The Lieutenant and The Secret River (Slipcase edition)
Kate Grenville

The Lieutenant is described by Kate Grenville as the other side of The Secret River story. Inspired by the 1790 notebooks of William Dawes, in which he recorded his conversations with a young Gadigal woman, this is a story about a man discovering his true self in extraordinary circumstances. Presented in a beautifully designed,
signed slipcase. The Lieutenant alone retails for $45, so this is fantastic value. It's even better value at Abbey's special price of $59.95 (usually $70)!

Kick
Rufus Butler Seder
"Kick!" does for kids what "Gallop!" does for animals - one child rides a bike, another kicks a football, a swimmer cuts through the water, and a skater pirouettes on ice. The effect is joyous, magical, mesmerizing, and perhaps even more compelling than "Gallop!" Because of the endless fascination that children find in watching other children. The second book created by Rufus Butler Seder, the inventor, artist, and filmmaker who developed Scanimation out of his obsession with antique optical toys and other pre-motion-picture illusions, "Kick!" uses 'persistence of vision' and a patented state-of-the-art multiphase animation process to create astonishment. There is nothing else like this unique, patented technology that literally inspires wonder.The images burst with activity, and adding greatly is a happy, rhyming text that captures in words, the pure energy of the figures in motion. You can't put it down.

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
William Bernstein

For anyone who loved Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel comes this vividly written, brilliantly original history of trade, the first for a generation. Few historical enquiries tell us as much about the world we live in today as the search for the origins of world trade. A Splendid Exchange sets out to establish just what drove early man to trade and to examine its profound influence on the world we know today. William Bernstein goes on to suggest that an analysis of one of the globe's most ancient forms of communication might teach us about how to avoid seemingly new anxieties about globalisation and the flattening of the world.

Past Imperfect
Julian Fellowes

From the author of the popular novel Snobs. Damian Baxter is hugely wealthy and dying. He lives alone in a big house in Surrey, looked after by a chauffeur, butler, cook and housemaid. He has but one concern - his fortune in excess of 100 million and who should inherit it on his death. Past Imperfect is the story of a quest. Damian Barker wishes to know if he has a living heir. By the time he married in his late thirties he was sterile (the result of adult mumps), but what about before that unfortunate illness?

Hitler
Ian Kershaw

When the two volumes of Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis were published, they were immediately greeted around the world as the essential works on perhaps the most malign figure ever to hold power in modern Europe. In the face of considerable demand for such an edition, Kershaw has now created a single volume version. The result is a frightening, fascinating narrative of how a bitter provincial failure from an obscure corner of Austria rose to unparalleled power.

Handel: The Man and His Music
Jonathan Keats

Though unquestionably one of the greatest and best-loved of all composers, George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) had received little attention from biographers before Jonathan Keates' masterful Handel: The Man and His Music appeared in 1985. This fully updated and expanded edition - published to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the composer's death - charts in detail Handel's life, from his youth in Germany, through his brilliantly successful Italian sojourn, to the opulence and squalor of Georgian London.