Seven childhood friends go camping together for the second summer in a row. Last summer they had just graduated high school and believed in their ability to remain so tightly-knit even when separated by several months and thousands of miles. Last summer they’d been so confident that nothing would change. They could not have been more wrong. Their first year of college did not go as expected. Everything that they took for granted fell apart in ways they never could have foreseen. This weekend is their last chance to put themselves back together. The Inconvenient Process of Falling describes the real struggle of growing up and accepting the unpleasant realization that life is not going to turn out exactly how you planned. It depicts the real coming-of-age experience of returning home and seeing how much you’ve changed. Ultimately, it’s a novel about realizing that friends are the family you get to choose. These seven friends undergo the same experience endured by all nineteen-year-olds. It’s a time of transition and trying to stay afloat in this strange state of quasi-adulthood. Growing up is a strange process, and this novel shows that no one is exempt from it. No matter where you live, where you go to school, or what aspirations you use to define yourself, nineteen is a hell of a year. The hardships endured at this age – the money troubles and family struggles and broken hearts that are an inevitable part of growing up – are their own brand of battle. When you emerge scarred and battered and kind of an adult, you probably still don’t know what you want to do with your life or how you’re going to become a full person, but you know who your friends really are, and that’s all you can ask for.

Structured around the fourteen days in 2011, from the moment the News of the World's hacking of the phone of a murdered 13-year-old schoolgirl was exposed, The Fall of the House of Murdoch is a riveting account of the scandal that closed the world's best-selling English-language newspaper, forced one of the most powerful families in the world to appear before Parliament and finally prompted Murdoch's departure from the UK newspaper world he dominated for three decades. But the book covers more than just Hackgate. It is a forensic expose of News Corp's culture, through the early days in Australian media, the purchase of the News of the World, the Sun and the Times group, the Wapping move to the move into satellite broadcasting and the creation of the Fox Network. Exhaustively researched and fully sourced, The Fall of the House of Murdoch is a morality tale for our times, a family drama played out on a world stage and required reading for anyone seeking to understand the hidden connections that bind politics, business and culture together.

At its peak, Gunns Ltd had a market value of $1 billion, was listed on the ASX 200, was the largest employer in the state of Tasmania and its largest private landowner. Most of its profits came from woodchipping, mainly from clear-felled old-growth forests. A pulp mill was central to its expansion plans. Its collapse in 2012 was a major national news story, as was the arrest of its CEO for insider trading. Quentin Beresford illuminates for the first time the dark corners of the Gunns empire. He shows it was built on close relationships with state and federal governments, political donations and use of the law to intimidate and silence its critics. Gunns may have been single-minded in its pursuit of a pulp mill in Tasmania’s Tamar Valley, but it was embedded in an anti-democratic and corrupt system of power supported by both main parties, business and unions. Simmering opposition to Gunns and all it stood for ramped up into an environmental campaign not seen since the Franklin Dam protests. Fearless and forensic in its analysis, the book shows that Tasmania’s decades-long quest to industrialise nature fails every time. But the collapse of Gunns is the most telling of them all. ‘This is a tale that needed telling. It is an important case history in environmental campaigning and a must-read for anyone interested in fairness and transparency in government.’ – Geoffrey Cousins AM, businessman and president of the Australian Conservation Foundation