Readings.com.au: Recently Read

Poet Who Forgot

No extra details available for this item.

Burning In

In her late twenties, Martine Hartmann moves from Sydney to New York to pursue her career as a photographer, leaving behind her mother Lotte, a holocaust survivor. Nine years later, Martine's daughter Ruby goes missing in Central Park. Ruby's disappearance throws Martine into an emotional struggle which threatens to overwhelm her, but which also, in time, brings her to understand Lotte's anxieties and inhibitions, and to discover the act of abandonment at their heart. BURNING IN is a closely observed psychological novel with an extraordinary eye for detail, and an unerring instinct for the suppressed rhythms of thought and feeling. Structured around two mysteries and three generations of Jewish women, it is an extended meditation on loss and guilt, exploring the long shadows cast by the past on the present, and the relationship between parental love and the imperatives of survival.

Resurrectionist

From the internationally acclaimed author of Wrack and The Deep Field comes a gothic thriller that is absolutely unputdownable!

London, 1826: Gabriel Swift has left behind his father's failures to study with Edwin Poll, the greatest of the city's anatomists. It is his chance to find advancement by making a name for himself. But instead he finds himself drawn to his master's nemesis, Lucan, the most powerful of the city's resurrectionists and ruler of its trade in stolen bodies. Dismissed by his master, Gabriel descends into the violence and corruption of London's underworld, a place where everything and everyone is for sale, and where – as Gabriel discovers – the taking of a life is easier than it might seem.

Ten years later, another man teaches art in the penal colony of New South Wales, his spare time spent trapping and painting birds. But as becomes clear when he falls in love with one of his pupils, no one may escape their past forever, and the worst prisons are often those we make for ourselves.

Stark, sinister and compelling, The Resurrectionist is both a gothic thriller and a triumphant follow-up to his internationally acclaimed Wrack and The Deep Field. It confirms James Bradley as one of the most exciting and ambitious novelists working today.

The Build Up

"Jimmy has this feeling he's often had here that somebody, or something, is watching him. He breathes in deep, filling his lungs, and dives, his eyes open. The water is surprisingly clear, the tree trunk disappears into the depths. He follows the line down, his gunked-up lungs burning but keeps going. Another big kick. He pulls at the line and it floats up. An anemone, he thinks. A tangle of tentacles. But he knows that can't be right, this is fresh not salt water. It's hair. Then a face. Hollow eyes. A lipless grimace. Her body naked. And in her, a white-handled knife."

The Children

You bring your children up to escape sorrow. You spend your best years trying to stop them witnessing it on television, in you, in your neighbours' faces. Then you realise, slowly, that there is no escape, that they must steer their own way through life's cruelties.

In The Children Charlotte Wood, one of Australian fiction's rising stars, delivers a short, sharp shock of a novel that takes you into the heart of a family as normal, and as broken, as any other.

When their father is critically injured, foreign correspondent Mandy and her siblings return home, bringing with them the remnants and patterns of childhood. Mandy has lived away from the country for many years. Her head is filled with images of terror and war, and her homecoming to the quiet country town - not to mention her family and marriage - only heightens her disconnection from ordinary life. Cathy, her younger sister, has stayed in regular contact with her parents, trying also to keep tabs on her brother Stephen who, for reasons nobody understands, has held himself apart from the family for years.

In the intensive care unit the children sit, trapped between their bewildered mother and one another; between old wounds and forgiveness, struggling to connect with their emotions, their past and each other. But as they wait and watch over their father, there's someone else watching too: a young wardsman, Tony, who's been waiting for Mandy to come home. As he insinuates himself into the family, the pressure, and the threat, intensify and build to a climax of devastating force.

This acutely observed novel exposes the tenacious grip of childhood, the way siblings seem to grow apart but never do, and explores the price paid for bearing witness to the suffering of others - whether far away or uncomfortably close to home. The Children marks Wood as one of our finest writers.

Geography

Catherine is a travel agent. The world is at her disposal. Her family is scattered around the globe. She's never settled. She never falls in love with anyone in the place in which she lives, a quirk that seems romantic to her and her friends. Then she meets and falls in love with Michael, who lives in Los Angeles, and builds what she calls a relationship and others call an obsession.

Catherine's world is soon defined by postcards, e-mail, books, movies, all of which have meaning only because of their connection to Michael. And then there are the media events which seem to effect, or follow, her affair: the Rodney King Trials, Waco, the LA Earthquake of 1994, the Sydney bushfires of 1994, the New York Blizzard of 1996, Princess Diana's death.

Increasingly Catherine can't tell the difference between what is happening to her and what is happening around her. She lives her life like a romantic heroine. She throws her money, her energy, a lot of words and even years of her life, on a man she doesn't know. Her obsession becomes more and more debilitating as her life becomes increasingly virtual.

Geography is about distance and desire. It's about the illusion of choice. And about how long it can take to figure out what the words love, and home, actually mean.