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October Reading Guide 2 0 15 bet terread.com.au
Welcome to our Better Read Than Dead October Reading Guide! Christmas madness has begun already! October is the biggest new release month of the year and we have enough books to fill an olympic-sized swimming poool and dive in (one can dream)! We chose four books of the month this October. The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood, M Train by Patti Smith, Zeroes by Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan and Deborah Biancotti and The Marvels by Brian Selznick. We are giving away a copy of each of these titles. To enter simply email stephanie@ betterread.com.au and be sure to include your name, address and contact number.
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Finally we have our biggest launch event yet coming up! Magda Szubanksi’s Reckoning will be launched by Magda herself on October 8th and the Dendy Newtown. To book simply click the events link of the adjacent page.
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AUSTRALIAN FICTION All our content for each category is linked directly. All you have to do is click on a tab! To check out our upcoming events, you can click the link below.
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BETTER READ EVENTS
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Australian Fiction The Natural Way of Things | Charlotte Wood | $29.99 | Allen & Unwin Two young women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a broken-down, nightmarish nightmarish institution in middle of a desert in Charlotte Wood’s new novel. Strangers to each other, where are they, how did they get there and what have they done? It’s a wonderful yet rare thing to pick up a novel and from the opening pages be so completely enthralled by not just the story on the page but also the extraordinary skill & art at work. Charlotte Wood’s new novel is a triumph and I cannot entreat you enough to read this terrifying, deeply imaginative and starkly real tale. You will be changed.
Book of the Month
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The Secret Chord | Geraldine Brooks | $39.99 | Hachette
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The book we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived! Geraldine Brooks, highly acclaimed author of The People of the Book and A Year of Wonders, re-enters the literary scene with another epic historical masterpiece. Set in 1000 BC during the Second Iron Age, The Secret Chord retells the story of King David’s extraordinary rise to power and fall from grace. With stunning and vivid originality, Brooks offers us a compelling portrait of faith, family, desire, power, and a morally complex hero with her signature richly drawn detail that brings David magnificently to life.
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Australian Fiction Tom Houghton | Todd Alexander | $32.99 | Simon & Schuster As a boy growing up in the western suburbs of Sydney, Tom Houghton escapes the harshness of the schoolyard by cocooning himself in the cinema of the golden age of Hollywood. Three decades later he is offered an acting role at a festival in Scotland. With the rigours of his past finally catching up with him, fantasy and reality struggle for control and Tom finds himself questioning everything he thought he knew about himself. This wonderful coming-of-age novel is raw, confronting and tender.
Blood Kin was Dovey’s debut novel and it was originally published in 2007 to widespread acclaim. We’re very excited that Blood Kin has been re-released. A chef, a portraitist and a barber are taken in a hostage supposed to overthrow the president of their nameless country while three women connected to the dissidents watch from the shadows. Dovey is exploring the nature of relationships, both political and familial as she masterfully draws the reader toward a devastating climax. Dovey marries straightforward prose with an elegant structure to present an impressive fable about the arrogance of power – that swirls with a
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Blood Kin | Ceridwen Dovey | $22.99 | Penguin
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Fiction The Heart Goes Last | Margaret Atwood | $32.99 | Bloomsbury Atwood’s new novel depicts another fine-tuned postapocalyptic future, a reworking of her Positron eBook series that began in 2012 with I’m Starved for You. Presenting us with an economically wreaked nearfuture America, married couple Charmaine and Stan are living in their car in a desperate state. They decide to partake in a ‘social experiment’ that offers stable jobs and their own home… But as always there’s a catch: every second month they must swap their home with an alternate couple for a prison cell where the pressures of conformity, mistrust, guilt, obsession and sexual desire begin to take over. The Heart Goes Last is more satirical in tone than The Handmaid’s Tale and the MaddAddam trilogy, but no less observant or chilling.
Karma’s Pick
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The Gap of Time | Jeanette Winterson | $29.99 | Hogarth Shakespeare
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New Bohemia. A black man finds a white baby abandoned in the night. He gathers her up and decides to take her home. London. England. After the financial crash. Leo Kaiser knows how to make money but he doesn’t know how to manage the jealousy he feels towards his best friend and his wife. New Bohemia. 17 years later. A boy and a girl are falling in love but there’s a lot they don’t know about who they are and where they come from. Jeanette Winterson’s cover version of The Winter’s Tale vibrates with echoes of the original but tells a contemporary story where Time itself is a player in a game of high stakes that will either end in tragedy or forgiveness.
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Fiction The Divers Clothes Lie Empty | Vendela Vida | $27.99 | Allen & Unwin A woman is robbed of her wallet and passport when she arrives at a hotel in Casablanca, Morocco. Suspicious, but feeling pleasantly liberated by the loss, the woman’s journey takes an unpredicted path. It begins when she meets a movie producer by chance. The producer persuades her to stand in for a film star. This starts the woman on a lushly imagined journeying a long way from the person she once was.
“Here’s a comic masterpiece about love, art, greed and the banking crisis.”
What links the Investment Bank of Torabundo, www. myhotswaitress.com (yes, with an ‘s’, don’t ask), an art heist, a novel called For the Love of a Clown, a six-year-old boy with the unfortunate name of Remington Steele, a lonely French banker, a tiny Pacific island, and a pest control business run by an ex-KGB agent? Here’s a comic masterpiece about love, art, greed and the banking crisis, from the author of wildly original breakout hit Skippy Dies.
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The Mark & the Void | Paul Murray | $32.99 | Penguin
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What Remains | Tim Weaver | $32.99 | Penguin
The Woman who Walked in Sunshine | Alexander McCall Smith | $39.99 | Hachette
Colm Healy used to be one of the Met’s best detectives—until, haunted by the unsolved murders of a mother and her twin daughters, his life was left in ruins. Missing persons investigator David Raker, the only friend Healy has left, understands that redemption rests on solving these murders. As they re-open the investigation together Raker learns the hard way how this case breeds obsession—and how an unsolvable puzzle can break even the best detective.
Co-director of the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency convinces the agency owner, Mma Ramotswe so go on holiday for the first time. But just as she’s about to leave, a new client appears, a young woman whose father’s heroic reputation is under scrutiny. Mma Ramotswe almost cancels her trip, but Mma Makutsi convinces her to go. Mma Ramotswe cannot resist the temptation to know what goes on while she holidays and secretly enlists an informer.
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Graphic Novels
The Diemenois | J W Clennett | $39.99 | Penguin
Space Dumplins | Craig Thompson | $27.99 | Faber & Faber
This extraordinary graphic novel tells an intriguing alternative history. Not much is known about the mysterious Australian colonist Henri Maurice Claudet and the French Tasmanian colony of la Ville de Baudin. This story unravels the secrets and tells tales of seclusion, murder, sensational escape, and cruel demise.
From the Eisner award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Habibi and Blankets, comes a grand space adventure filled with quirky aliens, awesome space-ships, and sharp commentary on our environmentally challenged world. For Violet, family is the most important thing in the whole galaxy. So when her father goes missing while on a hazardous job, she can’t just sit around and do nothing. Throwing caution to the stars, she sets out with a group of misfit friends on a quest to find him.
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Steph’s Pick
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Sci-Fi/Fantasy Luna | Ian McDonald | $29.99 | Hachette A great war in Heaven has reduced the streets of Paris to ruins, blackened the Seine, and left behind, debris, and ashes. Paris is controlled by a number of noble Houses, power bases for fallen angels. Once the most powerful, House Silverspires is in disarray, as a self-destructive alchemist, a Fallen angel, and a young man whose powers are from unknown sources, come together to save the Houses of Paris and the city from darkness and destruction.
“A great war in Heaven has reduced the streets of Paris to ruins...”
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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms | George R R Martin | $39.99 | Harper Collins
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This first volume in the Shattered Sand trilogy is a gateway to an intricate and exotic tale. It’s the beginning of a richly imaginative story set in a refreshingly unique fantasy setting and although it’s dark it’s shaken itself loose from the euro-medieval conventions of the genre in such a way that allows a contemporary attitude to gender and culture. Ceda scrapes a living by fighting in the pits, but when a mysterious creature confides in her a secret, Ceda realises that this new knowledge might be just the weapon she needs to overthrow the
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Sci-Fi/Fantasy The Aeronaut’s Windlass | Jim Butcher | $29.99 | Hachette Jim Butcher is the NY Times bestselling author of The Dresden Files and the Codex Alera novels. The Aeronaut’s Windlass is the first book in his upcoming Steampunk series The Cinder Spires. From time immemorial the Spires have towered over the world, sheltering humanity. Within their halls, aristocratic houses have ruled for generations, developing scientific marvels, fostering trade alliances and building fleets of airships to keep the peace. But an ancient evil has reawakened, and terrible creatures abound in a sinister mist.
Sorcerer to the Crown | Zen Cho | $29.99 | Pan Macmillan
Ghost | Edited by Louise Welsh | $39.99 | Harper Collins A book of one hundred short horror stories from a diverse range of authors selected and introduced by Louise Welsh. Authors include: Hilary Mantel, William Faulkner, Kate Atkinson, Henry James, Kazuo Ishiguro, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Franz Kafka, Ruth Rendell, Edgar Allan Poe, William Trevor, Helen Simpson, Haruki Murakami, Dylan Thomas, Bram Stoker, H.P Lovecraft, Lydia Davis, Sir Walter Scott, Annie Proulx, Bram Stoker, Angela Carter and Stephen King.
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Claire’s Pick
In Regency London, Zacharias Wythe is England’s first African Sorcerer Royal. He leads the eminent Royal Society of Unnatural Philosophers, but a malicious faction seeks to remove him. Ambitious orphan Prunella Gentleman is desperate to escape the school where she’s drudged all her life, and a visit by the beleaguered Sorcerer Royal is perfect timing. ‘An enchanting cross between Georgette Heyer and Susanna Clarke, full of delights and surprises’ says Naomi Novik.
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Cooking Cornersmith | Alex Elliot-Howery | $49.99 | Allen & Unwin Since it opened its doors a few years ago, Cornersmith Café and Picklery has become a staple establishment for inner-westies. Founders James Grant and Alex Elliot-Howery bring their passion for ethically produced and sourced food into everything that they do, and this book is a fabulous resource for anybody (but especially Sydney-siders) who want to make delicious food that’s in season and sustainable. Although, it’s not the book’s ethics that make me want a copy, the recipes within make for absolutely delicious breakfast, lunches, and dinners.
James’ Pick
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This Could Get Messy | James Wirth | $45.00 | Allen & Unwin
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Sydney-sider and hospitality wiz James Firth delivers modern pub cuisine with a twist. Meals rich with sugar and fat are leavened with Asian flavours, particularly Korean kimchi and chillies. My favourite is the “Salma Hayek Salad”, dedicated to all the “forty-something women in leather shorts” who sometimes frequent The Carrington Bar.
“...modern pub cuisine with a twist.”
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Cooking Alla Fratelli | Terry Durack & Barry McDonald | $49.99 | Allen & Unwin Alla Fratelli takes all that is great about Italian food and serves it up with a cheeky Sydney twist. ‘This is how everyone should cook at home,’ says Barry McDonald. ‘When you’re not eating at one of our restaurants, that is.’ It’s all about seasonal, fresh, heart-warming, delicious eating, dedicated to flavour and tradition - but it rips up the rule book at the same time, challenging some of the older Italian traditions and putting meals together that suit the way we live now.
Heidi Swanson, author of Super Natural Every Day, shares 125 natural foods recipes along with photographs inspired by her life and travels both near and far. From Northern California to Italy, Morocco, France, India, and Japan, Heidi reveals the places that put her warm and nourishing natural cooking at the centre of an emerging, modern, global cuisine. Lovers of the Arthur Street Kitchen cookbook Community and Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty will most definitely find a place for Heidi Swanson in their kitchens.
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Near & Far | Heidi Swanton | $39.95 | Random House
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Biography Book of the Month
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M Train | Patti Smith | $32.99 | Bloomsbury
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From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as “a roadmap to my life.” Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today.
Plain-Speaking Jane | Jane Caro | $34.99 | Pan Macmillan Jane Caro is known for saying what she thinks across the news and entertainment media, and she is also unafraid to apply that razor-sharp insight to her own life. Talking frankly about her battle with anxiety, Jane offers assurance and hope to the one-in-three Australian women affected by the condition, whilst also revealing imperfections about her childhood and motherhood. Written with panache and wit, Plain-speaking Jane is a refreshing, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest celebration of a perfectly imperfect life.
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Biography Furiously Happy | Jenny Lawson | $29.99 | Pan Macmillan Grumblings about contemporary culture are rarely as literary as those offered here. Peruvian writer and Nobel-Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa essays a number of issues: from the culture of spectacle, the rise and rise of the Internet, to the prominence of celebrity chefs and fashion designers. The list goes on.
Why Not Me? | Mindy Kaling | $32.99 | Random House
Big Blue Sky | Peter Garrett | $49.99 | Allen & Unwin Peter Garrett had an idyllic childhood in the Northern suburbs of Sydney, and since then he’s led a life that’s full to bursting. Garrett’s passion for the environment and indigenous affairs has permeated his life and his music (when he was the front man for the iconic Midnight Oil). He’s been a politician also. And all this with no hair!
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Extraordinary comic talent Mandy Kaling has written an idiosyncratic collection of essays that follow one of Better Read’s best sellers from 2012 ‘Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?’ Both insightful and tongue in cheek this is an inspired look at Hollywood life and what she calls a ‘second coming of age’.
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Non-Fiction Pacific | Simon Winchester | $32.99 | Harper Collins Winchester uses the Pacific Ocean as a focus from which to explore a wide array of issues. From modern politics—the military “exercises” of North Korea, the expansion of China’s naval presence— to the environment and scientific invention—the testing of the atom bomb in Bikini, for instance. This book ponders its past, present, and future with Winchester’s affable panache.
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Big Magic | Elizabeth Gilbert | $29.99 | Bloomsbury The author of Eat, Pray, Love has transformed her muchviewed TED Talk on genius and creativity into a book! Gilbert demystifies the deeply complex creative process in a series of easily digestible adages, anecdotes, and listicles. No more will creativity be challenging: Big Magic promises art that is both easy and fun!
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“Big Magic promises art that is both easy and fun!”
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Non-Fiction The Nature of Sex | Dr Carlin Bondar | $32.99 | Hachette Dr Carin Bondar, known as the ‘biologist with a twist,’ reveals the bare truth of nature’s X-rated side. Her web attracted over 12 million views, and in this richly diverse book she examines the sexual strategies and reproductive structures of the hyena, earwig and guppy, among other creatures. Presenting the fascinating diversity of the reproductive habits of the animal kingdom through approachable explanations and humorous examples, Bondar succeeds in making an eternally popular subject into a book of international appeal.
Potter by trade, artist, and author of the incredible 2010 book “The Hare With Amber Eyes” Edmund du Waal delights readers again. In this obsessive and practical study of porcelain, the history of this material, and those who handled it, is traced. Beginning in Jingdezhen, China, where porcelain was first fired 1,000 years ago, de Waal works his way west to 18thcentury Europe, England and then to Ayoree Mountain (now North Carolina). A passionate quest.
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The White Road | Edward De Waal | $35.00 | Random House
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Cabin Porn | Zach Klein | $45.00 | Penguin Ever dreamed of fleeing to the woods?! Ever yearned for the day when the flood will finally come?! Ever wanted to train a consortium of possums in basic agricultural tasks? If you have, then this is the book for you. It’s been put together by the same people who made the Tumblr account. We’re given to understand that Tumblr is a sort of online photo-sharing platform.
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Children of the World | Peter Guttman | $44.99 | New South
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Award-winning travel journalist Peter Guttman provides a comprehensive survey of our globe’s wildly diverse open air nurseries and spotlights a dazzling range of lifestyles, landscapes and emotions set amidst the vibrant stage set diorama that frames their distinctive upbringing. Children Around the World offers an intriguing showcase of newly minted human generations from across the entire planet.
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Art & Design Humans of New York: Stories | Brandon Stanton | $39.99 | Pan Macmillan Streets of Papunya is the most ambitious showcase of artists from this famed Western Desert arts centre to be presented in Sydney this decade. Curated by eminent scholar of Papunya art, Vivien Johnson, Streets of Papunya celebrates the renaissance of painting that has occurred in one of the best-known locations of art production in Central Australia, since the establishment of the Papunya Tjupi Arts Centre in 2007.
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In particular, the exhibition reveals the remarkable art of the women painters of Papunya today in its contemporary sociological and historical contexts, alongside short films that explore the reality of life in Papunya, and the famous paintings of the current generation’s ancestors. Streets of Papunya includes some of the first women painters in the desert, who joined the original Papunya art movement in the early 1980s, and the daughters of many of the ground-breaking Papunya Tula artists of the 1970s.
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Steph’s Pick