The Engagement
Chloe Hooper
Hamish Hamilton, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781926428376
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
Liese Campbell has an engagement for the weekend: to stay with Alexander Colquhoun, the well-mannered heir of a pastoral dynasty, at his property in western Victoria. Liese, an English architect in flight from the financial crisis, now works at her uncle's real-estate business in Melbourne. Alexander has been looking for a place in the city. The luxury apartments Liese shows him have become sets for a relationship that satisfies their fantasies — and helps pay her debts. It's a game. Both players understand the rules. Or so she thinks. Across the ancient landscape they drive at dusk to his grand decaying mansion. Here Liese senses a change in Alexander, and realises a different game has begun. This gripping, provocative new novel by one of Australia's finest writers is a psychological thriller for the modern age, one which explores the snares of money and love, and the dark side of erotic imagination. A trap has been set, but how and why? And for whom?
NW
Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton, LITERATURE, PB, 9780241145555
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
Hobbes, Smith, Bentham, Locke and Russell. Five identical blocks make up the Caldwell housing estate in North West London. If you grew up in this relic of seventies urban design, the plan was to get out and get on, to something better, somewhere else. Thirty years later, Caldwell kids Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan have all moved on, with varying degrees of success - whatever that means. Living only streets apart, they occupy separate worlds, and navigate an atomized city in which few care to be their neighbour's keeper. Then one April afternoon a stranger comes to Leah's door, seeking help, disturbing the peace, and forcing Leah out of her isolation . . . From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, where the main streets hide the back alleys and taking the high road can sometimes lead you to a dead end, NW is a quietly devastating novel of encounters.
Sweet Tooth
Ian McEwan
Jonathan Cape, LITERATURE, PB, 9780224097383
$25.41 ex $27.95 inc
Britain, 1972. Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services in her final year at Cambridge. The cultural cold war continues and the country is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism. Serena is sent on a 'secret mission' which brings her into the literary world of 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? To answer this question, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage... Trust no one. McEwan's mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty story of betrayal and intrigue, love, and the invented self.
Happy Valley
Patrick White, Introduction by Peter Craven
Text Publishing, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781921922916
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
Patrick White’s magnificent debut novel—available for the first time since 1939.
Based on Patrick White’s own experiences in the early 1930s as a jackaroo at Bolaro, near Adaminaby in south-eastern New South Wales, Happy Valley paints a portrait of a community in a desolate landscape. It is a jagged and restless study of small-town and country life.
White was twenty-seven when Happy Valley was published by George C. Harrop in London. This mesmerising first novel gives us a prolonged glimpse of literary genius in the making. It won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1941, but White did not allow the novel to be republished in English in his lifetime. Its appearance now in the Text Classics series is a major literary event.
Happy Valley is the missing piece in the extraordinary jigsaw of White’s work.
Toby's Room
Pat Barker
Hamish Hamilton, LITERATURE, PB, 9780241145227
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
Toby and Elinor, brother and sister, closest friends and confidants, are sharers of a dark secret, carried from the sweltering summer of 1912 into the battlefields of France and wartime London in 1917. Then, when Toby is reported 'Missing, Believed Killed', another secret casts a lengthening shadow over Elinor's world: how exactly did Toby die - and why? Elinor's fellow art student Kit Neville, recently returned from the war with his face destroyed, was there in the fox-hole when Toby met his fate, but he is in no mood to talk. Enlisting the help of former lover Paul Tarrant, Elinor determines to uncover the truth. Only then will she be able finally to close the door to Toby's room. Moving from the Slade School of Art before the First World War to Queen Mary's Hospital, where surgery and art intersect in the attempt to rebuild the shattered faces of the wounded, Toby's Room is a riveting drama of identity and damage, of intimacy and loss. It is Pat Barker's most powerful novel yet.
The Oldest Song in the World
Sue Woolfe
Harper Collins, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9780732294991
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
Kate, a lonely city woman and reluctant student, is asked by her teachers to travel to the middle of the Australian desert to record a dying Aboriginal woman singing an ancient song. She accepts because she believes that she might be able to reunite with a childhood love and solve the mystery of her past. But once there, she's confronted by an Aboriginal culture vastly different to her own, and also by the forceful personality of the man who is supposed to help her find the singer. Very soon she is questioning everything she has ever felt about her own country and about her childhood. Sensitively portrayed, lyrical, and full of insights about people's diverse sense of home, belonging and family, The Oldest Song in the World is a brave and controversial story about discovering the power of one's own voice and taking heed of the voice of others.
Skios
Michael Frayn
Faber & Faber, LITERATURE, PB, 9780571281428
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
On the sunlit Greek island of Skios, the Fred Toppler Foundation's annual lecture is to be given by Dr Norman Wilfred, the world-famous authority on the scientific organisation of science. He turns out to be surprisingly young and charming - not at all the intimidating figure they had been expecting. The Foundation's guests are soon eating out of his hand. So, even sooner, is Nikki, the attractive and efficient organiser. Meanwhile, in a remote villa at the other end of the island, Nikki's old school-friend Georgie waits for the notorious chancer she has rashly agreed to go on holiday with, and who has only too characteristically failed to turn up. Trapped in the villa with her, by an unfortunate chain of misadventure, is a balding old gent called Dr Norman Wilfred, who has lost his whereabouts, his luggage, his temper and increasingly all normal sense of reality - everything he possesses apart from the flyblown text of a well-travelled lecture on the scientific organisation of science…
Sufficient Grace
Amy Espeseth
Scribe, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781922070029
$27.23 ex $29.95 inc
Ruth and her cousin Naomi live in rural Wisconsin, part of an isolated religious community. The girls' lives are ruled by the rhythms of nature — the harsh winters, the hunting seasons, the harvesting of crops — and by their families' beliefs. Beneath the surface of this closed, frozen world, hidden dangers lurk. The Ruth learns that Naomi harbours a terrible secret. She searched for solace in the mysteries of the natural world: broken fawns, migrating birds, and the strange fish deep beneath the ice. Can the girls' prayers for deliverance be answered? Sufficient Grace is a story of lost of innocence and the unfailing bond between two young women. It is at once devastating and beautiful, and ultimately transcendent.
Umbrella
Will Self
Bloomsbury, LITERATURE, PB, 9781408832097
$25.45 ex $27.99 inc
A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella. James Joyce, Ulysses Recently having abandoned his RD Laing-influenced experiment in running a therapeutic community - the so-called Concept House in Willesden - maverick psychiatrist Zack Busner arrives at Friern Hospital, a vast Victorian mental asylum in North London, under a professional and a marital cloud. He has every intention of avoiding controversy, but then he encounters Audrey Dearth, a working-class girl from Fulham born in 1890 who has been immured in Friern for decades. A socialist, a feminist and a munitions worker at the Woolwich Arsenal, Audrey fell victim to the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the First World War and, like one of the subjects in Oliver Sacks' Awakenings, has been in a coma ever since.
Realising that Audrey is just one of a number of post-encephalitics scattered throughout the asylum, Busner becomes involved in an attempt to bring them back to life - with wholly unforeseen consequences. Is Audrey's diseased brain in its nightmarish compulsion a microcosm of the technological revolutions of the twentieth century? And if Audrey is ill at all - perhaps her illness is only modernity itself? And what of Audrey's two brothers, Stanley and Albert: at the time she fell ill, Stanley was missing presumed dead on the Western Front, while Albert was in charge of the Arsenal itself, a coming man in the Imperial Civil Service. Now, fifty years later, when Audrey awakes from her pathological swoon, which of the two is it who remains alive? Radical in its conception, uncompromising in its style, Umbrella is Will Self's most extravagant and imaginative exercise in speculative fiction to date.
The Dinner
Herman Koch
Text Publishing, LITERATURE, PB, 9781921758522
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
Paul Lohman and his wife Claire are going out to dinner with Paul's brother Serge, a charismatic and ambitious politician, and his wife Babette. Paul knows the evening will not be fun. The restaurant will be over-priced and pretentious, the head waiter will bore on about the organically certified free-range this and artisan-fed that, and almost everything about Serge, especially his success, will infuriate Paul. But as the evening wears on it becomes clear that tonight's dinner will be even more difficult than usual. There is something the two couples have to discuss. It's about their teenage sons and the very bad thing they have been doing. And it's about how far two sets of parents will go to save their children from the consequences of their actions.
Daughters of Mars
Tom Keneally
Vintage, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781864712254
$29.95 ex $32.95 inc
In 1915 sisters Naomi and Sally Durance answer a call for nurses to join the war effort. They are escaping the family dairy farm in the Macleay Valley, and they carry a secret with them. Soon they are in Egypt, where they are put to work on the Red Cross hospital ship Archimedes as it patrols the Dardanelles. On Archimedes they witness Mars in all his ferocity, as he pummels soldiers in the massive, brutal metal brawl that is Gallipoli. Yet the sisters and their newfound nursing friends, with whom they will witness undreamt-of carnage and take care of unspeakably blighted men, find themselves courageous in the face of the horror. Naomi, Sally and their gang are then sent to northern Europe, where Naomi nurses in the visionary Australian Voluntary Hospital run by the committed and eccentric Lady Tarlton, and Sally in a casualty clearing station next to the Western Front. Here, again, they must face the inhumanity of war in its many terrible guises - where trench warfare and gas abound. But it is here, too, that the sisters meet the remarkable men with whom they wish to spend the rest of their lives.
This is How You Lose Her
Junot Diaz
Faber & Faber, LITERATURE, PB, 9780571294190
$25.45 ex $27.99 inc
Junot Diaz's new collection, This Is How You Lose Her, is 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.'
My Struggle: Book One
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Archipelago Press, LITERATURE, PB, 9781935744184
$22.73 ex $25.00 inc
To the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day or another, this thumping motion shuts down of its own accord. . . . The changes of these first hours happen so slowly and are performed with such an inevitability that there is almost a touch of ritual about them, as if life capitulates according to set rules, a kind of gentleman's agreement. Almost ten years have passed since Karl O. Knausgaard's father drank himself to death. He is now embarking on his third novel while haunted by self-doubt. Knausgaard breaks his own life story down to its elementary particles, often recreating memories in real time, blending recollections of images and conversation with profound questions in a remarkable way. Knausgaard probes into his past, dissecting struggles--great and small--with great candor and vitality. Articulating universal dilemmas, this Proustian masterpiece opens a window into one of the most original minds writing today.
Memory of Salt
Melike Alice Ulgezer
Giramondo, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781920882907
$25.41 ex $27.95 inc
Ali's father is a Turkish circus musician performing in Kabul when Ali's mother, a young pediatrician from Melbourne, meets him in a bar. He plays the trumpet, the saz, the flute, hears voices that urge him to violence, sees angels in the skies and djinns in the street, inscribes prayers and invocations on the walls of his room, and across the suburb. Ulgezer offers a remarkable portrait of this crazed visionary, a madman and a mystic, intoxicated with hashish and Sufism, who wrecks the family, but is also an enchanted being. Ali's mother has grown up on Australia's outback frontiers - their courtship takes them from Afghanistan across Iran to Turkey and then to London where Ali is born. The novel is Ali's coming to terms with this meeting of two cultures that are at once so similar and so separate.
Tarcutta Wake
Josephine Rowe
University of Queensland Press, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9780702249303
$18.14 ex $19.95 inc
A mother drives north with her young children, who watch her and try to decipher her buried grief. Two photographers document a nation's guilt in pictures of its people's hands. An underground club in Western Australia plays jazz to nostalgic patrons dreaming of America's Deep South. A young woman struggles to define herself among the litter of objects an ex-lover has left behind. In short vignettes and longer stories, Josephine Rowe explores the idea of things that are left behind: souvenirs, scars, and prejudice. Rowe captures everyday life in restrained poetic prose, merging themes of collective memory and guilt, permanence and impermanence, and inherited beliefs. These beautifully wrought, bittersweet stories announce the arrival of an exciting new talent in Australian fiction.
Nine Days
Toni Jordan
Text Publishing, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781921922831
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
It is 1939 and although Australia is about to go to war, it doesn't quite realise yet that the situation is serious. Deep in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Richmond it is business - your own and everyone else's - as usual. And young Kip Westaway, failed scholar and stablehand, is living the most important day of his life. Kip's momentous day is one of nine that will set the course for each member of the Westaway clan in the years that follow. Kip's mother, his brother Francis and, eventually, Kip's wife Annabel and their daughters and grandson: all find their own turning points, their triumphs and catastrophes, in days to come. But at the heart of all their stories is Kip, and at the centre of Kip's fifteen-year-old heart is his adored sister Connie. They hold the threads that will weave a family. In Nine Days Toni Jordan has harnessed all the spiky wit, compassion and lust for life that drew readers in droves to Addition and Fall Girl. Ambitious in scope and structure, triumphantly realised, this is a novel about one family and every family. It is about dreams and fights and sacrifices. And finally, of course, it is - as it must be - about love.
Fishing for Tigers
Emily Maguire
Picador, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781742610832
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
Six years ago, Mischa Reese left her abusive husband and suffocating life in California and reinvented herself in steamy, chaotic Hanoi. In Vietnam, she finds satisfying work and enjoys a life of relative luxury and personal freedom. Thirty-five and single, Mischa believes that romance and passion are for teenagers; a view with which her cynical, promiscuous expat friends agree. But then a friend introduces Mischa to his visiting eighteen-year-old son. Cal is a strikingly attractive Vietnamese-Australian boy, but he's resentful of his father, and of the nation which has stolen him away. His beauty and righteous idealism awaken something in Mischa and the two launch into an affair that threatens Mischa's friendships and reputation and challenges her sense of herself as unselfish and good. Set among the louche world of Hanoi's expatriate community, Fishing for Tigers is about a woman struggling with the morality of finding peace in a war-haunted city, personal fulfilment in the midst of poverty and sexual joy with a vulnerable youth.
Lionel Asbo: State of England
Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape, LITERATURE, , 9780224096218
$25.41 ex $27.95 inc
Lionel Pepperdine is England's pre-eminent yob. A churlish and unashamedly savage reprobate, he was served his first Anti-Social Behaviour Order aged three, for the application of explosives to excrement. It was the start of an inimitable career. By the age of twenty-two, Lionel is a hardened petty criminal enjoying the rewards of extortion and stolen property, and the thrills of Grievous Bodily Harm. He has proudly had his name changed to Asbo, by deed poll. In an endless cycle of incarceration, it is while 'mucking out' in a London prison one morning that news of his greatest Success arrives: he has won the National Lottery, just shy of a hundred million pounds. 'Well at least this proves that God has a sense of humour,' says the prison governor. What follows is a sinister thriller and comic tour de force told by Lionel's honest, intelligent, and frighteningly vulnerable nephew Desmond, who lives in the shadow of Lionel's limitless anger, piqued by his own dirty secret. Most of all, it is a satire on the state of the nation: England, lost in a garish limbo of impotence, rage, and virtuoso vulgarity.
The Burial
Courtney Collins
Allen & Unwin, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781743311875
$25.45 ex $27.99 inc
It is the dawn of the twentieth century in Australia and a woman has done an unspeakable thing. Twenty-two-year-old Jessie has served a two-year sentence for horse rustling. As a condition of her release she is apprenticed to Fitzgerald 'Fitz' Henry, who wants a woman to allay his loneliness in a valley populated by embittered ex-soldiers. Fitz wastes no time in blackmailing Jessie and involving her in his business of horse rustling and cattle duffing. When Fitz is wounded in an accident he hires Aboriginal stockman, Jack Brown, to steal horses with Jessie. Soon both Jack Brown and Jessie are struggling against the oppressive and deadening grip of Fitz. One catastrophic night turns Jessie's life on its head and she must flee for her life. From her lonely outpost, the mountains beckon as a place to escape. First she must bury the evidence. But how do you bury the evidence when the evidence is part of yourself? Inspired by the life of Jessie Hickman, legendary twentieth-century bushranger, The Burial is a stunning debut novel, a work of haunting originality and power.
The Marmalade Files
Steve Lewis/Chris Uhlmann
Harper Collins, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9780732294748
$27.26 ex $29.99 inc
When seasoned newshound Harry Dunkley is slipped a compromising photograph one frosty Canberra dawn he knows he's onto something big. In pursuit of the scoop, Dunkley must negotiate the deadly corridors of power where the minority Toohey Government hangs by a thread - its stricken Foreign Minister on life support, her heart maintained by a single thought. Revenge. Rabid Rottweilers prowl in the guise of Opposition senators, union thugs wage class warfare, TV anchors simper and fawn ... and loyalty and decency have long since given way to compromise and treachery. From the teahouses of Beijing to the beaches of Bali, from the marbled halls of Washington to the basements of the bureaucracy, Dunkley's quest takes him ever closer to the truth - and ever deeper into a lethal political game. Award-winning journalists Steve Lewis of News Ltd and Chris Uhlmann from the ABC combine forces in this arresting novel that proves fiction is stranger than fact.
The Daylight Gate
Jeanette Winterson
Century, LITERATURE, HC, 9780099561859
$22.68 ex $24.95 inc
She is a master of her material, a writer in whom great talent abides' Muriel Spark, Vanity Fair An wonderfully atmospheric, intricating woven, magical modern-day tale of the Pendle Witches. The animosity and anger between the accused and the accusers - which tore the community apart in the seventeenth Century - is still going strong today.
The Queen's Lover
Francine Du Plessix Gray
Penguin US, LITERATURE, HC, 9781594203374
$32.73 ex $36.00 inc
Francine du Plessix Gray's beautifully realized historical novel reveals the untold love story between Swedish aristocrat Count Axel von Fersen and Marie Antoinette. The romance begins at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774, when the dashing nobleman first meets the mesmerizing nineteen-year-old dauphine, wife of the reclusive prince who will soon become Louis XVI. This electric encounter launches a love affair that will span the course of the French Revolution. As their relationship deepens, Fersen becomes a devoted companion to the entire royal family. Roaming the halls of Versailles and visiting the private haven of Le Petit Trianon, he discovers the deepest secrets of the court, even learning the startling erotic details of Marie Antoinette's marriage to Louis XVI. But his new intimacy with Marie Antoinette and her family is disrupted when the events of the American Revolution tear Fersen away. Moved by the cause, he joins French troops in the fight for American independence. He returns to find France on the brink of disintegration.
After the Revolution of 1789 the royal family is moved from Versailles to the Tuileries. Fersen devises an escape for the family and their young children (Marie-Therese and the dauphin--whom many suspect is in fact Fersen's son). The failed attempt leads to a more grueling imprisonment, and the family spends its excruciating final days captive before the king and queen face the guillotine. Grieving his lost love in his native Sweden, Fersen begins to sense the effects of the French Revolution in his homeland. Royalists are now targets, and the sensuous aristocratic world of his youth is fast vanishing. Fersen is incapable of realizing that centuries of tradition have disappeared, and he pays dearly for his naivete, losing his life at the hands of a savage mob that views him as a pivotal member of the ruling class. Scion of Sweden's most esteemed nobility, Fersen came to be seen as an enemy of the country he loved. His fate is symbolic of the violent speed with which the events of the eighteenth century transformed European culture.
Expertly researched and deeply imagined, The Queen's Lover is a fresh vision of the French Revolution and the French royal family as told through the love story that was at its center.
Darkness on the Edge Town
Jessie Cole
Harper Collins, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9780732293192
$22.72 ex $24.99 inc
My dad, he collects broken things ... Where other people see junk he sees potential ... My dad collects broken people too ... Vincent is nearly forty years old, with little to show for his life except his precious sixteen-year-old daughter, Gemma: sensitive, insightful and wise beyond her years. When a stranger crashes her car outside Vincent and Gemma’s bush home, their lives take a dramatic turn. In an effort to help the stranded woman, father and daughter are drawn into a world of unexpected and life-changing consequences. This book is a haunting tale that beguiles the reader with its deceptively simple prose, its gripping and unrelenting tensions, and its disturbing yet tender observations.
Tigers in Red Weather
Lisa Klaussman
Picador, LITERATURE, PB, 9781447212201
$25.45 ex $27.99 inc
The epitome of East Coast glamour, Tiger House is where the beautiful and the damned have always come to play in summer, scene of martinis and moonlit conspiracies, and newly inherited by the sleek, beguiling Nick. The Second World War is just ending, her cousin Helena has left in search of married bliss in Hollywood, and Nick's husband is coming home. Everything is about to change. Their children will suprise them. One summer, on the cusp of adolescence, Nick's daughter and Helena's son make a sinister discovery that plunges the island's bright heat into private shadow.
Beneath the Darkening Sky
Majok Tulba
, AUSTRALIAN LIT, PB, 9781926428420
$27.23 ex $29.95 inc
When the rebels come to Obinna's village, they do more than wreak terror for one night. Lining the children up in the middle of the village, they measure them against the height of an AK-47. Those who are shorter than the gun are left behind. Those who are taller are taken. Obinna and his older brother Akot find themselves the rebel army's newest recruits. But while Akot almost willingly surrenders to the training, Obinna resists, determined not to be warped by the revolution's slogans and violence. In the face of his vicious captain's determination to break him, Obinna finds help in a soldier called Priest, and in the power of his own dreams. Beneath the Darkening Sky describes a life unimaginably different from our own, but one that is the experience of tens of thousands of child soldiers. Uncompromising, vivid and raw, it is an astonishing portrait of a mind trying to make sense of a senseless world. Majok Tulba himself was shorter than the AK-47, and came to Australia from South Sudan as a refugee in 2001. This is the story of what might have happened to him had he been an inch taller.
To the Island
Meaghan Delahunt
Granta, LITERATURE, PB, 9781847082749
$18.17 ex $19.99 inc
He disappeared. That's all she really knew. In search of her father Andreas, whom she has never met, Lena travels with her small son from Australia to Greece. On the island of Naxos she finds him, a wary, tormented man living in self-imposed exile and haunted by what happened to him under the rule of the Colonels in the 1960s. Slowly Lena unlocks the secrets of her father's past, and in getting to know him begins to understand the dark realities of contemporary Greek history. To the Island is a book about the impact of larger political events on the lives of ordinary people, and how political and personal betrayals reverberate across generations, beautifully evoking the currents and cross-currents between individuals, within families and in broader society. And in Lena and Andreas's stories, it shows how difficult it is to confront our personal and collective pasts - and the terrible consequences of being unable to do so.
The Apartment
Greg Baxter
Penguin, LITERATURE, HC, 9781844882861
$27.23 ex $29.95 inc
'I wish we could preserve our relationship as it is now for a long time. I wish we could remain strangers.' A man walks across an old European capital. Heavy snow falls. He has come here from far away, hoping to forget. Instead, he remembers: home, war, lost friends. Complicity. In the company of a new friend and alive to the new experiences of the city, he moves through the snow and his complicated history in search of an apartment. 'Exceptional - a book rich in ideas and poetry. Its power is accumulative and it moves with a calm and yet ineitable progress. It is a deeply mysterious and admirable book.' Hisham Matar