Penguin Books Australia

A few weeks after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, journalist Megan Stack, a 25-year-old national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times , was thrust into Afghanistan and Pakistan, dodging gunmen and prodding warlords for information. From there, she travelled to war-ravaged Iraq and Lebanon and to other countries scarred by violence, including Israel, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen...

A unique and remarkable war memoir by an internationally acclaimed author.

Free Fall is a devastating account of the Second Chechen War, told through the eyes of a young Russian soldier. Nicolai Lilin was conscripted and then trained as a sniper in an unorthodox Russian Special Forces regiment called the Saboteurs.

From one of the most senior correspondents in the Canberra Press Gallery comes a rare account of life as a political insider.

 Born in a small village in Cyprus, Niki Savva spent her childhood in Melbourne's working-class suburbs ­— frontiers where locals were suspicious of olive oil, and Greek kids spoke Gringlish to their parents.

During her lifetime, Elizabeth Jolley established a formidable international reputation for her unique combination of unsentimental realism and original humour.

Five Acre Virgin and Other Stories brings together two highly acclaimed collections of Jolley's short fiction in a new edition. Five Acre Virgin and The Travelling Entertainer introduced Jolley as a major Australian talent and she went on to...

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American.

It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident.

Many books have been written by officers, historians and military experts on the part the Anzacs played in the Dardanelles campaign during the First World War. There are very few by the ordinary soldier.

Roy Kyle started writing this memoir at the age of 89 and almost completed it before he died. A typical Anzac, fiercely patriotic, he enlisted in the A.I.F. in 1915, several months under-age. He spent...

'I don't think I can actually remember a time in policing when I didn't want to join the Armed Offenders Squad. My early reasons for joining probably weren't the purest, though – I just thought they looked really cool.'

Five Foot and Fearless is the inspiring story of Liz Williams, a police officer and mum of one, who desperately wanted to be part of the Armed Offenders Squad. The brutal selection...

After twenty-seven years in prison, Nelson Mandela finally walked free in February 1990. This collection of his articles, speeches, letters from underground, and the transcripts from his trials, vividly demonstrates...

'Hiding... where would we hide?... Margot and I started packing our most important belongings into a satchel. The first thing I stuck in was this diary...'

King Abdullah II was schooled in America and at Sandhurst and heading for a life as a successful career soldier, when his father fell ill and he was unexpectedly named King of Jordan. Fiercely loyal to his country but also possessing an outsider's perspective on the political difficulties of the region, King Abdullah has since spent every effort to better Jordan — improving its economy, education...

Ex-slave Frederick Douglass's second autobiography-written after ten years of reflection following his legal emancipation in 1846 and his break with his mentor William Lloyd Garrison-catapulted Douglass into the international spotlight as the foremost spokesman for American blacks, both freed and slave.