Penguin Books Australia

If Bill Bryson were to join a funeral home as an apprentice, and if he searched for the meaning of life and death while he was at it, you'd have Curtains .

Why are there moves afoot to re-use graves in cemeteries?

Can we choose to be buried in a cardboard coffin?

Australia's 'death-care' industry is worth a staggering $700 million a year, and despite the fact that each of us will one day have to deal with those in the 'dismal trade', few of us know how the business of dying...

In the end, love is more important than everything and it will conquer and overcome anything. Or that's how Damon saw it, anyway. Damon wanted a book that talked a lot about love.

Damon Courtenay died on the morning of April Fool's Day. In this tribute to his son, Bryce Courtenay lays bare the suffering behind this young man's life. Damon's story is one of lifelong struggle, his love for Celeste, the...

An obsession with the nature of death lies at the heart of the human experience. For most of our history religion provided a clear explanation for life and the afterlife. But in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries this framework came under relentless pressure as new ideas – from psychiatry to evolution to Communism – seemed to suggest that our fate was now in our own hands...

"What happens when we die? Does the light just go out and that's that- the million-year nap? Or will some part of my personality, my me-ness, persist? What will that feel like? What will I do all day?

A wise, reassuring guide that will give you hope as you move through the pain of prolonged grief.

When someone you love receives a terminal diagnosis, the whole family is suddenly faced with a prolonged crisis.  While medical advances have given us the gift of extending life-meaning that a loved one could survive months or years before dying-it has also changed the way we grieve.