Readings.com.au: The Age Book of the Year Shortlist 2008 Non-fiction

I Am Melba

I Am Melba - how a Melbourne girl defied her father and left her husband to become the most famous singer of the age.

Growing up in Melbourne, Nellie Mitchell showed musical promise and dreamed of fame, but her father had more orthodox plans in mind. Early marriage took her to the Queensland cane-fields - but her ambitions remained, and she soon fled to London, trusting in talent and luck to get her by.

Within a few years, reborn as Nellie Melba, she was performing to overflowing concert halls, hobnobbing with royalty and collaborating with Europe's most renowned musicians. When her affair with the heir to the defunct French throne was discovered, the press chased them from Paris to St Petersburg and back again, desperate for a glimpse of "the Voice" and her royal conquest.

Feted and condemned by critics, relentlessly pursued by the press and mobbed by adoring fans, Dame Nellie Melba was Australia's first superstar. Behind the scenes, she was a canny businesswoman, an affectionate mother and a playful practical joker. When she died - apparently after a botched face-lift - flags were flown at half-mast and thousands turned out to see her funeral cortege.

In this definitive biography, Ann Blainey captures the exuberance, controversy and pathos of a remarkable Australian life.

Van Diemen's Land: A History

Almost half of the convicts who came to Australia came to Van Diemen’s Land. There they found a land of bounty and a penal society, a kangaroo economy and a new way of life. In this book James Boyce shows how the convicts were changed by the natural world they encountered. Escaping authority, they soon settled away from the towns, dressing in kangaroo-skin and living off the land. Behind the official attempt to create a Little England was another story of adaptation, in which the poor, the exiled and the criminal made a new home in a strange land. This is their story, the story of Van Diemen’s Land.

An Exacting Heart: The Story Of Hephzibah Menuhin

Hephzibah Menuhin had a musical gift most people only dream of. Her refusal to be defined by it led her to reinvent herself not once, but twice in her remarkable life.

Born in 1920 in San Francisco she was, like her world-renowned brother Yehudi, a child prodigy, simultaneously thrown into the spotlight at an early age and closeted by a dominating, controlling mother.

In the brief spring between the world wars, the Menuhin family travelled extensively, driven by the demands of Yehudi's career. Then Hephzibah, aged seventeen, celebrated as her brother's musical partner and on the brink of greatness in her own right, turned her back on performing. She married Lindsay Nicholas, the Melbourne-born heir to a pharmaceutical fortune, and moved to his sheep property in western Victoria.

Far from playing the conventional wife of a wealthy grazier, Hephzibah threw herself into humanitarian projects in her adopted country. She raised two sons and eventually resumed performing, both solo and with Yehudi, to international acclaim. But after sixteen years that seemed from the outside happy and fulfilled, she met a man who drew her to question what she thought she knew - and to abandon her established life a second time.

What makes a woman walk out on her children? What makes her turn her back on a brilliant artistic career? An Exacting Heart reveals the complex and contradictory nature of Hephzibah Menuhin: warm-hearted, humorous, astute, generous, occasionally ruthless and wrong-headed. In portraying the life and times of this fascinating and mercurial woman. Jacqueline Kent examines not only the consequences of possessing great talent, but the costs and rewards of gambling for high emotional stakes.

A Family History Of Smoking

A Family History of Smoking is a compelling memoir about two European families living through the last gasps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From great-grandfather David, who saw his family's fortunes decline with the gradual rise of anti-Semitism, to the ultra-modern, glamorous mother who held her family together through World War II, Andrew Riemer paints a beautiful portrait of a now vanished world that literally went up in smoke.

Set against the backdrop of the tumult of early twentieth-century Europe, A Family History of Smoking is full of eccentric characters, literary anecdotes and historical drama, and is a moving tribute to a family, its strength and its stories.