Spare a thought for Prince Harry

With eggs as scarce and hen’s teeth, many people have decided to put some hens in their backyard.

Good on them, however, just like any other animal they need care and attention.

This book is a valuable tool for people starting out. I have chickens and have done for about 18 months. I learned a lot from this guide to backyard chicken keeping.

The author covers all bases such as housing, their social lives and quirky minds, food and disease.

Well worth a read.

Linda Hall streets. His life in the shadow of that day has impacted his life since. From Eton he made the decision to follow in the footsteps of other family members by embarking on a military career.

Alongside that as he describes it himself he lead a life on the edge, with alcohol and drugs playing a part. In spite of pressure from the palace he served on the frontline , as a soldier, and then a pilot of an Apache attack helicopter. Perhaps, almost certainly influenced by his mother’s death, Harry struggled to form longterm relationships and his frequent escapades exposed by the British tabloid press challenged his lifestyle.

Most of Spare dispenses the details of his life in the military and his role as a working royal. And then, almost as a miracle he met and wooed Meghan which was also shared with readers, often, it seems without much adherence to the truth.

Prince Harry’s fallout with the royal family only occured after his marriage, and, contrary to all of the recent publicity takes up the last 50 or so pages of Spare.

A surprisingly good read, now my internal jury will have to meditate over which parts of his story that I believe or not. Good luck with that.

— Tony Nielsen

Dr Elisabeth Ku¨bler-Ross was an expert in managing palliative care for the dying, coming up with the five stages of grief in the late 1960s on her book On Death and Dying — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. (These have now been adapted to seven, and the stages are never linear.)

Marsden tells stories of people at the end of life who have taught her more about selfawareness when caring for the dying. But it's not a depressing book at all.

Each person had their own issues, and Marsden's job was to work out why she wasn't connecting or felt unable to help her patients. In places it feels self indulgent, but she makes it clear that not considering your own reactions and where they're coming from will inhibit your ability to connect and help the dying. — Linda Thompson

Tim Winton sort of set the ball rolling in shining a light on smalltown Australia with Cloudstreet while more recently Jane Harper has taken up a mortgage on the genre. Add to the list of Aussie noir Chris Hammer. With Scrublands, Silver, Trust and Treasure and Dirt, this new title The Tilt will well and truly elevate his status.

Newly minted homicide detective Nell Buchanan returns to her home town, somewhat annoyed at being assigned to a decades old murder. As it turns out, though, this is a far from ordinary cold case, with the discovery of more bodies casting a chain of escalating events through to the present day. Nell starts pulling the threads together and is perturbed as she questions how well she knows the remnants of her own family. The Tilt is an intense, emotional and at times harrowing story, which Chris Hammer has paced perfectly. Thoroughly recommended. — Tony Nielsen