Readings.com.au: Best Fiction 2008

Taking Pictures

The stories in Taking Pictures are snapshots of the body in trouble: in denial, in extremis, in love. Mapping the messy connections between people - and their failures to connect - the characters are captured in the grainy texture of real life: freshly palpable, sensuous and deeply flawed. From Dublin to Venice, from an American college dorm to a holiday caravan in France, these are stories about women stirred, bothered, or fascinated by men they cannot understand, or understand too well. Enright's women are haunted by children, and by the ghosts of the lives they might have led - lit by new flames, old flames, and flames that are guttering out.A woman's one night stand is illuminated by dreams of a young boy on a cliff road, another's is thwarted by a swarm of somnolent bees. A pregnant woman is stuck in a slow lift with a tactile American stranger, a naked mother changes a nappy in a hotel bedroom, and waits for her husband to come back from the bar. These are sharp, vivid stories of loss and yearning, of surrender to responsibilities or to unexpected delight; all share the unsettling, dislocated reality, the subversive wit and awkward tenderness that have marked Anne Enright as one of our most thrillingly gifted writers.

The Knife Of Never Letting Go: Chaos Walking Book One

Todd Hewitt is the only boy in a town full of men, a town where everyone can hear your thoughts and Todd finds out he doesn't fit in with the town's plans as he approaches the birthday that will make him a man. The town has been keeping secrets from him. Secrets that are going to force hime to run... "The Knife of Never Letting Go" is an unflinching novel about the impossible choices of growing up.

The Believers

A comic, tragic, supremely entertaining novel about one family's struggles with the consolations of faith and the trials of doubt.

When Audrey makes a devastating discovery about her husband, New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff, she is foreced to re-examine everything she thought she knew about their forty-year marriage. Joel's children will soon have to come to terms with this unsettling secret themselves, but for the meantime, they are trying to cope with their own dilemmas.

Rosa, a disillusioned revolutionary, is grappling with a newfound attachment to Orthodox Judaism. Karla, an unhappily married social worker, is falling in love with an unlikely suitor at the hospital where she works. Adopted brother Lenny is back on drugs again.

In the course of battling their own demons and each other, every member of the family is called upon to decide what - if anything - they still believe in.

Breath

Winner of the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award

Breath is a story about the wildness of youth - the lust for excitement and terror, the determination to be extraordinary, the wounds that heal and those that don't - and about learning to live with its passing.

In his first novel for seven years, Tim Winton has achieved a new level of mastery. Breath confirms him as one of the world's finest storytellers, a writer of novels that are at the smae time simple and profound, relentlessly gripping and deeply moving.

breath.timwinton.com.au

People of the Book

When Hanna Heath gets a call in the middle of the night in her Sydney home about a precious medieval manuscript which has been recovered from the smouldering ruins of war–torn Sarajevo, she knows she is on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. A renowned book conservator, she must now make her way to Bosnia to start work on restoring The Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book –– to discover its secrets and piece together the story of its miraculous survival. But the trip will also set in motion a series of events that threaten to rock Hanna's orderly life, including her encounter with Ozren Karamen, the young librarian who risked his life to save the book.

Man In The Dark

'I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the great American wilderness.'

So begins Paul Auster's brilliant, devastating novel about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us. Seventy-two-year-old August Brill is staying in his daughter's house in Vermont, recovering from a car accident. When sleep refuses to come, he lies in bed and tells himself stories, struggling to push back thoughts about things he would prefer to forget - his wife's recent death and the horrific murder of his granddaughter's boyfriend, Titus.

The retired book critic imagines a parallel world in which America is not at war with Iraq but with itself. In this other America the twin towers did not fall, and the 2000 election results led to secession, as state after state pulled away from the union, and a bloody civil war ensued. As the night progresses, Brill's story grows increasingly intense, and what he is so desperately trying to avoid insists on being told. Joined in the early hours by his granddaughter, he gradually opens up to her and recounts the story of his marriage. After she falls asleep, he at last finds the courage to revisit the trauma of Titus's death.

Passionate and shocking, Man in the Darkis a novel of our moment, a book that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence.

Novel About My Wife

If I could build her again using words, I would: starting at her long, painted feet and working up, meticulously shading in every cell and gap and space for breath until her pulse just couldn't help but kick back in to life. Her hip bones, her red knuckles, the soft skin of her thighs, her fine crackle of hair.

When Tom and Ann move from their tiny Camden flat into a large semi-derelict house in Hackney, it feels like the start of proper adulthood, though both are well into their thirties. Ann's room at St Bartholomew's hospital, coated in plaster-dust from the medical casts she moulds all day, is not quite what she had imagined when she was a sassy student at the Slade, while Tom's scriptwriting career seems to have stalled while he tinkers with endless drafts of his vampire movie. But, still deeply in love with his beautiful wife, with a baby on the way and a place of their own, it feels to Tom as though life is on the up. If they sometimes have to rely on credit cards for their weekly shop, well, plenty of aspirational London couples are doing the same.

Ann is galvanised by her pregnancy: her long hair loose, her elegant body lent a new luscious fullness, she spends hours cleaning and reorganising the house, and sits up all night talking with a new feverish passion about sculpture. But there is a darker side to this new fervour, somehow linked with her conviction that someone is lingering threateningly around their new home. Someone who - Tom soon realises - may not exist at all.

Dark, sensuous and utterly compelling, Novel About my Wife is a sexy, chilling novel about the secrets that lie at the heart of every marriage.

Life In Seven Mistakes

You're pathetic,' her brother said. 'Still bleating about what mummy and daddy did to you when you're almost old enough to retire. Are you still going to be blaming your parents when you're seventy? Life's too short, Liz.' After years of patient, passionate effort, Elizabeth Barton's career as a ceramicist is finally taking off. She's about to fly to New York for her first solo show at one of the world's most prestigious galleries. First, though, she has to survive Christmas with her family on the Gold Coast. Why is it impossible to act our age in front of our parents? And how can we begin to care for ageing parents we've spent our lives trying to avoid? LIFE IN SEVEN MISTAKES is a black family comedy with an unexpected, and deeply moving, climax. Beautifully written, and imbued with a rich sense of irony, it is acclaimed Australian novelist Susan Johnson s finest achievement to date.

Netherland

In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off–kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans – his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in the Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents.

Lost in a country he'd regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place – the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city's most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriended Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city's first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck's dream and Chuck's sense of American possibility – until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend's activities and ambitions...

Netherland is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering and recuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. With it, Joseph O'Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.

A Fraction Of The Whole

Meet the Deans.

Heroes or criminals?
Crackpots of visionaries?
Relatives or enemies?

It's a simple family story...

From the New South Wales bush to bohemian Paris, from sports fields to strip clubs, from the jungles of Thailand to a leaky boat in the Pacific, A Fraction of the Whole follows the Deans on their freewheeling, scathingly funny and finally deepy moving quest to leave their mark on the world.

Julius Winsome

Julius Winsome lives in a cabin in the hunting heartland of the Maine woods, with only his books and his dog for company. That is until the morning he finds that his dog has been shot dead - and not by accident.

Gerard Donovan weaves an extraordinary tale of revenge that is also a tender and heartbreaking paean to lost love. Narrated by the unforgettable voice of Julius himself - at once compassionate, vulnerable and threatening - it reads like a timeless, lost classic.