Books like Nobody came by Robbie Garner

In a quiet fishing village, a stranger with an unseen presence turns a close community into a maze of suspicion and fear, testing bonds and identity.

Kenneth Doyle recounts the harrowing abuse he and his brother Patrick endured growing up among nine siblings in a dysfunctional Tullamore household, detailing starvation, beatings and forced criminal activity at the hands of their mother.

Liza Parker, an adoptee seeking her origins, finds hope in Pine Bluff. Yet the town’s silence and the sheriff’s guarded interest blur the line between protection and revelation as her past threatens to surface.

"I pedal over to Kensington just after dark. As I roll along the lane towards the railway underpass, a young Asian woman on her way home from the station walks out of the tunnel towards me. After she passes there's a stillness, a moment of silent freshness that feels like spring." Helen Garner is one of Australia's greatest writers. Her short non-fiction has enormous range. Spanning fifteen years of work, Everywhere I Look is a book full of unexpected moments, sudden shafts of light, piercing intuition, flashes of anger and incidental humour. It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice. Everywhere I Look includes Garner's famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother and extracts from her diaries, which have been part of her working life for as long as she has been a writer. Everywhere I Look glows with insight. It is filled with the wisdom of life.