If you are yet to find the perfect gift for Mother’s Day, don’t panic! Or maybe you are planning on treating yourself!

We’ve compiled a top ten list of books that mums will love!

The Lucky One – Caroline Overington

Keep your secrets. Tell your lies. The gripping new psychological thriller from the author of the bestselling The One Who Got Away.

An old castle …

For more than 150 years, a grand house known as Alden Castle has stood proudly in the rolling hills of California’s wine country, home to a family weighed down by secrets and debt.

A fresh body …

When the castle is sold, billionaire developers move in, only to discover one skeleton after another – including a fresh corpse – rotting in the old family cemetery.

An unsolved mystery …

As three generations of the well-respected Alden-Stowe family come under scrutiny, police unearth a twisted web of rivalries, alliances, deceit, and treachery.

A gold-digger wife, a demented patriarch, a daughter in the grip of first love … Who has lied? Who will survive? And who, amidst all the horror and betrayal, is the lucky one?

See What I Have Done – Sarah Schmidt

A deeply atmospheric novel by a startling new Aussie talent; an incredibly unique look inside the mind of Lizzie Borden, famously accused of murdering her father and stepmother in 1892.

‘He was still bleeding. I yelled, “Someone’s killed Father.” I breathed in kerosene air, licked the thickness from my teeth. The clock on the mantel ticked ticked. I looked at Father, the way hands clutched to thighs, the way the little gold ring on his pinky finger sat like a sun. I gave him that ring for his birthday when I no longer wanted it. “Daddy,” I had said. “I’m giving this to you because I love you.” He had smiled and kissed my forehead.

A long time ago now.’

On 4 August 1892 Andrew and Abby Borden were murdered in their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. During the inquest into the deaths, Lizzie Borden was arrested and charged with the murder of her father and her stepmother.

Through the eyes of Lizzie’s sister Emma, the housemaid Bridget, the enigmatic stranger Benjamin and the beguiling Lizzie herself, we return to what happened that day in Fall River.

Lizzie Borden took an axe. Or did she?

$10 Meals with Chelsea – Chelsea Goodwin

Big on flavour, low on cost!

Discover the delicious recipes and brilliant meal planning from the creator of $10 Meals Australia that will save you money and time every week.

Revolutionise Your Kitchen. Home cook Chelsea Goodwin, creator of budget cookery platform $10 Meals Australia, wants to make your life a whole lot easier – and cheaper.

She’s taken the stress out of getting good food on the table by curating ten weeks’ worth of dinner meal plans with their recipes and grocery lists, making budget-friendly cooking a breeze.

Delicious Dinners on a Dime. Each recipe is easy to make and feeds at least four people, and the meal plans work out at $2.50 per serve or less. That’s a whole week of generous dinners for just $70!

Flavourful, Affordable Family Meals. Family-friendly, nutritious and flavour-packed, Chelsea’s recipes use easy-to-find supermarket ingredients and come with bonus tips and swaps for keeping your food costs low.

With eye-catching, full-colour photographs for every recipe, $10 Meals with Chelsea features-

Fakeaway favourites including Buttermilk Chicken Burgers, Black Pepper Beef and Cheat’s Pad Thai
30-minute meals like Vietnamese Meatballs, Green Carbonara and Thai Basil Chicken Stir-Fry
One-pot winners such as Zingy Chicken Tray Bake and Lamb Harira
Healthy choices from Rainbow Minestrone and Beef Burrito Bowls to Spinach and Potato Curry.

Kiss goodbye to the daily dinner dilemma and say hello to cost-saving convenience with $10 Meals with Chelsea.

Read our full review here

The Missing Pieces of Us

Sometimes you have to resolve the past before you can face the future.

Lauren Ramsey is a teacher whose mantra is to never let a child fall through the cracks. But Lauren is so concerned about the welfare of a little boy in her kindy class she doesn’t realise her own daughter, Skye, needs help.

At fourteen, Skye Ramsey is dealing with the usual pressures faced by teenage girls, from the pitfalls of social media to coping with fickle friends and the attention of boys. The only person who seems to listen to Skye is Tamara Thompson, the manager of her favourite clothes shop.

Tamara knows what it’s like to be a troubled teen because as an adolescent she felt unloved and overlooked. She now has a successful career and a partner who adores her, but her sense of worthlessness and fear of rejection are threatening to overwhelm her.

All three women are searching for a happier future, but finding it may lie in resolving secrets from their pasts . . .

From the bestselling author of Red Dust and Crimson Dawn comes a moving and intriguing novel about love, friendship and how the truth can sometimes set us free.

First We Make the Beast Beautiful

Sarah Wilson – bestselling author and entrepreneur, intrepid solver of problems and investigator of how to live a better life – has helped over 1.2 million people across the world to quit sugar. She has also been an anxiety sufferer her whole life.

In her new book, she directs her intense focus and fierce investigatory skills onto this lifetime companion of hers, looking at the triggers and treatments, the fashions and fads. She reads widely and interviews fellow sufferers, mental health experts, philosophers, and even the Dalai Lama, processing all she learns through the prism her own experiences.

Sarah pulls at the thread of accepted definitions of anxiety, and unravels the notion that it is a difficult, dangerous disease that must be medicated into submission. Ultimately, she re-frames anxiety as a spiritual quest rather than a burdensome affliction, a state of yearning that will lead us closer to what really matters.

Practical and poetic, wise and funny, this is a small book with a big heart. It will encourage the myriad sufferers of the world’s most common mental illness to feel not just better about their condition, but delighted by the possibilities it offers for a richer, fuller life.

Only – Caroline Baum

Three barely felt like a family. It felt like it did not count. Like we were unfinished. Incomplete. There was always a gap at the table, room to set places for others. Visitors were few and far between. Mostly, there was only me.

…Only is a painfully honest and entertaining story of an unconventional childhood. It reveals what it feels like to be an only child and the focal point of two people damaged by trauma and tragedy, and the courage it takes to break free from the past and the pull of its secrets…

Caroline Baum’s poignant and gripping memoir is for anyone who has felt the pressure of being at the fulcrum of a seesaw, the focus of all eyes and expectations – torn between love and fear, obedience and rebellion, duty and the longing to escape. In exploring what being a Good Daughter means and why it can be so difficult, Only uncovers truths that offer readers deep emotional insight…

Mrs Kelly: The Astonishing Life of Ned Kelly’s Mother – Grantlee Kieza

While we know much about the iconic outlaw Ned Kelly, his mother Ellen Kelly has been largely overlooked by Australian writers and historians – until now, with this vivid and compelling portrait by Grantlee Kieza, one of Australia’s most popular biographers.

When Ned Kelly’s mother, Ellen, arrived in Melbourne in 1841 aged nine, British convict ships were still dumping their unhappy cargo in what was then known as the colony of New South Wales. By the time she died aged ninety-one in 1923, having outlived seven of her twelve children, motor cars plied the highway near her bush home north of Melbourne, and Australia was a modern, sovereign nation.

Like so many pioneering women, Ellen, the wife of a convict, led a life of great hardship. Born in Ireland during a time of entrenched poverty and sectarian violence, she was a mother of seven when her husband died after months in a police lock-up. She lived through famine and drought, watched her babies die, listened through the prison wall while her eldest son was hanged and saw the charred remains of another of her children who’d died in a shoot-out with police. One son became Australia’s most infamous (and ultimately most celebrated) outlaw; another became a highly decorated policeman, an honorary member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a worldwide star on the rodeo circuit. Through it all, ‘the notorious Mrs Kelly’, as she was dubbed by Victoria’s Assistant Police Commissioner, survived as best she could, like so many pioneering women of the time.

By bestselling biographer Grantlee Kieza, Mrs Kelly is the astonishing story of one of Australia’s most notorious women and her wild family, but it’s also the story of the making of Australia, from struggling colony and backwater to modern nation.

My Favourite Mistake – Marian Keyes

How do you start again, after losing everything? Find out in the global no. 1 bestseller’s latest heartstopper…

Anna Walsh had a dream life – according to everybody else.
She lived in New York, had a long-term boyfriend, and had The Best Job In The World working as a highly successful beauty PR.
So why did she decide to take a flamethrower to the lot?
Because now she’s back Dublin, living with her parents. She’s undeniably forty-eight, with no partner, no job, and no direction.
Anna’s lost her purpose. She needs a new challenge to help her fall back in love with life again.
When an opportunity arises to solve a PR crisis in the tiny town of Maumtully, Anna leaps at the chance.
But will the appearance of an old love interest derail her plans?

Your Time Starts Now – Julie Goodwin

The extraordinary life story of Australia’s beloved Julie Goodwin, first winner of MasterChef and bestselling cookbook author

Julie Goodwin was catapulted into our hearts as the first-ever winner of MasterChef Australia. In many ways her win was unlikely. As a child Julie adored music and art, but her career began in youth work, including in a juvenile detention centre housing troubled boys and a toxic all-male staff. After her three sons were born, she and her husband started an IT business.

Then came MasterChef – a record-breaking juggernaut of a show. The attention and opportunities that flowed from Julie’s win were thrilling and overwhelming. She became a columnist for Australian Women’s Weekly, a presenter on Today, published numerous cookbooks and made appearances on many shows including facing off with snakes and alligators on I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! For years she co-hosted an award-winning breakfast radio show, and she opened a thriving cooking school.

It was by all appearances, a successful, rewarding life. But under the surface relentless pressure from Julie’s outer and inner worlds was taking its toll. Struggling with depression, anxiety and addiction, with bushfires blazing and lockdowns looming, Julie found herself hospitalised in a mental health unit.

Her recovery, bumpy and circuitous, is an ongoing process that Julie tackles with tenacity. In this gloriously candid, deeply moving memoir, filled with beautiful food, astonishing people, humour and heart, Julie writes with brutal honesty about her struggles. We are brought into her story, into her unravelling and quest for healing as she seeks to resume a richly lived life.

Mothering Heights: A year of joy and survival in the trenches of early parenthood – Rachael Morgan Macintosh

Following the year Rachael Mogan McIntosh gave birth to her third child and shapeshifted from wild to mild, Mothering Heights is a hilarious, moving celebration of early parenthood – written by a survivor.

As Rachael navigates her way through the confusing rules of modern-day motherhood and grapples with the crazy-making Sisyphean beast that is housework, her three children under five grow like weeds, eat like footballers and deliver non-stop comedic shenanigans.

Rachael adapts to the realisation that her old identity no longer quite fits, and neither do her trousers. The year is beyond tough but the hard-won wisdom of motherhood cracks her heart wide open. A comedy, tragedy and farcical romp all rolled into one, Mothering Heights is a love story about becoming a mother.

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