Best Fiction of 2009
The Housekeeper And The Professor
$32.95 (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... More »
Review
Homer and Langley
$29.99 (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... More »
Review
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... More »
Review
Jasper Jones
$29.99 (Trade paperback / Allen & Unwin )
Winner of the 2009 Indie Book of the Year award.
Late on a hot summer night in the tail end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-ou... More »
Review
The Winter Vault
$32.99 (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 ... 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... 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... More »
Review
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... More »
Review
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... More »
Review
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 ... More »
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
$32.99 (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... More »
Review
After The Fire, A Still Small Voice
$32.95$27.95 (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... More »
Review
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 ... More »
Review
The Year Of The Flood
$45.00$37.95 (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... More »
Review
The Dog of the Marriage
$24.95 (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... More »
The Book Of Flights
$24.95 (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... More »
Review
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... More »
Review
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... More »
Review
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest
$32.95$27.95 (Trade paperback / Quercus )
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... More »
Review
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... 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... 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... 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... More »
Review
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... More »
Buddenbrooks
$31.95 (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. 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... More »
Review
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... 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... More »
Review
A Gate At The Stairs
$32.95 (Trade paperback / Faber )
In her dazzling new novel - her first in over a decade - Laurie Moore turns her eye on the anxiety and disconnection of modern America.
With America quietly gearing up for war in the Middle east, twenty-year-old Tassie K... More »
Review
If The Dead Rise Not
$32.95 (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... More »
Review
Too Much Happiness
$45.00$39.95 (Hardcover book / Chatto & Windus )
A brilliant, compelling new collection from one of the world's greatest living short-story writers, and winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2009.
Brilliantly paced, lit with sparks of danger and underlying menac... More »
Review
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... 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... 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... More »
Review
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... More »
Review
Look Who's Morphing
$24.99 (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... More »
Review
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... More »
Review
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... 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... More »
Review
The House In Via Manno
$24.95 (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 — ... More »
Review
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. 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 ... More »
Review
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... More »
Review
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... More »
Review
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... More »
Review