Welcome to The Summer Library: selected extracts from the best new books this summer

Ah Gong and Ah Mah move into a culturally diverse aged-care facility

On pregnancy and birth, tradition and family

Even tattoos don’t last forever any more

The trouble with repealing section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act

A day in a drug treatment centre

What it takes to shift class in Australia

Australia Day in Pyalong

Mr Abe Lourie is 81, and tells me that he is in perfect health. Every morning he walks up two flights of stairs to open his store. The lift has been broken for quite some time and yet customers continue to come up, because for half a century he has helped …

John Safran’s ‘Race Relations’

Zachary Mexico’s ‘China Underground’

‘Ladies' is such a salacious word when slurred by young men, but when enunciated by a carefully coiffured middle-aged lady to a mass of Year 10 girls it is a severe admonition not to move. I wondered how long it would take to set the limbs of adolescent …

“Sheep’s placenta for the face is all the rage among Chinese women,” my father said. All his mainland-Chinese friends told him that this was the perfect gift for me to give when I went to Beijing: lanolin oil containing adventurous admixtures of …

She was found beneath the floorboards of an old house in Geelong, and appeared to have been through a fire. Her body had disintegrated, but her head was still intact. She was from England, and probably came into existence sometime between 1908 and 1925 …

Bianca promised to drive me to the 24-hour Kmart in East Burwood, Melbourne, because I wanted to see what people need to buy at three in the morning. Bianca goes for long drives alone, late at night, when she cannot get to sleep. On these drives, she …