Readings.com.au: Readings Recommends: Mother's Day Books

Reunion

Old friendships are expected to maintain their shape despite distance‚ lovers‚ careers‚ new friends. But twenty years is a long time.

Ava is an internationally acclaimed novelist who carries with her a lifetime of secrets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In The Kitchen

The new novel from the author of Brick Lane, In The Kitchen is a stunning novel set in the kitchen of a London hotel. The novel opens with a mysterious death in the cellars of a smart cosmopolitan hotel and over the course of the ensuing pages, peels back the layers of polyglot London to reveal the melting pot which exists below. Once again, it confirms Monica Ali not only as a great modern storyteller but also an acute observer of vagaries of a contemporary culture. Monica Alis is the bestselling author of Brick Lane, which was made into a 2007 film. She has been shortlisted for the Booker, George Orwell and Commonwealth Prizes. Monica will be in Australia for publication and will tour in Sydney and Melbourne.

The Women In Black

Written by a superb novelist of contemporary manners, The Women in Black is a fairytale which illuminates the extraordinariness of ordinary lives. The women in black are run off their feet, what with the Christmas rush and the summer sales that follow. But it’s Sydney in the 1950s, and there’s still just enough time left on a hot and frantic day to dream and scheme…

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

About Face

The wonderful new Commissario Brunetti novel, from Sunday Times Bestselling author Donna Leon.

At a dinner party given by his parents-in-law Comissario Brunetti meets Franca Marinello, the wife of a prosperous Venetian businessman. He's charmed - perhaps too charmed, suggests his wife Paola - by her love of Virgil and Cicero, but shocked by her appearance.

A few days later, Brunetti is visited by Carabinieri Maggiore Filipo Guarino from the nearby district of Marghera. As part of a wider investigation into Mafia takeovers of businesses in the region, Guarino wants information about the owner of a trucking company found murdered in his offices. He believes his death is connected to the illegal transportation of refuse - and more sinister material - in the company trucks. No stranger to mutual suspicion and competition between rival Italian police departments, Brunetti is nevertheless puzzled by the younger man's paranoid behaviour.

Eventually Guarino agrees to email a photo of his suspect, but by the time the photograph arrives, he himself is dead. Was he killed because he got too close? And how is it that Franca Marinello has often been seen in company of the suspect, a vulgar man with Mafia connections and a violent past?

Donna Leon's new novel is as subtle, gripping and topical as ever, bringing the sights, sounds and smells of Venice flooding to life.

Meet Me At Mike's

From Melbourne’s best loved crafty store comes Meet Me at Mike’s, a cornucopia of crafty fun and inspiration. Queen of Crafters Pip Lincolne has gathered 25 of the best projects from the country’s most creative cleverbods -everything from baby yoga pants and clutch purses to hankies and softies. You can sew, knit, crochet, collage and screenprint yourself into a frenzy! Each cute and quirky project comes with easy-to-follow instructions and full-size fold out patterns. With such a fabulous range of ideas, you’ll find something to make for all your favourite pals. If you’re looking for fun and creative things to brighten up everyone’s day, have a peek inside and get crafty!

Butterfly

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

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

Who ever forgets what happens when you're fourteen?

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

The Little Stranger

In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life? Little does Dr Faraday know how closely, and how terrifyingly, their story is about to become entwined with his. Prepare yourself. From this wonderful writer who continues to astonish us, now comes a chilling ghost story

The Weight Of Silence

The Weight Of Silence is the gravity of all the unsaids, the unseens, and how they shape our lives. A father's drinking, a mother's shame, a daughter's longing to hold onto a trouser leg to hear someone speak of what never happened. The Weight of Silence = 9 lbs 4 ozs. In her achingly funny, heartbreaking childhood memoir, Catherine Therese takes the reader inside her head, and upside down on a unique emotional rollercoaster from picking her belly button in her backyard in Blacktown, pulling her hair out standing on her head, to the stage; hiding inside her wardrobe interpreting silence, to the bedroom of a boy with half a thumb and to the labour ward, in an unforgettable story of remembering, forgetting, pretending, of becoming who you are.

Mother: Portraits By 40 Great Artists

From Durer to Hockney, Kahlo to Cassatt, forty portraits make up this collection of artists' mothers. A delicious combination of biographical anecdote and art history, it is also an elegant celebration of the powerful relationships between sons, daughters and their mothers.

Gardens Of Eden: Among The Worlds Most Beautiful Gardens

Gardens of Eden is not simply a stroll through the world s most beautiful gardens; it is a romp through history and an armchair ride around the world.

Snowflakes And Schnapps

Join Jane Lawson as she takes you on a culinary journey through the magnificent cold-climate cuisines of the snow-cloaked regions of northern, central and eastern Europe. From the seaside towns of Scandinavia, to the alpine villages of Austria, from the ski fields of France, to the fairy-tale castles of Germany, and as far afield as the white-blanketed cities of Russia and beyond, comes this enticing collection of traditional recipes with contemporary flair.

Celebrate the season of winter and enjoy this irresistible selection of simmering soups, hearty meals and indulgent desserts that will warm you to the core. From humble and satisfying classics to glamorous feasts worthy of a celebration, you are sure to be inspired by the mythical winter wonderland of Snowflakes and Schnapps.

Wetlands

Since its debut in February the novel ("Feuchtgebiete" in German) has sold more than 680000 copies and is the biggest selling book on Amazon anywhere in the world. The book is a headlong dash through every crevice and byproduct physical and psychological of its narrator's body and mind. It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel. Wetlands opens in a hospital room after an intimate shaving accident. It gives a detailed topography of Helen's hemorrhoids continues into the subject of anal intercourse and only gains momentum from there eventually reaching avocado pits as objects of female sexual satisfaction and - here is where the debate kicks in - just possibly female empowerment. Clearly the novel has struck a nerve catching a wave of popular interest in renewing the debate over women's roles and image in society.

Velvet Pears: Gardening by the Seasons at Foxglove Spires

A lavishly illustrated and deeply personal story of the creation of an idiosyncratic Australian country garden, Velvet Pears is an inspirational book that is also full of practical ideas. Author Susan Southam created the amazing garden at Foxglove Spires on the land of an old dairy paddock. Susan generously shares her life’s lessons in this beautiful gift book. Velvet Pears captures the essence of living simply and with the seasons, within a local community, with a sustainable lifestyle.

Foxeys Hangout

We were not obvious candidates for a sea change. When we talked of moving to the country, friends pointed out that Tony and I were hardly back-to-nature types. ‘Do you own a single pair of shoes without heels?’ asked a friend. But at the end of a bleak winter, we bought an old farmhouse on 10 daffodil-dotted acres at Red Hill and planted a vineyard.’ Cathy Gowdie had a life plan: have two children in quick succession before the age of thirty, move her parents down to Melbourne for childcare duties, and whip back into the office to resume a successful career. But life had other plans, and when it became clear that she would have to change tack, Cathy and her husband Tony, an aspiring winemaker, packed up and moved to Red Hill, on Victoria’s beautiful Mornington Peninsula. They knew it would never be easy. Living the dream is somewhat less deluxe than simply dreaming it. Like toddlers and Italian cars, the vineyards required constant vigilance, and Tony and Cathy soon discovered the delights and disasters of daily life on the land: scavenging birds, grape rot, objecting neighbours, late frost, dwindling bank balances, foxes at the window and weeds that fly across the wind to settle in carefully tended vegie patches.
Foxey’s Hangout chronicles their journey from city dwellers to winery owners, as they familiarise themselves with their new life and the murderous history behind their winery label. Illustrated throughout with lush photography and featuring a seasonal recipe for each month, Foxey’s Hangout reveals a year in the life of a winemaker, beyond the façade of the cellar door.

Nocturnes

New from the Booker-Prize winning author of The Remains of the Day, When We Were Orphans and Never Let Me Go.

'It was our third time playing The Godfather theme since lunch ...' In a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From the Piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning. Gentle, intimate and witty, Nocturnes is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a sense of life's romance, even as one gets older, relationships flounder and youthful hopes recede.

Breath

Winner of the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award

Breath is a story about the wildness of youth - the lust for excitement and terror, the determination to be extraordinary, the wounds that heal and those that don't - and about learning to live with its passing.

In his first novel for seven years, Tim Winton has achieved a new level of mastery. Breath confirms him as one of the world's finest storytellers, a writer of novels that are at the smae time simple and profound, relentlessly gripping and deeply moving.

breath.timwinton.com.au

The Winter Vault

Egypt, 1964. The great temple at Abu Simbel must be rescued from the rising waters of the Aswan dam. Block by block it is to be dismantled and resurrected sixty metres higher. This most delicate and daunting of tasks is overseen by Avery, a young engineer who at the same time is carefully, and joyfully, constructing a shared life with his new wife, Jean.

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

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

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

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

Waiting Room

'It all started with her bare feet. I'd never seen them like that before, from that angle, looking so vulnerable.'

When Gabrielle Carey's mother, who is usually pedantically punctual and organised, begins to forget basic things like where she put her dentures, Gabrielle knows that something is wrong. Scans reveal a brain tumour, and doctors advise its urgent removal. But there is another urgency at hand. Biding the dreadful passing of time in doctors' waiting rooms, Gabrielle begins to realise how much her mother has left untold, how many questions she still wants to ask her, and how little time there is left for answers.

Amid organising appointments, looking after her own children, and battling her mother's stubbornly principled idea that she should be left to die, Gabrielle begins to voice the unasked - to attempt to discover the mother whom she has lived with all her life, but never truly known.

In this sharp and honest memoir, we see what it is that families, in all their complex dynamics, can give to each other, and just what they stand to gain when they lay down their arms and let each other in.

My Cousin Rosa: Rosi Mitchell's Sicilian Kitchen

When a young girl and her family move from Sicily to country Australia, it is a surprisingly small step in kitchen miles. The tablecloth and stockpot are the same, cardoons and fennel still grow wild on the roadside and the extended family and neighbours gather to make salami in the barn once a year.

My Cousin Rosa captures the atmosphere, experiences and recipes of Rosa Mitchell’s Sicilian kitchen. Rosa’s food is very special: soulful, traditional, family-orientated and utterly authentic. In this beautiful book, her thoughts on life, both Australian and Sicilian, are scattered among the recipes like biscotti crumbs.

Chapters offer recipes for antipasto, soup, pasta, meat dishes, vegetables and desserts. The recipes are complemented by stunning photography of both finished dishes and from throughout the preparation process, be that the making of salami the traditional way or the preparation of fresh cannelloni. Gorgeous illustrations and family photographs complete the book.

Dog Boy

In a deserted Moscow apartment building four-year-old Romochka waits for Uncle to come home. Outside the snow is falling, but after a few days hunger drives Romochka outside, his mother's voice ringing in his ears. Don't talk to strangers. Overlooked by passers-by, he follows a street dog to her lair in a deserted basement at the edge of the city. There he joins four puppies suckling at their mother's teats.

And so begins Romochka's life as a dog.

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

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

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