Readings.com.au: MWF 2009 Author Highlights

The Red Highway

A key to unlock the heart of the country.

This is the story of a quest – a journey down the red highway.

On returning from a war zone, Nicolas Rothwell begins to explore the deserts and towns, sleepy coastline and hidden worlds of Australia’s north. As he travels, his journey gathers momentum and finds a shape. He has unforgettable, even mystical encounters: with a priest, an explorer, a collector and a hunter. It becomes a quest – for knowledge and a sense of home – that builds to a stunning culmination. Nicolas Rothwell is among Australia’s most gifted writers, and The Red Highway is a one-of-a-kind book. It explores death, friendship, travel and art, and evokes a unique and mesmerising part of the country.

“Rothwell’s calm wondering at what he sees and hears on his travels left me with a feeling of enchantment.”—Robert Dessaix

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

Tom Is Dead

Translated from the French by Lia HIlls

Set in the Blue Mountains and in Sydney, Tom is Dead is a suspense novel about grief. The narrator’s son has been dead for ten years; he was four and a half. For the first time since that day, she spends a few minutes without thinking of him. To stop herself from forgetting, she tries to write Tom’s story, the story of his death.

She writes about the first hours, the first days, and then about the hours and the days before. She strives to describe it all as precisely as possible. It’s the details that will lead her and the reader to the truth. Praise for Tom Is Dead:

‘I love the way Marie Darrieussecq writes about the world, as if it were an extension of herself and her feelings.’

— J.M.G. Le Clézio (Nobel Laureate for Literature 2008)

‘This savvy young writer plays her cards beautifully.’

— New York Times

‘A thousand times more inventive than any British writer of her generation.’

— Irish Times

The People's Train

A novel adventuring between the pre-WWI Russian enclave in Brisbane and Tsarist Russia.

Artem Samsurov, a charismatic protege of Lenin and an ardent socialist, reaches sanctuary in Australia after escaping his Siberian labour camp and making a long, perilous journey via Japan. But Brisbane in 1911 turns out not to be quite the workers' paradise he was expecting, or the bickering local Russian emigres a model of brotherhood.

As Artem helps organise a strike and gets dangerously entangled in the death of another exile, he discovers that corruption, repression and injustice are almost as prevalent in Brisbane as at home. Yet he finds fellow spirits in a fiery old suffragette and a distractingly attractive married lawyer, who undermines his belief that a revolutionary cannot spare the time for relationships. When the revolution dawns and he returns to Russia, will his ideals hold true?

Based on a true story, THE PEOPLE'S TRAIN brings the past alive and makes it resonate in the present. With all the empathy and storytelling skills that he brought to bear in SCHINDLER'S ARK, Tom Keneally takes us to the heart of the Russian Revolution through the dramatic life of an unknown, inspiring figure. Like Schindler, Samsurov was no saint, but he was an individual who played a vital role in world-changing events.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

A captivating, loveable novel of stunning originality and poignancy about a 12-year-old genius mapmaker.

T.S. Spivet is a 12-year-old genius mapmaker who lives on a ranch in Montana. His father is a silent cowboy and his mother is a scientist who for the last twenty years has been looking for a mythical species of beetle. His brother has gone, his sister seems normal but might not be, and his dog - Verywell - is going mad.

It's odd, but then families are. T.S. makes sense of it all by drawing beautiful, meticulous maps kept in innumerable colour-coded notebooks: maps of the countryside, maps of his family's behaviour, maps of animal and plant life. He is brilliant, and the Smithsonian Institution agrees, though when they telephone with news that he has won a major scientific prize they don't suspect for a minute that he is twelve years old.

So begins T.S.'s life-changing adventure, fleeing in the dead of night, riding freight trains two thousand miles across America - how else do 12-year-olds get to Washington D.C.? - to reach the awards dinner, the fame, the secret-society membership and the TV appearances that beckon. But is this what he wants? Do maps and lists explain the world? And why are adults so strange?

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet is a story like no other: exhilarating, funny, endlessly charming and unbearably poignant. It is a journey through life's mysteries great and small, and about how on earth a boy with a telescope, four compasses and a theodolite should set about solving them.

www.tsspivet.com

Sunnyside

Glen David Gold, author of the best seller Carter Beats the Devil, now gives us a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realised figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, heartrending and darkly comic, that captures the moment when American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging mecca of Hollywood intersect to spawn an enduring culture of celebrity.

Sunnyside opens on a winter day in 1916 during which Charlie Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary delusion that forever binds the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world’s last (and worst) Wild West star, as he finds unexpected love on the battlefields of France; Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America’s doomed expedition against the Bolsheviks; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vise of complications—studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother.

The narrative is as rich and expansive as the ground it covers, and it is cast with a dazzling roster of both real and fictional characters: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Adolph Zukor, Chaplin’s (first) child bride, a thieving Girl Scout, the secretary of the treasury, a lovesick film theorist, three Russian princesses (gracious, nervous, and nihilist), a crew of fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants moviemakers, legions of starstruck fans, and Rin Tin Tin.

By turns lighthearted and profound, Sunnyside is an altogether spellbinding novel about dreams, ambition, and the dawn of the modern age.

Burnt Shadows

In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this, he wonders? August 9th 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.

In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad's half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history - personal, political - are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.

Sweeping in its scope and mesmerising in its evocation of time and place, Burnt Shadows is an epic narrative of disasters elided and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.

Butterfly

Here is Plum Coyle, on the threshold of adolescence, striving to be new. Her fourteenth birthday is approaching: her old life and her old body will fall away, and she will become graceful, powerful, at ease. The strength in the objects she stores in a briefcase under her bed - a crystal lamb, a yoyo, an antique watch, a penny - will make sure of it.

Over the next couple of weeks, Plum's life will change. Her beautiful neighbour Maureen will begin to show her how she might fly. The older brothers she adores - the charismatic Justin, the enigmatic Cydar - will court catastrophe in worlds that she barely knows exist. And her friends - her worst enemies - will tease and test, smelling weakness. They will try to lead her on and take her down.

Who ever forgets what happens when you're fourteen?

Butterfly is a gripping, disquieting, beautifully observed novel that confirms Hartnett as one of Australia's finest writers.

The Reader

For 15-year-old Michael Berg, a chance meeting with an older woman leads to far more than he ever imagined. The woman in question is Hanna and before long they embark on a passionate, clandestine love affair, which leaves Michael both euphoric and confused. For Hanna is not all she seems. Years later, as a law student observing a trial in Germany, Michael is shocked to realise that the person in the dock is Hanna. The woman he had loved is a criminal. Much about her behaviour during the trial does not make sense. But then suddenly and terribly, it does - Hanna is not only obliged to answer for a horrible crime, she is also desperately concealing an even deeper secret.

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 True Story Of Butterfish

Curtis is no longer a rock star. His dad is dead, he has no wife and his life is a mess.

'I'm not about to attack,' she said. She smirked with one side of her mouth and looked up at me through the black spray of her fringe. Her eyes were dark and already she was playing some kind of game with me, or that's how it seemed. Her voice was a little deeper and huskier than I might have expected, so her last line had come out with a hint of something that might have been menace or even seductiveness or just a pitch at adult banter. Whatever it was, it stuck with me and it punctuated the moment and it didn't feel quite right for a conversation with a schoolgirl on my doorstep.

With his chart-topping band, Butterfish, Curtis Holland lived the cliched rock dream. Residing in hotels and recording studios, travelling in custom-built buses, he got married after a soundcheck in a wedding chapel in Nevada and barely noticed when his wife left him in Louisville.

But no dream lasts forever.

When Annaliese Winter walks down Curtis Holland's front path, he's ill-prepared for a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who's a confounding mixture of adult and child. He's back in Brisbane trying to build a life and he is not used to having a neighbour at all.

So when Curtis receives an invitation to dinner from Annaliese's mother, Kate, he is surprised when he not only accepts but finds himself being drawn to this remarkably unremarkable family. Even to fifteen-year-old Mark who is at war with his own surging adolescence.

Curtis soon realises that with Kate divorced, Annaliese and Mark need a male role model in their lives, but it's hard for him to help when he's just starting to grow up himself and harder still when Annaliese begins to show an interest in him that is less than filial.

Filled with acute observation, humour and tenderness, Butterfish is Nick Earls at his very best.

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

Grace

From the bestselling and award winning author of Once, Then and Boy Overboard comes the story of Grace Hillgrove.

In the beginning there was me and Mum and Dad and the twins.

And talk about happy families, we were bountiful.

But it came to pass that I started doing sins.

And lo, that when all our problems began.

Read an extract from Grace

The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

Lines may divide us, but hope will unite us . . .

Nine-year-old Bruno knows nothing of the Final Solution and the Holocaust. He is oblivious to the appalling cruelties being inflicted on the people of Europe by his country. All he knows is that he has been moved from a comfortable home in Berlin to a house in a desolate area where there is nothing to do and no one to play with. Until he meets Shmuel, a boy who lives a strange parallel existence on the other side of the adjoining wire fence and who, like the other people there, wears a uniform of striped pyjamas.

Bruno's friendship with Shmuel will take him from innocence to revelation. And in exploring what he is unwittingly a part of, he will inevitably become subsumed by the terrible process.

Tender Morsels

Tender Morsels is a dark and vivid story, set in two worlds and worrying at the border between them. It is a tale of journeys and transformations, penetrating the boundaries between male and female, reality and myth, conscious and unconscious, temporal and spiritual, human and beast From girl to witch to woman. From boy to beast to man. From hell to heaven to the real world.

Liga is a young peasant girl of no consequence. Abused by her father (who plies her with potions to induce miscarriages that destroy all evidence of his shame), then raped by callous youths, she has two beautiful babies. One day she is saved by natural magic and, in exchange for her earthly life, her world is changed into her own personal Heaven, given to her by natural magic. Safe in this nurturing world, Liga builds a life of loving domesticity for her daughters, gentle Branza and curious Urdda, who grow up there, protected from all that once harmed Liga: violence, sexual predation and village prejudice. What is this potent place? Is it the idealized world of Liga's imagination, a shared unconscious, or the realm of myth and magic?

But back in the real world, hedge-witch Muddy Annie, begged by a desperate, debt-ridden friend, tries sending him to his own Heaven. Her botched attempt puts him instead into the world of Liga and her daughters, and gives him on arrival the power to turn wildflowers to coins, frog-eggs to pearls, tiny birds to precious stones and to pass back into the real world with the wealth he gathers. But his numerous journeys create perforations in the skin between the real world and the magic world.

Although these generally have no effect, on Bear Day every spring the fur-costumed Bears running the ritual chase through the village sometimes tumble through, transformed from lusty young men into real, wild bears in Liga's Heaven.

How far can you take your fantasies before they grow dangerous? How fully can you protect your children, and how completely should you? Built on a mythic scaffolding, Tender Morsels asks timeless questions about what it is to be human, and explores the evil and sweetness in the world and reveals the essential magic of learning to live with both.

A long-awaited novel from an author acclaimed for the fearless range of her imagination, the emotional intensity of her stories, and the virtuosity of her writing.

A story of astonishing beauty, originality and power.

Tales From Outer Suburbia

CBCA Older Readers Book of the Year 2009

Do you remember the water buffalo at the end of our street?

Or the deep-sea diver we found near the underpass?

Do you know why dogs bark in the middle of the night?

Shaun Tan, creator of The Arrival, The Lost Thing and The Red Tree, reveals the quiet mysteries of everyday life: homemade pets, dangerous weddings, stranded sea mammals, tiny exchange students and secret rooms filled with darkness and delight.

The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

War in the post-9/11 world is far different from what we expected it be. Counterinsurgency and protracted guerrilla warfare, not shock and awe, are the order of the day. David Kilcullen is the world’s foremost expert on this way of war, and in The Accidental Guerrilla, the Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to the Pentagon and architect of ‘the Surge’, surveys war as it is actually fought in the contemporary world.

Colouring his account with gripping battlefield experiences that range from the jungles and highlands of South and Southeast Asia to the mountains of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to the dusty towns of the Middle East and the horn of Africa, The Accidental Guerrilla will, quite simply, change the way we think about war.

While conventional warfare has obvious limits, Kilcullen also stresses that neither counterterrorism nor traditional counterinsurgency is the appropriate framework to fight the enemy we now face. Certainly, traditional counterinsurgency is more effective than counterterrorism when it comes to entities like Al Qaeda, but as Kilcullen contends, our current focus is far too narrow, for it tends to emphasise one geographical region and one state. The current war presents a much different situation: stateless insurgents and terrorists operating across large number of countries and only loosely affiliated with each other. Just as importantly, the US had done a poor job of applying different tactics to different situations, continually misidentifying insurgents with limited aims and legitimate grievances as part of a coordinated worldwide network.

Given the incremental — yet remarkable — success of Kilcullen’s strategy in Iraq, what Kilcullen has to say will be widely anticipated. His vision of war has changed American policy, and this comprehensive account will help shape policy for years to come.

David Kilcullen is a former Australian army officer, guerrilla warfare expert, and nowadays a highly influential ‘warrior intellectual’ who has been seconded as senior counter-insurgency advisor to General David Petraeus, the commanding general of the US multinational task force in Iraq. Kilcullen was profiled in the New Yorker by George Packer in 2006, and in the UK’s Sunday Times in March 2007

The China Lover

'An extraordinary story . . . told wonderfully well' Victoria James, Independent

When Sidney Vanoven is sent to occupied Japan, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it is his dream posting. By day, he works in the censor's office watching Japanese films; at night he immerses himself in the sensual pleasures of Tokyo.

His job leads him into the circle of the beautiful film star Shirley Yamaguchi, a passionate and indomitable woman, whose wartime secrets hint at deception and betrayal. As he learns more of her story it seems to echo Japan's own dark secrets . . .

In The China Lover, Ian Buruma has created an exhilarating saga of war-torn Japan that is epic in scale, richly imagined and vividly populated. It is quite simply unforgettable.

'Richly textured and full of fascinating detail' Mariella Frostrup, Observer Christmas Books

'Packed with colour and incident . . . An extraordinary feat' Robert Hanks, New Statesman

'Passionate and intimate' James Urquhart, Independent on Sunday

'An exciting and revealing noveL.. Strange and beguiling' Susanna Jones, Literary Review

'Buruma skillfully weaves his tale around the real events of Yoshiko's extraordinary life, with well-known names such as Frank Capra, Truman Capote and Sam Fuller appearing among the supporting cast... Insightful and intriguing' John Walshe, Sunday Business Post

'With a sharp yet generous eye, Buruma explores the moods and sensibilities of the movie business in wartime Shanghai and postwar Tokyo... The China Lover overflows with intriguing characters... fmely drawn and true to the spirit of the history it covers.' Seth Faison, Los Angeles Times

Read an extract of The China Lover.

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.

The Bath Fugues

From one if Australia's most lauded writers, comes a wonderfully wrought work, melding intrigue, romance, comedy and deception, taking the form of three interwoven novellas. Castro has won nearly every Australian literary prize there is and with Bath Fugues he is set to have another literary bestseller.

Read our interview with Brian Castro about The Bath Fugues.

Affection: A Memoir Of Love Sex And Intimacy

Krissy Kneen was raised by a very protective, quite eccentric family who avoided any mention of sexuality: perhaps it was no coincidence that she became obsessed by the very idea of sex. After leaving home she plunged into a world of voracious exploration, revelling in any variation of sex play she could find. But despite the fun, despite the essentially innocent pursuit of pleasure without harm, she found that many of her lovers were not so generous.

Affection is the story of a life shaped by overwhelming appetite, and of a woman coming to know how it works: the interplay of sexual desire, and intimacy, and the kind of love that sustains someone for a lifetime.

The Horse Boy: A Father's Quest To Heal His Son

When his son Rowan was diagnosed with autism Rupert Isaacson was devastated, fearing he would never be able to communicate with his child. Then two things happened. Rowan made an unlikely connection with a group of visiting traditional healers; and Rupert, a lifelong horseman, went riding with his son.

The improvement each time was so striking that Rupert Isaacson came up with a crazy idea. There is one place, one culture, in the world where horses and shamanic healing intersect. Why not take Rowan there—to Mongolia?

The Horse Boy is the dramatic story of that impossible adventure. In Mongolia, the family found undreamed of landscapes and people, unbearable setbacks, and advances beyond their wildest dreams. This is a deeply moving, truly one-of-a-kind story—of a family willing to go to the ends of the earth to help their son, and of a boy learning to connect with the world for the first time.

Literary Melbourne

Created to mark the celebration of Melbourne becoming a UNESCO City of Literature, this anthology draws together a selection of the best Melbourne and Victorian writing. Extracts from eighty writers across different genres - crime, literary fiction, poetry, Indigenous stories, migrant tales, theatre, children’s fiction and others - provide a colourful and insightful snapshot of Melbourne’s rich literary heritage.

Read an extract from Literary Melbourne

The End Of The World

Melbourne-based writer Paddy O’Reilly has both a great sense of humour and the tantalising ability to record the absurd. In this collection of short stories I loved ‘Speak to Me’, a quirky tale of a visiting alien kept in silk in a top drawer. In it, O’Reilly allows her character to be bewildered and accepting of life. It is in some ways the theme of all of these stories – to be bemused and calm. This is a trait that allows her characters to observe those around her, and also to record their own struggle with family, neighbours, language and drivers. This collection should be read in quiet moments when a dissection of everyday life is needed.

Christine Gordon is from Readings Carlton.

The Lost Mother: A Story of Art and Love

After her mother's death in 2005, Anne Summers inherits a portrait of her mother as a child. Mesmerised by this image, she finds herself drawn into the story of how the portrait was painted and eventually found its way into her family. She soon learns the artist painted another portrait of her mother; this time as the Madonna.

In a gripping narrative that is part art history, part detective story and part meditation on the relations between mothers and daughters, Anne's search for the Madonna painting and the mysterious Russian émigré collector who bought both paintings takes her down unexpected paths. Her search soon turns into a parallel quest to rescue Constance Stokes, the artist, from obscurity, and to learn why the collector suddenly abandoned the paintings. Along the way Anne finds she must face the truth of the relationship she had with her mother.

In turn hypnotic and moving, The Lost Mother is a powerful exploration of art, loss and love.

Killing: Misadventures in Violence

How hard it it to kill, as a hunter on a Kangaroo cull, as a worker in an abbatoir, as an executioner in a prison, as a soldier at war?

Ninety years after World War I, police in a Victorian country town uncover the mummified head of a Turkish soldier, a bullet-ridden souvenir brought home from Gallipoli by a returning ANZAC.

The macabre discovery sets Jeff Sparrow on a quest to understand the nature of deadly violence. How do ordinary people-whether in today's wars or in 1915-learn to take a human life? How do they live with the aftermath?

These questions lead Sparrow through history and across Australia and the USA, talking to veterans and slaughtermen, executioners and writers about one of the last remaining taboos.

Compassionate, engaged and political, Killing takes us up close to the ways society kills today, meditating on what violence means, not just for perpetrators but for all of us.

Jeff Sparrow is the co-author of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within, and the author of Communism: A Love Story, which was shortlisted for the 2007 Colin Roderick Award. He is the editor of the Australian literary journal Overland and writes regularly for Crikey. He lives in Melbourne.

Read Jo Case's interview with Jeff Sparrow about Killing.

Growing Up Asian In Australia

Asian-Australians are known to each other and the outside world by many labels: Quiet Achiever. FOB. Gangster Chigger. Mainlander. Banana. But are these labels based on some degree of truth, or only fiction? What is it like to grow up Asian in Australia?

Unpredictable, honest, reflective and irreverent, this collection throws out the clichés and takes us behind the stereotypes. A young man tentatively steps toward manhood with Mariah Carey blasting in his ears, while two primary-school misfits stage a playground revolt. A white Australian woman describes mothering her adopted Asian son, and a teenage boy learns all about philandering from his visiting uncles. Here are respected public figures as well as exciting new voices, drawn from all walks of life and spanning several generations. With insight, courage and a large dose of humour, they shed new light on what it is like to grow up Asian, and Australian.

Child 44

In Stalin's Soviet Union, crime does not exist. But still millions live in fear. The mere suspicion of disloyalty to the State, the wrong word at the wrong time, can send an innocent person to his execution.

Officer Leo Demidov, an idealistic war hero, believes he's building a perfect society. But after witnessing the interrogation of an innocent man, his loyalty begins to waver, and when ordered to investigate his own wife, Raisa, Leo is forced to choose where his heart truly lies.

Then the impossible happens. A murderer is on the loose, killing at will, and every belief Leo has ever held is shattered. Denounced by his enemies and exiled from home, with only Raisa by his side, he must risk everything to find a criminal that the State won't admit even exists. On the run, Leo soon discovers the danger isn't from the killer he is trying to catch, but from the country he is trying to protect.

The House Of Wittgenstein: A Family At War

The Wittgenstein family was one of the richest, most talented and most eccentric in European history. Karl Wittgenstein, who ran away from home as a wayward and rebellious youth, returned to his native Vienna to make a fortune in the iron and steel industries. He bought factories and paintings and palaces, but the domineering and overbearing influence he exerted over his eight children resulted in a generation of siblings fraught by inner antagonisms and nervous tension. Three of his sons committed suicide; Paul, the fourth, became a world-famous concert pianist (using only his left hand), while Ludwig, the youngest is now regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.

In this dramatic, historical and psychological epic, Alexander Waugh traces the triumphs and vicissitudes of a family held together by a fanatical love of music yet torn apart by money, madness, conflicts of loyalty and the cataclysmic upheaval of two world wars. Through the bleak despair of a Siberian prison camp to the terror of a Gestapo interrogation room, one courageous and unlikely hero emerges from the rubble of the house of Wittgenstein in the figure of Paul, an extraordinary testament to the indomitable spirit of human survival.

The Lieutenant

Lieutenant Daniel Rooke, a brilliant young astronomer, sails on the First Fleet full of hope and ambition. New South Wales is a land waiting for scientific discovery: this is where he will make his mark.

He sets up an observatory. But his attention soon shifts from the stars to Tagaran, an Aboriginal child who begins to teach him her language. With meticulous care he records her words. He will produce a document—a key to a new language and a new world.

But as the words unfold a friendship grows and a new Daniel Rooke emerges. And when he is called to duty, the lieutenant faces a dilemma that reaches to the heart of his being.

Kate Grenville, one of Australia's most loved authors, returns to the landscape of her bestselling The Secret River. Inspired by the notebooks of William Dawes, she brings us The Lieutenant, a profoundly moving novel about friendship and humanity.

Mao's Last Dancer

From the bestselling autobiography by Li Cunxin
A film directed by Bruce Beresford
In cinemas October 1

Before you fly, you have to be free.

This is my story. Here is my recollection of those years growing up in Mao's China. It is my family's history. It is my journey, from my earliest memories, through discovering dance, to my life in the West. History may record things differently, others may too, but the stories here remain as true to me now as they ever were. It is a remembrance that contains the treasures from my heart.

So wrote Li Cunxin in the first edition of his now phenomenally bestselling memoir. Just as his journey from bitter poverty to international stardom is a dream come true, so too has the telling of his life story taken him to places he never could have imagined. Since its release in 2003, Mao's Last Dancer has sold over 400 000 copies and regularly featured on bestseller lists. Now, some six years after its original publication, Li's inspiring story of courage and determination has been made into a major feature film. For this edition, Li gives us three powerful new chapters as he shares his experiences in making the movie, his feelings for an utterly changed China and the ongoing stories of his beloved families in Melbourne and Qingdao.

'An honest and refreshing account of a peasant boy's journey from Mao's China to stardom in the West . . . an inspiring true story of courage and determination.' Adeline Yen Mah, author of Falling Leaves

Visit maoslastdancermovie.com for more.

D-Day: The Battle For Normandy

Even Stalin was awed by D-Day.

'In the whole history of war,' he wrote to Churchill, 'there has never been such an undertaking.' Those who took part in the great cross-Channel invasion, whether soldier, sailor or airman, would never forget the sight. It was by far the largest invasion fleet ever known. Nor, of course, would the German defenders alerted at the last moment on the Normandy coasts. It was by far the largest invasion fleet ever known.

The very scale of the undertaking and its meticulous planning were unprecedented, but although the beachheads were established as planned, it soon became clear that the next stage of the battle would be far more difficult than anyone had imagined. The thick hedgerows of Normandy were ideal for the defender, and the Germans, especially the Waffen-SS divisions, fought with cunning and a desperate ferocity. As they made their way inland, the British, Canadian and American forces became involved in battles whose savagery was often comparable to the Eastern Front.

Casualties began to mount and so did the tension between the principal commanders on both sides. French civilians, caught in the middle of these battlefields or under Allied bombing, endured terrible suffering. Even the joys of Liberation had their darker side. The war in northern France marked not just a generation but the whole of the post-war world, profoundly influencing relations between America and Europe.

Making use of overlooked and new material from over thirty archives in half a dozen countries, D-Day is the most vivid and well-researched account yet of the battle of Normandy. As with Stalingrad and Berlin - The Downfall, Antony Beevor's gripping narrative conveys the true experience of war.

D-Day is Beevor again doing what he does best, making military history readable, not by writing military history but simply by writing well. Les Carlyon - The Australian Literary Review

Everything I Knew

It's the year 1964, and fourteen-year-old know-it-all Robbie Burns is about to discover he still has a lot to learn.

The world is changing fast, although the news has yet to reach the small South Australian town of Penola. There Robbie leads and idyllic life of rabbiting, backyard science experiments, and hooligan scrapes with his friend Billy. Penola is oblivious even to its minor celebrity as the birthplace of the poet John Shaw Neilson, but poetry means the world to Robbie's new teacher from the city, the stylish Miss Peach, a sixties sophisticate with stirrup pants, Kool cigarettes and Vespa scooter.

Miss Peach's artistic yearnings and modern ways prove too much for the good people of Penola, but they fire Robbie's precocious imagination and burgeoning sexuality, until what begins as a schoolboy fantasy has terrible, real consequences.

Everything I Knew challenges our determination to believe in the innocence of childhood and adolescence. Yet again it shows Peter Goldsworthy to be a master of shifting tone, from the comic to the tragic, and 'one of the few Australian writers to command superb technique' (Sydney Morning Herald)

Guilt About The Past

From the author of the international bestselling novel The Reader

Just as Bernhard Schlink's bestselling novels, The Reader and Homecoming, tackle the burden of German guilt about events during the Second World War, so too the six essays that make up this compelling book view the long shadow of past guilt that is not just a German experience, but also a global one. Schlink explores the phenomenon of collective guilt and how it attaches to a whole society, not just to individual perpetrators. He considers:

how to use the lesson of history to motivate individual moral behaviour
how to reconcile a guilt-laden past
the role of law in this process
and how the theme of guilt influences his own fiction.

Based on the Weidenfeld lectures he delivered at Oxford University in 2008, Guilt is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand how events of the past can affect a nation's future. Written in Bernhard Schlink's eloquent but accessible style, it taps in to worldwide interest in the aftermath of war and how to forgive and reconcile the various legacies of the past.

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.

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.

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.