Melbourne's a city you get to know from the inside out - you have to walk it to love it. My favourite time to do this is at night. That's when you capture glimpses of people - eating, laughing, talking, arguing, watching TV and reading - through half-open terrace house doors and windows ... It is a city of inside places and conversation. Of intimacy. Melbourne begins on Black Saturday, the day that bushfires tore through the outskirts of Melbourne, destroying the townships of Marysville and Kinglake, shattering thousands of lives. Sophie Cunningham writes about what happened over the year that followed. Sit through a heatwave, visit the drains underneath the city, participate in a letterpress workshop, wander beside the Yarra, cycle alongside tram tracks and cheer at the footy. Live through the drought before the storm, the rain before yet more fire and days of searing heat. Along the way, be captivated as Cunningham shares her Melbourne, its stories and its characters. In a new introduction, Cunningham returns to Melbourne after a period away and reflects on how much her city has changed since Melbourne was first published in 2011: it is hotter, greener and has endured the rollercoaster ride - from boom times to economic depression - that defined 2020. 'Cunningham has successfully captured the dynamics of a city in constant flux, while focusing on the essence of its inner life, which gives it an ambience quite unlike that found in any other Australian city.' - Robert Hefner, The Canberra Times 'It would be nice to imagine that the gift of this book to Melbourne is its greater capacity to understand itself and its webs of connection.' - David Sornig, Melbourne Review 'An admirable response to the impossible task of writing about a city its history, its present, its characters, its stories, its politics and its personal meaning in a single, accessible volume when any one of these themes should take several. Cunningham is communicating this city's soul as though it's a person, full of contradictions but with an essential character.' -- Waleed Aly, The Sunday Age 'This beautiful book provokes nostalgia and deeper thinking about the events, places and people who have defined Melbourne.' -- Herald Sun 'Cunningham is communicating this city's soul as though it's a person, full of contradictions but with an essential character.' -- Waleed Aly, Australian Book Review

Over two years, writer Nick Gadd and his wife Lynne circled the city of Melbourne on foot, starting at Williamstown and ending in Port Melbourne. Along the way they uncovered lost buildings, secret places and mysterious signs that told of forgotten stories and curious characters from the past. Soon after they completed the circle, Lynne passed away from cancer. Melbourne Circle is the story of their journey, a memoir, and a stunning meditation on personal loss. ‘What a gem this book is! Oddity, wonderment, weirdness: these splendid essays reveal a marvellous Melbourne most of us have never encountered before. This is a psychogeography dense with vernacular history, humane detail, and from beneath the shadow of grief, love.’ –­ Gail Jones, author of Five Bells and The Death of Noah Glass ‘‘‘Psychojogging”’ and the pleasures of walking.’ – interview with Hilary Harper on Radio National, Life Matters ‘Marvellous Melbourne: the books that capture our city and its life.’ – The Age/Sydney Morning Herald ‘Melbourne Circle: Walking, Memory and Loss is a very special book. Just read it, and then take to the streets and walk with the same spirit of enquiry.’ – Sophie Cunningham, The Age ‘A beautiful meditation on the streets in which we live, ghosts, love and loss … While there is sadness in this book, Gadd writes with warmth, humour and a generosity of spirit.’ – Stephen Romei, The Weekend Australian ‘An endearing book about enduring love and serendipitous discoveries; of remnants of the past pasted onto old buildings, and the way these ghost signs are portals into another time.’ – The Saturday Paper

Like cities everywhere, Melbourne is two cities. There is the city of space and place, of the streets and parks and buildings where we live. Then there is the city of words, the imagined city that has inspired or directed the building of the material city, and that holds the memories of the lives its people have led. Before the invasion of the settlers, the Aborigines who lived in what would become Melbourne patterned their lives in song and dance, word and ritual, that joined them in a seamless reality of place and space: past, present and future. The settlers displaced this with the chartered streets where solid buildings aspired to the ostentatious wealth of London or Paris, and narrow lanes and alleyways crawled with the misery of poverty. As new forms of transport arrived, new suburbs spread. Successive waves of immigration brought people from around the world as the city passed through cycles of prosperity and depression and changed from British to Antipodean to cosmopolitan. Each wave brought its own dreams. Each appropriated what they liked in the new land as they tried to build their separate pasts into a common future. In this study of Melbourne as a city imagined through words, John McLaren examines the words of writers who, in memoir and autobiography, diaries and journalism, fiction and poetry, have shared their perceptions of the city, its conflicts and its celebrations. He shows how this past lives on beneath today's city, taking us back to the boats that filled its harbour, the rivers that run beneath its streets and the ghosts who dance in its market. His book offers its readers new prospects of reading, and new ways of seeing the city within the city.

The definitive travel guides that make you feel like a local wherever you go. Monocle reports from around the globe. As its editors and correspondents dart from city to city, they get to know the best places to rest their heads, stretch their limbs, and kick back with a contact in a hard-to-find cocktail bar. That information is now available in The Monocle Travel Guide Series: a line-up of titles that speaks to readers in an informed but informal way about everything from architecture to art, late-night bars to earlymorning markets. Designed to be compact and collectable, these books go beyond the traditional tourist beats to make sure visitors get the best out of a city--no matter how short their stay.

“Old landmarks fall in nearly every block ... and the face of the city is changing so rapidly that the time is not too far distant when a search for a building 50 years old will be in vain.” — Herald, 1925. The demolition firm of Whelan the Wrecker was a Melbourne institution for a hundred years (1892-1992). Its famous sign – ‘Whelan the Wrecker is Here’ on a pile of shifting rubble – was a laconic masterpiece and served as a vital sign of the city’s progress. It’s no stretch to say that over three generations, the Whelan family changed the face of Melbourne, demolishing hundreds of buildings in the central city alone. In A City Lost and Found, Robyn Annear uses Whelan’s demolition sites as portals to explore layers of the city laid bare by their pick-axes and iron balls. Peering beneath the rubble, she brings to light fantastic stories about Melbourne’s building sites and their many incarnations. This is a book about the making – and remaking – of a city.