Kirjahaku

From an award-winning Australian novelist comes a wonderfully inspiring story about the ill-fated love affair between a white female jazz saxophonist and a black American GI, set against the backdrop of 1940s Sydney. From an award-winning novelist comes a wonderfully inspiring story about the ill-fated love affair between a white female jazz saxophonist and a black American GI, set against the backdrop of 1940s Sydney. Sydney, 1942. Pearl is eighteen, beautiful, and impetuous. She plays saxophone in an all-girl jazz band at the Trocadero and occasionally sits in on underground gigs with her twin brother, Martin, who also plays the sax. One evening, black GI and jazz legend James Washington blows into her life, and love begins to unfold against the blacked-out nights and rumor-filled days of a city in the grip of war. When James is shipped out to fight in New Guinea, Pearl hatches a breathtaking plan to reunite with him. And then all hell breaks loose. Internationally acclaimed author Mandy Sayer writes with astonishing insight and tenderness in this audaciously original novel--a romance with a haunting jazz soundtrack and a war story like no other.

Today, roughly 100,000 Gypsies call Australia home, yet their experiences have never been included in any official histories of our country.Here, award-winning memoirist and novelist Mandy Sayer weaves together a wide-ranging history of Gypsies in Australia that begins with the roots of the Romani culture, tracing the first Gypsy people to arrive in Australia (including James Squire, the colony’s first brewer) through to the Gypsy families currently living in Australia, who share the stories of their ancestors and their lives.With her unconventional, nomadic early life, Mandy Sayer has a unique insight into the lives of the people she meets, and a strong sense of the importance of their history. Given their blessing to tell their stories, Sayer also demolishes some longstanding but baseless myths along the way.

“I fell in love with my first misfit at the age of three. He was a disabled man in a wheelchair who sold newspapers every afternoon outside the Empire Hotel in Annandale. Whenever I glimpsed him in the distance I would break into a run, jump onto his lap, and smother him with kisses.”Misfits and Me represents a selection of Mandy Sayer’s non-fiction writing from the past twenty years. Each essay has been chosen to reflect a different aspect of Mandy’s attraction to Australia’s misfits and outsiders, with those who live in the shadows of our society.

The trailblazing McDonagh sisters were the first women in Australia to form their own film production company. Between 1926 and 1933, this remarkable trio produced four feature films and a number of documentaries. The youngest, Paulette, was one of only five women film directors in the world. Phyllis produced, art directed and conducted publicity. And the eldest, Isabel, under her stage name Marie Lorraine, acted in all the female leads. Together, the sisters transformed Australian cinema's preoccupations with the outback and the bush – and what they mocked as 'haystack movies' – into a thrilling, urban modernity.In Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters, Mandy Sayer reveals the sisters' remarkable story, from daughters of a respected Sydney surgeon with a love of theatre and the arts, to their first feature film, Those Who Love (1926), an instant hit, to their controversial final film, Two Minutes Silence (1933). Today, their most famous feature, The Cheaters, is frequently screened at international film festivals around the world.