‘… the sky detonated into chandeliers of light, and the Harbour Bridge was illuminated with Eternity, but the dawning of the new millennium was for me an anticlimax. Nothing had really changed; you were still dying, and no amount of pretty, sequined light floating from the heavens was going to reverse your fate.’When Mandy Sayer learns of her father Gerry’s diagnosis of terminal cancer, she faces a reckoning with past and future as she learns to navigate a precarious prese...

Since the arrival of the First Fleet there have been Gypsies in Australia, yet their experiences have never been included in any official histories. In Australian Gypsies, award-winning memoirist and novelist Mandy Sayer weaves together a vivid, wide-ranging history that begins with the roots of the Romani culture, tracing the first Gypsy people to arrive in Australia (including James Squire, the colony's first brewer) through to Gypsy families today, who share the stories of thei...

'I fell in love with my first misfit at the age of three. He was a disabled man in a wheelchair who sold newspapers every afternoon outside the Empire Hotel in Annandale. Whenever I glimpsed him in the distance I would break into a run, jump onto his lap, and smother him with kisses.'Misfits & Me represents a selection of Mandy Sayer's non-fiction writing from the past twenty years. Each essay has been chosen to reflect a different aspect of Mandy's attraction to ...

I danced and danced because the neon light across the road had just blinked on, because it was the middle of spring, because I was twenty-one, because my father was playing beside me … In this vivid, seductive, gorgeously written memoir, Mandy Sayer recounts the fascinating years she spent performing on the streets of New York and New Orleans with her father. Gerry Sayer was a jazz drummer, a beguiling Irish charmer with a million stories and an insatiable love for jam sessions and all-nig...

Velocity tells the moving, painful but often hilarious story of Mandy Sayer's childhood and adolescence, a life lived on the edges – of society, of poverty, of certainty, of love. Filled with beautifully realised descriptions of life seen through a child's eyes – a child who gradually comes to realise her adored parents are all too tragically flawed and broken – Velocity packs the emotional impact of Angela's Ashes with the surreal humour and razor-sharp observations of Running With Scisso...

** Shortlisted, The Age Book of the Year Award 2023, Non-fiction **The trailblazing McDonagh sisters were the first women in Australia to form their own film production company. Between 1926 and 1933, while they were in their mid-twenties, these sassy sisters produced four feature films and a number of documentaries.The youngest, Paulette, was one of only five women film directors in the world. Phyllis produced, ar...

Even though we’d grown up in vastly different cultures and countries, we’d both known poverty, domestic violence and the expectation that neither one of us would ever amount to anything. That was probably what united us more than anything: our shared defiance of that prediction. She tap-danced on street corners for people’s small change. He was an out-of- work university teacher, poet and Vietnam vet. She was white and from Australia. He was black and from the Deep South. They met at Mardi...

Sydney, 1942. Pearl is eighteen, beautiful and impetuous. She plays saxophone in an all-girl jazz band at the Trocadero and occasionally sits in on underground gigs with her twin brother Martin, who also plays the sax. On one such evening black GI and jazz legend James Washington blows into her life, and nothing is ever the same again, especially not Pearl. A love story begins to unfold against the blacked-out nights and rumour-filled days of a city in the grip of war. But public events ar...

Blending the popular genre of crime fiction with the art of the short story, Crime and Other Pastimes reveals the interconnecting lives and deaths of unforgettable characters within an inner-city community. After the corpse of a newborn baby is discovered in a nearby laneway, an adopted girl being raised in a funeral home finally appreciates the sanctity of her own life. A drug dealer goes missing and his many clients plot an outrageous plan to ensure his safe return, with comically fatal ...

Australia's largest city "provides fertile ground for dark doings, as these 14 tales demonstrate . . . [a] cavalcade of crime Down Under" ( Kirkus Reviews ).Includes Kirsten Tranter's Edgar Award-nominated "The Passenger"Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each book comprises all new stories, each one set in a d...

An implicit sense of public service and ‘otherness’ has now come to permeate Canberra’s identity to a point that there is a great smugness, arrogance even, that the rest of Australia can hate us — but they’ll never know how good it is to live here.Canberra is a city of orphans. People arrive temporarily for work, but stay on because they discover unanticipated promise and opportunity in a city that the rest of the country loathes, but can’t really do without. Daley’s C...

Monologues are an essential part of every actor’s toolkit. Actors are required to perform monologues regularly throughout their career: preparing for drama school entry, showcasing skills for agents or auditioning for a role. Following on from the bestselling first volume (2008), this book showcases selected monologues from some of the finest modern plays by some of today’s leading contemporary playwrights. These monologues contain a diverse range of quirky and memorable characters that cr...