Brennan Book Program

Safe Haven by Shankari Chandran

In 2018, on his way to a family holiday in Cairo, Australian-Egyptian citizen Hazem Hamouda disappears without warning, going missing somewhere between landing and customs. His eldest daughter, Lamisse, has recently moved to Egypt from Australia to study at University of Cairo. With little Arabic and even less legal knowledge, she finds out her father has been arbitrarily arrested. Going up against the notorious Egyptian prison system, Lamisse discovers that the Australian embassy provides shockingly little support to dual citizens arrested abroad.

Shouldering the responsibility of her father’s welfare, Lamisse learns to navigate both deeply flawed systems, and freeing Hazem involves a reckoning with the two countries she’s called home – coming to terms with the prejudice and racism of the country she grew up in and the corruption in the country she was hoping to reconnect with. The Shape of Dust is a haunting appraisal of the way Australia treats its citizens, both at home and abroad.

Prima Facie by Suzie Miller

Tessa is a thoroughbred. A young, brilliant barrister from a working-class background now at the top of her game: defending, cross-examining and lighting up the shadows of doubt in any case. The law is a game and she is its most talented player.

One sickening night, though, Tessa finds herself in a position countless women - one in three - have been in before her. And she's faced with a gut-wrenching, life-changing decision. Will she take the stand to testify about her rape, with the full awareness that the system has not been built to protect her?

Drawn from the internationally acclaimed play, Prima Facie is a propulsive, raw look at the price victims pay for speaking out and the system that sets them up to fail. With breakneck prose and a devastating emotional intensity, this is a novel for our times, by one of Australia's most impressive writers.
 

Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law by Alecia Simmonds

Until well into the twentieth century, heartbroken men and women in Australia had a legal redress for their suffering: jilted lovers could claim compensation for 'breach of promise to marry'. Hundreds of people, mostly from the working classes, came before the courts, and their stories give us a tantalising insight into the romantic landscape of the past – where couples met, how they courted, and what happened when flirtations turned sour. In packed courtrooms and breathless newspaper reports, love letters were read as contracts and private gifts and gossip scrutinised as evidence.

In Courting, Associate Professor Alecia Simmonds, UTS Faculty of Law, brings these stories vividly to life, revealing the entangled histories of love and the law. Over the long arc of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, pre-industrial romantic customs gave way to middle-class respectability, women used the courts to assert their rights, and the law eventually retreated from people's romantic lives – with women, Simmonds argues, losing out in the process. 

Dirrayawadha: Rise Up by Anita Heiss

Miinaa was a young girl when the white ghosts first arrived. She remembers the day they raised a piece of cloth and renamed her homeland ‘Bathurst’. Now she lives at Cloverdale and works for a white family who have settled there.

The Nugents are kind, but Miinaa misses her miyagan. Her brother, Windradyne, is a Wiradyuri leader, and visits when he can, bringing news of unrest across their ngurambang. Miinaa hopes the violence will not come to Cloverdale.

When Irish convict Daniel O’Dwyer arrives at the settlement, Miinaa’s life is transformed again. The pair are magnetically drawn to each other and begin meeting at the bila in secret. Dan understands how it feels to be displaced, but they still have a lot to learn about each other. Can their love survive their differences and the turmoil that threatens to destroy everything around them?

Mean Streak by Rick Morton

From award-winning journalist and writer Rick Morton comes Mean Streak, the gripping, utterly compelling and horrifying story of how, over the course of four and a half years, Australia's government turned on its most vulnerable citizens. Powerfully moving, deeply compelling and utterly enraging, Mean Streak reveals disturbing things about the country we have become and the government that was. In the mode of a corporate thriller, this is a scouring cautionary tale of morality in public life gone badly awry - a story that is bigger than robodebt, and far from over.

Love Across Class by Rose Butler and Eve Vincent 

What does it mean to partner across class difference? This lucid and original book is the first to explore cross-class relationships in contemporary Australia, a society long-invested in the myth of egalitarianism. Drawing on in-depth interviews with people from a range of class and cultural backgrounds, Love Across Class brings to life the role of class in shaping people's childhoods, as well as the adult lives couples have built together. These stories move between the mundane, the profound and the taboo, as interviewees reckon openly with the pain, pleasure, humour and contradiction that comes with forming a close relationship across class. From escaping one's class background and confronting class dissimilarity, to managing money and negotiating holidays, this book offers rich accounts of personal worlds shared across class as they are lived Yet not only do those interviewed reflect on the classed dynamics and tensions present in their relationships and family.

Naku Dharuk The Bark Petitions by Clare Wright

In 1963—a year of agitation for civil rights worldwide—the Yolŋu of northeast Arnhem Land created the Yirrkala Bark Petitions: Naku Dharuk. ‘The land grew a tongue’ and the land-rights movement was born.

Naku Dharuk is the story of a founding document in Australian democracy and the trailblazers who made it. It is also a pulsating picture of the ancient and enduring culture of Australia’s first peoples. 

Joe Cinque's Consolation by Helen Garner

A true story of death, grief and the law from the 2019 winner of the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. In October 1997 a clever young law student at ANU made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests-most of them university students-had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder. Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. Compassionate but unflinching, this is a book about how and why Joe Cinque died. It probes the gap between ethics and the law; examines the helplessness of the courts in the face of what we think of as 'evil'; and explores conscience, culpability, and the battered ideal of duty of care. It is a masterwork from one of Australia's greatest writers.

Feel free to write a reflection on our past books including: 

Evicted: Poverty And Profit In The American City' by Matthew Desmond, ‘The End of Policing’ by Alex S. Vitale, ‘Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison, See what you made me do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse’ by Jess Hill, ‘Eggshell Skull’ by Bri Lee, ‘What the Colonists Never Knew: A History of Aboriginal Sydney’ by Dennis Foley and Peter Read, ‘Truganini’ by Cassandra Pybus, ‘Treaty’ by George Williams and Harry Hobbs, ‘The Truth Hurts’ by Andrew Boe, ‘Forgotten War’ by Henry Reynolds, ‘Upturn: A better normal after COVID-19’ by Tanya Plibersek, ‘Woman and Leadership: Real Lives, Real Lessons’ by Julia Gillard and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, A Stranger Truth: Lessons in Love, Leadership and Courage from India's Sex Workers by Ashok Alexander, ‘The Tyranny of Merit: What's become of the Common Good?’ by Michael Sandel, ‘Greed is Dead: Politics after Individualism’ by Paul Collier and John Kay, ‘Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present’ by Yanis Varoufakis, The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket by Benjamin Lorr, ‘The Yield’ by Tara June Winch, ‘The Nickel Boys’ by Colsen Whitehead, ‘My Dark Vanessa’ by Kate Elizabeth Russell, ‘How Much of These Hills Is Gold’ by C Pam Zhang,  ‘Saltwater’ by Cathy McLennan, ‘Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland’ by Patrick Radden Keefe, ‘There Are No Children Here’ by Alex Kotlowitz., ‘Too much lip’ by Melissa Lugashenko, ‘Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice’ by Bill Browder, ‘The Testaments’ by Margaret Atwood,  ‘Australia Day’ by Melanie Cheng, ‘The Color Purple’ by Alice Walker, ‘East West Street” by Philippe Sands, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood, 'The Tall Man' by Chloe Hooper, 'This Changes Everything' by Naomi Klein, 'Talking To My Country', by Stan Grant, ‘Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?’ by Bruce Pascoe, The Children Act’ by Ian McEwan, ‘We are All Completely Beside Ourselves’ by Karen Joy Fowler, ‘This House of Grief’ by Helen Garner (here’s a few thought starters), ‘Exit West’ by Mohsin Hamid or ‘Never Let Me Go’ by Kazuo Ishiguro (here’s a few points for discussion), Black and Blue: A Memoir of Racism and Resistance  (Scribe 2021) - Veronica Gorrie, The Mother Wound by Amani Haydar (2021 UTS Law Alumni Award winner), Reasonable Doubt by Xanthé Mallett, Reasonable Doubt by Xanthé Mallett, Dead in the Water: A Very Angry Book about our greatest environmental catastrophe…the death of the Murray Darling Basin by Richard Beasley, Coming of Age in the War on Terror by Randa Abdel-Fattah, Why Weren't We Told? By Henry Reynolds, The Kabul Peace House by Mark Isaacs, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division - Elif shafak, Transgender History (Second Edition) : The Roots of Today's Revolution, Queer: A Graphic History by Meg John Barker, Breeder by Honni van Rijswijk, After Story by Larissa Behrendt (available on audible), The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris (available on audible), Land of Big Numbers by Te-Ping Chen (available on audible), Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (available on audible), Steam Pigs by Melissa Lucashenko, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division by Elif Shafak (available on audible), Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (available on audible), Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (available on audible), Apeirogon by Colum McCann (available on audible), China Room by Sunjeev Sahota (available on audible), A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam (available on audible), The Promise by Damon Galgut (available on audible), The Fortune Men by Nadia Mohamed (available on audible).

2023

Still Alive, Safdar Ahmed (2021), The White Girl, T. Birch (2020) (available on audible), The Prophets, R. Jones Jr. (2022) (available on audible), The Keepers, A. Campbell (2022), Son of Sin, O. Sakr (2022) (available on audible), Red, F. McLean (2022) (available on audible), Pemulwuy, E. Willmot (2021), One Hundred Days, A. Pung (2021) (available on audible), Love & Virtue, D. Reid (2022) (available on audible), Jesustown, P. Daley (2022), In The Dream House: A Memoir, C. M. Machado (2020) (available on audible), Horse, G. Brooks (2022) (available on audible), Enclave, C. G. Coleman (2022), Cut, S. White (2022), Common People, T. Birch (2022), Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray, A. Heiss (2022) (available on audible), All That’s Left Unsaid, T. Lien (2022) (available on audible), The Woman President: Leadership, law and legacy for Women Based on Experiences from South and Southeast Asia, R. Vijeyarasa (2022), The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, R. Skloot (2017) (available on audible), The Hard Road Out: One Woman’s Escape from North Korea, J. Park, S. Chai and S. Baldwin-Beneich (2022) (available on audible), Sister Girl: Reflections on Tiddaism, Identity and Reconciliation, J. Huggins (2022), Net Privacy: How We Can Be Free in an Age of Surveillance, S. Molitorisz (2020), Know My Name: The Survivor of the Stanford Sexual Assault Case Tells Her Story, C. Miller (2020) (available on audible), Justice and Love: A Philosophical Dialogue, M. Zournazi & R. Williams (2020), His Name is George Floyd: One man’s life and the struggle for racial justice, R. Samuels and T. Olorunnipa (2022) (available on audible), Don’t Look Away: A memoir of identity and acceptance, D. Laidley (2022) (available on audible), Dropbear, E. Aruluen (2021), Butterfly, Y. Mardini (2022) (available on audible), Australia Day, S. Grant (2021) (available on audible), Another Day in the Colony, C. Watego (2021) (available on audible).

2024

The Shape of Dust by Lamisse Hamouda, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran, Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta, Tell Me Again by Amy Thunig, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, by Austin Channing Brown, Songs for the Dead and the Living by Sara M Saleh, Anam by André Dao, God Forgets About the Poor by Peter Polites, Storytellers: questions, answers and the craft of journalism by Leigh Sales, Borderland by Graham Akhurst.