Readings.com.au: Best Fiction of 2009

Jasper Jones

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 outsiders and secrets, and what it really means to be a hero.

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-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant figure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steals into the night by his side, terribly afraid but desperate to impress.

Jasper takes him through town and to his secret glade in the bush, and it's here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper's horrible discovery. With his secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion as he locks horns with his tempestuous mother, falls nervously in love and battles to keep a lid on his zealous best friend, Jeffrey Lu.

And in vainly attempting to restore the parts that have been shaken loose, Charlie learns to discern the truth from the myth, and why white lies creep like a curse. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.

'If we see a more entertaining, heartfelt piece of Australian literature in the next 12 months, it will be a rare year indeed - an Australian To Kill a Mockingbird.' - The Monthly

'It's genius.' - West Australian

'... impossible to put down ... There's tension, injustice, young love, hypocrisy ... and, above all, the certainty that Silvey has planted himself in the landscape as one of our finest storytellers.' - Australian Women's Weekly

'Jasper Jones confronts inhumanity and racism, as the stories of Mark Twain and Harper Lee did. Silvey's voice is distinctive: astute, witty, angry, understanding and self-assured.' - Weekend Australian 'Jasper Jones is a riveting tale, studded with laugh-out-loud and life-affirming moments yet underpinned by a clear-eyed examination of human weaknesses and misdemeanours.' - Adelaide Advertiser

Read our interview with Craig Silvey about Jasper Jones.

Lovesong

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 awaited new novel tells the deeply moving story of their lives together, and of how each came undone by desire.

Strangers did not, as a rule, find their way to Chez Dom, a small, rundown Tunisian cafe on Paris' distant fringes. Run by the widow Houria and her young niece, Sabiha, the cafe offers a home away from home for the North African immigrant workers working at the great abattoirs of Vaugiraud, who, like them, had grown used to the smell of blood in the air. But when one day a lost Australian tourist, John Patterner, seeks shelter in the cafe from a sudden Parisian rainstorm, the quiet simplicities of their lives are changed forever. John is like no-one Sabiha has met before - his calm grey eyes promise her a future she was not yet even aware she wanted. Theirs becomes a contented but unlikely marriage - a marriage of two cultures lived in a third - and yet because they are essentially foreigners to each other, their love story sets in train an irrevocable course of tragic events.

Years later, living a small, quiet life in suburban Melbourne, what happened at Vaugiraud seems like a distant, troubling dream to Sabiha and John, who confides the story behind their seemingly ordinary lives to Ken, an ageing, melancholy writer. It is a story about home and family, human frailties and passions, raising questions of morals and purpose - questions have no simple answer.

Lovesong is a simple enough story in many ways - the story of a marriage, of people coming undone by desire, of ordinary lives and death, love and struggle - but when told with Miller's distinctive voice, which is all intelligence, clarity and compassion, it has a real gravitas, it resonates and is deeply moving. Into the wonderfully evoked contemporary settings of Paris and Melbourne, memories of Tunisian family life, culture and its music are tenderly woven.

Read Angel Meyer's interview with Alex Miller about Lovesong.

The Housekeeper And The Professor

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 of short-term memory.

She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper with a ten-year-old son, who is entrusted to take care of him.

Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful relationship blossoms between them. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles - based on her shoe size or her birthday - and the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her little boy. With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family where one before did not exist.

Homer and Langley

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 the Spanish Flu pandemic that hit the city in 1918, Homer, a talented young piano player and artist, slowly loses his sight and is stricken blind. At the same time, Langley is deployed to Europe to fight in the war. There on the western front, he is exposed to mustard gas which subsequently sears his lungs, forcing him to recuperate in an army hospital. He eventually returns to his brother and their home. This brilliant, touching story takes place and is shaped by the epic events of the 20th Century - from the Jazz Age of the 20s to the hippies of the 60s. It is a book of profound intelligence and humanity which will delight E.L Doctorow's many fans.

Father's Day

‘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 invisible ties that bind — Birch’s subject matter is ordinary life, lit from within with an honesty which makes his characters and their travails achingly familiar.’ Cate Kennedy

The Winter Vault

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 overseen by Avery, a young engineer who at the same time is carefully, and joyfully, constructing a shared life with his new wife, Jean.

But not everything can be saved once the floodgates have opened. Villages will be deluged. Graves will be moved. Thousands will be exiled from their ancient homes and from the river that has been their lifeblood, and no feat of engineering can prevent this.

As the temple is taken apart and rebuilt, Avery and Jean suffer a terrible loss of their own. Their separate journeys through the landscape of grief will take them from Egypt, to Canada, to lands that have been flooded and reconfigured and homes that have been lost, to a guerrilla painter of the past whose story of destruction, reconstruction and replication in war-devastated Poland is built out of equal parts of hope and despair.

Weaving historical moments with the quiet intimacy of human lives, The Winter Vault tells of the ways in which we salvage what we can from the violence of life. It is the story of a husband and a wife trying to find their way back to each other; of people and nations displaced and uprooted and of the myriad means by which we all seek out a place we can call home.

It is a breathtaking and heartbreaking novel about the inescapability of memories, the devastation of loss, and the restorative power of love.

Figurehead

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 Nhem Kiry, soon to become known as ‘Pol Pot’s mouthpiece’. The consequences haunt him for the rest of his days. When the Khmer Rouge take power in Cambodia, Whittlemore watches, fascinated and horrified, as the ideals he holds dear are translated into unfathomable violence. In the intervening decades, as he tries to make sense of what went wrong, it is as if Kiry’s life has become intertwined with his own.

In this gripping novel, Patrick Allington takes readers deep into the world of power politics and agents of influence. He enters the worlds of Nhem Kiry and Ted Whittlemore, and with humour, intelligence and an unfailing moral sense, brings them to life.

Figurehead is about guilt and memory, and the awful distance that separates dreams from reality. It is about those people who, as George Orwell said, are ‘always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled’.

Patrick Allington lives in Adelaide. Figurehead is his first novel.

Read our interview with Patrick Allington about Figurehead

The Virtuoso

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 eyes on him.

London‚ November 1945: at a bohemian party‚ a young music student meets the charismatic concert pianist Noël Mewton−Wood. The two immediately become lovers‚ and the affair unleashes an overwhelming passion as grand and sublime as the music they both love.

Ten years on‚ the student‚ now a successful writer‚ reflects on the affair‚ the forces that shaped him and the one he adored‚ and the romantic obsession that ruled and almost ruined his life.

This assured‚ beautifully written debut novel is inspired by the brilliant life of Australian pianist Noel Mewton−Wood. Sonia Orchard vividly evokes the artistic world of post−war London in a novel of striking illuminations about music and imagination that is also a compelling and deeply moving love story.

Access Road

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 after more than fifty years Lionel and Roly are back. Rowan too, otherwise safe in her 'upper crusty' suburb, is drawn more and more strongly 'out west'.

The past is dangerously alive. Clyde Buckley - violent as a boy; enigmatic, subterranean as an old man - returns to his childhood territory. What does he want? What crimes does he hide? And how is Lionel involved? Rowan must abandon safety if she is to find out . . .

Maurice Gee is a master storyteller. Access Road is at once a novel of chilling tension and expansive humanity; both a beautifully crafted work of literature and an effortlessly seductive family story.

Things We Didn't See Coming

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 offers a sharp-eyed perspective on a hardscrabble future, as a boy jettisons his family and all other ties in order to survive as a journeyman in an uncertain landscape. By turns led by love, larceny, and a new sexual order, he must avoid capture and imprisonment, starvation, pandemic, and some particularly bad weather.

In Things We Didn’t See Coming, Steven Amsterdam links together nine luminous narratives through the mind of one peripatetic and resourceful wanderer who always has one eye on the exit door and the other on a future that shifts more drastically and more often than anyone would like to imagine.

"Something very strange happens upon finishing Steven Amsterdam's (remarkably assured and kind of masterful) stories: what should be a bum trip through a variety of dystopias – foodless worlds; heartless periods of ceaseless rain and savagery; breakouts of peace and plenty marked by venality and ambition; biblical pestilence and illness – ends up anything but; one puts down the book feeling something close to hope. Perhaps it's the life-is-long, cyclical wisdom of it all, maybe it's a new-found appreciation for the Here And Now, although I'm inclined to think it's just gratitude that there are such writers around." -David Rakoff

www.stevenamsterdam.com

Olive Kitteridge

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 of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her: a lounge musician haunted by a past romance; a former student who has lost the will to live; Olive’s own adult child, who feels tyrannized by her irrational sensitivities; and her husband, Henry, who finds his loyalty to his marriage both a blessing and a curse.

As the townspeople grapple with their problems, mild and dire, Olive is brought to a deeper understanding of herself and her life–sometimes painfully, but always with ruthless honesty. Olive Kitteridge offers profound insights into the human condition–its conflicts, its tragedies and joys, and the endurance it requires.

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

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 cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily, hilariously try to reassemble themselves. His characters - marauding Vikings, washed-up entrepreneurs, and jobbing hacks on local papers - are adrift from the mainstream, confused by contemporary masculinity, angry and aimless. Combining electric prose with compassion and dark wit, this is a major debut.

After The Fire, A Still Small Voice

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.

Forty years earlier, Leon is growing up in Sydney, turning out treacle tarts at his parents' bakery and flirting with one of the local girls. But when he's conscripted as a machine-gunner in Vietnam, he finds himself suddenly confronting the same experiences that haunt his war-veteran father.

As these two stories weave around each other - each narrated in a voice as tender as it is fierce - we learn what binds together Frank and Leon, and what may end up keeping them apart.

Censoring: An Iranian Love Story

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 secret messages hidden in code in the pages of books that have been outlawed, but then something quite extraordinary and unexpected happens. Through adeptly handled asides to the reader, as well as anecdotes, codes and metaphors, and cheeky references to the wonderfully rich Iranian literary heritage, the novel builds to offer a revealing yet often playful and hopeful comment on the pressures of writing within the tightly prescribed Islamic regime, pressures that naturally are heightened where affairs of the heart are concerned.

The Year Of The Flood

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 of science and religion, the preservation of all species, the tending of the Earth, and the cultivation of bees and organic crops on flat rooftops - has long predicted the Waterless Flood. Now it has occured, obliterating most human life. Two women have avoided it: the young trapeze-dancer, Ren, locked into the high-end sex club, Scales and Tails; and former SecretBurgers meat-slinger turned gardener, Toby, barricaded into the luxurious AnooYoo Spa, where many of the treatments are edible. Have others survived? Ren's bioartist friend Amanda, or the MaddAddam eco-fighters? Ren's one-time teenage lover, Jimmy? Or the murderous Painballers, survivors of the mutual-elimination Painball prison? Not to mention the CorpSeCorps, the shadowy and corrupt policing force of the ruling powers ...

Meanwhile, in the natural world, gene-spliced life forms are proliferating: the lion/lamb blends, the Mo'hair sheep with human hair, the pigs with human brain tissue. As Adam One and his intrepid hemp-clad band make their way through a ruined world, singing their devotional hymns and faithful to their creed and to their Saints - Saint Francis Assisi, Saint Rachel Carson and Saint Al Gore among them - what odds for Ren and Toby, and for the human race? By turns dark, tender, violent, thoughtful and uneasily hilarious, The Year of the Flood is Atwood at her most effective.

Lush Life

'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 restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn't say tending bar. He was going places - until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that's Eric's version.

In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the 'new' New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an X-ray of the street in the age of no broken windows and 'quality of life' squads, from a writer whose 'tough, gritty brand of social realism ... reads like a movie in prose.' - New York Times.

The Dog of the Marriage

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 damaged narrators, speak grandly to the longings and insecurities in all of us and in a voice that is bracingly direct and sneakily profound.

The Book Of Flights

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 adventures in four continents. It is an exploration and a celebration, glittering and exuberant, of the writer's art and of life itself.

Love And Summer

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 couldn't know that the Connultys are said to own half the town: he has only come to Rathmoye to photograph the scorched remains of its burnt-out cinema. But Mrs Connulty's daughter, liberated at last by the death of her imperious mother, resolves to keep an eye on Florian Kilderry, and it's she who comes to witness the events that follow.

A few miles out in the country, Dillahan, a farmer and a decent man, continues to live with the knowledge that he was accidentally responsible for the deaths of his wife and baby. He has married again: Ellie is the young convent girl who came to work for him when he was widowed. She falls in love with Florian Kilderry and, although he is planning to leave Ireland and begin all over again after what he considers to be his failed life, a dangerously reckless attachment develops between them.

In a characteristically masterly way Trevor evokes the passions and frustrations felt by Ellie and Florian, and by the people of a small Irish town during one long summer.

Love and Summer is William Trevor's eagerly awaited new novel, his first since the Booker-shortlisted The Story of Lucy Gault.

The Portrait

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 extraordinary story.

A young painter, loved for his fine and true-to-life portraits, receives a commission that is unlike any he's had before: make a portrait of a dead boy. 'You will save a life with it', says the boy's extremely rich father. The painter knows he will have to surpass himself. He takes on the job. But who was the boy? Why is he dead? Why, when the painting is finished, does the father not come to collect it? And why does the painter undertake this painting?

The Portrait is a thrilling novel about the desire to bring someone into the world. But it also about love and death, betrayal and trust, truth and falsehood, and lies and honesty.

It's breathtaking how Willem Jan Otten plays with secrets and riddles that the reader can only unravel at the very end. Demonstrating his rare gifts to English readers for the first time in this book, Otten has written an ingenious, contemporary, and extraordinarily gripping novel.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest

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 a bullet to the head, Salander is under close supervision in Intensive Care, and is set to face trial for three murders and one attempted murder on her eventual release.

With the help of journalist Mikael Blomkvist from Millennium Magazine, Salander must not only prove her innocence, but identify and denounce the corrupt politicians that have allowed the vulnerable to become victims of abuse and violence. Once a victim herself, Salander is ready to fight back.

Siddon Rock

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 Siddon Rock by night, watching over the town's inhabitants: Brigid, Granna, and all of the Aberline clan; Alistair in Meakin's Haberdashery, with his fine sense of style; Sybil, scrubbing away at the bloodstains in her father's butcher shop; Reverend Siggy, afraid of the outback landscape and the district s magical saltpans; silent Nell with her wild dogs; publican Marg, always accompanied by a cloud of blue; and the new barman, Kelpie Crush. It is only when refugee Catalin Morgenstern and her young son Josis arrive in town that Macha realises there is nothing she can do to keep the townspeople safe.

Small Wars

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, his other deep commitment is to Clara, his beautiful red, white and blue girl, who sustains him as he rises through the ranks.

When Hal is transferred to the Mediterranean, Clara, now his wife, and their baby daughters join him. But Cyprus is no sunshine posting, and the island is in the heat of the Emergency: the British are defending the colony against Cypriots schoolboys and armed guerrillas alike battling for enosis, union with Greece. The skirmishes are far from glorious and operations often rough and bloody. Still, in serving his country and leading his men, Hal has a taste of triumph.

Clara shares his sense of duty. She must settle down, make no fuss, smile. But action changes Hal, and Clara becomes fearful of the lethal tit-for-tat beyond the army base, and her increasingly distant husband. The atrocities Hal is drawn into take him further from Clara; a betrayal that is only part of the shocking personal crisis to come.

The prizewinning and bestselling author of The Outcast returns with an emotionally powerful portrait of a marriage in extremis and a world-view in question. Sadie Jones has produced a passionate, gut-wrenching and brilliantly researched depiction of a small wars with devastating consequences; and in doing so, raises important questions that resonate profoundly today.

The Anthologist

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 Only Rhyme. He's having a hard time getting started because his career is falling apart, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and actually deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has also promised his readers that he will reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the introduction will be a little longer than he'd thought. What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry, among other things; Paul tells us about all of the great poets, from Tennyson, Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, Bogan, Merwin) to the contemporary scene as well as the editorial staff of The New Yorker's editorial department. And what he reveals about the rhythm and music of poetry itself is astonishing and makes you realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the same time, Paul manages just barely to realize all of this himself and what results is a tender, wonderfully romantic, often hilarious, and inspired novel.

The Anthologist bears all the beloved hallmarks of Baker's novels: it is witty, erudite, breathtakingly articulate and stylish, and full of the whimsical, compulsive elements that have made its author a worldwide success.

The Death Of Bunny Munro

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 swaggers from door-to-door hawking his wares and feeding his libido, nine-year-old Bunny Junior waits in the car seeking the comfort of his mother’s ghost and watching his father self-destruct.

Haunted by his appetites, jealous husbands and a serial killer in a devil suit, Bunny Munro is a desperate man.

And he’s going to die.

Stylish, angry and engrossing, The Death of Bunny Munro is at once blackly comic, raw with heartache and bursting with Nick Cave’s hallmark wit and lyricism.

Blind Eye

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 to be discovered on building sites − eyes gouged out and the sockets burned.

Detective Sergeant Logan McRae is assigned to the investigation‚ codenamed Operation Oedipus‚ but with the victims too scared to talk‚ it′s going nowhere fast.

When the next victim turns out to be not a newly arrived eastern european‚ but Simon McLeod‚ owner of the Turf n′ Track bookies‚ Logan suddenly finds himself caught up in a world of drug wars‚ prostitution rings and gun−running courtesy of Aberdeen′s oldest and most vicious crime lord.

Bleed A River Deep

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 leads Devlin to a vicious people-smuggling ring operating in the city. Then Leon Bradley, the young environmentalist who attacked the senator, is found murdered near the site of the mine. Devlin questions the group of itinerant travellers who have gathered around a nearby river hoping to strike gold themselves, and soon it becomes clear to Devlin that the mine is a front for something far more sinister.

Buddenbrooks

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.

The Women In Black

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 and the summer sales that follow. But it’s Sydney in the 1950s, and there’s still just enough time left on a hot and frantic day to dream and scheme…

By the time the last marked-down frock has been sold, most of the staff of the Ladies’ Cocktail section at F. G. Goode’s have been launched into slightly different careers. With the lightest touch and the most tender of comic instincts, Madeleine St John conjures a vanished summer of innocence. The Women in Black is a great novel, a lost Australian classic.

Brothers And Sisters

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 her books to brilliant effect. Here, Charlotte brings her skills to an anthology of stories by well-known and new writers who have written about an element of sister/brother relationships, both in fictional and non-fictional forms. The contributors are:Tony Birch; Tegan Bennett Daylight; Robert Drewe;Ashley Hay; Cate Kennedy; Nam Le; Roger McDonald; Paddy O Reilly; Virginia Peters; Michael Sala; Christos Tsiolkas; Charlotte Wood.

Read our interview with Charlotte Wood about Brothers and Sisters.

Good To A Fault

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 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Canada and Caribbean region).

In a novel reminiscent of the work of Penelope Lively, Anne Tyler, and Alice Munro, acclaimed author Marina Endicott gives us one of the most profound and most memorable reads of the year. Absorbed in her own failings, Clara Purdy crashes her life into a sharp left turn, taking the young family in the other car along with her. When bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer, Clara - against all habit and comfort - moves the three children and their terrible grandmother into her own house. We know what is good, but we don't do it. In Good to a Fault, Clara decides to give it a try, and then has to cope with the consequences: exhaustion, fury, hilarity, and unexpected love. But she must question her own motives. Is she acting out of true goodness, or out of guilt? Most shamefully, has she taken over simply because she wants the baby for her own? What do we owe in this life, and what do we deserve? This compassionate, funny, and fiercely intelligent novel looks at life and death through grocery-store reading glasses: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice. 'Good to a Fault is a wise and searching novel about the fine line between being useful and being used.' - Elizabeth Hay 'Not even the best detective novels can claim the steady, inexorable suspense that Endicott brings to this story. Emotional stakes have never been higher.' - Lynn Coady 'Fierce and wise - a compelling read.' - Annabel Lyon

If The Dead Rise Not

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 Police, Bernie is now house detective at the famous Adlon Hotel. The discovery of two bodies - one a businessman and the other a Jewish boxer - involves Bernie in the lives of two hotel guests. One is a beautiful left-wing journalist intent on persuading America to boycott the Berlin Olympiad; the other is a German-Jewish gangster who plans to use the Olympics to enrich himself and the Chicago mob. As events unfold, Bernie uncovers a vast labour and construction racket designed to take advantage of the huge sums the Nazis are prepared to spend to showcase the new Germany to the world.

2666

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 academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; and a police detective in love with an elusive older woman.

But there is darker side still to the town. It is an emblem of corruption, violence and decadence, and one from which, over the course of a decade, hundreds of women have mysteriously, often brutally, disappeared...

Conceived on an astonishing scale, and – in the last years of Roberto Bolano's life – with burning, visionary commitment, 2666 has been greeted around the world as his masterpiece, surpassing even his previous work in inventiveness, imagination, beauty and scope.

Inspector Singh Investigates: A Bali Conspiracy Most Foul

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 much better suited to solving murder! So when a body is discovered in the wreckage, killed by a bullet before the bomb went off, Singh should be the one to find the answers - especially with the help of a wily Australian copper by his side. But simple murders are never as simple as they seem - and this one has far-reaching global consequences ...

The Ghost Poetry Project

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 and daring. A unique exploration of fear, courage, and the power of mystery and myth.

The Ghost Poetry Project is a unique approach to the paranormal, melding historical accounts with personal experience. A narrative of one extraordinary year it consists of around seven responses to each ‘haunted’ site, drawn together by ‘Bunyips only Eat Avocadoes’.

A father of four young children, poet Nathan Curnow became increasingly interested in how language works to both terrify and embolden us. This was most apparent when his daughter became afraid of bunyips, a fear that could not be relieved by any amount of her parents’ loving persuasion. After months of sleepless nights it was suddenly undone by the words of another child who told her that bunyips only eat avocadoes.

As a child Nathan Curnow experienced that same debilitating fear. He could barely breathe due to an overwhelming sense of terror. The Ghost Poetry Project is about returning to that place. It is an account of the ghosts he met, their stories and of what a poet can and cannot put to rest. The ten haunted sites include:

The Chifley Suite (ACT), Old Adelaide Gaol (SA), Picton (NSW), Monte Cristo Homestead (NSW), Fremantle Arts Centre (WA), Richmond Bridge (TAS), Elvira The Haunted Hearse (NSW), Norfolk Island, The Quarantine Station (NSW), Port Arthur (TAS).

Nathan Curnow is a poet, playwright and performer who has toured Australia and New Zealand and been heard widely on ABC radio. With further assistance from the Australia Council he is currently writing a new play based upon convict stories and escape myths.

Little White Slips

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 marriage using an action figure of Sigmund Freud, celebrating the apparent triumph of weight loss, or coping with the stresses of balancing a career with motherhood, the joys and frustrations of our lives are laid bare.

Karen Hitchcock's often painfully honest observations are balanced by a wry humour and sharp wit. And with stories encompassing growing up, love, betrayal, sex, marriage, self-image, and our relationships with family, friends and food, there are few women (and the odd man) who will not recognise themselves in these tales.

Barley Patch

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 experience. It is funny, self-deprecating, personal, as well as thoughtful and reflective, and enchanting in its clarity, detail and evocations of Australian life and landscape.

Sold

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 try to survive.

It reveals the routines, the agents’ listing tricks and the subtle intimidation used to motivate staff and prospective vendors at Prender and Prender Real Estate.

Failed AFL footballer, Will Pittman, now a junior agent, is looking for redemption. Former Auckland car dealer Harry ‘The Fox’ Osbourne just wants to pay the kids’ school fees.

And Dally Love, the smiling assassin, wants it all: money, the girl, and the warm glow that comes from being seen as a good bloke.

Then there’s Gerard. Mentally disabled, homeless, possibly dangerous. He’s like a scud missile with a busted radar. And he’s squatting in an old convent that’s about to be turned into luxury apartments...

Dog Boy

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 talk to strangers. Overlooked by passers-by, he follows a street dog to her lair in a deserted basement at the edge of the city. There he joins four puppies suckling at their mother's teats.

And so begins Romochka's life as a dog.

The story of the child raised by beasts has fascinated through the ages, but Eva Hornung has created such a vivid and original telling, so utterly emotionally convincing, that it becomes not just new but definitive: yes, this is how it would be.

Taking us with Romochka into the world of his dog-family, she shows through his clear, alien eyes the disintegration—and obdurate persistence—of community, of family; the uncertain embrace of society, the consequences of social breakdown and exclusion. And in doing this she shows us our brutal, tender, frightened selves; exploring what our animal nature brings to our humanity.

Dog Boy is the most visceral, utterly amazing novel you will read this year.

Look Who's Morphing

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 and physical power which reach their (literal) climax with one final morph, into a fifty-foot tall ‘cock rock’ hero with a striking resemblance to Lemuel Gulliver. Influenced by the young adult book series Sweet Valley High, Tom Cho began writing fiction in his mid-teens, and has published widely in zines, blogs and literary journals. This is his much anticipated first collection.

American Rust

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 with a propulsive thriller'- Kirkus Review

Set in a beautiful but economically devastated Pennsylvania steel town, American Rust is a novel of the lost American dream and the desperation - as well as the acts of friendship, loyalty, and love - that arises from its loss. From local bars to trainyards to prison, it is the story of two young men, bound to the town by family, responsibility, inertia, and the beauty around them, who dream of a future beyond the factories and abandoned homes.

Left alone to care for his aging father after his mother commits suicide and his sister escapes to Yale, Isaac English longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend and former high school football star Billy Poe, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.

Evoking John Steinbeck's novels of restless lives during the Great Depression, American Rust takes us into the contemporary American heartland at a moment of profound unrest and uncertainty about the future. It is a dark but lucid vision, a moving novel about the bleak realities that battle our desire for transcendence and the power of love and friendship to redeem us.

'. . . prying the lid off a rusted can of failed hope and small-town secrets. . . his taut, direct prose strikes the perfect tone for this kaleidoscope of fractured dreams. . . honest and unflinching storytelling.' Amazon, Book of the Month

'American Rust is both darkly disturbing and richly compelling...signals the arrival of a new voice in American letters.' - Patricia Cornwell

'With its strong narrative engine and understated social insight, American Rust is reminiscent of the best of Robert Stone and Russell Banks. Author Philipp Meyer locates the heart of his working class characters without false sentiment or condescension, and their world is artfully described.' George Pelecanos

'. . . a brilliantly realised story that is a painful rendition of the reality being played out. . . American Rust presents the human effects of our industrial decline more powerfully than any newspaper editorial or TV special report. Philipp Meyer is a fine writer, and he has nailed a difficult story.' Robert Birnbaum, The Morning News

'An engrossing drama.' Marie Claire

Reunion

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 secrets.

Helen‚ a brilliant and dedicated molecular biologist‚ is faced with unexpected moral dilemmas as she finds herself drawn into bioterrorism research.

Conrad is a philosopher with a popular media profile and a desire for a much younger woman.

And Jack‚ whose career has stalled in the light of his long unrequited love for Ava‚ is a scholar of the history and culture of Islam.

It is Ava′s husband‚ Harry‚ a man for whom the others can barely conceal their disdain‚ who has drawn them back to Melbourne where they first met at university.

As they deal with the reality of their present lives and their memories of the past‚ none will be unchanged by the reunion. And not everyone will survive.

Andrea Goldsmith has created a story of love‚ power‚ friendship and betrayal that is as gripping as it is exquisitely insightful.

Sum: Forty Tales From The Afterlives

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 different ages, in some you are recreated based on your credit card records, and in others you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been.

In these wonderfully imagined tales – at once funny, wistful and unsettling – Eagleman kicks over the chessboard of traditional notions and offers us a dazzling lens through which to see ourselves here and now. His stories are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of hope, love and death that cuts through human nature at innovative angles.

This Is How

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 remote seaside town. But in spite of his hopes and determination to build a better life, nothing goes to plan and Patrick is soon driven to take a desperate and chilling course of action.

This Is How is a mesmerising and meticulously drawn portrait of a man whose unease in the world leads to his tragic undoing. With breathtaking wisdom and an astute insight into the human mind, award-winning M.J. Hyland’s new book is a masterpiece that inspires horror and sympathy in equal measure.

Read our interview with M.J. Hyland about This Is How (http://www.readings.com.au/interview/m-j-hyland)

Praise for This Is How:

‘This Is How confirms M.J. Hyland as a true original. She has a ferocious imagination, and an eerie way of squeezing the distance between author, character and reader, so that the atmosphere of the book soaks and penetrates the reader’s mind. When you’ve been reading Hyland, other writers seem to lack integrity; they seem wedded to weak confabulations, whereas she aims straight for the truth and the heart.’
— Hilary Mantel

‘A tour de force. Hyland illuminates this man’s damaged soul with such a steely, brilliant clarity that your heart breaks for him.’
— Helen Garner

‘It reminds us that there are some truths only fiction can carry…Very skilfully, Hyland combines a timeless story about emotional repression and unease in the world with a restrained portrait of late 1960s mores…If the first half is involving, the second…is extraordinary…Bleak yet moving, mercilessly dispassionate yet shot through with kindness and wit, it is a profound achievement.’
— Guardian

Wolf Hall

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 this atmosphere of distrust and need comes Thomas Cromwell, first as Wolsey′s clerk, and later his successor.

Cromwell is a wholly original man: the son of a brutal blacksmith, a political genius, a briber, a charmer, a bully, a man with a delicate and deadly expertise in manipulating people and events. Ruthless in pursuit of his own interests, he is as ambitious in his wider politics as he is for himself. His reforming agenda is carried out in the grip of a self-interested parliament and a king who fluctuates between romantic passions and murderous rages.

From one of our finest living writers, Wolf Hall is that very rare thing: a truly great English novel, one that explores the intersection of individual psychology and wider politics. With a vast array of characters, and richly overflowing with incident, it peels back history to show us Tudor England as a half-made society, moulding itself with great passion and suffering and courage.

The House In Via Manno

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 — her romantic, beautiful, and somewhat crazy grandmother. Nonna is an unforgettable character whose life spans much of the twentieth century. A dreamer with fierce loyalties and unbridled passions, we follow her search for perfect love to an ending both surprising and profound. Along the way, against the stunning Sardinian landscape of cities, marinas and mountains, we meet the members of her large family, and the mysterious Veteran, the man of her dreams — each one drawn with warmth, humour and deep insight.

Milena Agus writes of family loves and secrets, of sexuality, of music, and of the harsh realities of war and migration in twentieth-century Europe in a powerful, compelling, and yet whimsical voice.

A bestseller in Europe, The House in Via Manno introduces Milena Agus to English-speaking readers in this sparkling translation by Brigid Maher.

The City And The City

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.

The World Beneath

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 — although they’ve gone about it in very different ways. About the only thing they have in common these days is their fifteen-year-old daughter, Sophie.

When the perennially restless Rich decides to take Sophie, who he hardly knows, on a six-day walk into the Tasmanian wilderness, his overconfidence and her growing disillusion with him set off a chain of events that none of them could have predicted. Instead of respect, Rich finds antagonism in the relationship he hoped to create with Sophie, and, in the vast wilderness he once felt an affinity with, nothing but disorientation and fear. The uneasy truce established long ago between Rich and Sandy is shattered when he and Sophie leave the track to explore the remote terrain known as the Labyrinth.

As days pass with no word, all three characters begin to understand that if they are to survive, each must traverse not only the secret territories that lie between them but also those within themselves.

The Danger Game

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 account of deprivation and resistance, and a critique of the human cost of untrammelled economic rationalism. Another outstanding novel from a leading small publisher of Australian fiction.

Read Rebecca Starford's interview with Kalinda Ashton about The Danger Game.

Fifty Grand

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 life working illegally in Colorado. He settled in a ski resort popular with the Hollywood set, where the facade is maintained by the immigrant cleaners and labourers who work for below minimum wage while the local sheriff is bribed to turn a blind eye. Hernandez Sr's dreams of fortune and freedom came to a swift end when he was killed in a hit-and-run accident.

Sworn to avenge his death, Hernandez has some obstacles to overcome - not least getting out of Cuba, where visas are as elusive as constant electricity.

Seguing back and forth between heat-soaked Havana and the icy luxury of the mountainside resort, Fifty Grand is an audacious thriller from an acknowledged talent - and an incendiary debut for a new hero.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

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 on the weapon. Her history of unpredictable and vengeful behaviour makes her an official danger to society – but no-one can find her. Mikael Blomkvist, editor-in-chief of Millennium, does not believe the police. Using all his magazine staff and resources to prove Salander’s innocence, Blomkvist also uncovers her terrible past, spent in criminally corrupt institutions. Yet Salander is more avenging angel than helpless victim. She may be an expert at staying out of sight – but she has ways of tracking down her most elusive enemies.

Truth

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 panic button within reach.

So begins Truth, the sequel to Peter Temple’s bestselling masterpiece, The Broken Shore, winner of the Duncan Lawrie Dagger for Best Crime Novel.

Villani’s life is his work. It is his identity, his calling, his touchstone. But now, over a few sweltering summer days, as fires burn across the state and his superiors and colleagues scheme and jostle, he finds all the certainties of his life are crumbling.

Truth is a novel about a man, a family, a city. It is about violence, murder, love, corruption, honour and deceit. And it is about truth.