At age seven, after her parents' marriage broke down, Anne Manne travelled with her mother and sisters from Adelaide to the Central Victorian countryside to begin a new life. So This Is Life is a haunting and luminous account told through stories—unexpected moments of epiphany—where meaning, suddenly and sometimes shockingly, reveals itself.

Possessing an astonishingly faithful and vivid memory of the pain, fear and joy of childhood; a sensibility keenly alive to the beauty of the landscape, the fellow-creatureliness of animals and the comedy, tragedy and dignity of the lives of the country folk she grew up among, So This Is Life is about the meaning of kindness, and the desolation of grief.

It depicts worlds as far apart as the faded gentility of former goldfields wealth, and the patriarchal spivvery of the country racetrack. Full of inconsolable pain but also impish humour, these stories sparkle like gems.

The Man Who Loved Children is Christina Stead's masterpiece about family life. Set in Washington during the 1930s, Sam and Henny Pollit are a warring husband and wife. Their tempestuous marriage, aggravated by too little money, lies at the centre of Stead's satirical and brilliantly observed novel about the relations between husbands and wives, and parents and children.

Sam, a scientist, uses words as weapons of attack and control on his children and is prone to illusions of power and influence that fail to extend beyond his family. His wife Henny, who hails from a wealthy Baltimore family, is disastrously impractical and enmeshed in her own fantasies of romance and vengeance. Much of the care of their six children is left to Louisa, Sam's 14-year-old daughter from his first marriage. Within this psychological battleground, Louisa must attempt to make a life of her own.

First published in 1940, The Man Who Loved Children was hailed for its satiric energy. Now its originality is again lauded by novelist Jonathan Franzen in his illuminating new introduction.

Christina Stead was born in Sydney in 1902, and died there in 1983. Most of her life was spent elsewhere: in London, Paris and other places in Europe, and in the United States. Her first book, The Salzburg Tales, was published in 1934, followed by twelve more works of fiction. In The Man Who Loved Children she drew on her own childhood in Sydney. She was the recipient of the inaugural Patrick White Literary Award in 1974.

To write your life story is to go down into the dark and steamy kitchen of the soul, to lift the lids of the cooking pots and examine the contents, one by one…

Lauris Edmond completed her remarkable three-volume autobiography in the early 1990s. It tells the story of a Hawkes Bay childhood in an unconventional home, wartime years as a student in Wellington, motherhood and teaching in country towns.

And then Lauris Edmond's 'second life' began, when she became an award-winning poet of international standing—a life that she describes, however, as no more real nor more important than that earlier one.

'Lauris Edmond is now an internationally known recorder of New Zealand experience. This penetrating narrative, with its grace, clarity, sensitivity and stark honesty, is the equal of her finest poems. We are immeasurably in her debt.' — New Zealand Books