Cirrus@Austlit

'Any Ordinary Day, Leigh Sales’s investigative report from the coalface of tragedy and resilience, is based on solid research and lengthy interviews. Sales, who wants to know the secrets of surviving outrageous fortune, has the journalistic chops to take on the quest. ‘I rely on a particular skill set … I know how to craft a line of questioning,’ she writes early in her new book. Readers familiar with Sales’s on-camera persona as the anchor of ABC television’s The 7.30 Report will perhaps brace themselves for some field surgery as she probes the testimonies of people who have met and overcome one or more tragedies. But those readers may be surprised.'  (Introduction)

'My ear tracked the sound … the slow roll of rubber on blue metal, the stealthy crunching undergrowth sound of something prowling.

'At the age of seventeen, Gail Bell was shot in the back. Coming home from evening class later than usual one night, she took a short cut through the dark streets of a new estate, unaware she was being watched. When a car began following her, she felt a jolt of fear. Then the car stopped and out of the eerie silence came a cracking sound as a bullet struck her from behind. The car sped away and the shooter was never found.

'Being shot is a life-altering experience that cries out for explanation, but for Gail there were bigger mysteries than the identity of the gunman. In this book, she questions the place of guns in our world, and explores the intricate, surprising ways our minds deal with traumatic shock.

'Gail Bell, author of the critically acclaimed and prize-winning The Poison Principle, uses the story of her shooting as the basis of this astonishing memoir, taking us into a world where lives can be changed forever by a single gunshot.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'When Dr William Macbeth poisoned two of his sons in 1927, his wife and sister hid the murders in the intensely private realm of family secrets. Macbeth behaved as if he were immune to consequences and avoided detection and punishment.

'Or did he? Secrets can be as corrosive as poison, and as time passed, the story haunted and divided his descendants. His granddaughter, Gail Bell, spent ten years reading the literature of poisoning in order to understand Macbeth’s life. Herself a chemist, she listened for echoes in the great cases of the nineteenth century, in myths, fiction, and poison lore.

'Intricate, elegant, and beautifully realised, The Poison Principle is a masterful book about family secrets and literary poisonings. It is a meditation on death, deceit and language, and answers questions like: how do arsenic, cyanide and strychnine work? Why is it so hard to poison someone these days? Was it ever easy? And it finally answers the question of what really happened to those small boys in the winter of 1927.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Brio Books).