Readings.com.au: Bestselling Festival Books

On Rage

Germaine Greer's passionate and powerfully worded essay about Aboriginal rage is a provocation that will cause heated and intense debate.

MUP's new series Little Books on Big Themes pairs leading Australian thinkers and cultural figures with some of the big themes in life: rage, experience, longing and ecstasy. Each author's 10,000-word take on a chosen theme is presented as an eminently collectable hardback.

Stray Dog Winter

A searing story of a young man's search for his own family truths set against the relentlessly cold, cruel and stark realities of early 80s Soviet Russia.

Enthralling, atmospheric and suspenseful, Stray Dog Winter is at once an unconventional Cold War thriller and an original, unforgettable love story set in 1980s Moscow.

Darcy, a restless young artist, travels to the Soviet Union to visit his elusive half-sister Fin. Together only briefly during their youth, Darcy and Fin are estranged by the distance between them, yet inextricably bound by the secrets and betrayals of their childhood.

Upon his arrival in the depths of a bleak Moscow winter, Darcy is immediately embroiled in Fin's mysterious life there and also drawn to Moscow's forbidden underground, finding himself swept up in political and sexual intrigues of a nature he could never have imagined.

As the past resurfaces and the present closes in, the intricacies of their bond as brother and sister are revealed, and Darcy uncovers Fin's involvement in a dangerous game of her own. Their worlds threaten to collide with profound and deadly consequences.

With Stray Dog Winter , David Francis has entered Graham Greene territory, placing a naive hero in the center of political intrigue and betrayal at the end of the Cold War. Written with a stark, haunting beauty, this novel is pure Soviet noir, a remarkable tale of love, passion, politics, identity, and espionage.

The Lost Dog

Whatever the linguistic equivalent of perfect pitch may be, she has it - Sunday Telegraph (UK)

The Lost Dog is the extraordinary new novel by the acclaimed writer Michelle de Kretser. Her first novel, The Rose Grower, was a bestseller in both hardback and paperback. Her second, The Hamilton Case, won the Commonwealth Prize (SE Asia and Pacific), the Tasmania Prize and the Encore Prize, and was a New York Times Notable Book.

Set in present-day Australia and mid-20th century India, The Lost Dog is a haunting, beautifully written work that brilliantly counterpoints new cityscapes and their inhabitants with the wild, ancient continent beyond. With its atmosphere of menace and an acute sense of the unexplained in any story, The Lost Dog intriguingly highlights the collision of the primal and the civilised, modernity and the past and home and exile.

A mystery, a love story, a celebration of dogs and the joy they bring us, and a meditation on the essence of art and nature, The Lost Dog is a gripping contemporary novel which explores the weight of history as well as different ways of seeing and comprehending the world.

On Experience

In this beautifully written, eloquent piece, David Malouf explores the connections between writing and the imagination and offers wonderful insights into his own experiences of the writer's life.

The Whisperers: Private Life In Stalin's Russia

This is the story of the lives of ordinary people in Stalin's Russia: a world where everyone was afraid to talk and a society spoke in whispers, whether to protect friends and family - or to betray them. Where a junior worker might inform on their superior to get their job; a husband to get rid of a lover; a neighbour out of petty jealousy. Where living a double life became the norm and yet, somehow, a few defied the state.

Orlando Figes' phenomenal book gives a voice to these silent survivors for the first time.

The General: CHERUB Book Ten

Riots, robbery & the biggest ever training exercise.

The world's largest urban warfare training compound stands in the desert near Las Vegas. Forty British commandos are being hunted by an entire American batallion.

But their commander has an ace up his sleeve: he plans to smuggle in ten CHERUB agents and fight the best war game ever.