Penguin Books Australia

The third in a series of novels that began with The Angel's Game and The Shadow of the Wind .

'If only we'd stop trying so hard to be happy, we'd have a pretty good time.' Edith Wharton 

The Antidote: Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking is an exploration of a radically new path to happiness.

In an approach that turns decades of self-help advice on its head, Oliver Burkeman explains why positive thinking serves only to make us more miserable, and why 'getting...

When it became clear that Amanda Webster's eleven-year-old son Riche was not just a little too skinny but dangerously ill, people were often surprised.

Do boys get anorexia? they would ask.

And then, How did he get it?

That was the question Amanda asked herself, too. She had trained as a doctor; she knew that every disease has a cause. And if her son had an eating disorder, she wondered what...

'You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A  person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader  deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames...'

Lured north to a Yup'ik village on the Alaskan tundra in search of adventure, John Morgan and his wife Anna can barely contain their excitement. But something is about to go terribly wrong.

What happens when an epidemic strikes—and no one comes to help?

Shifting from contemporary Eskimo village life to a gripping post-apocalyptic nightmare, The  Raven's Gift dares to confront the terrifying...

Love. Nightmares. Angels. War.

It's been almost a year since Gaby Winters was in the car crash that killed her twin brother, Jude. Her body has healed in the sunshine of Pandanus Beach, but her grief is raw and constant.

It doesn't help that every night in her dreams she kills demons and other hell-spawn. And then Rafa comes to town. Not only does he look exactly like the guy who's been...

Ron Rash has long been a critically acclaimed writer but his novel, Serena, catapulted him to new heights garnering rave reviews across Australia and becoming a New York Times bestseller. The New Yorker said 'Rash's evocative rendering of the blighted landscape and the tough characters who inhabit it recalls both John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy.'

Hal Challis is in trouble at home and abroad: carpeted by the boss for speaking out about police budget cuts; missing his lover, Ellen Destry, who is overseas on a study tour.

But there's plenty to keep his mind off his problems. A rapist in a police uniform stalks Challis's Peninsula beat, there is a serial armed robber headed in his direction and a home invasion that's a little too close to home...

A woman washes ashore in Sicily. She has come from north Africa to find her son, taken from her when he was just days old by his father and stolen away to Berlin. With nothing but her maid's uniform and a knife stashed in a plastic bag, she relies on strangers— some generous, some exploiting—to guide her passage north.

For ten-year-old Miller, who lives with his mother in Watertown, New York, life has become a struggle to make sense of his father's disappearance, for which he blames himself. Then, when he becomes convinced that he has found his father lying comatose in the local VA hospital, a victim of the war in Iraq, Miller begins a search for the one person he believes can save him, the famously reclusive —...

The big dilemmas of the day resist resolution. For decades we have relied on economics, science and the law for answers to pressing problems. But economics is not as rational as we hoped, science not as certain—even the law has shades of grey beyond the black letters. 

'MCC insists Iceland ashes must remain at Lords.'
'Turnbull resigns, will stay on as PM in his mind.'
'Wife becomes first to beat Tiger Woods with golf club.'

The best Chaser Annual yet!

The Christmas Story.

Beautiful, simple, inspirational…and not just for Christians. 

Actually, it's not all that simple either.

It turns out there are a few burning Christmass-y questions to tackle:

• Who told the Christmas Story in the first place?

• Why did they leave the donkey out?

• Did the nativity really happen in a stable or in someone's spare room?

• Three...

Bestselling novelist Joe Logan walks out into a hot summer's evening in central London. The next day his body is found dumped in a disused Victorian crypt at the Brompton Cemetery.

Detective Inspector Mark Tartaglia is convinced that Logan's personal life holds the key but unraveling his past proves difficult. Following the overnight success of his debut novel Indian Summer, Logan had become...

The Possessed draws on Elif Batuman's articles in the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine , and n+1 to tell the true story of one woman's intellectual and sentimental education and her many strange encounters with scholars devoted to classic Russian writers. In a series of intertwined essays about her life – and other people's lives – in the world of Russian literature and scholarship, Batuman...

'The secret to having people give you money is to act as though you don't want it.' 

Meet Ella Canfield, highly qualified evolutionary biologist. Attractive, if a little serious-looking in those heavy glasses—but then she's about to put her career on the line. Dr Canfield is seeking funding for a highly unorthodox research project. She wants to prove that an extinct animal still roams in...

What would make a soldier betray his country? 

In the battle-smoke and chaos of Gallipoli, a young New Zealand soldier helps a Turkish doctor fighting to save a boy's life. Then a shell bursts nearby; the blast that should have killed them both consigns them instead to the same military hospital. 

She is a healthy seventy-one-year-old woman. He is a dying eighty-two-year-old man. This couple, who have been united through the horrors of twentieth-century Europe, and through the joys of love and family, cannot live up to the vows they made nearly fifty years ago to stay together 'until death do us part': they will die as one, never to be parted. On 13 October 1991 they take their own lives, together...

On the autobahn in Vienna a taxi leaves the carriageway and strikes the crash barrier, flinging its male and female passengers out of its back doors as it spins through the air. The driver cannot explain why he lost control; only saying that the mysterious couple in the back seat seemed to be about to kiss... Set against the tumultuous backdrop and aftermath of the war in the Balkans, The Accident...

How was I supposed to know that any mention of suicide to the phalanx of doctors making Friday rounds would warrant the loss of not only weekend-pass privileges but also the liberty to take a leak in private?

In The Dead Fish Museum Charles D'Ambrosio delivers eight short stories full of characters who float through their lives and relationships, adrift and apprehensive, tested by failure and strengthened...