Gift ideas for Mother's Day
Mother's Day is almost here, so we've put together some last-minute recommendations that cover a number of our favourite recent reads! From cultural studies to fantastic fiction, we have you covered.
Mothers in search of food-centric reading
Small Fires by Rebecca May Johnson
The spatter of sauce in a pan, a cook’s subtle deviation from a recipe, the careful labour of cooking for loved ones: these are not often the subjects of critical enquiry. Cooking, we are told, has nothing to do with serious thought; the path to intellectual fulfilment leads directly out of the kitchen.
Drawing on insights from ten years spent thinking through cooking, Johnson explores the radical openness of the recipe text, the liberating constraint of apron strings and the transformative intimacies of shared meals. Playfully dissolving the boundaries between abstract intellect and bodily pleasure, domesticity and politics, Johnson awakens us to the richness of cooking as a means of experiencing the self and the world.
A Splash of Soy by Lara Lee
A Splash of Soy is full of everyday family recipes you'll love to eat.
In this book, Lara gives us 80 game-changing recipes that close the gap between classic Asian dishes and easy, quick-to-table meals. Here you'll find inventive brunch ideas like a Tom Yum Bloody Mary, spicy sides like Sambal Patatas Bravas, easy noodles like Cheesy Kimchi Linguine with Gochujang Butter and many more punchy curries, stir-fries and rice recipes from glazed meat to fragrant veg. She also includes pantry swaps and vegan swaps so these fuss-free recipes can adapt to your own busy home kitchen.
Mothers who are historically inclined
Viking Women by Lisa Hannett
Let's travel in time together, a thousand or so years back, and meet Viking women in their hearth-lit world. How did these medieval viragoes live, love and die? How can we encounter them as flesh-and-blood beings with fears and feelings – not just as names in sagas or runes carved into stone?
In this groundbreaking work, Lisa Hannett lifts the veil on the untold stories of wives and mothers, girls and slaves, widows and witches who sailed, settled, suffered, survived - and thrived - in a society that largely catered to and memorialised men. Hannett presents the everyday experiences of a compelling cast of women, all of whom are resourceful and petty, hopeful and jealous, and as fabulous and flawed as we are today.
Empress of the Nile by Lynne Olson
The fascinating story of the feisty French archaeologist who led the international effort to save ancient Egyptian temples from the floodwaters of the Aswan Dam.
In the 1960s, the world’s attention was focused on a nail-biting race against time: fifty countries contributed nearly a billion dollars to save a dozen ancient Egyptian temples from drowning in the floodwaters of the gigantic new Aswan High Dam. But the massive press coverage of this unprecedented rescue effort completely overlooked the gutsy French archaeologist who made it all happen. Without the intervention of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, the temples would now be at the bottom of a gigantic reservoir.
Mothers drawn to hearing others' stories
Aphrodite’s Breath by Susan Johnson
In life, as in myth, women are the ones who are supposed to stay home like Penelope, weaving at their looms, rather than leaving home like Odysseus. Meet eighty-five-year-old Barbara and her sixty-two-year-old writer-daughter Susan, who asked her mother-on a whim-if she wanted to accompany her to live on the Greek island of Kythera. What follows is a moving unravelling of the mother-daughter relationship told in irresistible prose.
Aphrodite's Breath is a strikingly original, funny and forensic examination of love and finding home, amid the stories of the people, olives and wonders of the birthplace of Aphrodite.
Everything and Nothing by Heather Mitchell
Heather Mitchell is an esteemed Australian stage and screen actor, and yet behind the scenes her real life has taken many remarkable twists and turns.
Training an unflinching spotlight on her most formative memories, Heather illuminates the heartbreaking secrets, sexual encounters, family dramas and creative pursuits that have shaped her life as a woman, an actor and a mother.
Told with raw candour and spellbinding lyricism, Everything and Nothing draws back the curtain on a unique and fascinating life.
Mothers interested in how to live more fully
Built to Move by Juliet Starrett & Kelly Starrett
Did you know that your ability to sit down cross-legged on the floor, and stand up again without using your hands, is a predictor of your lifespan? Or that losing your ability to stand on one leg increases the likelihood that you will be seriously injured in a fall?
Built to Move introduces readers to the idea that using their body the way it’s supposed to be used is the secret to avoiding pain and counteracting the effects of sedentary living. It boils the benefits of mobility practice down to the foundational essentials that allow everyone to use their body with elegance and ease. Most of these practices are not things you’re going to hear or read about anywhere else, and they will entirely transform the way you feel.
Saving Time by Jenny Odell
Our daily experience, dominated by the corporate clock that so many of us contort ourselves to fit inside, is destroying us. It wasn't built for people, it was built for profit. This is a book that tears open the seams of reality as we know it-the way we experience time itself-and rearranges it, reimagining a world not centered around work, the office clock, or the profit motive. Explaining how we got to the point where time became money, Odell offers us new models to live by.
Saving Time is a radical argument that we are living on the wrong clock, one that tells us time is money, and that embracing a new concept of time can open us up to bold, hopeful possibilities.
Mothers invested in the discussions of the moment
Man-Made by Tracey Spicer
'Mum, I want a robot slave.’
Broadcaster Tracey Spicer had an epiphany when her young son uttered these six words. Suddenly, her life’s work fighting inequality seemed futile. What’s the point in agitating to change the present, if bigotry is being embedded into our futures? And so began a quest to uncover who was responsible and hold them to account. Who is the ultimate villain? Big Tech, whose titans refuse to spend money to fix the problem? The world’s politicians, who lack the will to legislate? Or should we all be walking into a hall of mirrors and taking a good, hard look at ourselves…?
The Queen Is Dead by Stan Grant
A searing, viscerally powerful, emotionally unstoppable, pull-no-punches book on the bitter legacy of colonialism for indigenous people. Taking us on a journey through the world's fault lines, from the war in Ukraine, the rise of China, the identity wars, the resurgence of white supremacy, and the demand that Black Lives Matter, The Queen is Dead is a full-throated, impassioned argument on the necessity for an end to monarchy in Australia, the need for a Republic, and what needs to be done – through the Voice to Parliament and beyond – to address and redress the pain and sorrow and humiliations of the past.
Momentous and timely, The Queen is Dead carries an urgent, undeniable and righteous demand for justice, for a reckoning, and a just settlement with First Nations people.
Personal Score by Ellen van Neerven
Sport is such a big part of ‘Australian’ life and identity but one that is rarely unpacked or questioned. With the incredible upsurge in the popularity of women’s sport comes the potential to reshape the narratives around sport and culture. As Personal Score examines, many athletes challenge mainstream views of gender and sexuality, and use sport and their role within it to effect change not only in their own sporting realm, but more broadly in the wider culture and society. Moreover, van Neerven interrogates the implications of playing sport on stolen land and how this complicates questions of identity around sport, who plays it and where.
A ground-breaking look at sport on this continent from a First Nations and queer perspective.
Mothers ready for a fictional journey
Pineapple Street by Jenny Jackson
Darley, the eldest daughter in the well-connected, carefully-guarded Stockton family, has never had to worry about money. Darley followed her heart, trading her job and her inheritance for motherhood, sacrificing more of herself than she ever intended. Sasha, Darley's new sister-in-law, has come from more humble origins, and her hesitancy about signing a pre-nup has everyone worried about her intentions. And Georgiana, the baby of the family, has fallen in love with someone she can't (and really shouldn't) have, and must confront the kind of person she wants to be.
Rife with the indulgent pleasures of life among New York's one per centers – glittering parties, weekend homes and hungover brunches – Pineapple Street is a scintillating, escapist novel that sparkles with wit and wry humour.
River Sing Me Home by Eleanor Shearer
Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy. These are the names of her children. The five who survived, only to be sold to other plantations. The faces Rachel cannot forget. It’s 1834, and the law says her people are now free. But for Rachel freedom means finding her children, even if the truth is more than she can bear. With fear snapping at her heels, Rachel keeps moving. From sunrise to sunset, through the cane fields of Barbados to the forests of British Guiana and on to Trinidad, to the dangerous river and the open sea.
Only once she knows their stories can she rest. Only then can she finally find home.
Dust Child by Nguyen Phan Que Mai
In 1969, two sisters from rural Việt Nam leave their parents’ home and travel to the bustling city of Sài Gòn. Soon their lives are swept up in the unstoppable flames of a war that is blazing through their country. Survival now might mean compromising the values they once treasured.
Decades later, two men wander through the streets and marketplaces of a very different Sài Gòn: modern, forward-looking, healing. Phong – the son of a Black American soldier and a Vietnamese woman – embarks on a search to find his parents and a way out of Việt Nam, while Dan, a war veteran, hopes that retracing the steps of his youth will ease the PTSD that has plagued him for decades.
When the lives of these unforgettable characters converge, each is forced to reckon with the explosive events of history that still ripple through their lives.
The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer
A sparkling debut novel, which reminds us all to live our best life with fewer regrets.
In her work as a 'death doula', Clover Brooks ushers people peacefully through their last days, collecting their final words into three notebooks – Advice, Confessions and Regrets. But Clover spends so much time with the dying that she's forgotten how to live. Can her clients' hard-won wisdom – and the inspiring love story of a spirited old woman named Claudia - show Clover the way to a happy ending? After all, what's the point of giving someone a beautiful death if you can't give yourself a beautiful life?