AustLit

''Some days all I want to do is give up the constant, exhausting struggle and stop trying to be normal. But I can't. It's not in me to walk away from a fight. I'll keep fighting and telling my story. Before I forget.'

'When she was just 46, Christine Bryden – science advisor to the prime minister and single mother of three daughters – was diagnosed with younger-onset dementia. Doctors told her to get her affairs in order as she would soon be incapable of doing so. Twenty years later she is still thriving, still working hard to rewire her brain even as it loses its function.

'The unusually slow progress of her condition puts Christine in a unique position to describe the lived experience of dementia, a condition affecting tens of millions of people worldwide. In this revealing memoir, she looks back on her life in an effort to understand how her brain – once her greatest asset, now her greatest challenge – works now. She shares what it's like to start grasping for words that used to come easily. To be exhausted from visiting a new place. To suddenly realise you don't remember how to drive. To challenge, every day, the stereotype of the 'empty shell'. Brave and inspiring, this is Christine's legacy for people with dementia and those who care about them.' (Publication summary)

'Gina Davies, aka The Doll, is a 26-year-old pole dancer at the Chairman's Lounge in Sydney's Kings Cross. She's a flawed woman, racist, obsessed with money, who finds her life suddenly being destroyed by the things she has up until that moment most firmly believed in. The evening of the Mardi Gras, 2007. Three unexploded bombs have been found that day at Homebush Stadium, so the country is on high-alert. When wandering through the Mardi Gras' crowds the Doll runs into a good-looking, young dark man. They end up at his place. When she wakes, it's Sunday morning and he has gone. She is getting a coffee in a café opposite the apartment block she spent the night in when she sees armed police surround the building she has just left. Later in the day while shopping in the city she sees a story on a big video screen in which the news is of a suspected terrorist entering the same building she had spent the night in. That night, on television news, the story has altered a little. In an exclusive, the network has security camera footage of the terrorist entering the building the night before with an accomplice, a woman she recognises as herself. And so a case is brought against her by the media, and the hunt for her begins. From a 26-year-old pole dancer in the Chairman's Lounge, she quickly becomes the most wanted woman in Australia as every truth of her life is turned into a lie...' (Publisher's blurb)