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.

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.

Take a walk through Melbourne’s streets and discover a world of fascinating historical tidbits with renowned writer and history buff Robyn Annear.

WINNER OF THE 2022 AGE BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR FICTION HIGHLY COMMENDED IN THE 2022 VICTORIAN PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION 'A parent's love for a child, you probably know this yourself, it's pretty bottomless. It goes down into the guts of the world. But a child's love for a parent is different. It goes up. It's more ethereal. It's not quite present on the earth.' In present-day Melbourne, a man attempts to piece together the mystery of his father's apparent suicide as his young family slowly implodes. At the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, in 1976, a man searching for salvation must confront his capacity for violence and darkness. And in a not-too-distant future, a woman with a life-altering decision to make travels through a climate-ravaged landscape to visit her estranged father. In Moonland is a portrait of three generations, each grappling with their own mortality. Spanning the wild idealism of the 70s through to the fragile hope of the future, it is a novel about the struggle for transcendence and the reverberating effects of family bonds. This long-awaited second outing from Miles Allinson, the multi-award-winning author of Fever of Animals, will affirm his reputation as one of Australia's most interesting contemporary fiction writers, and urge us to see our own political and environmental reality in a new light.

There is so much to do in marvellous Melbourne - places to see and new friends to meet. Found in Melbourne is a counting book, a story of friendship, and so much more. Whether you live in Melbourne, are planning your first visit, or are just curious - what will you find in this vibrant city?