Here for the first time is the full horror and madness of sharing a house, told by someone who’s been there. Birmingham pulls no punches: from dead rats in the kitchen to tent-dwelling lodgers in the living room, you’ll run for the safety of living alone.

In 1981, fifteen-year-old Nikki McWatters is living in a Gold Coast suburb, dragging herself through humdrum schooldays and dreaming of losing her virginity to a rock star. With three friends she starts the Vulture Club for aspiring groupies – and so begins a festival of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. As Nikki gets older, her conquests get bigger and the stakes get higher. From Australian Crawl to INXS, Pseudo Echo to Duran Duran, she is living her teenage dream – but is the groupie life all it’s cracked up to be? One Way or Another is an irresistible romp through a world of pub rock, big hair, wild nights and mornings after. With irrepressible humour and a bulging little black book, Nikki McWatters recalls an age when everything seemed possible – even if everything wasn’t such a good idea. ‘A vivid, heartfelt trip into the human side of rock ’n’ roll ... Painfully honest and insightful, this is a Puberty Blues for the ’80s generation.’ —Richard Lowenstein, director of Dogs in Space and He Died with a Felafel in His Hand ‘McWatters renders her story with skill, sensitivity, wit and honesty ... a fascinating look into some of rock’s seedier aspects.’ —Bookseller+Publisher ‘A great Australian rock ’n’ roll read’ —Steve Kilbey

Nat’s What I Reckon was the tattooed lockdown saviour we didn’t know we needed, rescuing us from packet food, jar sauce and total boredom with his hilarious viral recipe videos that got us cooking at home like champions again. Now that we’ve cooked our way out of lockdown and are wondering what the hell to do next, our favourite ratbag is back – and he’s ready to teach us more about life in this thoroughly unhelpful (but maybe actually kinda helpful?) self-help guide. Nat’s already shown us that jar sauce can get f*cked. But what else is sh*t – and what’s actually not sh*t? Is it all as bad as we feel like it is most of the time? No part of our weird world and strange behaviour is spared as our long-haired guru tells us what he reckons about it all – and amps up the flavour with some eye-watering stories from his early years before a sweary video about pasta sauce shot him to global fame. With Nat’s nine no-nonsense rules, you’ll be on the road to being a better d*ckhead faster than you can say ‘get in the bin’ to jar sauce. And if you screw it up: it doesn’t bloody Parramatta! Features a small selection of Nat's favourite recipes illustrated by Sydney artists Bunkwaa, Glenno and Onnie O'Leary. 'The tastiest self-help book of this generation . . . Regardless of what you take away from Un-Cook Yourself, you’ll definitely be laughing.' Urban List

On March 14, 2003, the world changed forever. A wave of energy slammed into North America and devastated the continent. The U.S. military, poised to invade Baghdad, was left without a commander in chief. Global order spiralled into chaos. Now, while a skeleton U.S. government tries to reconstruct the nation, swarms of pirates and foreign militias plunder the lawless wasteland of the East Coast, where even the president is fair prey. With New York clutched in the grip of thousands of heavily armed predators, is an all-out attack on the city the only way to save it?

Freelance travel writer and Lonely Planet guidebook contributor Tim Richards decides to shake up his life by taking an epic rail journey across Australia. Jumping aboard iconic trains like the Indian Pacific, Overland, and Spirit of Queensland, he covers over 7,000 kilometres, from the tropics to the desert and from big cities to ghost towns. Tim's journey is one of classic travel highs and lows: floods, cancellations, extraordinary landscapes, and forays into personal and public histories—as well as the steady joy of random strangers encountered along the way.

If a bad attitude could be subject to copyright, my ten years as a waiter would have left me obscenely wealthy. Working the floor, I was the Kerry Packer of passive aggression. Sullen insolence was my personal trademark, diligently honed and perfected over time. For a long list of perceived diner slights - ranging from ordering the tomato sauce separately to the fries, to calling me 'dear' - I could perform a Jekyll and Hyde switch into the most perfunctory, robotic and joyless server the world has ever seen. If I didn't like a group of people I would endeavour to do my very best to ensure that the only thing left of their night was a cold, dry husk. That I regularly used something I privately referred to as the 'Dead Eyes' should reveal plenty. Before she was one of Australia's top restaurant critics, Larissa Dubecki was one of its worst waitresses. A loving homage to her ten-year reign of dining-room terror, Prick With a Fork takes you where a diner should never go. From the crappiest suburban Italian to the hottest place in town, what goes on behind the scenes is rarely less fraught than the seventh circle of hell. Psychopathic chefs, lecherous owners, impossible demands and insufferable customers are just the start of an average shift. Therapy for former waiters, a revelation to diners, and pure reading pleasure for anyone interested in what really happens out the back of the restaurant, Prick With a Fork is an hilarious and horrific dissection of the restaurant industry, combining the gritty take-no-prisoners attack of Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential with the gross confessions and forensic grunge of John Birmingham's He Died with a Felafel in His Hand. Dining out will never be the same again.

Jamie's tyres squealed to a halt. Standing in the glare of the headlights was an apparition dressed in a puffy shirt with a garish flower pattern It wore oversized red shoes, striped pants and white face paint. It stared at him with ungodly boggling eyes, then turned away...this seemingly random incident triggers a nightmarish chain of events as Jamie finds he is being stalked by a trio of gleefully sadistic clowns who deliver a terrifying ultimatum: you have two days to pass your audition. You better pass it, feller. You're joining the circus. Ain't that the best news you ever got? Jamie is plunged into the horrific alternate universe that is the centuries-old Pilo Family Circus, a borderline world between hell and earth from which humankind's greatest tragedies have been perpetrated. Yet in this place peopled by the gruesome, grotesque and monstrous, where violence and savagery are the norm, Jamie finds that his worst enemy is himself - for when he applies the white face paint, he is transformed into JJ, the most vicious clown of all. And JJ wants Jamie dead.

This is an often tongue-in-cheek handbook. Thematically organized to cover the full range of masculine endeavor, it puts the "Man" back in manhood.

An electrifying, epic history of the city of Sydney as you have never seen her before. 'To peer deeply into this ghost city, the one lying beneath the surface, is to understand that Sydney has a soul and that it is a very dark place indeed.' Beneath the shining harbour, amid the towers of global greed and deep inside the bad-drugs madness of the suburban wastelands, lies Sydney's shadow history. Terrifying tsunamis, corpse-robbing morgue staff, killer cops, neo-Nazis, power junkies and bumbling SWOS teams electrify this epic tale of a city with a cold vacuum for a moral core. Birmingham drills beneath the cover story of a successful multicultural metropolis and melts the boundaries between past and present to reveal a ghost city beneath the surface of concrete and glass. In Birmingham's alternative history of Sydney, the yawning chasm between the megarich and the lumpen masses is as evident in the insane wealth of the new elites as it was in the head-spinning rapacity of the NSW Rum Corps. This is a city shattered by the nexus between government, big money and the underworld, where the glittering prizes go to the strong, not the just. Combining intensive research with the pace of a techno-thriller, John Birmingham creates a rich portrait of a city too dazzled by its own gorgeous reflection to care much for what lies at its dark, corrupted heart. Illuminated by wild flashes of black humour, violent, ghoulish and utterly compelling, Leviathan is history for the Tarantino generation.