Best Wishes
Making the world a better, less annoying place one wish at a time.
Do you hate noisy restaurants, pre-ripped jeans and pedestrians who walk five abreast?
Do you also have a problem with plastic-wrapped fruit, climate-change deniers and take-away sandwiches priced at $14.95?
And, most of all, do you think the world would be a better place if people got back their sense of humour?
Here’s proof you are not alone. Heartfelt and hilarious, serious but sly, Best Wishes is the encyclopedia of ‘can do better’. It’s a plea for a better world – one wish at a time.
“I wish I could think, hope, laugh, dream and, indeed, write like Richard Glover. And I wish every Australian could read this book. A soaring tribute to the power of wishful thinking.” – Trent Dalton
“Charming, funny and sincere, this is yet another winning book from the only Boomer worth listening to. A triumph!” – Tom Ballard
“He is right about leaf blowers, for example, but quite wrong about breakfast in bed… Richard’s view of the world will frequently have you punching the air and shouting, “Yes!”” – Jean Kittson
Richard Glover
About the Author
Richard Glover’s most recent book is “Best Wishes”, a book about making the world a better, less annoying place, one wish at a time. He is also author of “Love, Clancy” – a collection of the letters sent home by his dog Clancy to his parents in the bush; and of the bestseller “The Land Before Avocado” – a journey into the bizarre Australia of the late 60s and early 70s.
Richard’s previous books include “Flesh Wounds”, which was voted one of the top five books of the year by viewers of ABC television’s “The Book Club” and won the Readers’ Choice Award as Biography of the Year in the 2016 Australian Book Industry Awards.
Richard’s weekly humour column has been published in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age for over thirty years. He writes regularly for The Washington Post and also presents Thank God It’s Friday on ABC local radio.
Love, Clancy
Heartfelt and hilarious, this is a book for anyone who has tried to imagine what their dog was thinking.
Human beings often write about their dogs, but the dogs don’t usually get a right of reply. In “Love, Clancy”, Richard Glover has collated the letters sent by Clancy to his parents in the bush. They are full of a young dog’s musings about the oddities of human behaviour, life in the big city, and his own attempts to fit in. You’ll meet Clancy as a puppy, making his first attempt to train his humans, then see him grow into a mature activist, demanding more attention be paid to a dog’s view of the world. Along the way, there are adventures aplenty, involving robotic vacuum cleaners, songs about cheese, trips to the country and stolen legs of ham – all told with a dog’s deep wisdom when it comes to what’s important in life.
“Unnervingly accurate, always funny, Richard Glover effortlessly inhabits the fine mind of a dog” – Julia Baird
The Land Before Avocado
Publisher: HarperCollins
This is a vivid portrait of a quite peculiar land: the Australia of the late ’60s and early ’70s. The Land Before Avocado will make you laugh and cry, feel angry and inspired. And leave you wondering how bizarre things were, not so long ago. Let’s break the news now: they didn’t have avocado.
‘This is vintage Glover – warm, wise and very, very funny. Brimming with excruciating insights into life in the late sixties and early seventies, The Land Before Avocado explains why this was the cultural revolution we had to have‘ – Hugh Mackay
Praise for "Flesh Wounds":
“Poignant and wildly entertaining”
The Sydney Morning Herald
“Engrossing and extremely funny”
The Saturday Paper
The Sun-Herald
“A new classic … a breathtaking accomplishment in style and empathy”
The Australian
“Not since ‘Unreliable Memoirs’ by Clive James has there been a funnier, more poignant portrait of an Australian childhood”
The Australian Financial Review
The Mud House: Four friends, One block of land, No power tools
Publisher: HarperCollins
This frank, funny and thought-provoking memoir describes how Richard and his friend Philip built a mud brick house in the bush on weekends. This huge and exhausting undertaking — it took eight years simply to make the bricks — examines what it means to be a man, the nature of male friendships, improvised housebuilding techniques, and the extraordinary accomplishment of making something with your own hands.
Other Books
Why Men Are Necessary
In Bed with Jocasta
George Clooney’s Haircut
Desperate Husbands
The Dag’s Dictionary
The No-minute Noodler: Dag’s Dictionary for Kids
The Joke Trap
The Dirt Experiment
