Readings.com.au: New Fiction

Hope: A Tragedy

The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: No one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any historical import at all has ever happened there, which is why Solomon Kugel, like other urbanites fleeing their pasts and histories, decided to move his wife and young son there. To begin again. To start anew. But it isn't quite working out that way. His ailing mother stubbornly holds on to life, and won't stop reminiscing about the Nazi concentration camps she never actually suffered through. To complicate matters further, some lunatic is burning down farmhouses just like the one he bought. And when, one night, Kugel discovers history-a living, breathing, thought-to-be-dead specimen of history-hiding upstairs in his attic, bad quickly becomes worse.

The critically acclaimed writer Shalom Auslander's debut novel is a hilarious and disquieting examination of the burdens and abuse of history, propelled with unstoppable rhythm and filled with existential musings and mordant wit. It is a comic and compelling story of the hopeless longing to be free of those pasts that haunt our every present.

American Dervish

An extraordinary debut from a talented new writer.

Growing up as a first generation Pakistani-American in the suburbs of Wisconsin was, at best, unusual circumstance for a young boy. Hayat Shah's life brightens when his mother's best friend, Mina, shows up from Pakistan to rebuild her life after a vicious divorce back in her homeland. Beautiful, brilliant and devout, Mina teaches the eleven-year old Hayat about his Islamic faith, opening him up to a way of life that seems, to him, as wondrous as Mina herself. But when Mina falls in love with Hayat's father best friend, Nathan Wolff, a local Jewish intellectual and doctor, problems ensue. The local Muslim-American community's anti-Semitism blends and incubates Hayat's jealousy about losing Mina, driving a dramatic rift through the Shah household.

Set in the 1980s, AMERICAN DERVISH chronicles young Hayat's journey deep into the Islamic faith and the damage his journey inflicts on the one person he loves more than anyone, Mina.

Ayad Akhtar is an American-born, first generation Pakistani-American from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is the author of numerous screenplays and was star and co-writer of The War Within, which premiered at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for (Best Screenplay) and an International Press Academy Satellite Award (Best Picture - Drama) and released internationally. He is currently writing a screenplay for Sony. AMERICAN DERVISH is his first novel.

The Little Shadows

The eagerly anticipated new novel from the Commonwealth Prize winning author of the bestselling Good to a Fault follows three sisters into the backstage world of Polite Vaudeville before and during the First World War.

The Little Shadows revolves around three sisters in the world of vaudeville before and during the First World War. We follow the lives of all three in turn: Aurora, the eldest and most beautiful, who is sixteen when the book opens; thoughtful Clover, a year younger; and the youngest sister, joyous, headstrong sprite Bella, who is thirteen. The girls, overseen by their fond but barely coping Mama, are forced to make their living as a singing act after the untimely death of their father. They begin with little besides youth and hope, but Marina Endicott's genius is to show how the three girls slowly and steadily evolve into true artists even as they navigate their way to adulthood among a cast of extraordinary characters - some of them charming charlatans, some of them unpredictable eccentrics, and some of them just ordinary-seeming humans with magical gifts.

Using her gorgeous prose and extraordinary insight, Endicott lures us onto the brightly lit stage and then into the little shadows that lurk behind the curtain, and reveals how the art of vaudeville - in all its variety, madness, melodrama, hilarity and sorrow - echoes the art of life itself.

Canadian author Marina Endicott was born in Golden, British Columbia, and grew up in Nova Scotia and Toronto. She worked as an actor and director before moving to London, where she began to write fiction. Since returning to Canada in 1984, Marina has worked as Dramaturge at the Saskatchewan Playwrights Centre and Associate Dramaturge at the Banff Centre's Playwrights Colony. She now teaches creative writing at the University of Alberta. She's had three plays produced and her long poem, The Policeman's Wife, some letters, was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Awards in 2006.

Marina's first novel, Open Arms, was nominated for the Amazon/Books In Canada First Novel award in 2002 and serialized on CBC Radio's Between the Covers. Good to a Fault (2009) was a finalist for the 2008 Giller Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Canada and the Caribbean. The Little Shadows has recently been named on the longlist of the 2011 Giller Prize.

Red Ruby Heart In A Cold Blue Sea

Twelve-year-old Florine Gilham lives in a fishing village on the coast of Maine with her parents in what would appear to be an idyllic situation – on the waters in a harbour, where she and her friends run wild in the nearby pine woods and along the rocky shores. But in August of 1963, Carlie, Florine’s mother, disappears without a trace, and Florine and her grief-stricken father must move on with their lives, even as the mystery of what might have happened plagues them.

Both nurtured and hindered by those she has always known, Florine must find her way to young adulthood while clinging to the hope that her mother will return and her life, as she knew it, will continue. Written in the voice of a feisty young heroine and filled with the dry wit that people on the coast of Maine are famous for, Red Ruby Heart in a Cold Blue Sea is an amazing debut novel written by native Morgan Callan Rogers.

The Wolf Gift

A daring new departure from the inspired creator of The Vampire Chronicles (“unrelentingly erotic . . . unforgettable”—The Washington Post), Lives of the Mayfair Witches (“Anne Rice will live on through the ages of literature”—San Francisco Chronicle), and the angels of The Songs of the Seraphim (“remarkable”—Associated Press). A whole new world—modern, sleek, high-tech—and at its center, a story as old and compelling as history: the making of a werewolf, reimagined and reinvented as only Anne Rice, teller of mesmerizing tales, conjurer extraordinaire of other realms, could create.

The time is the present.

The place, the rugged coast of Northern California. A bluff high above the Pacific. A grand mansion full of beauty and tantalizing history set against a towering redwood forest.

A young reporter on assignment from the San Francisco Observer . . . An older woman welcoming him into her magnificent family home that he has been sent to write about and that she must sell with some urgency . . . A chance encounter between two unlikely people . . . An idyllic night—shattered by horrific unimaginable violence, the young man inexplicably attacked—bitten—by a beast he cannot see in the rural darkness . . . A violent episode that sets in motion a terrifying yet seductive transformation, as the young man, caught between ecstasy and horror, between embracing who he is evolving into and fearing what he will become, soon experiences the thrill of the wolf gift.

As he resists the paradoxical pleasure and enthrallment of his wolfen savagery and delights in the power and (surprising) capacity for good, he is caught up in a strange and dangerous rescue and is desperately hunted as “the Man Wolf” by authorities, the media, and scientists (evidence of DNA threatens to reveal his dual existence) . . . As a new and profound love enfolds him, questions emerge that propel him deeper into his mysterious new world: questions of why and how he has been given this gift; of its true nature and the curious but satisfying pull towards goodness; of the profound realization that there may be others like him who are watching—guardian creatures who have existed throughout time who possess ancient secrets and alchemical knowledge. And throughout it all, the search for salvation for a soul tormented by a new realm of temptations, and the fraught, exhilarating journey, still to come, of being and becoming, fully, both wolf and man.

The Soldier's Wife

Dan Riley is a major in the British Army. After a six month tour of duty in Afghanistan, he is coming home to the wife and young daughters he adores. The outside world sees those reunions as a taste of heaven after months of hell.

But are they? Can a man trained to fight adjust again to family and domestic life? And how will the family cope, if he can't? How much, indeed, can Alexa, Dan's wife, sacrifice her own needs and fulfilment to serve his commitment to a way of life that demands everything not just of him, but of her and the children as well?

This novel takes a keen look at the home lives of the modern Army. What happens, these days, when love and a vocation collide, head on?

The Rook

At the start of Australian author Daniel O'Malley's impressive debut, a supernatural detective thriller distinguished by its adept use of humor, an unknown woman reads a letter that opens Dear You and closes Sincerely, Me.

The letter informs the woman that she now inhabits the body of Myfanwy Alice Thomas. A second letter from Thomas gives her bodys new mental occupant a choiceeither flee London to take up a new, carefree life of affluence, or pretend that she is in fact Thomas in order to identify the person responsible for her memory loss. If the situation isnt confusing enough, the new Thomas finds herself in the middle of a park in a heavy rain; scattered on the ground are motionless bodies wearing latex gloves. After making the more interesting choice, she learns that Thomas is a Rook, one of the leaders of a super-secret government organization that protects an unknowing public from a wide variety of paranormal threats. While the old Thomas has left detailed explanations about people and things for her successor, the new Thomas still must struggle to mask her complete ignorance about some of her major responsibilities. Dry wit, surprising reversals of fortune, and a clever if offbeat plot make this a winner. Dr. Who fans will find a lot to like.

Galore

Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book, Caribbean & Canada and the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award; Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Book Award, and the Winterset Award

When a whale beaches itself on the shore of the remote coastal town of Paradise Deep, the last thing any of the townspeople expect to find inside it is a man, silent and reeking of fish, but remarkably alive. The discovery of this mysterious person, soon christened Judah, sets the town scrambling for answers as its most prominent citizens weigh in on whether he is man or beast, blessing or curse, miracle or demon. Though Judah is a shocking addition, the town of Paradise Deep is already full of unusual characters. King-me Sellers, self-appointed patriarch, has it in for an inscrutable woman known only as Devine’s Widow, with whom he has a decades-old feud. Her granddaughter, Mary Tryphena, is just a child when Judah washes ashore, but finds herself tied to him all her life in ways she never expects. Galore is the story of the saga that develops between these families, full of bitterness and love, spanning two centuries.

With Paradise Deep, award-winning novelist Michael Crummey imagines a realm where the line between the everyday and the otherworldly is impossible to discern. Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical, Galore is a novel about the power of stories to shape and sustain us.

The Roundabout Man

By the Booker-shortlisted author of Astonishing Splashes of Colour, a wry, poignant novel about a man trying to escape his fame as the boy in his mother's bestselling books.

Who is the Roundabout Man?

He doesn't look like a tramp, yet he lives on a roundabout in a caravan and survives on the leftovers from a nearby motorway service station. He calls himself Quinn, the name of a boy in a world-famous series of children's books, but he's nearer retirement than childhood.

What he hopes no one will discover is that he's the real Quinn, immortalised as a child by his mother in her entrancing tales about a little boy's adventures with his triplet sisters. It is this inheritance he has successfully run away from - until now. When Quinn's reclusive existence is invaded, he has to turn and face his past, and all the uncomfortable truths it contains about himself, his sisters and, most of all, his mother.

By the author of Astonishing Splashes of Colour and The Man Who Disappeared, The Roundabout Man delivers a wittily observed slice of modern life as it plumbs the gulf between nostalgia and reality.

Clare Morrall's first novel, Astonishing Splashes of Colour, was published by Tindal Street Press in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She has since published three novels: NATURAL FLIGHTS OF THE HUMAN MIND, THE LANGUAGE OF OTHERS and THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED. Born in Exeter, she now lives in Birmingham where she works as a music teacher, and has two grown-up children.

The Sea On Our Skin

A lyrical novel of mothers and sons, love, family and the far-reaching consequences of betrayal, set on a small Pacific island.

Set in a tiny, traditional community on a Pacific island, this is the story of a marriage and a family, of great loves and great betrayals and how real island life is so much more than the blissful idyll Westerners see. Ioane Matate has been a traveller running away from his island since he was fifteen, restless, dissatisfied and troubled. Amalia Hoko has grown up an island child, loved and sheltered, accepting as a boundary and limitation the sea that Ioane uses as his escape route. They belong to different worlds, but when Ioane returns to the island, Amalia is the wife he chooses, loves and maltreats, with far-reaching and disturbing consequences for both them and their children.

The Sea on Our Skin transports the reader to the South Pacific with an immediacy that makes the island almost tangible. This is a beguiling and lyrical story, taking its rhythms from the oral storytelling tradition of island life and the myths of the South Seas and blending them with the age-old stories of mothers and children and characters whose joy and suffering linger hauntingly in the mind of the reader.

Originally from Scotland, Madeleine spent several years in the Pacific islands. She tried to leave but they wouldn't let her. She now lives in Auckland with her Fijian husband.

Pure

A stunning coming of age novel set in a richly imagined post-apocalyptic world. For fans of THE PASSAGE and THE HUNGER GAMES this is a fantastic addition to the growing cannon of dystopian fiction.

We know you are here, our brothers and sisters. We will, one day, emerge from the Dome to join you in peace. For now, we watch from afar, benevolently.

Pressia Belze has lived outside of the Dome ever since the detonations. Struggling for survival she dreams of life inside the safety of the Dome with the 'Pure'.

Partridge, himself a Pure, knows that life inside the Dome, under the strict control of the leaders' regime, isn't as perfect as others think.

Bound by a history that neither can clearly remember, Pressia and Partridge are destined to forge a new world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Julianna is an award-winning poet, novelist, and young adult writer. For years, she has been thinking about writing a futuristic dystopian novel about a society of haves - the Pure, who escaped the apocalypse and live in an uncontaminated dome-covered city - and have-nots - the wretched survivors who live in the nearly-destroyed outside world.

The Book Of Lost Fragrances

A scintillating thriller of murder and secrets, lovers separated by time, and a mystical perfume that unlocks past lives ...

Jac L'Etoile has always been haunted by the past, her memories infused with the exotic scents she grew up around as the heir to a storied French perfume company. Fleeing the pain of those remembrances - and the suicide of her mother - she's left the company in the hands of her brother Robbie.

But when Robbie hints at an earth-shattering discovery in the family archives in Paris, and then suddenly goes missing - leaving a dead body in his wake - Jac is plunged into a world she thought she'd left behind.

For the House of L'Etoile has been hiding a powerful secret since 1799: a scent that unlocks the mysteries of reincarnation. In the wrong hands, it's a perfume with a deadly power. However identifying the formula may be Jac's only chance to save her brother...

The Book Of Lost Fragrances fuses history, passion and suspense in an intoxicating weave that moves from Cleopatra's Egypt and the terrors of revolutionary France to Tibet's battle with China and the glamour of modern-day Paris.

The Map

August Winthrop, an American who fought with the International Brigade in 1937, is talked into returning a 17th century chronicle containing a great mystical secret written by a Spanish Jewish physic fleeing both the Inquisition and the witch trial of Logrono. It means August will have to risk his life and possible arrest to return the book to the Basque family who have been safeguarding it for centuries. Meanwhile, unknown to August, three other parties seek both the chronicle and August -- a maverick CIA operative who has killed in the past in his desperate search for the chronicle and will kill again, a mysterious middle-aged woman who is the secret leader of a band of occultists in thrall to Aleister Crowley, and the MI5 who have become convinced August is a Soviet agent out to sabotage a military pact between Spain and the US.

August himself is swept up in solving the secret of the chronicle -- the key to a great mystical treasure -- a quest that takes him into the political complexities of Franco′s Spain as well as the ancient spiritual beliefs of the Basques, throws him into a network of ex-International Brigadiers across both France and Germany and finally into a psychological, political and spiritual revelation that will shatter his (and the reader′s) world.

Marilyn's Last Sessions

*4.25 am, 5 August 1962, West Los Angeles Police Department

‘Marilyn Monroe has died of an overdose’, a man’s voice says dully. And when the stunned policeman asked ‘What?’, the same voice struggled to repeat ‘Marilyn Monroe has died. She has committed suicide.’*

If life were scripted like the movies, this extraordinary phone call would have been made by the most important man in Marilyn Monroe’s life – Dr Ralph Greenson, her final psychoanalyst. During her last years Marilyn had come to rely on Greenson more and more. She met with him almost every day. He was her analyst, her friend and her confessor. He was the last person to see her alive, and the first to see her dead.

In this highly acclaimed novel, Marilyn’s last years – and her last sessions on Dr Greenson’s couch – are brilliantly recreated. This is the story of the world’s most famous and elusive actress, and the world she inhabited, surrounded by such figures as Arthur Miller, Truman Capote and John Huston. It is a remarkable piece of storytelling that illuminates one of the greatest icons of the twentieth century.

Praise for Marilyn's Last Sessions:

‘Michel Schneider breathes life into the complex and fascinating relationship between Marilyn Monroe and Ralph Greenson, creating an intimate, inventive and heartbreaking novel in which psychoanalysis and the movies are brilliantly intertwined.’ Hanif Kureishi

‘A fascinating blend of fact and fiction. This is one of the major events of the literary season.’ Lire

‘Psychoanalysis and the darkened screen have never seemed so close. Schneider’s novel is made in the image of his heroes: larger than life, tortured and downright unique.’ Evene

What Remains

'Before you fall in love, or find a dear friend, you should know: this is the day I will meet someone whose memory will touch my heart and change my world forever. I believe the ability to do this is buried deep within each of us, and if we could find it we could imprint on our minds what the world looked like before so we could take the full measure of what remains.'

What Remains follows the tumultuous life of journalist Kate Price from her first assignment as a naive and idealistic young correspondent in Riyadh in 1991, to Baghdad in 2004, where she can't feel anything unless it cuts her to the bone. We track her through the war zones of the Arabian Peninsula, Palestine, South Africa, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya and Iraq, through harrowing scenes of violence and destruction as she pays the price of bearing witness to unspeakable calamity and cruelty. Yet in the face of that horror, where friendship can be life's currency and love is often fleeting, comfort can be found in the smallest and most tender moments.

On her very first trip into a war zone, Kate meets legendary photographer Pete McDermott, and it is their journey together that lights up the pages of this remarkable novel. From a cynical beginning to grudging respect to something much more precious, their meetings and growing attraction frame the danger and terror of their working lives.

In a world that no longer makes sense, Kate begins to question everything she has ever believed in. The answers, when they come, will finally show her the way - but they cannot protect her from what she both longs for and fears.

What Remains is an epic story of love, war, friendship and ultimately of hope: gripping, confronting and unbearably heartbreaking. It will stay with you forever.

'Modern warfare and the lives of the correspondents who report it are portrayed with unflinching authenticity. This book is unforgettable.' - Rosie Scott, author of Faith Singer

'This is a love story, but it rips into your guts with the awful truth of the horror of war and the heartbreaking heroism of ordinary people. Fantastic read.' - Susan Duncan, author of Salvation Creek 'What Remains is about the eternal themes of love and war, the most intense and contemporaneous versions of both.' - Lucina Kathmann

Jack Holmes And His Friend

Many straight men and gay men are best friends, but if the phenomenon is an urban commonplace it has never been treated before as the focus of a major novel.

Jack Holmes is in love, but the man he loves never shares his bed. The other men Jack sleeps with never last long and he dallies with several women. He sees a shrink and practices extreme discretion about his gay adventures since the book begins in the 1960s, before gay liberation, and ends after the advent of AIDS in the 1980s. Jack’s friend, Will Wright, comes from old stock, has aspirations to be a writer, and like Jack works on the Northern Review, a staid cultural quarterly. Will is shy and lonely—and Jack introduces him to the beautiful, brittle young woman he will marry. Over the years Will discovers his sensuality and almost destroys his marriage in doing so. Towards the end of the 1970s Jack’s and Will’s lives merge as they both become accomplished libertines.

Jack Holmes and his Friend deploys Edmund White’s wonderful perceptions of American society to dazzling effect, as character after character is delicately and colourfully rendered and one social milieu after another glows in the reader’s mind. He is a connoisseur of the nuances of personality and mood, and here unveils his very human cast in all their radical individuality. New York itself is a principle character with its old society and its bohemians rich and poor, with its sleek European immigrants and its rough-and-tumble transplanted Midwesterners. With narrative daring and a gifted sense of the rueful submerged drama of life, the novel is a beautifully sculpted exploration of sexuality and sensibility.

My Policeman

From the moment Marion first lays eyes on Tom - her best friend's big brother, broad, blond, blue-eyed - she is smitten.And when he comes home from National Service to be a policeman, Marion, a newly qualified teacher, is determined to win him.Unable to acknowledge the signs that something is amiss, she plunges into marriage, sure that her love is enough for both of them...

But Tom has another life, another equally overpowering claim on his affections.Patrick, a curator at the Brighton Museum, is also besotted with his policeman, and opens Tom's eyes to a world previously unknown to him.But in an age when those of 'minority status' were condemned by society and the law, it is safer for this policeman to marry his teacher.The two lovers must share him, until one of them breaks and three lives are destroyed.

Unfolding through the dual narratives of Marion and Patrick, both writing about the man at the centre of their lives, this beautifully-told, painful, tragic story is revealed.It is a tale of wasted years, misguided love and thwarted hope, of how at a time when the country was on the verge of change so much was still impossible.Bethan Roberts has produced an intense and exquisitely raw yet tender novel, which proves her to be one of our most exciting young writers.

Pure

The author of the prize-winning, hugely acclaimed INGENIOUS PAIN returns to the 18th century with an enthralling tale set in pre-revolutionary Paris.

A year of bones, of grave-dirt, relentless work. Of mummified corpses and chanting priests.
A year of rape, suicide, sudden death. Of friendship too. Of desire. Of love...
A year unlike any other he has lived.

Deep in the heart of Paris, its oldest cemetery is, by 1785, overflowing, tainting the very breath of those who live nearby. Into their midst comes Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer charged by the king with demolishing it.

At first Baratte sees this as a chance to clear the burden of history, a fitting task for a modern man of reason. But before long, he begins to suspect that the destruction of the cemetery might be a prelude to his own.

A Crown Imperilled: A Chaoswar Saga Book Two

War rages in Midkemia but behind the chaos there is disquieting evidence of dark forces at work.

Jim Dasher′s usually infallible intelligence network has been cleverly dismantled; nowhere is safe. He feels that the world is coming apart at the seams and is helpless to protect his nation.

Quiet palace coups are underway in Roldem and Rillanon; and King Gregory of the Isles has yet to produce an heir. In each kingdom a single petty noble has risen from obscurity to threaten the throne.

Lord Hal of Crydee and his great friend Ty Hawkins, champion swordsman of the Masters′ Court, are entrusted with the task of smuggling Princess Stephané and her lady-in-waiting, the lovely but mysterious Lady Gabriella, out of Roldem to a place of greater safety. But is there any safe haven to be found?

Meanwhile, Hal′s younger brothers Martin and Brendan are attempting to hold the strategic city of Ylith against an onslaught of Keshian Dog Soldiers, and a mysterious force from beneath the sea. The Kingdom might lose Crydee and recover; but if Ylith falls, all is lost.

An unknown player appears to orchestrating these conflicts. Can Pug and the Conclave of Shadows track down this source before Midkemia is destroyed?

Feist is one of the world’s leading fantasy writers. His Riftwar and Serpentwar Sagas have been global bestsellers for years.

Born and raised in Southern California, Raymond E. Feist was educated at the University of California, San Diego, where he graduated with honours in Communication Arts. He is the author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed Riftwar Saga.

The Lost Memory Of Skin

The acclaimed author of The Sweet Hereafter and Rule of the Bone returns with a provocative new novel that illuminates the shadowed edges of contemporary American culture with startling and unforgettable results

Suspended in a strangely modern-day version of limbo, the young man at the center of Russell Banks’s uncompromising and morally complex new novel must create a life for himself in the wake of incarceration. Known in his new identity only as the Kid, and on probation after doing time for a liaison with an underage girl, he is shackled to a GPS monitoring device and forbidden to live within 2,500 feet of anywhere children might gather. With nowhere else to go, the Kid takes up residence under a south Florida causeway, in a makeshift encampment with other convicted sex offenders.

Barely beyond childhood himself, the Kid, despite his crime, is in many ways an innocent, trapped by impulses and foolish choices he himself struggles to comprehend. Enter the Professor, a man who has built his own life on secrets and lies. A university sociologist of enormous size and intellect, he finds in the Kid the perfect subject for his research on homelessness and recidivism among convicted sex offenders. The two men forge a tentative partnership, the Kid remaining wary of the Professor’s motives even as he accepts the counsel and financial assistance of the older man.

When the camp beneath the causeway is raided by the police, and later, when a hurricane all but destroys the settlement, the Professor tries to help the Kid in practical matters while trying to teach his young charge new ways of looking at, and understanding, what he has done. But when the Professor’s past resurfaces and threatens to destroy his carefully constructed world, the balance in the two men’s relationship shifts.

Suddenly, the Kid must reconsider everything he has come to believe, and choose what course of action to take when faced with a new kind of moral decision.

Long one of our most acute and insightful novelists, Russell Banks often examines the indistinct boundaries between our intentions and actions. A mature and masterful work of contemporary fiction from one of our most accomplished storytellers, Lost Memory of Skin unfolds in language both powerful and beautifully lyrical, show-casing Banks at his most compelling, his reckless sense of humor and intense empathy at full bore.

The perfect convergence of writer and subject, Lost Memory of Skin probes the zeitgeist of a troubled society where zero tolerance has erased any hope of subtlety and compassion—a society where isolating the offender has perhaps created a new kind of victim.

Miles Off Course

In early 1933, Rowland Sinclair and his companions are ensconced in the superlative luxury of The Hydro Majestic - Medlow Bath, where trouble seems distant indeed.

And then Harry Simpson vanishes.

Croquet and pre-dinner cocktails are abandoned for the High Country where Rowland hunts for Simpson with a determination that is as mysterious as the disappearance itself. Stockmen, gangsters and a belligerent writer all gather to the fray, as the investigation becomes embroiled with a much darker consipiracy.

Currawalli Street

A beguiling celebration of the extraordinary in ordinary people's lives, this gently moving and beautifully written novel tells the stories of the people of Currawalli Street across the generations. It's a modern classic in the making that will stay with you long after the last page is turned.

We all have secret lives. And we are all pretty good at keeping them secret.

With simplicity and great beauty, Currawalli Street reveals the echoes between past and present through the story of one ordinary street and its families, from the pre-war innocence of early 1914 to the painful and grim consequences of the Vietnam War. In 1914, Thomas, the young rector, questions his faith and falls in love; his sister Janet, a dutiful spinster, hides a surprising secret; and their neighbour, Rose, is burdened with visions of the coming hell. In 1972, Jim, a soldier fresh from Vietnam, returns home to Currawalli Street to find that death has a way of seeping in everywhere; Patrick, looked after by his elderly wife, Mary, can't relinquish his former identity; and always there is the boy up in the tree, watching them all and keeping note. In only three short generations, working horses and wagons are lost to cars, wood-fired ovens are replaced with electric stoves, and the lessons learned at such cost in the Great War seem forgotten. But despite all the changes, the essential human things remain: there will always be families and friends reaching out for connection; people will always have secrets to keep hidden from view; and desire and love are as inevitable as war and violence. Deep, rich and satisfying, Currawalli Street links families and neighbours, their lovers and friends, in a powerful and moving dance through time.

Christopher Morgan has been a singer in a French restaurant, an artificial tree builder, a kitchen hand, a fire brigade roster clerk and a printing factory storeroom worker. In 1996 Christopher was diagnosed with a brain tumour and found that the only thing that was improved by the tumour was his imagination and decided to put it to good use. His first novel for adults, The Island of Four Rivers, was published in 2006 after which Christopher wrote two children's stories, Pirates Eat Porridge (2006) and Pirates Drive Buses (2007). Currawalli Street is his second novel for adults.

Suddenly A Knock On The Door

Etgar Keret is an ingenious and original master of the short story. Hilarious, witty and always unusual, declared a ‘genius’ by the New York Times, Keret brings all of his prodigious talent to bear in this, his sixth bestselling collection.Long a household name in Israel, where he has been declared the voice of his generation, Keret has been acknowledged as one of the country’s most radical and extraordinary writers. Exuding a rare combination of depth and accessibility, Keret’s tales overflow with absurdity, humour, longing and compassion, and though their circumstances are often strange and surreal, his characters are defined by a familiar and fierce humanity. A man barges into a writer’s house and, holding a gun to his head, demands that he tell him a story, something to take him away from the real world. A pathological liar discovers one day that all the lies he tells come true. A young woman finds a zip in her boyfriend’s mouth, and when she opens it he unfolds to reveal a completely different man inside. SUDDENLY, A KNOCK ON THE DOOR is at once Keret’s most mature and most playful work yet, and establishes him as one of the great global writers of our time. Etgar Keret is the author of the short story collections: KNELLER’S HAPPY CAMPERS, MISSING KISSINGER and THE NIMROD FLIP-OUT.

I've Got Your Number

I've lost it. The only thing in the world I wasn't supposed to lose. My engagement ring. It's been in Magnus's family for three generations. And now, the very same day his parents are coming, I've lost it. The very same day. Do not hyperventilate Poppy. Stay positive!!

Poppy Wyatt has never felt luckier. She is about to marry the ideal man, Magnus Tavish, but in one afternoon her 'happy ever after' begins to fall apart. Not only has she lost her engagement ring but in the panic that followed, she has now lost her phone. As she paces shakily round the hotel foyer she spots an abandoned phone in a bin. Finders keepers! Now she can leave a number for the hotel to contact her when they find her ring. Perfect!

Well, perfect except the phone's owner, businessman Sam Roxton doesn't agree. He wants his phone back and doesn't appreciate Poppy reading all his messages and wading into his personal life.

What ensues is a hilarious and unpredictable turn of events as Poppy and Sam increasingly upend each other's lives through emails and text messages. As Poppy juggles wedding preparations, mysterious phone calls and hiding her left hand from Magnus and his parents... she soon realises that she is in for the biggest surprise of her life.

The Third Reich

On vacation with his girlfriend, Ingeborg, the German war games champion Udo Berger returns to a small town on the Costa Brava where he spent the summers of his childhood. Soon they meet another vacationing German couple, Charly and Hanna, who introduce them to a band of locals—the Wolf, the Lamb, and El Quemado—and to the darker side of life in a resort town.

Late one night, Charly disappears without a trace, and Udo’s well-ordered life is thrown into upheaval; while Ingeborg and Hanna return to their lives in Germany, he refuses to leave the hotel. Soon he and El Quemado are enmeshed in a round of Third Reich, Udo’s favorite World War II strategy game, and Udo discovers that the game’s consequences may be all too real.

Written in 1989 and found among Roberto Bolaño’s papers after his death, The Third Reich is a stunning exploration of memory and violence. Reading this quick, visceral novel, we see a world-class writer coming into his own—and exploring for the first time the themes that would de?ne his masterpieces The Savage Detectives and 2666.

Iago: A Novel

An unforgettable adventure beginning where Shakespeare'sOthello leaves off

Wounded in love, tormented by his past, Shakespeare's most complex villain is brought magnificently to life in this tale of two adversaries—one an accused killer; the other, one of the most powerful men in Venice. Having escaped from Cyprus, accused of the murders of the governor, known as the Moor, and his lovely young wife, Iago is now locked in battle with Annibale Malipiero, known as Il Terribile, the chief inquisitor of Italy's greatest city.

Malipiero is repelled by the more brutal tasks of the interrogante. His obsession is with the very nature of evil. What makes a man into a murderer, he longs to know? Is Iago a lone psychopath, or does he lie at the heart of a more widespread Ottoman conspiracy? Malipiero knows that torture will not provide him with the answers he seeks. But there is, perhaps, a more audacious and unusual route to the truth . . .

Exuberantly inventive, thrillingly complex, and richly entertaining, Iago will captivate fans already familiar with Shakespeare and appeal to anyone who loves a rich historical novel. Iago marks the emergence of a remarkable new literary voice.

Lightning Rods

Helen DeWitt’s follow-up to her critically accalimed debut novel The Last Samurai arrives with a bang, ready to take on the complex issues surrounding sexual tension in the workplace with a wicked dose of satire and humor.

Joe is a down-and-out salesman who spends most of his time sitting around his trailer in Florida fantasizing about women. But one afternoon a particularly strange fantasy turns into a life-changing epiphany. Suddenly he knows how to curtail sexual harassment in the office and increase productivity. His solution? Sexual lightning rods: women who, via a carefully constructed system of anonymity and strict protection, provide “sexual release” for alpha-male employees. As unlikely to succeed as it seems, Joe has finally found a product he can sell with boundless enthusiasm, and he simply refuses to fail, no matter what the obstacles. And of course he encounters quite a few of those on his rise through corporate America.

Lighting Rods is DeWitt at her finest, offering a mesmerizing blend of social commentary and jaw-dropping humor, all with a philosophic approach that takes modern storytelling into new realms of possibility.

“It so emphatically aces the tasks it sets for itself, and delivers such a jolt of pleasure along the way, that it reminds me of just how major a minor work can be... At any rate, as one of her endearingly flummoxed characters might say, I literally cannot wait to see what she does next.” — Garth Risk Hallberg, The Millions

“DeWitt’s wickedly smart satire deserves to be a classic.” — Bookforum

“Helen DeWitt shocks the reader with her intelligence. Lightning Rods, an exploration of the collective Id, is as lucid, methodical, and elegantly argued as a mathematical proof. It is also unremittingly filthy. DeWitt begins with a premise and goes on to think everything thinkable about it. A weird, generous, hilarious marvel.” — Teju Cole, Open City

“In Lightning Rods, the nonpareil Helen DeWitt has written a hilarious and pretty near perfect novel about…well, about selling and sex and the sound of the stories we tell ourselves, and of the stories we tell ourselves about the stories we tell ourselves, and of the stories we sell to others to help them have another story to sell to themselves, and about…did I mention sex? Lightning Rods is a strange and ingenious and happy-about-the-state-literature-making book.” — Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances

The Berlin Crossing

THE BERLIN CROSSING is a compelling, unforgettable novel that brings to life the very human story behind a momentous turning point in history.

Brandenburg 1993: The Berlin Wall is down, the country is reunified and thirty-year-old school teacher Michael Ritter feels his life is falling apart. His wife has thrown him out, his new West German headmaster has fired him for being a socialist, former Party member and he is still clinging on to the wreckage of the state that shaped him. Disenfranchised and disenchanted, Michael heads home to care for his terminally ill mother.

Before she dies, she urges him to seek out an evangelical priest, Pastor Bruck, who is the only one who knows the truth about his father. When Michael eventually tracks him down, he is taken on a journey of dark discoveries, one which will shatter his foundations, but ultimately bring him hope to rebuild them.

Kevin Brophy grew up in a military barracks on Ireland's west coast and now lives in Galway. He has written various non-fiction titles previously and his chequered career includes stints as a postman and teacher, barman and businessman. He has lived in Ireland, England and Poland but feels most at home in Germany.

It's Fine By Me

On his first day of school, a teacher welcomes Audun to the class by asking him to describe his former life in the country. But there are stories about his family he would prefer to keep to himself, such as the weeks he spent living in a couple of cardboard boxes, and the day of his little brother’s birth, when his drunken father fired three shots into the ceiling. So he refuses to talk and refuses to take off his sunglasses. In his late teens Audun is the only one of his family who remains with his mother in their home in a working-class district of Oslo. He delivers newspapers when he is not in school and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with his best friend Arvid. But he’s not sure that school is the right path for him, feeling that life holds other possibilities. Sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, It's Fine By Me is a brilliant novel from the acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses.

Micro

Three men are found dead in the locked second floor office of a Honolulu building, with no sign of struggle except for the ultra-fine, razor-sharp cuts covering their bodies. The only clue left behind is a tiny bladed robot, nearly invisible to the human eye.

In the lush forests of Oahu, groundbreaking technology has ushered in a revolutionary era of biological prospecting. Trillions of microorganisms, tens of thousands of bacteria species, are being discovered; they are feeding a search for priceless drugs and applications on a scale beyond anything previously imagined.

In Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven graduate students at the forefront of their fields are recruited by a pioneering microbiology start-up. Nanigen MicroTechnologies dispatches the group to a mysterious lab in Hawaii, where they are promised access to tools that will open a whole new scientific frontier.

But once in the Oahu rainforest, the scientists are thrust into a hostile wilderness that reveals profound and surprising dangers at every turn. Armed only with their knowledge of the natural world, they find themselves prey to a technology of radical and unbridled power. To survive, they must harness the innate powers of nature itself.

An instant classic, MICRO pits nature against technology in vintage Crichton fashion. Completed by visionary science writer Richard Preston, this boundary-pushing thriller melds scientific fact with pulse-pounding fiction to create yet another masterpiece of sophisticated, cutting-edge entertainment.

Stone Arabia

Denise and Nik grew up in the ’70s LA music scene. Nik—handsome and gifted, with a knack for songwriting—was a star on the rise. Denise, his sister, was his biggest fan. Now, fleeting success long behind him, Nik makes his art in isolation, painstakingly documenting his own work. Denise is his most devoted audience—sometimes his only audience.

Then her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film revealing Nik’s underground career.

Stone Arabia is a novel about family and memory, celebrity and obsession. It’s about the urge to create, and the search for authenticity.

Praise for Stone Arabia: With her novel’s clever structure, jaundiced affection for Los Angeles, and diamond- honed prose, Spiotta (National Book Award finalist for Eat the Document) delivers one of the most moving and original portraits of a sibling relationship in recent fiction.
Publisher's Weekly

Is there a more electrifying novelist working than Dana Spiotta?…[Stone Arabia] makes for a sharp character study: A portrait of the artist as middle-aged never-was. Yet Spiotta’s genius is to recognize that Nik’s journey is representative not just for his sister or his mother but for every one of us.
David Ulin, LA Times

Added to the brilliant glitter of Ms. Spiotta’s earlier work — so reminiscent, at times, of early Don DeLillo and early Joan Didion — is something deeper and sadder: not just alienation, but a hard-won awareness of mortality and passing time… both a clever meditation on the feedback loop between life and art, and a moving portrait of a brother and sister, whose wild youth on the margins of the rock scene has given way to the disillusionments and vexations of middle age.
Michiko Katutani, New York Times

Stone Arabia is a rock n’ roll novel like no other. Where desire for legacy tangles with fantasy. And identity and memory are in and out of control. A loser’s game of conceit, deceit, passion, love and the raw mystery of superstar desire.
Thurston Moore, singer/guitarist for Sonic Youth

Zone One

The most chilling, witty and downright beautifully written Zombie novel you'll ever read.

In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild-ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern-ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street--aka Zone One--but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety--the "malfunctioning" stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.

Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work-ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz's desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world. And then things start to go wrong.

Both spine chilling and playfully cerebral, "Zone One" bril-liantly subverts the genre's conventions and deconstructs the zombie myth for the twenty-first century

Jubilee

A heartwarming and nostalgic novel set during a street party for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977.

It is 1977, the Queen's Silver Jubilee and a photographer captures a moment forever: a street party with bunting and Union Jacks fluttering in the breeze. Right in the centre of the frame, a small Asian boy stares intently into the camera.

The photograph becomes iconic, a symbol of everything that is great about Britain. But the harmonious image conceals a very different reality. Amid the party food and the platform shoes, the pop music and the punk, there are tensions in the Cherry Gardens community. As the street party begins, those tensions threaten to erupt.

Fast forward to the present and the boy, Satish, has become a successful cardiologist, saving lives, respected by those around him. But he is living with a secret. When Satish is asked to take part in a reunion of those involved in that Jubilee photograph, he must confront the truth about that day and the events that changed the course of his life.

Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion

It is 1810, and the Damned are out of favor—banished from polite society. Jane Austen’s old undead friends have become new neighbors, raising hell in her tranquil village just in time to interrupt Jane’s work on what will be her masterpiece. Suddenly Jane’s niece is flirting dangerously with vampires, and a formerly respectable spinster friend has discovered the forbidden joys of intimate congress with the Damned (and is borrowing Jane’s precious silk stockings for her assignations). Writing is simply impossible now, with murderous creatures prowling the village’s once-peaceful lanes. And with the return of her vampire characteristics, a civil war looming between factions of the Damned, and a former lover who intends to spend eternity blaming her for his broken heart, Jane is facing a very busy year indeed.

22 Britannia Road

'A riveting historical novel, set in post-WWII England . . . crimes of love and war'
Oprah.com

In war we sometimes lose ourselves . . .

It is 1946 and Silvana and eight-year-old Aurek board a ship that will take them from Poland to England. Silvana has not seen her husband Janusz in six years, but, they are assured, he has made them a home in Ipswich.

However, after living wild in the forests for years, carrying a terrible secret, all Silvana knows is that she and Aurek are survivors. Everything else is lost. While Janusz, a Polish soldier who has criss-crossed Europe during the war, hopes his family will help put his own dark past behind him.

But the war and the years apart will always haunt each of them unless they together confront what they were compelled to do to survive.

'An affecting story, extremely well told' The Times

'A moving, powerful account of the day-to-day struggle for survival' Sunday Times

'Harrowing, terrifying, heartbreaking, incredibly moving. Prepare to be left teary-eyed more than once' Stylist

Dark Matter

A terrifying 1930s ghost story set in the haunting wilderness of the far north.

January 1937. Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely and desperate to change his life. So when he's offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year. Gruhuken.

But the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice. Stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return - when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible.

And Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark...

Liar Bird

PR whizz Cassandra Daley isn′t afraid of using all the dirty tricks of the trade to spin a story her way. A glamorous city-slicker, she has never given much thought to wildlife until she humiliatingly loses a PR war with a potoroo.

Sacked and disgraced, she flees the city for an anonymous bolt hole. But small-town Beechville has other plans for her.

Feral pigs, a snake in the dunny, a philosopher frog and a town with a secret--could things get worse? Add one man who has the sexiest way with maps she′s ever seen and they soon do. Her best friend Jessica thinks she′s been brainwashed by some kind of rural cult, and Jessica could be right. Can Cassandra reinvent herself or will she always be a liar bird?

Power And Beauty: A Love Story Of Life On The Streets

Hip-hop artist Tip "T.I." Harris has received every acclaim the music world has to offer. Now, working with bestselling celebrity collaborator David Ritz, T.I. applies all his talent and experience to the world of fiction by creating the epic love story of Power and Beauty.

After the death of his mother, Charlotte, Paul “Power” Clay allows himself to be guided by Slim, a local businessman. Slim always has the best of everything, and Power is sure that if he learns Slim's ways, he'll make something of himself--and perhaps be worthy of Tanya “Beauty” Long. From Chicago to Miami to New York, through drugs, women, and violence, Power makes the difficult transition from boy to man and, in doing so, begins to question if those who have taught him--including Slim--truly have his best interests at heart.

Beauty has always known that the only person she can rely on is herself. After her mother died when she was eleven years old, she was adopted by close family friend Charlotte Clay. But with Charlotte's death, Beauty knows she's no longer safe and protected--especially as Power gets sucked into a new kind of life. As soon as she can, she turns her back on Atlanta--and the growing love she feels for Power--for a chance to make it in the Big Apple. With a successful fashion career on the horizon, Beauty takes New York by storm with her wit, business savvy, and breathtaking good looks. But she's never forgotten those she left behind. And when it becomes clear that Power needs her, Beauty will risk everything to save the man she loves.

Memory Wall

Set on four continents, Anthony Doerr′s new collection of stories is about memory: the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others.

In the luminous and beautiful title story, a young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old woman′s secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life. In ′The River Nemunas′, a teenaged orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather, and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. ′Village 113′ is about the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the seedkeeper who guards the history of a village soon to be submerged. And in ′Afterworld,′ the radiant, cathartic final story, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson.

The stories in ′Memory Wall′ show us how we figure the world, and show Anthony Doerr to be one of the masters of the form.

The Angel Esmeralda

The stories here, collected from all five decades of DeLillo's career, show an acknowledged master of the novel in complete command of the short form. In The Angel Esmeralda, DeLillo finds the freedom to represent the wide range of human experience in contemporary America – and forces us to confront the uncomfortable shadows lurking in the background.

His characters are exposed to their own deep, often unconscious, longings: one man exploits the vulnerability of a woman he's just met, following her home to her apartment and pushing her too far; another finds himself deceiving his wife and beginning an affair. They are subjected to shocking violations, unexpected acts of terror: a woman lives in constant fear of the earthquakes happening all around her; people bear witness to the mysterious abduction of a child from a small park by a stranger.

No matter whether he is focused upon the slums of New York or astronauts in orbit around the earth, DeLillo chooses not to turn away from the unsettling manner in which humans are often brought together, or the disquieting truth behind their emotional interactions. DeLillo's world is a timeless present, eerily perceptive and prophetic, in which he creates powerful stories of lust and obsession, of loss and remorse, of grief and ecstasy.

Don DeLillo, the author of fifteen novels, including Point Omega, Falling Man, White Noise and Libra, has won many honours in America and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. In 2010, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award. He has also written three plays.

Ed King

No extra details available for this item.

The Festival By The Sea

Gina Laurel is ready to move on from her quiet life at Shelly Beach – and she's got the brilliant job offer to prove it. But when her erstwhile lover – and director of the inaugural Shelly Beach Writers' Festival – takes a job in the city, Gina finds herself the last-minute fill-in as director of the chaotic seaside festival.

Before she can rejoin the rat race, she must negotiate her way through celebrity-author hissy fits, champagne galas, rogue pirates and giant mice . . . not to mention a love/hate relationship with the former festival director.

As the festival looms ever closer, Gina has some big decisions to make. Is she really ready to swap her ocean view for an office desk and the bright lights of the city?

From the author of The Shelly Beach Writers' Group comes the second hilarious instalment of Gina's adventures at Shelly Beach, full of wit, warmth and whimsy.

Various Positions

Nuanced, fresh, and gorgeously well-written, Martha Schabas’ extraordinary debut novel takes us inside the beauty and rigour of professional dance, and the young women striving to make it in that world. Shy and introverted, and trapped between the hyper-sexualised world of her teenaged friends and her dysfunctional family, Georgia is only at ease when she’s dancing. Fortunately, she’s an unusually talented and promising dancer.

When she is accepted into the notoriously exclusive Royal Ballet Academy—Canada’s preeminent dance school—Georgia thinks she has made the perfect escape. In ballet, she finds the exhilarating control and power she lacks elsewhere in her life: physical, emotional and, increasingly, sexual.

This dynamic is nowhere more obvious than in Georgia’s relationship with Artistic Director Roderick Allen. As Roderick singles her out as a star and subjects her to increasingly vicious training, Georgia obsesses about becoming his perfect student, disciplined and sexless. But a disturbing incident with a stranger on the subway, coupled with her dawning recognition of the truth of her parents’ unhappy marriage, causes her to radically reassess her ideas about physical boundaries—a reassessment that threatens both Roderick’s future at the academy and Georgia’s ambitions as a dancer.

Praise for Various Positions: 'A debut novel so exquisite, its sentences so delicately perfect, its initial pages so immediately engrossing, that you must re-check the press materials to ensure you aren’t reading a fourth or fifth effort…. Schabas is a writer in full control of her craft.' National Post (Canada)

'Schabas’s dialogue is often extraordinarily expressive, compressed to a tight code for swirling inner worlds… You will want to gather Georgia into your arms and make it all better… A wonderful, courageous debut.' The Globe and Mail (Canada)

An Honourable Man

A big and important Victorian novel set in London and the Sudan from a major international writer.

From one of Britain's most important writers, An Honourable Man is set in the tumultuous world of late Victorian England. Beginning in the Sudan and London of 1884, this extraordinary new novel is played out against the shambolic end of the Empire. Slovo draws on the lives of two real men: Charles Gordon, an heroic, hubristic, career army man whose refusal to obey orders helped bring down the Gladstone government, and W T Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, the father of tabloid journalism. Their story is intercuts with the tale of a poor, working woman in London. This is a book about destiny and about how wrong men can be; about foreign adventure and heroism doomed to failure; about women struggling to carve a place for themselves in the world; about political compromise and military mayhem. It is magnificent.

Born in South Africa, Gillian Slovo has written ten novels. ICE ROAD was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and RED DUST was filmed with Hilary Swank and Chiwetel Ejiofor. She is the President of English PEN.

Thirteen Flowers Of Nanjing

This moving short novel is based on true events that took place during the Nanjing Massacre in 1937 when the Japanese invaded the Chinese city, slaughtering not only soldiers but raping and murdering the civilian population as well. It tells the story of an American missionary who, for a few terrifying days, finds himself sheltering a group of schoolgirls, prostitutes and wounded Chinese soldiers in the compound of his church.American priest Father Engelmann is one of the small group of Westerners who have remained in Nanjing, despite the approach of the Japanese. America is not yet in the war and so his church compound is supposedly neutral territory. However, his confidence in his ability to look after the Chinese schoolgirls left in his care is shaken when thirteen prostitutes from the floating brothel on the nearby Yangtze River climb over the compound wall and demand to be hidden. The situation becomes even more intense when some wounded Chinese soldiers appear. Meanwhile Engelmann is becoming increasingly aware of the barbaric behaviour of the Japanese outside the compound walls. It is only a matter of time before they knock on the door and find the people he is protecting ...Like Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, this poignant book looks at the effect upon individuals of large-scale war and tragedy. The characters are beautifully observed. From the naive schoolgirls, the brazen prostitutes and the frightened soldiers to the slightly priggish priest and his resentful Chinese entourage, we watch how people are forced to change their preconceptions in challenging circumstances. As the Japanese circle ever closer, the barriers of hatred and prejudice that separate the characters dissolve, and they perform unexpected and moving acts of heroism. Geling Yan, an important Chinese writer, reveals herself to be a master of detail and emotion in this novel. She recreates history as if it is unfolding before our eyes, and writes characters that are so engaging and so rich that we believe in them entirely. This is a novel full of humanity - at its worst and at its best - and a fascinating insight into 1930s China.

The Marriage Plot

Madeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn′t get the memo. While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little too nicely for the taste of her more Bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend whose college love life, despite her good looks, hadn′t lived up to expectations.

But now, in the spring of her final year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course ′to see what all the fuss is about′. And, for reasons that have nothing to do with her studies, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with Leonard Morten -- charismatic loner and college Darwinist -- who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus - devotee of Patti Smith and Thomas Merton - resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that she will be his wife.

The triangle at the heart of this novel is at once age-old and completely fresh and surprising. With brilliant wit, irony and an incredible understanding of and love for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides captures the original energies of the novel while creating a story so contemporary that it reads like an intimate journal of our own lives.

Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close (Film Tie-In)

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies.

When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father's closet. It is a search which leads him into the lives of strangers, through the five boroughs of New York, into history, to the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey which brings him ever closer to some kind of peace.

We Bought A Zoo (Film Tie-In)

In the market for a house and the adventure of a lifetime, Benjamin Mee decided to uproot his family and move them to an unlikely new home: a dilapidated zoo on the English countryside, complete with over 200 exotic animals. Mee, who specializes in animal behavior, had a dream to refurbish the zoo and run it as a family business. Naturally, friends and colleagues thought he was crazy.

Mee’s pipedream became a reality in October of 2006, when he and the rest of the Mee clan—wife Katherine, son Milo (age six), daughter Ella (age four), brother Duncan, and his seventy six-year-old mother—relocated to the Dartmoor Wildlife Park and met their new neighbors, which included five Siberian tigers, three African lions, nine wolves, three big brown bears, two pumas, a lynx, four Asian short-clawed otters, two flamingos, monkeys that wouldn’t stop fighting, several emu, boa constrictors, a llama, and a tarantula.

The grand reopening of the zoo was scheduled for spring, but there was much work to be done and none of it easy for these first-time zookeepers. Tigers broke loose, money ran low, the staff grew skeptical, and family tensions ran high.

Then tragedy struck. Katherine had a recurrence of a brain tumor, forcing Benjamin and his children to face the heartbreak of illness and the devastating loss of a wife and mother. But inspired by the memory of Katherine and the healing power of the incredible family of animals they had grown to love, Benjamin and his kids resovled to move forward. The Mee family opened the gates of the revitalized zoo in July 2007.

Brimming with energy and insight, We Bought a Zoo is a profoundly moving portrait of an ordinary family living in the most extraordinary circumstances.

The Transformation Of Bartholomew Fortuno

A sumptuous period story with the most wondrously vibrant cast of characters – this tale of secrets, friendship and forbidden love will leave you enchanted.

In the late 1860s, as America was recovering from Lincoln's assassination, a man named P. T. Barnum opened a museum in New York City. Filled with oddities from around the world, it also hosted a number of sideshow freaks – including The Transformation of Bartholomew Fortuno's narrator, the Human Skeleton.

This atmospheric and utterly original story of how he fell in love with the Bearded Lady is a moving novel about human appetites and longings, exploring what it means to be profoundly unique – and demonstrating love's power to transcend even the greatest divisions.

Me Before You

Lou Clark knows lots of things.

She knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun tea shop and she knows she might not love her boyfriend Patrick.

What Lou doesn't know is she's about to lose her job or that knowing what's coming is what keeps her sane.

Will Traynor knows his motorcycle accident took away his desire to live. He knows everything feels very small and rather joyless now and he knows exactly how he's going to put a stop to that.

What Will doesn't know is that Lou is about to burst into his world in a riot of colour. And neither of them knows they're going to change the other for all time.

Praise for Jojo Moyes:

'What a wonderful, thoughtful and moving book. I was riveted all the way through. Absolutely loved it.' Sophie Kinsella

'The Last Letter from Your Lover manages to be a both gorgeously romantic and partner-ignoringly compulsive read' Independent on Sunday

'This poignant novel will make your heart flutter.' Heat

'A small-life-big-dreams weepie that'll have you snivelling ecstatically into your cocoa.' Daily Mail

In Red

(Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston)

In this latest groundbreaking novel, Magdalena Tulli creates a world that is unreal, yet strangely familiar and utterly convincing. Set in a mythical fourth partition of Poland, In Red is full of dreamlike descriptions of the town and its inhabitants; its power lies in Tulli’s evocative, almost hallucinatory use of language.

"There is much to treasure. Tulli plays with the line between unexpected and quirky very well. . . . You can't help but to want to return again and again."—NPR

"A beautifully flowing translation. Johnston aptly captures the dreamy as well as the stark quality of the original."—Danuta Borchardt

"Powerful imagery caught in a sinewy, architectural, elegiac prose. An inner-outer dance of cityscape with the taut emotion, terror & psyche of the 'human.' Where are we? What magical zone of dream and stone? We are inhabitants of the wild, brilliant imagination of Magdalena Tulli. This book is a great pleasure to read: deeply provocative, intuitive, haunting. 'I hunt among stones' was Charles Olson's probing line, a mission manifested here with full beauty & finesse. And rendered from Polish to English in an inspired translation by Bill Johnston."—Anne Waldman

"A startling, beautiful, powerful achievement."—W. S. Merwin

Midwife Of Venice

At midnight, the dogs, cats, and rats rule Venice. The Ponte di Ghetto Nuovo, the bridge that leads to the ghetto, trembles under the weight of sacks of rotting vegetables, rancid fat, and vermin. Seeping refuse on the streets renders the pavement slick and the walking treacherous. It was on such a night that the men came for Hannah.Hannah Levi, a midwife in the Jewish ghetto, is known throughout Venice for her skills. When the Conte di Padovani appears at Hannah's door imploring her to attend his wife in her travails, Hannah's compassion is tested. Not only is it illegal for Jews to render medical treatment to Christians, it's also punishable by torture ... and death. But Hannah cannot turn down the money the Count will reward her with if she is successful in delivering him an heir. With such a handsome sum, she can save her own husband, Isaac, who was captured at sea and taken to Malta as a slave of the Knights of St. John.Aided by her 'birthing spoons' - rudimentary forceps she invented to help with difficult births, themselves illegal, will Hannah be able to save both mother and child? And if she fails how will she be able to save herself, let alone her husband?

Antwerp

Antwerp is Bolano intensified and distilled. As his friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarria, once suggested, it can be viewed as the Big Bang of his fictional universe. It is the birth of Bolano's enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his talent explodes. It's a short book, with short chapters, each like a prose poem, and from this springboard – which Bolano chose not to publish until 2002, more than twenty years after he'd written it – he plunged into the unexplored depths of the modern novel for which he is now revered.

In fifty-six sections, the fractured narration moves in multiple directions – spliced together with an experimental crime novel set on the Costa Brava are voices from a dream, from a nightmare, from passers-by, from an omniscient narrator, from 'Roberto Bolano'. This is a deep and meditative work – in Bolano's words, radical and solitary – the result of a highly personal wrestling with the form of the novel itself. The author sets out to ensure, wilfully, that this is a novel like no other – for rules about plot only apply to novels that are copies of other novels – and the aim is nothing less than to find in the written word a powerful and sustaining life force: 'Of what is lost, irretrievably lost, all I wish to recover is the daily availability of my writing, lines capable of grasping me by the hair and lifting me up when I'm at the end of my strength.'

Forecast Turbulence

The turbulent river rushes on.

′Everything flows,′ wrote Heraclitus, ′and nothing stays fixed.′

FORECAST TURBULENCE is a breathtaking and exquisitely lyrical collection of nine short stories and one memoir piece from internationally acclaimed Australian author Janette Turner Hospital. Featuring a compelling and enigmatic cast of characters -- a loner obsessed with the beautiful face of a neighbour; a militant religious cult; the mute skipper of a whale-watching boat; a teenager who hasn′t set eyes on his father since the breakdown of his parents′ marriage; the daughters of a charming family man (and paedophile); a child and his grandmother sitting out a hurricane; two vulnerable girls visiting their stepfathers in prison; a young woman deeply ashamed of what her father has become; and the grief-stricken parents of an abducted child -- Turner Hospital sensitively weaves their stories of raw emotion, heartbreaking vulnerability and incredible resolve, revealing their quest to hold their centres and maintain equilibrium in a turbulent and uncertain world.

The Prague Cemetery

An inspired twisting of history and fiction by the critically celebrated, best-selling author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum.

Nineteenth-century Europe—from Turin to Prague to Paris—abounds with the ghastly and the mysterious. Conspiracies rule history. Jesuits plot against Freemasons. Italian republicans strangle priests with their own intestines. French criminals plan bombings by day and celebrate black masses at night. Every nation has its own secret service, perpetrating forgeries, plots, and massacres. From the unification of Italy to the Paris Commune to the Dreyfus Affair to notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Europe is in tumult and everyone needs a scapegoat.

But what if, behind all of these conspiracies both real and imagined, lay one lone man? What if that evil genius created the most infamous document of all?

Eco takes his readers on an unforgettable journey through the underbelly of world-shattering events. The Prague Cemeteryis Umberto Eco at his most exciting, a novel immediately hailed as his masterpiece.

Exile

Despite the tough discipline, the students at the International School in Moshi are free to run wild. For this motley cohort of ex-pat Europeans, Indian Tanzanians and wealthy Africans, it's all about getting high, getting drunk and getting laid.

Samantha is tough on the outside, but underneath it all she's lost. Her parents don't get on, her teachers hate her and she's at that age when boys only want one thing. She has lived in Tanzania since she was three. Her father is a mercenary, her mother downs gin and tonics under the midday sun. Ignored and misunderstood, Samantha learns quickly that affection comes at a premium, however hollow the "love" on offer. Before long, her reputation precedes her, losing her friends as quickly as it wins her admirers.

Exile is the first of three powerful and gritty novels about growing up as an ex-pat in Tanzania in the '80s, where the ordinary teenaged pressures are magnified by post-colonial tensions and the easy availability of drink and drugs.

I Curse The River Of Time

An enthralling novel of a mother and son's turbulent relationship from the author of Out Stealing Horses.

It is 1989: Communism is crumbling, and Arvid Jansen, thirtyseven, is facing his first divorce. At the same time, his mother gets diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, we follow Arvid as he struggles to find a new footing in his life while all the established patterns around him are changing at staggering speed. I Curse the River of Time is an honest, heartbreaking yet humorous portrayal of a complicated mother-son relationship told in Per Petterson’s precise and beautiful prose.

1Q84

The Australian edition, exceeding 900 pages, comprises all three volumes of the book (which were published in Japan and the UK as separate books).

Read an early review of 1Q84 by friend of Readings and Melbournian Louis Bravos here

The 12th novel from Japanese master Haruki Murakami is a mesmerising, epic and utterly involving masterpiece.

The year is 1984. Aomame sits in a taxi on the expressway in Tokyo.

Her work is not the kind which can be discussed in public but she is in a hurry to carry out an assignment and, with the traffic at a stand-still, the driver proposes a solution. She agrees, but as a result of her actions starts to feel increasingly detached from the real world. She has been on a top-secret mission, and her next job will lead her to encounter the apparently superhuman founder of a religious cult.

Meanwhile, Tengo is leading a nondescript life but wishes to become a writer. He inadvertently becomes involved in a strange affair surrounding a literary prize to which a mysterious seventeen-year-old girl has submitted her remarkable first novel. It seems to be based on her own experiences and moves readers in unusual ways. Can her story really be true?

Aomame and Tengo's stories influence one another, at times by accident and at times intentionally, as the two come closer and closer to intertwining. As 1Q84 accelerates towards its conclusion, both are pursued by persons and forces they do not know and cannot understand. As they begin to decipher more about the strange world into which they have slipped, so they sense their destinies converging. What they cannot know is whether they will find one another before they are themselves found.

1Q84 is a magnificent and fully-imagined work of fiction – a thriller, a love-story and a mind-bending ode to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is a world from which the reader emerges stunned and altered.

Reviews by members of our Uncorrected Proof Book Club

Review #1 by Jeanie Misko, Canning Vale, WA

I finished reading 1Q84 (surely the blockbuster novel of 2011) almost a week ago, but I wanted to collect my thoughts before I put fingers to keyboard. This is a novel (sounds trite, perhaps epic would be a better word) that remains with you for a long, long time after reading it. I’ve kept thinking about the story and how each event fits in the overall structure of the book, how clever and intricate the world created is and how I can picture in my head a world that doesn’t exist…or does it?

The ARC copy I read comprised of Books 1 and 2 (Book 3 will be published in the UK on 25th October 2011, I’m uncertain of an Australian release date). The sheer weight of the first two books (nearly 600 pages) will come as a delight to Murakami fans. For readers new to Murakami, it may take a little while to warm up to the picture that is being painted lovingly before you but persevere, the puzzle pieces soon fall into place. The book opens with Aomame (whose name means ‘green pea’, we never know her by any other name) in a taxi, stuck in a traffic jam in Tokyo in 1984. She is going to be late for her appointment when the taxi driver informs her of an emergency exit that will take her off the expressway back to ground level. He says a few odd things, but Aomame is not concerned about that. She takes his advice, goes down the stairs and off to her appointment – killing a man.

Meanwhile, Tengo is a young writer who is struggling to make a name for himself while teaching mathematics at a cram school. At a meeting with his somewhat mentor, he is asked to rewrite a novel written by a seventeen year old girl that has been submitted for a new writers’ prize. The novel, Air Chrysalis, is nothing like he’s ever read before. Neither is its author, Fuka-Eri, a strange girl who never uses a question mark in her speech.

Can you see the Murakami originality coming through? The cover pictured gives quite an insight into the main symbols of this book. I don’t want to spoil the story for others – it’s highly original and will keep you reading all through the night but be prepared for almost anything to happen: religious cults, strange sightings of the moon, an older woman out for revenge, missing persons, murder, love, sex and all sorts of people – from big to small.

Murakami must be lauded for his ability to think of such an intricate plot – almost every detail is leading you further into the story and almost nothing is there by chance. It all combines together later in the second book with exquisite tension before the explosion of the bittersweet ending. Be aware that there is a fair bit of sex in this book but I felt it was needed to show where the characters were coming from and where they were heading.

On finishing this book, I hardly dared to look up at the moon in case I was in 1Q84! Everything else I’ve read since has paled in comparison to 1Q84. I simply can’t recommend this book more highly – it’s a beautiful masterpiece.

Jeanie Misko blogs at samstillreading.wordpress.com and you can follow her on twitter - @samstillreading

Review #2 by Christena Singh, Melbourne, VIC

I can’t remember a novel I have enjoyed reading as much as 1Q84, and I don’t even know how it ends yet. I have little doubt though, that when I do read the final instalment, this will be without a doubt the most amazing novel I will have read this year. While it is a lengthy tome, don’t let its size put you off, such is the magic of Murakami’s writing that it is a hard book to put down, and leaves you wanting more.

Set in Japan in 1984, the novel alternates between the stories of Aomame and Tengo, and one of the strengths is that in this work Murakami has convincingly written from the female perspective as well as the male. While the circumstances the characters find themselves in have the quintessential Murakami strangeness, there would be few readers who would not be able to relate to at least some parts of the main characters.

From the opening pages, with the mysterious Janacek-playing taxi-driver telling Aomame that “things are not what they seem” as he drops her into the alternate world of 1Q84, the reader instinctively knows that no, things won’t be what they seem. It is a novel which leaves you questioning the nature of reality, making you question the times when you might have consciously or un-knowingly have made a decision that took you to a different world.

In 1Q84, Murakami draws you in, with cascading mysteries and questions, all interlinked. Drawing on his use of Chekov’s gun, which once brought into a story must be used, the reader also knows that every mystery Murakami brings into the story will end up forming an important part of the narrative. There is no padding here.

1Q84 is a work that can be confronting for readers, dealing with strong sexual and cult issues. From the outset the characters are confronted with moral challenges, whether it be Tengo’s involvement in a potential literary fraud, or Aomame’s skilful dispatching of selected problematic men to “the other side”. Whilst surreal and supernatural in parts, well most parts really, it is ultimately a love story, and we find ourselves desperately wanting to bring his characters together, and wondering how it will all end.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time so far in the world of 1Q84. And I definitely want more, eagerly awaiting the final instalment due for release later this year. And I have no doubt that when I do come to the end, where all is revealed or possibly not, I will be thinking that this is the best book I have read this year. I recommend reading while listening to Janacek’s Sinfonia, with a cup of green tea…

Christena Singh is from Melbourne, Victoria. You can follow her on twitter - @christenasingh

Review #3 by Jef Tan, South Yarra, VIC

The notion of true love made possible by a conspiracy of strange and unknown forces is not unfamiliar ground for Murakami, who earlier explored this same idea from a philosophical perspective in 'On Seeing The 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning' (from the short story collection The Elephant Vanishes): "What a wonderful thing it is," he writes, "to find and be found by your 100% perfect other; it's a miracle, a cosmic miracle." With 1Q84, Murakami conjures up this 'miracle', complete with wild and fantastical other-realities, spun through his signature all-kooky cast of characters.

Set in a weird parallel universe, 1Q84 is a journey of suspenseful twists sometimes disturbing turns with Murakami's endearing style of converging subplots gathering into a mad momentum as we race to the finish. Not since Dance, Dance, Dance and Kafka on the Shore have we seen more sinister villains and sexier heroines crossing paths with the writer's always solo underdog-hero. Many will find Murakami's fearsome three-book epic pushing a dangerous boundary with 1Q84 but I'd say this might well be his most romantic yet.

Jef Tan is from South Yarra. He blogs at sixoclock.posterous.com

The Cat's Table

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England – a ‘castle that was to cross the sea’. At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly ‘Cat's Table’ with an eccentric group of grown-ups and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys become involved in the worlds and stories of the adults around them, tumbling from one adventure and delicious discovery to another, ‘bursting all over the place like freed mercury’. And at night, the boys spy on a shackled prisoner – his crime and fate a galvanizing mystery that will haunt them forever.

As the narrative moves from the decks and holds of the ship and the boy’s adult years, it tells a spellbinding story about the difference between the magical openness of childhood and the burdens of earned understanding – about a life-long journey that began unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage, when all on board were ‘free of the realities of the earth’.

With the ocean liner a brilliant microcosm for the floating dream of childhood, The Cat’s Table is a vivid, poignant and thrilling book, full of Ondaatje’s trademark set-pieces and breathtaking images: a story told with a child’s sense of wonder by a novelist at the very height of his powers.

The Sense Of An Ending

Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize.

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove.

The Sense of an Ending is the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past. Laced with trademark precision, dexterity and insight, it is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers

Solace

Mark Casey has left home, the rural community where his family has farmed for generations, to study for a doctorate in Dublin, a vibrant, contemporary city full of possibility. To his father, Tom, who needs help baling the hay and ploughing the fields, Mark's pursuit isn't work at all and indeed he finds himself whiling away his time with pubs and parties. His is a life without focus or responsibility, until he meets Joanne Lynch, a trainee solicitor whom he finds irresistible. Joanne too has a past to escape and for a brief time they share the chaos and rapture of a new love affair, until the lightning strike of tragedy changes everything. Belinda McKeon is a startling new talent in the great Irish mould, and Solace is a work to be admired equally for its spare, intense lyricism as for its range, understanding, and deeply compassionate portrayal of life as it is lived now.

Destiny

The author of DESIRE and PASSION is back with a fantastic new blockbuster - an irresistible story of ambition, secrets and true love.

Kate Fox was a teenage orphan from the rough side of the Bronx. Now a beautiful woman, Kate wants wealth and security for life. When media mogul Marcus Broder proposes, it seems the dream has come true. But a life of pampered luxury does not make Kate happy. When she walks out and forges a career of her own, a humiliated Marcus is furious. Bitterly jealous, he is determined to destroy her.

Wall Street's favourite entrepreneur, David Abrams, has heard the rumours that Kate Fox is a gold digger. But is Kate still the woman she once was? When irresistible passion flares between them, David has to decide if winning Kate is worth the gamble of losing everything he has... including his heart.

Summer

An engrossing portrait of an extraordinary summer on a remote farm endured by two recently orphaned children - a stunning novel by a real talent.

When Grace Hooper, on the verge of womanhood, and her nine year-old brother Billy are left orphaned by a freak accident at the beginning of a long, hot summer, they find themselves cast adrift from their old life and numb with grief. Sent to stay with their estranged grandfather on the remote farmstead where their mother grew up, there they must try to uncover a new understanding of the world and their place in it. But in the relentless heat and the unnatural calm of the near-deserted farm, nature itself soon becomes both enemy and ally, and as the bond between brother and sister disintegrates, Grace discovers that the farm hosts a tragic past and an uncertain future. At once disturbing and compelling, SUMMER is a deeply atmospheric exploration of loss and regeneration. As the story unfolds, layer upon layer of life is stripped away until all that remains is the very tick of existence.

Tom Darling was born in Oxford in 1978. He has an M.Phil. from Trinity College, Dublin, and is the author of the novel Glass People.

The Map And The Territory

If Jed Martin, the main character of this novel, was to tell you its story, he would perhaps begin by talking about a boiler breaking down, one 15th December. Or about his father, a well-known and committed architect, with whom he passed alone many a Christmas Eve. He would certainly recall Olga, a very pretty Russian he met at the start of his career, during the first exhibition of his photographs of Michelin road maps.

This was before global success arrived with the series of 'professions', those portraits of personalities from all walks of life (including the writer Michel Houellebecq), captured at their work. He should also say how he helped inspector Jasselin to solve an atrocious crime, whose terrifying scene left a lasting mark on the police teams. At the end of his life he will find a certain serenity, and utter only murmurs.

Art, money, love, the father-son relationship, death, work, and France turned into a tourist paradise are some of the themes of this novel, which is resolutely classical and openly modern.

Landfall

Alice Robinson is having doubts about her job on a fashionable London art magazine. Agreeing to house sit for her parents, she moves back to the suburban streets of her childhood, a world of Girl Guides, Tudorbethan houses and blossom trees, and finds herself confronting some truths about the way she's chosen to live her life. How can we connect? What are the maps and manuals that show us how to live today?

Exploring the landscape of the South East and the nature of life on an island, this clear-eyed, mordantly witty, warm and unsparing novel culminates in one of the most surprising and destabilizing endings you'll have read in some time.

Landfall marks the arrival of a new, intriguing voice and a major literary talent.

When She Woke

Hannah Payne′s life has been devoted to church and family, but after her arrest, she awakens to a nightmare: she is lying on a table in a bare room, covered only by a paper gown, with cameras broadcasting her every move to millions at home, for whom observing new Chromes -- criminals whose skin colour has been genetically altered to match the class of their crime -- is a new and sinister form of entertainment. Hannah is a Red; her crime is murder. The victim, according to the State of Texas, was her unborn child, and Hannah is determined to protect the identity of the father, a public figure with whom she′s shared a fierce and forbidden love.

WHEN SHE WOKE is a fable about a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate an America of a not-too-distant future - where the line between Church and State has been eradicated and convicted felons are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated but chromed and released back into the population to survive as best they can. In seeking a path to safety in an alien and hostile world, Hannah unknowingly embarks on a path of self-discovery that forces her to question the values she once held true and the righteousness of a country that politicizes faith.