Welcome to the library

Description

In January 1941, the dapper, slightly built Major Hashida arrived at Circular Quay carrying only a small suitcase. It was eleven months before Pearl Harbor and a year before the attack on Sydney Harbour.

Japan was claiming to be neutral in the war. Believing there were no grounds to prevent Hashida from landing, the Army consulted its intelligence section, which proposed that he be 'closely shepherded' with a strict watch on his movements.

He was met by Japanese businessmen and consular officials and made his way around the country, stopping at each major city and gathering pieces of intelligence on everything from Australia's fortifications to its car industry. But what was the true purpose of his mission?

In Major Hashida's Notebook, acclaimed author Craig Collie has used Hashida's own diaries, along with military and police archives, to tell the long-buried story of one of the most intriguing espionage operations ever conducted on our shores.

Description

Who decides the rules of the games we play? In August 2007, or thereabouts, a young philosopher leaves Oslo, heading for Greece, on a mission to find Theódoros Apostolakis, the head of the Society of Lost Things. Fortunately, Apostolakis isn't lost but everything else is: ancient libraries, entire civilisations, priceless books and a beautiful box, once used to play the world-famous game of Seven. The hunt for this small thing, among the countless lost things, becomes an absurdist quest through time and space: from the earliest human societies to the advent of AI. Told, shared and mythologised by our narrator, along with a wild cast of dreamers, philosophers, poets, rebels and optimists, 'Seven' is an extraordinary, uplifting journey through an ever darkening world.