Best Fiction of 2009
Jasper Jones
$23.99 – Paperback book / Allen & Unwin
Winner of the 2009 Indie Book of the Year award.
Full of unforgettable characters, a page-turning pace and outrageously good dialogue, this is a glorious novel - thoughtful, funny, heartbreaking and wise - about outsider... Buy or find out more →
Lovesong
$39.99$26.95 – Hardcover book / Allen & Unwin
Seeking shelter in a Parisian cafe from a sudden rainstorm, John Patterner meets the exotic Sabiha and his carefully mapped life changes forever. Resonant of the bestselling Conditions of Faith, Alex Miller's keenly awai... Buy or find out more →
The Housekeeper And The Professor
$32.95$13.95 – Trade paperback / Harvill
The eagerly awaited novel from the author of The Diving Pool.
He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury some seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes... Buy or find out more →
Homer and Langley
$29.95$9.95 – Trade paperback / Little Brown
E.L. Doctorow's new novel follows the fascinating lives of Homer and Langley Collyer, two orphaned brothers who live reclusively in a massive 4-storey townhouse on Fifth Avenue. After their mother and father succumb to t... Buy or find out more →
Father's Day
$24.95 – Paperback book / Hunter House Pub
‘To make stories look and sound so heartbreakingly real you need an unflinching eye and a compassionate ear and Tony Birch knows just what details are going to go straight to his reader’s heart. Loss, memory, and the inv... Buy or find out more →
The Winter Vault
$32.99$14.95 – Trade paperback / Bloomsbury
Egypt, 1964. The great temple at Abu Simbel must be rescued from the rising waters of the Aswan dam. Block by block it is to be dismantled and resurrected sixty metres higher. This most delicate and daunting of tasks is ... Buy or find out more →
Figurehead
$29.95 – Trade paperback / Black Inc
What if you saved a man’s life and he went on to play a leading role in one of the bloodiest revolutions of modern times?
Ted Whittlemore, a radical Australian journalist, does just that. In the late 1960s, he saves Nh... Buy or find out more →
The Virtuoso
$27.99 – Paperback book / Harper Collins
Looking back‚ I realise I′d always been waiting for the arrival of Noel Mewton−Wood. His entrance occurred with such ease that I began to believe he′d always been there‚ standing in the wings‚ long before I′d even laid e... Buy or find out more →
Access Road
$29.95 – Trade paperback / Viking
As she watches her brother losing the battle with his memories, Rowan wonders how long she can keep her own past at bay
The old family home in Access Road, where Lionel, Roly and Rowan grew up, is crumbling away - but af... Buy or find out more →
Things We Didn't See Coming
$24.95 – Paperback book / Sleepers Publishing
It’s the anxious eve of the millennium. The car is packed to capacity, and as midnight approaches, a family flees the city in a fit of panic and paranoid, conflicting emotions.
The ensuing journey spans decades and off... Buy or find out more →
Olive Kitteridge
$22.99 – Paperback book / Pocket Books
Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town ... Buy or find out more →
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
$33.00$14.95 – Trade paperback / Granta
Startling, savagely funny stories from a highly original new voice.
A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the sweat-smudged footprint on the inside of his windscreen doesn't match her own. Teenage... Buy or find out more →
After The Fire, A Still Small Voice
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Vintage
Following the breakdown of a turbulent relationship, Frank moves from Canberra to a shack on the east coast once owned by his grandparents. There, among the sugar cane and sand dunes, he struggles to rebuild his life.
Fo... Buy or find out more →
Censoring: An Iranian Love Story
$29.99 – Trade paperback / Little Brown
Truly original, Censoring an Iranian Love Story is an incredibly imaginative yet always charming love story set in contemporary Iran that crackles with wit, verve and social comment: Sara falls in love with Dara through ... Buy or find out more →
The Year Of The Flood
$45.00 – Hardcover book / Bloomsbury
Margaret Atwood's eagerly-awaited new novel The Year of the Flood is a dystopic masterpiece and a testament to her visionary power.
Adam One, the kindly leader of the God's Gardeners - a religion devoted to the melding o... Buy or find out more →
Lush Life
$23.99 – Paperback book / Bloomsbury
'So, what do you do?'
Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers.
Artist, actor, screenwriter ... But now he's thirty-five years old
and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the
rest... Buy or find out more →
The Dog of the Marriage
$24.95$12.95 – Paperback book / Quercus
A quietly powerful presence in American fiction during the past two decades, these collected stories show the true scale of Amy Hempel s achievement. Her compact fictions, populated by smart, neurotic and somewhat damage... Buy or find out more →
The Book Of Flights
$12.95 – Paperback book / Vintage
Young Man Hogan's journey begins in the dazzling streets of a nameless necropolis, and leads across fleeting landscapes - deserts, seas, mountains, islands, cities and great plains - to countless entertainments and adven... Buy or find out more →
Love And Summer
$45.00 – Hardcover book / Viking
It's summer and nothing much is happening in Rathmoye. So it doesn't go unnoticed when a dark-haired stranger appears on his bicycle and begins photographing the mourners at Mrs Connulty's funeral. Florian Kilderry could... Buy or find out more →
The Portrait
$27.95 – Paperback book / Scribe Publications
This is a short and extremely powerful new novel from one of Holland's greatest living writers. Reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is narrated by a canvas, a key eye-witness and participant in an... Buy or find out more →
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest
$32.95$27.95 – Trade paperback / Maclehose Press
Lisbeth Salander is plotting her revenge - against the men who tried to kill her, and against the government institutions that nearly destroyed her life. But it is not going to be a straightforward campaign. After taking... Buy or find out more →
Siddon Rock
$24.95 – Paperback book / Vintage
When Macha Connor came home from the war she walked into town as naked as the day she was born, except for well-worn and shining boots, a dusty slouch hat, and the .303 rifle she held across her waist.' Macha patrols Sid... Buy or find out more →
Small Wars
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Chatto & Windus
What happens when everything a man believes in – the army, his country, his marriage – begins to crumble…
Hal Treherne is a young and dedicated soldier on the brink of a brilliant career. Impatient to see action, h... Buy or find out more →
The Anthologist
$32.99 – Trade paperback / Simon & Schuster
Nicholson Baker's new novel, The Anthologist, is narrated by Paul Chowder, a poet of some little reknown who is sitting in his barn most of the time trying to write the introduction to a new anthology of poetry called On... Buy or find out more →
The Death Of Bunny Munro
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Text Publishing
Bunny Munro sells beauty products and the scent of adventure to the lonely housewives of England’s south coast. Set adrift by his wife’s death he hits the road one last time—with his young son in tow.
As Bunny swag... Buy or find out more →
Blind Eye
$32.99 – Trade paperback / Harper Collins
It′s Summer in the Granite City‚ but even the sunshine can′t improve the mood at Grampian Police Headquarters.
Aberdeen′s growing Polish community is under attack from a serial offender who leaves mutilated victims... Buy or find out more →
Bleed A River Deep
$32.99 – Trade paperback / Macmillan
When a controversial American senator is attacked during the opening of a Donegal gold mine, Garda Inspector Benedict Devlin is blamed for a lapse in security. The shooting of an illegal immigrant in Belfast the same day... Buy or find out more →
Buddenbrooks
$12.95 – Paperback book / Vintage
This story of a prosperous Hanseatic family and their gradual disintegration is also a portrayal of the transition from the stable bourgeois life of the 19th century to a modern uncertainty. Buy or find out more →
The Women In Black
$29.95 – Trade paperback / Text Publishing
Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, The Women in Black is a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The women in black are run off their feet, what with the Christmas rush a... Buy or find out more →
Brothers And Sisters
$32.99 – Trade paperback / Allen & Unwin
Critics and readers alike have long commented on Charlotte Wood's ability to portray sibling relationships in her novels. Life-long resentments, tensions, alliances and affections between brothers and sisters play out in... Buy or find out more →
Good To A Fault
$27.99 – Paperback book / Allen & Unwin
When Clara Purdy takes a dreamy turn in her car and ends up plowing into the lives of the Gage family, her low-impact, nine-to-five life in the suburbs is transformed into heady, noisy chaos. Winner of the 2009 Commonwea... Buy or find out more →
If The Dead Rise Not
$32.95$19.95 – Trade paperback / Quercus
As Berlin prepares for the 1936 Olympic Games, Bernie Gunther is caught between violently opposing factions in a story that comes full circle in 1950s Cuba.
Forced to resign as a homicide detective with Berlin's Criminal... Buy or find out more →
2666
$24.99 – Paperback book / Picador
The epic novel that defined one of Latin America's greatest writers and his unique vision of the 20th century.
Santa Teresa, on the Mexico-US border, is an urban sprawl that draws in lost souls. Among them are three acad... Buy or find out more →
Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul
$22.99 – Paperback book / Piatkus
Inspector Singh is back, but this time on secondment to Bali. A bomb has exploded and Singh has been sent to help with anti-terrorism efforts. But there's a slight problem: he knows squat about hunting terrorists. He's m... Buy or find out more →
The Ghost Poetry Project
$24.00 – Paperback book / Puncher And Wattmann
Ten nights. Ten haunted locations. One terrifying adventure across Australia. From a gaol cell to a lunatic asylum to a night in a haunted hearse, The Ghost Poetry Project is one poet’s attempt to find a language of guts... Buy or find out more →
Little White Slips
$29.99 – Trade paperback / Picador
The 13 stories in this debut collection showcase a writing that is deeply personal, strikingly feminine, heartbreakingly beautiful, at times fearless and confronting, and frequently hilarious.
Whether tackling a troubled... Buy or find out more →
Barley Patch
$27.95 – Paperback book / Giramondo Publishing
Barley Patch is Gerald Murnane’s first published book of fiction since 1995. It is a meditation on fiction and Murnane’s own dedication to writing, and an examination of the relation between memory, image and lived exper... Buy or find out more →
Sold
$24.95 – Paperback book / Sleepers Publishing
Money. Lust. Real estate.
Sold takes a fly-on-the-wall look at Melbourne’s property industry. Set in the leafy, prosperous inner suburbs, it follows the fortunes and misfortunes of three agents as they jostle, thrive and... Buy or find out more →
Dog Boy
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Text Publishing
In a deserted Moscow apartment building four-year-old Romochka waits for Uncle to come home. Outside the snow is falling, but after a few days hunger drives Romochka outside, his mother's voice ringing in his ears. Don't... Buy or find out more →
Look Who's Morphing
$24.95 – Paperback book / Giramondo Publishing
This is a collection of brilliant stories about transformation, with the storyteller and his family shifting through identities drawn from comics, video games, daytime TV, porn flicks and movies, in fantasies of sexual a... Buy or find out more →
American Rust
$32.99 – Trade paperback / Allen & Unwin
A heart-wrenching, unputdownable tale of redemption and survival in small-town America in the tradition of Richard Ford, Pete Dexter and Cormac McCarthy.
'A grimly powerful hybrid: provocative literary fiction crossed wi... Buy or find out more →
Reunion
$32.99 – Trade paperback / Fourth Estate
Old friendships are expected to maintain their shape despite distance‚ lovers‚ careers‚ new friends. But twenty years is a long time.
Ava is an internationally acclaimed novelist who carries with her a lifetime of ... Buy or find out more →
Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives
$22.95 – Paperback book / Canongate
In the afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and unaware of your existence. Or you may find the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember. In some afterlives you are split into all your di... Buy or find out more →
This Is How
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Text Publishing
From the author of the Man Booker-shortlisted Carry Me Down comes a novel of remarkable power and resonance.
When his fiancée breaks off their engagement, Patrick Oxtoby leaves home and moves into a boarding house in a r... Buy or find out more →
Wolf Hall
$32.99 – Paperback book / Fourth Estate
Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
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 t... Buy or find out more →
The House In Via Manno
$0.01 – Paperback book / Scribe Publications
Translated by Brigid Maher.
Zerilli-Marimò Prize for Italian Fiction 2008
‘But what do we really know about other people?’
In this magical, jewel-like novel, a young Sardinian woman explores the life of her Nonna — ... Buy or find out more →
The City And The City
$34.99 – Trade paperback / Macmillan
When the body of a murdered woman is found in the extraordinary, decaying city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks like a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borl of the Extreme Crime Squad. Buy or find out more →
The World Beneath
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Scribe Publications
Once Rich and Sandy were environmental activists, part of a world-famous blockade in Tasmania to save the wilderness. Now, twenty-five years later, they have both settled into the uncomfortable compromises of middle-age ... Buy or find out more →
The Danger Game
$24.95 – Paperback book / Sleepers Publishing
With preoccupations reminiscent of Elliot Perlman, The Danger Game is a work of literary realism, told through three voices in a pared-back style laced with black humour.
The Danger Game is at once an unsentimental accou... Buy or find out more →
Fifty Grand
$32.99 – Trade paperback / Serpents Tail
Cuban heat meets immigrant politics in this thriller with a social conscience.
Cuban cop Hernandez has a score to settle, on behalf of a deadbeat dad, a 'traitor' who skipped free from Castro's control to set up a new li... Buy or find out more →
The Girl Who Played With Fire
$24.95 – Paperback book / Maclehose Press
The second volume in the bestselling Millennium Trilogy... Lisbeth Salander is a wanted woman. Two Millennium journalists about to expose the truth about the sex trafficking trade are murdered and Salander’s prints are o... Buy or find out more →
Truth
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Text Publishing
Winner of the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
At the close of a long day, Inspector Stephen Villani stands in the bathroom of a luxury apartment high above the city. In the glass bath, a young woman lies dead, a pani... Buy or find out more →