Penguin Books Australia

Some days you lose your job, some days your kids move out and some days your husband resembles a cocktail frankfurt. Some days you prang the car, you're stalked, or you're robbed, some days your hair looks like you've been electrocuted and some days all of these things happen at once. And on top of that your bum drops.

In this gleefully exaggerated memoir Gretel Killeen looks at the big questions that...

'No longer a boy, not quite a man, often a prat . . .'

When Alan Davies was growing up he seemed to drive his family mad. 'What are we going to do with you?' they would ask – as if he might know the answer.

'A gripping hour-by-hour dissection of events in the Western Himalayas over three deadly days. A fitting shelfmate to the modern classic Into Thin Air. A cracking read'  Sunday Times

K2, August 1st, 2008

Thirty climbers are attempting the summit of the most savage mountain on Earth. They make it. But before they start their descent an ice shelf collapses, sweeping away their ropes. It is dark...

'I am English.  Tweedy.  Pukka.  Confident.  Establishment.  Self-assured.  In charge.  That is how people like to see me, be the truth never so at variance . . . In fact, I am chronically overmastered by a sense of failure, underachievement and a terrible knowledge that I have betrayed, abused or neglected the talents that nature bestowed upon me . . . Are you not...

'It will be the fiercest Francophobe who can read Alice's recipes and not hanker for a taste'   Time

In this memoir-turned-cookbook, Alice B. Toklas describes her life with partner Gertrude Stein and their famed Paris salon, which entertained the great avant-garde and literary figures of their day.

A third of teachers leave within their first term on the job. This one wouldn't quit for all the world.