Simon Cleary

'I want to go with the river's flow, not against it. I want to follow where the river leads - to listen, to observe, hopefully to learn.'When novelist and experienced hiker Simon Cleary sets off to follow the course of the river that has so influenced his life, he hopes that by walking its banks - from its source to where it empties into the bay - he will better understand the power and impact of this immense waterway on the environment and communities who rely on it. Cleary's ambitious journey, alone and with companions, explores the ways rivers connect landscapes, ecologies, histories, communities and myth. But his journey along the unpredictable and magnificent Brisbane River threatens to be cut short by one of the wettest autumn months on record. Over four eventful weeks and 344 kilometres we are witness to the river in all its beauty and fury. Everything is Water considers our complex relationship with nature through flood, drought, time and place. It is an inspiring pilgrimage that invites us to connect with nature and also to navigate our own path.

When Brigadier James Phelan returns from Afghanistan with the body of a young soldier killed under his command, he is traumatised by the tragedy. An encounter with young Sydney tattoo artist Kira leaves him with a permanent tribute to the soldier, but it is a meeting that will change the course of his life. What he isn't expecting is a campaign of retribution from the soldiers who blame him for the ambush and threaten his career. With his marriage also on the brink, his life spirals out of control. Years later, Phelan is surprised when Kira re-enters his life seeking refuge from her own troubles and with a young son in tow. She finds a way to help him make peace with his past, but she is still on the run from her own. The War Artist is a timely and compelling novel about the legacy of war, the power of art and the possibility of redemption.

In a post-truth age where anything is believable and the best way to survive is to contradict everything and believe in nothing, the everyday person can fail to find their place in it all, as every living moment is documented, polished up and presented for consumption by the all-seeing gaze of our so-called "friends" where it is judged and rated, then left to fall away down the wall, existing only on a server in Colorado, and a few failing neurons sparking in the darkness. Throw a light on that darkness! Look at everything in your lives! Examine the everyday! In this collection, Simon Cleary, a pretentious writer who failed at being "deep" turns his hand to documenting the strangeness of being a human in this society, trying to get jobs, attend social events and get along with fellow man...sometimes with, to use the parlance of today, "sub-optimal results..."

Chedworth is one of the few Roman villas in Britain whose remains are open to the public, and this book seeks to explain what these remains mean. The fourth century in Britain was a ‘golden age’ and at the time the Cotswolds were the richest area of Roman Britain. The wealthy owners of a villa such as Chedworth felt themselves part of an imperial Roman aristocracy. This is expressed at the villa in the layout of the buildings, rooms for receiving guests and for grand dining, the provision of baths, and the use of mosaics. The villa would also have housed the wife, family and household of the owner and been the centre of an agricultural estate. In the nineteenth century Chedworth was rediscovered, and part of the villa’s tale is the way in which it was viewed by a nineteenth-century Cotswold landowner, Lord Eldon, and then its current owners, the National Trust. Now, in this remarkable and beautifully illustrated volume, Chedworth’s story is told in full.

Nestling in a wooded combe in the heart of the Cotswolds and surrounded by beautiful woodland walks, Chedworth Roman Villa is one of the most important sites where visitors can come into direct contact with Roman Britain. Its uncovering in 1864 yielded one of the most complete plans of a Romano-Britain villa, and the museum constructed immediately after is one of the earliest (if not the earliest) purpose-built, on-site museums in the country. The Villa and its finds demonstrate the prosperity of the Golden Age of Roman Britain in the fourth century AD. During this time Britain's ruling class had come to absorb much Roman culture, such as the gods and goddesses and myths of the Mediterranean. But this is not the full story. Parts of the villa complex have as yet not been excavated: the agriculture buildings, the houses of the labourers who cultivated the fields and tended the herds. It was these resources and workers that paid for the lords and ladies to live in such high style. This guide tells the story of how the fortunate wealthy few at the very top of Romano-British society lived and worked. It includes details about when the Villa was first built, who the people who lived at the Villa and on its lands were, what the landscape of this part of the Roman Cotswolds looked like, and how this great Villa came to be abandoned and fall into ruin. Including painstaking reconstructions and drawings of the villa and its facilities through the ages, this guide benefits from modern conservation and archaeology to reveal the secrets of a unique treasure of Roman Britain.