MWF 2009 Author Highlights
The Red Highway
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Black Inc
A key to unlock the heart of the country.
This is the story of a quest – a journey down the red highway.
On returning from a war zone, Nicolas Rothwell begins to explore the deserts and towns, sleepy coastline and hidd... 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 →
Tom Is Dead
$29.95 – Trade paperback / Text Publishing
Translated from the French by Lia HIlls
Set in the Blue Mountains and in Sydney, Tom is Dead is a suspense novel about grief. The narrator’s son has been dead for ten years; he was four and a half. For the first time sin... Buy or find out more →
The People's Train
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Vintage
A novel adventuring between the pre-WWI Russian enclave in Brisbane and Tsarist Russia.
Artem Samsurov, a charismatic protege of Lenin and an ardent socialist, reaches sanctuary in Australia after escaping his Siberian l... Buy or find out more →
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet
$36.95 – Trade paperback / Harvill
A captivating, loveable novel of stunning originality and poignancy about a 12-year-old genius mapmaker.
T.S. Spivet is a 12-year-old genius mapmaker who lives on a ranch in Montana. His father is a silent cowboy and his... Buy or find out more →
Sunnyside
$32.99$27.95 – Trade paperback / Hodder Headline
Glen David Gold, author of the best seller Carter Beats the Devil, now gives us a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realised figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, heartre... Buy or find out more →
Burnt Shadows
$32.99 – Trade paperback / Bloomsbury
In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this, he wonders? August 9th 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taki... Buy or find out more →
Butterfly
$29.95 – Trade paperback / Hamish Hamilton
Here is Plum Coyle, on the threshold of adolescence, striving to be new. Her fourteenth birthday is approaching: her old life and her old body will fall away, and she will become graceful, powerful, at ease. The strength... Buy or find out more →
The Reader
$22.95$13.95 – Paperback book / Phoenix House
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 leave... 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 True Story Of Butterfish
$32.95$24.95 – Trade paperback / Vintage
Curtis is no longer a rock star. His dad is dead, he has no wife and his life is a mess.
'I'm not about to attack,' she said. She smirked with one side of her mouth and looked up at me through the black spray of her frin... 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 →
Grace
$19.95 – Paperback book / Viking
From the bestselling and award winning author of Once, Then and Boy Overboard comes the story of Grace Hillgrove.
In the beginning there was me and Mum and Dad and the twins.
And talk about happy families, we were bounti... Buy or find out more →
The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas
$23.95 – Paperback book / Red Fox Books
Lines may divide us, but hope will unite us . . .
Nine-year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution and the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his count... Buy or find out more →
Tender Morsels
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Allen & Unwin
Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. It is a tale of journeys and transformations, penetrating the boundaries between male and female, reality and myth, con... Buy or find out more →
Tales From Outer Suburbia
$35.00 – Hardcover book / Allen & Unwin
CBCA Older Readers Book of the Year 2009
Do you remember the water buffalo at the end of our street?
Or the deep-sea diver we found near the underpass?
Do you know why dogs bark in the middle of the night?
Shaun Tan, cre... Buy or find out more →
The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One
$35.00 – Trade paperback / Scribe Publications
War in the post-9/11 world is far different from what we expected it be. Counterinsurgency and protracted guerrilla warfare, not shock and awe, are the order of the day. David Kilcullen is the world’s foremost expert on ... Buy or find out more →
The China Lover
$24.95 – Paperback book / Atlantic Books
'An extraordinary story . . . told wonderfully well' Victoria James, Independent
When Sidney Vanoven is sent to occupied Japan, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it is his dream posting. By day, he work... 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 →
The Bath Fugues
$29.95 – Trade paperback / Giramondo Publishing
From one if Australia's most lauded writers, comes a wonderfully wrought work, melding intrigue, romance, comedy and deception, taking the form of three interwoven novellas. Castro has won nearly every Australian literar... Buy or find out more →
Affection: A Memoir Of Love Sex And Intimacy
$34.95 – Trade paperback / Text Publishing
Krissy Kneen was raised by a very protective, quite eccentric family who avoided any mention of sexuality: perhaps it was no coincidence that she became obsessed by the very idea of sex. After leaving home she ... Buy or find out more →
The Horse Boy: A Father's Quest To Heal His Son
$34.95 – Trade paperback / Text Publishing
When his son Rowan was diagnosed with autism Rupert Isaacson was devastated, fearing he would never be able to communicate with his child. Then two things happened. Rowan made an unlikely connection with a group of visit... Buy or find out more →
Literary Melbourne
$24.95 – Hardcover book / Hardie Grant
Created to mark the celebration of Melbourne becoming a UNESCO City of Literature, this anthology draws together a selection of the best Melbourne and Victorian writing. Extracts from eighty writers across different genr... Buy or find out more →
The End Of The World
$23.95 – Paperback book / Univ Queensland Pr
Melbourne-based writer Paddy O’Reilly has both a great sense of humour and the tantalising ability to record the absurd. In this collection of short stories I loved ‘Speak to Me’, a quirky tale of a visiting alien kept i... Buy or find out more →
The Lost Mother: A Story of Art and Love
$34.99$15.95 – Hardcover book / Melb Univ Press
After her mother's death in 2005, Anne Summers inherits a portrait of her mother as a child. Mesmerised by this image, she finds herself drawn into the story of how the portrait was painted and eventually found its way i... Buy or find out more →
Killing: Misadventures in Violence
$34.99 – Trade paperback / Melb Univ Press
How hard it it to kill, as a hunter on a Kangaroo cull, as a worker in an abbatoir, as an executioner in a prison, as a soldier at war?
Ninety years after World War I, police in a Victorian country town uncover the mummi... Buy or find out more →
Growing Up Asian In Australia
$29.95 – Trade paperback / Black Inc
Asian-Australians are known to each other and the outside world by many labels: Quiet Achiever. FOB. Gangster Chigger. Mainlander. Banana. But are these labels based on some degree of truth, or only fiction? What is it l... Buy or find out more →
Child 44
$22.95 – Paperback book / Simon & Schuster
In Stalin's Soviet Union, crime does not exist. But still millions live in fear. The mere suspicion of disloyalty to the State, the wrong word at the wrong time, can send an innocent person to his execution.
Officer Leo ... Buy or find out more →
The House Of Wittgenstein: A Family At War
$24.95 – Paperback book / Bloomsbury
The Wittgenstein family was one of the richest, most talented and most eccentric in European history. Karl Wittgenstein, who ran away from home as a wayward and rebellious youth, returned to his native Vienna to make a f... Buy or find out more →
The Lieutenant
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Text Publishing
Lieutenant Daniel Rooke, a brilliant young astronomer, sails on the First Fleet full of hope and ambition. New South Wales is a land waiting for scientific discovery: this is where he will make his mark.
He sets up an ob... Buy or find out more →
Mao's Last Dancer
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Viking
From the bestselling autobiography by Li Cunxin
A film directed by Bruce Beresford
In cinemas October 1
Before you fly, you have to be free.
This is my story. Here is my recollection of those years growing up in Mao's Ch... Buy or find out more →
D-Day: The Battle For Normandy
$59.95$16.95 – Hardcover book / Viking
Even Stalin was awed by D-Day.
'In the whole history of war,' he wrote to Churchill, 'there has never been such an undertaking.' Those who took part in the great cross-Channel invasion, whether soldier, sailor or airman,... Buy or find out more →
Everything I Knew
$32.95 – Trade paperback / Hamish Hamilton
It's the year 1964, and fourteen-year-old know-it-all Robbie Burns is about to discover he still has a lot to learn.
The world is changing fast, although the news has yet to reach the small South Australian town of Penol... Buy or find out more →
Guilt About The Past
$26.95 – Paperback book / Univ Queensland Pr
From the author of the international bestselling novel The Reader
Just as Bernhard Schlink's bestselling novels, The Reader and Homecoming, tackle the burden of German guilt about events during the Second World War, so 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 →
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 →
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 →