How do we take in the beauty of our planet while processing the losses? What trees can survive in the city? Which animals can survive in the wild? How do any of us—humans, animals, trees—find a forest we can call home? In these moving, thought-provoking essays Sophie Cunningham considers the meaning of trees and our love of them. She chronicles the deaths of both her fathers, and the survival of P-22, a mountain lion in Griffith Park, Los Angeles; contemplates the loneliness of Ranee, the first elephant in Australia; celebrates the iconic eucalyptus and explores its international status as an invasive species. City of Trees is a powerful collection of nature, travel and memoir writing set in the context of global climate change. It meanders through, circles around and sometimes faces head on the most pressing issues of the day. It never loses sight of the trees.'[Cunningham] creates a convincing sense of time and place, and can carry a reader with...

Shortlisted, Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Best First Book 2004'Just getting on a plane made me want sex.'For Catherine travel is about many things other than getting from here to there. Cities, for instance, and what cities do to people; the perils of geography and the excuses people use to keep others at a distance. It is about loss and longing, and the possibility of escape. In the years after she first meets Michael in Los Angeles, it is mostly about obsessive desire and damage.Sophie Cunningham's first novel is a fearless evocation of a woman losing herself to the idea of love. It will remind you how easy it is to cross the line, and how hard it can be to get back.'Geography is a new map of the heart from an author equipped with the latest global positioning system.' Weekend Australian

Warning is the definitive account of one of the most frightening extreme weather events our country has ever seen.When Cyclone Tracy swept down on Darwin at Christmas 1974, the weather became not just a living thing but a killer. Tracy destroyed an entire city, left seventy-one people dead and ripped the heart out of Australia's season of goodwill. For the fortieth anniversary of the nation's most iconic natural disaster, Sophie Cunningham has gone back to the eyewitness accounts of those who lived through the devastation, and those who faced the heartbreaking clean-up and the back-breaking rebuilding. From the quiet stirring of the service-station bunting that heralded the catastrophe to the wholesale slaughter of the dogs that followed it, Cunningham brings to the tale a novelist's eye for detail and an exhilarating narrative drive. And a sober appraisal of what Tracy means to us now, as we face more - and more destructive - extreme weather with...

Sophie Cunningham's spellbinding novel is an exquisite depiction of the equivocal bond between mother and daughter, and the search for identity through Buddhism.To her lovers and friends, Anna Davidoff was a mystery: beautiful, charismatic, irresponsible yet disarming; famous, in a way, but ultimately unknowable. To her daughter, she is no less an enigma even now, thirty years after her death.Of course Ana-Sofia knows the stories of Anna's unlikely transformations. How the young post-war refugee from a devastated Soviet Union became a Hollywood starlet, a muse to jazz greats, a friend of the Beats and a heroin addict. How later, ordained as a Buddhist nun, she died alone in a Himalayan cave at the age of forty-three.But now Ana-Sofia is the same age Anna was when she died. Successful, content, single in New York City and hopeful of new love. And Anna has begun to haunt her.'Cunningham never puts a foot wrong in relating a fabulous story, as unpredictable as it is...