2019 / Reader’s Guide
01 / Fiction 01
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
Talented tomboy and authorto-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, unite in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War.
Esteban’s wild desires are tempered only by his love for his ethereal wife, Clara. Their daughter, Blanca, whose love for a man Esteban has deemed unworthy infuriates him, yet will produce his greatest joy: his granddaughter Alba, who will lead all into a revolutionary future.
Seconds before Earth is demolished, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Together they begin a journey through space aided by fellow travellers.
AMERICAN CLASSIC
MAGICAL REALISM
SCI-FI HUMOUR
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Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood
The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure
Elaine, a painter, returns to Toronto for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by images of the past – girls who initiated her into a world of friendship, longing, and betrayal – she must come to terms with her identity but mostly she must seek release from haunting memories.
Lucien has little empathy for the Jews so when a wealthy industrialist offers a large sum of money to devise secret hiding places, he struggles but ultimately can’t resist the challenge. When one of his clever hiding spaces fails horribly the immense suffering of Jews becomes incredibly personal.
Year of Wonders: Book of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks
COMING OF AGE
SUSPENSE
In 1666 an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village. Anna and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. Death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting.
HISTORICAL
02 / Fiction
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The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who yearns to travel in search of a worldly treasure. His quest will lead him to riches far different, and far more satisfying, than he ever imagined.
Harry thinks he has killed the serial killer who plagued Los Angeles. But the dead man’s widow is suing Harry and the LAPD for killing the wrong man. When a new victim is discovered Harry must hunt down a deathdealer before he strikes again.
Marie-Laure flees Nazi-occupied Paris with her father, carrying the most valuable jewel from the museum where he worked. In Germany, Werner is enchanted by a crude radio. He becomes an expert and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance.
QUEST
CRIME
HISTORICAL
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The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes
Anna lives alone, a recluse. She spends her day drinking wine, watching old movies and spying on her neighbours. When the Russells move into the house across the way Anna sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble and its shocking secrets are laid bare.
Penniless Janowski has no direction until he finds the Benzini Brothers circus. He is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie and meets Marlena, a beautiful equestrian star married to a brutal animal trainer, and Rosie, an untrainable elephant.
Rachel has such a fondness for recreational drugs that her family has forked out the cash for a spell in Cloisters, Dublin’s answer to the Betty Ford Clinic. But what Rachel doesn’t count on are the embarrassments and the dearth of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll.
SUSPENSE
ROMANCE
HUMOUR
03 / Fiction 13
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11/22/63 by Stephen King
The Green Mile by Stephen King
The Long Walk by Stephen King
Jake’s friend Al, who owns the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to the past, a particular day in 1958. Al enlists Jake to take over the mission that has become his obsession: to prevent the Kennedy assassination.
Prison guard Paul has never seen anything like John Coffey, a man with the body of a giant and the mind of a child. And in this place of ultimate retribution, Paul is about to discover the terrible, wondrous truth that will challenge his most cherished beliefs.
America has become a police state and one hundred boys are selected to enter an annual contest. Sixteen-year-old Ray knows the rules: keep a steady walking pace of four miles per hour. Three warnings and you’re out. Permanently.
ALTERNATIVE HISTORY
SOUTHERN GOTHIC
DYSTOPIAN
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Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King
The Rider by Tim Krabbé
I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb
It’s the start of the Tour de Mont Aigoual, and Tim Krabbé is ready to race his rivals through the mountains of France. Krabbé takes his bike 150 kilometres, and pulls his readers into the life of the sport he loves.
Dominick’s entire life has been compromised by his schizophrenic twin brother, Thomas, and their adoptive father, Ray. It will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick’s lives.
A man convicted of murder lives in a prison ruled by a sadistic warden and secretly run by a con who knows all. He has more brains than anyone else in the sinister slammer and develops a diabolically cunning plan of revenge.
RETRIBUTION
ENDURANCE
FAMILY SECRETS
04 / Fiction
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Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
As children, Sean, Jimmy, and Dave were friends. But then a car pulled up to their street and something happened that ended their friendship and changed them forever. Twenty-five years later, Jimmy’s daughter is found murdered the same night that Dave comes home covered in someone else’s blood.
Madeleine is unaware that her father is caught up in a web of secrets. When a local murder occurs, Madeleine is forced to learn a lesson about the ambiguity of human morality, one she will only understand when she carries her quest for the truth into adulthood.
Pi, son of a zookeeper, and his family immigrate to North America with their zoo animals. The ship sinks leaving Pi in a lifeboat with a tiger. When they reach the coast of Mexico, the tiger flees. The authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story.
BILDUNGSROMAN
ADVENTURE
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No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
American Rust Philipp Meyer
Llewellyn finds a pickup truck surrounded by dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. He takes the money and sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law can contain.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road and each other.
THRILLER
DOOMSDAY
Left alone to care for his aging father, Isaac longs for a life beyond his hometown. But when he finally sets out to leave for good, accompanied by his temperamental best friend, they are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives forever.
SUSPENSE
MYSTERY
05 / Fiction 25
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Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
What Alice Forgot by Liane Moriarty
1Q84 by Haruki Murakami
Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled, manipulative daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, arrives at young womanhood just in time to see the Civil War forever change her way of life.
Alice is 29, crazy about her husband and pregnant with her first child. So imagine her surprise when she comes to on the floor of a gym and then discovers she’s getting divorced, she has three kids, and she’s actually 39 years old.
It’s 1984, Tokyo. Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies around her. Meanwhile aspiring writer, Tengo, takes on a suspect ghostwriting project with an unusual author and soon his previously placid life begins to come unravelled.
HISTORICAL
CHICK LIT
ALTERNATE UNIVERSE
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The Plains by Gerald Murnane
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
Man on Fire by A.J. Quinnell
Obsessed landowning families hire historians to record every aspect of their lives. A filmmaker arrives hoping to make a contribution. Privately he begins to take notes for a film and chooses the daughter of his patron for the lead. Twenty years later, he begins to tell his haunting story.
Clare and Henry have known each other since Clare was six and Henry was thirty-six, were married when Clare was twentythree and Henry thirty-one. Impossible but true, because periodically Henry’s genetic clock resets and he finds himself misplaced in time.
Creasy takes on the job of guarding an 11 year old girl who penetrates his cynicism to become his friend. Then something terrible happens that fills Creasy with a deadly anger. Armed with a formidable weaponry, he wages a personal war on an evil enemy.
SCI-FI ROMANCE
REVENGE
ALLEGORY
06 / Fiction
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We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
The Bronze Horseman trilogy by Paullina Simons
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Eva never wanted to be a mother, certainly not the mother of the boy who murdered seven students, a cafeteria worker, and a teacher. Two years later she must come to terms with career, family and Kevin’s horrific rampage in startling correspondences with her estranged husband.
Tatiana and Dasha share a cramped apartment with their family when Hitler’s armies attack Russia. Tatiana meets Alexander, a Red Army officer, as starvation and fear grip their city. Tatiana and Alexander’s impossible love threatens to tear the family apart and expose the secret he carefully protects.
Ignatius lives at home with his mother and pens his magnum opus on writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed. But his quiet life screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested. Soon Ignatius is pounding the pavement in search of a job.
EPISTOLARY NOVEL
HISTORICAL ROMANCE
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The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas
The Martian by Andy Weir
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This slap and its consequences force eight people to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires.
Six days ago, Mark became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there. Stranded and with no way to signal Earth that he’s alive, he confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next.
It is 1939, Nazi Germany. Liesel, a poor foster girl living outside of Munich, encounters something she can’t resist: books. Her foster father teaches her to read and she shares her stolen books with neighbours and the Jewish man hidden in her basement.
CULTURAL DRAMA
SCI-FI
TRAGICOMEDY
HISTORICAL
07 / Non-Fiction
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La Belle Saison by Patricia Atkinson
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
Seven principles that make a person more effective personally and professionally. Covey shows how a principle-centred, character-based existence helps you build the healthy relationships that are key to an effective life.
Millionaire Charles Howard and trainer Tom Smith buy Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price. With jockey Red Pollard - a failed boxer blind in one eye and halfcrippled - against the odds these unlikely partners transform Seabiscuit into an American sports icon.
When Patricia Atkinson moved to France, her intention was to establish a vineyard. Soon she was integrating into a life that she would hardly have believed existed. Grounded in the rhythms of the seasons, life here is dictated by rituals long lost in our supermarket age.
FRENCH TRAVEL
SELF-HELP
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Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
A bank of clouds was assembling on the horizon, but Jon Krakauer, at the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that “suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down.” He was wrong. The storm would provide the impetus for Krakauer’s account of the 1996 disaster.
Frances Mayes entered a new world when she began restoring a villa in the Tuscan countryside. There were unexpected treasures at every turn: frescos beneath the whitewash in her dining room, a vineyard under overgrown brambles in the garden, and nearby, vibrant markets and delightful people.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
ADVENTURE
ITALIAN TRAVEL
SPORTING LEGEND
Scientists know Henrietta Lacks as HeLa. She was a poor black farmer whose cells, taken without her knowledge in 1951, became one of the most important tools in medicine. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions yet she remains virtually unknown.
ETHICS
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Pig the Pug by Aaron Blabey
The students don’t proffer a shred of respect for their goodnatured teacher Miss Nelson, but when the witchy substitute Miss Viola Swamp appears on the scene, they start to regret their own wicked ways.
Pig is a greedy Pug. He has all the balls, bones, and chew toys a dog could ever want yet he refuses to share with his poor friend, Trevor. Little does he know, however, that being greedy has its consequences.
Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself by Judy Blume
RESPECT
SHARING
Sally’s brother becomes ill so the family travels south to spend time in Florida. There Sally meets friends …including her unsuspecting enemy, Adolf Hitler. Sally’s Hitler will play an important role in one of her grandest movie spectaculars.
FRIENDSHIP
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Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl
Two teenage girls, Enid and Becky, are best friends facing the prospect of growing up, and more importantly, apart.
Someone’s been stealing from the three meanest farmers around. It’s Fantastic Mr Fox! Working alone they could never catch him but now the farmers have joined forces. What they don’t know is that they’re not dealing with just any fox.
Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy by Lynley Dodd
CULT CLASSIC
ACTION
Meet Hercules Morse, Bitzer Maloney, Muffin McLay, Bottomley Potts, Schnitzel von Krumm and of course Hairy Maclary from Donaldon’s Dairy. The six dogs go out for a walk, but little do they know that Scarface Claw, is lurking round the next corner.
RHYMING
08 / Children & Youth
43 Miss Nelson Is Missing by Harry Allard
09 / Children & Youth
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Cannily, Cannily by Simon French
Deadly, Unna? by Phillip Gwynne
Beaver Towers by Nigel Hinton
Trevor lives in a Kombivan. He has seen more of Australia than any kid he knows. He wears clothes his mum makes, has his hair long and doesn’t like meat. His parents don’t have a fixed address or full-time work. Trevor is different.
Dumby Red and Blacky don’t have a lot in common. Dumby’s the star of the footy team, he’s got a killer smile and a knack with girls, and he’s a Nunga. Blacky needs braces, never knows what to say and he’s white. But they’re friends.
DIFFERENCES
SOUTH AUSTRALIAN
A spell whisks Philip away to a far-off island where he meets the beavers. They tell him of a terrible danger. A wicked witch has imprisoned most of the island’s inhabitants. When her powers are complete she will put them to death and rule the island.
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Noni the Pony by Alison Lester
Playing Beatie Bow by Ruth Park
Grug by Ted Prior
Introducing Noni, the friendliest, funniest, and friskiest pony! When she’s not racing and chasing with her best pals Dave Dog and Coco the Cat, she’s busy making sure they feel cozy and loved. Because Noni isn’t just heaps of fun, she’s a great friend, too.
Distraught over her parents’ separation, Abigail follows a strange child called Beatie Bow and time slips back a hundred years where she becomes involved with an Australian shopkeeper’s family.
Grug loves looking at the pictures in books, but one day he decides to teach himself how to read the words. Soon he can enjoy his favourite book of all - Grug!
FRIENDSHIP
TIME TRAVEL
FANTASY
AUSTRALIAN CLASSIC
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Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
The Lorax by Dr Seuss
Come along with a brave family. They cross a field of tall grass, wade through a river, struggle through mud, a dark forest, a whirling snowstorm and enter a gloomy cave. You’ll soon learn how to escape a big, furry bear!
Harry discovers he is a wizard, though he lives in the ordinary world of non-magical people known as Muggles. Children with his abilities are invited to attend magic schools that teach the necessary skills to succeed in the wizarding world.
Long before saving the earth became a global concern, Dr. Seuss, speaking through his character the Lorax, warned against mindless progress and the danger it posed to the earth’s natural beauty.
ADVENTURE
FANTASY
CONSUMERISM
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Storm Boy and Other Stories by Colin Thiele
My Place by Nadia Wheatley
Along the rugged beauty of the South Australian coast, Storm Boy cares for an injured pelican and finds a friend that shows him the power of loyalty and love.
A unique, intimate history of Australia featuring colourful illustrations and maps, My Place starts in 1988 and works its way back two hundred years to 1788, telling the history of one particular place through the generations of children who have lived there.
Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems
AUSTRALIAN CLASSIC
ILLUSTRATED HISTORY
When a bus driver takes a break from his route, a very unlikely volunteer springs up to take his place. A pigeon! But you’ve never met one like this before. He pleads, wheedles, and begs but will he get his one desire?
HUMOUR
10 / Children & Youth
55 We’re Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen
Checklist
01/ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 02/ Little Women 03/ The House of the Spirits 04/ Cat’s Eye 05/ The Paris Architect 06/ Year of Wonders: Book of the Plague
21/ Life of Pi 22/ No Country for Old Men 23/ The Road
43/ Miss Nelson Is Missing
25/ Gone with the Wind
44/ Pig the Pug
26/ What Alice Forgot
45/ Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself
27/ 1Q84 28/ The Plains
08/ The Concrete Blonde
29/ The Time Traveler’s Wife 30/ Man on Fire
10/ The Woman in the Window
31/ We Need to Talk About Kevin
11/ Water for Elephants
32/ The Bronze Horseman trilogy
12/ Rachel’s Holiday
42/ The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
24/ American Rust
07/ The Alchemist
09/All the Light We Cannot See
41/ Under the Tuscan Sun
46/ Ghost World 47/ Fantastic Mr Fox 48/ Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy 49/ Cannily, Cannily 50/ Deadly, Unna? 51/ Beaver Towers 52/ Noni the Pony
13/ 11/22/63
33/ A Confederacy of Dunces
14/ The Green Mile
34/ The Slap
54/ Grug
15/ The Long Walk
35/ The Martian
16/ Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
36/ The Book Thief
55/ We’re Going on a Bear Hunt
17/ The Rider 18/ I Know This Much Is True 19/ Mystic River 20/ The Way the Crow Flies
37/ La Belle Saison 38/ The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People 39/ Seabiscuit: An American Legend 40/ Into Thin Air
53/ Playing Beatie Bow
56/ Harry Potter series 57/ The Lorax 58/ Storm Boy and Other Stories 59/ My Place 60/ Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus