A property developer fears that a burgeoning ibis population will prevent the construction of a high rise apartment complex; a bus stop outside a dementia care facility in Düsseldorf suffers its own identity crisis; a young man's new job requires him to pose as a woodcutter and wave at a trainload of tourists; an aging, reclusive archivist becomes locked in a strange battle of wills with a courier; a backpacker in Israel has a bizarre religious experience.

From the winner of the Russell Prize for Humour Writing. David Cohen's most wryly humorous and disturbing work of fiction yet.A public memorial's name is changed to avoid any mention of the tragedy it has been set up to commemorate. Two attention-seeking activists campaign against exclusionary policies adopted by the gift shop at a suburban shopping mall. A customer service representative becomes obsessed with a colleague who has worked from home for so long, nobody in the company remembers her. A middle-aged father loses his marriage and falls in love again with a cherished but damaged childhood toy. An academic's research into roadside memorials takes a peculiar turn.David Cohen's sometimes bizarre yet pitch-perfect stories capture everyday horrors but are always shot through with a profound empathy and generosity.The Terrible Event delivers not just one terrible event, but many events of varying degrees of terrible-ness. Death, destruction, disappearance, decline,...

A unique and powerful look at a New Zealand experiment in social welfare gone wrong. From the late 1950s to the mid 1980s, when most of them were closed down, the New Zealand government maintained 26 residences for children and teenagers. Some of those children had the bad fortune to come from families with large numbers of children and who couldn't cope financially. Plucking a child out and putting him in a home to ease the burden was seen as a solution. Other children in came from profoundly dysfunctional backgrounds or were profoundly dysfunctional themselves. Could putting them all together in close quarters, supervised by staff with mostly inadequate training, ever deliver a positive outcome? In this powerfully written book David Cohen, who himself spent time at Epuni Boy's Home in the 1970s, argues not. He tracks down former residents and staff members, many of whom argue that boys'-home stints led boys to, rather than away from, lives of crime. It also led some into abuse. Evocatively and originally written, Cohen's research takes him back to the era of moral panic about juvenile delinquency that drove the creation of the homes and traces the sea change in ideas about the care of troubled adolescents, especially Maori, who were hugely over-represented in the muster, that spelled their eventual demise. Totally gripping, it is a unique insider account of a failed experiment.

Henry VIII played his daughters off against each other, alternately exiling and honouring one and then the other; George I cut his children off from their mother when he had her imprisoned; George III violently attacked his son; George V allowed one of his sons to be starved by a nanny. When he was just five years old, Prince Charles was reunited with his mother, who had been away for months touring the Empire and Commonwealth. Newsreels show him waiting for her at Victoria station. Immaculately dressed, as a trophy child should be, he was expected not to act his age. When his mother gets off the train, she does not rush towards him, kiss him or hug him. Instead, she shakes her son's hand. In a nice display of 'spurious maturity', he shakes her hand back. Achingly formal, it is an almost perfect example of protocol taking precedence over love.As a new generation of princes and princesses comes of age, Bringing Them Up Royal reveals the truth about what it's like to be raised as a member of the royal family. Tracing hundreds of years of British history, David Cohen weaves a compelling and sometimes shocking tale, full of arresting psychoanalytic insights and twists. Intertwining history with child psychology, this unique study maps the changing face of royal parenting from 1066 to the present day – and suggests how it might develop in the twenty-first century.Bringing Them Up Royal is a story of violence, sex, betrayal, cruelty – and the occasional gem of kindness and wisdom.

David Cohen takes suburban life and turns it into a warped comedy with a body count, letting weirdness in, compellingly, irresistibly, until our sense of what's real is flickering on and off like a dodgy fluoro tube.' - Nick EarlsHideaway Self Storage, located just off Brisbane's M1, is in decline. But manager Ken Guy and his assistant Bruce carry on with their daily rituals even as the facility falls apart around them. Lately, however, certain tenants have been disappearing off the face of the earth, leaving behind units full of valuable items. Ken has no idea where these rent defaulters have gone but he thinks he might be able to turn their abandoned 'things' into a nice little earner that could help save his business. But the disappearances are accompanied by strange occurrences such as Bruce's inexplicable late-night excursions, Ken's intensifying aversion to fluorescent lights, and Ken's girlfriend's intensifying aversion to Ken. While further along the motorway,...