal, Vivienne Skinner.

Vivienne has been a television newsreader, broadcast journalist and magazine editor. She has written under her own name (and for others) for a variety of publications including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Saturday Paper, The Australian, the Sun Herald and Crikey.