A house is not just a series of openings and closings but a curated collection of objects and belongings. From the architects who have built the spaces to the artisans and makers who have crafted the objects, here are twenty-four inspiring homes showcasing the rooms and people that make them exceptional.

Shannon McGrath, one of Australia’s best interiors photographers, opens her archive to reveal the details and layers that make up a room: from furniture and fittings, to lighting choices, colour palettes and art curation. Grand or small, each gesture speaks across generations, adding layers of detail that bring a house to life.

Written by Annie Reid, Assemblage is a true celebration of the beauty of design and intentional curation, revealing that even the smallest of objects, and the way they are assembled, can make an extraordinary impact.

A wry, affectionate and thrilling return to the world of the author’s critically acclaimed Soon I Will Be Invincible

Dr Rick Tower is a mild-mannered English professor easing into middle-age at a New England college. Even his vices are unremarkable. But it wasn’t always like this. Not until they changed his name, altered his looks and told him- ‘pretend you were never different’.

Because, decades earlier after a very bad day at high school, he was committed to a secret government facility with three other kids, Cat, Jack and Stephanie, each special in their own way. Tested, tutored and trained, this extraordinary quartet were then told to save the world.

It was the best thing that ever happened to them. Until it became the worst.

Now, twenty years later, a mysterious disappearance means Tower must reunite with his former comrades. But while great power come might come with great responsibility, there’s little of that on display from any of them.

Combining compelling storytelling and fierce imagination with a rich cast of characters, Fight Me is a page-turning and distinctive thriller, a unique tale of good, evil and one man trying to do the right thing. Against impossible odds…

A joyful, rule-breaking experiment in biography, which celebrates ‘country life’ as a state of mind

1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block.

1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast.

1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’.

Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and was forever changed by it.

We encounter them at quiet moments – pausing to look at an insect on the windowsill; jotting down a recipe; or digging for potatoes, dirt beneath their nails. Slowly, we start to see transformations unfold. Invigorated by new landscapes, and the daily trials and small pleasures of making homes, they emerge from long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment; they embark on new experiments in form, in feeling and in living. In the country, each woman finds her path- to convalescence and recovery; to sexual and political awakening; and, above all, to personal freedom and creative flourishing.

Graceful, fluid, and enriched by previously untouched archival material, Rural Hours is both a paean to the bravery and vision of three pioneering writers, and a passionate invitation to us all- to recognize the radical potential of domestic life and rural places, and find new enchantment in the routines and rituals of each day.

‘A stunning self-portrait of a woman trying to make sense of the misogyny and sexism she has faced throughout her life.’ – TIME Magazine

In early 2021, popular artist Anna Marie Tendler checked herself into a psychiatric hospital following a year of crippling anxiety, depression and self-harm. Over two weeks, she underwent myriad psychological tests, participated in numerous therapy sessions, connected with fellow patients and experienced profound breakthroughs, such as when a doctor noted, “There is a you inside that feels invisible to those looking at you from the outside.”

In Men Have Called Her Crazy, Tendler recounts her hospital experience as well as pivotal moments in her life that preceded and followed. This is a memoir that speaks to every woman who has been made to question her own sanity, doubt herself and her worth. Anna Marie Tendler’s powerful writing, insight and clarity enabled her to find a way out of the narratives that had been foisted on her since girlhood and create her own, new story. This beautiful and heartfelt book invites us to do the same.

This stunning literary self-portrait examines the unreasonable expectations and pressures women face in the 21st century. Yet overwhelming and despairing as that can feel, Tendler ultimately offers a message of hope. Early in her stay in the hospital, she says, “My wish for myself is that one day I’ll reach a place where I can face hardship without trying to destroy myself.” By the end of the book, she fulfils that wish.

Discover the six seasons of the Noongar calendar in English and Noongar with emerging First Nations talent Ebony Froome and Leanne Zilm.

Djinang Bonar takes readers through the seasons of the Noongar calendar, exploring different seasonal indicators to increase readers’ awareness of the environment around them and their knowledge of Noongar language. Noongar country is portrayed in spectacular detail with gorgeous illustrations of the plants and animals typically seen in each season of the year.

This is the perfect picture book for parents, carers, teachers and librarians to share insights into the six Noongar seasons and learn some Noongar language.

An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge.

It’s fifteen years since the Second World War and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the conflict is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel’s life is as it should be- led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season…

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis – she sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn’t. In response Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house – a spoon, a knife, a bowl – Isabel’s suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel’s desperate desire for order transforms into infatuation – leading to a discovery that unravels all she has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva – nor the house – are what they seem.

This is the story of a wall that somehow chose me as the witness of what it said and did.

Nasser Abu Srour grew up in a refugee camp in the West Bank, on the outskirts of Bethlehem. As a child, he played in its shadow and explored the little world within the camp. As he grew older, he began questioning the boundaries that limited his existence. Later, sentenced to life in prison, with no hope of parole, he found himself surrounded by a physical wall.

This is the story of how, over thirty years in captivity, he crafted a new definition of freedom. Turning to writings by philosophers as varied as Derrida, Kirkegaard and Freud, he begins to let go of freedom as a question that demanded an answer, in order to preserve it as a dream. The wall becomes his stable point of reference, his anchor, both physically and psychologically.

As each year brings with it new waves of releases of prisoners, he dares to hope, and seeks refuge in the wall when these hopes are dashed. And, in a small miracle, he finds love with a lawyer from the outside – while in her absence, the wall is his solace and his curse.

A testimony of how the most difficult of circumstances can build a person up instead of tearing them down, The Tale of a Wall is an extraordinary record of the vast confinement and power of the mind.

‘A storm is approaching Nineveh, the sky swollen with impending rain. One of the clouds approaching the world’s largest and wealthiest city, built on the banks of the river Tigris, is bigger and darker than the others-and more impatient. It floats suspended above a majestic building adorned with marble columns, pillared porticos and monumental statues. This is the North Palace, where the king resides in all his might and glory. The cloud casts a shadow over the imperial residence. For unlike humans, water has no regard for social status or royal titles.

Dangling from the edge of the cloud is a single drop of rain – no bigger than a bean and lighter than a chickpea. For a while it quivers precariously – small, spherical and scared. How frightening it is to observe the earth open down below like a lonely lotus flower.

Remember that raindrop, inconsequential though it may be compared to the magnitude of the universe. Inside, it holds a miniature world, a story of its own…’

This is the story of one lost poem, two great rivers, and three remarkable lives – all connected by a single drop of water.

In the ruins of Nineveh, that ancient city of Mesopotamia, there lies hidden in the sand fragments of a long-forgotten poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

In Victorian London, an extraordinary child is born at the edge of the dirt-black Thames. Arthur’s only chance of escaping poverty is his brilliant memory. When his gift earns him a spot as an apprentice at a printing press, Arthur’s world opens up far beyond the slums, with one book soon sending him across the seas: Nineveh and Its Remains.

In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl living by the River Tigris, waits to be baptised with water brought from the holy sit of Lalish in Iraq. The ceremony is cruelly interrupted, and soon Narin and her grandmother must journey across war-torn lands in the hope of reaching the sacred valley of their people.

In 2018 London, broken-hearted Zaleekhah, a hydrologist, moves to a houseboat on the Thames to escape the wreckage of her marriage. Zaleekhah foresees a life drained of all love and meaning – until an unexpected connection to her homeland changes everything.

‘I read Mina’s Matchbox like a besotted child, enraptured, never wanting it to end.’ RUTH OZEKI, author of The Book of Form and Emptiness

On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars.

After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya. It is a year which will change her life.

The 1970s are bringing changes to Japan and her uncle’s magnificent colonial mansion opens up a new and unfamiliar world for Tomoko; its sprawling gardens are even home to a pygmy hippo the family keeps as a pet. Tomoko finds her relatives equally exotic and beguiling and her growing friendship with her cousin Mina draws her into an intoxicating world full of secret crushes and elaborate storytelling.

Rich with the magic and mystery of youth, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time, and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.

The dramatic history of a massacre in Damascus, and the collapse of the old Ottoman world order.

This remarkable book recreates one of the watershed moments in the history of the Middle East- the ferocious outbreaks of disorder across the Levant in 1860 which resulted in the massacre of thousands of Christians in Damascus.

Eugene Rogan brilliantly recreates the lost world of the Middle East under Ottoman rule. The once mighty empire was under pressure from global economic change and European imperial expansion. Reforms in the mid-nineteenth century raised tensions across the empire, nowhere more so than in Damascus. A multifarious city linked by caravan trade to Baghdad, the Mediterranean and Mecca, the chaos of languages, customs and beliefs made Damascus a warily tolerant place. Until the reforms began to advantage the minority Christian community at the expense of the Muslim majority.

But in 1860 people who had generally lived side by side for generations became bitter enemies as news of civil war in Mount Lebanon arrived in the city. Under the threat of a French expeditionary force, the Ottomans dealt with the disaster effectively and ruthlessly – but the old, generally quite tolerant Damascene world lay in ruins. It would take a quarter of a century to restore stability and prosperity to the Syrian capital.

This is both an essential book for understanding the emergence of the modern Middle East from the destruction of the old Ottoman world, and a uniquely gripping story.