2022 Book club guide

book club guide

acknowledgement of country

We acknowledge the Bundjalung, Gumbaingirr and Yaegl peoples, the traditional custodians of the lands which lie within the Clarence Valley Council and Bellingen Shire Council boundaries and pay tribute and respect to the Elders both past, present and emerging.

Thanks for reading our Book Club Booklet

This guide has been created by your library for our wonderful book clubs. It contains services your library offers, guidelines and helpful advice on how to run book clubs, and a comprehensive list of all the kits available.

We love our book clubs because of the benefits they create for our library members. You can use then as an excuse to gather with your friends, share your love of books, and discover our wide collection of stories.

If you’re new to book clubs ask our friendly staff how to join an existing group or alternatively, start your own.

guidelines

membership

Each book club registers as a library ‘member’ designating the name and details of a nominated contact person.

The contact person is responsible for:

The book club borrowers card

Reserving kits

Liaising with library staff for questions

Ensuring kits are returned on time and complete Answer enquiries about others joining their group

lending

Kits are packaged in library bags with a single barcode on a swing tag attached to the bag. These kits usually consist of multiple (normally 10) copies of a single title.

Only book club kits can be borrowed on the book club library card.

Clubs can borrow a maximum of 2 kits at a time for up too 6 weeks and can only be renewed twice.

Only complete kits will be accepted when returned.

advice

Pick 8 to 15 people for your group to keep discussions varied but not overwhelming

Make it fun and relaxing. A book club is not a test - there are no right or wrong answers

Choose books that make a good discussion. Liking the book is secondary

Encourage participants to come even if they haven’t finished the book

It’s not necessary to have book reviews or a list of questions. Each reader can bring a question they want answered

Use audiovisuals if they fit the discussion

Going back

how a former refugee, now an internationally acclaimed surgeon, returned to Iraq to change the lives of injured soldiers and civilians

Al Muderis, Munjed

nonfiction 2019

Munjed’s new book is once more a journey, but this time in taking him across the world on a quest to save others rather than himself. In Munjed Al Muderis’s bestselling memoir Walking Free, he described his experience as a refugee fleeing Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, his terrifying sea journey to Australia and the brutal mandatory detention he faced in the remote north of Western Australia. The book also detailed his early work as a pioneering orthopaedic surgeon at the cutting edge of world medicine. In Going Back, Munjed shares the extraordinary journey that his life-changing new surgical technique has taken him on. Through osseointegration, he implants titanium rods into the human skeleton and attaches robotic limbs, allowing patients genuine, effective and permanent mobility. Munjed has performed this operation on hundreds of Australian civilians, wounded British soldiers who’ve lost legs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a survivor of the Christchurch earthquake in New Zealand. But nothing has been as extraordinary as his return to Iraq after eighteen years, at the invitation of the Iraqi government, to operate on soldiers, police and civilian amputees wounded in the horrific war against ISIS.

Riptides

“One bad decision can tear your world apart.” -- Front cover.; “Set in Queensland during a time of tremendous social upheaval, Riptides is a gripping family drama about dreams, choices and consequences. December 1974. Abby Campbell and her brother Charlie are driving to their father’s farm on a dark country road when they swerve into the path of another car, forcing it into a tree. The pregnant driver is killed instantly. In the heat of the moment, Abby and Charlie make a fateful decision. They flee, hoping heavy rain will erase the fact they were there. They both have too much to lose. The pair have no idea who they’ve just killed or how many lives will be affected by her death. Soon the truth is like a riptide they can’t escape, as their terrible secret pulls them down deeper by the day.” -- Back cover.

Alexander, Kirsten

The cedar tree

Alexander, Nicole L.

In 1864 cousins Brandon and Sean O’Riain fled their tenant farms in County Tipperary as wanted criminals. Now, three years on, they are working as cedar-cutters in New South Wales’s lush-green Richmond Valley. But while Brandon embraces the opportunities this new country offers, Sean refuses to let go of the past. And one of them is about to make a dangerous choice ... Nearly a century later, in the spring of 1949, Stella O’Riain is also fleeing her home - a sheep property on the barren edge of the Strzelecki Desert. She leaves behind her husband Joe and a baby daughter. With no money and limited options, Stella accepts her brother-in-law Harry’s offer to live at the O’Riain family cane farm in the Richmond Valley. However Harry’s refusal to discuss Joe - or the row that tore the brothers apart - leaves Stella with more questions than answers. In particular, why does she feel someone is watching her from a distance? And what is the real reason she is banned from speaking to the owner of the farm next door?

Ripper

Allende,

“A fast-paced mystery involving a brilliant teenage sleuth who must unmask a serial killer in San Francisco through Ripper, the online mystery game she plays with her beloved grandfather and friends around the world”

The house of the spirits

Allende, Isabel fiction 19861985

Review: “Spanning four generations, Isabel Allende’s family saga is populated by an often eccentric cast of characters. Together, men and women, spirits, the forces of nature and of history, converge in a brlliantly realised novel.”

Bird country

Aman, Claire, Local author, Grafton

Bird Country is a collection of stories that are steeped in the rural Australian landscape and the Australian psyche. The things we don’t say and the relationships we yearn for hover between the lines of these moving and evocative stories, as do the smell and feel of the mud and grass plains, roads and roadhouses, and the pubs and kitchen tables of country life. These are tales of love and loss, of friendship and betrayal, and of happiness and pain. Claire Aman is a strong new voice in Australian fiction.

The truth and other lies

Arango, Sascha,

Famous bestselling author, loving husband, generous friend - Henry Hayden is a pleasant person to have around. Or so it seems. And when his mistress, who is also his editor, becomes pregnant, his carefully constructed life threatens to fall apart. So Henry works out an ingenious plan.

The Exotic Booze Club

Armstrong, Brian (journalist)

nonfiction 20132013

It was a club created in flagrant violation of his employer’s rules. A club for intrepid film-makers to share their hair-raising stories - of deadly snakes, acid lakes, enormous crocodiles and other examples of nature at its most dangerous - over a glass (or ten) of rotgut booze from the world’s most dangerous zones. A memoir of alcoholic proportions!

Mosaic

This remarkable true story begins in the Polish city of Krakow in 1890 and spans one hundred years and four continents. God blessed Lieba and the devout Jewish patriarch Daniel Baldinger with eleven children, and this richly textured portrait follows their lives down the decades, through the terrifying years of the Holocaust, to the present. Lies that personify the struggles and hopes of our century. Mosaic is compelling storytelling at its best: from the fascinating detail of Polish-Jewish culture and the rivalries and dramas of family life, to its moving account of lives torn apart by war and persecution, this an extraordinary story of a family, and of one woman’s journey to reclaim her heritage.

The birdman’s wife

Ashley, Melissa, fiction 20162016

Inspired by letters from Elizabeth found tucked inside her famous husbands research, The Birdmans Wife takes the form of an intimate memoir of a woman whose talent and adventurous spirit led her from the glittering salons of London to the wilds of Van Diemans land and New South Wales. Artist Elizabeth Gould spent her life capturing the sublime beauty of birds the world had never seen before. But her legacy was eclipsed by the fame of her husband, John Gould. This book at last gives voice to a passionate and adventurous spirit who was so much more than the woman behind the man. Elizabeth was a woman ahead of her time, juggling the demands of her artistic life with her roles as wife, lover, helpmate, and mother to an ever-growing brood of children. In a golden age of discovery, her artistry breathed wondrous life into countless exotic new species, including Charles Darwin’s Galapagos finches. In this book, a naïve young girl who falls in love with an ambitious genius comes into her own as a woman, an artist and a bold adventurer who defies convention by embarking on a trailblazing expedition to the colonies to discover Australia’s curious birdlife. This is an indelible portrait of an extraordinary woman overlooked by history until now.

Hag-seed

The tempest retold

Atwood, Margaret,

Felix is at the top of his game as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival. His productions have amazed and confounded. Now he’s staging a Tempest like no other: not only will it boost his reputation, it will heal emotional wounds. Or that was the plan. Instead, after an act of unforeseen treachery, Felix is living in exile in a backwoods hovel, haunted by memories of his beloved lost daughter, Miranda. And brewing revenge. After twelve years, revenge finally arrives in the shape of a theatre course at a nearby prison. Here, Felix and his motley crew of inmate actors will put on his Tempest, and snare the traitors who destroyed him. But willit remake Felix as his enemies fall?

A man called Ove

Backman, Fredrik, fiction 20152014

There is something about Ove. At first sight, he is almost certainly the grumpiest man you will ever meet. He thinks himself surrounded by idiots - neighbours who can’t reverse a trailer properly, joggers, shop assistants who talk in code, and the perpetrators of the vicious coup d’etat that ousted him as Chairman of the Residents’ Association. He will persist in making his daily inspection rounds of the local streets. But isn’t it rare, these days, to find such old-fashioned clarity of belief and deed? Such unswerving conviction about what the world should be, and a lifelong dedication to making it just so? In the end, you will see, there is something about Ove that is quite irresistible...The word-of-mouth bestseller causing a sensation across Europe, Fredrik Backman’s heartwarming debut is a funny, moving, uplifting tale of love and community that will leave you with a spring in your step - and less ready to judge on first impressions a man you might one day wish to have as your dearest friend.

The heart of a horse

Baker, Candida, nonfiction 20212021

When author Candida left behind a city lifestyle and a high-profile job as editor of Weekend Australian Magazine, to live in the hills behind Byron Bay, little did she realise this was a first step on a journey of self-discovery - through her natural horsemanship, photography, writing and journalism - to an enhanced sense of spiritual and psychic connection with the animal world. Told through a series of true stories, each illustrating a life lesson, at its essence, The Heart of a Horse is about learning to ‘listen’, with all our senses. Using her lifelong love of horses as the main vehicle for bridging the gap between our thought processes and intuition, Candida describes the magic that happens when we keep an open mind about the idea of communication.

life lessons from horses and other animals

The sense of an ending

The Sense of an Ending is narrated by a retired man named Tony Webster, who recalls how he and his clique met Adrian Finn at school and vowed to remain friends for life. When the past catches up with Tony, he reflects on the paths he and his friends have taken.

-

Mortimer J. Adler

In the case of all good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

After story

Behrendt, Larissa fiction 20212021

When Indigenous lawyer Jasmine decides to take her mother Della on a tour of England’s most revered literary sites, Jasmine hopes it will bring them closer together and help them reconcile the past. Twenty-five years earlier the disappearance of Jasmine’s older sister devastated their tight-knit community. This tragedy returns to haunt Jasmine and Della when another child mysteriously goes missing on Hampstead Heath. As Jasmine immerses herself in the world of her literary idols - including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf - Della is inspired to rediscover the wisdom of her own culture and storytelling. But sometimes the stories that are not told can become too great to bear. Ambitious and engrossing, After Story celebrates the extraordinary power of words and the quiet spaces between. We can be ready to listen, but are we ready to hear?

The boy in the headlights

Bjork, Samuel,

Winter 1999. An old man is driving home when his headlights catch an animal on the empty road up ahead. He stamps hard on the brakes. But it is not an animal at all. It is a young boy, frightened and alone, with a set of deer antlers strapped firmly to his head. Fourteen years later, a body is found in a mountain lake. Within weeks, three people have died. Each time, the killer has left a clue, inviting Special Investigations Detectives Munch and Krüger to play a deadly game -- a game they cannot possibly win. Against the most dangerous and terrifying kind of serial killer. One who chooses their victims completely at random. To find the killer they must look deep within their own dark pasts, but how can you stop a murderer when you cannot begin to predict their next move?

An ice-cream war

Boyd, William,

fiction

20101982

‘We will all melt like ice-cream in the sun!’ - British soldier, East Africa, October 1914As millions were slaughtered on the Western Front, a ridiculous and little-reported campaign was waged in East Africa - a war they continued after the Armistice because no one told them to stop.Primarily a gripping story of the men and women swept up by the passions of love and battle, William Boyd’s magnificently entertaining novel also elicits the cruel futility and tragedy of it all.’As ambitious as it is remarkable - balances on seesaws of innocence and violence, sanity and lunacy, hilarity and horror’ - The Times’He has a black-edged laughter of his own - quite outstanding’ - Claire Tomalin in the Sunday Times’Funny, assured and expansively told, a seriocomic romp. But it’s also something maturely more - a study of people caught in the side pockets of calamity that dramatizes their plights with humour, detail and grit’

Lion

Brierley, Saroo

nonfiction 20162013

A true story of survival and triumph against incredible odds. When Saroo Brierley used Google Earth to find his long-lost home town half a world away, he made global headlines.Saroo had become lost on a train in India at the age of five. Not knowing the name of his family or where he was from, he survived for weeks on the streets of Kolkata, before being taken into an orphanage and adopted by a couple in Australia. Despite being happy in his new family, Saroo always wondered about his origins. He spent hours staring at the map of India on his bedroom wall. When he was a young man the advent of Google Earth led him to pore over satellite images of the country for landmarks he recognised. And one day, after years of searching, he miraculously found what he was looking for.Then he set off on a journey to find his mother. This is a moving and inspirational true story that celebrates the importance of never letting go of what drives the human spirit.

Year of wonders

a novel of the plague

Brooks, Geraldine

“When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated mountain village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna’s eyes we follow the story of the plague year, 1666, as her fellow villagers make an extraordinary choice: convinced by a visionary young minister, they elect to quarantine themselves within the village boundaries to arrest the spread of the disease. But as death reaches into every household, faith frays. When the villagers turn from payers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must confront the deaths of family members, the disintegration of her community, and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to survive, a year of plague becomes instead an annus mirabilis, a ‘year of wonders’.”

People of the book

Brooks, Geraldine

When Hannah Heath gets a call in the middle of the night in her Sydney home about a Jewish praybook manuscript which has been discovered in war-torn Sarajevo, she knows she is about to embark on the experience of a life time.

The miniaturist

On an autumn day in 1686, eighteen-year-old Nella Oortman knocks at the door of a grand house in the wealthiest quarter of Amsterdam. She has come from the country to begin a new life as the wife of illustrious merchant trader Johannes Brandt, but instead she is met by his sharp-tongued sister, Marin.

The butcherbird sings

a memoir of hope and help for carers and those suffering any disease, but particularly Parkinsonism (PSP, CBD, MSA)

Julie, Local

author,

Yamba nonfiction 20212021

Julie and Steve had been happily married for years, busy running their own business and looking after their two children when Julie first noticed Steve having trouble with the planning of an overseas holiday. The moments of confusion soon turned into periods of memory loss, followed by hand tremors, disturbed sleep and loss of spatial awareness. Determined to get to the bottom of whatever is going on, Julie and Steve embark on a long frustrating journey of doctors, specialists and endless tests. When a diagnosis is finally given, Julie realises that this was not the end of the battle, but only the beginning of one she never imagined she and Steve would have to face.The Butcherbird Sings tells the story of living a nightmare when the basics of human communication dissolve, normal life functions disappear at random, the medical profession have limited knowledge, and where there is no compassion from our legal system for those who have to face such cruelty till the bitter end.

Campbell,

A hospital bed at home

Carey, Janene

‘A hospital bed at home’ is a linked collection of true stories about the experience of being a carer during the weeks, months and years that can stretch between the day someone you love is diagnosed with an incurable, fatal disease and the day of his or her death. Couples facing separation after forty years together; a workaholic with three small children and a dying, angry wife; an Irish immigrant called home to nurse an ailing father who cannot, or will not, eat; a Buddhist couple striving for serene acceptance of a brain tumour... The patients and carers profiled in these stories bring to their challenging situations the gamut of typically human strengths and weaknesses, plus all the baggage of their pre-existing relationships. The narratives are intensely personal and biographical, but the insights and information they contain about illness, caregiving and dying at home have profound and general relevance. The author’s reflections on these topics are woven throughout, linking the individual stories and concluding with a gritty memoir about caring for her own mother, an anxious optimist who was ravaged by cancer.

family stories of caregiving from diagnosis to death

The mother

Caro, Jane

Recently widowed, Miriam Duffy is a respectable North Shore real estate agent and devoted mother and grandmother. She was thrilled when her younger daughter Ally married her true love, but as time goes by Miriam wonders whether all is well with Ally, as she moves to the country and gradually withdraws, finding excuses every time Miriam offers to visit. Their relationship has always had its ups and downs, and Miriam tries to give her daughter the distance she so clearly wants. But is all as it seems? When the truth of her daughter’s situation is revealed, Miriam watches in disbelief as Ally and her children find themselves increasingly vulnerable and cut off from the world. As the situation escalates and the law proves incapable of protecting them, Miriam is faced with an unthinkable decision.

Await your reply

Chaon, Dan

“Longing to get on with his life, Miles Cheshire nevertheless can’t stop searching for his troubled twin brother, Hayden, who has been missing for ten years. Hayden has covered his tracks skillfully, moving stealthily from place to place, managing along the way to hold down various jobs and seem, to the people he meets, entirely normal. But some version of the truth is always concealed.” “A few days after graduating from high school, Lucy Lattimore sneaks away from the small town of Pompey, Ohio, with her charismatic former history teacher, They arrive in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere, at a long-deserted motel next to a dried-up reservoir, to figure out the next move on their path to a new life, But soon Lucy begins to feel quietly uneasy.”

Child, Lee

Jack Reacher walks alone. Once a go-to hard man in the US military police, now he’s a drifter of no fixed abode. But the army tracks him down. Because someone has taken a long-range shot at the French president. Only one man could have done it. And Reacher is the one man who can find him. This pursuit takes Reacher across the Atlantic to Paris and then to London. The stakes have never been higher - because this time, it’s personal.

Deeper water

Cole, Jessie

A profound and sensuous novel of grace and beauty from a stunning young Australian talent. Innocent and unworldly, Mema is still living at home with her mother on a remote, lush hinterland property. It is a small, confined, simple sort of life, and Mema is content with it. One day, during a heavy downpour, Mema saves a stranger from a raging creek. She takes him into her family home, where, marooned by rising floods, he has to stay until the waters recede.

Light and shadow

memoirs of a spy’s son

Mark,

Light and Shadow is the incredible story of a father waging a secret war against communism during the Cold War, while his son comes of age as a journalist and embarks on the risky career of a foreign correspondent. Mark covered local and global events for the ABC for more than four decades, reporting on wars, royal weddings and everything in between. In the midst of all this he discovered that his father was an MI6 spy. Mark was witness to some of the most significant international events, including the Iranian hostage crisis, the buildup to the first Gulf War in Iraq and the direct aftermath of the shocking genocide in Rwanda. But when he contracted a life-threatening illness while working in the field, his world changed forever.Mark Colvin’s engrossing memoir takes you inside the coverage of major news events and navigates the complexity of his father’s double life. Light and Shadow was published seven months before Mark’s death, and he had the pleasure of seeing it become a bestseller. Award-winning ABC journalist Tony Jones pays tribute to his friend in an afterword.

Colvin,

nonfiction

The trout opera

Condon, Matthew,

After several lifetimes of living anonymously in the outback, Wildred Lampe is finally marked out for greatness in his hundredth year by the Sydney Olympic Committee who need an Australian everyman for their opening ceremony. On the verge of becoming a legend, Wilfred is in his paddock when a freak accident looks likely to rob him of his chance.

Lost & found

Davis, Brooke

A seven years old, Millie Bird realises that everything is dying around her. She wasn’t to know that safter she had recorded twenty-seven assorted creatures in her Book Of Dead Things her dad would be a Dead Thing, too. Agatha Pantha is eighty-two and has not left her house since her husband died. She sits behind her front window, hidden by curtains and ivy, and shouts at passers-by, roaring her anger at complete strangers. Until the day Agatha spies a young girl across the street. Karl the touch typist is eighty-seven when his son kisses him on the cheek before leaving him in the nursing home. As he watches his son leave, Karl has a moment of clarity. He escapes the home and takes off in search of something different.

Birds without wings

De Bernières, Louis fiction 20052004

Review: “It is the story of a small coastal town in South West Anatolia in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire told in the richly varied voices of the people ... - whose lives are rooted there, intertwined for untold years. There is Iskander, the potter and local font of proverbial wisdom; Karatavuk - Iskander’s son - and Mehmetcik, childhood friends whose playground stretches across the hills above the town, where Mehmetcik teaches the illiterate Karatavuk to write Turkish in Greek letters. There are Father Kristoforos and Abdulhamid Hodja, holy men of different faiths who greet each other as “Infidel Efendi”; Rustem Bey, the landlord and protector of the town, whose wife is stoned for the sin of adultery.. But Birds Without Wings is also the story of Mustafa Kemal, whose military genius will lead him to victory against the invading Western European forces of the Great War and a reshaping of the whole region.” “When the young men of the town are conscripted, we follow Karatavuk to Gallipoli, where the intimate brutality of battle robs him of all innocence. And in the town he left behind, we see how the twin scourges of fanatical religion and nationalism unleashed by the war quickly, and irreversibly, destroy the fabric of centuries-old peace.”

The hare with amber eyes

a hidden inheritance

De Waal, Edmund

“264 Japanese wood and ivory carvings, none of them bigger than a matchbox: Edmund de Waal was entranced when he first encountered the collection in his great uncle Iggie’s Tokyo apartment. When he later inherited the ‘netsuke’, they unlocked a story far larger and more dramatic than he could ever have imagined. From a burgeoning empire in Odessa to fin de sieÌ€cle Paris, from occupied Vienna to Tokyo, Edmund de Waal traces the netsuke’s journey through generations of his remarkable family against the backdrop of a tumultous century.”--Cover.

The language of flowers

Diffenbaugh, Vanessa

In Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s powerful first novel, a damaged young woman, Victoria Jones, who can only communicate through the Victorian language of flowers, goes from being homeless to a sought after wedding floral designer. The Victorian language of flowers was used to express emotions: honeysuckle for devotion, azaleas for passion, and red roses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it has been more useful in conveying feelings like grief, mistrust and solitude. After a childhood spent in the foster care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and her only connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings. Now eighteen, Victoria has nowhere to go, and sleeps in a public park, where she plants a small garden of her own. When her talent is discovered by a local florist, she discovers her gift for helping others through the flowers she chooses for them. But it takes meeting a mysterious vendor at the flower market for her to realise what’s been missing in her own life, and as she starts to fall for him, she must decide whether it’s worth risking everything for a second chance at happiness.

The happiest refugee

the extraordinary true story of a boy’s journey from starvation at sea to becoming one of Australia’s best-loved comedians

Do, Anh

Anh Do nearly didn’t make it to Australia. His entire family came close to losing their lives on the sea as they escaped from war-torn Vietnam in an overcrowded boat. This book tells the incredible, uplifting and inspiring life story of one of our favourite personalities. Tragedy, humour, heartache and unswerving determination - a big life with big dreams. Anh’s story will move and amuse all who read it.

All the light we cannot see

a novel

Doerr, Anthony,

An epic novel set during WW2, from the prize-winner Anthony Doerr. When Marie Laure goes blind, aged six, her father builds her a model of their Paris neighborhood, so she can memorize it with her fingers and then navigate the real streets.

It’s Jack’s birthday and he’s excited about turning five. Jack lives with his Ma in Room, which has a locked door and a skylight, and measures 11 feet by 11 feet. He loves watching TV but he knows that nothing he sees on screen is truly real. Until the day Ma admits that there’s a world outside.

Precious things

Doust, Kelly fiction 20162016

Normandy, France, 1891: a young woman painstakingly sews an intricate beaded collar to her wedding dress, the night before her marriage to someone she barely knows. Yet Aimee longs for so much more ...Shanghai, 1926: dancing sensation and wild child Zephyr spies what looks like a beaded headpiece lying carelessly discarded on a ballroom floor. She takes it with her to Malaya where she sets her sights on a prize so out of reach that, in striving for it, she will jeopardise everything she holds dear ...PRECIOUS THINGS tells the story of a collar - a wonderful, glittering beaded piece - and its journey through the decades. It’s also the story of Maggie, an auctioneer living in modern-day London, who comes across the crumpled, neglected collar in a box of old junk, and sets out on an unexpected mission to discover more about its secret and elusive past.

This is a wonderful, absorbing and moving novel about desire, marriage and family, telling the story about how we so often reach out for the sparkly, shiny things (and people) we desire, only to realise - in the nick of time - that the most precious things are the ones we’ve had with us all along.

The midnight watch

Dyer, David Lloyd

Sometimes the smallest of human failings can lead to the greatest of disasters. As the Titanic was sinking slowly in the wretchedly cold North Atlantic, she could see the lights of another ship on the horizon. She called for help by Morse lamp and the new Marconi telegraph machine, but there was no response. Just after midnight the Titanic began firing distress rockets. The other ship, the Californian, saw these rockets but didn’t come. Why not? When the story of the disaster begins to emerge, it’s a question that Boston American reporter John Steadman cannot let go. As soon as he lays eyes on the Californian’s captain and second officer, he knows a story lurks behind their version of events. So begins his strange journey towards the truth. Haunted by the fifteen hundred who went to their deaths in those icy waters, and by the loss of his own baby son years earlier, Steadman must either find redemption in the Titanic’s tragedy or lose himself. Based on true events, The Midnight Watch is at once a heart-stopping mystery and a deeply knowing novel - about the frailty of men, the strength of women, the capriciousness of fate and the price of loyalty.

Girl, woman, other

Evaristo, Bernardine,

Welcome to Newcastle, 1905. Ten-year-old Grace is an orphan dreaming of the mysterious African father she will never meet. Cornwall, 1953. Winsome is a young bride, recently arrived from Barbados, realising the man she married might be a fool. London, 1980. Amma is the fierce queen of her squatters’ palace, ready to Smash The Patriarchy with a new kind of feminist theatre. Oxford, 2008. Carole is rejecting her cultural background (Nigeria by way of Peckham) to blend in at her posh university. Northumberland, 2017. Morgan, who used to be Megan, is visiting Hattie who’s in her nineties, who used to be young and strong, who fights to remain independent, and who still misses Slim every day. Welcome to Britain and twelve very different people - mostly women, mostly black - who call it home. Teeming with life and crackling with energy, Girl, Woman, Other follows them across the miles and down the years. With vivid originality, irrepressible wit and sly wisdom, Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country: ever-dynamic, ever-expanding and utterly irresistible.

A week in December

Faulks, Sebastian

London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days we follow the lives of seven major characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop. With daring skill, the novel pieces together the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life. Greed, the dehumanising effects of the electronic age and the fragmentation of society are some of the themes dealt with in this savagely humorous book.

The woman in the window

Finn, A. J.

It isn’t paranoia if it’s really happening... Anna Fox lives alone -- a recluse in her New York City home, drinking too much wine, watching old movies... and spying on her neighbors. Then the Russells move next door: a father, a mother, their teenaged son. The perfect family. But when Anna sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble -- and its shocking secrets are laid bare. What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this gripping Hitchcockian thriller, no one and nothing are what they seem. This is a smart, sophisticated novel of psychological suspense that recalls the best of Hitchcock.; It’s been ten months since Anna last left her home. Her lifeline to the real world is her window, where she sits day after day, watching her neighbours. When the Russells move in, Anna is instantly drawn to them. But one evening, a frenzied scream rips across the silence, and Anna witnesses something no one was supposed to see.

The narrow road to the deep north

Flanagan,

Richard,

fiction 20152013

What would you do if you saw the love of your life, whom you thought dead for a quarter of a century, walking towards you? Richard Flanagan’s story, of Dorrigo Evans, an Australian doctor haunted by a love affair with his uncle’s wife, journeys from the caves of Tasmanian trappers in the early twentieth century to a crumbling pre-war beachside hotel; from a Thai jungle prison to a Japanese snow festival; from the Changi gallows to a chance meeting of lovers on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Taking its title from 17th-century haiku poet Basho’s travel journal, The Narrow Road To The Deep North is about the impossibility of love. At its heart is one day in a Japanese slave labour camp in August 1943. As the day builds to its horrific climax, Dorrigo Evans battles and fails in his quest to save the lives of his fellow POWs, a man is killed for no reason, and a love story unfolds.

Extremely loud & incredibly close

Foer, Jonathan Safran, fiction

20062005

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is an inventor, amateur entomologist, Francophile, letter writer, pacifist, natural historian, percussionist, romantic, Great Explorer, jeweller, detective, vegan, and collector of butterflies. When his father is killed in the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Centre, Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he discovers in his father’s closet. It is a search which leads him into the lives of strangers, through the five boroughs of New York, into history, to the bombings of Dresden and Hiroshima, and on an inward journey which brings him ever closer to some kind of peace.

The hidden hours

Arabella Lane, senior executive at a children’s publisher, is found dead in the Thames on a frosty winter’s morning after the office Christmas party. No one is sure whether she jumped or was pushed. The one person who may know the truth is the newest employee at Parker & Lane the office temp, Eleanor. Eleanor has travelled to London to escape the repercussions of her traumatic childhood in outback Australia, but now tragedy seems to follow her wherever she goes. To her horror, she has no memory of the crucial hours leading up to Arabella’s death, memory that will either incriminate or absolve her. As Eleanor desperately tries to remember her missing hours and uncover the events of that fateful night, her own extended family is dragged further into the dark, terrifying terrain of blame, suspicion and guilt. Caught in a crossfire of accusations, Eleanor fears she can’t even trust herself, let alone the people around her. And soon, she’ll find herself in a race against time to find out just what happened that night and discover just how deadly some secrets can be.

We are all completely beside ourselves

Karen Joy

Rosemary’s young, just at college, and she’s decided not to tell anyone a thing about her family. So we’re not going to tell you too much either: you’ll have to find out for yourselves what it is that makes her unhappy family unlike any other. Rosemary is now an only child, but she used to have a sister the same age as her, and an older brother. Both are now gone - vanished from her life... There’s something unique about Rosemary’s sister, Fern. So now she’s telling her story; a looping narrative that begins towards the end, and then goes back to the beginning. Twice... It’s funny, clever, intimate, honest, analytical and swirling with ideas that will come back to bite you. We hope you enjoy it, and if, when you’re telling a friend about it, you do decide to spill the beans about Fern, don’t feel bad. It’s pretty hard to resist.

All that I am

Funder, Anna,

“Ruth Becker, defiant and cantankerous, is living out her days in the eastern suburbs of Sydney. She has made an uneasy peace with the ghosts of her past - and a part of history that has been all but forgotten. Another lifetime away, it’s 1939 and the world is going to war. Ernst Toller, self-doubting revolutionary and poet, sits in a New York hotel room settling up the account of his life. When Toller’s story arrives on Ruth’s doorstep their shared past slips under her defences, and she’s right back among them - those friends who predicted the brutality of the Nazis and gave everything they had to stop them. Those who were tested - and in some cases found wanting - in the face of hatred, of art, of love, and of history.” -- Book cover.

This house of grief

the story of a murder trial

Anyone can see the place where the children died. You take the Princes Highway past Geelong, and keep going west in the direction of Colac. Late in August 2006, soon after I had watched a magistrate commit Robert Farquharson to stand trial before a jury on three charges of murder, I headed out that way on a Sunday morning, across the great volcanic plain. On the evening of 4 September 2005, Father’s Day, Robert Farquharson, a separated husband, was driving his three sons home to their mother, Cindy, when his car left the road and plunged into a dam. The boys, aged ten, seven and two, drowned. Was this an act of revenge or a tragic accident? The court case became Helen Garner’s obsession. She followed it on its protracted course until the final verdict. In this utterly compelling book, Helen Garner tells the story of a man and his broken life. She presents the theatre of the courtroom with its actors and audience, all gathered for the purpose of bearing witness to the truth, players in the extraordinary and unpredictable drama of the quest for justice. This House of Grief is a heartbreaking and unputdownable book by one of Australia’s most admired writers.

Helen,

Eat, pray, love

Gilbert, Elizabeth, nonfiction 20102006

IIt’s 3 A.M. and Elizabeth Gilbert is sobbing on the bathroom floor. She’s in her thirties, she has a husband, a house, they’re trying for a baby - and she doesn’t want any of it. A bitter divorce and a turbulent love affair later, she emerges battered and bewildered and realizes it is time to pursue her own journey in search of three things she has been missing: pleasure, devotion and balance.

one woman’s search for everything

The signature of all things

From the moment Alma Whittaker steps into the world, everything about life intrigues her. Instilled with an unquenchable sense of wonder by her father, a botanical explorer and the richest man in the New World, Alma is raised in a house of luxury and curiosity. It is not long before she becomes a gifted botanist in her own right. But as she flourishes and her research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, the man she comes to love draws her in the opposite direction - into the realm of the spiritual, the divine and the magical.

Flesh wounds

Glover, Richard nonfiction 20152015

A mother who invented her past, a father who was often absent, a son who wondered if this could really be his family. Richard Glover’s favourite dinner-party game is called ‘Who’s Got the Weirdest Parents?’. It’s a game he always wins.

Maestro

Goldsworthy, Peter,

fiction 20141981

Against the backdrop of Darwin, that small, tropical hothouse of a port, half-outback, half-oriental, lying at the tip of northern Australia, a young and newly arrived southerner encounters the ‘maestro’, a Viennese refugee with a shadowed past. The occasion is a piano lesson, the first of many...

Memoirs of an imaginary friend

Green, Matthew

Budo is Max’s imaginary friend. But though only Max can see him, he is real. Budo and the other imaginary friends watch over their children until the day comes that the child stops imagining them. And then they’re gone. Budo has lasted a lot longer than most imaginary friends - four years - because Max needs him more. His parents argue about sending him to a special school. Then Max mysteriously disappears from the school. Budo knows he must find him and rescue him.

Ape house

a novel

Gruen, Sara

When a family of bonobo apes is kidnapped from a language laboratory, their mysterious appearance on a reality TV show calls into question our assumptions about these animals who share 99.4% of our DNA.

Water for elephants

Gruen, Sara

Ninety-something-year-old Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant, who gave them hope.

The Midnight Library

Haig, Matt,

“Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices... Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’ A dazzling novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived, from the internationally bestselling author of Reasons to Stay Alive and How To Stop Time. Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

In The Midnight Library, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place”

The dressmaker

Ham, Rosalie

Tilly Dunnage has come home to care for her mad old mother. She left the small Victorian town of Dungatar years before, and became an accomplished couturier in Paris. Now she earns her living making exquisite frocks for the people who drove her away when she was ten. Through the long Dungatar nights, she sits at her sewing machine, planning revenge. The Dressmaker is a modern Australian classic, much loved for its bittersweet humour. Set in the 1950s, its subjects include haute couture, love and hate, and a cast of engagingly eccentric characters. It is now a major motion picture, starring Kate Winslet and fine Australian actors including Judy Davis, Hugo Weaving, Liam Hemsworth and extras from the author’s hometown of Jerilderie.

The year of the farmer

Ham, Rosalie

In a quiet farming town somewhere in country New South Wales, war is brewing. The last few years have been punishingly dry, especially for the farmers, but otherwise, it’s all Neralie Mackintosh’s fault. If she’d never left town then her ex, the hapless but extremely eligible Mitchell Bishop, would never have fallen into the clutches of the truly awful Mandy, who now lords it over everyone as if she owns the place. So, now that Neralie has returned to run the local pub, the whole town is determined to reinstate her to her rightful position in the social order. But Mandy Bishop has other ideas. Meanwhile the head of the local water board - Glenys ‘Gravedigger’ Dingle - is looking for a way to line her pockets at the expense of hardworking farmers already up to their eyes in debt. And Mandy and Neralie’s war may be just the chance she was looking for...

The party

one invitation. a lifetime of regrets

Harding, Robyn

Sweet sixteen. It’s a coming of age, a milestone, a rite of passage. Of course Jeff and Kim Sanders would throw a party for their daughter, Hannah. She was a good kid with good grades and nice friends. And it wasn’t a big, indulgent affair. It was just four girls coming over for pizza and cake, movies and a sleepover. What could possibly go wrong? But things did go wrong, horrifically wrong. When a tragic accident leaves one of the young guests disfigured, Jeff and Kim’s flawless life in a wealthy San Francisco suburb begins to unravel. The injured girl’s mother, Lisa, files a lawsuit that turns friends into enemies, reveals dark secrets in the Sanders’ marriage, and exposes the truth about their perfect daughter, Hannah. Lisa’s determination to make the Sanders pay stems from a fierce love for her only child and Lisa’s own dark and damaged past. At school, Hannah must deal with the ugly aftermath as her peers turn on the victim, and she struggles to maintain her social standing while heeding her moral compass. Her popular best friend, Lauren, is losing herself to drugs, alcohol, and a relationship with an inappropriate older man. Then a shocking, horrifying act of desperation rocks their upscale world and brings everything to a halt. And no one’s life will ever be the same.

The dry

Jane

“Who really killed the Hadler family? Luke Hadler turns a gun on his wife and child, then himself. The farming community of Kiewarra is facing life and death choices daily. If one of their own broke under the strain, well ... When Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to Kiewarra for the funerals, he is loath to confront the people who rejected him twenty years earlier. But when his investigative skills are called on, the facts of the Hadler case start to make him doubt this murder-suicide charge. And as Falk probes deeper into the killings, old wounds are reopened. For Falk and his childhood friend Luke shared a secret ... A secret Falk thought long-buried ... A secret which Luke’s death starts to bring to the surface ...” - back cover.

The survivors

Harper, Jane (Jane Elizabeth)

Kieran Elliott’s life changed forever on a single day when a reckless mistake led to devastating consequences. The guilt that haunts him still resurfaces during a visit with his young family to the small coastal town he once called home. When a body is discovered on the beach, long-held secrets threaten to emerge in the murder investigation that follows. A sunken wreck, a missing girl, and questions that have never washed away.

Force of nature

Harper, Jane (Jane Elizabeth)

fiction 20172017

Five women reluctantly pick up their backpacks and start walking along the muddy track. Only four come out the other side. The hike through the rugged Giralang Ranges is meant to take the office colleagues out of their air-conditioned comfort zone and teach resilience and team building. At least that is what the corporate retreat website advertises. Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk has a particularly keen interest in the whereabouts of the missing bushwalker. Alice Russell is the whistleblower in his latest case - and Alice knew secrets. About the company she worked for and the people she worked with. Far from the hike encouraging teamwork, the women tell Falk a tale of suspicion, violence and disintegrating trust. And as he delves into the disappearance, it seems some dangers may run far deeper than anyone knew.

The truths and triumphs of Grace Atherton

Harris, Anstey

For fans of The Keeper of Lost Things, The Truths and Triumphs of Grace Atherton is the story of a woman who has her heart broken, but then puts it back together again in the most uplifting and exquisite way. Between the simple melody of running her violin shop and the full-blown orchestra of her romantic interludes in Paris with David, her devoted partner of eight years, Grace Atherton has always set her life to music. Her world revolves entirely around David, for Graces own secrets have kept everyone else at bay. Until, suddenly and shockingly, one act tips Graces life upside down, and the music seems to stop. It takes a vivacious old man and a straight-talking teenager to kickstart a new chapter for Grace. In the process, she learns that she is not as alone in the world as she had once thought, that no mistake is insurmountable, and that the quiet moments in life can be something to shout about...

The colour of Bee Larkham’s murder

Harris, Sarah J.,

Whatever happens, don’t tell anyone what you did to Bee Larkham... Jasper is not ordinary. In fact, he would say he is extraordinary. Synaesthesia paints the sounds of his world in a kaleidoscope of colours that no one else can see. But on Friday, he discovered a new colour the colour of murder. He’s sure something has happened to his neighbour, Bee Larkham, but no-one else seems to be taking it as seriously as they should be. The knife and the screams are all mixed up in his head and he’s scared that he can’t quite remember anything clearly. But where is Bee? Why hasn’t she come home yet? Jasper must uncover the truth about that night including his own role in what happened.

A country nurse

Hayes, Thea, nonfiction 20202020

Thea Hayes spent twenty years living and working on Wave Hill Station in the Northern Territory. She arrived as a naive nineteen-year-old trainee nurse from Sydney, but when she left in 1979 she was married with four children and eager for her next adventure. And what twists and turns her new life in rural Queensland had in store. From a stint running a corner shop in the small town of Toogoolawah to dairy and cattle farming and working as a nurse in hospitals and nursing homes, Thea’s life was eternally colourful. At the age of sixty-five, after losing her beloved husband Ralph, Thea moved to London to work as a nurse and travel around Europe. Back home in Australia, she found a second chance at love with a country boy from WA, and her new life with Bob began with a caravan, a dangerous farming floodplain and a swag full of laughs. A Country Nurse charts Thea’s rich and inspiring life, from Wave Hill to North Stradbroke Island; London to the Riverina in NSW, and just about everywhere in between. This is the story of an ordinary girl from Sydney who has lived her extraordinary life to the fullest.

from Wave Hill to rural Queensland and almost everywhere in between

The storyteller

and his three daughters

Hearn, Lian

TOKYO 1884: Sei has devoted his life to storytelling, captivating audiences with his tales. But now he is starting to wonder if the new world has left him behind. Just when he thinks he will never write again, his own life and the lives of the people around him begin to spiral out of control - providing the inspiration for the greatest story he has ever told. A story of love, jealousy, intrigue, and betrayal. Set against the background of Japan’s first incursions into Korea, Sei offers a wise and witty reflection on the nature of storytelling, its perils and delights, its lies and, ultimately, its truth.

Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray

Heiss, Anita, fiction 20212021

“Gundagai, 1852. The powerful Murrumbidgee River surges through town leaving death and destruction in its wake. It is a stark reminder that while the river can give life, it can just as easily take it away.Wagadhaany is one of the lucky ones. She survives. But is her life now better than the fate she escaped? Forced to move away from her miyagan, she walks through each day with no trace of dance in her step, her broken heart forever calling her back home to Gundagai. When she meets Wiradyuri stockman Yindyamarra, Wagadhaany’s heart slowly begins to heal. But still, she dreams of a better life, away from the degradation of being owned. She longs to set out along the river of her ancestors, in search of lost family and country. Can she find the courage to defy the White man’s law? And if she does, will it bring hope ... or heartache?Set on timeless Wiradyuri country, where the life-giving waters of the rivers can make or break dreams, and based on devastating true events, Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (River of Dreams) is an epic story of love, loss and belonging.” -- Inside front cover.

Catch-22

Heller, Joseph

Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved

A solitary walk on the Moon

Hinton, Hilde

“Evelyn went to the third drawer down in her dresser. It was her drawer of things past, she had an item from each of her previous lives. Evelyn was good at reinventing herself, becoming who she was going to be next, but she still kept one thing from each life. Never two.” For Evelyn, mornings pass as mornings always do. She ticks off the jobs at the laundromat and gives welcoming smiles to those who come in. If they’ve earned one. Evelyn knows what is going on in her community because she pays attention. She sees the weariness of the frazzled shop owners, the woman with the nasty boyfriend, the nice man with the curly-topped dog, the car parking war and the forgetful man. The community might not notice Evelyn, because it is easy to overlook the seemingly ordinary. But Evelyn is far from ordinary. She isn’t afraid to put things right, and is always ready to find lost property or lost people, even if that means breaking the rules. For a boy with a struggling mum and a lonely man with a smile in his eyes, Evelyn is going to make a difference, whether they like it or not. She will teach them that you don’t have to be blood to be family. And they will remind her of what comes from loving someone. It is up to Evelyn if she can pay the price.

Girl on the Edge

Hodges, Kim, Local author, Urunga nonfiction 20162016

Detailing her upbringing in the small NSW country town of Coolah, Girl on the Edge shares Kim’s experiences through exploring gender roles, class divisions, religion, wealth and poverty, violence, culture, power and powerlessness, mental health and the lack of a mother-daughter relationship all within a small town context. The story is told through a 16-18 year old teenager lens, and personal reflections from Kim as an adult are embedded in the writing.

The keeper of lost things

Hogan, Ruth

Once a celebrated author of short stories now in his twilight years, Anthony Peardew has spent half his life lovingly collecting lost objects, trying to atone for a promise broken many years before. Realising he is running out of time, he leaves his house and all its lost treasures to his assistant Laura, the one person he can trust to fulfil his legacy and reunite the thousands of objects with their rightful owners. But the final wishes of the Keeper of Lost Things have unforeseen repercussions which trigger a most serendipitous series of encounters...

Eleanor Oliphant is completely fine

Honeyman, Gail

Eleanor Oliphant has learned how to survive - but not how to live Eleanor Oliphant leads a simple life. She wears the same clothes to work every day, eats the same meal deal for lunch every day and buys the same two bottles of vodka to drink every weekend. Eleanor Oliphant is happy. Nothing is missing from her carefully timetabled life. Except, sometimes, everything. One simple act of kindness is about to shatter the walls Eleanor has built around herself. Now she must learn how to navigate the world that everyone else seems to take for grantedwhile searching for the courage to face the dark corners she’s avoided all her life. Change can be good. Change can be bad. But surely any change is better than... fine?

The remains of the day

Ishiguro, Kazuo, fiction 20111989

‘After all what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?’In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the English countryside and into his past...The Remains of the Day is now available as a Faber Modern Classics edition.

The snow child

Ivey, Eowyn

Scope and content: Alaska, 1920: a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart--he breaking under the weight of the work of the farm; she crumbling from loneliness and despair. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone--but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees. This little girl, who calls herself Faina, seems to be a child of the woods. She hunts with a red fox at her side, skims lightly across the snow, and somehow survives alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As Jack and Mabel struggle to understand this child who could have stepped from the pages of a fairy tale, they come to love her as their own daughter. But in this beautiful, violent place things are rarely as they appear, and what they eventually learn about Faina will transform all of them.-From Amazon.

A brief history of seven killings

Jamaica, 1976: Seven men storm Bob Marley’s house with machine guns blazing. The reggae superstar survives, but leaves Jamaica the following day, not to return for two years.; On 3 December 1976, just weeks before the general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert to ease political tensions, seven gunmen from West Kingston stormed his house with machine guns blazing. Marley survived and went on to perform at the free concert, but the next day he left the country, and didn’t return for two years. Not a lot was recorded about the fate of the seven gunmen, but much has been said, whispered and sung about in the streets of West Kingston. Inspired by this near-mythic event, A Brief History of Seven Killings takes the form of an imagined oral biography, told by ghosts, witnesses, killers, members of parliament, drug dealers, conmen, beauty queens, FBI and CIA agents, reporters, journalists, and even Keith Richards’ drug dealer.

Me, myself and Lord Byron

Julietta,

“’Mad, bad and dangerous to know’, Lord Byron was not just one of England’s finest poets, he was also history’s first true rock star, living a life of abundant extravagance and shocking scandal that led eventually to self-imposed exile in Europe. Through his travels, Byron carved out a new life, remaining true to himself to the end. So when journalist Julietta Jameson is complelled by emotional crisis to embark on her own personal exile, whose footsteps better to follow than those of her beloved Byron? Her suitcase filled with his verse, Julietta traces the path of this luminary poet through the Alps, across Italy and over the Mediterranean, and in doing so, learns to live her life in truth, just as he did. ... is a story of parallel journeys ... Julietta explores the flipside of Byron’s celebrity-his insecurities, fears and regrests. ...”--Back cover.

The one hundred year old man who climbed out the window and disappeared

Jonasson, Jonas,

After a long and eventful life Allan Karlsson is moved to a nursing home to await the inevitable. But his health refuses to fail and as his 100th birthday looms a huge party is planned. Allan wants no part of it and decides to climb out the window... Charming and funny; a European publishing phenomenon.

Untethered

Katzen, Hayley

nonfiction 20202020

When urban academic Hayley Katzen moves to a remote Australian cattle property to live with her farmer girlfriend, she hopes, at last, to find home. But this is no happy-ever-after tree change. Lecture halls, law reform and the arts are replaced with castrating calves, shovelling manure, fire-fighting and anti-gas blockades. In a place that attracts people who live by their own rules, Hayley must confront her limitations and preconceptions to forge her own identity. Set in the unpredictable beauty of the Australian landscape, and told with Hayley Katzen’s compelling candour and rigour, Untethered charts one migrant’s search for home. Part love story and part off-the-grid adventure, Untethered is a powerful reminder that home can be found in many forms - in love, in family and friends, in ideologies and political movements, in landscapes and communities, and ultimately, in ourselves.

Burial rites

Agnes is sent to wait out the time leading to her execution on the farm of District Officer Jon Jonsson, his wife and their two daughters. Horrified to have a convicted murderess in their midst, the family avoids speaking with Agnes. Only Toti, the young assistant reverend appointed as Agnes’s spiritual guardian, is compelled to try to understand her, as he attempts to salvage her soul. As the summer months fall away to winter and the hardships of rural life force the household to work side by side, Agnes’s ill-fated tale of longing and betrayal begins to emerge. And with it the family’s terrible realisation that all is not as they assumed.

Devotion

Kent, Hannah, fiction 20212021

Prussia, 1836. Hanne Nussbaum is a child of nature - she would rather run wild in the forest than conform to the limitations of womanhood. In her village of Kay, Hanne is friendless and considered an oddity . . . until she meets Thea. Ocean, 1838. The Nussbaums are Old Lutherans, bound by God’s law and at odds with their King’s order for reform. Forced to flee religious persecution the families of Kay board a crowded, disease-riddled ship bound for the new colony of South Australia. In the face of brutal hardship, the beauty of whale song enters Hanne’s heart, along with the miracle of her love for Thea. Theirs is a bond that nothing can break. The whale passed. The music faded. South Australia, 1838. A new start in an old land. God, society and nature itself decree Hanne and Thea cannot be together. But within the impossible . . . is devotion.

The secret life of bees

Kidd, Sue Monk

Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four. She not only has her own memory of holding the gun, but her father’s account of the event. Now fourteen, she yeams for her mother, and for forgiveness. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her father, she has only one friend: Rosaleen, a black servant whose sharp exterior hides a tender heart. South Carolina in the sixties is a place where segregation is still considered a cause worth fighting for. When racial tension explodes one summer afternoon, and Rosaleen is arrested and beaten, Lily is compelled to act. Fugitives from justice and from Lily’s harsh and unyielding father, they follow a trail left by the woman who died ten years before. Finding sanctuary in the home of three beekeeping sisters, Lily starts a journey as much about her understanding of the world, as about the mystery surrounding her mother.

The invention of wings

Kidd, Sue Monk

“Hetty ‘Handful’ Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. The novel is set in motion on Sarah’s eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, who is to be her handmaid. We follow their remarkable journeys over the next thirty five years, as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other’s destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love. As the stories build to a riveting climax, Handful will endure loss and sorrow, finding courage and a sense of self in the process. Sarah will experience crushed hopes, betrayal, unrequited love, and ostracism. This novel looks with unswerving eyes at a devastating wound in American history, through women whose struggles for liberation, empowerment, and expression will leave no reader unmoved.

The poisonwood Bible

Barbara

“The Poisonwood Bible” tells the story of an American family in the Congo during a time of tremendous political and social upheaval. The story is told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them all they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil. This tale of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction, over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa, is set against one of history’s most dramatic political parables. “The Poisonwood Bible” dances between the darkly comic human failings and inspiring poetic justices of our times. In a compelling exploration of religion, conscience, imperialist arrogance, and the many paths to redemption, Barbara Kingsolver has written a novel of overwhelming power and passion.

A delicate truth

Le Carre, John,

2008. A counter-terrorist operation, codenamed Wildlife, is being mounted on the British crown colony of Gibraltar. Its purpose: to capture and abduct a high-value jihadist arms-buyer. Its authors: an ambitious Foreign Office Minister, a private defense contractor who is also his bosom friend, and a shady American CIA operative of the evangelical far-right. So delicate is the operation that even the Minister’s personal private secretary, Toby Bell, is not cleared for it. Cornwall, UK, 2011. A disgraced Special Forces Soldier delivers a message from the dead. Was Operation Wildlife the success it was cracked up to be--or a human tragedy that was ruthlessly covered up? Summoned by Sir Christopher (“Kit”) Probyn, retired British diplomat, to his decaying Cornish manor house, and closely observed by Kit’s beautiful daughter, Emily, Toby must choose between his conscience and duty to his Service. If the only thing necessary to the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing, how can he keep silent?

The boat

Le, Nam,

A dazzling, emotionally riveting debut collection: the seven stories in Nam Le’s The Boat take us across the globe as he enters the hearts and minds of characters from all over the world. Whether Nam Le is conjuring the story of 14-yearold Juan, a hit man in Colombia; or an aging painter mourning the death of his much-younger lover; or a young refugee fleeing Vietnam, crammed in the ship’s hold with 200 others, the result is unexpectedly moving and powerful.

To kill a mockingbird

Lee, Harper, fiction 20101960

Classic fiction. Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit ‘em, but remember it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.’ A lawyer’s advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee’s classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with exuberant humour the irrationality of adult attitudes to race and class in the Deep South of the thirties. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina of one man’s struggle for justice. But the weight of history will only tolerate so much. To Kill a Mockingbird is a coming-of-age story, an anti-racist novel, a historical drama of the Great Depression and a sublime example of the Southern writing tradition.

The beekeeper of Aleppo

In the midst of war, he found love In the midst of darkness, he found courage In the midst of tragedy, he found hope. What will you find from his story? Nuri is a beekeeper; his wife, Afra, an artist. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo - until the unthinkable happens. When all they care for is destroyed by war, they are forced to escape. But what Afra has seen is so terrible she has gone blind, and so they must embark on a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece towards an uncertain future in Britain. On the way, Nuri is sustained by the knowledge that waiting for them is Mustafa, his cousin and business partner, who has started an apiary and is teaching fellow refugees in Yorkshire to keep bees. As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss, but dangers that would overwhelm the bravest of souls. Above all - and perhaps this is the hardest thing they face - they must journey to find each other again. Moving, powerful, compassionate and beautifully written, The Beekeeper of Aleppo is a testament to the triumph of the human spirit. Told with deceptive simplicity, it is the kind of book that reminds us of the power of storytelling.

Lefteri, Christy,

Library Edition

A short history of tractors in Ukrainian

Lewycka, Marina,

fiction

For years, Nadezhda and Vera, two Ukrainian sisters, raised in England by their refugee parents, have had as little as possible to do with each other - and they have their reasons. But now they find they’d better learn how to get along, because since their mother’s death their aging father has been sliding into his second childhood, and an alarming new woman has just entered his life. Valentina, a bosomy young synthetic blonde from the Ukraine, seems to think their father is much richer than he is, and she is keen that he leave this world with as little money to his name as possible.

The Golden Age

London, Joan,

This is a story of resilience, the irrepressible, enduring nature of love, and the fragility of life. From one of Australia’s most loved novelists. He felt like a pirate landing on an island of little maimed animals. A great wave had swept them up and dumped them here. All of them, like him, stranded, wanting to go home. Perth, 1954.

Mullumbimby

When Jo Breen uses her divorce settlement to buy a neglected property in the Byron Bay hinterland, she is hoping for a tree change, and a blossoming connection to the land of her Aboriginal ancestors. What she discovers instead is sharp dissent from her teenage daughter, trouble brewing from unimpressed white neighbours and a looming Native Title war between the local Bundjalung families. When Jo unexpectedly finds love on one side of the Native Title divide she quickly learns that living on country is only part of the recipe for the Good Life.

Lucashenko, Melissa,

The history of bees

Lunde, Maja

fiction

England, 1852. William is a biologist and seed merchant, who sets out to build a new type of beehive that will give both him and his children honour and fame. United States, 2007. George is a beekeeper and fights an uphill battle against modern farming, but hopes that his son can be their salvation. China, 2098. Tao hand paints pollen onto the fruit trees now that the bees have long since disappeared. When Tao’s young son is taken away by the authorities after a tragic accident, and is kept in the dark about his whereabouts and condition, she sets out on a gruelling journey to find out what happened to him. The History of Bees joins these three very different narratives into one story that is just as much about the powerful relationships between children and parents as it is about our very relationship to nature and humanity.

The unlikely voyage of Jack de Crow

Truly hilarious books are rare. Even rarer are those based on real events. Join A.J. Mackinnon, your charming and eccentric guide, on an amazing voyage in a boat called Jack de Crow.

‘A couple of quiet weeks sailing the River Severn was the intention. Somehow things got out of hand - a year later I had reached Romania and was still going.”

Truly hilarious books are rare. Even rarer are those based on real events. Join A.J. Mackinnon, your charming and eccentric guide, on an amazing voyage in a boat called Jack de Crow.

Equipped with his cheerful optimism and a pith helmet, this Australian Odysseus in a dinghy travels from the borders of North Wales to the Black Sea - 4,900 kilometres over salt and fresh water, under sail, at the oars, or at the end of a tow-rope - through twelve countries, 282 locks and numerous trials and adventures, including an encounter with Balkan pirates. Along the way he experiences the kindness of strangers, gets very lost, and perfects the art of slow travel.

Mackinnon, Alexander James, nonfiction

Long walk to freedom

In Long Walk To Freedom, Nelson Mandela at last shares the story of his life. It is an epic saga of struggle, setback and ultimate triumph.

Mandela, Nelson,

the autobiography of Nelson Mandela

The last migration

McConaghy, Charlotte

A dark past. An impossible journey. The will to survive. How far you would you go for love? Franny Stone is determined to go to the end of the earth, following the last of the Arctic terns on what may be their final migration to Antarctica. As animal populations plummet and commercial fishing faces prohibition, Franny talks her way onto one of the few remaining boats heading south. But as she and the eccentric crew travel further from shore and safety, the dark secrets of Franny’s life begin to unspool. A daughter’s yearning search for her mother. An impulsive, passionate marriage. A shocking crime. Haunted by love and violence, Franny must confront what she is really running towards - and from.

The ruin

McTiernan, Dervla

Cormac Reilly is about to reopen the case that took him twenty years to forget ... Galway 1993: Young Garda Cormac Reilly is called to a scene he will never forget. Two silent, neglected children - fifteen-year-old Maude and five-year-old Jack - are waiting for him at a crumbling country house. Upstairs, their mother lies dead.Twenty years later, a body surfaces in the icy black waters of the River Corrib. At first it looks like an open-and-shut case, but then doubt is cast on the investigation’s findings - and the integrity of thepolice. Cormac is thrown back into the cold case that has haunted him his entire career - what links the two deaths, two decades apart? As he navigates his way through police politics and the ghosts of the past, Detective Reilly uncovers shocking secrets and finds himself questioning who among his colleagues he can trust.What really did happen in that house where he first met Maude and Jack? The Ruin draws us deep into the dark heart of Ireland and asks who will protect you when the authorities can’t - or won’t.

Foal’s bread

Mears, Gillian, Local author, Grafton

Set in hardscrabble farming country and around the country show high-jumping circuit that prevailed in rural New South Wales prior to the Second World War, Foal’s Bread tells the story of two generations of the Nancarrow family and their fortunes as dictated by the vicissitudes of the land.

The penguin lessons

Michell, Tom nonfiction 20162015

‘I was hoping against hope that the penguin would survive because as of that instant he had a name, and with his name came the beginning of a bond which would last a life-time’ Tom Michell is in his roaring twenties: single, free-spirited and seeking adventure. He has a plane ticket to South America, a teaching position in a prestigious Argentine boarding school, and endless summer holidays. He even has a motorbike, Che Guevara style. What he doesn’t need is a pet. What he really doesn’t need is a pet penguin. Set against Argentina’s turbulent years following the collapse of the corrupt Peronist regime, this is the heart-warming story of Juan Salvador the penguin, rescued by Tom from an oil slick in Uruguay just days before a new term. When the bird refuses to leave Tom’s side, the young teacher has no choice but to smuggle it across the border, through customs, and back to school. Whether it’s as the rugby team’s mascot, the housekeeper’s confidant, the host at Tom’s parties or the most flamboyant swimming coach in world history, Juan Salvador transforms the lives of all he meets - in particular one homesick school boy.The Penguin Lessons is a unique and moving true story which has captured imaginations around the globe - for all those who dreamed as a child they might one day talk to the animals.

Coal Creek

Miller, Alex,

Bobby Blue is caught between loyalty to his only friend, Ben Tobin, and his boss, Daniel Collins, the new Constable at Mount Hay. ‘Ben was not a big man but he was strong and quick as a snake. He had his own breed of pony that was just like him, stocky and reliable on their feet.’ Bobby understands the people and the ways of Mount Hay; Collins studies the country as an archaeologist might, bringing his coastal values to the hinterland. Bobby says, ‘I do not think Daniel would have understood Ben in a million years.’ Increasingly bewildered and goaded to action by his wife, Constable Collins takes up his shotgun and his Webley pistol to deal with Ben. Bobby’s love for Collins’ wilful young daughter Irie is exposed, leading to tragic consequences for them all. Miller’s exquisite depictions of the country of the Queensland highlands form the background of this simply told but deeply significant novel of friendship, love, loyalty and the tragic consequences of misunderstanding and mistrust. This book is a wonderfully satisfying novel with a gratifying resolution. It carries all the wisdom and emotional depth.

The lure of the horizon

Moret, Barbera, Local author, Urunga

About the Book: In 1957 BARBERA MORET left a Europe that was still recovering from the devastation of World War II. Her native Holland had experienced five years of Nazi occupation and a decade of post-war rebuilding. She moved to Australia – far distant from the upheavals of military conflict and the Cold War. Here she established a new life and a safe haven for her growing family. But the impact of cataclysmic events is inevitably profound, and in Barbera’s case, repercussions from her war experiences lingered long after her arrival. The history of post-war immigration from Europe to Australia is full of tales of trauma and heart-ache, of optimism and achievement. Barbera’s life is typical, and THE LURE OF THE HORIZON is her story. http://au.blurb. com/b/7411686-the-lure-of-the-horizon

The husband’s secret

Moriarty, Liane

The story of a woman who finds a letter from her husband. It says: For my wife, Cecilia Fitzpatrick. To be opened only in the event of my death. Her husband is very much alive. Should she open it? Would YOU open it?

Apples never fall

Moriarty, Liane

From the outside, the Delaneys appear to be an enviably contented family. Even after all these years, former tennis coaches Joy and Stan are still winning tournaments, and now that they’ve sold the family business they have all the time in the world to learn how to ‘relax’. Their four adult children are busy living their own lives, and while it could be argued they never quite achieved their destinies, no-one ever says that out loud. But now Joy Delaney has disappeared and her children are re-examining their parents’ marriage and their family history with fresh, frightened eyes. Is her disappearance related to their mysterious house guest from last year? Or were things never as rosy as they seemed in the Delaney household?.

The opal desert

Three women, facing uncertain futures, form an unlikely friendship in Australia’s remote opal fields. Kerrie, in her 40s, has just lost her famous sculptor husband who had been the centre of her existence and for whom she made many sacrifices and she now finds her life has lost direction. Shirley, approaching 80, was betrayed by her lover many years before and has retreated from the world, becoming a recluse living in an underground dugout.

Three cups of tea

Mortenson, Greg

‘Here we drink three cups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything - even die’ - Haji Ali, Korphe Village Chief, Karakoram mountains, Pakistan. In 1993, after a terrifying and disastrous attempt to climb K2, a mountaineer called Greg Mortenson drifted, cold and dehydrated, into an impoverished Pakistan village in the Karakoram Mountains. Moved by the inhabitants’ kindness, he promised to return and build a school. Three Cups of Tea is the story of that promise and its extraordinary outcome. Over the next decade Mortenson built not just one but fifty-five schools - especially for girls - in remote villages across the forbidding and breathtaking landscape of Pakistan and Afghanistan, just as the Taliban rose to power. His story is at once a riveting adventure and a testament to the power of the humanitarian spirit.

one man’s extraordinary journey to promote peace - one school at a time

The forgotten garden

Morton, Kate,

A lost child. On the eve of the first world war, a little girl is found abandoned on a ship to Australia. A mysterious woman called the Authoress had promised to look after her but the Authoress has disappeared without a trace. A terrible secret. On the night of her twenty-first birthday, Nell O’Connor learns a secret that will change her life forever. Decades later, she embarks upon a search for the truth that leads her to the windswept Cornish coast and the strange and beautiful Blackhurst Manor, once owned by the aristocratic Mountrachet family. A mysterious inheritance. On Nell’s death, her grand-daughter, Cassandra, comes into an unexpected inheritance. Cliff Cottage and its forgotten garden are notorious amongst the Cornish locals for the secrets they hold - secrets about the doomed Mountrachet family and their ward Eliza Makepeace, a writer of dark Victorian fairytales. It is here that Cassandra will finally uncover the truth about the family, and solve the century-old mystery of a little girl lost.

After you

Jojo,

Lou Clark has lots of questions. Like how it is she’s ended up working in an airport bar, spending every shift watching other people jet off to new places. Or why the flat she’s owned for a year still doesn’t feel like home. Whether her close-knit family can forgive her for what she did 18 months ago. And will she ever get over the love of her life. What Lou does know for certain is that something has to change. Then, one night, it does. But does the stranger on her doorstep hold the answers Lou is searching for - or just more questions? Close the door and life continues: simple, ordered, safe. Open it and she risks everything. But Lou once made a promise to live. And if she’s going to keep it, she has to invite them in.

Still me

Moyes, Jojo,

Louisa Clark arrives in New York ready to start a new life, confident that she can embrace this new adventure and keep her relationship with Ambulance Sam alive across several thousand miles. She is thrown into the world of the superrich Gopniks: Leonard and his much younger second wife, Agnes, and a never-ending array of household staff and hangers-on. Lou is determined to get the most out of the experience and throws herself into her job and New York life within this privileged world. Before she knows what’s happening, Lou is mixing in New York high society, where she meets Joshua Ryan, a man who brings with him a whisper of her past. In Still Me, as Lou tries to keep the two sides of her world together, she finds herself carrying secrets--not all her own--that cause a catastrophic change in her circumstances. And when matters come to a head, she has to ask herself Who is Louisa Clark? And how do you reconcile a heart that lives in two places?

The ship of brides

The year is 1946, and all over the world young women are crossing the seas in their thousands en route to the men they married in wartime, and an unknown future. Strict rules are enforced but the men and brides find their lives intertwined in ways the Navy could never have imagined. Sometimes the journey is more important than the destination.

Moyes, Jojo,

Me before you

Moyes, Jojo,

Lou Clark knows lots of things. She knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home. She knows she likes working in The Buttered Bun tea shop and she knows she might not love her boyfriend Patrick. What Lou doesn’t know is she’s about to lose her job or that knowing what’s coming is what keeps her sane.

The housemaid’s daughter

Mutch, Barbara

Duty and love collide on the arid plains of central South Africa. Cathleen Harrington leaves her home in Ireland in 1919 to travel to South Africa and marry the fiance she has not seen for five years. Isolated and estranged in a harsh landscape, she finds solace in her diary and the friendship of her housemaid’s daughter, Ada. Cathleen recognises in her someone she can love and respond to in a way that she cannot with her own husband and daughter. Under Cathleen’s tutelage, Ada grows into an accomplished pianist, and a reader who cannot resist turning the pages of the diary, discovering the secrets Cathleen sought to hide. When Ada is compromised and finds she is expecting a mixed-race child, she flees her home, determined to spare Cathleen the knowledge of her betrayal, and the disgrace that would descend upon the family. Scorned within her own community, she is forced to carve a life for herself, her child, and her music. But Cathleen still believes in Ada, and risks the constraints of apartheid to search for her and persuade her to return with her daughter. Beyond the cruelty, there is love, hope - and redemption.

Can you hear the sea?

my grandmother’s story

Brenda Niall has turned her biographer’s eye to a personal subject—her grandmother, Aggie. She tells the story of a fiercely independent and intelligent woman who braved a new country as a single woman, teaching in a country school, before marrying a Riverina grazier, whose large powerful family was wary of the newcomer with ideas of her own. Aggie dealt with hardships and loneliness after the early and drawn-out death of her husband, and brought up her seven children to be happy—all with a calm determination. But it was the memory box and her longing for the sea that captured the imagination of her granddaughter.

Dreams from my father

Obama, Barack nonfiction 20082004

In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns that his father - a figure he knows more as a myth than as a man - has been killed in a car accident. This sudden death inspires an emotional odyssey - first to a small town in Kansas, from which he retraces the migration of his mother’s family to Hawaii, and then to Kenya, where he meets the African side of his family, confronts the bitter truth of his father’s life, and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

Daughter of The River Country

from stolen childhood to remarkable leader - a memoir of survival and triumph

O’Brien, Dianne

nonfiction 20212021

From a victim of the ‘stolen generations’ comes a remarkable memoir of abuse, survival - and ultimately hope. Born in country NSW in the 1940s, baby Dianne is immediately taken from her Aboriginal mother. Raised in the era of the White Australia policy, Dianne grows up believing her adoptive Irish mother, Val, is her birth mother. Val promises Dianne that one day they will take a trip and she will ‘tell her a secret’. But before they get the chance, Val tragically dies. Abandoned by her adoptive father, Dianne is raped at the age of 15, sentenced to Parramatta Girls’ Home and later forced to marry her rapist in order to keep her baby. She goes on to endure horrific domestic violence at the hands of different partners, alcohol addiction and cruel betrayal by those closest to her. But amazingly her fighting spirit is not extinguished. At the age of 36, while raising six kids on her own, Dianne learns she is Aboriginal, a Yorta Yorta woman, daughter of the river country. She is reunited with her birth mother and learns that her great-grandfather was William Cooper, a famous Aboriginal activist. Miraculously she finds a way to forgive her traumatic past and becomes a leader in her own right, vowing to help other ‘stolen people’ just like her.

Boy, lost

Kristina,

A powerful family memoir from the award-winning author of The China Garden Kristina Olsson’s mother lost her infant son, Peter, when he was snatched from her arms as she boarded a train in the hot summer of 1950.

Warlight

Michael,

Just after World War II, Nathaniel and his older sister Rachel stay behind in London when their parents move to Singapore, leaving them in the care of a mysterious figure named The Moth and his eccentric crew of friends. These friends are men and women joined by a shared history of unspecified service during the war, all of whom seem, in some way, determined now to protect and educate Rachel and Nathaniel. Their mother returns after months of silence-- without their father, explaining nothing. A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all that he didn’t know and understand in that time.

The Thursday Murder Club

Osman, Richard,

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved killings. But when a local property developer shows up dead, “The Thursday Murder Club” find themselves in the middle of their first live case. The four friends, Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron, might be octogenarians, but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves. Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it’s too late?

Where the crawdads sing

Owens, Delia

For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. She’s barefoot and wild; unfit for polite society. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark. But Kya is not what they say. Abandoned at age ten, she has survived on her own in the marsh that she calls home. A born naturalist with just one day of school, she takes life lessons from the land, learning from the false signals of fireflies the real way of this world. But while she could have lived in solitude forever, the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. Drawn to two young men from town, who are each intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new and startling world until the unthinkable happens.

Dark Emu

“Dark Emu argues for a reconsideration of the ‘hunter-gatherer’ tag for pre-colonial Aboriginal Australians and attempts to rebut the colonial myths that have worked to justify dispossession. Accomplished author Bruce Pascoe provides compelling evidence from the diaries of early explorers that suggests that systems of food production and land management have been blatantly understated in modern retellings of early Aboriginal history, and that a new look at Australia?s past is required”--Publisher’s website.

Bruce,

Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture

Commonwealth

Patchett, Ann

This is a powerful story of two families brought together by beauty and torn apart by tragedy. It is 1964: Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited and notices a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman. When he kisses Beverly Keating, his host’s wife, he sets in motion the joining of two families whose shared fate will be defined on a day seven years later. In 1988, Franny Keating, now twenty-four, has dropped out of law school and is working as a cocktail waitress in Chicago. When she meets the famous author Leon Posen one night at the bar, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story. Told with equal measures of humour and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a powerful tale of a family’s far-reaching bonds of love and responsibility - and a meditation on inspiration, interpretation and the ownership of stories.

The Dutch house

Patchett, Ann

Danny Conroy grows up in the Dutch House, a lavish mansion. Though his father is distant and his mother is absent, Danny has his beloved sister Maeve: Maeve, with her wall of black hair, her wit, her brilliance. Life is coherent, played out under the watchful eyes of the house’s former owners in the frames of their oil paintings. Then one day their father brings Andrea home. Though they cannot know it, her arrival to the Dutch House sows the seed of the defining loss of Danny and Maeve’s lives. The siblings are drawn back time and again to the place they can never enter, knocking in vain on the locked door of the past. For behind the mystery of their own exile is that of their mother’s: an absence more powerful than any presence they have known.

A spark of light

Picoult, Jodi,

The warm fall day starts like any other at the Center- its staff offering care to anyone who passes through its doors. Then, in late morning, a desperate and distraught gunman bursts in and opens fire, taking all inside hostage. After rushing to the scene, Hugh McElroy, a police hostage negotiator, sets up a perimeter and begins making a plan to communicate with the gunman. Told in a daring and enthralling narrative structure that counts backward through the hours of the standoff, this is a story that traces its way back to what brought each of these very different individuals to the same place on this fateful day. Jodi Picoult-one of the most fearless writers of our time--tackles a complicated issue in this gripping and nuanced novel. How do we balance the rights of pregnant women with the rights of the unborn they carry? What does it mean to be a good parent? This is a story that will inspire debate, conversation . . . and, hopefully, understanding.

Lucky’s

Pippos, Andrew

Lucky’s is a story of family. It is also about a man called Lucky. His restaurant chain. A fire that changed everything. A New Yorker article which might save a career. The mystery of a missing father. An impostor who got the girl. An unthinkable tragedy. A roll of the dice. And a story of love, lost, sought and won again, (at last).

Love & virtue

Diana

Michaela and Eve are two bright, bold women who befriend each other their first year at a residential college at university, where they live in adjacent rooms. They could not be more different; one assured and popular - the other uncertain and eager-to-please. But something happens one night in O-week - a drunken encounter, a foggy memory that will force them to confront the realities of consent and wrestle with the dynamics of power. Initially bonded by their wit and sharp eye for the colleges’ mix of material wealth and moral poverty, Michaela and Eve soon discover how fragile friendship is, and how capable of betrayal they both are.

The seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Reid, Taylor Jenkins

“Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself... Regardless of why Evelyn has chosen her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career. Summoned to Evelyn’s Upper East Side apartment, Monique listens as Evelyn unfurls her story: from making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the late 80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way. As Evelyn’s life unfolds, revealing a ruthless ambition, an unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love, Monique begins to feel a very a real connection to the actress. But as Evelyn’s story catches up with the present, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.”--

The lost flowers of Alice Hart

Ringland, Holly

Alice Hart lives in isolation by the sea, where her mother’s enchanting flowers and their hidden messages shelter her from the dark moods of her father. When tragedy changes her life irrevocably, 9-year-old Alice goes to live with the grandmother she never knew existed, on a native flower farm that gives refuge to women who, like Alice, are lost or broken. In the Victorian tradition, every flower has a meaning and, as she settles into her new life, Alice uses this language of flowers to say the things that are too hard to speak. As she grows older, though, family secrecy, a devastating betrayal and a man who’s not all he seems, combine to make Alice realise there are some stories that flowers alone cannot tell. If she is to have the freedom she craves, she must find the courage to possess the most powerful story she knows: her own.

Beautiful world, where are you

Rooney, Sally

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a distribution warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend Eileen is getting over a break-up, and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen and Simon are still young - but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

The pagoda tree

Scobie, Claire

The Pagoda Tree is an epic, sensual novel set in 18th century India. It begins in 1765 in the beautiful temple city of Tanjore, and traces the story of Maya, a young girl destined from birth to be a temple dancer, or devadasi.

The lovely bones

a novel

Sebold, Alice

This is the tale of family, memory, love, and living told by 14-year-old Susie Salmon, who is already in heaven. Through the voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and builds out of her family’s grief a hopeful and joyful story.

South

the Endurance expedition

Shackleton, Ernest Henry Sir,

nonfiction 20081919

Sir Ernest Shackleton’s South is one of the greatest survival stories of all time. In 1914, Shackleton led a party of men hoping to be the first to traverse the Antarctic, but when their ship became crushed by ice 350 miles from land, the expedition soon became a matter of life and death.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Shaffer, Mary Ann,

It’s 1946. The war is over, and Juliet Ashton has writer’s block. But when she receives a letter from Dawsey Adams of Guernsey – a total stranger living halfway across the Channel, who has come across her name written in a second hand book – she enters into a correspondence with him, and in time with all the members of the extraordinary Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Through their letters, the society tell Juliet about life on the island, their love of books –and the long shadow cast by their time living under German occupation. Drawn into their irresistible world, Juliet sets sail for the island, changing her life forever.

Just between us

short stories by many australian authors

nonfiction 20132013

“In this collection of fiction and non-fiction stories, Australia’s best women writers put their friendships - and themselves - under the spotlight as they reveal the truth about female friendship in all its complexity, heartache and hilarity. Their stories tackle every stage of life and a range of scenarios - from netball to family, school and work, from sharing secrets to sharing boyfriends. With its uncompromising honesty, raw emotion and laugh-out-loud wit, Just Between Us shows how our friendships with other women define us and shape our lives, even when they end...”--Back cover.

Australian writers tell the truth about female friendship

Land/marks

Stories from the Clarence Valley 2020

short stories by many local authors nonfiction

This year has etched its marks. There’s been plenty to write about. Bushfires, floods, pandemic, ecological decline. In the face of these things, writing can be the only way to respond, whether in grief, hope, humour or the great escape of fantasy. This heartfelt collection of stories traces our connections with each other across our beloved Clarence Valley landscapes.

To the island

short stories by many local authors

Welcome to The long way home’s 2019 edition of Stories from the Clarence Valley. We’re delighted to present this new collection of stories by Clarence Valley writers. Storytelling takes courage, imagination, and effort. This year nearly 200 people reached into themselves, found a story to tel, and took the time to writed it down. We’re so grateful and proud of all the writers who entered a story. This book gives you a selection of some of the best of those stories. ... We are delighted, as with last year, so many Indigenous storytellers have written excellent stories. Our shortlists shive bright with Indigenous storytellers and themes. We’re particularly proud of Maclean High School’s Kaia Mercy. She won the high schools section with her heartfelt story about Ulgundahi Island.

stories from the Clarence Valley 2019

Jasper Jones

Silvey, Craig,

“Late on a hot summer night in the tail end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleepout. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant figure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie steals into the night by his side, terrified but desperate to impress. Jasper takes him through town to his secret glade in the bush, and it’s here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper’s horrible discovery.” -- Publisher.

Mr Wigg

Inga

It’s the summer of 1971, not far from the stone-fruit capital of New South Wales, where Mr Wigg lives on what is left of his family farm. Mrs Wigg has been gone a few years now and he thinks about her every day. He misses his daughter, too, and wonders when he ll see her again. He spends his time working in the orchard, cooking and preserving his produce and, when it’s on, watching the cricket. It s a full life. Things are changing though, with Australia and England playing a one-day match, and his new neighbours planting grapes for wine. His son is on at him to move into town but Mr Wigg has his fruit trees and his chooks to look after. His grandchildren visit often: to cook, eat and hear his stories. And there’s a special project he has to finish. Trouble is, it’s a lot of work for an old man with shaking hands, but he ll give it a go, as he always has.

The Rosie project

Simsion, Graeme C

A first date dud, socially awkward and overly fond of quick dry clothes, Don Tillman has given up on love. Until a chance encounter gives him an idea.

Two steps forward

Simsion, Graeme C.

Zoe, a sometime artist, is from California. Martin, an engineer, is from Yorkshire. Both have ended up in picturesque Cluny, in central France. Both are struggling to come to terms with their recent past—for Zoe, the death of her husband; for Martin, a messy divorce. Looking to make a new start, each sets out alone to walk two thousand kilometres from Cluny to Santiago, in northwestern Spain, in the footsteps of pilgrims who have walked the Camino—the Way—for centuries. The Camino changes you, it’s said. It’s a chance to find a new version of yourself. But can these two very different people find each other? In this smart, funny and romantic journey, Martin’s and Zoe’s stories are told in alternating chapters by husband-and-wife team Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist.

The Rosie effect

Simsion, Graeme C.

‘We’ve got something to celebrate,’ Rosie said. I am not fond of surprises, especially if they disrupt plans already in place. I assumed that she had achieved some important milestone with her thesis. Or perhaps she had been offered a place in the psychiatry-training programme. This would be extremely good news, and I estimated the probability of sex at greater than 80%. ‘We’re pregnant,’ she said. Graeme Simsion returns with the highly anticipated sequel, The Rosie Effect. Don Tillman and Rosie Jarman are now married and living in New York. Don has been teaching while Rosie completes her second year at Columbia Medical School. Just as Don is about to announce that Gene, his philandering best friend from Australia, is coming to stay, Rosie drops a bombshell: she’s pregnant. In true Tillman style, Don instantly becomes an expert on all things obstetric. But in between immersing himself in a new research study on parenting and implementing the Standardised Meal System (pregnancy version), Don’s old weaknesses resurface. And while he strives to get the technicalities right, he gets the emotions all wrong, and risks losing Rosie when she needs him most. The Rosie Effect is the charming and hilarious romantic comedy of the year.

The Paris library

Skeslien Charles, Janet

Based on the true World War II story of the heroic librarians at the American Library in Paris. Paris, 1939: Young and ambitious Odile Souchet has it all: her handsome police officer beau and a dream job at the American Library in Paris. When the Nazis march into Paris, Odile stands to lose everything she holds dear, including her beloved library. Montana, 1983: Lily is a lonely teenager looking for adventure in small-town Montana. Her interest is piqued by her solitary, elderly neighbor. As Lily uncovers more about her neighbor’s mysterious past, she finds that they share a love of language, the same longings, and the same intense jealousy, never suspecting that a dark secret from the past connects them.

Ladies in black

In the famous F.G. Goode department store, Lisa is the new Sales Assistant (Temporary) in Ladies’ Cocktail Frocks. She is about to meet Magda, the glamorous Continental refugee and guardian of the rose-pink cave of Model Gowns.

A little tea, a little chat

Ever since his early manhood, since his marriage, he had bought women; most had been bargains and most had made delivery at once. He never paid in advance- ‘I got no time for futures in women’. New York, on the cusp of World War II. Robert Grant, a middle-aged businessman, lives life by his own rules. His chief hobbies are moneymaking and seduction; he is always on the hunt for the next woman to beguile and betray. That is, until he meets his match- Barbara, the ‘blondine’, a woman he cannot best. A sardonic commentary on sexual relations and war as potent as when it was first published in 1948, A Little Tea, a Little Chat holds up a mirror to the corruption and cravenness of our late-capitalist moment.

The Sparrows of Edward Street

It’s 1948 and Hanora Sparrow and her teenage daughters, Aria and Rosy, have fallen on tough times. With little more than the suitcases they carry and a few pounds between them, they must move to a housing commission camp on the outskirts of Sydney.

The light between oceans

Stedman, M. L.

This is a story of right and wrong, and how sometimes they look the same ... 1926. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world. One April morning a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying infant - and the path of the couple’s lives hits an unthinkable crossroads. Only years later do they discover the devastating consequences of the decision they make that day - as the baby’s real story unfolds

The apartment

Steel, Danielle

Four young women’s lives intersect in the apartment they’ve shared in Hell’s Kitchen: Claire, a shoe designer; Abby, an aspiring novelist; Morgan, a successful financial consultant; and Sasha, a resident in obstetrics. As different as they are from one another, the women had become a family by choice. But while their lives had proceeded smoothly in the years they’d lived together, new relationships, job opportunities, and surprising circumstances will test the strength of their bond in and outside the loft that had become their home.

Letters to my grandchildren

Suzuki, David T, nonfiction 20152015

In this inspiring series of letters to his grandchildren, David Suzuki offers grandfatherly advice mixed with stories from his own remarkable life and explores what makes life meaningful. He challenges his grandchildren -- and us -- to do everything at full tilt. He explains why sports, fishing, feminism, and failure are important; why it is dangerous to deny our biological nature; and why First Nations must lead a revolution. Drawing on his own experiences and the wisdom he has gained over his long life, he decries the lack of elders and grandparents in the lives of many people, especially immigrants, and champions the importance of heroes. And he even has something to say about fashion. The book also provides an intimate look at Suzuki’s life as a father and grandfather with letters that are chock-full of anecdotes about his children and grandchildren when they were small. As he ponders life’s deepest questions and offers up a lifetime of wisdom, Suzuki inspires us all to live with courage, conviction, and passion.

The kitchen god’s wife

Amy,

Pearl deplores her mother Winnie’s criticism and bossiness, her superstitious rituals, and her fearful, negative outlook, which has created an emotional abyss between them. Dreading her mother’s reaction, Pearl has kept her multiple sclerosis a secret. But Winnie herself has concealed some astonishing facts about her early life in china. Encouraged by her friend and fellow eÌ migreÌ Helen Kwong, Winnie decides to tell Pearl the story of her life. In the telling, Winnie casts off social taboos, old wives’ tales, wartime propaganda, American knowhow - as well as her own regrets. And in the end, she shows her daughter - and herself - why it is still possible to change the past, to claim the future, to go beyond the fate of the Kichen God’s Wife.

An iron rose

Temple, Peter,

‘When men in police uniforms came to execute me on the roadside, beside dark fields, it was a definite sign that my new life was over.’ A regular at the local pub, a mainstay of the footy team, Mac Faraday is a man with a past living the quiet life of a country blacksmith. But when his best friend Ned Lowey is found hanged, Mac, who has learned the hard way never to accept things at face value, isn’t convinced he committed suicide and starts asking questions. Why did Ned keep press cuttings about the skeleton of a girl found in an old mine shaft? What was he doing at Kinross Hall, the local detention centre for juvenile girls? Who was the beaten girl found naked beside a lonely road? As Mac’s search for answers pushes deeper into the past, it resurrects the terrifying spectre of what he calls his ‘old life’, forcing him to turn to long-discarded skills not only to discover why his best friend died, but also to save his own life.

Goodwood

Throsby, Holly, fiction 20162016

It wasn’t just one person who went missing, it was two people. Two very different people. They were there, and then they were gone, as if through a crack in the sky. After that, in a small town like Goodwood, where we had what Nan called ‘a high density of acquaintanceship’, everything stopped. Or at least it felt that way. The normal feeling of things stopped...Goodwood is a small town where everyone knows everything about everyone. It’s a place where it’s impossible to keep a secret...In 1992, when Jean Brown is seventeen, a terrible thing happens. Two terrible things. Rosie White, the coolest girl in town, vanishes overnight. One week later, Goodwood’s most popular resident, Bart McDonald, sets off on a fishing trip and never comes home...People die in Goodwood, of course, but never like this. They don’t just disappear...As the intensity of speculation about the fates of Rosie and Bart heightens, Jean, who is keeping secrets of her own, and the rest of Goodwood are left reeling...Rich in character and complexity, its humour both droll and tender, Goodwood is a compelling ride into a small community, torn apart by dark rumours and mystery.

The Lincoln Highway

Towles, Amor

“The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction-to the City of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles’s third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes”--

The slap

Tsiolkas, Christos,

“At a suburban barbecue one afternoon, a man slaps an unruly boy. The boy is not his own. It’s a single act of violence, but the slap reverberates through the lives of everyone who witnesses it. Told through the eyes of eight of those present at the barbecue, this acclaimed bestseller is an unflinching interrogation of the life of the modern family. Poignant and provocative, THE SLAP makes us question the nature of commitment and happiness, compromise and truth. Whose side are you on?” -- Book cover.

The visionist

Urquhart, Rachel

‘It was years before a Visionist came to the City of Hope. How could I have fathomed that her presence in our small, remote sanctuary - as unforeseen to her as to anyone - would change everything?’ Massachusetts, 1842. Fifteen-year-old Polly Kimball sets fire to her family farm, killing her abusive father. With his fiery ghost at her heels, Polly and her young brother seek refuge in a local Shaker community - the City of Hope. Polly has much to hide from this mysterious society of believers, with the local fire inspector on her trail and the ever-present daemons from her past. But when they hail her a ‘Visionist’, the first their community has known, she is subject to overwhelming scrutiny. Despite being fiercely protected by a young Shaker sister named Charity, a girl who has never known the outside world yet will stake her very soul on Polly’s purity, Polly finds herself in danger from forces both sides of the City’s walls.

Si’Empra’s Queen

Verbeek, Miriam, Local author, Urunga

It’s been fifteen years since Ellen became si’Empra’s leader. She’s still a young woman but her health is failing. She must train a successor - maybe two. Richard is an obvious candidate but she cannot - yet - tell him the one secret that will make or break him, but she can take him to places that reveal the true nature of Si’Empra. Ellen’s focused on her duty and on making good her promises. She’s oblivious to Norm Tucker’s designs for revenge till too late. In book three of the “Songs of Si’Empra” series, an era comes to an end to make way for a new one that’s full of excitement and energy. Not everyone is destined to step into that sunny future. Read this book to finally learn all the verses of the Songs of Si’Empra.

The ghost at the wedding

Walker, Shirley, nonfiction 20102009

The women coped as best they could, raised the children, lived in fear of an official telegram. They grieved for those killed, and learnt of worse things than death in combat. They bore more sons to replace those lost, and these were just the right age to go off to the Second World War. The Ghost at the Wedding chronicles events from both sides of war: the horror of the battlefields and the women left at home. Shirley Walker’s depictions of those battles – Gallipoli, the Western Front, the Kokoda Track – are grittily accurate, their reverberations haunting. Written with the emotional power of a novel, here is a true story whose sorrow is redeemed by astonishing beauty and strength of spirit. ‘Exquisitely written ... A portrait of true Aussie grit and survival not to be missed.’ Australian Women’s Weekly ‘Powerful ... A succession of lightning strikes.’ Roger McDonald, Australian Literary Review ‘A poignant family war memoir, a tragic love story and a rare literary accomplishment ... A book I must read again.’ Warren Brewer, Hobart Mercury ‘Convinces utterly, immerses the reader in the experience … Evocative, heartfelt.’ Lucy Sussex, Sunday Age

Before I go to sleep

Steven J.

Each day, Christine wakes knowing nothing of her life. Each night, her mind erases the day. But before she goes to sleep, she will recover fragments from her past, flashbacks to the accident that damaged her, and then mercifully she will forget.

When the apricots bloom

Wilkinson, Gina,

In the historic city of Baghdad, a secretary, an artist and a diplomat’s wife, must confront the complexities of trust, friendship, and motherhood under the rule of the dictator Saddam Hussein and his ruthless secret police.

Extinctions

Wilson, Josephine

He hated the word ‘retirement’, but not as much as he hated the word ‘village’, as if ageing made you a peasant or a fool. Herein lives the village idiot. Professor Frederick Lothian, retired engineer, world expert on concrete and connoisseur of modernist design, has quarantined himself from life by moving to a retirement village. His wife, Martha, is dead and his two adult children are lost to him in their own ways. Surrounded and obstructed by the debris of his life - objects he has collected over many years and tells himself he is keeping for his daughter - he is determined to be miserable, but is tired of his existence and of the life he has chosen. When a series of unfortunate incidents forces him and his neighbour, Jan, together, he begins to realise the damage done by the accumulation of a lifetime’s secrets and lies, and to comprehend his own shortcomings. Finally, Frederick Lothian has the opportunity to build something meaningful for the ones he loves. Humorous, poignant and galvanising by turns, Extinctions is a novel about all kinds of extinction - natural, racial, national and personal - and what we can do to prevent them.

The yield

Winch, Tara June

The yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land. In the language of the Wiradjuri yield is the things you give to, the movement, the space between things: baayanha. Knowing that he will soon die, Albert ‘Poppy’ Gondiwindi takes pen to paper. His life has been spent on the banks of the Murrumby River at Prosperous House, on Massacre Plains. Albert is determined to pass on the language of his people and everything that was ever remembered. He finds the words on the wind. August Gondiwindi has been living on the other side of the world for ten years when she learns of her grandfather’s death. She returns home for his burial, wracked with grief and burdened with all she tried to leave behind. Her homecoming is bittersweet as she confronts the love of her kin and news that Prosperous is to be repossessed by a mining company. Determined to make amends she endeavours to save their land -- a quest that leads her to the voice of her grandfather and into the past, the stories of her people, the secrets of the river. Profoundly moving and exquisitely written, Tara June Winch’s The Yield is the story of a people and a culture dispossessed. But it is as much a celebration of what was and what endures, and a powerful reclaiming of Indigenous language, storytelling and identity.

Still life

Winman,

Sarah,

fiction 20212021

By the bestselling, prize-winning author of When God was a Rabbit and Tin Man, Still Life is a beautiful, big-hearted, richly tapestried story of people brought together by love, war, art, flood... and the ghost of E.M. Forster. It’s 1944 and in the ruined wine cellar of a Tuscan villa, as the Allied troops advance and bombs fall around them, two strangers meet and share an extraordinary evening together. Ulysses Temper is a young British solider and one-time globe-maker, Evelyn Skinner is a sexagenarian art historian and possible spy. She has come to Italy to salvage paintings from the ruins and relive her memories of the time she encountered EM Forster and had her heart stolen by an Italian maid in a particular Florentine room with a view. These two unlikely people find kindred spirits in each other and Evelyn’s talk of truth and beauty plants a seed in Ulysses mind that will shape the trajectory of his life - and of those who love him - for the next four decades. Moving from the Tuscan Hills, to the smog of the East End and the piazzas of Florence, Still Life is a sweeping, mischievous, richly-peopled novel about beauty, love, family and fate.

Eyrie

Eyrie tells the story of Tom Keely, a man who’s lost his bearings in middle age and is now holed up in a flat at the top of a grim highrise, looking down on the world he’s fallen out of love with. He’s cut himself off, until one day he runs into some neighbours: a woman he used to know when they were kids, and her introverted young boy. The encounter shakes him up in a way that he doesn’t understand. Despite himself, Keely lets them in. What follows is a heart-stopping, groundbreaking novel for our times, funny, confronting, exhilarating and haunting, populated by unforgettable characters. It asks how, in an impossibly compromised world, we can ever hope to do the right thing.

I for Isobel

Witting, Amy, fiction 20141989

This was life: no sooner had you built yourself your little raft and felt secure than it came to pieces under you and you were swimming again. Born into a world without welcome, Isobel observes it as warily as an alien trying to pass for a native. Her collection of imaginary friends includes the Virgin Mary and Sherlock Holmes. Later she meets Byron, W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. Isobel is not so much at ease with the flesh-and-blood people she meets, and least of all with herself, until a lucky encounter and a little detective work reveal her identity and her true situation in life. I for Isobel, a modern-day Australian classic, was followed by Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop, winner of the Age Book of the Year Award.

Bridge of clay

Let me tell you about our brother. The fourth Dunbar boy named Clay. Everything happened to him. We were all of us changed through him. The Dunbar boys bring each other up in a house run by their own rules. A family of ramshackle tragedy, their mother is dead, their father has fled, they love and fight, and learn to reckon with the adult world. It is Clay, the quiet one, who will build a bridge; for his family, for his past, for his sins. He builds a bridge to transcend humanness. To survive. A miracle and nothing less. Yes, always for us there was a brother, and he was the one, the one of us amongst five of us, who took all of it on his shoulder. At once an existential riddle and a search for redemption, this tale of five brothers coming of age in a house with no rules brims with energy, joy and pathos.