Josep Cambras

Ian Graham

Here at last is the complete bible for those who never wish to grow up. A massive collection of all the useless tricks, facts and gags that make life worth living.

Paul Levitz

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader

Author Mary Groves has lived the great outback dream and knows how tough it can be.

Gordan Lomas

Award winning children's writer Kim Wilkins assumes a pseudonym as she turns her hand to 'chick literature' with Wildflower Hill.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader.

Making the right choice in life is never straightforward but is one of the main reasons we find ourselves and each other so fascinating. Three Dollars is the story of Eddie Harnovey, a honest, compassionate man with a brilliant wife, Tanya, and a beautiful, if possibly epileptic, daughter Abbey. Eddie's life revolves around work and the three women in his life; the third is Amanda, a childhood sweetheart who re-appears in his life with mathematical precision every nine-and-a-half years. Eddie has a lovely house in the suburbs, he has a strong moral conscience, he's intelligent and witty, and the world around him is falling apart. On the brink of bankruptcy with just $3 to his name, has he made the wrong choices?Perhaps a large part of the answer lies in the speed with which we live our lives. It is easy to feel sympathy for Eddie as he bemoans the pace of change: "Everything happens too quickly to be understood while it is happening. Analysis is impossible until the event is over."A more likely cause of Eddie's predicament may lie in the fact that his wife is about to lose her teaching position at the university and Eddie, an engineer working for the Department of Environment, has been asked by his wife's former lover to falsify a report to allow a smelting plant to be built by Amanda's father.The depth of these relationships is explored with insight and great wit, unpicking those worries that come to us at night while, like Eddie, we lie and notice (and usually ignore) the cracks and flaking of paint on the bedroom ceiling. For Eddie, it is a time to rank debts and what has become the persistence and tyranny of the day-to-day struggle to financially survive.Three Dollars was written in 1998, but set in the times of Australia's introduction to what the surely misnamed 'economic rationalism'. The obsession with material goods and the soulless never-ending pursuit of profit are both a target for Eddie's scorn as well as a source of hilarious black comedy. Written with great humour and prose which at times may seem just a little too deliberate, Three Dollars is as pertinent today as it was in the 1990s.There are times, however, when the characters' tendency to editorialise or sermonise is a touch overwhelming, even if the sentiments seem sound or relevant to Australian politics today. Take this monologue from Eddie's wife, Tanya:"People's fear of change and their despair at the lack of certainty in any area of their lives, particularly where the social and the personal meet, that is with respect to their jobs and income, if it lasts long enough, will lead them to abandon reason, to be suspicious of it and to look for scapegoats and simplistic solutions. The wisdom or correctness of a government's decision will scarcely be discussed but instead attention will be focused on the strength with which the decision was made, the apparent certainty, the conviction with which it was implemented."Admittedly, Tanya is a university politics lecturer, but the moral hectoring in the novel can easily distract from the plot and soon become tiring.Ignoring the occasional sermon, however, Three Dollars an entertaining read, beautifully written and extremely funny. It sat on my bookshelf for over a decade and was rescued only because the mixed reviews for Perlman's latest novel, The Street Sweeper, made me curious. No ambiguity about Three Dollars though: compelling, dramatic and a disconcertingly humorous reflection of the way so many of us live our lives. In 2005, Three Dollars was made into an Australian movie, starring David Wenham. A superb interpretation of the novel, both film and book are highly recommended.

Rob Minshull produces Weekends with Warren and is an avid reader

As punishment for having stolen from his employer, our antihero, drug-addicted twenty-four year old 'Case' has had his nervous system crippled with mycotoxin, preventing him from entering the cyberspace system known as the Matrix.

Marion von Adlerstein

Chloe Maxwell

Jason Torres

Paralysed from the neck down after a football tackle 26 years ago, Brett Morris finishes the Gold Coast Marathon Fun Run in a wheelchair in under an hour, and he's "very happy it's done".

MORNING BRIEFING: NSW police hunt for Sunjay Dayal, who escaped while undertaking maintenance work in Mount Kiera, while three cars set alight in a garage triggers the fire alarms inside a Liverpool unit block.

A woman on trial accused of murdering her partner allegedly poisoned him with a "cocktail of dangerous medication" so she could benefit financially from his death, an Adelaide court is told.

In March 1996, teenager Matthew De Gruchy bludgeoned his family to death in a "frenzied attack" in NSW. Twenty-three years later, he is set to be released from prison as a 41-year-old man.

Fine-dining chefs Tom Chiumento and Simon Evans usually serve seven-course degustations, but recently they've been using their talents to provide quality meals from food destined for the bin.

Triple murderer Matthew De Gruchy has been driven away from Sydney's Long Bay jail after serving 23 years of his 28-year sentence for bludgeoning to death his mother and younger brother and sister.

Rugby league player Jack de Belin will stand trial on sexual assault charges in March next year, just two weeks before the start of the 2020 NRL season.

Do you suffer from an indescribable feeling of vertigo, constant dizziness and motion sickness? Chances are you could have Mal de Debarquement Syndrome.

A man who had a container of railway detonators in his bag on a train on the New South Wales south coast pleads guilty to possessing an explosive device in public.

A man has been sentenced to six months in prison after being found with an explosive device at Wollongong train station last Thursday during peak hour.

Locals say a man who died while under attack from a swooping magpie near Wollongong was in a 'bad way' and they tried to resuscitate him before help arrived.

A New South Wales man claims he has been "deceived" by the state's public trustee after his elderly mother's will was allegedly changed without his knowledge.

A major crime review into the suspected murder of three-year-old Cheryl Grimmer, who was taken from a Wollongong Beach almost 50 years ago will be conducted, as her family desperately pleads for the state coroner to hold a second inquest into her death.

A man charged with the manslaughter of Valmai Birch, 34, at her NSW south coast home eight years ago is accused of hogtieing her and causing her death by asphyxiation or other means, before putting her body in a wheelie bin.

Artist Tanya Stubbles created 22 artworks for a Chinese client six months after leaving a brain injury unit in Sydney.