Reading Lists

The Little Veggie Patch Co: an A-Z guide to growing food in small places by Mat Pember and Fabian Capomolla

Available in print

Fundamentals such as Soil, Climate, Watering, Composting, Worm Farms, Saving and Sowing Seeds, and Raised Garden Beds and Crates are all covered comprehensively - each with fully illustrated step-by-step plans that show how to create your own little veggie patch in any space.

A complete A-Z of Edible Plants gives you vital information on more than 40 vegetables (and fruit trees), including detailed planting information, ongoing maintenance advice, tips on best companions and when to harvest. And the Weekend Activities scattered throughout the book will get the kids involved too, whether they're Making a Scarecrow, Building a Spud Tower or Growing Beans in a Bean Can.

Lots of fun, and packed full of all the knowledge you'll need - plus recipes and some hilarious stories - this colourful guide is for anyone interested in growing their own food.

The art of growing food by Juliet Jacobs

Available in print

The Art of Growing Food is a comprehensive guide for anyone interested in growing their own food at home. This book offers a unique approach to food gardening by incorporating edible trees, vines, shrubs, herbs, and flowers into your yard, creating a beautiful and bountiful landscape.

The book starts by discussing the benefits of growing your own food. The authors explain how gardening can be a relaxing and rewarding hobby that also provides many health and environmental benefits. They also delve into the environmental benefits of growing your own food, including reduced carbon emissions and less waste.

Next, the book provides a step-by-step plan for creating a garden that incorporates edible trees, vines, shrubs, herbs, and flowers. The authors offer practical advice on everything from choosing the right plants and preparing the soil to watering, fertilizing, and pest control. They also provide tips on how to design a garden that works for your space and your needs.

The book then moves on to specific plants that are easy to grow and provide a bountiful harvest. The authors provide detailed information on each plant, including planting instructions, growing tips, and harvesting advice. They also discuss the nutritional and culinary benefits of each plant, making it easy to choose the good plants for your diet and health.

Finally, the book provides guidance on how to use your homegrown produce. The authors offer delicious recipes for using fresh fruits, vegetables, herbs, and flowers in salads, soups, stews, and more. They also provide tips on how to preserve your produce for later use, ensuring that your harvest lasts all year round.

Backyard big: growing food in your backyard by Jeffrey S. McLain

Available in print

Gardening is one of the most fulfilling endeavors anyone can undertake. You go out in nature, help new life emerge through the earth, and watch your hard work blossom from mere seedlings into fully-fledged plants. You get to enjoy both the journey and the end. But not as many people practice gardening with concerns such as:

I don't have enough space.

I would love to, but I just don't have the time.

It seems like a lot of work.

How and where do I even start?

If these are some of the factors holding you back, this book about gardening aims to show you that growing food in your backyard is more sustainable and efficient than you think. Author Jeffrey S. McLain covers all the bases of growing organic vegetables and fruits and creating a thriving garden that gives you bounty harvests seasons on end!

Vegetable gardening made easy by Resh Gala

Available in print

Supercharge your food garden while reducing your workload with over 80 detailed solutions, techniques, and methods that resolve some of gardening's most common challenges.

Vegetable Gardening Made Easy is filled with valuable advice every food gardener can use. No matter the size of your garden or your experience level, backyard veggie gardeners like you can use the practical information found inside to grow a more productive (and beautiful!) edible garden. Discover an abundance of useful tid-bits on everything from designing the garden and starting from seed to maximizing production, managing pests naturally, and preserving the harvest. 

Each page explains and illustrates an essential piece of core advice, offering plenty of eco-friendly information to lead you to success without making you feel like you need a science degree to make it happen.  Among the abundance of growing tips and solutions, you'll find advice on: Adding healthy biodiversity to your soil and boosting it with micronutrients, growing straighter carrots, spicier peppers, and plumper radishes, pruning tomatoes to enhance yields, hand-pollinating cucumbers and squash for higher production, choosing which crops to grow based on your space and needs, creative ways to sow tiny seeds, simple how-tos for preparing your harvest, storing onions, garlic, and potatoes long-term, what to do when your plants turn yellow, have holes, or look sickly.

Vegetable Gardening Made Easy is smart garden know-how presented by a professional kitchen gardener who has been there, done that and wants nothing more than to see you succeed. Make it easy and make it fun!

The backyard homestead guide to growing organic food byTanya Denckla Cobb

Available in print

This essential guide to growing a bountiful food garden includes detailed seed-starting, growing, and harvesting information for 62 vegetables, fruits, and herbs, a complete companion-planting guide, and organic pest-control handbook.

The Backyard Homestead Guide to Growing Organic Food is a one-stop reference for all the key information food gardeners need to grow a healthy, bountiful garden. Author Tanya Denckla Cobb presents key information based on extensive research and years of experience, including when to start seeds for each type of crop (and at what temperature), how far apart to space seedlings, how to tell when a crop is ready to harvest, and notes on preservation. The book features a comprehensive companion planting guide and an in-depth review of the most effective organic pest control practices, including recipes for how to make your own pest deterrent sprays.

  Find more books about vegetable gardening here.

Simplify vegetable gardening by Tony O'Neill

eBook

Growing vegetables by Alex Smith

eBook

If you have a taste for fresh, home-grown produce, then this is the book for you. A delightful manual on keeping a vegetable garden, it is packed with tips on how to get the most from your plot.

Clear step-by-step illustrations show how to design and plant a vegetable patch, irrigate, stake and support plants and compost waste. The calendar section provides a week-by-week guide to cultivation, with advice on maintaining healthy, pest-free, organic crops so you can benefit from an abundance of fresh produce all year round.

Whether you are an experienced or a novice gardener, the seasonal advice and planting guides in this book will prove invaluable.

Grow a pizza garden by John Benzee

eBook

Zero waste gardening by Ben Raskin

eBook

Find more books to help grow your own vegetables on Borrowbox here.

The loud librarian by Jenna Beatrice

When loud-voiced Penelope becomes student-librarian, she is determined to prove she is perfect for the job while staying true to herself.

The shape of home by Rashin Kheiriyeh

It's Rashin's first day of school in America! Everything is a different shape than what she's used to: from the foods on her breakfast plate to the letters in the books! And the kids' families are from all over!

The new teacher asks each child to imagine the shape of home on a map. Rashin knows right away what she'll say: Iran looks like a cat! What will the other kids say?

Open this book to join Rashin in discovering the true things that shape a place called home.

Rabbit, Duck, and Big Bear by Nadine Brun-Cosme

A picture book about three best friends who do everything together, until they each realize that sometimes having time alone can be nice too.

Rabbit, Duck, and Big Bear are best friends. They do everything together and go everywhere together except for one place. They never go down the long and winding path together. But this winter, when Rabbit, Duck, and Big Bear go skating on the frozen pond, Rabbit loses control and barrels straight down the path.

What she finds there is one of the most beautiful places she has ever seen, but to her surprise, Big Bear and Duck both admit they sometimes go there when they want to be alone. And while she sits in the quiet calm, Rabbit begins to understand why.

In this story rich with social emotional learning, young readers will see the importance of balancing time with friends and time spent on their own.

 Luminous by Julia Kuo

When it's dark out, we need light to see. But what if your body could make its own light?

From fungi to glow worms to deep-sea fish, Julia Kuo shines a light on the wondrous natural phenomenon that is bioluminescence.

Twenty questions by Mac Barnett

Not all questions have answers. Some have more than one answer. And others have endless answers, unfolding out to the edges of the world.

In this spare yet expansive narrative, Mac Barnett poses twenty questions both playful and profound. Some make us giggle. Others challenge our assumptions. The result is a quirky, wandering exploration of where the best questions lead to stories.

Find more books with audio here.

The very hungry caterpillar by Eric Carle

Follows the progress of a hungry little caterpillar as he eats his way through a varied and very large quantity of food until, full at last, he forms a cocoon around himself and goes to sleep and wakes up a butterfly.

There's a bear in the window by June Pitman-Hayes

There's a bear in the window of the house across the street. It's tall and round, with great big feet! I wonder what I would see if I were that bear, and that bear were me? From singer-songwriter June Pitman-Hayes comes a story told in both English and Māori that celebrates the great teddy bear hunt, that entertained thousands of children during lockdown in 2020.

Ninni Yabini by Cheryl Kickett-Tucker

In this delightful bi-lingual picture book, Mother and Father swan are busy rebuilding their nest after a storm when their baby, Ninni Yabini, wanders off. Luckily, the evening star, his namesake, comes out to guide him home.

Written in Noongar and English by Noongar author and academic Cheryl Kickett-Tucker, and illustrated with striking contemporary artwork by Noongar and Ait Koedhal multi-disciplinary artist and graphic designer Tyrown Waigana, this is a memorable celebration of family and belonging.

 Dear zoo by Rod Campbell

A letter to the zoo asking for a pet results in a succession being dispatched - all of the deliveries containing highly unsuitable pets! All, of course, except the last one . . .

Find more bilingual picture books here.

The longest memory by Fred D'Aguiar

Available in print and eBook

Written in taut, poetic language, THE LONGEST MEMORY is set on a Virginian plantation in the 19th century, and tells the tragic story of a rebellious, fiercely intelligent young slave who breaks all the rules: in learning to read and write, in falling in love with a white girl, the daughter of his owner, and, finally, in trying to escape and join her in the free North. For his attempt to flee, he is whipped to death in front of his family, and this brutal event is the pivot around which the story evolves.

The boy behind the curtain by Tim Winton

Available in print, MP3 and eAudiobook

In this remarkable work of nonfiction, Australia's greatest novelist takes us behind the scenes, sharing the extraordinarily powerful true stories that have influenced his view of the world and fuelled his fiction. Like those of his characters, Tim Winton's life has been shaped by havoc.

The Boy behind the Curtain shows the unexpected links between car crashes and religious faith, between surfing and writing, and how going to the wrong movie at the age of eight opened him up to a life of the imagination. Behind it, all, from risk-taking youth to surprise-averse middle age, has been the crazy punt of staking everything on becoming a writer.

By turns impassioned, funny, joyous, astonishing, Winton's most intimate book to date is an insight into the man who's held us enthralled for three decades.

1984 by George Orwell

Available in print, graphic novel and eBook

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."

The year is 1984. War and revolution have left the world unrecognisable. Great Britain, now known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party, led by Big Brother. Mass surveillance is everything and The Thought Police ensure no individual thinking is allowed.

Winston Smith works at The Ministry of Truth, carefully rewriting history. But Winston dreams of freedom, and of rebellion. It is here that he falls in love with Julia, and starts a secret, forbidden affair with her - but in this world nothing can be kept secret, and they are forced to face consequences more terrifying than either of them could have ever imagined.

A dystopian masterpiece, this is the powerful and prophetic novel that defined the twentieth century.

The catcher in the rye by J. D. Salinger

Available in print and eBook

Disgusted with the phoniness of adults and expelled from school, sixteen year old Holden Caulfield decides to spend three days alone in New York City instead of going home. He gives a sensitive and frank account of the mental turmoil and disillusionment he undergoes.

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

Available in print, CD, MP3, eBook and eAudiobook

Centred on the precariously settled coastal town of Desperance, a township shaped by cyclones, monsoonal floods and a river that spurns human endeavour with its incomprehensible tides, it tells the story of the powerful Phantom family. Led by Norm Phantom, the great fish-embalming king of time, legendary storyteller, suspected murderer and leader of the Pricklebush people, the Phantoms battle to retain sovereignty over a country where "legends and ghosts live side by side". Sovereignty depends on stories.

The official version of the region's history makes no mention of the Phantoms or the Great War of the Dump that burst the Pricklebush people apart and set Eastsider against Westsider. Nor does it mention the old tribal tensions that resurfaced and the search for lost ancestral stories that lay claim to traditional ownership.

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

Available in print, CD, eBook and eAudiobook

In 1900, a class of young women from an exclusive private school go on an excursion to the isolated Hanging Rock, deep in the Australian bush. The excursion ends in tragedy when three girls and a teacher mysteriously vanish after climbing the rock. Only one girl returns, with no memory of what has become of the others . . .

Afterlove by Tanya Byrne

Ash Persaud is about to become a grim reaper in the afterlife, but she is determined to see Poppy Morgan, the love of her life again - the only thing that separates them is death. AFTER-LIFE COMES LOVE.

Car headlights. The last thing Ash hears is the shriek of metal and the snap of breaking glass as the windscreen hits her and breaks into a million pieces like stars. But she made it, she's still here. Or is she?

This New Year's Eve Ash gets an RSVP from the afterlife she can't decline: to join a clan of fierce girl reapers who take the souls of the city's dead to a boat on the seafront to await their fate. But Ash can't forget her first love, Poppy Morgan, and she will do anything to see her again, even if it means they only get a few days together. Dead or alive.

Any way the wind blows by Rainbow Rowell

In Carry On, Simon Snow and his friends realized that everything they thought they understood about the world might be wrong. And in Wayward Son, they wondered whether everything they understood about themselves might be wrong.

In Any Way the Wind Blows, Simon and Baz and Penelope and Agatha have to decide how to move forward. For Simon, that means deciding whether he still wants to be part of the World of Mages and if he doesn't, what does that mean for his relationship with Baz?

Meanwhile Baz is bouncing between two family crises and not finding any time to talk to anyone about his newfound vampire knowledge. Penelope would love to help, but she's smuggled a cursed American Normal into London, and now she isn't sure what to do with him. And Agatha? Well, Agatha Wellbelove has had enough.

Felix ever after by Kacen Callender

Felix Love has never been in love - and, yes, he's painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it's like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What's worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he's one marginalisation too many - Black, queer and transgender - to ever get his own happily-ever-after.

When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages - after publicly posting Felix's deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned - Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn't count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi-love triangle . . . But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself.

Felix Ever After is an honest and layered story about identity, falling in love, and recognising the love you deserve.

 The hollow heart by Marie Rutkoski

Intrigue, romance, and magic abound in the heart-stopping conclusion to Marie Rutkoski's Forgotten Gods duology.

At the end of The Midnight Lie, Nirrim offered up her heart to the God of Thieves in order to restore her people's memories of their city's history. The Half Kith who once lived imprisoned behind the city's wall now realize that many among them are powerful. Meanwhile, the person Nirrim once loved most, Sid, has returned to her home country of Herran, where she must navigate the politics of being a rogue princess who has finally agreed to do her duty.

In the Herrani court, rumors begin to grow of a new threat rising across the sea, of magic unleashed on the world, and of a cruel, black-haired queen who can push false memories into your mind, so that you believe your dearest friends to be your enemies. Sid doesn't know that this queen is Nirrim, who seeks her revenge against a world that has wronged her. Can Sid save Nirrim from herself? Does Nirrim even want to be saved? As blood is shed and war begins, Sid and Nirrim find that it might not matter what they want for the gods have their own plans.

Cemetery boys by Aiden Thomas

Yadriel, a trans boy, summons the angry spirit of his high school's bad boy, and agrees to help him learn how he died, thereby proving himself a brujo, not a bruja, to his conservative family.

Find more LGBTIQ+ books for young adults here.

The glass room by Ann Cleeves 

Read by Janine Birkett

DI Vera Stanhope is not one to make friends easily but when one of her neighbours goes missing she feels duty-bound to find out what happened. It’s an easy job to track the young woman down to the Writers’ House a country retreat where aspiring authors gather to work on their novels. But things get complicated when a body is discovered and Vera’s neighbour is found with a knife in her hand. Vera knows that she should hand the case over to someone else. But the investigation is too tempting and she’s never been one to follow the rules. Working with Sergeant Joe Ashworth she starts the hunt for a murderer who has turned killing into an art form.

Small mercies by Richard Anderson 

Read by Nicholas Osmond

After enduring months of extreme drought on their modest freehold farming couple Dimple and Ruthie face uncertain times on more than one front. Ruthie receives the news every woman dreads. Meanwhile Wally Oliver a wealthy landowner appears on the local radio station warning small farmers that they are doomed and the sooner they leave the land to large operators like him the better.

Bracing for a fight on all fronts Dimple and Ruthie decide to take a road trip to confront Oliver. Along the way not only is their resolve tested but their relationship as well. Desperate not to dwell on the past but to face up to the future Dimple and Ruthie make a crucial decision they soon regret. And when the storm clouds finally roll in across the land they love there's more than rain to contend with.

Worn out wife seeks new life by Carmen Reid

Read by Penelope Freeman

Tess Simpson needs a break! No one appreciates her at home. No one appreciates her at work. And now her dog has died. She’s had enough! Maybe what she really needs is a break from hopeless husband Dave the ungrateful ‘kidults’ and the lacklustre job. River Romero needs a break! She’s had success in the past but screenwriting is a tough career in a tough town and her next script has got to fly or River’s dream career is over.

The swap! Everything about River’s L.A. life sounds exciting to Tess from the condo with a pool to the Hollywood glitz. Everything about Tess’s English country life sounds so calming to River from the wisteria over the front door to the peaceful bedroom. Both women want their lives to change but real life isn’t like the movies. And what if getting away from it all isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?

 True West by David Whish-Wilson

Read by Adam Fitzgerald

Western Australia 1988. After betraying the Knights motorcycle gang 17-year-old Lee Southern flees to the city with nothing left to lose. Working as a rogue tow-truck driver in Perth he is captured by right-wing extremists whose combination of seduction and blackmail keeps him on the wrong side of the law and under their control. As the true nature of what drives his captors unfolds Lee becomes an unwilling participant in a breathtakingly ambitious plot - and a cold-blooded crime that will show just how much he and everyone else still has to lose.

Find more most borrowed uLIBRARY titles here.