Readings.com.au: Best Books of 2007

Diary Of A Bad Year

A famous writer is commissioned to contribute to a book of essays called Strong Opinions when he meets a young woman who lives in his apartment tower.
He asks her to become his . . .

In the laundry room of her apartment block a young woman makes the acquaintance of an ageing writer. She agrees to type up his opinions, although she is aware that what he really desires . . . The young woman's boyfriend starts to spy on his neighbour and hatches a jealous plot to . . .

J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year is about loneliness, friendship and the possibility of love. It takes the reader from Australian democracy to Guantanamo Bay, from the meaning of dishonour to the creative truth of dreams. Written in a wholly innovative form for three simultaneous voices; enthralling, unexpected and deeply moving; Diary of a Bad Year may be the most original work of fiction to appear this year.

Let The Northern Lights Erase Your Name

Upon the death of her beloved father, Clarissa finds out she was not biologically related to him. Unfortunately, she has no-one to turn to for answers. Her mother left when Clarissa was 14, and her only sibling has Down Syndrome and barely recognises her.

The Right Attitude To Rain: The Sunday Philosophy Club Book Three

Alexander McCall Smith's charming invention Isabel Dalhousie returns for another Edinburgh-based adventure in the delightful The Right Attitude to Rain. Although not as immediately quirky and accessible as his Botswana-based Ladies' Detective Agency series, McCall Smith's Dalhousie novels contain a quaint and subtle rhythm that match his offbeat storytelling. Isabel's cousin Mimi has arrived in Edinburgh from Dallas and she quickly introduces Isabel to the larger than life Texan, Tom. Unsettingly, Tom appears interested in Isabel even-though he is engaged to a young minx with a roving eye. But with Isabel smitten with the ever-reliable Jamie, Tom's amore appears misguided. Surely with all these complications of the heart Ms Dalhousie's part-time sleuthing will be sidelined? No chance! Polite and polished, The Right Attitude to Rain is a perfect edition to the charming chronicles of Ms Dalhousie.

Chris Zeiher (Dead Write)

Arlington Park

Juliet is enraged at the victory of men over women in family life. Amanda is warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework. Solly is confronting her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger. Maisie despairs at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed. And Christine's troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents.Rachel Cusk's sixth novel is her best yet. Full of compassion and wit, she writes about the domestic lives, private thoughts and fears of a group of remarkable and instantly recognisable women.

Anonymous Lawyer

He's a hiring partner at one of the world's largest law firms. Brilliant yet ruthless, he has little patience for associates who leave the office before midnight or steal candy from the bowl on his secretary's desk. He hates holidays and paralegals. And he's just started a web-blog to tell the world about what life is really like at the top of his profession. Meet Anonymous Lawyer - corner office, granite desk, and a billable rate of $675 an hour.

The summer is about to start, and he's got a new crop of law school interns who will soon sign away their lives for a six-figure salary at the firm. But he's also got a few problems that require his attention. There's The Jerk, his bitter rival at the firm, who is determined to do whatever it takes to beat him out for the chairman's job. There's Anonymous Wife, who is spending his money as fast as he can make it. And there's that secret blog he's writing, which is a perverse bit of fun until he gets an e-mail from someone inside the firm who knows he's its author.

Written in the form of a blog, "Anonymous Lawyer" is a spectacularly entertaining debut that rips away the bland facade of corporate law and offers a telling glimpse inside a frightening world. Hilarious and fiendishly clever, Jeremy Blachman's tale of a lawyer who lives a lie and posts the truth is sure to be one of the year's most talked-about novels.

On Chesil Beach

On Chesil Beach is another superbly orchestrated work by Ian McEwan exploring the subtleties and fragility of human relationships. Florence is a talented violinist whose dream is to perform in concert on stage. Edward is studying at University College in London. They met by chance one day in 1961. Florence and Edward believe their marriage will bring them eternal happiness, confidence and freedom to fulfil their dreams. However, as their wedding night approaches, Florence and Edward’s respective private anxieties overshadow the occasion. In a hotel on the Dorset coast, overlooking Chesil Beach, the couple’s lives and dreams are changed forever without a word hardly being said. This is a haunting tale that keeps you anxiously enthralled and wondering to its very end.
Emily Harms is from Readings Carlton.

Buying A Piece Of Paris

Paris has seduced many admirers, but for visiting Australian Ellie Nielsen it's true love. So deep is her infatuation that, if she can't have it all to herself, she'll only be satisfied with buying her own little piece of Paris.

The object of her desire seems so simple: the sort of apartment she's seen a thousand times in magazines and books. Something effortlessly charming, and old, and quirky – and expertly decorated. Something exuding character and Parisian chic. Something quintessentially French.

The trouble is, she has only two short weeks in which to realise her fantasy – and she must somehow negotiate the deal in a foreign language without offending French real-estate etiquette. Is this even vaguely possible, or just a ridiculous folly?

Buying a Piece of Paris is a charming and witty love-song to the most beautiful city in the world. Written with great verve and a superb ear for language, it is a joy to read and a pleasure to dream about.

Infidel

In this profoundly affecting memoir, the internationally renowned political superstar and intrepid activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali tells her astonishing life story, from her traditional Muslim childhood in Somalia to her intellectual awakening in the Netherlands, to her life under armed guard in the West.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of today's most admired and controversial political figures. She burst into international headlines following the 2004 murder by an Islamist of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was left in an Amsterdam street with a letter pinned to his chest that promised that Hirsi Ali, the screenwriter on Van Gogh's film Submission, would be killed next.

Eagerly awaited, Infidel shows the coming of age of this elegant, distinguished — and sometimes reviled — champion of free speech, and gives the absorbing back story to how she developed her beliefs, iron will, and her extraordinary determination to fight injustice done in the name of religion and change the world for the better. Raised in a strict Muslim family and extended clan, Hirsi Ali survived civil war, female circumcision, brutal beatings, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, and life in four countries under dictatorships. She escaped from a forced marriage and in 1992 sought asylum in the Netherlands, where she fought for the rights of Muslim women and the reform of Islam, earning her the enmity of reactionary Islamists and craven politicians. Under constant threat, she refuses to be silenced.

Ultimately a celebration of triumph over adversity, Hirsi Ali's story tells how a bright, curious, dutiful little girl evolves into a pioneering freedom fighter, a woman who has put her life on the line to work for women's rights and an enlightened Islam and as a result has won numerous humanitarian awards.

Engleby

What a wonderful experience reading this novel has been! Theres nothing I enjoy more than taking a risk on a piece of fiction and thinking: Sebastian Faulks isnt a writer whos been on my radar before, but this sounds interesting (the power of the publishers blurb!) - so Ill give it a go. Imagine, then, my increasing delight as I delved deeper and deeper into this remarkable firstperson narrative of one Mike Engleby, Cambridge undergraduate, and (in later life) Fleet St journalist. On the face of it, this is a conventional story of a life - early childhood, school and university years, settling down into career and relationships - but there are early signs that all is not quite as it seems. In emphases on particular events and the telescoping of particular time periods, particularly the uni years in the early 70s - we understand Engleby is exploring how his life and self have been constituted in a non-linear sense. What was it - all that was wretched, comic, wistful and hopeful in his life - that has made him what he is? And who is he exactly? There are panic attacks, sudden fits of anger, odd mental blackouts throughout his life ... how are these to be explained? When a university sweetheart mysteriously disappears, Englebys long journey to selfknowledge begins .... To finish, let me quote the aforementioned publishers blurb, because I think it is spot-on: Engleby can be read as a lament for a generation and the country it failed. It is also a poignant account of the frailty of human consciousness ... [it] is a bolt from the blue, unlike anything he has written before: contemporary, demotic, heart-wrenching - and funny, in the deepest shade of black. Booker judges take note - if this doesnt floor you, I have no idea what would. My novel of the year, to date!!

Martin Shaw is from Readings Carlton

The Complete Stories

David Malouf's imagination inhabits shocking violence, quick humor, appealing warmth and harsh cruelty with equal intensity. He shares tales of bookish boys, taciturn men and intimate stories of men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on. This is a comprehensive compilation of David's shorter work. Stories are set in the stark and challenging Australian interior and the more lush and mysterious coastal enclaves; others are set in Australia's past. The youthful dreams, physical desires and mental despair of Malouf's richly varied characters as they explore their place in the world are always moving and universal. Readers won't want to skim a single page of the 31 stories in this epic collection, a few of which are novella length. Together, they represent a quarter-century of a formidable craftsman's career.

Castle In The Forest

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Upside Of Down

Homer-Dixon, Director of the Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, has written a book that should be required reading for all of us - especially our politicians and policy makers. He starts by analysing the collapse of the Roman Empire; a highly complex globalised society created by the exploitation of solar energy, via agricultural crops. As the empire grew, they needed more energy and more complex rules of interaction to exploit it. As the arable land was degraded and traditional agricultural methods gradually grew inadequate, the empire began to break down and eventually collapsed, exacerbated by attacks from poorer neighbours. The world today is in a similar situation: we have developed a highly complex energy dependent global system, with a growing divide between rich and poor. The same tensions that caused the collapse of the Roman Empire are evident; principally our falling reserves of energy, and in particular, oil. Growing income inequality, coupled with a global system and relatively accessible weapons will see the rise of small disaffected groups with ability to wreak havoc; the wealthy countries, with falling birth rates, will experience mass attempts at incursions. It sounds like a pretty gloomy picture and it is. It need not be so - but it does require a paradigm shift in the way we approach our world: from breakdown can come great renewal.

Thomas Homer-Dixon will be a guest of The Melbourne Writers Festival.

Mark Rubbo is the Managing Director of Readings.

The Memory Room

What is a spy? Are they born, or are they made?' With these words, Vincent Austin analyses his future occupation. Some spies are made, he says, but his kind is born. He is devoted to secrecy for its own sake. Vincent is orphaned early, and his boyhood in Tasmania is spent with an elderly aunt. His fascination with secrecy and espionage - and much else besides - is shared to an uncanny degree by Erika Lange, daughter of a post-World War German immigrant. She too has lost her mother, and she and Vincent see themselves as twin spirits, inhabiting a shared, platonic world of fantasy and ritual. At University, Vincent aims to enter Foreign Affairs - an ambition shared by his easygoing friend Derek Bradley. However, in his final year, Vincent is recruited by ASIS - Australia's overseas secret intelligence service - and his adolescent dream becomes reality. Erika becomes a journalist, eventually entering the overseas service as a press officer. She is an attractive and magnetic woman, but her emotional life is chaotic. She, Vincent and Bradley meet again in 1982, when they are in their thirties, and have all been posted to the Australian Embassy in Beijing. Here, Erika and Bradley begin an affair which is ultimately doomed to fail. At the same time, Vincent attempts an espionage coup which ends in disaster for himself and Bradley. Both men are expelled from China, and are based in Canberra, where Vincent is confined to the ASIS Registry: the 'memory room' of the book's title. This is the year of Star Wars, and the final phase of the Cold War. Erika, also returning to Australia, becomes a television journalist, and enjoys a period of national prominence. The fantasies of youth have become reality for Erika and Vincent, and lead to a tragic climax for them both. It is left to Bradley, who inherits Vincent s diaries, to contemplate their fate. Although The Memory Room deals with espionage, its aims go far beyond those of a thriller. A psychological study of a brilliant but eccentric secret intelligence operative, it is also an exploration of the mystical nature of secrecy itself, and of the consequences of a shared obsession.

Sorry

In the remote outback of Western Australia during World War II, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife, Stella, raise a lonely child, Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary: in a shack in the wilderness, with a distant father burying himself in books and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl's limited education.

Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf and mute boy, Billy, and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Perdita and Mary come to call one another sister and to share a very special bond. They are content with life in this remote corner of the globe, until a terrible event lays waste to their lives.

Through this exquisite story of Perdita's troubled childhood, Gail Jones explores the values of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice with a brilliance that has already earned her numerous accolades for her previous novels, Dreams of Speaking and Sixty Lights.

The Gift Of Rain

Staff Review This steamy atmospheric novel set in Penang in the years leading up to and during WWII made the Booker longlist, but not the shortlist. Phillip Hutton’s mother was Chinese, his father a wealthy English Penang businessman. Phillip had never felt connected to or accepted by the society in which he lived. He befriends a Japanese consular offi cial, Endo-san, who is also an aikido sensei. Endo-san takes him under his wing and begins to teach him aikido. In return Phillip shows him around the island of Penang, unaware that Endo-san is gathering information for the impending Japanese invasion. When the Japanese eventually occupy Penang, Phillip off ers his services as a facilitator and interpreter in return for a guarantee of his family’s safety. His position is one that he fi nds increasingly diffi cult to reconcile and he begins to leak information to the resistance movement. Gift of Rain is a rich and rewarding historical novel. Interestingly, it reminded me of Greg Roberts’ Shantaram, also published by Scribe. Mark Rubbo is Managing Director of Readings

Landscape Of Farewell

A hauntingly beautiful meditation on the land, the past, exile and friendship, Landscape of Farewell is the powerful new novel from acclaimed Australian author, Alex Miller. It is the story of Max Otto, an elderly German academic. After the death of his much-loved wife and his recognition that he will never write the great study of history that was to be his life's crowning work, Max believes his life is all but over. Everything changes, though, when his valedictory lecture is challenged by Professor Vita McLelland, a feisty young Australian Aboriginal academic visiting Germany. Their meeting and growing friendship sets Max on a journey that would have seemed unthinkable just a few short weeks earlier. When, at Vita's invitation, Max travels to Australia, he forms a deep friendship with her uncle, Aboriginal elder Dougald Gnapun. It is a friendship that not only gives new meaning and purpose to Max, but which teaches him the profound importance of truth-telling in reconciliation with his own and his country's past. Following Alex Miller's Miles Franklin-winning Journey to the Stone Country, Landscape of Farewell is a wise and grave novel of power, beauty and truth. Praise for Alex Miller 'The Ancestor Game is a wonderful novel of stunning intricacy and great beauty.' - Michael Ondaatje 'Miller is a master storyteller.' - Drusilla Modjeska

The Discovery of France

It's easy to reduce France to the sum of its parts: weekend breaks amid the culture of Paris or summer holidays basking in the sunshine of the south; accounts of the Revolution - Madame Defarge knitting beside the guillotine - and Napoleon's battle at Waterloo (mis)remembered from school history lessons; a country famous for its intellectuals, its philosophers and writers, its fashion, food and wine...

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

From the Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author of Woman: An Intimate Geography, a playful, passionate guide to the science all around us — Lewis Carroll meets Lewis Thomas -- a book that will enrapture, inspire, and enlighten.

With the singular intelligence and exuberance that made Woman an international sensation, Natalie Angier takes us on a whirligig tour of the scientific canon. She draws on conversations with hundreds of the world's top scientists and on her own work as a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for the New York Times to create a thoroughly entertaining guide to scientific literacy. Angier's gifts are on full display in The Canon, an ebullient celebration of science that stands to become a classic.

The Canon is vital reading for anyone who wants to understand the great issues of our time -- from stem cells and bird flu to evolution and global warming. And it's for every parent who has ever panicked when a child asked how the earth was formed or what electricity is. Angier's sparkling prose and memorable metaphors bring the science to life, reigniting our own childhood delight in discovering how the world works. "Of course you should know about science," writes Angier, "for the same reason Dr. Seuss counsels his readers to sing with a Ying or play Ring the Gack: These things are fun and fun is good."

The Canon is a joyride through the major scientific disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy. Along the way, we learn what is actually happening when our ice cream melts or our coffee gets cold, what our liver cells do when we eat a caramel, why the horse is an example of evolution at work, and how we're all really made of stardust.

NATALIE ANGIER writes about biology for the New York Times, where she has won a Pulitzer Prize, the American Association for the Advancement of Science journalism award, and other honors. She is the author of The Beauty of the Beastly, Natural Obsessions, and Woman: An Intimate Geography, named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, People, National Public Radio, Village Voice, and Publishers Weekly, among others. She lives with her husband and daughter outside of Washington, D.C.

The Damned Utd

1974 was the year Britain had two general elections and there was great uncertainty in the air. Overachieving and eccentric football manager Brian Clough was on his way to take over at one of the country's most successful, and most reviled football club: Leeds United, home to a generation of fiercely competitive but ageing players. Cloughie knows if this is to work, it will have to work his way. His successes, his triumphs and his trophies count for nothing in this godforsaken corner of West Yorkshire. But his dreams, as well as that of his fellow countrymen, are not well starred. David Peace's extraordinarily inventive novel tells the story of a world characterised by fear of failure and hunger for success set in the bleak heart of the 1970s.

Caravan Story

So here I am, I’m going: it happens to us all. There is no rhyme nor reason. Even when you’ve sucked the fingers of the hand that feeds you it can still turn around and grab you by the throat.

One morning, without warning, our narrator wakes into a nightmare. He and his female companion are put in a caravan and driven to a football oval in a faraway country town. There they join scores of other caravan-dwellers in a seemingly closed community. They are divided into groups, given their tasks. Then our narrator ‘escapes’, to an abandoned school in a big country town…

Wayne Macauley has a gift for storytelling. He can, and cannot but help, spin a yarn. It is this continual shifting on of our attention through the description of the particulars of a scene that gives his writing such a weird intensity.

Examining the darker side of our manufacture and manipulation of culture, Caravan Story is a deeply unsettling and at times hilarious read. With Macauley’s inexorable narrative logic we are held in its thrall until the sparkling, if muted, transfiguration of its ending.

'In an era when many Australian novelists are playing it safe... Wayne Macauley is an ambitious talent worth watching.'
Emmett Stinson, Wet Ink

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand

Whilst preparing to leave Paris for a forensic training course in Quebec, Commissaire Adamsberg is troubled by an unsolved case from his past. For 30 years he has tried to prove that seemingly unrelated murders are the work of one man, Judge Fulgence, whom he calls The Trident. When a fresh murder takes place he has a hard time convincing anyone of his theory, as the judge has been dead for 16 years. While in Quebec, Adamsberg makes the acquaintance of a young Frenchwoman and when she is found murdered in a similar manner he goes on the run with the hopeless task ahead of him of proving that Fulgence has risen from the grave and recommenced his murderous spree. Ingenious, with oodles of Gallic charm.

Towards Another Summer

Sometimes, Grace thought, "no thank you" was the most chilling phrase in the English language. Janet Frame wrote this small and exquisite novel in 1963 whilst taking a break from her longest novel, The Adaptable Man. It's a highly personal work that she did not want published until after her death. Towards Another Summer is a meditation on the themes of exile and return, homesickness and not remembering where home is. The novel is suffused with beauty and tenderness and shot-through with self-deprecating humour and knowingness, and frailty. All of Frame's observational prowess is here in the vivid, heartbreaking passages about children and childhood and in Grace, the protagonist s, growing awareness of the deep-rooted forces of social convention and how demanding and exhausting it can be to try and fulfil the expectations of others. Grace is taking a break from writing a long novel and seems to be losing her grip on daily life in London. She feels more and more like a migratory bird as the pull of her native New Zealand makes life in England seem transitory. The desire to allow herself to become a bird and leave behind the social human agonies of appearing neither too clever nor too stupid, too helpful or too lazy, becomes overwhelming. A beautiful novel that demands reading, and re-reading. Staff review Towards Another Summer is an intensely autobiographical novel which Janet Frame, New Zealand’s most famous author (after perhaps Mansfield) wrote in 1963 while taking a break from another novel, and only allowed to be published after her death (Frame passed away in 2004). It is the delightful tale of successful young Kiwi author Grace Cleave and her travails whilst resident in the UK: trying to come to terms not just with the bleak landscapes and bitter cold of the Northern winter, but also the weight of expectation – for this most private and socially awkward of individuals – as a minor celebrity from a farflung land. An invitation to spend a weekend with a well-meaning family makes Grace wonder if she’s up to any sort of social interaction whatsoever. Memories of her childhood come flooding in, and she decides her real identity is not human, but rather that of a migratory bird, for whom “home” is a state of mind as much as a yearned-for place … Delicate, funny, poignant, wise – this is the Janet Frame New Zealanders, and all lovers of literature, revere! Martin Shaw, a New Zealand èmigrè, works at Readings Carlton

Out Stealing Horses

In 1948, when he is fifteen, Trond spends a summer in the country with his father. The events - the accidental death of a child, his best friend's feelings of guilt and eventual disappearance, his father's decision to leave the family for another woman - will change his life forever. An early morning adventure out stealing horses leaves Trond bruised and puzzled by his friend Jon's sudden breakdown. The tragedy which lies behind this scene becomes the catalyst for the two boys' families gradually to fall apart. As a 67-year-old man, and following the death of his wife, Trond has moved to an isolated part of Norway to live in solitude. But a chance encounter with a character from the fateful summer of 1948 brings the painful memories of that year flooding back, and will leave Trond even more convinced of his decision to end his days alone. A moving tale about feelings of isolation and of the painful loss of innocence and of traditional ways of life gone for ever.

Darkmans

If History is just a sick joke which keeps on repeating itself, then who exactly might be telling it, and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV's infamous court jester, whose favourite pastime was to burn people alive – for a laugh? Or could it be Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII's physician, who kindly wrote John Scogin's biography? Or could it be a tiny Kurd called Gaffar whose days are blighted by an unspeakable terror of – uh – salad? Or a beautiful, bulimic harpy with ridiculously weak bones? Or a man who guards Beckley Woods with a Samurai sword and a pregnant terrier?

Darkmans is a very modern book, set in Ashford (a ridiculously modern town), about two very old–fashioned subjects: love and jealousy. It's also a book about invasion, obsession, displacement and possession, about comedy, art, prescription drugs and chiropody. And the main character? The past, which creeps up on the present and whispers something quite dark – quite unspeakable – into its ear.

Darkmans is the third of Nicola Barker's visionary narratives of the Thames Gateway. Following on from Wide Open (winner Dublin IMPAC award 2000) and Behindlings it confirms Nicola Barker as one of Britain's most original and exciting literary talents.

Courage

Courage is a quality this author holds dear. Rippling across the page in marvellously meditative style, the loosely connected chapters combine philosophy, memoir, history and anecdote to explore the concept of courage and the many forms it can take. Tumarkin’s vision of courage concerns the spontaneous actions of everyday people. She explores the courage we need to get by in our daily lives and to stand up to the bullies of this world, focusing on her own experiences as a migrant from the former Soviet Union and a wide-ranging palette of cultural and intellectual touchstones – from the Holocaust to Dave Eggers to Love Actually. Ultimately, she writes about the writers, experiences and events that interest her. Because of her intelligence, skill and passion, they interest us too. An impressive follow-up to Traumascapes (2006).

The Seven Hundred Habits of Highly Ineffective People and How You Can Avoid Falling Into Them

This is an hilarious book, laugh-out-loud funny from one of Australia's best comedic talents across stage, screen and writing. A direct take on The 700 Habits of Highly Effective People, Jonathan Biggins turns it on its head and writes a modern day response to the ills of modern society.

In the same vein as Roy and HG, Tony Martin and Wendy Harmer, Biggins romps through all our modern day dilemmas with a witty, dry sense of humour he is well known for.

He charts the Ineffective Person and their habits across all areas of life. From communication, modern technologies and emails, he looks at the hectic breakneck speed with which we all live now and breaks open some stereotypes.

At last, a self-help book for those people who can't be bothered to help themselves to free coffee. How many times have you wanted to unleash the power within but simply couldn't face even the thought of all that effort?

You don't have to hack out a path through the jungle of modern life-someone else has already done that for you. All you need is a guide to point out the traps and the pitfalls, the poisonous plants and the fresh dung. Tread carefully and you can reach your goals!

Touching From A Distance Film Tie In

This is the only in-depth biographical account of the legendary lead singer of Joy Division, written by his widow. Revered by his peers and idolised by his fans, Ian Curtis left behind a legacy rich in artistic genius. But although mesmerising on stage, in his private life he was introverted and had desperate mood swings. In Touching from a Distance his widow pieces together why - despite his impending international fame and young family - Curtis died by his own hand on 18 May1980. Regarded as the essential book on the essential icon of the post-punk era, Touching from a Distance includes a full set of Curtis' lyrics, discography and gig list.

Callisto

Odell Deefus, a down-and-out American youth, may not have much going for him, but he has a story to tell. It was near the town of Callisto, where his car had broken down, that things started to go very wrong for him. Accidentally killing his would-be murderer was not a smart move, and finding a dead body in the fellows freezer only complicated things even further. Keeping the lid on what hed done proved pretty tough too, especially when he found himself in the thick of police, prison guards, news reporters, drug smugglers and polygraphs. With one bizarre plot twist after another, Callisto quickly becomes a hide-the-body farce which works brilliantly since there is no sympathy for the victim. A very, very dark comedy, and an excellent satire on everything there is to mock in Bushs America.

Judith Loriente is from Readings Hawthorn

The Gathering

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Notes From An Exhibition

When troubled artist Rachel Kelly dies painting obsessively in her attic studio in Penzance, her saintly husband and adult children have more than the usual mess to clear up. She leaves behind an extraordinary and acclaimed body of work – but she also leaves a legacy of secrets and emotional damage it will take months to unravel.

A wondrous, monstrous creature, she exerts a power that outlives her. To her children she is both curse and blessing, though they all in one way or another reap her whirlwind, inheriting her waywardness, her power of loving – and her demons...Only their father's Quaker gifts of stillness and resilience give them any chance of withstanding her destructive influence and the suspicion that they came a poor second to the creation of her art.

The reader becomes a detective, piecing together the clues of a life – as artist, lover, mother, wife and patient – which takes them from contemporary Penzance to 1960s Toronto to St Ives in the 1970s. What emerges is a story of enduring love, and of a family which weathers tragedy, mental illness and the intolerable strain of living with genius.

Yacoubian Building

This controversial bestselling novel in the Arab world reveals the political corruption, sexual repression, religious extremism, and modern hopes of Egypt today.

All manner of flawed and fragile humanity reside in the Yacoubian Building, a once-elegant temple of Art Deco splendor now slowly decaying in the smog and bustle of downtown Cairo: a fading aristocrat and self-proclaimed "scientist of women"; a sultry, voluptuous siren; a devout young student, feeling the irresistible pull toward fundamentalism; a newspaper editor helplessly in love with a policeman; a corrupt and corpulent politician, twisting the Koran to justify his desires.

These disparate lives careen toward an explosive conclusion in Alaa Al Aswany's remarkable international bestseller. Teeming with frank sexuality and heartfelt compassion, this book is an important window on to the experience of loss and love in the Arab world.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

At a cafe table in Lahore, a Pakistani man begins the tale that has led to his fateful meeting with an uneasy American stranger. Changez is living an immigrant's dream of America. He thrives on the energy of New York, his work at an elite firm, and his budding relationship. For a time, it seems that nothing will stand in the way of his meteoric rise to success. But in the wake of September 11, Changez finds his relationship crumbling and his exalted status overturned. Allegiances are subsequently unearthed, proving themselves more fundamental than money, power and maybe even love.

Dodging The Bull

"This is rugged, strong writing with tonnes of character. It's for people who think life hurst, rewards, bends, breaks abd redeems." Martin Flanagan. Mitchell's stories are socially aware and compassionate, but also confronting and progressive.

I Wouldn't Start From Here

Andrew Mueller seems to be the leftwings answer to P.J. ORourke. This intriguing, intelligent, frankly hilarious book takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the worlds trouble spots Bosnia, Afghanistan, Albania, Iraq, Belfast with the odd sojourn to more cosmopolitan cities like New York, London and Paris. Im a fan of foreign correspondent style reportage, and thats what I expected this to be, but its really not. Its more like sitting down at the pub with a (quite witty and clever) globetrotting mate spinning yarns about his exploits and venting his frustration at the state of the world. Of course, this mate would also have to be hugely knowledgeable about world politics. And brave enough to make quips equating a West Bank riot with a quaintly violent folk tradition like a rodeo, or frankly admit to abandoning his ambition to be a proper, grown-up war correspondent when in the midst of gunfire. This is fabulously readable, one of those rare and wonderful books that entertains and educates in equal measure.

Jo Case is Editor of Readings Monthly

The Content Makers: Understanding the Media in Australia

In The Content Makers Margaret Simons explains the changes taking place in the Australian media. She analyses audiences, our major media organisations, the role of government – and the implications of all of these for our society and our democracy.

Her examination leads her to the conclusion that the challenges facing the content providers in the modern world are part of a broader striving, a very old struggle – we might call it the search for meaning. The big media businesses may or may not survive into the future, but content certainly will, because we need it, and have always needed it.

The Content Makers delivers a visceral understanding of how modern media works, gives a plain-language explanation of new media, and provides straightforward information on recent changes to ownership legislation and what they mean. But most importantly, it suggests a vision for the future – a. new way of looking at the role of the content makers and how they and their audiences might find new hope and purpose in the future.

Michael Sweeney's Method

Michael Sweeney and his friend Dud are just two of the many invisible nothings at their expensive school. They come from deep in the suburbs and they're not cool or tough or even that brainy. So they're pretty much left alone, until they make friends with the new American guy. And before long, Michael Sweeney is somebody. But that's just the beginning of his troubles. . .

Sucked In

Murray Whelan is pushing fifty. He's also pushing something malodorous uphill as a member of the Labor Party's very small, very ineffectual parliamentary minority. It's a thankless task, and Murray is not a satisfied man.

But Charlie Talbot's a dead one, and there's nothing like the passing of an old friend to put things in perspective. When it coincides, however, with the discovery of human remains that may unlock a mystery from Murray's past, the question has to be asked. How much perspective can one man really handle?

Eagerly anticipated by his legion of fans, Shane Maloney's sixth Murray Whelan has been well worth the wait.

Wild Mary A Life Of Mary Wesley

Mary Wesley published her first novel when she was 70 - and went on to write 9 more bestsellersbefore her death in 2002 at the age of 89. Wesley was a pen-name, derived from the family name of Wellesley. She was born Mary Farmar, descended from the Duke of Wellington, and grew up a rebel who believed that she was her mother's least-favourite child. Like many girls of her background, she married for escape; but her first marriage(to Lord Swinfen) was conventional. Her second husband, Eric Siepmann, a writer who never managed to make any money at all, was feckless and bohemian. In between Swinfen and Siepmann, she had a love affair with Czech war-hero, Heinz Ziegler - and possibly with his brother at the same time; and in her later years enjoyed a torrid relationship with Robert Bolt. At the outbreak of the Second World War she was, as she put it, 'roped into intelligence', where she worked on breaking codes. Her experiences in MI 5 and her many wartime love affairs, which form the core of this biography, also formed the cores of her novels. She wrote about the atmosphere of the home front, and how war dislocates families, and how a sense of the imminence of death loosens the inhibitions - her novels are sexy and witty. She also drew on her love and knowledge of Cornwall.

Perfect Summer England 1911 Just Before The Storm

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Towards The Light The Story Of The Struggles For Liberty Andrights That Made The Modern West

In Towards the Light, A.C. Grayling places the liberation of the individual at the centre of the story of Western development between the Reformation and the late 20th Century. The Modern West, he argues, was formed by a series of struggles leading to victories over arbitrary authority, slavery, and ignorance. Paying detailed attention to the dominance, and subsequent erosion, of religious hegemony, absolute rule, feudalism and slavery, Towards the Light focuses on the hard-won reforms in the three hundred years following the Reformation and the way in which they laid the foundations for education and modern democracy.

In an eloquent, grandly epic narrative, Grayling describes how these struggles for liberation have made the Western world what it is today. This is an important story of the liberation of the individual.

The Butterfly Month

Betrayed by her parents, her lover, and her own body, Joni, a young doctor, leaves her home in the Netherlands for a rural hospital in post-apartheid South Africa. There she lives a life of self-imposed exile, dominated and deadened by the daily stream of medical emergencies confronting her, the inadequacies of the system she works in, and the loneliness of her empty domestic existence. Apart from a few brief erotic encounters, she is able to keep the world at a distance.

Gradually, though, the lives of Joni’s Zulu housemaid, Zanele, and Zanele’s two children begin to intrude on her isolation. As they forge a personal link with her, so the spirits of Africa penetrate Joni’s life and begin to erode its sense of controlled precision. And as Joni finally realises that she, too, has unwittingly become emotionally involved with her African friends, the vulnerability of her fragile routine becomes all too clear. In a mesmerising denouement, Joni finds herself at the mercy of ‘the God of Africa’ and exposed to chaotic, brutal forces that she cannot control.

The Butterfly Month is an edgy, haunting novel that derives immense power from its disarmingly gentle tone.

No One Belongs Here More Than You

Miranda July is a filmmaker, performing artist and writer. Her short fiction has appeared in the Paris Review and the New Yorker. Her 2005 feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which she wrote, directed and starred in, won prizes at both the Sundance and Canne film festivals.

The View From Castle Rock

On a clear day, you could see 'America' from Edinburgh's Castle Rock - or so said Alice Munro's great-great-great-grandfather, James Laidlaw, when he had drink taken. Then, in 1818, Laidlaw left the parish of 'no advantages', of banked Presbyterian emotions and uncanny tales - where, like his more famous cousin James Hogg, he was born and bred - and sailed to the new world with his family. This is the story of those shepherds from the Ettrick Valley and their descendants, among them the author herself. They were a Spartan lot, who kept to themselves; showing off was frowned on, and fear was commonplace, at least for females. But opportunities present themselves for two strong-minded women in a ship's close quarters; a father dies, and a baby vanishes en route from Illinois to Canada; another story hints at incest; childhood is short and hazardous. This is family history where imperfect recollections blur into fiction, where the past shows through the present like the tracks of a glacier on a geological map. First love flowers under an apple tree while lust rears its head in a barn; a restless mother with ideas beyond her station declines painfully; a father farms fox fur and turkeys; a clever girl escapes to college and then into a hasty marriage. Beneath the ordinary landscape there's a different story - evocative, frightening, sexy, unexpected, gripping. Alice Munro tells it like no other.