Readings.com.au: New Fiction

Solar

An engrossing, satirical and very funny new novel on climate change

Michael Beard is a Nobel prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. Trading on his reputation, he speaks for enormous fees, lends his name to the letterheads of renowned scientific institutions and half-heartedly heads a government-backed initiative tackling global warming. A compulsive womaniser, Beard finds his fifth marriage floundering. But this time it is different: she is having the affair, and he is still in love with her.

When Beard’s professional and personal worlds collide in a freak accident, an opportunity presents itself for Beard to extricate himself from his marital mess, reinvigorate his career and save the world from environmental disaster.

Ranging from the Arctic Circle to the deserts of New Mexico, Solar is a serious and darkly satirical novel, showing human frailty struggling with the most pressing and complex problem of our time.A story of one man’s greed and self-deception, it is a profound and stylish new work from one of the world’s great writers.

Mr Rosenblum's List

Jack Rosenblum is five foot three and a half inches of sheer tenacity. Through study and application he intends to become a Very English Gentleman. Jack is compiling a list, a comprehensive guide to the manners, customs and habits of his new home. And he never speaks German, apart from the occasional curse.

Assimilation, he's convinced, is the secret of success. But the war's been over for eight years and despite his best efforts, his bid to blend in remains fraught with unexpected hurdles. Including his wife. Sadie finds his obsession baffling. She doesn't want to forget who they are or where they come from. She'd rather bake cakes to remember the people they left behind than worry about how to play bridge. But Jack is convinced they can find a place to call home.

In a final attempt to complete his list, he leads a reluctant Sadie into the English countryside. Here, in a land of woolly pigs, bluebells and jitterbug cider, they embark on an impossible task...

Dawn Of The Dreadfuls

With more than one million copies in print, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was the surprise publishing phenomenon of 2009. A best seller on three continents, PPZ has been translated into 21 languages and optioned to become a major motion picture. In this terrifying and hilarious prequel, we witness the genesis of the zombie plague in early-nineteenth-century England. We watch Elizabeth Bennet evolve from a naiuml;ve young teenager into a savage slayer of the undead. We laugh as she begins her first clumsy training with nunchucks and katana swords and cry when her first blush with romance goes tragically awry. Written by acclaimed novelist (and Edgar Award nominee) Steve Hockensmith, Dawn of the Dreadfuls invites Austen fans to step back into Regency England, Land of the Undead!

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand

Honour, duty and a properly brewed cup of tea ... get ready for the Major to steal your heart in the sweet, moving and uplifting story of a highly unlikely relationship between a very proper English gentleman and a widowed Pakistani shopkeeper.

Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired) leads a quiet life in the small rural English village of Edgecombe St Mary where he values the proper things that Englishmen have treasured for generations - honour, duty, decorum and a properly brewed cup of tea. The Major takes pleasure in his well-organised and rational life until he finds out that his patronising son, and the kind yet interfering ladies of the village, seem to have their own, rather special plans for him.

It takes news of his brother's death, though, to open the Major's eyes to Mrs Jasmina Ali, the village shopkeeper, and counfound all those carefully laid plans. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But although the Major was actually born in Lahore, and Mrs Ali in Cambridge, village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as a permanent foreigner.

A most unlikely hero, Major Pettigrew finds himself contending with irate relatives and an outraged village before he comes to understand his own heart.

Written with warmth, feeling and a delightfully dry sense of humour, this very modern love story will have you cheering wildly for the Major and Mrs Ali and believing that sometimes life does give you a second chance.

The Postmistress

Letters of love, telegrams of loss – the postmistress awaits them all

The wireless crackles with news of blitzed-out London and of the war that courses through Europe, leaving destruction in its wake. Listening intently on the other side of the Atlantic, newly-wed Emma considers the fragility of her peaceful married life as America edges closer to the brink of war. As the reporter's distant voice fills the room, she sits convincing herself that the sleepy town of Franklin must be far beyond the war's reach.

But the life of American journalist Frankie, whose voice seems so remote, will soon be deeply entangled with her own. With the delivery of a letter into the hands of postmistress Iris, the fates of these three women become irrevocably linked. But while it remains unopened, can Iris keep its truth at bay?T

The Norseman's Song

An ancient man with no past hails a taxi driven by a petty crim with no future.

Reluctantly, the pair embarks on a journey in search of a legendary whaler and murderer known simply as The Norseman. To guide them they have only a half-remembered sea-farer’s tale, an antique whalebone carved with a snake-like engraving of a Chinese dragon, and a hundred year old journal bound in human skin.

This is a one-way journey — but who is taking who for a ride?

The Norseman’s Song evokes the tradition of Joseph Conrad and Edgar Allan Poe to produce a stylistically brilliant blend of gothic mystery and modern crime noir. In this audacious literary debut, Joel Deane creates a violent and lyrical vision of contemporary Australia with the pace and energy of a road movie and the haunting atmosphere of a nightmare.

Wildhorse Creek

From the bestselling author of Pieces of Blue and The Waddi Tree comes a spellbinding novel about loyalty, friendship and first love.

Young Billy Martin runs from home, burying his past in the quest for a future. He finds it in Queensland's spectacular Gulf Country, on the sprawling cattle runs. The Gulf breeds tough men, and Billy is quickly drawn to the excitement and adventure of working with the fiery cattleman and ex-con, Blake Reilly, and his daughter, Jo.

Billy finds mateship, danger and romance in the Gulf, but he also finds an untamed land with a history of violence. In the brooding heat and unpredictable storms, the future he had sought unfolds - in ways as turbulent and unexpected as the country itself - and Billy discovers a place where he can at last belong.

PRAISE FOR KERRY McGINNIS

'Heartbreaking one moment but full of hope with the turn of the page.' Adelaide Advertiser

'McGinnis has an ear for the colloquialisms of the bush and keen eyes when it comes to realising the landscape.' The Age

Alone In Berlin

Berlin, 1940. The city is paralysed by fear.
But one man refuses to be scared.

Otto, an ordinary German living in a shabby apartment block, tries to stay out of trouble under Nazi rule. But when he discovers his only son has been killed fighting at the front he's shocked into an extraordinary act of resistance, and starts to drop anonymous postcards attacking Hitler across the city. If caught, he will be executed.

Soon this silent campaign comes to the attention of ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich, and a murderous game of cat-and-mouse begins. Whoever loses, pays with their life.

'Extraordinary … redemptive … as morally powerful as anything I've ever read' Charlotte Moore, Daily Telegraph

'One of the most extraordinary and compelling novels written about World War II. Ever' Alan Furst

'Terrific … a fast-moving, important and astutely deadpan thriller' Irish Times

'Fallada assembles a cast of vivid low-life characters, stoolies, thieves and whores' James Buchan, Guardian

'An unrivalled and vivid portrait of life in wartime Berlin' Philip Kerr

All That Follows

A gunman seizes hostages a short drive from Leonard Lessing's house. His face leaps out of the evening news – and out of Leonard's own past...

Lennie Lessing is a jazzman taking a break. His glory days seem to be behind him, his body is letting him down, and rather than continue to take on the world, he relives old gigs and feeds his media addiction during solitary days at home. Increasingly estranged from his busy wife Francine, who is herself mourning the sudden absence of her only daughter, Leonard has found his own groove: suburban and safe from surprises. Then comes the news bulletin that threatens to change everything.

Set in England, 2024, and George Bush's Texas, 2006, this hypnotic novel wonders whether a life full of sound and fury signifies more than a life lived quietly, and asks what it truly means to love, to believe, and to be courageous.

The Secret Adventures Of Charlotte Bronte

Laura Joh Rowland's San Ichiro novels have enthralled thousands of readers. Now the author turns her gift for historical fiction to Victorian England and the famous and fascinating Bront family with this critically acclaimed new thriller. Upon learning that she has been falsely accused of plagiarism, the normally mild-mannered Charlotte Bront sets off for London to clear her name. But when she unintentionally witnesses a murder, Charlotte finds herself embroiled in a dangerous chain of events that forces her to confront demons from her past.

The Surrendered

June Han has forged a life thousands of miles from her birthplace: she has built a business in New York, survived a husband, borne a child. But her past holds more secrets than she has ever been able to tell, and thirty years after her escape from war-ravaged Korea, the time has come for her to confront them. Hector Brennan, fighter, drinker and 'failure grand and total', is the man who long ago saved June's life. And between them lies the story of the beautiful, damaged Sylvie Tanner, whose elusive love they both once sought. On a journey that takes them from the scorched hillsides and abandoned rice paddies of a shattered Korea to a blood-soaked century-old Italian battlefield, together June and Hector go in search of their past, bound together by a legacy of shocking acts of violence and love. Compelling, suspenseful and unforgettable, THE SURRENDERED is a stunning epic of war, redemption and human longing. It is a masterpiece.

Point Omega

In the middle of a desert somewhere south of nowhere, to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, 73, was a scholar – an outsider – when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked Elster to conceptualise their efforts – to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create. Bulk and swagger, he called it.

At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a young filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character – Just a man against a wall.

The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster's daughter Jessie visits – an otherworldly woman from New York – who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men's talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and isolation, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible. Point Omega is a deeply unnerving and brilliant work from one of our greatest living writers.

Gravel

Eight brilliant stories by a master of the form, author of the classic 'Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam' and 'The Kiss'

A contented woman finds herself considering a bizarre sexual invitation that just days before filled her with scorn. A mediocre man is pulled into a strange dance with his stalker. A father gives his daughter a Christmas present with a disturbing history. An ugly sports parent plays a game of ridiculous chance. A young boy's music lesson offers him a discordant insight into adult behaviour. And in a primal tale about the borderline between animals and humans, death is horrifyingly not the end of the story . . .

Compulsively readable, pitch-perfect in mood, Gravel ponders the forces that can wear down a marriage, darken desire, lead people to thwart their best intentions.

PRAISE FOR GOLDSWORTHY'S SHORT FICTION

'Stories of magnificent achievement and disturbing power' Gail Jones, Australian Book Review

'A subtle hook draws the reader in . . . Once the lure is taken, you're drawn effortlessly to the end' Barry Oakley, Weekend Australian

'Goldsworthy's brilliance is peculiarly Australian. His is a literature of the Australian mundane' Ben Eltham, Courier-Mail

Below The Styx

How on earth does Marcus Clarke, a brilliant young Englishman - author of For the Term of His Natural Life - stranded on the far side of the world and dead for more than a century, get himself mixed up in a murder in exclusive, modern day Toorak? A challenging, amusing, and intriguing novel about reading, writing and thinking ... and many other things besides.

Martin Frobisher has been beating close family members about the head with an epergne. Frobisher, successful publisher and community leader, is in the City Remand Centre, awaiting trial for murder. What shadow has fallen across the comfortable lives of Frobisher, his ambitious wife Coralie and her flaky sister Madeleine? What has led a cultivated and reflective man, known to shoo spiders and earwigs out of the harm's way, to such reckless acts of violence? With the prospect of imprisonment for the Term of his Natural Life, can Frobisher and his research assistant Petra find guidance in the life and fortunes of a brilliant young Englishman, marooned in Australia, 'the land of vulgarity and mob rule' more than a century earlier, and obsessed with the darker moments in the nation's history? Why does Frobisher appear to care more, in the end, about the life of Marcus Clarke than he does about his own?

Trespass

Rose Tremain won the 2008 Orange Prize. Her brilliant new novel, Trespass, is a gripping story of redemption and revenge, in the beautiful, sinister setting of the gorges and forests of the Cevennes.

Set among the hills and gorges of the Cevennes, the dark and beautiful heartland of southern France, Trespass is a thrilling novel about disputed territory, sibling love and devastating revenge.

In a silent valley stands an isolated stone farmhouse, the Mas Lunel. Its owner is Aramon Lunel, an alcoholic so haunted by his violent past that he’s become incapable of all meaningful action, letting his hunting dogs starve and his land go to ruin.Meanwhile, his sister, Audrun, alone in her modern bungalow within sight of the Mas Lunel, dreams of exacting retribution for the unspoken betrayals that have blighted her life.

Into this closed Cevenol world comes Anthony Verey, a wealthy but disillusioned antiques dealer from London. Now in his sixties, Anthony hopes to remake his life in France, and he begins looking at properties in the region. From the moment he arrives at the Mas Lunel, a frightening and unstoppable series of consequences is set in motion.

Two worlds and two cultures collide. Ancient boundaries are crossed, taboos are broken, a violent crime is committed. And all the time the Cevennes hills remain as cruel and seductive as ever, unforgettably captured in this powerful and unsettling novel, which reveals yet another dimension to Rose Tremain’s extraordinary imagination.

The Man Who Disappeared

What would you do if, out of the blue, your reliable husband disappears? Then you are told he has been involved in money-laundering. Surely the man you know intimately couldn't be a criminal... could he? When Felix Kendall vanishes, his wife Kate is left in turmoil. As she and their children adjust to a hand-to-mouth existence, she looks back on her marriage and Felix's orphaned upbringing in search of clues, confronting the possibility that she has badly misread him. And as Kate gradually discovers strengths she never knew she had, many miles away Felix is coming to terms with just what he has done and lost. This compelling story of deception and self-deception, compromise and second chances questions how far we can know even those closest to us as it probes beneath society's veneer - in times of adversity, friends fall away and the most unexpected people step forward. With her characteristic wry wit, Clare Morrall delivers a thought-provoking, profoundly affecting and inspiring tale.

Black Hills

Paha Sapa, Black Hills , is a Red Indian shaman who as a young boy at the Battle of Little Bighorn takes the ghost of the dying General Custer into his own body. Sixty years later as an old man working as a dynamiter on Mount Rushmore, he plots to blow it up.

The Hopeless Life Of Charlie Summers

Hector Chetwode-Talbot, Eck to his friends, has left the army after a rather nasty moment in Colombia. From a privileged background, he is slightly at a loss as to what to do next, when he is approached by an old army pal, Bilbo Mountwilliam. Bilbo runs an investment fund company and persuades Eck to join the company. It is on a golfing trip to France with his friend Henry Newark that Eck first meets Charlie Summers, a fly-by-night entrepreneur who is hiding out in France after a 'misunderstanding with Her Majesty's Customs and Revenue.' Charlie's latest scheme is to import Japanese dog food into the UK. Henry casually mentions that Charlie should 'look us up' if he is ever in Gloucestershire. But not only does Charlie Summers look Henry up, he arrives with his suitcase, intent on staying with the Newarks and relaunching his dog food business in their area. But with the financial crash looming, Eck begins to ask himself if they are so very different...

Diamond Star Halo

The summer Elvis and Marc Bolan die, a new star is born ... and this is his story ...

Description

This is a family novel, and like almost all families these days this one is full of foundlings and misfits, but they cohere in their own fine way. The Llewellyns are a family who happen to run a legendary recording studio on the Welsh border that is also a working farm. So, it's also a rock'n'roll novel (as the Marc Bolan theft of the title promises). It's a countryside novel. It's a novel about stardom. It's a novel about the past walking hand-in-hand with the present. Being Welsh, it's just the right side of sentimental. It's terrific fun, full of incidental wit, and its principal characters are all lovely: the witchy Welsh nan, the cockney midget nan, the orphan she adopts, the boy with stardom in his veins, the sister-who-isn't-a-sister doomed to love him, the Bowie-obsessed brother under whose vast, sparkling skirts everyone shelters etc etc. Yes, it's a bit vaudeville (there's a streak of gypsy in it), yes, it lobs cliches like coconuts at its characters, but they dodge them, remaining at all times quick-witted, even metal-tongued, living people about whom you care, deeply.

The Cost Of Living

'In this collection, we witness the miracle of a great writer's birth and brisk maturation, a blossoming incapable of withering, and that remains masterful and truthful today.' - Jhumpa Lahiri

Mavis Gallant is admired and beloved as one of the masters of the modern short story. Selected from early collections and the New Yorker, where many of the author's stories have appeared in the last fifty years, and with an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, The Cost of Living reveals a writer coming into her own. The stories span the first twenty years of a long career, from the poise and poignancy of her very first published story, Madeleine's Birthday (1951), to the masterly exploration of the passage of time in the long story The Burgundy Weekend (1971) that appears here in the book form for the first time. Gallant's sensibility has always been cosmopolitan and these stories take us from Quebec to postwar Europe, via New York and New England, before settling, like their author, in Paris. Everywhere the book reveals Gallant's subtly penetrating psychological insight, wit and unsentimental sympathy for the excluded and the exiled, not to mention her wonderfully wicked sense of humour.

The Forty Rules Of Love

Ella Rubenstein is forty years old and unhappily married when she takes a job as a reader for a literary agent – and suddenly her life is transformed. Her first assignment is to read a novel about the ancient Sufi mystic, Rumi, who was transformed by the whirling dervish into a passionate poet and advocate of love. Slowly she realizes that his thirteenth-century life is starting to mirror her own, and in doing so it opens up exciting opportunities for her to embrace the dervish's timeless message for herself.

This is a mesmerizing novel about finding love and inspiration in the most unlikely of places.

Best European Fiction 2010

Historically, English-language readers have been great fans of European literature, and names like Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann are so familiar we hardly think of them as foreign at all. What those writers brought to English-language literature was a wide variety of new ideas, styles, and ways of seeing the world. Yet times have changed, and how much do we even know about the richly diverse literature being written in Europe today? Best European Fiction 2010 is the inaugural installment of what will become an annual anthology of stories from across Europe. Edited by acclaimed Bosnian novelist and MacArthur "Genius-Award" winner Aleksandar Hemon, and with dozens of editorial, media, and programming partners in the U.S., UK, and Europe, the Best European Fiction series will be a window onto what's happening right now in literary scenes throughout Europe, where the next Kafka, Flaubert, or Mann is waiting to be discovered.

The Piper's Son

Melina Marchetta's brilliant, heart-wrenching new novel takes up the story of the group of friends from her best-selling, much-loved book Saving Francesca - only this time it's five years later and Thomas Mackee is the one who needs saving.

Thomas Mackee wants oblivion. Wants to forget parents who leave and friends he used to care about and a string of one-night stands, and favourite uncles being blown to smithereens on their way to work on the other side of the world.

But when his flatmates turn him out of the house, Tom moves in with his single, pregnant aunt, Georgie. And starts working at the Union pub with his former friends. And winds up living with his grieving father again. And remembers how he abandoned Tara Finke two years ago, after his uncle's death.

And in a year when everything's broken, Tom realises that his family and friends need him to help put the pieces back together as much as he needs them.

This Is Where I Leave You

Judd Foxman returns home early to find his wife in bed with his boss - in the act. He now faces the twin threats of both divorce and unemployment. His misery is compounded further with the sudden death of his father. He is then asked to come and 'sit Shiva' for his newly deceased parent with his angry, screwed up and somewhat estranged brothers and sisters in his childhood home. It is there he must confront who he really is and - more importantly - who he can become. Funny, moving, powerful and poignant. THIS IS WHERE I LEAVE YOU is the fabulous follow up to HOW TO TALK TO A WIDOWER and Jonathan Tropper at his best.

Nineteen Seventysomething

Barry Divola‘s Nineteen Seventysomething is a requiem for bygone days. In the fictional suburb of Braithwaite, we meet Charlie during the listless weeks of his summer holidays. Against a backdrop of buzzing cicadas, Dragstar bikes, schoolboy rock bands, church youth groups, and Top 40 radio, Barry Divola deftly evokes that awkward, exhilarating journey from childhood to adolescence. Told with humour, poignancy and authenticity, Nineteen Seventysomething marks the familiar stages of teenage awakening - in friendship, desire and love.

‘Barry Divola hides meticulous attention to the detail of an era in prose that is disarming and real, and reads as though it came without effort. This is a book for anyone who ever owned a Dragstar bike or marvelled at a Valiant Charger‘ - Nick Earls

Revenge

Amber and Chelsea Stone are sisters who share the same dream - huge, global fame. As children they were close, but success has pulled them apart. Both have the looks, the talent, and the star quality - but only one has the ruthless ambition to make it to the very top. And she will stop at nothing to get what she wants.

Border Watch

Captain Morgan Pentland flies for Border Watch, patrolling the vast Australian coastline. With steely determination, she's fought hard to reach this point in her career, but her private life is a shambles. Will she ever break the tragic patterns of her childhood? Customs agent Rafe Daniels is working with her undercover. Morgan knows Rafe doesn't like her. What she doesn't know is that he has her under surveillance as a suspected terrorist. Critical information about their operations is leaking and she's the main suspect. Carl Wiseman, an elite policeman and Morgan's ex, is still on the scene, but is he pursuing Morgan to regain her love or for something more sinister? Morgan and Rafe will be forced to work together if they are to discover what is really going on, and stop a terrorist attack on Australian soil. But first, they will have to acknowledge the attraction that is growing between them.

Tuscan Rose

The internationally bestselling author of WHITE GARDENIA returns with her greatest heroine yet. A mysterious stranger known as ′The Wolf′ leaves an infant with the sisters of Santo Spirito. A tiny silver key hidden in her wrappings is the one clue to the child′s identity ...

Rosa′s only family is the nuns who have raised her. When she turns fifteen, she must leave them and become governess to the daughter of an aristocrat and his strange, frightening wife. Their house is elegant but cursed, and Rosa - blessed with gifts beyond her considerable musical talents - is torn between her desire to know the truth and her fear of its repercussions.

And all the while, the hand of Fascism curls around beautiful Italy, and none of her citizens is safe. Rosa faces unimaginable hardship: her only weapons her intelligence, intuition and determination ...and her extraordinary capacity for love.

A tale of sacrifice and reward, of beauty and horror, and of redemption as only Belinda Alexandra can deliver.

′a wonderful saga. Belinda Alexandra has successfully created an elaborate world ... which readers can get lost in′ GOOD READING on WILD LAVENDER

Martin Westley Takes A Walk

What if you were given the chance to wipe the slate clean?

"People were supposed to remember who they were and where they lived. They were supposed to remember who loved them and who did not and where their grandmothers were born. Martin Jeremiah Westley didn’t remember any of it, including the fact that he was Martin Jeremiah Westley."

Martin Westley has lost his memory and quite possibly his mind. He has a wife who despises him, a son who ignores him and a daughter who is drifting away. He has a nice house, a not-so-nice factory and an aggressively attractive mistress. But something is deeply, terribly wrong, and he knows he needs to make it right.

So Martin Westley walks. Along the way he picks up a cowboy hat, a sense of purpose, and an Indian who isn't really an Indian. And if he's lucky, he might just recover his life.

A darkly comic parable about families and the wonderful opportunities errant action kites can provide to start life anew.

Manhattan Dreaming

From Manuka to Manhattan - Lauren’s going all the way!

Lauren is a curator at the NAG - the National Aboriginal Gallery in Canberra. She's good at her job, passionate about the Arts, and focused on her work - that is, when she's not focusing on Adam, half-back for the Canberra Cockatoos.

But Adam is a player, on and off the field. Lauren knows he's the one, but he doesn't seem to feel the same way about her. If she just waits long enough, though, surely he'll realise how much he needs her?

Then her boss offers her the chance of a lifetime - a fellowship at the Smithsonian in New York. Lauren has to make some big decisions: The Man or Manhattan?

By the best-selling author of Not Meeting Mr Right and Avoiding Mr Right

Reviews

Praise for NOT MEETING MR RIGHT

“Anita Heiss is a fresh and bold new Australian voice in the genre of chick lit. So get comfy, grab a copy of NOT MEETING MR RIGHTand prepare to be entertained and delighted by gorgeous Alice on her quest for true luuurve!” - girl.com.au
“Anita Heiss creates the genre of Koori chick lit in NOT MEETING MR RIGHT” - Susan Wyndham ‘This Year’s Best Books’ in Sydney Morining Herald

*”There's lots of social commentary, hands-on sex, and brilliant satire here, heaps of black/white politics and revisionist history, and most impressive of all there's the most vivid, three-dimensional account ever written in any language of a truly serious hangover.”- Alex Miller

"Anita is Aboriginal Australia's answer to Whoopi Goldberg." - Jackie Huggins

"Great witty entertainment here, from a clever young Aussie author. More please." - Woman's Day

Praise for AVOIDING MR RIGHT

Anita Heiss could well be Indigenous Australia's answer to Carrie Bradshaw “- Judy Skatssoon AAP
“Anita Heiss is a hoot. She is funny, generous, glamorous and looking for Mr Right. When not publishing scholarly editions of Indigenous writing she has a deft way with Chick Lit.” - Rosemary Cameron, Festival Director, MWF 2008
“Sassy, intelligent, strong, independent and brilliantly funny - Deborah Mailman star of THE SECRET LIFE OF US.
“Witty entertainment!” - Woman's Day.
“Cheeky fun ... Anita Heiss' witty prose will have you hooked from the first page” - Andrea Black, New Idea. Product Details

The Calligrapher's Daughter

A richly drawn novel about a country torn between ancient customs and modern possibilities, a family ultimately united by love and a woman who never gives up her search for freedom.

Najin Han, the privileged daughter of a calligrapher, longs to choose her own destiny. Smart and headstrong, she is encouraged by her mother - but her stern father is determined to maintain tradition, especially as the Japanese steadily gain control of his beloved country. When he seeks to marry fourteen-year-old Najin into an aristocratic family, her mother defies generations of obedient wives and instead sends her daughter to serve in the king's court as a companion to a young princess. But the king is soon assassinated, and the centuries-old dynastic culture comes to its end. In the shadow of the dying monarchy, Najin begins a journey through increasing oppression that will change her world forever. As she desperately seeks to continue her education, will the unexpected love she finds along the way be enough to sustain her through the violence and subjugation her country continues to face? Spanning thirty years, The Calligapher's Daughter is a richly drawn novel about a country torn between ancient customs and modern possibilities, a family ultimately united by love and a woman who never gives up her search for freedom.

Eugenia Kim is the daughter of Korean parents who immigrated to America shortly after the Pacific War. She has published short stories and essays in journals and anthologies, including Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writings, and is an MFA graduate of Bennington College. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband and son. The Calligrapher's Daughter is her first novel.

Blackout

No historian can possibly change the past - or can they?

In her first novel since 2002, Nebula and Hugo award-winning author Connie Willis returns with a stunning, enormously entertaining novel of time travel, war, and the deeds - great and small - of ordinary people that shape history and, alarmingly perhaps, the future. The year is 2060, the fourth decade since the invention of time travel by a scientist who would not have been born had Hitler won World War II. At Oxford University, historians jockey for plum assignments, to carry out first-person research in the era of their specialty, from the Crusades to the Plague or the aftermath of the devastating nuclear attack on London. In the face of increasing scientific criticism of time travel - and the possibility that it could shatter the space-time continuum - three academics are in the heart of World War II in England. Merope is a maid in a country house studying evacuated children in England in 1940. Mike is researching a common thread of heroism across history and is on his way to Dunkirk. Polly lives as a shopgirl during the Blitz, watching the behaviour of ordinary citizens under stress. For all three, unknown corners of history explode as Hitler's bombs rain down on London. But when they try to return they find themselves unable to make their way back to the future. Have they broken the law of time travel and changed the narrative of history in some accidental way? A dreadful awareness comes over them all: far from witnessing the past, they may be on a journey into the utterly unknown. And the world they left in 2060 may no longer be there to save them.

Love In Mid Air

Will a chance encounter with a stranger completely wreck Elyse's safe but stale life? Intense, honest and sexy - an irresistible, smart and thought-provoking novel about a woman exploring what's missing in her marriage.

'You always forget this part, that life regenerates itself underground through the winter, that happiness comes back. You forget that your body has the capacity for joy, that it craves it like water. You forget that one thing can end and another can begin. There is always a way out through the broken places, although you don't know this at first - of course, why not, why would you? Pay attention, Tory. This is why things have edges.' Forty-something Elyse is happy with her life. That is to say, she's not actively unhappy. She's got a perfectly nice husband, child, home and life and knows she should be grateful for what she's got. Flying back home one day from a work trip, she meets an attractive married man on a plane and - intensely, quickly, unexpectedly - she steps through all the instincts that say 'no' and instead lets 'yes' happen. There are consequences for her, her husband, her child and her circle of close friends, all of whom have an investment in her life continuing as normal. But things will never be normal again - and was 'normal' what she really wanted after all? Sexy, smart and thought-provoking, Love in Mid Air is a witty, sharp, bittersweet plum of a book, all bite and juice. 'Funny, sexy, heartbreaking, wise, Love in Mid Air is the kind of novel you will stay up late for. I read the first page and was hooked, I couldn't put it down. It is not simply the story of a divorce, the story of an affair, the story of one woman caught between two men; it is a delicate exploration of the pull that almost every woman will feel at some point in her life for the unhindered freedom of something more.' - Dawn Clifton Tripp, author of Season of Open Water

South Of Broad

The one and only Pat Conroy returns, with a big, sprawling novel that is at once a love letter to Charleston and to lifelong friendship.

'It was my father who called the city the Mansion on the River. He was talking about Charleston, South Carolina, and he was a native son, peacock proud of a town so pretty it makes your eyes ache with pleasure just to walk down its spellbinding, narrow streets. Charleston was my father's ministry, his hobbyhorse, his quiet obsession, and the great love of his life.' Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of thirteen, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him. Eventually, he finds his answer when he becomes part of a tightly knit group of high school seniors that includes friends Sheba and Trevor Poe, glamorous twins with an alcoholic mother and a prison-escapee father; hardscrabble mountain runaways Niles and Starla Whitehead; socialite Molly Huger and her boyfriend, Chadworth Rutledge X; and an ever-widening circle whose liaisons will ripple across two decades-from1960s counterculture through the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. The ties among them endure for years, surviving marriages happy and troubled, unrequited loves and unspoken longings, hard-won successes and devastating breakdowns, and Charleston's dark legacy of racism and class divisions. But the final test of friendship that brings them to San Francisco is something no one is prepared for. South of Broad is Pat Conroy at his finest; a long-awaited work from a great American writer whose passion for life and language knows no bounds.

Pat Conroy is the bestselling author of nine books: The Boo, The Water is Wide, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, Beach Music, My Losing Season, The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life and South of Broad. He lives in Fripp Island, South Carolina.

The Egyptologist

From the bestselling author of Prague comes a witty, inventive, brilliantly constructed novel about an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal king.

This darkly comic labyrinth of a story opens on the desert plains of Egypt in 1922, then winds its way from the slums of Australia to the ballrooms of Boston, by way of Oxford, the battlefields of the First World War, and a royal court in turmoil.

Just as Howard Carter unveils the tomb of Tutankhamun, making the most dazzling find in the history of archaeology, Oxford-educated Egyptologist Ralph Trilipush is digging himself into trouble, having staked his professional reputation and his fiancée’s fortune on a scrap of hieroglyphic pornography. Meanwhile, a relentless Australian detective sets off on the case of his career, spanning the globe in search of a murderer. And another murderer. And possibly another murderer. The confluence of these seemingly separate stories results in an explosive ending, at once inevitable and utterly unpredictable.

Arthur Phillips leads this expedition to its unforgettable climax with all the narrative bravado that garnered Prague such critical acclaim. Exploring issues of class, greed, ambition, and the very human hunger for eternal life, this staggering second novel demonstrates Phillips’s range and maturity, for which he has been hailed as one of the most exciting authors of his generation.

A Stairway To Paradise

A Stairway to Paradise is classic Madeleine St John: poignant, witty, full of sharp and subtle observations.

Alex and Andrew are friends. And Barbara…Barbara is a goddess. Here is the eternal triangle, the story of three people locked in an unhappy tangle of emotions, none able to articulate the precise quality of their longing and dissatisfaction. In St John’s hands, what is commonplace is transformed and transcendent.

This is the work of an extraordinary writer.

Praise for A Stairway to Paradise:

‘Not much in the way of folly escapes Madeleine St John, and the oubliette she opens into the darker reaches of the spirit is unsettling.’ — The Times

‘St John proves herself a comic, humane observer.’ — Newsday

‘Madeleine St John is brilliant on the elliptical way lovers talk to each other.’ — Daily Telegraph

The Theory Of Light And Matter

Winner, Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction

These ten stories offer a stunning vision of contemporary American suburbia, littered with tension, heartbreak and revelations. Andrew Porter’s stories take readers across the country— from rural Pennsylvania to Southern California to the quiet streets of Connecticut.

At the heart of each story characters struggle to find meaning in their daily lives. Among them a college student searches for her soul mate, a young man reconstructs the memory of a friend’s deadly fall, and two neighbours share an intimate secret.

This is the work of an important new voice in American fiction. Praise for The Theory of Light & Matter:

‘Andrew Porter has the kind of voice one can accept as universal—honest and grave, with transparency as its adornment.’ — Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gilead

The Eternal Son

Winner, São Paulo Art Critics’ Association Award for that year’s best work of fiction, the Jabuti Prize, the Bravo! Award, the Portugal–Telecom Award, the São Paulo Literature Award, and the Zaffari & Bourbon Award, all for best novel or work of fiction

In this multi-award-winning autobiographical novel, Cristovão Tezza draws his readers into the mind of a young father whose son, Felipe, is born with Down syndrome. From the initial shock of diagnosis, and through his growing understanding of the world of hospitals and therapies, Tezza threads the story of his son’s life with his own.

Felipe, who lives in an eternal present, becomes a remarkable young man; for Tezza, however, the story is a settling of accounts with himself and his own limitations and, ultimately, a coming to terms with the sublime ironies and arbitrariness of life. He struggles with the phantom of shame, as if his son’s condition were an indication of his own worth, and yearns for a ‘normal’ world that is always out of reach.

Reading this compelling book is like stumbling through a trap door into the writer’s mind, where nothing is censored, and everything is constantly examined and reinterpreted. What emerges is a hard-won philosophy of everyday life.

It is extraordinary to encounter a common human drama — the birth of a disabled child — investigated profoundly by a father who happens to be a gifted writer. The Eternal Son is an honest and insightful story by one of Brazil’s foremost contemporary novelists, here beautifully translated by Alison Entrekin. It is world literature at its finest.

Mornings In Jenin

The first commercial literary work to emerge from inside Palestine: an astonishing and important novel that forces us to re-think our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Palestine, 1941. In the small village of Ein Hod a father leads a procession of his family and workers through the olive groves. As they move through the trees the green fruits drop onto the orchard floor; the ancient cycle of the seasons providing another bountiful harvest. 1948: The Abulheja family are forcibly removed from their ancestral home in Ein Hod and sent to live in a refugee camp in Jenin. Through Amal, the bright granddaughter of the patriarch, we witness the stories of her brothers: one, a stolen boy who becomes an Israeli soldier; the other who in sacrificing everything for the Palestinian cause will become his enemy. Amal's own dramatic story threads its way through six decades of Palestinian-Israeli tension, eventually taking her into exile in Pensylvania in America. Amal's is a story of love and loss, of childhood, marriage and parenthood, and finally the need to share her history with her daughter, to preserve the greatest love she has. Richly told and full of humanity, Mornings in Jenin forces us to take a fresh look at one of the defining political conflicts of our lifetime. It is an extraordinary debut.

Serena

The year is 1929 and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton arrive from Boston in the North Carolina mountains to create a timber empire.

Serena is new to the mountains— but she soon proves herself the equal of any worker, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband’s life in the wilderness. Yet she soon learns that she will never bear a child.

Serena’s discovery will set in motion a course of events bound to change the lives of everyone in this remote community. As the Pembertons’ intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel, this riveting story of love, passion and revenge moves toward its shocking reckoning.