Formats:
A = Audio Book available Library collection
DVD = DVD available in the Library collection
E = eAudiobook available via the Library website
K = Title on the Book Club Kindle kit
LP = Large Print copy available in the Library Collection
O = eBook available from the Library website, via Overdrive
S = Title available on the Book Club Sony kit
For help accessing any of the alternate formats from Warringah Council Library, please ask our staff.
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84, Charring Cross Road
100 Year Old Man Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared, The
Above the Fold
Alchemist, The
All That I Am
All the Light We Cannot See
Amber Amulet, The
American Gods
Americanah
And The Mountains Echoed
Animal People
Ape House
Atonement
Aviators Wife, The
Barracuda
Behind The Beautiful Forevers
Bellman & Black
Bellwether Revivals, The
Bereft
Big Little Lies
Book Of Rachael, The
Book Thief, The
Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, The
Brooklyn
Brother of the More Famous Jack
Burial Rites
Caleb’s Crossing
Calling me home
Casual Vacancy
Catcher In The Rye, The
Chaperone, The
Church of Marvels
Leslie Parry
Cloudstreet
Cold Comfort Farm
Collected Works of A.J. Fikry
Constant Gardener, The
Crane Wife, The
Crazy Rich Asians
1
AUTHOR
Helen Hanff
Jonas Jonasson
Peter Yeldham
Paulo Coelho
Anna Funder
David Doerr
Craig Silvey
Neil Gaiman
ADDITIONAL
FORMATS
A
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LP
O
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A, LP
Khaled Hosseini
Charlotte Wood
Sara Gruen
Ian McEwan
Melanie Benjamin
Christos Tsiolkas
Katherine Boo
Diane Setterfield
Benjamin Wood
Chris Womesley
Liane Moriarty
Leslie Cannold
Markus Zusak
John Boyne
Colm Toiban
Barbara Trapido
Hannah Kent
Geraldine Brooks
Julie Kibler
J. K. Rowling
J.D. Salinger
Laura Moriarty
K
Tim Winton
Stella Gibbons
Gabrielle Zevin
John le Carre
Patrick Ness
Kevin Kwan
A, DVD, E, LP
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Crossing To Safety
Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time, The
Cutting For Stone
Danish Girl, The
Day We Met, The
Defending Jacob
Descendants, The
Digging To America
Disgrace
Don’t ask why he died
Elegance Of The Hedgehog, The
Elizabeth is Missing
Empty mansions
Eucalyptus
Eugenia
Everything I never Told You
Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close
Eye of the Sheep
Eyrie
Fates and Furies
Finkler Question, The
Fishermen, The
Fishing Fleet, The
Five Bells
Flesh Wounds
Foal’s Bread
Franklin And Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage
Forgotten Garden, The
Fortunate Life, A
Frog Music
Fry Chronicles, The
Girl at War
Girl on the Train, The
Girl With A Pearl Earring
Glass Castle, The
Go Set a Watchman
God in Ruins, A
God Of Small Things, The
Gold
Golden Age, The
Golden Boys, The
Goldfinch, The
Gone Girl
Gossip
Great Gatsby, The
Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society, The
H is for Hawk
Half The Sky
Wallace Stegner
Mark Haddon
Abraham Verghese
David Ebershoff
Rowan Coleman
William Landay
Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl
WuDunn
A, K
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Hand Me Down World
Handmaid’s Tale, The
Hannah And Emil
Happiest Refugee, The
Lloyd Jones
Margaret Attwood
Belinda Castles
Ahn Do
A, E
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Kaui Hart Hemmings
Anne Tyler
J. M. Coetzee
Vincent Matthews
Muriel Barbery
Emma Healey
Bill Dedman
Murray Bail
Mark Tedeschi
Celeste Ng
Jonathan Safran Foer
Sofie laguna
Tim Winton
Lauren Groff
Howard Jacobson
Chigozie Obioma
Anne de Courcy
Gail Jones
Richard Glover
Gillian Mears
Hazel Rowley
Kate Morton
A.B. Facey
Emma Donoghue
Stephen Fry
Sara Novic
Paula Hawkins
Tracy Chevalier
Jeannette Walls
Harper Lee
Kate Atkinson
Arundhati Roy
Chris Cleeve
Joan London
Sonya Hartnett
Donna Tartt
Gillian Flynn
Beth Gutcheon
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Mary Ann Shaffer
Helen MacDonald
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Hare With Amber Eyes, The
Help, The
Homecoming
Hotel On The Corner Of Bitter And Sweet
How To Be A Woman
Husband’s Secret, The
I am Malala
Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks, The
In Cold Blood
In the Quiet
Instructions For A Heatwave
Indelible Ink
Invention of Wings, The
It Takes A Village
Jasper Jones
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Lake House, The
Language Of Flowers
Legacy, The
Let The Great World Spin
Let The Great World Spin
Lieutenant, The
Life After Life
Life Of Pi
Light Between Oceans, The
Little Coffee Shop Of Kabul, The
Little Paris Bookshop, The
Longbourn
Lost and Found
The love song of Miss Queenie Hennessy
Love In Years Of Lunacy
Lovely Bones, The
Mad Men, Bad Girls And The Guerilla Knitters Institute
Man Called Ove, A
Man Who Loved Children, The
March
Mateship With Birds
Matilda Is Missing
Me Before You
Messenger, The
Middlesex
Midnight Dress, The
Miniaturist
Mr Penumbra’s 24-Hour Book Store
Mr Wigg
Mister Pip
Mitford Girls
Mothers' Group, The
Murder in Mississippi
My Brilliant Friend
My Brother Jack
My Family and Other Animals
Edmund de Waal
Kathryn Stockett
Bernhard Schlink
Jamie Ford
Caitlin Moran
Liane Moriarty
Malala Yousafzai
Rebecca Skloot
Truman Capote
Eliza Henry-Jones
Maggie O'Farrell
Fiona McGregor
Sue Monk Kidd
Christine Stinson
Craig Silvey
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Kindle
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Kate Morton
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
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Katherine Webb
Colum Mccann
Colum Mccann
Kate Grenville
Kate Atkinson
Yann Martel
M. L. Stedman
Deborah Rodriguez
Nina George
Jo Baker
Brooke Davis
Rachel Joyce
Mandy Sayer
Alice Sebold
Maggie Groff
Fredrik Backman
Christina Stead
Geraldine Brooks
Carrie Tiffany
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Caroline Overington
Jojo Moyes
Markus Zusak
Jeffrey Eugenides
Karen Foxlee
Jessie Burton
Robin Sloan
Inga Simpson
Lloyd Jones
Mary S. Lovell
Fiona Higgins
John Safran
Elana Ferrante
George Johnston
Gerald Durrel
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Narrow Road to the Deep North, The
Natural way of Things, The
Necessary Lies
Night Circus, The
Night Guest, The
Nightingale, The
Nightingale, The
Norwegian Wood
Not Forgetting the Whale
Richard Flanagan
Charlotte Wood
Diane Chamberlain
Erin Morgenstern
Fiona McFarlane
Kristin Hannah
Fiona McIntosh
Haruki Murakami
J W Ironmanger
A
Ocean at the end of the lane, The
Neil Gaiman
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Oranges And Sunshine
Ordinary Grace
Orphan Train
Painted Veil, The
Paris Wife, The
Past The Shallows
People Of The Book
People Smuggler
Perfume : The Story Of A Murderer
Persuasion
Pillars Of The Earth, The
Please Look After Mother
Postmistress, The
Prayer For Owen Meany, A
Price of Salt, The
Questions of Travel
Reader, The
Rebecca
Red Tent, The
A Reliable Wife
Remains Of The Day, The
Revolutionary Road
Rhubarb
Road, The
Room
Rosie Effect, The
Rosie Project, The
Rules Of Civility
Salvage The Bones
Sarah Thornhill
Sarah’s Key
Secret Chord, The
Secret Keeper, The
Secret History, The
Secret River, The
Sense Of An Ending, The
Shadow of the Wind, The
Signature Of All Things, The
Silver Linings Playbook, The
Slap, The
Small Island
Sony Reader
Margaret Humphreys
William Kent Kreuger
Christina Baker Kline
W. Somerset Maugham
O
Paula McLain
Favel Parrett
Geraldine Brooks
Robin de Crespigny
Patrick Süskind
Jane Austen
Ken Follett
Kyung-Sook Shin
Sarah Blake
John Irving
Patricia Highsmith
Michelle de Kretser
Bernhard Schlink
Daphne Du Maurier
Anita Diamant
Robert Goolrick
Kazuo Ishiguro
Richard Yates
Craig Silvey
Cormac McCarthy
Emma Donogue
Graeme Simsion
Graeme Simison
Amor Towles
Jesmyn Ward
Kate Grenville
Tatiana de Rosnay
Geraldine Brooks
Kate Morton
Donna Tartt
Kate Grenville
Julian Barnes
Carols Ruiz Zafon
Elizabeth Gilbert
Matthew Quick
Christos Tsiolkas
Andrea Levy
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Space Between Us, The
Spare Room, The
Spool of Blue Thread, A
Sport And A Past Time, A
Star Of The Sea, The
Stasiland
Station Eleven
Still Alice
Story Of Beautiful Girl, The
Suddenly, A Knock On The Door
Sweet Tooth
Tall Man, The
Testament of Youth
That Deadman Dance
That Woman: the life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
This House of Grief
This Is How You Lose Her
Three Cups Of Tea
Time and Time Again
Time Traveller’s Wife, The
Tipping the Velvet
To Be Sung Underwater
To Kill A Mockingbird
Too Close To Home
Tree Of Man, The
Ugly
Uncommon Reader, The
Unknown Terrorist, The
Unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry, The
Us
Vanishing Act Of Esme Lennox, The
View of the Harbour, A
Water For Elephants
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves
We Need To Talk About Kevin
When God Was A Rabbit
When the Night Comes
Where’d You Go, Bernadette?
White Tiger, The
Wide Sargasso Sea
Winter Of Our Disconnect, The
Witches: Salem1692, The
With My Body
Wolf Hall
Women In Black , The
Wonder
Year of Wonders
Z: a novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
5
Thrity Umrigar
Helen Garner
Anne Tyler
James Salter
Joseph O’Connor
Anna Funder
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A, E
O
Hilary St John Mandel
Lisa Genova
Rachel Simon
Etgar Keret
Ian McEwan
Chloe Hooper
Vera Brittain
Kim Scott
Anne Sebba
Helen Garner
Junot Diaz
Greg Mortenson
Ben Elton
Audrey Niffenegger
Sarah Walters
Tom McNeal
Harper Lee
Georgia Blain
Patrick White
Robert Hoge
Alan Bennett
Richard Flanagan
Rachel Joyce
David Nicholls
Maggie O’farrell
Elizabeth Taylor
Sara Gruen
Karen Joy Fowler
Lionel Shriver
Sarah Winman
Favel Parrett
Maria Semple
Aravind Adiga
Jean Rhys
Susan Maushart
Stacy Schiff
Nikki Gemmell
Hilary Mantel
Madeline St John
R.A. Palacio
Geraldine Brooks
Therese Fowler
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84 Charring Cross Road
Helene Hanff
This book is the very simple story of the love affair between Miss Helene Hanff of New York and
Messrs Marks and Co, sellers of rare and secondhand books, at 84 Charing Cross Road, London.
Told in a series of letters, this true story has touched the hearts of thousands.
Biography
71 Pages; Pub 1970
The 100 year old man climbed out the window and disappeared
Jonas Jonasson
After a long and eventful life Allan Karlsson is moved to a nursing home to await the inevitable. But
his health refuses to fail and as his 100th birthday looms a huge party is planned. Allan wants no part
of it and decides to climb out the window... Charming and funny; a European publishing phenomenon.
Sitting quietly in his room in an old people's home, Allan Karlsson is waiting for a party he doesn't
want to begin. His one-hundredth birthday party to be precise. The Mayor will be there. The press will
be there. But, as it turns out, Allan will not . . . Escaping (in his slippers) through his bedroom window,
into the flowerbed, Allan makes his getaway. And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey
involving a suitcase full of cash, a few thugs, a very friendly hot-dog stand operator, a few deaths, an
elephant and incompetent police. As his escapades unfold, Allan's earlier life is revealed. A life in
which - remarkably - he played a key role behind the scenes in some of the momentous events of the
twentieth century. The One Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
is a charming, warm and funny novel, beautifully woven with history and politics.
Fiction
384 Pages; Pub 2012
A Spool of Blue Thread
Anne Tyler
'It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon' This is the way Abby Whitshank always
begins the story of how she and Red fell in love that day in July 1959. The whole family on the
porch, relaxed, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times
before. And yet this gathering is different. Abby and Red are getting older, and decisions must be
made about how best to look after them and their beloved family home. They've all come, even
Denny, who can usually be relied on only to please himself. From that porch we spool back
through three generations of the Whitshanks, witnessing the events, secrets and unguarded
moments that have come to define who and what they are. And while all families like to believe
they are special, round that kitchen table over all those years we also see played out our own
hopes and fears, rivalries and tensions – the essential nature of family life.
Fiction
368 Pages; Pub 2015
Above the Fold
Peter Yeldham
Luke Elliott and Claudia Marsden have fallen in love at a perilous time. The Second World War is
raging in the Pacific, barbed wire and gun emplacements are strung along the northern beaches
in preparation for invasion. As the war moves closer, their 'sextet' of loyal school friends is
splintering as individual career dreams are pursued. Luke yearns to be a journalist but a start in
newspapers is proving challenging. The war's end unexpectedly provides Luke's big break, but
the pursuit of his dream will keep him away from Australia and Claudia, with surprising
consequences for them both. "Above The Fold is a big-hearted novel that explicitly examines
notions of love and loyalty... Anyone who enjoys reading about post-war Australian history and
the attitudes that informed much of it, will be delighted." Gabrielle Lord, author of Dishonour
"Written with meticulous detail, this is an engaging story spanning a tumultuous period in
Australian history." Nicole Alexander, author of The Great Plains. 'Peter Yeldham's historical
fiction pedigree is one of the best in the country.' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
Fiction
405 Pages; Pub 2014
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho
6
The Alchemist is the magical story of Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in
search of a worldly treasure as extravagant as any ever found. From his home in Spain he journeys to
the markets of Tangiers and across the Egyptian desert to a fateful encounter with the alchemist. The
story of the treasures Santiago finds along the way teaches us, as only a few stories have done,
about the essential wisdom of listening to our hearts, learning to read the omens strewn along life's
path, and, above all, following our dreams.
Fiction
197 Pages; Pub 1993
All that I am
Anna Funder
Ruth Becker, defiant and cantankerous, is living out her days in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. She
has made an uneasy peace with the ghosts of her past -- and a part of history that has been all but
forgotten. Another lifetime away, it's 1939 and the world is going to war. Ernst Toller, self-doubting
revolutionary and poet, sits in a New York hotel room settling up the account of his life. When Toller's
story arrives on Ruth's doorstep their shared past slips under her defences, and she's right back
among them -- those friends who predicted the brutality of the Nazis and gave everything they had to
stop them. Those who were tested -- and in some cases found wanting -- in the face of hatred, of art,
of love, and of history. Based on real people and events, All That I Am is a masterful and exhilarating
exploration of bravery and betrayal, of the risks and sacrifices some people make for their beliefs, and
of heroism hidden in the most unexpected places.
Fiction
369 Pages; Pub 2011
Australian Author
All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr
A novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both
try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking
distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are
thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six, she goes blind, and her father builds her a
model of their neighborhood, every house, every manhole, so she can memorize it with her fingers
and navigate the real streets with her feet and cane. When the Germans occupy Paris, father and
daughter flee to Saint-Malo on the Brittany coast, where Marie-Laure's agoraphobic great uncle lives
in a tall, narrow house by the sea wall. In another world in Germany, an orphan boy, Werner, grows
up with his younger sister, Jutta, both enchanted by a crude radio Werner finds. He becomes a
master at building and fixing radios, a talent that wins him a place at an elite and brutal military
academy and, ultimately, makes him a highly specialized tracker of the Resistance. Werner travels
through the heart of Hitler Youth to the far-flung outskirts of Russia, and finally into Saint-Malo, where
his path converges with Marie-Laure. Doerr's gorgeous combination of soaring imagination with
observation is electric. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the
ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.
Fiction
531 Pages; Pub 2014
Amber Amulet
Craig Silvey
Meet Liam McKenzie, a lonely twelve year old boy whose alter ego is the Masked Avenger - a
superhero with powers so potent, so fast, not even he can fully comprehend their extent. Along with
his sidekick, Richie the power-beagle, Liam protects the people of Franklin Street from chaos,
mayhem, evil and low tyre pressure - but can he save them from sadness?
Fiction
96 pages, Pub. 2012
American Gods
Neil Gaiman
After three years in prison, Shadow has done his time. But as the time until his release ticks away, he
can feel a storm brewing. Two days before he gets out, his wife Laura dies in a mysterious car crash,
in adulterous circumstances. Dazed, Shadow travels home, only to encounter the bizarre Mr
Wednesday claiming to be a refugee from a distant war, a former god and the king of America.
Together they embark on a very strange journey across the States, along the way solving the murders
which have occurred every winter in one small American town. But the storm is about to break...
7
Disturbing, gripping and profoundly strange, Gaiman's epic new novel sees him on the road to the
heart of America.
Speculative Fiction
658 Pages; Pub 2001
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
As teenagers in a Lagos secondary school, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under
military dictatorship, and people are leaving the country if they can. Ifemelu—beautiful, self-assured—
departs for America to study. She suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships and
friendships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race.
Obinze—the quiet, thoughtful son of a professor—had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will
not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.
Years later, Obinze is a wealthy man in a newly democratic Nigeria, while Ifemelu has achieved
success as a writer of an eye-opening blog about race in America. But when Ifemelu returns to
Nigeria, and she and Obinze reignite their shared passion—for their homeland and for each other—
they will face the toughest decisions of their lives.
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous
lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today’s globalized world
Fiction
477 pages, Pub. 2013
And the Mountains Echoed
Khaled Hosseini
In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and
caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honour, and
sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the
times that matter most.
Fiction
404 pages, Pub. 2012
Animal people
Charlotte Wood
Set in Sydney over a single day, Animal People traces a watershed day in the life of Stephen,
aimless, unhappy, unfulfilled - and without a clue as to how to make his life better. His dead-end job,
his demanding family, his oppressive feelings for Fiona and the pitiless city itself ... the great weight of
it all threatens to come crashing down on him. The day will bring untold surprises and disasters, but
will also show him - perhaps too late - that only love can set him free. Sharply observed, hilarious,
tender and heartbreaking, Animal People is a portrait of urban life, a meditation on the conflicted
nature of human-animal relationships, and a masterpiece of storytelling. Filled with shocks of
recognition and revelation, it shows a writer of great depth and compassion at work.
Fiction
264 pages; Pub 2011
Australian Author
Ape house
Sara Gruen
After the extraordinary success of Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen returns with another immensely
charming, endlessly surprising, and engaging novel in which a family of apes teaches us what it
means to be human. Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants has become one of the most beloved and
bestselling novels of our time. Now Gruen has moved from a circus elephant to family of bonobo
apes. When the apes are kidnapped from a language laboratory, their mysterious appearance on a
reality TV show calls into question our assumptions about these animals who share 99.4% of our
DNA. A devoted animal lover, Gruen has had a life-long fascination with human-ape discourse, and a
particular interest in Bonobo apes, who share 99.4% of our DNA. She has studied linguistics and a
system of lexigrams in order to communicate with apes, and is one of the few visitors who has been
allowed access to the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, where the apes have come to love her.
In bringing her experience and research to bear on this novel, she opens the animal world to us as
few novelists have done. Ape House is a riveting, funny, compassionate, and, finally, deeply moving
new novel that secures Sara Gruens place as a master storyteller who allows us to see ourselves as
we never have before.
Fiction
306 Pages; Pub 2010
8
Atonement
Ian McEwan
On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip
off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching her is
Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By
the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have
crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the
younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she
will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.
Literary Fiction
372 pages; Pub 2007
Aviator’s Wife, The
Melanie Benjamin
For much of her life, Anne Morrow, the shy daughter of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, has stood in
the shadows of those around her, including her millionaire father and vibrant older sister, who often
steals the spotlight. Then Anne, a college senior with hidden literary aspirations, travels to Mexico City
to spend Christmas with her family. There she meets Colonel Charles Lindbergh, fresh off his
celebrated 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic. Enthralled by Charles's assurance and fame, Anne is
certain the aviator has scarcely noticed her. But she is wrong. Charles sees in Anne a kindred spirit, a
fellow adventurer, and her world will be changed forever. The two marry in a headline-making
wedding. Hounded by adoring crowds and hunted by an insatiable press, Charles shields himself and
his new bride from prying eyes, leaving Anne to feel her life falling back into the shadows. In the years
that follow, despite her own major achievements--she becomes the first licensed female glider pilot in
the United States--Anne is viewed merely as the aviator's wife. The fairy-tale life she once longed for
will bring heartbreak and hardships, ultimately pushing her to reconcile her need for love and her
desire for independence, and to embrace, at last, life's infinite possibilities for change and happiness.
Fiction
402 Pages; Pub 2013
Barracuda
Christos Tsiolkas
His whole life Danny Kelly's only wanted one thing: to win Olympic gold. Everything he's ever done every thought, every dream, every action - takes him closer to that moment of glory, of vindication,
when the world will see him for what he is: the fastest, the strongest and the best. His life has been a
preparation for that moment. His parents struggle to send him to the most prestigious private school
with the finest swimming program; Danny loathes it there and is bullied and shunned as an outsider,
but his coach is the best and knows Danny is, too, better than all those rich boys, those pretenders.
Danny's win-at-all-cost ferocity gradually wins favour with the coolest boys - he's Barracuda, he's the
psycho, he's everything they want to be but don't have the guts to get there. He's going to show them
all. He would be first, everything would be alright when he came first, all would be put back in place.
When he thought of being the best, only then did he feel calm. A searing and provocative novel by the
acclaimed author of the international bestseller THE SLAP, BARRACUDA is an unflinching look at
modern Australia, at our hopes and dreams, our friendships, and our families. Should we teach our
children to win, or should we teach them to live? How do we make and remake our lives? Can we
atone for our past? Can we overcome shame? And what does it mean to be a good person?
BARRACUDA is about living in Australia right now, about class and sport and politics and migration
and education. It contains everything a person is: family and friendship and love and work, the
identities we inhabit and discard, the means by which we fill the holes at our centre. It's brutal and
tender and blazingly brilliant; everything we have come to expect from this fearless vivisector of our
lives and world.
Fiction
516 pages; Pub 2013
Australian Author
Behind the Beautiful Forevers
Katherine Boo
From Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo comes a landmark work of narrative non-fiction that tells the
dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the
world's most lively but treacherous cities. Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong
into one of the 21st century's hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.
Non-fiction
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262 pages, Pub. 2012
Bellman & Black
Diane Setterfield
ONE MOMENT IN TIME CAN HAUNT YOU FOREVER. Caught up in a moment of boyhood
competition, William Bellman recklessly aims his slingshot at a rook resting on a branch, killing the
bird instantly. It is a small but cruel act, and is soon forgotten. By the time he is grown, with a wife and
children of his own, William seems to have put the whole incident behind him. It was as if he never
killed the thing at all. But rooks don't forget . . . Years later, when a stranger mysteriously enters
William's life, his fortunes begin to turn--and the terrible and unforeseen consequences of his past
indiscretion take root. In a desperate bid to save the only precious thing he has left, he enters into a
rather strange bargain, with an even stranger partner. Together, they found a decidedly macabre
business. And Bellman & Black is born.
Fiction
328 pages; Pub 2013
Bellwether Revivals, The
Benjamin Wood
Bright, bookish Oscar Lowe has escaped the urban estate where he was raised and made a new life
for himself amid the colleges and spires of Cambridge. He has grown to love the quiet routine of his
life as a care assistant at a local nursing home, where he has forged a close friendship with the
home's most ill-tempered resident, Dr. Paulsen. But when he meets and falls in love with Iris
Bellwether, a beautiful and enigmatic medical student at King's College, Oscar is drawn into her world
of scholarship and privilege, and soon becomes embroiled in the strange machinations of her brilliant
but troubled brother, Eden, who believes he can adapt the theories of a forgotten Baroque composer
to heal people with music. Eden's self-belief knows no bounds, and as he draws his sister and closed
circle of friends into a series of disturbing experiments to prove himself right, Oscar realises the extent
of the danger facing them all...
Psychological Fiction
420 pages; Pub 2012
Bereft
Chris Womersley
It is 1919. The Great War has ended, but the Spanish flu epidemic is raging through Australia.
Schools are closed, state borders are guarded by armed men and train travel is severely restricted.
There are rumours it is the end of the world. In the NSW town of Flint, Quinn Walker returns to the
home he fled ten years earlier when he was falsely accused of an unspeakable crime. Aware that his
father and uncle would surely hang him, Quinn hides in the hills surrounding Flint. There, he meets a
mysterious young girl called Sadie Fox, who encourages him to seek justice – and seems to know
more about the crime than she should. A searing gothic novel of love, longing, and revenge, Bereft is
about the suffering endured by those who go to war and those who are forever left behind.
Literary Fiction; Historical Fiction
264 pages, Pub 2010
Australian Author
Winner of the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year 2011
Winner of the Indie Award for Fiction 2011
Big Little Lies
Liane Moriarty
I guess it started with the mothers.' 'It was all just a terrible misunderstanding.' 'I'll tell you exactly why
it happened.' Pirriwee Public's annual school Trivia Night has ended in a shocking riot. A parent is
dead. Liane Moriarty's new novel is funny and heartbreaking, challenging and compassionate. The
No. 1 New York Times bestselling author turns her unique gaze on parenting and playground politics,
showing us what really goes on behind closed suburban doors. 'Let me be clear. This is not a circus.
This is a murder investigation.'
Fiction
460 Pages; Pub 2014
Australian Author
The Book of Rachael
Leslie Cannold
What if the man you loved betrayed your brother?
Two thousand years ago, while a young Jewish preacher from Nazareth was gathering followers
among the people of Galilee, his sister swept floors and dreamed of learning to read. In Leslie
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Cannold’s story, it is the women of Nazareth who take centre stage.
The rebellious, gifted Rachael, consigned by her sex to a life of drudgery. Bindy, the crone who
teaches her skills of the healer. Shona her sister, the victim of a harsh social code, and their mother
Miriame, a woman seemingly unable to love.
When Rachael falls in love with her brother’s dearest friend, the rebel Judah of Iscariot, it seems that
at least one of the women of Nazareth may find happiness. Then a message comes from her brother
in Jerusalem. And the events begin to unfold that will change not just Rachael’s life, but the
world;forever.
Historical Fiction
328 pages, Pub 2011
Australian Author
The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
It is 1939. Nazi Germany. Liesel Meminger and her younger brother are being taken by their mother
to live with a foster family outside Munich. Liesel’s father was taken away and Liesel sees the fear of
a similar fate in her mother’s eyes. On the journey, Death visits the young boy, and by her brother’s
graveside, Liesel’s life is changed when she picks up a single object, partially hidden in the snow. It is
The Gravedigger’s Handbook, left there by accident, and it is her first act of book thievery. So begins
a love affair with books and words, as Liesel, with the help of her accordion-playing foster father,
learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi book-burnings, the mayor’s wife’s library,
wherever there are books to be found. But these are dangerous times...
This is an unforgettable story about the ability of books to feed the soul.
Historical Fiction
584 pages; Pub 2005
Australian Author
The boy in the striped pyjamas
John Boyne
Berlin 1942. When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are
being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their
home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence
running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he
can see in the distance. But Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to
this desolate new place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another
boy whose whole life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a
friendship that has devastating consequences
Historical fiction
216 pages; Pub 2006
Brooklyn
Colm Toiban
Set in Brooklyn and Ireland in the early 1950s, when one young woman crosses the ocean to make a
new life for herself. Eilis Lacey has come of age in small-town Ireland in the years following World
War Two. Though skilled at bookkeeping, she cannot find a job in the miserable Irish economy. When
an Irish priest from Brooklyn to sponsor Eilis in America -- to live and work in a Brooklyn
neighbourhood "just like Ireland" -- she decides she must go, leaving her fragile mother and her
charismatic sister behind. Eilis finds work in a department store on Fulton Street, and when she least
expects it, finds love. Tony, a blond Italian from a big family, slowly wins her over with patient charm.
He takes Eilis to Coney Island and Ebbets Field, and home to dinner in the two-room apartment he
shares with his brothers and parents. He talks of having children who are Dodgers fans. But just as
Eilis begins to fall in love with Tony, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her
future. Brooklyn will make readers fall in love with Toiban’s gorgeous writing and spellbinding
characters.
Literary Fiction
262 Pages; Pub 2009
Winner: Costa Novel Award 2009
Brother of the More Famous Jack
Barbara Trapido
Stylish, suburban Katherine is eighteen when she is propelled into the heart of Professor Jacob
Goldman's rambling home and his large eccentric family. As his enchanting yet sharp-tongued wife,
Jane, gives birth to her sixth child, Katherine meets beautiful, sulky Roger and his volatile younger
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brother, Jonathan. Inevitable heartbreak sends her fleeing to Rome, but ten years later, older and
wiser, she returns to find the Goldmans again.
Fiction
239 Pages; Pub1982
Burial Rites
Hannah Kent
In northern Iceland, 1829, Agnes Magnusdottir is condemned to death for her part in the brutal murder
of two men. Agnes is sent to wait out the time leading to her execution on the farm of District Officer
Jon Jonsson, his wife and their two daughters. Horrified to have a convicted murderess in their midst,
the family avoids speaking with Agnes. Only Toti, the young assistant reverend appointed as Agness
spiritual guardian, is compelled to try to understand her, as he attempts to salvage her soul. As the
summer months fall away to winter and the hardships of rural life force the household to work side by
side, Agness ill-fated tale of longing and betrayal begins to emerge. And as the days to her execution
draw closer, the question burns: did she or didnt she? Based on a true story, BURIAL RITES is a
deeply moving novel about personal freedom: who we are seen to be versus who we believe
ourselves to be, and the ways in which we will risk everything for love. In beautiful, cut-glass prose,
Hannah Kent portrays Icelands formidable landscape, where every day is a battle for survival, and
asks, how can one woman hope to endure when her life depends upon the stories told by others?
Fiction
Australian Author
338 pages; Pub 2013
Caleb’s Crossing
Geraldine Brooks
In 1665, a young man from Martha′s Vineyard became the first Native American to graduate from
Harvard College. From the few facts that survive of his extraordinary life, Geraldine Brooks creates a
luminous tale of love and faith, magic and adventure. When Bethia Mayfield, a spirited twelve-year-old
living in the rigid confines of an English Puritan settlement - and the daughter of a Calvinist minister meets Caleb, the young son of a Wampanoag chieftain, the two forge a secret friendship that draws
each into the alien world of the other. As Bethia′s father feels called to convert the Wampanoag to his
own strict faith, he awakens the wrath of the medicine men. Caleb becomes a prize in a contest
between old ways and new, eventually taking his place at Harvard, studying Latin and Greek
alongside the sons of the colonial elite. Fighting for a voice in a society that requires her silence,
Bethia becomes entangled in Caleb′s struggle to navigate the intellectual and cultural shoals that
divide their two cultures.
Historical fiction
369 Pages; Pub 2011
Australian Author
Calling me home
Julie Kibler
Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favor to ask her hairdresser Dorrie Curtis. It's a big one.
Isabelle wants Dorrie, a black single mom in her thirties, to drop everything to drive her from her home
in Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati. With no clear explanation why. Tomorrow. Dorrie,
fleeing problems of her own and curious whether she can unlock the secrets of Isabelle's guarded
past, scarcely hesitates before agreeing, not knowing it will be a journey that changes both their
lives.Over the years, Dorrie and Isabelle have developed more than just a business relationship. They
are friends. But Dorrie, fretting over the new man in her life and her teenage son's irresponsible
choices, still wonders why Isabelle chose her. Isabelle confesses that, as a willful teen in 1930s
Kentucky, she fell deeply in love with Robert Prewitt, a would-be doctor and the black son of her
family's housekeeper-in a town where blacks weren't allowed after dark. The tale of their forbidden
relationship and its tragic consequences makes it clear Dorrie and Isabelle are headed for a gathering
of the utmost importance and that the history of Isabelle's first and greatest love just might help Dorrie
find her own way.
Fiction
325 pages; Pub 2013
The Casual Vacancy
J.K. Rowling
When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is,
seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind
the pretty facade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at
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war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils, Pagford is not what it first seems. And the
empty seat left by Barry on the town's council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town
has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity and unexpected
revelations?
Fiction
503 Pages; Pub 2012
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
"The Catcher in the Rye" is J . D. Salinger's world-famous novel of disaffected youth. Holden Caulfield
is a seventeen- year-old dropout who has just been kicked out of his fourth school. Navigating his way
through the challenges of growing up, Holden dissects the 'phony' aspects of society, and the
'phonies' themselves: the headmaster whose affability depends on the wealth of the parents, his
roommate who scores with girls using sickly-sweet affection. Written with the clarity of a boy leaving
childhood behind, "The Catcher in the Rye" explores the world with disarming frankness and a warm,
affecting charisma which has made this novel a universally loved classic of twentieth-century
literature.
Fiction
240 Pages ; Pub 1951
Chaperone, The
Laura Moriarty
Only a few years before becoming a famous silent-film star, a fifteen-year-old Louise Brooks leaves
Wichita, Kansas, to study with the prestigious Denishawn School of Dancing in New York.
Much to her annoyance, she is accompanied by Cora, a thirty-six-year-old chaperone, who is neither
mother nor friend. Ultimately, the five weeks they spend together will transform their lives forever.
Under the bright lights of Broadway, in a time when prohibition reigns and speakeasies with their
forbidden whispers behind closed doors thrive, Cora finds what she has been searching for. It is here,
in a time when illicit thrills and daring glamour sizzle beneath the laws of propriety that her life truly
begins. It is here that Cora and her charge, Louise Brooks, take their first steps towards their dreams.
Fiction
406 Pages; Pub 2012
Church of Marvels
Leslie Parry
New York, 1895. It's late on a warm city night when Sylvan Threadgill, a young night soiler who cleans
out the privies behind the tenement houses, pulls a terrible secret out from the filthy hollows: an
abandoned newborn baby. An orphan himself, Sylvan was raised by a kindly Italian family and can't
bring himself to leave the baby in the slop. He tucks her into his chest, resolving to find out where she
belongs. Odile Church is the girl-on-the-wheel, a second-fiddle act in a show that has long since lost
its magic. Odile and her sister Belle were raised in the curtained halls of their mother's spectacular
Coney Island sideshow: The Church of Marvels. Belle was always the star-the sword swallower-light,
nimble, a true human marvel. But now the sideshow has burnt to the ground, their mother dead in the
ashes, and Belle has escaped to the city. Alphie wakes up groggy and confused in Blackwell's Lunatic
Asylum. The last thing she remembers is a dark stain on the floor, her mother-in-law screaming. She
had once walked the streets as an escort and a penny-Rembrandt, cleaning up men after their
drunken brawls. Now she is married; a lady in a reputable home. She is sure that her imprisonment is
a ruse by her husband's vile mother. But then a young woman is committed alongside her, and when
she coughs up a pair of scissors from the depths of her agile throat, Alphie knows she harbors a
dangerous secret that will alter the course of both of their lives... On a single night, these strangers'
lives will become irrevocably entwined, as secrets come to light and outsiders struggle for
acceptance. From the Coney Island seashore to the tenement-studded streets of the Lower East
Side, a spectacular sideshow to a desolate asylum, Leslie Parry makes turn-of-the-century New York
feel alive, vivid, and magical in this luminous debut. In prose as magnetic and lucid as it is detailed,
she offers a richly atmospheric vision of the past marked by astonishing feats of narrative that will
leave you breathless.
Fiction
368 Pages; Pub 2015
Cloudstreet
Tim Winton
From separate catastrophes two rural families flee to the city and find themselves sharing a great,
breathing, shuddering joint called Cloudstreet, where they begin their lives again from scratch. For
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twenty years they roister and rankle, laugh and curse until the roof over their heads becomes a home
for their hearts. Tim Winton's funny, sprawling saga is an epic novel of love and acceptance. Winner
of the Miles Franklin and NBC Awards in Australia, Cloudstreet is a celebration of people, places and
rhythms which has fuelled imaginations world-wide.
Fiction
432 Pages; Pub 1991
Australian Author
Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
When sensible, sophisticated Flora Poste is orphaned at nineteen, she decides her only choice is to
descend upon relatives in deepest Sussex. At the aptly named Cold Comfort Farm, she meets the
doomed Starkadders: cousin Judith, heaving with remorse for unspoken wickedness; Amos,
preaching fire and damnation; their sons, lustful Seth and despairing Reuben; child of nature Elfine;
and crazed old Aunt Ada Doom, who has kept to her bedroom for the last twenty years. But Flora
loves nothing better than to organize other people. Armed with common sense and a strong will, she
resolves to take each of the family in hand. A hilarious and merciless parody of rural melodramas,
“Cold Comfort Farm” (1932) is one of the best-loved comic novels of all time.
Humorous Fiction
233 Pages; Pub 1932
The Collected Works of A.J. Fikry
Gabrielle Zevin
A.J. Fikry owns a failing bookshop. His wife has just died, in tragic circumstances. His rare and
valuable first edition has been stolen. His life is a wreck. Amelia is a book rep, with a big heart, and a
lonely life. Maya is the baby left on A.J.'s bookshop floor with a note. What happens in the bookshop
that changes the lives of these seemingly normal but extraordinary characters? This is the story of
how unexpected love can rescue you and bring you back to real life, in a world that you won't want to
leave, with characters that you will come to love.
Fiction
243 Pages; Pub 2014
The Constant Gardener
John Le Carre
Tessa Quayle has been horribly murdered on the shores of Lake Turkana in Northern Kenya, the
birthplace of mankind. Her putative African lover, a doctor with one of the aid agencies has
disappeared. Her husband, Justin, a career diplomat and amateur gardener at the British High
Commission in Nairobi, sets out on a personal odyssey in pursuit of the killers and their motive. On
his way, Justin meets terror, violence, laughter, conspiracy and knowledge. But his greatest discovery
is the woman he barely had time to love.
Suspense Fiction
480 Pages; Pub 2001
The Crane Wife
Patrick Ness
One night, George Duncan - decent man, a good man - is woken by a noise in his garden. Impossibly,
a great white crane has tumbled to earth, shot through its wing by an arrow. Unexpectedly moved,
George helps the bird, and from the moment he watches it fly off, his life is transformed. The next day,
a kind but enigmatic woman walks into George's shop. Suddenly a new world opens up for George,
and one night she starts to tell him the most extraordinary story.Wise, romantic, magical and funny,
The Crane Wife is a hymn to the creative imagination and a celebration of the disruptive and
redemptive power of love.
Fiction
320 pages, Pub.2013
Crazy rich Asians
Kevin Kwan
Crazy Rich Asians is the outrageously funny debut novel about three super-rich, pedigreed Chinese
families and the gossip, backbiting, and scheming that occurs when the heir to one of the most
massive fortunes in Asia brings home his ABC (American-born Chinese) girlfriend to the wedding of
the season. When Rachel Chu agrees to spend the summer in Singapore with her boyfriend, Nicholas
Young, she envisions a humble family home, long drives to explore the island, and quality time with
the man she might one day marry. What she doesn't know is that Nick's family home happens to look
like a palace, that she'll ride in more private planes than cars, and that with one of Asia's most eligible
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bachelors on her arm, Rachel might as well have a target on her back. Initiated into a world of
dynastic splendor beyond imagination, Rachel meets Astrid, the It Girl of Singapore society; Eddie,
whose family practically lives in the pages of the Hong Kong socialite magazines; and Eleanor, Nick's
formidable mother, a woman who has very strong feelings about who her son should--and should not-marry. Uproarious, addictive, and filled with jaw-dropping opulence, Crazy Rich Asians is an insider's
look at the Asian JetSet; a perfect depiction of the clash between old money and new money;
between Overseas Chinese and Mainland Chinese; and a fabulous novel about what it means to be
young, in love, and gloriously, crazily rich.
Fiction
403 pages; Pub 2013
Crossing to safety
Wallace Stegner
Called a “magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom” by Howard Frank Mosher in The
Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself
as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives,
loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet
majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.
Literary Fiction
368 pages; Pub 1987
The Curious Incident of the dog in the night-time
Mark Haddon
Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every
prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions.
He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow
This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighbourhood
dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.
Fiction
224 Pages; Pub 2003
Winner: Whitbread Book of the Year
Cutting for stone
Abraham Verghese
Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a devout young nun, leaves the south Indian state of Kerala in 1947 for a
missionary post in Yemen. During the arduous sea voyage, she saves the life of an English doctor
bound for Ethiopia, Thomas Stone, who becomes a key player in her destiny when they meet up
again at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa. Seven years later, Sister Praise dies birthing twin boys:
Shiva and Marion, the latter narrating his own and his brother's long, dramatic, biblical story set
against the backdrop of political turmoil in Ethiopia, the life of the hospital compound in which they
grow up and the love story of their adopted parents, both doctors at Missing. The boys become
doctors as well and Verghese's weaving of the practice of medicine into the narrative is fascinating
even as the story bobs and weaves with the power and coincidences of the best 19th-century novel.
Fiction
Pub 2009; 541 Pages
The Danish Girl
David Ebershoff
Loosely based on the life of Danish painter Einar Wegener who, in 1931, became the first man to
undergo a sex-change operation, The Danish Girl borrows the bare bones of his story as a starting
point for an exploration of how Wegener's decisions affected the people around him. Chief among
these is his Californian wife, Greta, also a painter, who unwittingly sets her husband's feet on the path
to transformation when, trying to finish a portrait, she asks Einar to stand in for her female sitter.
Putting on her clothes and shoes, he is shaken...
Fiction
Pub 1999; 310 Pages
The Day We Met
Rowan Coleman
For fans of Jojo Moyes's Me Before You comes a beautifully written, heartwarming novel about
mothers and daughters, husbands and wives. The Day We Met asks: Can you love someone you
don't remember falling in love with? A gorgeous husband, two beautiful children, a job she loves-Claire's got it all. And then some. But lately, her mother hovers more than a helicopter, her husband,
Greg, seems like a stranger, and her kids are like characters in a movie. Three-year-old Esther's
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growing up in the blink of an eye, and twenty-year-old Caitlin, with her jet-black hair and clothes to
match, looks like she's about to join a punk band--and seems to be hiding something. Most
concerning, however, is the fact that Claire is losing her memory, including that of the day she met
Greg. A chance meeting with a handsome stranger one rainy day sets Claire wondering whether she
and Greg still belong together: She knows she should love him, but she can't always remember why.
In search of an answer, Claire fills the pages of a blank book Greg gives her with private memories
and keepsakes, jotting down beginnings and endings and everything in between. The book becomes
the story of Claire--her passions, her sorrows, her joys, her adventures in a life that refuses to
surrender to a fate worse than dying: disappearing.
Fiction
Pub 2015; 334 Pages
Defending Jacob
William Landay
Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney for two decades. He is respected. Admired in the
courtroom. Happy at home with the loves of his life: his wife, Laurie, and their teenage son, Jacob.
Then Andy's quiet suburb is stunned by a shocking crime: a young boy stabbed to death in a leafy
park. And an even greater shock: The accused is Andy's own son--shy, awkward, mysterious Jacob.
Andy believes in Jacob's innocence. Any parent would. But the pressure mounts. Damning evidence.
Doubt. A faltering marriage. The neighbors' contempt. A murder trial that threatens to obliterate
Andy's family. It is the ultimate test for any parent: How far would you go to protect your child? It is a
test of devotion. A test of how well a parent can know a child. For Andy Barber, a man with an iron will
and a dark secret, it is a test of guilt and innocence in the deepest sense. How far would you go?
Fiction
435 Pages; Pub 2013
The Descendants
Kaui Hart Hemmings
A descendant of one of Hawaii's largest landowners, Matt King finds his luck changed when his funloving, flighty wife Joanie falls into a coma, victim of a boating accident. Matt is left in sole charge of
his two daughters, teenage ex-model and recovering drug addict Alex, and Scottie, a feisty ten-yearold. And then Matt discovers Joanie has been having an affair. Deciding to seek out Joanie's lover so
that he too has a chance to say his goodbyes, Matt takes to the road with his daughters on a
memorable journey of painful revelations and unexpected humour...
Fiction
283 Pages; Pub 2008
Digging to America
Anne Tyler
Anne Tyler's richest, most deeply searching novel-a story about what it is to be an American, and
about Iranian-born Maryam Yazdan, who, after 35 years in this country, must finally come to terms
with her "outsiderness." Two families, who would otherwise never have come together, meet by
chance at the Baltimore airport - the Donaldsons, a very American couple, and the Yazdans,
Maryam's fully assimilated son and his attractive Iranian wife. Each couple is awaiting the arrival of an
adopted infant daughter from Korea. After the instant babies from distant Asia are delivered, Bitsy
Donaldson impulsively invites the Yazdans to celebrate: an "arrival party" that from then on is
repeated every year as the two families become more and more deeply intertwined. Even Maryam is
drawn in - up to a point. When she finds herself being courted by Bitsy Donaldson's recently widowed
father, all the values she cherishes - her traditions, her privacy, her otherness-are suddenly
threatened. A luminous novel brimming with subtle, funny, and tender observations that immerse us in
the challenges of both sides of the American story.
Fiction
292 Pages; Pub 2007
Disgrace
J. M. Coetzee
A divorced, middle-aged English professor has an impulsive affair with a student. The affair sours
and he is denounced and summoned before a committee of inquiry. Willing to admit his guilt, but
refusing to yield to the pressure to repent publicly, he resigns and retreats to his daughter Lucy’s
isolated small holding. For a time, his daughter’s influence and natural rhythms of the farm promise to
harmonise his discordant life. But the balance of power in the country is shifting. He and Lucy become
victims of a savage and disturbing attack which brings into relief all the faultlines in their relationship.
Man Booker Prize Winner
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220 Pages; Pub 1999
Don’t ask why he Died
Vincent Matthews
English journalist Walter Burstall gets into a lot of trouble trying to solve the mystery of a sub-editor’s
suicide in a Durban newspaper office. Martin Johnson shot himself sitting at his desk the day Walter
was due to leave South Africa. He’s offered the dead man’s job. And he takes it. But he couldn’t have
predicted the dangers he’d face in a nation tormented with racial conflict.
Walter becomes infatuated with a Coloured woman who’d been the dead man’s lover. Does she have
the answers to the mystery?
Walter’s getting to know too much when a top cop warns him: “You should leave South Africa. Your
life’s in danger.”
This novel is set in apartheid South Africa where the author worked on newspapers.
The story uncovers a dangerous mix of racism, corruption in politics and big business. And sexual
obsessions
Fiction
325 pages; Pub 2014
The elegance of the hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
Renee Michel is the 54-year-old concierge of a luxury Paris apartment building. Her exterior (short,
ugly, and plump) and demeanor (poor, discreet, and insignificant) belie her keen, questing mind and
profound erudition. Paloma Josse is a 12-year-old genius who behaves as everyone expects her to
behave: a mediocre pre-teen high on adolescent subculture, a good but not outstanding student, an
obedient if obstinate daughter. She plans to kill herself on the sixteenth of June, her thirteenth
birthday.
Both Renee and Paloma hide their true talents and finest qualities from the bourgeois families around
them, until a wealthy Japanese gentleman named Ozu moves into building. Only he sees through
them, perceiving the secret that haunts Renee, winning Paloma’s trust, and helping the two discover
their kindred souls. Moving, funny, tender, and triumphant, Barbery’s novel exalts the quiet victories of
the inconspicuous among us.
An enchanting New York Times and international bestseller and award-winner about life, art,
literature, philosophy, culture, class, privilege, and power.
France – Fiction
320 Pages; Pub 2006
Elizabeth is missing
Emma Healy
What if you could remember just one thing? Maud is forgetful. She makes a cup of tea and doesn't
remember to drink it. She goes to the shops and forgets why she went. Back home she finds the
place horribly unrecognizable - just like she sometimes thinks her daughter Helen is a total stranger.
But there's one thing Maud is sure of: her friend Elizabeth is missing. The note in her pocket tells her
so. And no matter who tells her to stop going on about it, to leave it alone, to shut up, Maud will get to
the bottom of it. Because somewhere in Maud's damaged mind lies the answer to an unsolved
seventy-year-old mystery. One everyone has forgotten about. Everyone, except Maud...
Fiction
274 Pages; Pub 2014
Empty mansions : the mysterious life of Huguette Clark and the loss of one of
the world's greatest fortunes
Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.
When Pulitzer Prize - winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale,
unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history.
Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the
nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a
reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age
104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in
California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room,
despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her
fortune, or controlled by those managing her money?; Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark's
cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her.
Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of
extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world. nbsp; Huguette was
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the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a
controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in
New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by
Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But
wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to
quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else. The
Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in
Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a
distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the
terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second
voyage of the Titanic .Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her
intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her
French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to
inherit Huguette's copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, Empty
Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age
who lived life on her own terms.
Non Fiction
456 Pages; Pub 2013
Eucalyptus
Murray Bail
On a property in New South Wales, a widower named Holland lives with his daughter, Ellen. Over the
years as she grows into a beautiful woman, Holland plants hundreds of different eucalyptus trees on
his land, filling the landscape, making a virtual outdoor museum of trees. When Ellen is nineteen,
Holland announces that she may only marry the man who can correctly name the species of each and
every gum tree on his property. A strange contest begins, and Ellen is left unmoved by her suitors
until she chances on a strange young man resting under the Coolibah tree whose stories will amaze
and dazzle her. A modern fairy tale, and an unforgettable love story, that bristles with spiky truths and
unexpected wisdom about art, feminine beauty, landscape, and language.
Literary Fiction
264 Pages; Pub 1998
Australian Author
Winner: Commonwealth Writers Prize
Eugenia : a true story of adversity, tragedy, crime and courage
Mark Tedeschi
The true crime account of Eugenia Falleni, a woman who in 1920 was charged with the murder of her
wife. Eugenia had lived in Australia for twenty-two years as a man and during that time officially
married twice. She lived a full married life with her first wife, Annie, for four years before Annie
realised that her husband was a woman. Even after Annie knew, they lived together for eight months
before they went on a bush picnic, when Annie mysteriously died. Her body was not identified for
almost three years, and during this time Eugenia married again, this time to Lizzie. When Eugenia
was finally arrested and charged with Annie's murder, the police attempted to tell Lizzie that her
husband was a woman. She laughed at them - she was so convinced that her husband was a man
that she thought she was pregnant to him.
Biography
260 pages; Pub 2012-12-19
Australian Author
Everything I never Told You
Celeste Ng
Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet . . . So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about
a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and
James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother's bright blue eyes and her father's
jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue-in Marilyn's case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James's case that
Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party. When Lydia's
body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family
together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly
pulling them apart. James, consumed by guilt, sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his
marriage. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to find a responsible party, no matter what
the cost. Lydia's older brother, Nathan, is certain that the neighborhood bad boy Jack is somehow
involved. But it's the youngest of the family--Hannah--who observes far more than anyone realizes
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and who may be the only one who knows the truth about what happened. A profoundly moving story
of family, history, and the meaning of home, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping pageturner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a
family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands
and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another
Fiction
260 pages; Pub 2014
Extremely loud and incredibly close
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his bestselling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Now, with humor, tenderness, and awe, he confronts
the traumas of our recent history. What he discovers is solace in that most human quality,
imagination. Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor,
jeweler, pacifist, correspondent with Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr. He is nine years old. And he
is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to find the lock
that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. An
inspired innocent, Oskar is alternately endearing, exasperating, and hilarious as he careens from
Central Park to Coney Island to Harlem on his search. Along the way he is always dreaming up
inventions to keep those he loves safe from harm. What about a birdseed shirt to let you fly away?
What if you could actually hear everyone's heartbeat? His goal is hopeful, but the past speaks a loud
warning in stories of those who've lost loved ones before. As Oskar roams New York, he encounters a
motley assortment of humanity who are all survivors in their own way. He befriends a 103-year-old
war reporter, a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building, and lovers enraptured or
scorned. Ultimately, Oskar ends his journey where it began, at his father's grave. But now he is
accompanied by the silent stranger who has been renting the spare room of his grandmother's
apartment. They are there to dig up his father's empty coffin
Fiction
Pages; Pub 2005
The Eye of the Sheep
Sofie Laguna
Meet Jimmy Flick. He's not like other kids - he's both too fast and too slow. He sees too much,
and too little. Jimmy's mother Paula is the only one who can manage him. She teaches him how
to count sheep so that he can fall asleep. She holds him tight enough to stop his cells spinning. It
is only Paula who can keep Jimmy out of his father's way. But when Jimmy's world falls apart, he
has to navigate the unfathomable world on his own, and make things right. In the tradition of
'Room' and 'The Lovely Bones', here is a surprising and brilliant novel from one of our finest
writers.
Fiction
311 Pages; Pub 2014
Australian Author
Eyrie
Tim Winton
Tom Keely's reputation is in ruins. And that's the upside. Divorced and unemployed, he's lost faith in
everything precious to him. Holed up in a grim highrise, cultivating his newfound isolation, Keely looks
down at a society from which he's retired hurt and angry. He's done fighting the good fight, and well
past caring. But even in his seedy flat, ducking the neighbours, he's not safe from entanglement. All it
takes is an awkward encounter in the lobby. A woman from his past, a boy the likes of which he's
never met before. Two strangers leading a life beyond his experience and into whose orbit he falls
despite himself. What follows is a heart-stopping, groundbreaking novel for our times - funny,
confronting, exhilarating and haunting. Inhabited by unforgettable characters, Eyrie asks how, in an
impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing.
Fiction
433 pages; Pub 2013
Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff
Every story has two sides. Every relationship has two perspectives. And sometimes, it turns out, the
key to a great marriage is not its truths but its secrets. At the core of this rich, expansive, layered
novel, Lauren Groff presents the story of one such marriage over the course of twenty-four years. At
19
age twenty-two, Lotto and Mathilde are tall, glamorous, madly in love and destined for greatness. A
decade later, their marriage is still the envy of their friends, but with an electric thrill we understand
that things are even more complicated and remarkable than they have seemed. With stunning
revelations and multiple threads, and in prose that is vibrantly alive and original, Groff delivers a
deeply satisfying novel about love, art, creativity and power that is unlike anything that has come
before it. Profound, surprising, propulsive and emotionally riveting, it stirs both the mind and the heart.
Fiction
pages; Pub 2015
The Finkler Queston
Howard Jacobson
Funny, furious and unflinching, The Finkler Question is a scorching story of friendship and loss,
exclusion and belonging, and of the wisdom and humanity of maturity.
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a
popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly
relationship, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other — or with their former teacher, Libor
Sevick. Both Libor and Sam are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and
unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s
apartment. It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a
time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation
of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it.
Literary Fiction;
207 Pages; Pub 2010
Man Booker Prize Winner
Fishermen,The
Chigozie Obioma
In a Nigerian town in the mid 1990's, four brothers encounter a madman whose mystic prophecy
of violence threatens the core of their close-knit family. Told from the point of view of nine year
old Benjamin, the youngest of four brothers, THE FISHERMEN is the Cain and Abel-esque story
of an unforgettable childhood in 1990's Nigeria, in the small town of Akure. When their strict
father has to travel to a distant city for work, the brothers take advantage of his extended
absence to skip school and go fishing. At the ominous, forbidden nearby river, they meet a
dangerous local madman who persuades the oldest of the boys that he is destined to be killed by
one of his siblings. What happens next is an almost mythic event whose impact-both tragic and
redemptive-will transcend the lives and imaginations of its characters and its readers. Dazzling
and viscerally powerful, The Fishermen never leaves Akure but the story it tells has enormous
universal appeal. Seen through the prism of one family's destiny, this is an essential novel about
Africa with all of its contradictions-economic, political, and religious-and the epic beauty of its
own culture. With this bold debut, Chigozie Obioma emerges as one of the most original new
voices of modern African literature, echoing its older generation's masterful storytelling with a
contemporary fearlessness and purpose.
Literary Fiction
297 Pages; Pub 2015
The Fishing Fleet
Anne De Courcy
From the late 19th century, when the Raj was at its height, many of Britain's best and brightest young
men went out to India to work as administrators, soldiers and businessmen. With the advent of steam
travel and the opening of the Suez Canal, countless young women, suffering at the lack of eligible
men in Britain, followed in their wake. This amorphous band was composed of daughters returning
after their English education, girls invited to stay with married sisters or friends and yet others whose
declared or undeclared goal was simply to find a husband. They were known as
the Fishing Fleet and this book is their story, hitherto untold.
Non-Fiction
335 Pages; Pub 2012
Five Bells
Gail Jones
On a radiant day in Sydney, four adults converge on Circular Quay, site of the iconic Opera House
and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Crowds of tourists mix with the locals, enjoying the glorious
surroundings and the play of light on water. But each of the four carries a complicated history from
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elsewhere; each is haunted by past intimacies, secrets and guilt: Ellie is preoccupied by her sexual
experiences as a girl, James by a tragedy for which he feels responsible, Catherine by the loss of her
beloved brother in Dublin and Pei Xing by her imprisonment during China’s Cultural Revolution. Told
over the course of a single Saturday, Five Bells describes four lives which chime and resonate,
sharing mysterious patterns and symbols. But it is a fifth person, a child, whose presence at the Quay
haunts the day and who will overshadow everything that unfolds. By night-time, when Sydney is
drenched in a rainstorm, each life has been transformed. Five Bells is a novel of singular beauty and
power by one of Australia’s most gifted novelists
Australian Fiction
216 Pages; Pub 2011
Australian Author
Flesh Wounds
Richard Glover
A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could
really be his family. Richard Glover's favourite dinner party game is called 'Who's Got the Weirdest
Parents?'. It's a game he always thinks he'll win. There was his mother, a deluded snob, who made
up large swathes of her past and who ran away with Richard's English teacher, a Tolkien devotee,
nudist and stuffed-toy collector. There was his father, a distant alcoholic, who ran through a gamut of
wives, yachts and failed dreams. And there was Richard himself, a confused teenager, vulnerable to
strange men, trying to find a family he could belong to. As he eventually accepted, the only way to
make sense of the present was to go back to the past - but beware of what you might find there. Truth
can leave wounds - even if they are only flesh wounds. Part poignant family memoir, part rollicking
venture into a 1970s Australia, this is a book for anyone who's wondered if their family is the oddest
one on the planet. The answer: 'No'. There is always something stranger out there.
Memoir
Pub 2015; 285 Pages
Foal’s bread
Gillian Mears
A love story of impossible beauty and sadness, it is also a chronicle of dreams 'turned inside out', and
miracles that never last, framed against a world both tender and unspeakably hard. The sound of
horses' hooves turns hollow on the farms west of Wirri. If a man can still ride, if he hasn't totally lost
the use of his legs, if he hasn't died to the part of his heart that understands such things, then he
should go for a gallop. At the very least he should stand at the road by the river imagining that he's
pushing a horse up the steep hill that leads to the house on the farm once known as One Tree. Set in
hardscrabble farming country and around the country show high-jumping circuit that prevailed in rural
New South Wales prior to the Second World War, FOAL'S BREAD tells the story of two generations
of the Nancarrow family and their fortunes as dictated by the vicissitudes of the land. It is a love story
of impossible beauty and sadness, a chronicle of dreams 'turned inside out', and miracles that never
last, framed against a world both tender and unspeakably hard. Written in luminous prose and with an
aching affinity for the landscape the book describes, FOAL'S BREAD is the work of a born writer at
the height of her considerable powers.
Literary Fiction
361 Pages; Pub 2011
Australian Author
A fortunate life
A.B. Facey
"I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled
by it when I look back.''
This is the story of Albert Barnet Facey from his very beginning in 1894 in Maidstone in Victoria,
through his extremely rough childhood and working years as a young man through to his service in
WW1 and life afterwards.
Facey, who had no formal education, taught himself to read and write. He made the first notes of his
life soon after World War I, and filled notebooks with his accounts of his experiences.
Finally, on his children's urging, he submitted the hand-written manuscript to the Fremantle Arts
Centre Press.
He died in 1982, nine months after A Fortunate Life had been published to wide acclaim.
Memoir
Pub 1981
Franklin and Eleanor : an extraordinary marriage
21
Hazel Rowley
Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt's marriage is one of the most celebrated and scrutinized
partnerships in presidential history. It raised eyebrows in their lifetimes and has only become more
controversial since their deaths. From FDR's lifelong romance with Lucy Mercer to Eleanor's
purported lesbianism - and many scandals in between - the American public has never tired of
speculating about the ties that bound these two headstrong individuals. Some claim that Eleanor
sacrificed her personal happiness to accommodate FDR's needs; others claim that the marriage was
nothing more than a gracious facade for political convenience. No one has told the full story until now.
Non Fiction
345 pages; Pub 2012
The forgotten garden
Kate Morton
A foundling, an old book of dark fairy tales, a secret garden, an aristocratic family, a love denied, a
mystery — The Forgotten Garden is a captivating, atmospheric and compulsively readable story of
the past, secrets, family and memory from the international best-selling author Kate Morton.
Cassandra is lost, alone and grieving. Her much loved grandmother, Nell, has just died and
Cassandra, her life already shaken by a tragic accident ten years ago, feels like she has lost
everything dear to her. But an unexpected and mysterious bequest from Nell turns Cassandra’s life
upside down and ends up challenging everything she thought she knew about herself and her family.
Inheriting a book of dark and intriguing fairytales written by Eliza Makepeace, the Victorian authoress
who disappeared mysteriously in the early twentieth century, Cassandra takes her courage in both
hands to follow in the footsteps of Nell on a quest to find out the truth about their history, their family
and their past little knowing that in the process, she will also discover a new life for herself.
Fiction
494 Pages; Pub 2008
Australian Author
Frog Music
Emma Donoghue
Summer of 1876: San Francisco is in the fierce grip of a record-breaking heatwave and a smallpox
epidemic. Through the window of a railroad saloon, a young woman called Jenny Bonnet is shot
dead. The survivor, her friend Blanche Beunon, is a French burlesque dancer. Over the next three
days, she will risk everything to bring Jenny's murderer to justice--if he doesn't track her down first.
The story Blanche struggles to piece together is one of free-love bohemians, desperate paupers and
arrogant millionaires; of jealous men, icy women and damaged children. It's the secret life of Jenny
herself, a notorious character who breaks the law every morning by getting dressed: a charmer as
slippery as the frogs she hunts.
Fiction
403 Pages; Pub 2014
The Fry Chronicles
Stephen Fry
Stephen Fry is not just a multi-award-winning comedian and actor, but also an author, director and
presenter. Much loved by the public and his peers, Stephen Fry is one of the most influential cultural
forces in the UK. This dazzling memoir promises to be a courageously frank, honest and poignant
read. It will detail some of the most turbulent and least well known years of his life with writing that will
excite you, make you laugh uproariously, move you, inform you and, above all, surprise you.
Memoir
446 Pages; Pub 2011
Girl at War
Sara Novic
Zagreb, summer of 1991. Ten-year-old Ana Juric is a carefree tomboy who runs the streets of
Croatia’s capital with her best friend, Luka, takes care of her baby sister, Rahela, and idolizes her
father. But as civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, soccer games and school lessons are
supplanted by sniper fire and air raid drills. When tragedy suddenly strikes, Ana is lost to a world of
guerilla warfare and child soldiers; a daring escape plan to America becomes her only chance for
survival.
Part war saga, part coming of age tale, part story of love and friendship, Girl at War is a powerful
debut novel.
Fiction
22
320 Pages; Pub 2015
The Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins
Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller " The Girl on the Train has more fun with unreliable narration
than any chiller since Gone Girl . . . . [It] is liable to draw a large, bedazzled readership."- The New
York Times "Like its train, the story blasts through the stagnation of these lives in suburban London
and the reader cannot help but turn pages."- The Boston Globe " Gone Girl fans will devour this
psychological thriller."- People A debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look
at other people's lives. Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles
down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her
to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She's even started to feel like she knows
them. "Jess and Jason," she calls them. Their life-as she sees it-is perfect. Not unlike the life she
recently lost. And then she sees something shocking. It's only a minute until the train moves on, but
it's enough. Now everything's changed. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel offers what she knows to
the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of
everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good? Compulsively readable, The Girl on the
Train is an emotionally immersive, Hitchcockian thriller and an electrifying debut.
Fiction
323 Pages; Pub 2015
Girl with a pearl earring
Tracy Chevalier
th
Griet, the daughter of a tilemaker in 17 century Holland, obtains her first job, as a servant in
Vermeer’s household. This book shows the reader, through Griet’s eyes, the family, the society of the
town of Delft, and life with an obsessive genius. Griet loves being drawn into his artistic life, but the
cost to her own survival may be high.
Historical Fiction
248 pages; Pub 1999
The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist's journey from the deserted and dusty mining
towns of the American Southwest, to an antique filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls
narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, 'brilliant' but alcoholic parents. At
the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her
younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilisation her parents sought to
escape, Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the 'mundane, middle class existence' she had
always craved. In her apartment, overlooked by 'a portrait of someone else's ancestor' she recounts
poignant remembered images of star watching with her father, juxtaposed with recollections of
irregular meals, accidents and police-car chases and reveals her complex feelings of shame, guilt,
pity and pride toward her parents.
Memoir
304 Pages; Pub 2006
Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee
Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to
her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was
discovered in late 2014.
Go Set a Watchman features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years
later. Returning home to Maycomb to visit her father, Jean Louise Finch—Scout—struggles with
issues both personal and political, involving Atticus, society, and the small Alabama town that shaped
her.
Exploring how the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird are adjusting to the turbulent events
transforming mid-1950s America, Go Set a Watchman casts a fascinating new light on Harper Lee’s
enduring classic. Moving, funny and compelling, it stands as a magnificent novel in its own right.
Fiction
304 pages; Pub 2015
A God in Ruins
Kate Atkinson
23
Kate Atkinson’s dazzling Life After Life , the bestselling adult book this year to date in the UK,
explored the possibility of infinite chances, as Ursula Todd lived through the turbulent events of
the last century again and again. In A God in Ruins , Atkinson turns her focus on Ursula’s
beloved younger brother Teddy ‘would-be poet, RAF bomber pilot, husband and father’ as he
navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. For all Teddy endures in battle, his
greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have.
Fiction
394 pages; Pub 2015
The God of small things
Arundhati Roy
Set against a background of political turbulence in Kerala, Southern India, ‘The God of Small Things’
tells the story of twins Esthappen and Rahel. Amongst the vats of banana jam and heaps of
peppercorns in their grandmother’s factory, they try to craft a childhood for themselves amidst what
constitutes their family — their lonely, lovely mother, their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical
Marxist and bottom-pincher) and their avowed enemy Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent
grand-aunt). Arundhati Roy has written an astonishingly rich, fertile novel, teeming with life, colour,
heart-stopping language, wry comedy and a hint of magical realism.
Fiction
Gold
Chris Cleeve
Usually, this is where we'd tell you what this book is about. But with Chris Cleave, it's a bit different.
Because if you've read THE OTHER HAND or INCENDIARY, you'll know that what his books are
about is only part of the story - what really matters is how they make you feel. GOLD is about the
limits of human endurance, both physical and emotional. It will make you cry. GOLD is about what
drives us to succeed - and what we choose to sacrifice for success. It will make you feel glad to be
alive. GOLD is about the struggles we all face every day; the conflict between winning on others'
terms, and triumphing on your own. It will make you count your blessings. GOLD is a story told as
only Chris Cleave could tell it. And once you begin, it will be a heart-pounding race to the finish.
Fiction
366 pages; Pub 2012
Golden Age, The
Joan London
This is a story of resilience, the irrepressible, enduring nature of love, and the fragility of life. It is 1954
and thirteen-year-old Frank Gold, refugee from wartime Hungary, is learning to walk again after
contracting polio in Australia. At the Golden Age Children's Polio Convalescent Hospital in Perth, he
sees Elsa, a fellow-patient, and they form a forbidden, passionate bond. The Golden Age becomes
the little world that reflects the larger one, where everything occurs, love and desire, music, death,
and poetry. Where children must learn that they are alone, even within their families. Written in Joan
London's customary clear-eyed prose, The Golden Age evokes a time past and a yearning for deep
connection. It is a rare and precious gem of a book from one of Australia's finest novelists.
Fiction
Australian Author
242 pages; Pub 2014
Golden Boys, The
Sonya Hartnett
With their father, there's always a catch . . .Colt Jenson and his younger brother Bastian have moved
to a new, working-class suburb. The Jensons are different. Their father, Rex, showers them with gifts
- toys, bikes, all that glitters most - and makes them the envy of the neighbourhood.To Freya Kiley
and the other local kids, the Jensons are a family from a magazine, and Rex a hero - successful,
attentive, attractive, always there to lend a hand. But to Colt he's an impossible figure in a different
way: unbearable, suffocating. Has Colt got Rex wrong, or has he seen something in his father that will
destroy their fragile new lives?
Fiction
Australian Author
238 pages; Pub 2014
The goldfinch
Donna Tartt
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A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of
his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to
make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things
that reminds him of his mother: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo
into the art underworld. Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey
through present-day America, and a drama of almost unbearable acuity and power. It is a story of loss
and obsession, survival and self-invention, and the enormous power of art.
Fiction
771 Pages; Pub 2014
Gone girl
Gillian Flynn
On the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, Nick's wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police
immediately suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from
him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says
they aren't his. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone. So what really did happen
to Nick's beautiful wife?
Suspense Fiction
395 Pages; Pub 2012
Gossip
Beth Gutcheon
The owner of a small high-end dress shop on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Loviah "Lovie" French is
the one to whom certain women turn when they want to dish in the dressing room--including Lovie's
two best friends since boarding school, Dinah Wainwright and Avis Metcalf. Outspoken Dinah made a
name for herself as a columnist covering New York's most fabulous; shy, proper Avis rose to
prominence in the art world with her quiet manners and hard work. Despite their deep affection for
Lovie, they have been allergic to each other for decades, uneasy acquaintances who are unwillingly
bound to each other when Dinah's favorite son and Avis's only daughter fall in love. At the center of
their orbit is Lovie, who knows everyone's secrets and manages them as wisely as she can. Which is
not wisely enough, as things turn out--a fact that will have a shattering effect on all their lives.
Fiction
278 Pages; Pub 2012
The great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby brilliantly captures the disillusion of a society obsessed with wealth and status.
Young, handsome and fabulously rich, Jay Gatsby appears to have it all, yet he yearns for the one
thing that will always be out of his reach, the absence of which renders his life of glittering parties and
bright young things ultimately hollow. Gatsby’s tragic pursuit of his dream is often cited as the Great
American Novel.
Classic Fiction
240 Pages; Pub 2008
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Mary Ann Shaffer
January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet
Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a
man she’s never met, a native of the island of Guernsey, who has come across her name written
inside a book by Charles Lamb…. As Juliet and her new correspondent exchange letters, Juliet is
drawn into the world of this man and his friends—and what a wonderfully eccentric world it is. The
Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society—born as a spur-of-the-moment alibi when its
members were discovered breaking curfew by the Germans occupying their island—boasts a
charming, funny, deeply human cast of characters, from pig farmers to phrenologists, literature lovers
all. Written with warmth and humour as a series of letters, this novel is a celebration of the written
word in all its guises, and of finding connection in the most surprising ways.
Historical Fiction
265 Pages; Pub 2008
H is for Hawk
Helen MacDonald
As a child, Helen Macdonald was determined to become a falconer, learning the arcane terminology
and reading all the classic books. Years later, when her father died and she was struck deeply by
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grief, she became obsessed with the idea of training her own goshawk. She bought Mabel for
GBP800 on a Scottish quayside and took her home to Cambridge, ready to embark on the long,
strange business of trying to train this wildest of animals. H is for Hawk is an unflinchingly honest
account of Macdonald's struggle with grief during the difficult process of the hawk's taming and her
own untaming. This is a book about memory, nature and nation, and how it might be possible to
reconcile death with life and love.
Memoir
300 Pages; Pub 2014
Half the sky: turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting team, husband and wife Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, take
us on a journey through Africa and Asia to meet an extraordinary array of exceptional women
struggling against terrible circumstances. More girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely
because they are girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century combined. More
girls are killed in this routine ‘gendercide’ in any one decade than people were slaughtered in all the
genocides of the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the central moral challenge was slavery.
In the twentieth, it was totalitarianism. In the twenty-first, Kristof and WuDunn demonstrate, it will be
the struggle for gender equality in the developing world. Fierce, moral, pragmatic, full of amazing
stories of courage and inspiration, HALF THE SKY is essential reading for every global citizen.
Non Fiction - Women’s Rights
328 Pages; Pub 2010
Hand me down World
Lloyd Jones
This is a story about a woman. And the truck driver who mistook her for a prostitute. The old
man she robbed and the hunters who smuggled her across the border. The woman whose
name she stole, the wife who turned a blind eye. This is the story of a mother searching for
her child. This is a novel you cannot stop thinking about.
By the author of the Commonwealth Writers Prize-winning novel Mr Pip.
Literary Fiction
313 Pages; Pub 2010
The Handmaid’s tale
Margaret Attwood
In the world of the near future, who will control women’s bodies?
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his
wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because
women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the
Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other
Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable.
Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when
she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to
knowledge. But all of that is gone now….
Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once scathing
satire, dire warning, and tour de force
Speculative Fiction
324 Pages; Pub 1985
Nominated: Booker prize 1986
Hannah & Emil
Belinda Castles
Emil and Hannah live their lives amid the turmoil of 20th-century history. Emil, a German veteran of
the Great War, has returned home to a disturbed nation. As inflation and unemployment edge the
country near collapse, Emil's involvement with the resistance ultimately forces him from his family and
his home. Hannah, soaked in the many languages of her upbringing as a Russian Jew in the West
End of London and intent on experiencing the world, leaves home for Europe, travelling into a
continent headed again towards total war. In Brussels, she meets the devastated Emil, who has just
crossed the border on foot from Nazi Germany, leaving tragedy in his wake. All too briefly, they make
a life in England before war strikes, and Emil, an enemy alien, is interned and then sent away.
Hannah, determined to find him, prepares herself for a lonely and dangerous journey across the seas.
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Hannah and Emil is a moving love story riven by the powerful currents of history - an inspiring story of
courage, conviction, and love.
Historical Fiction
410 pages; Pub 2012
Australian Author
The Happiest Refugee
Ahn Do
Ahn Do nearly didn’t make it to Australia. His family came close to losing their lives when they
escaped war torn Vietnam in an overcrowded boat. But neither murderous pirates nor the threat of
death by hunger, disease or dehydration could quench their desire to make a better life. Marked by
tragedy, humour and heartache, this story will amuse and move you.
Biography
229 Pages; 2010
Australian Author
Winner: 2011 Australian Book of the Year, Winner:
Indie Book of the Year Award 2011
The Hare with Amber eyes
Edmund du Waal
264 wood and ivory carvings, none of them larger than a matchbox: potter Edmund de Waal was
entranced when he first encountered the collection in the Tokyo apartment of his great uncle Iggie.
Later, when Edmund inherited the netsuke, they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have
imagined. The Ephrussis came from Odessa, and at one time were the largest grain exporters in the
world; in the 1870s, Charles Ephrussi was part of a wealthy new generation settling in Paris. Marcel
Proust was briefly his secretary and used Charles as the model for the aesthete Swann in
Remembrance of Things Past. Charles’s passion was collecting; the netsuke, bought when Japanese
objets were all the rage in the salons, were sent as a wedding present to his banker cousin in
Vienna.Later, three children (including a young Ignace) would play with the netsuke as history
reverberated around them. The Anschluss and Second World War swept the Ephrussis to the brink of
oblivion. Almost all that remained of their vast empire was the netsuke collection, smuggled out of the
huge Viennese palace (then occupied by Hitler’s theorist on the Jewish Question), one piece at a
time, in the pocket of a loyal maid and hidden in a simple straw mattress. In this stunningly original
memoir, Edmund de Waal travels the world to stand in the great buildings his forebears inhabited. He
traces the network of a remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. And, in prose
as elegant and precise as the netsuke themselves, he tells the story of a unique collection which
passed from hand to hand and which, in a final twist of fate, found its way home to Japan
Memoir
354Pages; pub 2010
Winner: Costa Book Award for Biography
The Help
Kathryn Stockett
In Jackson, Mississippi, there are lines that are not crossed. Black maids raise the white children, but
no one trusts them not to steal the silver. Aibileen is a black maid, raising her seventeenth white child,
but with a bitter heart after the death of her son.
Historical Fiction
451 Pages; Pub 2009
Homecoming
Bernhard Schlink
As a child raised by his mother in post-war Germany, Peter Debauer becomes fascinated by a story
he discovers in the proof pages of a novel edited by his grandparents. It is the tale of a German
prisoner of war who escapes from a Russian camp and braves countless dangers to return home to a
wife who believes him to be dead. But the novel is incomplete and Peter becomes obsessed by the
question of what happened when the soldier and his wife met again.Years later, the adult Peter
remembers the novel and embarks on a search for the missing pages that soon becomes a
mysterious search for his own father, a German soldier whom he always believed was killed in the
war.
Fiction
351 Pages; Pub 2008
Hotel on the corner of bitter and sweet
Jamie Ford
27
In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and
Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to
Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an
incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to
internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol.
This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s
world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in
China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier
Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American
student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of
friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World
ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps,
she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other
will be kept.
Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty
basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object
whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words
that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him
and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made
many years ago.
Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of
Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko,
Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and
the human heart.
Fiction
Pub 2009; 301 Pages
How to be a woman
Caitlin Moran
It's a good time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill, and we haven't been burnt as witches
since 1727. However, a few nagging questions do remain... Why are we supposed to get Brazilians?
Should we use Botox? Do men secretly hate us? And why does everyone ask you when you're going
to have a baby? Part memoir, part rant, Caitlin answers the questions that every modern woman is
asking.
Non Fiction
312 Pages; Pub. 2012
The Husband’s Secret
Liane Moriarty
The Husband's Secret is a funny, heartbreaking novel of marriage, grief, love and secrets. A devoted
mother to three daughters, Celia runs her household like clockwork, is President of the P&C, owns an
extremely successful Tupperware business and is happy in her fifteen-year marriage. Until she
discovers a letter in their attic labelled: "To my wife Cecilia, to be opened in the event of my
death"...Her husband's secret is a bombshell beyond all imagining with repercussions across the lives
of three women.
Fiction
416 pages, Pub. 2013
I am Malala
Malala Yousafzai
On Tuesday, 9 October, 2012, a fifteen-year-old Pakistani girl was shot in the face at point-blank
range because she had the temerity to stand up to the Taliban. That girl, Malala Yousafzai, survived
the attack and the shocking story made headlines around the world. Overnight, Malala became a
global symbol of peaceful protest and education for all.
Memoir
276 pages; pub 2013
The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot
Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco
farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells - taken without her knowledge
- become one of the most important tools in modern medicine. Taken in 1951, these cells became the
first immortal human cell line ever grown in culture. They were vital for developing the polio vaccine;
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uncovered the secrets of cancer, viruses and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important
advances like in vitro fertilisation, cloning, and gene mapping, and have been bought and sold by the
billions. Put together, her cells would now weigh more than 22 million tons and placed end-to-end
would wrap around the earth five times. Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey,
from the "coloured" wards of Johns Hopkins in the 1950s to poverty stricken tenements of East
Baltimore today, where Henrietta's children are unable to afford health insurance, and struggle with
feelings of pride, fear and betrayal. Their story is inextricably linked to the birth of bioethics, the rise of
multi-billion dollar biotech industry, and the legal battles that determine if we own our bodies. Intimate
in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, THE IMMORTAL LIFE OF HENRIETTA
LACKS captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.
Non Fiction
369 Pages; Pub 2010
In cold blood
Truman Capote
Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is both a masterpiece of journalism and a powerful crime thriller.
Inspired by a 300-word article in The New York Times, Capote spent six years exploring and writing
the story of Kansas farmer Herb Clutter, his family and the two young killers who brutally murdered
them. In Cold Blood created a genre of novelistic non-fiction and made Capote's name with its
unflinching portrayal of a comprehensible and thoroughly human evil.
True Crime
343 Pages; Pub 2008
In the Quiet
Eliza Henry-Jones
A moving, sweet and uplifting novel of love, grief and the heartache of letting go, from a wonderful
new Australian author. Cate Carlton has recently died, yet she is able to linger on, watching her three
young children and her husband as they come to terms with their life without her on their rural horse
property. As the months pass and her children grow, they cope in different ways, drawn closer and
pulled apart by their shared loss. And all Cate can do is watch on helplessly, seeing their grief, how
much they miss her and how - heartbreakingly - they begin to heal. Gradually unfolding to reveal
Cate's life, her marriage, and the unhappy secret she shared with one of her children, In the Quiet is
compelling, simple, tender, true - heartbreaking and uplifting in equal measure.
Fiction
282 Pages; Pub 2015
Australian Author
Indelible Ink
Fiona McGregor
A novel about connections in a changing world of friends, lovers, family, illness, and death, this
unique narrative tells the story of Marie King—a 59-year-old divorcée from Sydney’s affluent north
shore. Having devoted her rather conventional life to looking after her husband and three children,
Marie is experiencing an identity crisis. Forced to sell the family home now that her children have
moved out, Marie expresses herself by getting a tattoo and, consequently, forges a friendship with
tattoo artist Rhys. As Rhys introduces Marie to an alternative side of Sydney, friction erupts between
Marie’s social spheres—the affluent middle class and the tattoo subculture. A multi-layered
examination of how we live now, this account positions one family as a microcosm for the
modifications operating in society at large.
Fiction
452 Pages; Pub 2010
Australian Author
Winner: Age Book of the Year Award 2011
Instructions for a Heatwave
Maggie O’farrell
A sweeping family drama, in which the disappearance of a family patriarch forces three adult siblings
to gather together to find him and to confront what they really know about their father and themselves.
It's the summer of 1976 and London is in the grip of a record-breaking heat wave when Gretta
Riordan discovers that her newly retired husband, Robert, has cleaned out his bank account and
vanished. Now, Gretta's three children converge in their mother's home for the first time in years:
Michael Francis, a history teacher whose marriage is failing; Monica, with two stepdaughters who
despise her and an ugly secret that has driven a wedge between herself and the little sister she once
adored; and Aoife, the youngest of the Riordans, now living in Manhattan, a smart, immensely
29
resourceful young woman who has arranged her entire life to conceal her illiteracy. As the siblings
tease out clues about their father's whereabouts, they navigate rocky pasts and long-held secrets,
until at last their search brings them to their ancestral village in Ireland, where the truth of their
parents' lives--and their own--is suddenly revealed. Wise, lyrical, instantly engrossing, Instructions for
a Heat Wave is a richly satisfying page-turner from a writer of exceptional intelligence and grace.
Fiction
289 pages; Pub 2013
Invention of Wings, The
Sue Monk Kidd
Hetty "Handful" Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond
the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke's daughter,
Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is
hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. Kidd's sweeping novel is set in motion on Sarah's
eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid.
We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own,
dramatically shaping each other's destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt,
defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love. As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful
will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience
crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism before leaving Charleston to find her place
alongside her fearless younger sister, Angelina, as one of the early pioneers in the abolition and
women's rights movements. Inspired by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke, Kidd goes beyond the
record to flesh out the rich interior lives of all of her characters, both real and invented, including
Handful's cunning mother, Charlotte, who courts danger in her search for something better. This
exquisitely written novel is a triumph of storytelling that looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating
wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and
expression will leave no reader unmoved.
Fiction
384 pages; pub 2014
It Takes a Village
Christine Stinson
Growing up in conservative, postwar Australia isn't easy. For eight-year-old Sophie, who has just
been told that she's a bastard, it seems that she lives in a world of secrets, unanswered questions
and whispers. Who is her father and why did her mother never tell anyone who he was? With only her
reclusive grandfather to raise her, and more than one neighbour expecting her to go off the rails like
her mother - after all, apples rarely fall far from the tree - Sophie struggles to find her place in the
world. In a time when experiences are shared around the kitchen table, over the back fence or up at
the corner shop, Sophie learns that life is rarely simple, love is always complicated and sometimes it
takes more than blood ties to make a family.
Fiction
323 pages; Pub 2011
Australian Author
Jasper Jones
Craig Silvey
Late on a hot summer night in 1965, Charlie Bucktin is startled by an urgent knock on the window of
his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant
figure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steals into
the night by his side, terribly afraid but desperate to impress. Jasper takes him to his secret glade in
the bush, and it's here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper's horrible discovery. With his secret like a
brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion as
he locks horns with his tempestuous mother, falls nervously in love and battles to keep a lid on his
zealous best friend, Jeffrey Lu. And in vainly attempting to restore the parts that have been shaken
loose, Charlie learns to discern the truth from the myth, and why white lies creep like a curse. In the
simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to
know, and even harder to hold in his heart.
Fiction
299 Pages; Pub 2009
Australian Author
Overall Winner, Indie Book of the Year Award 2009
Winner, ABIA (Australian Book Industry Awards) Book of the Year 2010
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Kindle
Warringah Council is offering our Boo kClub users the opportunity to try the Kindle reading
device.
The Kindles are a way for our Boo kClubs to interact with emerging technology and will
increase access to high demand titles.
They will be useful to our readers who have a vision impairment as Kindles give users the
ability to display type in various sizes and 16 shades of gray and many books offer a text-tospeech feature that “reads” a book out loud.
The Kindle is loaded with the following titles:- Pride and Prejudice/ Jane Austen; Wuthering
Heights/ Emily Brontë; The Tall Man/ Chloe Hooper; Sarah's Key/ Tatiana de Rosnay; The Happiest
Refugee/ Anh Do; Room/ Emma Donoghue; Middlemarch/ George Eliot; The Pillars of the Earth/ Ken
Follett; The Fry Chronicles/ Stephen Fry; Cold Comfort Farm/ Stella Gibbons; The Secret River/ Kate
Grenville; The Scarlet Letter/ Nathaniel Hawthorne; Atonement/ Ian McEwan; The Poisonwood Bible/
Barbara Kingsolver; Half the Sky/ Nicholas D. Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn; The Tiger's Wife/ Tea
Obreht; The Bell Jar/ Sylvia Plath; That Deadman Dance/ Kim Scott; The Guernsey Literary and
Potato Peel Pie Society/ Mary Ann Shaffer; Jasper Jones/ Craig Silvey; Major Pettigrew's; Last Stand/
Helen Simonson; The Help/ Kathryn Stockett; Before I Go to Sleep/ S.J. Watson; Revolutionary Road
/ Richard Yates; The Book Thief/ Markus Zusak, Gone Girl/Gillian Flynn, The Paris Wife/ Paula
McLain, Burial Rites/ Hannah Kent, And the Mountains Echoed/ Khaled Hosseini, The Light Between
Oceans/ M.L. Steadman, The Rosie project/ Graeme Simsion.
The Lake House
Kate Morton
The morning after the Edevane's exclusive Midsummer Eve party in Cornwall in 1933, their youngest
child, Theo, is nowhere to be found. After months of futile searching, the family pack up and leave
their beautiful country home, never to return. Until, in 2003, a young female police officer stumbles
into the lost gardens surrounding the abandoned house and determines to find out what happened.
Fiction
pages; Pub 2015
Language of Flowers
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
The Victorian language of flowers was used to express emotions: honeysuckle for devotion, azaleas
for passion, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it has been more useful in conveying
feelings like grief, mistrust and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster care system, she is
unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their
meanings. Now eighteen, Victoria has nowhere to go, and sleeps in a public park, where she plants a
small garden of her own. When her talent is discovered by a local florist, she discovers her gift for
helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But it takes meeting a mysterious vendor at
the flower market for her to realise what's been missing in her own life, and as she starts to fall for
him, she must decide whether it's worth risking everything for a second chance at happiness.
A heartbreaking and redemptive novel about the meaning of flowers, the meaning of family, and the
meaning of love.
Fiction
322 pages; Pub 2011
The Legacy
Katherine Webb
Following the death of their grandmother, Erica and her sister Beth return to the house where they
spent their summer holidays as children. As Erica sorts through her grandmother's belongings, she is
flooded with memories of her childhood - and of her cousin, Henry, whose disappearance from the
manor tore the family apart. Erica sets out to discover what happened to Henry - so that the past can
be laid to rest, and her sister, Beth, might finally find some peace. Gradually, as Erica begins to sift
through remnants of the past, a secret family history emerges; one that stretches all the way back to
turn-of-the-century Oklahoma, to a beautiful society heiress and a haunting, savage land. As past and
present converge, Erica and Beth must come to terms with two terrible acts of betrayal - and the
heart-breaking legacy left behind. THE LEGACY is an unforgettable, deeply satisfying story that will
stay with you long after the last page has been turned.
Fiction
422 pages; Pub 2010
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Let the great world spin
Colum McCann
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring
up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running,
dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets
below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann's
stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people. Corrigan, a radical young Irish monk, struggles
with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of
mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover
just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that
sends her own life careening sideways. Tillie, a thirty-eight-year-old grandmother, turns tricks
alongside her teenage daughter, determined not only to take care of her family but to prove her own
worth. Elegantly weaving together these and other seemingly disparate lives, McCann's powerful
allegory comes alive in the unforgettable voices of the city's people, unexpectedly drawn together by
hope, beauty, and the artistic crime of the century.
Fiction
349 Pages; Pub 2009
Winner: National Book Award for fiction 2009
Winner: International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2011
The lieutenant
Kate Grenville
In 1787 Lieutenant Thomas Rooke sets sail from Portsmouth with the First Fleet and its cargo of
convicts, destined for New South Wales. As a young officer and a man of science, the shy and quiet
Rooke is full of anticipation about the natural wonders he might discover in this strange land on the
other side of the world.
After the fleet arrives in Port Jackson, Rooke sets up camp on a rocky and isolated point, and starts
his work of astronomy and navigation.
It's not too long before some of the Aboriginal people who live around the harbour pay him a visit. One
of them, a girl named Tarunga, starts to teach him her own language. But her lessons and their
friendship are interrupted when Rooke is given an order that will change his life forever.
Inspired by the 1790 notebooks of William Dawes in which he recorded his conversations with a
young Gadigal woman, The Lieutenant is a story about a man discovering his true self in
extraordinary circumstances.
Historical Fiction
320 Pages; Pub 2008
Australian Author
Life After Life
Kate Atkinson
What if you had the chance to live your life again and again, until you finally got it right? During a
snowstorm in England in 1910, a baby is born and dies before she can take her first breath. During a
snowstorm in England in 1910, the same baby is born and lives to tell the tale. What if there were
second chances? And third chances? In fact an infinite number of chances to live your life? Would
you eventually be able to save the world from its own inevitable destiny? And would you even want
to? Life After Life follows Ursula Todd as she lives through the turbulent events of the last century
again and again. With wit and compassion, she finds warmth even in life's bleakest moments, and
shows an great ability to evoke the past. Kate Atkinson at her most profound and inventive, in a novel
that celebrates the best and worst of ourselves.
Historical Fiction
477 pages; pub 2013
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
Possessing encyclopaedia-like intelligence, unusual zookeeper's son Pi Patel sets sail for America.
When the ship sinks, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors
from the wreck are a Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan - and a 450-pound
Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary and best-loved works of fiction
in recent years.
Literary Fiction
326 pages; Pub 2002
Man Booker Prize Winner
32
The light between oceans
M. L. Stedman
This is a story of right and wrong, and how sometimes they look the same ... 1926. Tom Sherbourne
is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus
Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world. One April morning a
boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying infant - and the path of the couple's lives hits
an unthinkable crossroads. Only years later do they discover the devastating consequences of the
decision they made that day - as the baby's real story unfolds ...
Fiction
362 Pages; Pub 2012
Australian Author
The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul
Deborah Rodriguez
In a little coffee shop in one of the most dangerous places on earth, five very different women come
together. Sunny, the proud proprietor, Yaxmina, a young pregnant woman, Candace, a wealthy
American, Isabel, a determined journalist, and Halajan, a sixty-year-old den mother. They form a
unique bond that will for ever change their lives.
Fiction
304 Pages; Pub 2011
The Little Paris Bookshop
Nina George
On a beautifully restored barge on the Seine, Jean Perdu runs a bookshop; or rather a 'literary
apothecary', for this bookseller possesses a rare gift for sensing which books will soothe the troubled
souls of his customers. The only person he is unable to cure, it seems, is himself. He has nursed a
broken heart ever since the night, twenty-one years ago, when the love of his life fled Paris, leaving
behind a handwritten letter that he has never dared read. His memories and his love have been
gathering dust - until now. The arrival of an enigmatic new neighbour in his eccentric apartment
building on Rue Montagnard inspires Jean to unlock his heart, unmoor the floating bookshop and set
off for Provence, in search of the past and his beloved.
Fiction
359 Pages; Pub 2015
Longbourn
Jo Baker
If Elizabeth Bennet had the washing of her own petticoats, Sarah thought, she would be more careful
not to trudge through muddy fields.It is wash-day for the housemaids at Longbourn House, and
Sarah's hands are chapped and bleeding. Domestic life below stairs, ruled tenderly and forcefully by
Mrs Hill the housekeeper, is about to be disturbed by the arrival of a new footman smelling of the sea,
and bearing secrets.For in Georgian England, there is a world the young ladies in the drawing room
will never know, a world of poverty, love, and brutal war.
Fiction
364 pages; pub 2013
Lost and Found
Brooke Davis
Millie Bird (aka Captain Funeral), seven-years old and ever hopeful, always wears red gumboots to
match her red, curly hair. Her struggling mother leaves Millie in a local department store and never
returns. Agatha Pantha, eighty-two, has not left her house – or spoken to another human being –
since she was widowed seven years ago. She fills the silences by yelling at passers by, watching loud
static on the TV and maintaining a strict daily schedule. Karl the Touch Typist, eighty-seven, once
used his fingers to type out love notes on his wife's skin. Now he types his words out into the air as he
speaks. Karl is moved into a nursing home but in a moment of clarity and joy, he escapes. A series of
events binds the three together on a road trip that takes them from the south coast of WA to
Kalgoorlie and along the Nullarbor to the edge of the continent. Millie wants to find her mum. Karl
wants to find out how to be a man. And Agatha just wants everything to go back to how it was. They
will discover that old age is not the same as death, that the young can be wise, and that letting
yourself experience sadness just might be the key to life.
Fiction
280 Pages; Pub 2014
The love song of Miss Queenie Hennessy
33
Rachel Joyce
From the author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, an exquisite, funny and heartrending
parallel story. When Queenie Hennessy discovers that Harold Fry is walking the length of England to
save her, and all she has to do is wait, she is shocked. Her note to him had explained she was dying
from cancer. How can she wait? A new volunteer at the hospice suggests that Queenie should write a
second letter; only this time she must tell Harold the truth. Composing this letter, the volunteer
promises, will ensure Queenie hangs on. It will also atone for the secrets of the past. As the volunteer
points out, 'It isn't Harold who is saving you. It is you, saving Harold Fry.' This is that letter. A letter
that was never sent. Told in simple, emotionally-honest prose, with a mischievous bite, this is a
novella about a woman who falls in love but chooses not to claim it. It is about friendship and
kindness as well as the small victories that pass unrecorded. It is about the truth and the significance the gentle heroism - of a life lived alone. Queenie thought her first letter would be the end of the story.
She was wrong. It was just the beginning...
Fiction
351 pages; Pub 2014
Love in the Years of Lunacy
Mandy Sayer
Sydney, 1942. Pearl is eighteen, beautiful and impetuous. She plays saxophone in an all-girl jazz
band at the Trocadero and occasionally sits in on underground gigs with her twin brother Martin, who
also plays the sax. On one such evening black GI and jazz legend James Washington blows into her
life, and nothing is ever the same again, especially not Pearl. A love story begins to unfold against the
blacked-out nights and rumour-filled days of a city in the grip of war. But public events are closing in
on Pearl's private world. When James is shipped out to fight in New Guinea, she hatches a
breathtaking plan to reunite with him. And then all hell breaks loose. Moving, tender and audaciously
original, LOVE IN THE YEARS OF LUNACY is a love story with a haunting jazz soundtrack and a war
story like no other.
Historical fiction
491 Pages; Pub 2011
Australian author
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold
This is Susie Salmon. Watching from heaven, Susie sees her happy, suburban family devastated by
her death, isolated even from one another as they each try to cope with their terrible loss alone. Over
the years, her friends and siblings grow up, fall in love, do all the things she never had the chance to
do herself. But life is not quite finished with Susie yet . . .
The Lovely Bones is a luminous and astonishing novel about life and death, forgiveness and
vengeance, memory and forgetting - but, above all, about finding light in the darkest of places.
Fiction
328 pages; Pub 2002
Mad men, bad girls and the Guerilla Knitters Institute
Maggie Groff
When a secretive American cult moves to the Gold Coast, freelance journalist Scout Davis's
investigative antennae start quivering. She sets out to expose the cult's lunatic beliefs and bizarre
practices, but when she learns the identity of a recent recruit, her quest becomes personal. And
dangerous. The cult isn't the only case on Scout's agenda. Someone is cutting up girls' underwear at
an exclusive school and Scout agrees to look into it. And the sinister secret behind the vandalism is
not nice. Not at all. But Scout has her secrets too. In the dead of night she sneaks out with an
underground group of yarn bombers to decorate the locality with artworks. The next mission ticks all
the right boxes - it's risky, difficult and extremely silly. However, not everyone is amused, and Scout
has a sneaking suspicion that the local police sergeant, Rafe Kelly, is hot on her tail. MAD MEN, BAD
GIRLS AND THE GUERRILLA KNITTERS INSTITUTE is frequently hilarious, always surprising, and
delivered with a strong cast of charmingly eccentric characters.
Fiction
359 Pages; Pub 2012
Australian Author
Man Called Ove, A
Fredrik Backman
There is something about Ove. At first sight, he is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever
meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots - neighbours who can't reverse a trailer properly,
34
joggers, shop assistants who talk in code, and the perpetrators of the vicious coup d'etat that ousted
him as Chairman of the Residents' Association. He will persist in making his daily inspection rounds of
the local streets. But isn't it rare, these days, to find such old-fashioned clarity of belief and deed?
Such unswerving conviction about what the world should be, and a lifelong dedication to making it just
so? In the end, you will see, there is something about Ove that is quite irresistible...
Fiction
294 Pages; Pub 2014
The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead
Sam and Henny Pollit are a warring husband and wife, he a fully blown narcissist and she spoiled and
prone to fits of despair. Christina Stead's masterpiece about family life is acknowledged as a
contemporary classic of Australian and international literature.
Literary Fiction
551 Pages; Pub 2010
Australian Author
March
Geraldine Brooks
Set during the American Civil War, MARCH tells the story of John March, known to us as the father
away from his family of girls in LITTLE WOMEN, Louisa May Alcott's classic American novel. In
Brooks' telling, March emerges as an abolitionist and idealistic chaplain on the front lines of a war that
tests his faith in himself and in the Union cause when he learns that his side, too, is capable of
barbarism and racism. As he recovers from a near-fatal illness in a Washington hospital, he must
reassemble the shards of his tattered mind and body, and find a way to reconnect with a wife and
daughters who have no idea of the ordeals he has been through.
Historical Fiction
304 pages; Pub 2005
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Mateship with birds
Carrie Tiffany
On the outskirts of an Australian country town in the 1950s, a lonely farmer trains his binoculars on a
family of kookaburras that roost in a tree near his house. Harry observes the kookaburras through a
year of feast, famine, birth, death, war, romance and song. As Harry watches the birds, his next door
neighbour has her own set of binoculars trained on him. Ardent, hard-working Betty has escaped to
the country with her two fatherless children. Betty is pleased that her son, Michael, wants to spend
time with the gentle farmer next door. But when Harry decides to teach Michael about the opposite
sex, perilous boundaries are crossed. MATESHIP WITH BIRDS is a novel about young lust and
mature love. It is a hymn to the rhythm of country life - to vicious birds, virginal cows, adored dogs and
ill-used sheep. On one small farm in a vast, ancient landscape, a collection of misfits question the
nature of what a family can be.
Fiction
211 pages; Pub 2012
Australian Author
Matilda is missing
Caroline Overington
Garry Hartshorn and Softie Monaghan were never love's young dream. Not even on their wedding
day. Softie was sophisticated, a career woman, who owned a nice apartment overlooking St Kilda
Beach. Garry had a few rough edges, plus one failed marriage and an assortment of jobs under his
belt. But Softie's body clock was ticking, and Garry wanted children ... So they got married, and
produced the only thing they ever had in common. Matilda. Now, two years later, their golden-haired
child is at the centre of a bitter custody battle. Both parents insist that her well-being is the only thing
they care about. Yet, in truth, Matilda was always the one most likely to become lost.
Fiction
353 pages; pub. 2011
Australian Author
Me before you
Jojo Moyes
They had nothing in common until love gave them everything to lose . . . Louisa Clark is an
ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life ;steady boyfriend, close family ;who has
barely been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for
35
Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair bound after an accident. Will has
always lived a huge life; big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel; and now he's pretty
sure he cannot live the way he is. Will is acerbic, moody, bossy; but Lou refuses to treat him
with kid gloves, and soon his happiness means more to her than she expected. When she
learns that Will has shocking plans of his own, she sets out to show him that life is still worth
living.
Fiction
369 pages; Pub 2013
The messenger
Markus Zusak
Protect the diamonds, survive the clubs, dig deep through spades, feel the hearts. Meet Ed Kennedy,
cab-driving prodigy, pathetic card player, and useless at sex (self-proclaimed). His life is one of
peaceful routine and incompetence - until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery! That's when the first
Ace turns up, and that's when Ed becomes the Messenger. Chosen to care, he makes his way
through town, helping and hurting (where necessary) until only one question remains. Who's behind
Ed's mission?
Fiction
357 pages Pub 2006
Australian Author
Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself
drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively
develops between them -- along with Callie's failure to develop -- leads Callie to suspect that she is
not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all. The explanation for this shocking state of
affairs takes us out of suburbia -- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the
Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for
their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in
motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a
hermaphrodite.
Literary Fiction
529 pages; Pub 2002
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The midnight dress
Karen Foxlee
When a teenage girl disappears, a small town is awash with rumours: everyone is talking about the
dress she wore, a midnight-blue dress made from the remnants of other dresses, a dress of stories
...For her whole life, Rose Lovell has moved from town to town with her alcoholic father. When they
wash up in a coastal sugarcane town, Rose wonders if this time it will be different. At the local high
school, Rose meets Pearl Kelly, who is popular, pretty and intent on tracking down her Russian
father. When she convinces Rose to be part of the annual Harvest Parade, Rose must find a special
dress for the occasion. She seeks the help of the eccentric Edie Baker, who knows all the town's
secrets and whose own family is a rich tapestry of stories. When Rose agrees to let Edie teach her to
sew, she doesn't realise that nothing will ever be the same again. The Midnight Dress weaves an
intriguing story of loss and longing to the very last page.
Australian Fiction
328 Pages, Pub 2013
Miniaturist, The
Jessie Burton
On a cold winter's day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman knocks at the door of a grand house
in the wealthiest quarter of Amsterdam. She has come from the country to begin a new life as the wife
of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt, but instead she is met by his sharp-tongued sister,
Marin. Only later does Johannes appear and present her with an extraordinary wedding gift: a
cabinet-sized replica of their home. It is to be furnished by an elusive miniaturist, whose tiny creations
mirror their real-life counterparts in unexpected ways... Nella is at first mystified by the closed world of
the Brandt household, but as she uncovers its secrets she realises the escalating dangers that await
them all. Does the miniaturist hold their fate in her hands? And will she be the key to their salvation or
the architect of their downfall?
36
Fiction
434 Pages; Pub 2014
Mr Penumbra's 24-hour bookstore
Robin Sloan
Clay Jannon, twenty-six and unemployed, reads books about vampire policemen and teenage
wizards. Familiar, predictable books. Books that fit neatly into a section at the bookstore. But he is
about to encounter a new species of book entirely: secret, strange, and frantically sought-after.
Fiction
288 Pages; Pub 2012
Mr Wigg
Inga Simpson
It's the summer of 1971, not far from the stone-fruit capital of New South Wales, where Mr Wigg lives
on what is left of his family farm. Mrs Wigg has been gone a few years now and he thinks about her
every day. He misses his daughter, too, and wonders when he ll see her again. He spends his time
working in the orchard, cooking and preserving his produce and, when it's on, watching the cricket. It
s a full life. Things are changing though, with Australia and England playing a one-day match, and his
new neighbours planting grapes for wine. His son is on at him to move into town but Mr Wigg has his
fruit trees and his chooks to look after. His grandchildren visit often: to cook, eat and hear his stories.
And there's a special project he has to finish. Trouble is, it's a lot of work for an old man with shaking
hands, but he ll give it a go, as he always has.
Fiction
296 Pages; Pub 2013
Australian Author
Mister Pip
LLoyd Jones
After the trouble starts and the soldiers arrive on Matilda's tropical island, only one white person stays
behind. Mr Watts wears a red nose and pulls his wife around on a trolley. The kids call him Pop Eye.
But there is no one else to teach them their lessons. Mr Watts begins to read aloud to the class from
his battered copy of Great Expectations, a book by his friend Mr Dickens. Soon Dickens' hero Pip
starts to come alive for Matilda. She writes his name in the sand and decorates it with shells. Pip
becomes as real to her as her own mother, and the greatest friendship of her life has begun. But
Matilda is not the only one who believes in Pip. And, on an island at war, the power of the imagination
can be a dangerously provocative thing.
Fiction
240 Pages; Pub 2008
The Mitford Girls
Mary S. Lovell
THE MITFORD GIRLS tells the true story behind the gaiety and frivolity of the six Mitford daughters and the facts are as sensational as any novel: Nancy, whose bright social existence masked an
obsessional doomed love which soured her success; Pam, a countrywoman married to one of the
best brains in Europe; Diana, an iconic beauty, who was already married when at 22 she fell in love
with Oswald Moseley, the leader of the British fascists; Unity, who romantically in love with Hitler,
became a member of his inner circle before shooting herself in the temple when WWII was declared;
Jessica, the family rebel, who declared herself a communist in the schoolroom and the youngest
sister, Debo, who became the Duchess of Devonshire.This is an extraordinary story of an
extraordinary family, containing much new material, based on exclusive access to Mitford archives.
Non-Fiction
624 Pages; Pub 2002
The mothers' group
Fiona Higgins
An unthinkably shocking event sends shockwaves through a tight-knit mother's group, testing their
bonds and revealing closely-held secrets that threaten to shatter their lives in an explosive, enthralling
debut novel about motherhood, friendship and love. The Mothers' Group tells the story of six very
different women who agree to meet regularly soon after the births of their respective babies. Set
during the first crucial year of their babies' lives, The Mothers' Group tracks the women's individual
journeys - and the group's collective one - as they navigate birth and motherhood as well as the
shifting ground of their relationships with their partners. GINIE, a successful partner in a big legal firm,
returns to work a month after her baby is born. MADE (pron. mar-day) is a young Balinese woman
married to a much older Australian man. SUZIE, a single mother, is struggling to bring up her
37
daughter on her own. MIRANDA longs to bond with her sunny baby but finds herself increasingly
distracted - and frustrated - by her spoilt and demanding toddler stepson. PIPPA is suffering from an
injury incurred during the birth of her child but is unable to talk about her problem. CARA, whose
marriage is turned upside down after meeting a long-lost love. Each woman struggles in her own way
to become the mother she wants to be, and finds herself becoming increasingly reliant on the
friendship and support of the members of the mothers' group. Until one day an unthinkably shocking
event changes everything, testing their bonds and revealing closely-held secrets that threaten to
shatter their lives. The MOTHERS' GROUP is an unflinching and compelling portrait of the modern
family in all its complexity and intensity: love, sex and marriage and all the joys and tension of raising
children in an increasingly complicated world. Moving, provocative, tender and utterly gripping, The
MOTHERS' GROUP will draw you in and never let you go.
Fiction
304 pages; Pub 2012
Australian Author
Murder in Mississippi
John Safran
When filming his TV series Race Relations, John Safran spent an uneasy couple of days with one of
Mississippi's most notorious white supremacists. A year later, he heard that the man had been
murdered - and what was more, the killer was black.At first the murder seemed a twist on the old
Deep South race crimes. But then more news rolled in. Maybe it was a dispute over money, or most
intriguingly, over sex. Could the infamous racist actually have been secretly gay, with a thing for black
men? Did Safran have the last footage of him alive? Could this be the story of a lifetime? Seizing his
Truman Capote moment, he jumped on a plane to cover the trial.Over six months, Safran got deeper
and deeper into the South, becoming entwined in the lives of those connected with the murder - white
separatists, black campaigners, lawyers, investigators, neighbours, even the killer himself. And the
more he talked with them, the less simple the crime, and the world, seemed.Murder in Mississippi is a
brilliantly innovative true-crime story. Taking us places only he can, Safran paints an engrossing,
revealing portrait of a dead man, his murderer, the place they lived and the process of trying to find
out the truth about anything.
Non Fiction
368 pages; Pub 2013
My Brilliant Friend
Elana Ferrante
My friendship with Lila began the day we decided to go up the dark stairs that led, step after step,
flight after flight, to the door of Don Achille's apartment... I waited to see if Lila would have second
thoughts and turn back. I knew what she wanted to do; I had hoped that she would forget about it, but
in vain. My Brilliant Friend is a ravishing, wonderfully written novel about a friendship that lasts a
lifetime. The story of Elena and Lila begins in a poor but vibrant neighbourhood on the outskirts of
Naples. The two girls learn to rely on each other ahead of anyone or anything else, sometimes to their
own detriment, as each discovers more about who she is and suffers or delights in the throes of their
intense friendship. There is a piercing honesty about Ferrante's prose that makes My Brilliant Friend a
compulsively readable portrait of two young women, and also the story of a neighbourhood, a city and
a country.
Fiction
331 pages; Pub 2012
My Brother Jack
Johnston, George
David and Jack Meredith grow up in a patriotic suburban Melbourne household during the First World
War, and go on to lead lives that could not be more different. Through the story of the two brothers,
George Johnston created an enduring exploration of two Australian myths: that of the man who loses
his soul as he gains worldly success, and that of the tough, honest Aussie battler, whose greatest
ambition is to serve his country during the war. Acknowledged as one of the true Australian classics,
My Brother Jack is a deeply satisfying, complex and moving literary masterpiece.
Literary Fiction
367 Pages; Pub 1964
Australian Author
My family & other animals
Gerald Durrell
38
My Family and Other Animals is the bewitching account of a rare and magical childhood on the island
of Corfu by treasured British conservationist Gerald Durrell. Escaping the ills of the British climate, the
Durrell family - acne-ridden Margo, gun-toting Leslie, bookworm Lawrence and budding naturalist
Gerry, along with their long-suffering mother and Roger the dog - take off for the island of Corfu. But
the Durrells find that, reluctantly, they must share their various villas with a menagerie of local fauna among them scorpions, geckos, toads, bats and butterflies. Recounted with immense humour and
charm My Family and Other Animals is a wonderful account of a rare, magical childhood
Biography
386 pages; Pub 1956
Narrow Road to the Deep North, The
Richard Flanagan
A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love. August, 1943. In
the despair of a Japanese POW camp on the Thai-Burma death railway, Australian surgeon Dorrigo
Evans is haunted by his love affair with his uncle's young wife two years earlier. Struggling to save the
men under his command from starvation, from cholera, from beatings, he receives a letter that will
change his life forever. This savagely beautiful novel is a story about the many forms of love and
death, of war and truth, as one man comes of age, prospers, only to discover all that he has lost.
Historical Fiction
467 pages; pub 2013
Australian Author
The natural Way of Things
Charlotte Wood
Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down property
in the middle of a desert. Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they
came to be there with eight other girls, forced to wear strange uniforms, their heads shaved, guarded
by two inept yet vicious armed jailers and a 'nurse'. The girls all have something in common, but what
is it? What crime has brought them here from the city? Who is the mysterious security company
responsible for this desolate place with its brutal rules, its total isolation from the contemporary world?
Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: in each girl's past
is a sexual scandal with a powerful man. They pray for rescue - but when the food starts running out it
becomes clear that the jailers have also become the jailed. The girls can only rescue themselves.
Fiction
pages; pub 2015
Australian Author
Necessary Lies
Diane Chamberlain
After losing her parents, fifteen-year-old Ivy Hart is left to care for her grandmother, older sister and
nephew as tenants on a small tobacco farm. As she struggles with her grandmother's aging, her
sister's mental illness and her own epilepsy, she realizes they might need more than she can give.
When Jane Forrester takes a position as Grace County's newest social worker, she doesn't realize
just how much her help is needed. She quickly becomes emotionally invested in her clients' lives,
causing tension with her boss and her new husband. But as Jane is drawn in by the Hart women, she
begins to discover the secrets of the small farm--secrets much darker than she would have guessed.
Soon, she must decide whether to take drastic action to help them, or risk losing the battle against
everything she believes is wrong.
Fiction
368 pages; pub 2013
The Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown
lampposts and billboards. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Welcome to Le Cirque des
Reves. Beyond the smoke and mirrors, a fierce competition is underway -- a contest between two
young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood to compete in "a game," in
which each must use their powers of illusion to best the other. Unbeknownst to the players, this game
is a duel to the death, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will.
The young magicians practice their magic tirelessly for something their mercurial instructors, Hector
and Alexander, will reveal little about, except that it is a rivalry to which they are irrevocably bound.
With no knowledge of how their manipulative masters intend the game to end, Celia and Marco
innocently tumble head first into love. A deep, passionate, and magical love that makes the lights
39
flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands. Hector and Alexander still
pull the strings, however, and this unforeseen occurrence forces them to intervene, resulting in a
painful blow to both Celia and Marco as well as the other performers whose lives hang in the balance.
The young magicians realize they can't stave off the inevitable end of the game. They can see only
one way out, but it will take an unprecedented display of their talents and the assistance of an
unsuspecting character to pull off a twist of fate that would be unfathomable to anyone who didn't
believe in magic.
Fiction
387 Pages; Pub 2011
The Night Guest
Fiona McFarlane
One morning Ruth wakes thinking a tiger has been in her seaside house. Later that day a formidable
woman called Frida arrives, looking as if she's blown in from the sea. In fact she's come to care for
Ruth. Frida and the tiger: both are here to stay, and neither is what they seem. Which of them can
Ruth trust? And as memories of her childhood in Fiji press upon her with increasing urgency, can she
even trust herself?
Fiction
288 pages; Pub 2014
The Nightingale
Kristin Hannah
Despite their differences, sisters Viann and Isabelle have always been close. Younger, bolder Isabelle
lives in Paris while Viann is content with life in the French countryside with her husband Antoine and
their daughter. But when the Second World War strikes, Antoine is sent off to fight and Viann finds
herself isolated so Isabelle is sent by their father to help her. As the war progresses, the sisters;
relationship and strength is tested. With life changing in unbelievably horrific ways, Viann and Isabelle
will find themselves facing frightening situations and responding in ways they never thought possible
as bravery and resistance take different forms in each of their actions.
Fiction
440 pages; Pub 2015
Nightingale, The
Fiona McIntosh
Amidst the carnage of Gallipoli, British nurse Claire Nightingale meets Australian Light Horseman
Jamie Wren. Despite all odds, they fall deeply in love. Their flame burns bright and carries them
through their darkest hours, even when war tears them apart. When Jamie encounters Turkish soldier
Açar Shahin on the bloodstained battlefield, the men forge an unforgettable bond. Their chance
meeting also leaves a precious clue to Jamie's whereabouts for Claire to follow.Come peacetime,
Claire's desperate search to find Jamie takes her all the way to Istanbul, and deep into the heart of
Açar's family, where she attracts the unexpected attention of a charismatic and brooding scholar.In
the name of forgiveness, cultures come together, enemies embrace and forbidden passions ignite but by the nai;-biting conclusion, who will be left standing to capture Nurse Nightingale's heart?
Fiction
387 pages; Pub 2014
Australian Author
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami
A successful, 37-year-old businessman, Toru Watanabe, hears a version of the Beatles' Norwegian
Wood, and the music transports him back 18 years to his college days. His best friend, Kizuki,
inexplicably commits suicide, after which Toru becomes first enamored, then involved with Kizuki's
girlfriend, Naoko. But Naoko is a very troubled young woman; her brilliant older sister has also
committed suicide, and though sweet and desperate for happiness, she often becomes untethered.
She eventually enters a convalescent home for disturbed people, and when Toru visits her, he meets
her roommate, an older musician named Reiko, who's had a long history of mental instability. The
three become fast friends. Toru makes a commitment to Naoko, but back at college he encounters
Midori, a vibrant, outgoing young woman. As he falls in love with her, Toru realizes he cannot
continue his relationship with Naoko, whose sanity is fast deteriorating. Though the solution to his
problem comes too easily, Murakami tells a subtle, charming, profound and very sexy story of young
love bound for tragedy.
Fiction
296 pages; Pub 1987
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Not Forgetting the Whale
J W Ironmonger
When a young man washes up, naked, on the sands of St Piran in Cornwall, he is quickly rescued by
the villagers. From the retired village doctor and the schoolteacher, to the beachcomber and the
owner of the local bar, the priest's wife and the romantic novelist, they take this lost soul into their
midst. But what the villagers don't know is that Joe Haak has fled the City of London fearing a
worldwide collapse of civilisation, a collapse forecast by Cassie, a computer program he designed.
But is the end of the world really nigh? Can Joe convince the village to seal itself off from the outside
world? And what of the whale that lurks in the bay? Intimate, funny and deeply moving, Not Forgetting
the Whale is the story of a man on a journey to find a place he can call home.
Fiction
368 pages; Pub 2015
The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman
A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home to attend a funeral. Although the house he lived in
is long gone, he is drawn to the farm at the end of the road, where, when he was seven, he
encountered a most remarkable girl, Lettie Hempstock, and her mother and grandmother. He hasn't
thought of Lettie in decades, and yet as he sits by the pond (a pond that she'd claimed was an ocean)
behind the ramshackle old farmhouse, the unremembered past comes flooding back. And it is a past
too strange, too frightening, too dangerous to have happened to anyone, let alone a small boy.Forty
years earlier, a man committed suicide in a stolen car at this farm at the end of the road. Like a fuse
on a firework, his death lit a touchpaper and resonated in unimaginable ways. The darkness was
unleashed, something scary and thoroughly incomprehensible to a little boy. And Lettie--magical,
comforting, wise beyond her years--promised to protect him, no matter what.A groundbreaking work
from a master, The Ocean at the End of the Lane is told with a rare understanding of all that makes
us human, and shows the power of stories to reveal and shelter us from the darkness inside and out.
It is a stirring, terrifying, and elegiac fable as delicate as a butterfly's wing and as menacing as a knife
in the dark.
Fiction
255 pages; Pub 2013
Oranges and sunshine
Margaret Humphreys
In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a British social worker, investigated a woman's claim that at the age of
four she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first thinking it incredulous,
Margaret discovered that this was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Up to 150,000 children, some
as young as three years old, had been deported from children's homes in Britain and shipped off to a
"new life" in distant parts of the British empire, right up until 1970. Many were told that their parents
were dead, and parents often believed that their children had been adopted in Britain. In fact, for
many children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse far away from everything
they knew. Here, Margaret reveals how she unravelled this shocking secret and how it became her
mission to reunite these innocent and unwilling exiles with their families in Britain.
Non Fiction
384 pages; Pub 1995
Also published as Empty Cradles
Ordinary Grace
William Kent Kreuger
That was it. That was all of it. A grace so ordinary there was no reason at all to remember it.
Yet I have never across the forty years since it was spoken forgotten a single word
New Bremen, Minnesota, 1961. The Twins were playing their debut season, ice-cold root beers were
selling out at the soda counter of Halderson’s Drugstore, and Hot Stuff comic books were a mainstay
on every barbershop magazine rack. It was a time of innocence and hope for a country with a new,
young president. But for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum it was a grim summer in which death visited
frequently and assumed many forms. Accident. Nature. Suicide. Murder.
Frank begins the season preoccupied with the concerns of any teenage boy, but when tragedy
unexpectedly strikes his family - which includes his Methodist minister father; his passionate, artistic
mother; Juilliard-bound older sister; and wise-beyond-his-years kid brother - he finds himself thrust
into an adult world full of secrets, lies, adultery, and betrayal, suddenly called upon to demonstrate a
maturity and gumption beyond his years.
Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, Ordinary Grace is a brilliantly
41
moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that
seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price
of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.
Fiction
307 Pages; Pub 2013
Orphan Train
Christina Baker Kline
Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the
farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be
determined by pure luck. Would they be adopted by a kind and loving family, or would they face a
childhood and adolescence of hard labor and servitude? As a young Irish immigrant, Vivian Daly was
one such child, sent by rail from New York City to an uncertain future a world away. Returning east
later in life, Vivian leads a quiet, peaceful existence on the coast of Maine, the memories of her
upbringing rendered a hazy blur. But in her attic, hidden in trunks, are vestiges of a turbulent past.
Seventeen-year-old Molly Ayer knows that a community-service position helping an elderly widow
clean out her attic is the only thing keeping her out of juvenile hall. But as Molly helps Vivian sort
through her keepsakes and possessions, she discovers that she and Vivian aren't as different as they
appear. A Penobscot Indian who has spent her youth in and out of foster homes, Molly is also an
outsider being raised by strangers, and she, too, has unanswered questions about the past. Moving
between contemporary Maine and Depression-era Minnesota, Orphan Train is a powerful tale of
upheaval and resilience, second chances, and unexpected friendship.
Fiction
278 pages; pub 2013
The Painted Veil
W. Somerset Maugham
Kitty Fane is the beautiful but shallow wife of a bacteriologist stationed in Hong Kong. Unsatisfied by
her marriage, she starts an affair with a man who she finds charming, attractive and exciting. But
when her husband discovers her deception, he exacts a strange but horrible vengeance: Kitty must
accompany him to his new posting in remote mainland China, where a Cholera epidemic rages. A
classic story of a woman’s spiritual awakening.
Fiction
212 Pages; Pub 2007
The Paris wife
Paula McLain
Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year-old who has all but given up on love
and happiness, until she meets Ernest Hemingway. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair
set sail for Paris, where they soon fall in with a circle of lively and volatile expatriates, including F.
Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Ezra Pound. Ernest and Hadley are thrust into a life of artistic
ambition, hard liquor and spur-of-the-moment dashes to Pamplona, the Riviera and the Swiss Alps.
But Jazz Age Paris does not lend itself to family life and fidelity. As Hadley struggles with jealousy and
self-doubt, Ernest’s ferocious literary endeavours begin to bear fruit, and the couple faces the ultimate
crisis of their marriage - a deception that will lead to the unravelling of everything they made for
themselves in Paris, their great good place.
Fiction
392 pages; Pub 2010
Past the shallows
Favel Parrett
Harry and Miles live with their father, an abalone fisherman, on the south-east coast of Tasmania.
With their mum dead, they are left to look after themselves. When Miles isn't helping out on the boat
they explore the coast and Miles and his older brother, Joe, love to surf. Harry is afraid of the water.
Everyday their dad battles the unpredictable ocean to make a living. He is a hard man, a bitter drinker
who harbours a devastating secret that is destroying him. Unlike Joe, Harry and Miles are too young
to leave home and so are forced to live under the dark cloud of their father's mood, trying to stay as
invisible as possible whenever he is home. Harry, the youngest, is the most vulnerable and it seems
he bears the brunt of his father's anger.
Fiction
254 Pages: Pub 2011
Australian Author
People of the book
42
Geraldine Brooks
People of the Book crosses continents and centuries to bring stories of hope amidst darkness,
compassion amidst cruelty, all bound together by the discoveries made by a young Australian woman
restoring an ancient Hebrew book. When Hanna Heath gets a call in the middle of the night in her
Sydney home about a precious medieval manuscript that has been recovered from the smouldering
ruins of war–torn Sarajevo, she knows she is on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. A renowned
book conservator, she must now make her way to Bosnia to start work on restoring the Sarajevo
Haggadah – a Jewish prayer book – to discover its secrets and piece together the story of its
miraculous survival. But the trip will also set in motion a series of events that threaten to rock Hanna's
orderly life, including her encounter with Ozren Karamen, the young librarian who risked his life to
save the book. As meticulously researched as all of Brooks' previous work, People of the Book is a
gripping and moving novel about war, art, love and survival.
Fiction
Pub 2008
Australian Author
The People Smuggler : the true story Ali Al Jenabi, the 'Oskar Schindler of
Asia'
Robin de Crespigny
After his father, brother and he were incarcerated and tortured in Saddam's Abu Ghraib, Ali al Jenabi
escaped from Iraq first to work with the anti-Saddam resistance in Iran and then to help his family out
of the country all together.
Non Fiction
351 Pages; Pub 2012
Australian Author
Perfume : the story of a murderer
Patrick Süskind
Survivor, genius, perfumer, killer: this is Jean-Baptiste Grenouille. He is abandoned on the filthy
streets of Paris as a child, but grows up to discover he has an extraordinary gift: a sense of smell
more powerful than any other human's. Soon, he is creating the most sublime fragrances in all the
city. Yet there is one odor he cannot capture. It is exquisite, magical: the scent of a young virgin. And
to get it he must kill. And kill. And kill.
Suspense Fiction
295 Pages; Pub 2007
Persuasion
Jane Austen
At twenty-seven, Anne Elliot is no longer young and has few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier,
she had been persuaded by her family to break off her engagement to the man she loved - Frederick
Wentworth, a handsome naval captain with neither fortune nor rank. Now, circumstances have
conspired to bring him back into her social circle and Anne finds her old feelings for him reignited.
Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and
pretension, but, above all, it is a love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities.
Classic Fiction
260 Pages; Pub 2008
The pillars of the earth
Ken Follett
The story of Philip, prior of Kingsbridge, a devout and resourceful monk driven to build the greatest
Gothic cathedral the world has known, of Tom, the mason who becomes his architect - a man divided
in his soul of the beautiful, elusive Lady Aliena, haunted by a secret shame and of a struggle between
good and evil that will turn church against state, and brother against brother. A spellbinding epic tale
of ambition, anarchy, and absolute power set against the sprawling medieval canvas of twelfthcentury England, this is Ken Follett's historical masterpiece.
Historical Fiction
1100 Pages; Pub 2007
Please look after mother
Kyung-Sook Shin ; translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim.
PLEASE LOOK AFTER MOTHER is about So-nyo, a wife and mother, who has lived a life of sacrifice
and compromise. A few years before the novel begins she suffered a stroke, leaving her vulnerable
and often confused. Now, travelling from her home village in the countryside to the Seoul of her
43
grown-up children, she is separated from her husband as the doors close on a packed train. Her
children and husband desperately follow every lead but fail to find So-nyo, last seen wandering into
the hustle-and-bustle of Seoul station. The novel is told from four different viewpoints, following Sonyo's husband and two of her children as they lash out at each then grow closer again, each
confronting their indifference to So-nyo's pain and loneliness. A tear-jerking, beautifully rendered
novel about sacrifice, guilt and the ties of family love.
Fiction
212 Pages; Pub 2011
The postmistress
Sarah Blake
Those who carry the truth sometimes bear a terrible weight . . . It is 1940 and half the world is living
through the horror of the Second World War, but America still believes it is safe from the bloodshed.
In Franklin, a small town on Cape Cod, Iris James is the postmistress and she firmly believes that her
job is to keep and deliver people's secrets, to pass along the news of love and sorrow that letters
carry. But one day she does the unthinkable: she doesn't deliver a letter and instead slips it into her
pocket. Every night Iris and Emma Fitch, the young doctor's wife, tune in to Frankie Bard's radio
dispatches, anguished bulletins sent from the air-raid shelters and Underground stations of London
during the Blitz. One night in a bomb shelter, Frankie meets a doctor from Cape Cod with a letter in
his pocket, a letter Frankie vows to deliver. In the last desperate days of the summer of 1941 Frankie
leaves a traumatised London, rides the trains out of Germany and records the stories of refugees
desperately trying to escape. The townspeople of Franklin listen and the war seems a life-time away,
but Iris and Emma, unable to tear themselves away from Frankie's voice, know better. The
Postmistress is an unforgettable tale of the secrets we must bear or bury. It is about what happens to
love during wartime, when those we cherish leave. And how every story of love or war is about
looking left when we should have been looking right.
Fiction
326 pages; Pub 2010
A Prayer for Owen Meany
John Irving
In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys—best friends—are playing in a Little League
baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other
boy’s mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn’t believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is
God’s instrument. What happens to Owen, after that 1953 foul ball, is extraordinary and terrifying.
Fiction
543 Pages; Pub 2001
The Price of Salt
Patricia Highsmith
A chance encounter between two lonely women leads to a passionate romance in this lesbian cult
classic. Therese, a struggling young sales clerk, and Carol, a homemaker in the midst of a bitter
divorce, abandon their oppressive daily routines for the freedom of the open road, where their love
can blossom. But their newly discovered bliss is shattered when Carol is forced to choose between
her child and her lover.Author Patricia Highsmith is best known for her psychological thrillers
Strangers on a Train andThe Talented Mr. Ripley. Originally published in 1952 under a pseudonym,
The Price of Salt was heralded as "the novel of a love society forbids." Highsmith's sensitive treatment
of fully realized characters who defy stereotypes about homosexuality marks a departure from
previous lesbian pulp fiction. Erotic, eloquent, and suspenseful, this story offers an honest look at the
necessity of being true to one's nature.
Fiction
249 Pages; Pub
Questions of Travel
Michelle de Kretser
A mesmerising literary novel, QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL charts two very different lives. Laura travels
the world before returning to Sydney, where she works for a publisher of travel guides. Ravi dreams
of being a tourist until he is driven from Sri Lanka by devastating events. Around these two superbly
drawn characters, a double narrative assembles an enthralling array of people, places and stories from Theo, whose life plays out in the long shadow of the past, to Hana, an Ethiopian woman
determined to reinvent herself in Australia. Award-winning author Michelle de Kretser illuminates
travel, work and modern dreams in this brilliant evocation of the way we live now. Wonderfully written,
44
QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL is an extraordinary work of imagination - a transformative, very funny and
intensely moving novel.
Fiction
517 pages, pub 2013
The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever
imagined. The woman in question is Hanna, and before long they embark on a passionate,
clandestine love affair which leaves Michael both euphoric and confused. For Hanna is not all she
seems. Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realize that
the person in the dock is Hanna. The woman he had loved is a criminal. Much about her behaviour
during the trial does not make sense. But then suddenly, and terribly, it does - Hanna is not only
obliged to answer for a horrible crime, she is also desperately concealing an even deeper secret
Literary Fiction
240 Pages; Pub 2009
Rebecca
Daphne Du Maurier
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. With these words, the reader is ushered into an
isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter
recalls the chilling events that transpired as she began her new life as the young bride of a husband
she barely knew. For in every corner of every room were phantoms of a time dead but not forgotten—
a past devotedly preserved by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers: a suite immaculate and
untouched, clothing laid out and ready to be worn, but not by any of the great house's current
occupants. With an eerie presentiment of evil tightening her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter walked
in the shadow of her mysterious predecessor, determined to uncover the darkest secrets and
shattering truths about Maxim's first wife—the late and hauntingly beautiful Rebecca.
Fiction
410 Pages; Pub 1997
Red Tent, The
Anita Diamant
Lost to the history by the chronicles of men, here at last is the dazzling story of Dinah, Jacob's only
daughter in the Book of Genesis. Moving panoramically from Mesopotamia to Canaan to Egypt, The
Red Tent is robustly narrated by Dinah, from her upbringing by the four wives of Jacob, to her growth
into one of the most influential women of her time. Seeking to preserve not only her own remarkable
experiences but those of a long-ago era of womanhood left largely undocumented by the original
male scribes and later Biblical scholars, Dinah breaks a male silence that has lasted for centuries,
revealing the ancient origins of many contemporary religious practices and sexual politics. The result
is a beautiful, thought-provoking novel.
Historical Fiction
395 pages; Pub 2007
A Reliable Wife
Robert Goolrick
Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a
train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife."
But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" that
Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by
greed. Her plan is simple: she will win this man's devotion, and then, ever so slowly, she will poison
him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. What she has not counted on, though, is that Truitt --- a
passionate man with his own dark secrets --- has plans of his own for his new wife. Isolated on a
remote estate and imprisoned by relentless snow, the story of Ralph and Catherine unfolds in
unimaginable ways.
With echoes of Wuthering Heights and Rebecca, Robert Goolrick's intoxicating debut novel delivers a
classic tale of suspenseful seduction, set in a world that seems to have gone temporarily off its axis.
Fiction
305 Pages; Pub 2010
The remains of the day
Kazuo Ishiguro
45
In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday
that will take him deep into the countryside and into his past…A contemporary classic, The Remains
of the Day is Kazuo Ishiguro’s beautiful and haunting evocation of life between the wars in a Great
English House, of lost causes and lost love.
Literary Fiction
256 Pages; Pub 1989
Man Booker Prize Winner
Revolutionary road
Richard Yates
Hailed as a masterpiece from the moment of its first publication, Revolutionary Road is the story of
Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple whose empty suburban life is held
together by the dream that greatness is only just round the corner. With heartbreaking compassion
and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their hopes and ideals, betraying in
the end not only each other, but their own best selves.
Literary Fiction
336 Pages; Pub 2007
Rhubarb
Craig Silvey
A poignant and tender sort-of-love story about two damaged people tenuously connecting. Eleanor is
blind and lives with her reclusive mother. Ewan is a cello player with agoraphobia. She is drawn to
him through his music but cannot understand the difficulty he faces in forming a friendship. He does
not understand her past, nor the impact his music has on her. Amidst the heat of a Fremantle summer
they stumble towards each other.
Sad, funny and affecting, and peopled with characters that live and breathe, Rhubarb is simply a
wonderful novel. With his sublime and playful use of language and his uncanny ability to reveal the
human condition in all its vulnerability and fragility, Craig Silvey has created an extraordinary
contemporary Australian story.
Fiction
332 pages; Pub 2004
Australian Author
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Set in the smoking ashes of a post-apocalyptic America, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road tells the story
of a father-son journey toward the sea and an uncertain salvation. The world they pass through is a
ghastly vision of scorched countryside and blasted cities “held by cores of blackened looters who
tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and
anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell”. It is a starved world,
all plant and animal life dead or dying, some of the few human survivors even eating each other alive.
The father and son move through the ruins searching for food and shelter, trying to keep safe from
murderous, roving bands. They have only a pistol to defend themselves, the clothes they are wearing,
a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
Awesome in the totality of its vision, The Road is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best
that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps
two people alive in the face of total devastation.
Apocalyptic Literature
287 Pages; Pub 2006
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Room
Emma Donoghue
Five-year-old Jack and his Ma enjoy their long days together, playing games, watching TV, and
reading favorite stories. Through Jack's narration, it slowly becomes apparent that their pleasant days
are shrouded by a horrifying secret. Seven years ago, his 19-year-old Mother was abducted and has
since been held captive—in one small room. To her abductor she is nothing more than a sex slave,
with Jack as a result, yet she finds the courage to raise her child with constant love under these most
abhorrent circumstances. He is a bright child—bright enough, in fact, to help his mother successfully
carry out a plan of escape. Once they get to the outside world, the sense of relief is short lived, as
Jack is suddenly faced with an entirely new worldview (with things he never imagined, like other
people, buildings, and even family) while his mother attempts to deal with her own psychological
trauma. Gripping, riveting, and close to the bone, this story grabs you and doesn't let go. Donoghue
46
skillfully builds a suspenseful narrative evoking fear and hate and hope—but most of all, the triumph
of a mother's ferocious love.
Literary Fiction
321 Pages; Pub 2010
The Rosie Effect
Graeme Simsion
'We've got something to celebrate,' Rosie said. I am not fond of surprises, especially if they disrupt
plans already in place. I assumed that she had achieved some important milestone with her thesis. Or
perhaps she had been offered a place in the psychiatry-training programme. This would be extremely
good news, and I estimated the probability of sex at greater than 80%. 'We're pregnant,' she said.
Don Tillman and Rosie Jarman are now married and living in New York. In true Tillman style, Don
instantly becomes an expert on all things obstetric. But in between immersing himself in a new
research study on parenting and implementing the Standardised Meal System (pregnancy version),
Don's old weaknesses resurface. And while he strives to get the technicalities right, he gets the
emotions all wrong, and risks losing Rosie when she needs him most.
Fiction
368 Pages; Pub 2014
Australian Author
The Rosie project
Graeme Simsion
Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. Then a chance encounter gives
him an idea. He will design a questionnaire-a sixteen-page, scientifically researched document-to find
the perfect partner. She will most definitely not be a barmaid, a smoker, a drinker or a late-arriver.
Rosie Jarman is all these things. She is strangely beguiling, fiery and intelligent. And she is also on a
quest of her own. She's looking for her biological father, a search that a certain DNA expert might just
be able to help her with-even if he does wear quick-dry clothes and eat lobster every single Tuesday
night.
Fiction
Pub 2013; 329 Pages
Rules of civility
Amor Towles
Set in New York City in 1938, Rules of Civility tells the story of a watershed year in the life of an
uncompromising twenty-five-year-old named Katey Kontent. Armed with little more than a formidable
intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of cool nerve, Katey embarks on a journey from a Wall
Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future.
Fiction
335 pages; Pub. 2012
Salvage the bones
Jesmyn Ward
A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage,
Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker, largely absent, he doesn't show
concern for much else. Esch and her three brothers are stocking food, but there isn't much to save.
Lately, Esch can't keep down what food she gets; she's fourteen and pregnant. Her brother Skeetah
is sneaking scraps for his prized pitbull's new litter, dying one by one in the dirt. Meanwhile, brothers
Randall and Junior try to stake their claim in a family long on child's play and short on parenting. As
the twelve days that make up the novel's framework yield to their dramatic conclusion, this
unforgettable family-motherless children sacrificing for one another as they can, protecting and
nurturing where love is scarce-pulls itself up to face another day. A big-hearted novel about familial
love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive
realities of rural poverty, Salvage the Bones is muscled with poetry, revelatory, and real.
Fiction
261 Pages; Pub 2011
National Book Award Winner
Sarah Thornhill
Kate Grenville
From the beginning Jack and I was friends. Somehow our way of looking at things fitted together. He
never called me Dolly, The way the others did, only my full and proper name. Sarah Thornhill is the
youngest child of William Thornhill, convict-turned-landowner on the Hawkesbury River. She grows up
in the fine house her father is so proud of, a strong-willed young woman who's certain where her
47
future lies. She's known Jack Langland since she was a child, and always loved him. But the past is
waiting in ambush with its dark legacy. There's a secret in Sarah's family, a piece of the past kept
hidden from the world and from her. A secret Jack can't live with. A secret that changes everything,
For both of them. Kate Grenville takes us back To The early Australia of the Secret River And The
Thornhill family. This is Sarah's story. It's a story of tangled secrets, a story of loss and unlooked-for
happiness, and a story about the silent spaces of the past.
Historical fiction
307 pages; pub 2011
Australian Author
Sarah's key
Tatiana de Rosnay
Paris, July 1942 : Sarah, a ten year-old Jewish girl, is arrested by the French police in the middle of
the night, along with her mother and father. Desperate to protect her younger brother, she locks him
in a cupboard and promises to come back for him as soon as she can. Paris, May 2002 : Julia
Jarmond, an American journalist, is asked to write about the 60th anniversary of the Vel'
d'Hiv'acirc;euro;"the infamous day in 1942 when French police rounded up thousands of Jewish men,
women and children, in order to send them to concentration camps. Sarah's Key is the poignant story
of two families, forever linked and haunted by one of the darkest days in France's past. In this
emotionally intense, page-turning novel, Tatiana de Rosnay reveals the guilt brought on by longburied secrets and the damage that the truth can inflict when they finally come unravelled.
Fiction
320 pages; Pub 2008
The Secret Chord
Geraldine Brooks
1000 BC. The Second Iron Age. The time of King David. Anointed as the chosen one when just a
young shepherd boy, David will rise to be king, grasping the throne and establishing his empire. But
his journey is a tumultuous one and the consequences of his choices will resound for generations. In
a life that arcs from obscurity to fame, he is by turns hero and traitor, glamorous young tyrant and
beloved king, murderous despot and remorseful, diminished patriarch. His wives love and fear him,
his sons will betray him. It falls to Natan, the courtier and prophet who both counsels and castigates
David, to tell the truth about the path he must take. With stunning originality, acclaimed author
Geraldine Brooks offers us a compelling portrait of a morally complex hero from this strange age part legend, part history. Full of drama and richly drawn detail, THE SECRET CHORD is a vivid story
of faith, family, desire and power that brings David magnificently alive.
Fiction
400 pages; Pub 2015
The secret history
Donna Tartt
A misfit at an exclusive New England college, Richard finds kindred spirits in the five eccentric
students of his ancient Greek class. But his new friends have a horrific secret. When blackmail and
violence threaten to blow their privileged lives apart, they drag Richard into the nightmare that engulfs
them. And soon they enter a terrifying heart of darkness from which they may never return.
Literary Fiction
672 Pages; Pub 2006
The secret keeper
Kate Morton
In a bucolic English summer at the end of the 1960s, a young girl witnesses a shocking crime. Fifty
years later, she sets out to find out the truth, uncovering layers of mystery and deception. Moving
from London during the Blitz to the present day, this is classic Kate Morton: a compulsively-readable,
entrancing mystery with a long held secret to be uncovered at its heart. 1961: On a sweltering
summers day, while her family picnics by the stream on their Suffolk farm, sixteen-year-old Laurel
hides out in her childhood tree house dreaming of a boy called Billy, a move to London, and the bright
future she can't wait to seize. But before the idyllic afternoon is over, Laurel will have witnessed a
shocking crime that changes everything. 2011: Now a much-loved actress, Laurel finds herself
overwhelmed by shades of the past. Haunted by memories, and the mystery of what she saw that
day, she returns to her family home and begins to piece together a secret history. A tale of three
strangers from vastly different worlds - Dorothy, Vivien and Jimmy - who are brought together by
chance in wartime London and whose lives become fiercely and fatefully entwined. WC Shifting
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between the 1930s, the 1960s and the present, THE SECRET KEEPER is a spellbinding story of
mysteries and secrets, theatre and thievery, murder and enduring love.
Fiction
Pub 2012
Australian Author
The Secret River
Kate Grenville
After a childhood of poverty and petty crime in the slums of London, William Thornhill is sentenced in
1806 to be transported to New South Wales for the term of his natural life. With his wife Sal and
children in tow, he arrives in a harsh land that feels at first like a death sentence. But among the
convicts there is a whisper that freedom can be bought, an opportunity to start afresh. Away from the
infant township of Sydney, up the Hawkesbury River, Thornhill encounters men who have tried to do
just that: Blackwood, who is attempting to reconcile himself with the place and its people, and
Smasher Williams, whose fear of this alien world turns into brutal depravity towards it. As Thornhill
and his family stake their claim on a patch of ground by the river, the battle lines between old and new
inhabitants are drawn.
Historical fiction
352 Pages; Pub 2005
Australian author
Winner: Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would
navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe
Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay
friends for life. Now Tony is in middle age. He's had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce.
He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up
surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove. THE SENSE OF AN ENDING is the story of one man
coming to terms with the mutable past. Laced with trademark precision, dexterity and insight, it is the
work of one of the world's most distinguished writers.
Literary Fiction
150 pages; Pub 2011
Man Booker prize Winner
The shadow of the wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
1945: A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book
dealer's son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The
Shadow of the Wind, by one Julin Carax. But when he sets out to find the author's other works, he
makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book
Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax's books in existence. Soon Daniel's
seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona's darkest secrets--an epic story of
murder, madness, and doomed love.
Fiction
496 pages; pub 2001
The signature of all things
Elizabeth Gilbert
Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the
extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker--a poor-born Englishman
who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man
in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry's brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father's money
and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable gifts herself. As Alma's research takes
her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike who
makes incomparable paintings of orchids and who draws her in the exact opposite direction -- into the
realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical. Alma is a clear-minded scientist; Ambrose a utopian
artist -- but what unites this unlikely couple is a desperate need to understand the workings of this
world and the mechanisms behind all life. The story is peopled with unforgettable characters:
missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad. But
most memorable of all, it is the story of Alma Whittaker, who -- born in the Age of Enlightenment, but
living well into the Industrial Revolution- bears witness to that extraordinary moment in human history
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when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into
dangerous new ideas.
Historical Fiction
501 Pages; Pub 2013
The silver linings playbook
Matthew Quick
During the years he spends in a neural health facility, Pat Peoples formulates a theory about silver
linings: he believes his life is a movie produced by God, his mission is to become physically fit and
emotionally supportive, and his happy ending will be the return of his estranged wife, Nikki. When Pat
goes to live with his parents, everything seems changed: no one will talk to him about Nikki; his old
friends are saddled with families; the Philadelphia Eagles keep losing, making his father moody; and
his new therapist seems to be recommending adultery as a form of therapy.
Fiction
289 Pages, Pub 2008
The slap
Christos Tsiolkas
At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This event has a shocking ricochet
effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event. What
unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the
fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse. In its clear-eyed
and forensic dissection of the ever-growing middle class and its aspirations and fears, The Slap is
also a poignant, provocative novel about the nature of loyalty and happiness, compromise and truth.
Literary Fiction
485p Pub. 2008
Australian Author
Winner: Commonwealth Writers prize 2009
Small Island
Andrea Levy
It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has
only just begun. Queenie Bligh’s neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican
lodgers, but Queenie doesn’t know when her husband will return, or if he will come back at all. What
else can she do? Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF
to fight against Hitler. Returning to England as a civilian he finds himself treated very differently. It’s
desperation that makes him remember a wartime friendship with Queenie and knock at her door.
Gilbert’s wife Hortense, too, had longed to leave Jamaica and start a better life in England. But when
she joins him she is shocked to find London shabby, decrepit, and far from the golden city of her
dreams. Even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was.
Historical fiction
533 pages; Pub 2004
Winner: Orange Prize for Fiction
Sony Reader
Our set of Sony Readers contains:- All that I am/ Anna Funda, Bereft/ Chris Womersley, Fifty
Shades of Grey/ E L James, The Glass Castle/ Jeannette Walls, Gold/ Chris Cleeve, The Help/
Kathryn Stockett, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet/ Jamie Ford, Jasper Jones/ Craig
Silvey, The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul/ Deborah Rodriguez, The Night Circus/ Erin Morgenstern,
The Paris Wife/ Paula McLain, Past the Shallows/ Favel Parrett, The Song of Achilles/ Madeline
Miller, The Story of Beautiful Girl/ Rachel Simon, Tea with Arwa: A memoir of family, faith and
finding a home in Australia/ Arwa El Masri, Wake In Fright/ Kenneth Cook
The space between us
Thrity Umrigar
This beautifully crafted novel about the interlinked lives of two women explores the complex
relationships between the classes in India. Set in contemporary Bombay, The Space Between Us tells
the story of Sera Dubash, an upper-middle-class Parsi housewife and Bhima, the woman who works
as a domestic servant in her home. Despite their class differences, the two women are bound by the
bonds of gender and shared life experiences - both had marriages that started out with great romantic
love and promise, but ended up as crushing disappointments. Ultimately, Sera Dubash faces a
decision that will force her to choose between loyalty to gender and friendship or loyalty to her social
position and class.
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Fiction
321pages; Pub. 2006
The spare room
Helen Garner
Helen prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola, who is flying down from Sydney for a three-week
visit. But this is no ordinary visit - Nicola has advanced cancer. She is coming to Melbourne to receive
treatment she believes will cure her. From the moment Nicola steps off the plane, Helen becomes her
nurse, her protector, her guardian angel and her stony judge. The Spare Room tells a story of
compassion and rage as the two women - one sceptical, one stubbornly serene - negotiate their way
through Nicola's gruelling treatments. Garner's dialogue is pitch perfect, her sense of pacing flawless
as this novel draws to its terrible and transcendent finale.
Literary Fiction
Australian Author
195p. Pub. 2008
A Sport and a Past time
James Salter
Twenty-year-old Yale dropout Phillip Dean is traveling Europe aimlessly in a borrowed car with little
money, until stopping for a few days in a church-quiet town near Dijon, where he meets Anne-Marie
Costallat, a young shop assistant. She quickly becomes to him the real France, its beating heart and
an object of pure longing. The two begin an affair both carnal and innocent.
Beautiful and haunting, A Sport and a Pastime is one of the first great American novels to speak
frankly of human desire and the yearning for passion free of guilt and shame.
Literary Fiction
185 Pages; Pub. 1967
The Star of the Sea
Joseph O’Connor
In the bitter winter of 1847, The Star of the Sea sets sail from Ireland for New York. Amongst the
passengers are a maidservant with a devastating secret, bankrupt Lord Merridith and his family, an
aspiring novelist and a maker of revolutionary ballads. All in search of a new home in the Promised
land, each is yet connected more deeply than they can possibly know... and a camouflaged killer is
stalking the decks, hungry for vengeance and absolution.
Fiction
432 pages, Pub. 2004
Stasiland
Anna Funder
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany
ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum
literally overnight and one in 50 East Germans were informing on their fellow citizens, there are
thousands of captivating stories. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the
former East Germany. She meets Miriam, who as a 16-year-old might have started World War III; she
visits the man who painted the line which became the Berlin Wall; and she gets drunk with the
legendary "Mik Jegger" of the east, once declared by the authorities to his face to "no longer to exist."
Each enthralling story depicts what it's like to live in Berlin as the city knits itself back together--or fails
to. This is a history full of emotion, attitude, and complexity.
Non Fiction
304 Pages ; Pub 2002
Station Eleven
Hilary St John Mandel
An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells
the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors
roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.
Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the
pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as
Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the
crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art,
memory, and ambition, "Station Eleven" tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the
ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.
Fiction
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333 pages; Pub 2014
Still Alice
Lisa Genova
A professor at the height of her career when her memory begins to fail her, Alice Howland struggles to
maintain her lifestyle as her sense of self is gradually stripped away, leaving her unable to continue in
her profession, take care of herself, recognise her loved ones or even understand that she is ill.
Fiction
237pages; Pub. 2009
The story of beautiful girl
Rachel Simon
On a stormy night in small-town America, a couple, desperate and soaked to the skin, knock on a
stranger's door. When Martha, a retired schoolteacher living a safe and conventional life, answers
their knock, her world changes forever. For they are fugitives. Lynnie, a young woman with an
intellectual disability, and Homan, a deaf man with only sign language to guide him, have escaped
together from The School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, a brutal institution where people with
disabilities are left to languish, shuttered away from the world. In a moment of despair, they reveal
that Lynnie has a newborn baby. But, moments later, the police bang on the door. Homan escapes
into the darkness, Lynnie is captured. But just before she is returned to The School, bound and tied,
she utters two words to Martha: "Hide her." And so begins the unforgettable story of Lynnie, Homan,
Martha, and baby Julia - lives divided by seemingly insurmountable obstacles, yet drawn together by
a secret pact and extraordinary love.
Fiction
346; Pub 2011
Suddenly, a knock on the door
Etgar Keret
Bringing up a child, lying to the boss, placing an order in a fast-food restaurant: in Etgar Keret's new
collection, daily life is complicated, dangerous, and full of yearning. In his most playful and most
mature work yet, the living and the dead, silent children and talking animals, dreams and waking life
coexist in an uneasy world. Overflowing with absurdity, humour, sadness, and compassion, the tales
in Suddenly, a Knock on the Door establish Etgar Keret - declared a "genius" by The New York Times
- as one of the most original writers of his generation.
Short Stories
293 Pages; Pub 2012
Sweet tooth
Ian McEwan
Britain, 1972. Operation Sweet Tooth: Serena Frome, a bishop's daughter now turned spy, is sent on
a secret mission to charm Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First she loves his stories, then she
begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life?
Fiction
320 Pages; Pub 2012
The tall man
Chloe Hooper
In 2004 Cameron Doomadgee, a 36-year-old resident of Palm Island, was arrested for swearing at a
white police officer. Within 45 minutes he was dead. The main suspect was well respected Senior
Sergeant Christopher Hurley. This is the story of what happened, the trial, and the Aboriginal myths
around the case. It is a story in luminous detail of two worlds clashing.
Non Fiction
258pages; Pub. 2008
Australian Author
Testament of Youth
Vera Brittain
In 1914 Vera Brittain was eighteen and, as war was declared, she was preparing to study at Oxford.
Four years later her life - and the life of her whole generation - had changed in a way that was
unimaginable in the tranquil pre-war era. TESTAMENT OF YOUTH, one of the most famous
autobiographies of the First World War, is Brittain's account of how she survived the period; how she
lost the man she loved; how she nursed the wounded and how she emerged into an altered world. A
passionate record of a lost generation, it made Vera Brittain one of the best-loved writers of her time.
Non Fiction
612 pages; Pub. 1933
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That Deadman Dance
Kim Scott
In playful, musical prose, this book explores the early contact between the Aboriginal Noongar people
and the first European settlers. The novel's hero is a young Noongar man named Bobby
Wabalanginy. Clever, resourceful and eager to please, Bobby befriends the new arrivals, joining them
hunting whales, tilling the land, exploring the hinterland and establishing the fledgling colony. But
slowly - by design and by accident - things begin to change. Not everyone is happy with how the
colony is developing. As the Europeans impose ever stricter rules and regulations in order to keep the
peace, Bobby's Elders decide they must respond in kind. Supple and accessible in style, generous in
spirit and outlook, 'That Deadman Dance' is a fascinating, powerful portrait of Australia's earliest days.
Literary Fiction
400p. Pub. 2010
Australian Author
Winner: Miles Franklin Literary Award 2011
That woman : the life of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor
Anne Sebba
'That woman', so called by her sister-in-law the new Queen Elizabeth, was born Bessie Wallis
Warfield in 1895 in Baltimore and she endured a childhood of relative obscurity which sharpened a
burning desire to rise above her circumstances. To win in the game of life was her unequivocal aim.
The first serious yet sympathetic book by a female biographer to explain the story of how an American
divorcee became a hate figure for allegedly ensnaring a British King from his throne, this book
focuses on the core conflict of her life in the 1930s, with particular reference to her impoverished
American childhood as a motivation for her ambition.
Fiction
344 pages; pub 2013
This House of Grief
Helen Garner
On the evening of 4 September 2005, Robert Farquharson, a separated husband, was driving his
three sons home to their mother when his car plunged into a dam. The boys, aged ten, seven, and
two, drowned. Was this an act of deliberate revenge or a tragic accident? The court case became
Helen Garner's obsession. She was in the courtroom every day of Farquharson's trial and subsequent
retrial, along with countless journalists and the families of both the accused and his former wife. In this
utterly compelling book, Helen Garner tells the story of a man and his broken life. At its core is a
search for truth that takes author and reader through complex psychological terrain. Garner exposes,
with great compassion, that truth and justice are as complex as human frailty and morality.
Non Fiction
Australian Author
300 pages; Pub 2014
This is how you lose her
Junot Diaz
A collection of linked narratives about love - passionate love, illicit love, dying love, maternal love told through the lives of New Jersey Dominicans, as they struggle to find a point where their two
worlds meet. In prose that is endlessly energetic and inventive, tender and funny, it lays bare the
infinite longing and inevitable weaknesses of the human heart. Most of all, these stories remind us
that the habit of passion always triumphs over experience and that 'love, when it hits us for real, has a
half-life of forever.'
Short Stories
213 pages; Pub 2012
Three Cups of Tea
Greg Mortenson
In 1993, a young American mountain climber named Greg Mortenson stumbles into a tiny village high
in Pakistan’s beautiful and desperately poor Karakoram Himalaya region. Sick, exhausted, and
depressed after a failing to scale the summit of K2, Mortenson regains his strength and his will to live
thanks to the generosity of the people of the village of Korphe. Before he leaves, Mortenson makes a
vow that will profoundly change both the villagers’ lives and his own—he will return and build them a
school.
The war-torn mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan appear in the news as the breeding grounds of
terrorist training camps, Al Qaeda hide-outs, and fierce religious extremism. In Three Cups of Tea,
53
Mortenson and Relin take readers behind the headlines to reveal the true heart and soul of this
explosive region and to show how one man’s promise might be enough to change the world.
Non Fiction
349Pages; Pub 2007
Time and Time Again
Ben Elton
It's the 1st of June 1914 and Hugh Stanton, ex-soldier and celebrated adventurer is quite literally the
loneliest man on earth. No one he has ever known or loved has been born yet. Perhaps now they
never will be. Stanton knows that a great and terrible war is coming. A collective suicidal madness
that will destroy European civilization and bring misery to millions in the century to come. He knows
this because, for him, that century is already history. Somehow he must change that history. He must
prevent the war. A war that will begin with a single bullet. But can a single bullet truly corrupt an entire
century? And, if so, could another single bullet save it?
Fiction
386Pages; Pub 2014
Time traveler's wife, The
Audrey Niffenegger
The love story of Clare and Henry who have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was
thirty-six, and were married when Clare was twenty-two and Henry thirty. Impossible but true,
because Henry is one of the first people diagnosed with Chrono-Displacement Disorder: periodically
his genetic clock resets and he finds himself pulled suddenly into his past or future. His
disappearances are spontaneous and his experiences are alternately harrowing and amusing. The
Time Traveler's Wife depicts the effects of time travel on Henry and Clare's passionate love for each
other with grace and humour. Their struggle to lead normal lives in the face of a force they can neither
prevent nor control is intensely moving and entirely unforgettable.
Fiction
518Pages, 2004
Tipping The Velvet
Sarah Walters
This delicious, steamy novel chronicles the adventures of Nan King, who begins life as an oyster girl
in the provincial seaside town of Whitstable and whose fortunes are forever changed when she falls in
love with a cross-dressing music-hall singer named Miss Kitty Butler.
Drawing comparison to the work of Jeanette Winterson, Sarah Waters' novel is a feast for the senses
- an erotic, lushly detailed historical novel that bursts with life and dazzlingly casts the turn of the
century in a different light.
Historical Fiction
472 pages; Pub 2000
To be Sung Underwater
Tom McNeal
Judith Whitman always believed in the kind of love that "picks you up in Akron and sets you down in
Rio." Long ago, she once experienced that love. Willy Blunt was a carpenter with a dry wit and a
steadfast sense of honor. Marrying him seemed like a natural thing to promise. But Willy Blunt was
not a person you could pick up in Nebraska and transport to Stanford. When Judith left home, she
didn't look back. Twenty years later, Judith's marriage is hazy with secrets. In her hand is what may
be the phone number for the man who believed she meant it when she said she loved him. If she
called, what would he say?
Fiction
464 pages, Pub. 2012
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
Set in the deep South of America in the 1930’s, To Kill a Mocking Bird is narrated by the young
tomboy Scout. Prompted by their friend Dill, Scout and her brother Jem try to make the reclusive Boo
Radley come out of hiding.
This is one of their last summers of innocence as the events surrounding their father bring the whole
town into conflict. When Atticus Finch is set the task of defending a black man for the rape of a white
woman, he becomes the target of bigotry and ignorance. Not only do his children learn some difficult
lessons about conscience, responsibility and justice but their very lives are put in peril.
Classic Fiction
296 pages; Pub 1960
54
Too Close to Home
Georgia Blain
Freya writes uncomfortable domestic dramas. Her friends work in theatre and film, show in galleries,
talk politics and are trying new ways of having children with friends. These are the people who are
slowly gentrifying the next ring of inner-city suburbs while praising their diversity. As the stultifying
heat of summer descends, Shane, an Aboriginal man, moves up the road. He was once close to Matt,
Freya's partner, and he not only brings with him a different approach to life, he also has news of a boy
who might be Matt's son. Despite wanting to embrace all that Shane represents and the possibility of
another child in their life, Freya and Matt stumble, failing each other and their beliefs.
Literary Fiction
293Pages, Pub 2011
Australian Author
Tree of man, The
Patrick White
Stan Parker, with only a horse and a dog for companions, journeys to a remote scrubby patch of land
that he has inherited in the Australian hills. When the land is cleared enough for a rudimentary house
to be built, Stan brings his new wife, Amy, to the wilderness. Together they struggle to establish a
home for themselves and their growing family.
Literary Fiction
499Pages, Pub 1955
Australian Author
Nobel Prize winning author
Ugly
Robert Hoge
Home for the Hoges was a bayside suburb of Brisbane. Robert s parents, Mary and Vince, knew that
his life would be difficult, but they were determined to give him a typical Australian childhood. So
along with the regular, gruelling and often dangerous operations that made medical history and
gradually improved Robert s life, there were bad haircuts, visits to the local pool, school camps and
dreams of summer sports.Ugly is Robert s account of his life, from the time of his birth to the arrival of
his own daughter. It is a story of how the love and support of his family helped him to overcome
incredible hardships. It is also the story of an extraordinary person living an ordinary life, which is
perhaps his greatest achievement of all.
Memoir
Pub 2013
Uncommon reader, The
Alan Bennett
The Uncommon Reader is none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when
her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. She reads widely and intelligently.
Her reading naturally changes her world view and her relationship with people like the oleaginous
prime minister and his repellent advisers. She comes to question the prescribed order of the world
and loses patience with much that she has to do. In short, her reading is subversive. The
consequence is, of course, surprising, mildly shocking and very funny.
Fiction
124Pages, Pub 2007
Unknown terrorist, The
Richard Flanagan
This explosive novel holds a mirror to contemporary Australia. In its terrifying reflection we see the
image of the Doll, a 26-year-old Sydney pole dancer – a flawed woman, racist, obsessed with money
– who finds her life suddenly being destroyed by the things she has up until that moment most firmly
believed in. The Unknown Terrorist is a relentless tour de force that has been praised around the
world. It paints a devastating picture of a contemporary society gone haywire, where the ceaseless
drumbeat of terror alert levels, newsbreaks, and fear of the unknown pushes a nation ever closer to
breaking point.
Fiction
325pages, Pub 2006
Australian Author
Unlikely pilgrimage of Harold Fry, The
Rachel Joyce
55
Recently retired, sweet, emotionally numb Harold Fry is jolted out of his passivity by a letter from
Queenie Hennessy, an old friend, who he hasn't heard from in twenty years. She has written to say
she is in hospice and wanted to say goodbye. Leaving his tense, bitter wife Maureen to her chores,
Harold intends a quick walk to the corner mailbox to post his reply but instead, inspired by a chance
encounter, he becomes convinced he must deliver his message in person to Queenie--who is 600
miles away--because as long as he keeps walking, Harold believes that Queenie will not die.
So without hiking boots, rain gear, map or cell phone, one of the most endearing characters in current
fiction begins his unlikely pilgrimage across the English countryside. Along the way, strangers stir up
memories--flashbacks, often painful, from when his marriage was filled with promise and then not, of
his inadequacy as a father, and of his shortcomings as a husband.
Fiction
295 Pages, Pub 2012
Us
David Nicholls
A compellingly human, deftly funny new novel about what holds marriages and families together—and
what happens, and what we learn about ourselves, when everything threatens to fall apart.
Us is the story of a man trying to rescue his relationship with the woman he loves, and learning how to
get closer to a son who’s always felt like a stranger. Us is a moving meditation on the demands of
marriage and parenthood, the regrets of abandoning youth for middle age, and the intricate
relationship between the heart and the head. And in David Nicholls’s gifted hands, Douglas’s odyssey
brings Europe—from the streets of Amsterdam to the famed museums of Paris, from the cafés of
Venice to the beaches of Barcelona—to vivid life just as he experiences a powerful awakening of his
own. Will this summer be his last as a husband, or the moment when he turns his marriage, and
maybe even his whole life, around?
Fiction
416 Pages; Pub 2014
Vanishing act of Esme Lennox, The
Maggie O’farrell
Set between the 1930s,and the present this the story of Esme, a woman edited out of her family’s
history, and of the secrets that come to light when, sixty years later, she is released from care, and a
young woman, Iris, discovers the great aunt she never knew she had
Fiction
245Pages; Pub 2006
View of the Harbour, A
Elizabeth Taylor
Blindness and betrayal are Elizabeth Taylors great subjects, and in A View of the Harbour she turns
her unsparing gaze on the emotional and sexual politics of a seedy seaside town thats been left
behind by modernity. Tory, recently divorced, depends more and more on the company of her
neighbors Robert, a doctor, and Beth, a busy author of melodramatic novels. Prudence, Robert and
Beths daughter, disapproves of the intimacy that has grown between her parents and Tory and the
gossip it has awakened in their little community. As the novel proceeds, Taylors view widens to take
in a range of characters from bawdy, nosey Mrs. Bracey; to a widowed young proprietor of the local
waxworks, Lily Wilson; to the would-be artist Bertramwhile the book as a whole offers a beautifully
observed and written examination of the fictions around which we construct our lives and manage our
losses.
Fiction
312 Pages; Pub
Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen
This is a great, glorious, big-hearted novel set in a travelling circus touring the backblocks of America
during the Great Depression of the early 1930s. It's a story of love and hate, trains and circuses,
dwarves and fat ladies, horses and elephants - or to be more specific, one elephant, Rosie, star of
Benzini Bros Most Spectacular Show on Earth ...When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and
suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, swindlers and misfits in a
second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression. It is there that Jacob meets
Marlena, the beautiful equestrienne who is married to August, a charismatic but violently
unpredictable animal trainer. Jacob also meets Rosie, an elephant who seems unmanageable until he
discovers an unusual way to reach her. Water for Elephants is a story that has it all - warmth, humour,
poignancy and passion. It is a novel that will win your heart.
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Fiction
335 Pages; Pub 2006
We are all Completely Beside Ourselves
Karen Joy Fowler
Meet the Cooke family: Mother and Dad, brother Lowell, sister Fern, and our narrator, Rosemary, who
begins her story in the middle. She has her reasons. “I spent the first eighteen years of my life defined
by this one fact: that I was raised with a chimpanzee,” she tells us. “It’s never going to be the first
thing I share with someone. I tell you Fern was a chimp and already you aren’t thinking of her as my
sister. But until Fern’s expulsion, I’d scarcely known a moment alone. She was my twin, my funhouse
mirror, my whirlwind other half, and I loved her as a sister.”
Rosemary was not yet six when Fern was removed. Over the years, she’s managed to block a lot of
memories. She’s smart, vulnerable, innocent, and culpable. With some guile, she guides us through
the darkness, penetrating secrets and unearthing memories, leading us deeper into the mystery she
has dangled before us from the start. Stripping off the protective masks that have hidden truths too
painful to acknowledge, in the end, “Rosemary” truly is for remembrance.
Fiction
310 pages, Pub 2013
We need to talk about Kevin
Lionel Shriver
That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child's character is self-evident. But
such generalizations provide cold comfort when it's your own son who's just opened fire on his fellow
students and whose class photograph — with its unseemly grin — is blown up on the national news.
Telling the story of her son Kevin's upbringing, Eva addresses herself to her estranged husband
through a series of letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has
become, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general and
Kevin in particular. How much is her fault?
Lionel Shriver tells a compelling, absorbing, and resonant story while framing these horrifying
tableaux of teenage carnage as metaphors for the larger tragedy — the tragedy of a country where
everything works, nobody starves, and anything can be bought but a sense of purpose.
Literary Fiction
468 Pages; Pub 2003
Winner: Orange Prize for Fiction 2005
When God was a rabbit
Sarah Winman
Spanning four decades, from 1968 onwards, this is the story of a fabulous but flawed family and the
slew of ordinary and extraordinary incidents that shape their everyday lives. It is a story about
childhood and growing up, loss of innocence, eccentricity, familial ties and friendships, love and life.
Stripped down to its bare bones, it's about the unbreakable bond between a brother and sister.
Fiction
401 Pages; Pub 2011
Where'd you go, Bernadette?
Maria Semple
"Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner;
to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary
architect, and to 15-year-old Bee, she is a best friend and, simply, Mom. Then Bernadette disappears.
It began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica.
But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle--and people in general--has made her so agoraphobic
that a virtual assistant in India now runs her most basic errands. A trip to the end of the earth is
problematic. To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret
correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a
mother and daughter's role in an absurd world."
Domestic Fiction
234 Pages; Pub 2012
When the Night Comes
Favel Parrett
Running away from the mainland was supposed to make their lives better. But, for Isla and her
brother, their mother's sadness and the cold, damp greyness of Hobart's stone streets seeps into
everything.
Then, one morning, Isla sees a red ship. That colour lights her day. And when a sailor from the ship
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befriends her mother, he shares his stories with them all - of Antarctica, his home in Denmark and life
onboard. Like the snow white petrels that survive in the harshest coldest place, this lonely girl at the
bottom of the world will learn that it is possible to go anywhere, be anything. But she will also find out
that it is just as easy to lose it all. An evocative and gently told story about the power fear and
kindness have to change lives.
Fiction
256 Pages; Pub 2014
Australian Author
The white tiger
Aravind Adiga
Meet Balram Halwai, the 'White Tiger': servant, philosopher, entrepreneur and murderer. Balram, the
White Tiger, was born in a backwater village on the River Ganges, the son of a rickshaw-puller. He
works in a teashop, crushing coal and wiping tables, but nurses a dream of escape. When he learns
that a rich village landlord needs a chauffeur, he takes his opportunity, and is soon on his way to Delhi
behind the wheel of a Honda. Amid the cockroaches and call-centres, the 36,000,004 gods, the
slums, the shopping malls, and the crippling traffic jams, Balram learns of a new morality at the heart
of a new India. Driven by desire to better himself, he comes to see how the Tiger might escape his
cage...
Literary Fiction
278 pages; Pub 2008
Wide Sargasso sea
Jean Rhys
Wide Sargasso Sea was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling
landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress
Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty.
After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his
demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.
Literary Fiction
151Pages; Pub 1966
The Winter of our disconnect: how three totally wired teenagers[and a mother who
slept with her iPhone] pulled the plug on their technology and lived to tell the tale
Susan Maushart
When journalist and commentator Susan Maushart first decided to pull the plug on all electronic
media at home, she realised her children would have sooner volunteered to go without food, water or
hair products. At ages 14, 15 and 18, her daughters and son didn't use media. They inhabited media.
Non Fiction
296 pages; Pub 2010
Australian Author
The Witches: Salem, 1692
Stacy Schiff
It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter started
to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before nineteen men and women had
been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most
educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbours accused neighbours, parents
accused children, husbands accused wives, children accused their parents, and siblings each other.
Vividly capturing the dark, unsettled atmosphere of seventeenth-century America, Stacy Schiff's
magisterial history draws us into this anxious time. She shows us how a band of adolescent girls
brought the nascent colony to its knees, and how quickly the epidemic of accusations, trials, and
executions span out of control. Above all, Schiff's astonishing research reveals details and complexity
that few other historians have seen. Every detail of colonial life just decades after the first landing family, farming, praying, housekeeping, dangers of life at wilderness's edge, estrangement from
England, the pressures of a life dominated by Biblical thought - is rendered with a clarity that makes
almost inconceivable events comprehensible. As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal,
as magnificently written as it is deeply researched, THE WITCHES breathes new life into one of
history's most enduring mysteries.
Non Fiction
512 Pages; Pub 2015
With my body
Nikki Gemmell
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In 2003 Nikki Gemmell created waves when, writing under the tag 'Anonymous', The Bride Stripped
Bare became a literary sensation, with its raw and unflinching depiction of female sexuality. She
called it 'a very honest take on sex, from a woman's perspective', and it went on to top bestseller lists
around the world. Now, eight years later, Nikki returns with another tour de force, articulating thoughts
and feelings that most people simply cannot put into words. Told in her distinctively lyrical style, With
My Body addresses the questions of what is intimacy and whether it is ever truly possible to know
another person. It is at once a manifesto of married mothers everywhere and a highly personal story
of one woman's sexual awakening. A wife, comfortably married and with several children, is
contemplating middle age along with all the constraints of motherhood. Finding herself numb and
locked down in an unending cycle of school runs, laundry and meal times, she cannot at first see a
way to live with honesty. Even her husband, whom she loves, has never reached the core of her.
Despairing of ever finding a way through her family to her own identity, she returns to the memory of
an old love affair - the consequences of which she has never resolved. This is beautiful, literary
writing at its best - exquisitely raw, emotional and bold, and deeply
resonant of the classic French erotic writings of Colette, Nin and Duras, but with a modern and
provocative twist
Literary fiction
484Pages; Pub 2011
Australian Author
The women in black
Madeleine St John
Sydney in the 1950s. On the second floor of the famous F. G. Goode department store, in Ladies'
Cocktail Frocks, the women in black are girding themselves for the Christmas rush. Among the staffPatty Williams with her wayward husband Frank, the sweet but unlucky Fay, faithful Mrs Jacob of the
measuring tape-is Lisa, the new Sales Assistant (Temporary), who is waiting for the results of her
Leaving Certificate. Across the floor and beyond the arch, Lisa will meet the glamorous Continental
refugee, Magda, guardian of the rose-pink cave of Model Gowns. With the lightest touch and the most
tender of comic instincts, Madeleine St John conjures a vanished summer of innocence. The Women
in Black is a great novel, a lost Australian classic.
Fiction
233 Pages; Pub 1993
Australian Author
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
England, the 1520s. Henry VIII is on the throne, but has no heir. Cardinal Wolsey is his chief advisor,
charged with securing the divorce the pope refuses to grant. Into this atmosphere of distrust and need
comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey's clerk, and later his successor. Cromwell is a wholly
original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with
a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own
interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried
out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions
and murderous rages. From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly
great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics.
With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us
Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.
Literary Fiction
651Pages; Pub 2009
Winner: Man Booker Prize 2009
Wonder
R.J. Palacio
WONDER is the funny, sweet and incredibly moving story of Auggie Pullman. Born with a terrible
facial abnormality, this shy, bright ten-year-old has been home-schooled by his parents for his whole
life, in an attempt to protect him from the stares and cruelty of the outside world. Now, for the first
time, Auggie is being sent to a real school - and he's dreading it. The thing is, Auggie's just an
ordinary kid, with an extraordinary face. But can he convince his new classmates that he's just like
them, underneath it all? Through the voices of Auggie, his big sister Via, and his new friends Jack and
Summer, WONDER follows Auggie's journey through his first year at Beecher Prep. Frank, powerful,
warm and often heart-breaking, WONDER is a book you'll read in one sitting, pass on to others, and
remember long after the final page.
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Fiction
315 Pages; Pub 2012
Year of Wonders
Geraldine Brooks
When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated mountain village, a
housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we
follow the story of the plague year, 1666, as her fellow villagers make an extraordinary choice:
convinced by a visionary young minister, they elect to quarantine themselves within the village
boundaries to arrest the spread of the disease. But as death reaches into every household, faith frays.
When the villagers turn from payers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must confront the deaths of
family members, the disintegration of her community, and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to
survive, a year of plague becomes instead an annus mirabilis, a 'year of wonders
Non Fiction
310 pages; Pub 2005
Australian Author
Z
Therese Ann Fowler
I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we're ruined, Look closer...and you'll see something
extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed. When
beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in
1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before
long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or
prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both
fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of
Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St.
Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes. What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is
unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own
time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel--and his witty,
perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in
this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island,
Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera--where they join the endless party of the glamorous,
sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and
Gertrude Stein. Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning
mist. But not even Jay Gatsby's parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous-sometimes infamous--husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and
Scott's, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda's irresistible
story as she herself might have told it.
Fiction
375 pages; 2013 Pub
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