Chasing memories of the losses of his brother and father, the author, a young newspaper director, and his Australian wife visit the Cotswolds. On a whim they buy a cottage and Ian resigns. They slowly get to know Norman, their inscrutable and apparently terrifying neighbour; Geoff, the ebullient landlord of their eclectic local - last bastion against the encroaching gastropub - and Tom, an ex-gamekeeper, who lets Ian see something of a hidden rural culture. The delightful aspects of village life and an ever-changing landscape is evocatively captured; but it is from working with Norman on his small chaotic farm that they learn about the loss of the countryside to industrial farming and of no-longer affordable housing to the dreaded 'white settlers'. And it is shadows of the past and a seemingly segregated social world around them that begin to cast doubts on whether this is the place for them. This is a gentle lesson in taking time to confront our losses, memories and prejudices to discover a revitalised life in our own country.

A Place in the Country is W. G. Sebald’s meditation on the six artists and writers who shaped his creative mind—and the last of this great writer’s major works to be translated into English. This edition includes more than 40 pieces of art, all originally selected by W. G. Sebald. This extraordinary collection of interlinked essays about place, memory, and creativity captures the inner worlds of five authors and one painter. In his masterly and mysterious style—part critical essay, part memoir—Sebald weaves their lives and art with his own migrations and rise in the literary world. Here are people gifted with talent and courage yet in some cases cursed by fragile and unstable natures, working in countries inhospitable or even hostile to them. Jean-Jacques Rousseau is conjured on the verge of physical and mental exhaustion, hiding from his detractors on the island of St. Pierre, where two centuries later Sebald took rooms adjacent to his. Eighteenth-century author Johann Peter Hebel is remembered for his exquisite and delicate nature writing, expressing the eternal balance of both the outside world and human emotions. Writer Gottfried Keller, best known for his 1850 novel Green Henry, is praised for his prescient insights into a Germany where “the gap between self-interest and the common good was growing ever wider.” Sebald compassionately re-creates the ordeals of Eduard Mörike, the nineteenth-century German poet beset by mood swings, depression, and fainting spells in an increasingly shallow society, and Robert Walser, the institutionalized author whose nearly indecipherable scrawls seemed an attempt to “duck down below the level of language and obliterate himself” (and whose physical appearance and year of death mirrored those of Sebald’s grandfather). Finally, Sebald spies a cognizance of death’s inevitability in painter Jan Peter Tripp’s lovingly exact reproductions of life. Featuring the same kinds of suggestive and unexplained illustrations that appear in his masterworks Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, and translated by Sebald’s colleague Jo Catling, A Place in the Country is Sebald’s unforgettable self-portrait as seen through the experiences of others, a glimpse of his own ghosts alongside those of the men who influenced him. It is an essential addition to his stunning body of work. Praise for A Place in the Country “Measured, solemn, sardonic . . . hypnotic . . . [W. G. Sebald’s] books, which he made out of classics, remain classics for now.”—Joshua Cohen, The New York Times Book Review “In Sebald’s writing, everything is connected, everything webbed together by the unseen threads of history, or chance, or fate, or death. The scholarly craft of gathering scattered sources and weaving them into a coherent whole is transformed here into something beautiful and unsettling, elevated into an art of the uncanny—an art that was, in the end, Sebald’s strange and inscrutable gift.”—Slate “Magnificent . . . The multiple layers surrounding each essay are seamless to the point of imperceptibility.”—New York Daily News “Sebald’s most tender and jovial book.”—The Nation “Reading [A Place in the Country is] like going for a walk with a beautifully talented, deeply passionate novelist from Mars.”—New York

Fifteen-year-old Issy and her newly single mother, Caroline Evans, are struggling to find their way alone, as well as together. At thirty-eight, with little money and all the responsibility for the two of them, Caroline is coming to terms with her new situation. When she decides to leave Singapore, home of her former well-off life (and her cheating husband), she ends up living in an English village pub, cooking dinners there to earn enough to get by, meeting unexpectedly quirky people, and making friends. But Issy still adores her father and secretly blames her mother for their change in life. Just as Caroline's dream of converting an old barn into a restaurant finally begins to take shape, her chance at happiness is threatened and hangs in the balance as whispers of murder and vengeance find their way to her. When Issy, who is hovering in that limbo between girl and young woman, begins to make some risky choices, the stakes are raised even higher. A Place in the Country is filled with emotions every woman will recognize as Caroline and Issy make their way in the world and do battle with those who would wish to see them lose their chances to gain their hearts' desires. Love and hate, blame and responsibility, deception and trust all collide in this novel that is Elizabeth Adler at her page-turning best. From The New York Times bestselling author comes an emotionally powerful novel about mothers and daughters, the secrets they share, and those they keep to themselves.

Whether your goal is food, profit or enjoyment, this book offers the 'eyes wide open' approach to creating your own beautiful, productive and sustainable rural landscape. You'll also find expert knowledge on FireWise landscape design, best practices for protecting your property and vital strategies for reducing the risk posed by bushfires. Suitable for old hands and first-timers alike, and for hobby farms of all shapes and sizes, A Place in the Country gives practical advice to help you achieve long-term peace and prosperity on the land.

This inspiring anthology it the first to convey the noteworthy experiences and contributions of women in the American military in their own words-from the Revolutionary War to the present wars in the Middle East. Serving with the Union Army during the Civil War as a nurse, scout, spy, and soldier, Harriet Tubman tells what it was like to be the first American woman to lead a raid against an enemy, freeing some 750 slaves. Busting gender stereotypes, Inga Fredriksen Ferris's describes how it felt to be a woman marine during World War II. Heidi Squier Kraft recounts her experiences as a lieutenant commander in the navy, deployed to Iraq as a psychologist to provide mental health care in a combat zone. In excerpts from their diaries, letters, oral histories, military depositions and testimonies, as well as from published and unpublished memoirs-generations of women reveal why and how they chose to serve their country, often breaking with social norms and at great personal peril.

Best-selling author and internationally renowned painter Sally Morgan teams up with Ezekiel Kwaymullina for a picture book celebrating country.

In the early 1990s, at the watershed age of thirty, Marilyn Abildskov decided she needed to start over. She accepted an offer to move from Utah to Matsumoto, Japan, to teach English to junior high school students. “All I knew is that I had to get away and when I stared at my name on the Japanese contract, the squiggles of katakana, my name typed in English sturdily beneath, I liked how it looked. As if it—as if I—were translated, transformed, emerging now as someone new.” The Men in My Country is the story of an American woman living and loving in Japan. Satisfied at first to observe her exotic surroundings, the woman falls in love with the place, with the light, with the curve of a river, with the smell of bonfires during obon, with blue and white porcelain dishes, with pencil boxes, and with small origami birds. Later, struggling for a deeper connection—“I wanted the country under my skin”—Abildskov meets the three men who will be part of her transformation and the one man with whom she will fall deeply in love. A travel memoir offering an artful depiction of a very real place, The Men in My Country also covers the terrain of a complex emotional journey, tracing a geography of the heart, showing how we move to be moved, how in losing ourselves in a foreign place we can become dangerously—and gloriously—undone.