Beartown by Fredrik Backman

$19.99 AUD

Category: General

In a large Swedish forest Beartown hides a dark secret . . . Cut-off from everywhere else it experiences the kind of isolation that tears people apart. And each year more and more of the town is swallowed by the forest. Then the town is offered a bright new future. But it is all put in jeopardy by a single, brutal act. It divides the town into those who think it should be hushed up and forgotten, and those who'll risk the future to see justice done. Who will speak up? Could you stand by and stay silent? Or would you risk everything for justice? Which side would you be on?   'I utterly believed in the residents of Beartown and felt ripped apart by the events in the book' JOJO MOYES, bestselling author of Me Before You 'Surrounded by impenetrable forests, Beartown recreates the stifling atmosphere of a dying community. A mature, compassionate novel' Sunday Times 'You'll love this engrossing novel' People 'Backman is a masterful writer' Kirkus Review ...Show more

West by Carys Davies

$19.99 AUD

Category: General

An exquisite page-turner from the winner of the 2015 Frank O'Connor Award is "a tightly knit, compulsively readable tale...with all the heft of a sprawling western classic" (Booklist, starred review). When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been disc overed in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to write and to return within two years, he leaves behind his daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister, Julie, and heads west. With only a barnyard full of miserable animals and her dead mother's gold ring to call her own, Bess, unprotected and approaching womanhood, fills lonely days tracing her father's route on maps at the subscription library in town and waiting for his letters to arrive. Bellman, meanwhile, wanders farther and farther from home, across harsh and alien landscapes in reckless pursuit of the unknown. From Frank O'Connor Award winner Carys Davies, "West taps the spirit of the great quest novels of Twain, Melville, Cervantes, but with a gentle feminist twist and a fraction of the page count" (The Toronto Star). "Moving, atmospheric" (Real Simple), West is a spellbinding and timeless epic-in-miniature, an eerie parable of the American frontier, and an electric monument to possibility--"the sort of book that warms even as it devastates, that forces serious reflection and yet charms" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). ...Show more

Truly, Madly, Guilty by Liane Moriarty

$27.99 AUD

Category: General

If only they'd said no...What if they hadn't gone? That's the question Clementine can't stop asking herself. It was just an ordinary backyard barbeque on a Sunday afternoon. They didn't know their hosts that well. They were friends of friends. They could so easily have said no. But she and her husband S am said yes, and now they can never change what they did and didn't do that beautiful winter's day. Six responsible adults. Three cute kids. One yapping dog. It's a normal weekend in the suburbs. What could possibly go wrong? Once again Liane Moriarty uses her unique, razor-sharp observational skills to sift through the emerging fault lines of seemingly happy families. It was just an ordinary Sunday afternoon...PRAISE FOR LIANE MORIARTY "The mistress of the razor-sharp observation." Kate Morton "Staggeringly brilliant." Sophie Hannah, Daily Mail "Moriarty produces novels that are miracles of structure as well as human insight." Sydney Morning Herald "If you're looking for a novel that will turn you into a compulsive book-finisher...look no further." Oprah.com ...Show more

Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

$29.99 AUD

Category: General | Reading Level: good

It is 1964: Bert Cousins, the deputy District Attorney, shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited, bottle of gin in hand. As the cops of Los Angeles drink, talk and dance into the June afternoon, he notices a heart-stoppingly beautiful woman. When Bert kisses Beverly Keating, his host's w ife, the new baby pressed between them, 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 one of her idols, the famous author Leon Posen, and tells him about her family, she unwittingly relinquishes control over their story. Franny never dreams that the consequences of this encounter will extend beyond her own life into those of her scattered siblings and parents. Told with equal measures of humour and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a powerful and tender tale of family, betrayal and the far-reaching bonds of love and responsibility. A meditation on inspiration, interpretation and the ownership of stories, it is Ann Patchett's most astonishing work to date. ...Show more

The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

$32.99 AUD

Category: General

What does it mean to live happily ever after? At dinner parties and over coffee, Rabih and Kirsten's friends always ask them the same question: how did you meet? The answer comes easily - it's a happy story, one they both love to tell. But there is a second part to this story, the answer to a question t heir friends never ask: what happened next? Rabih and Kirsten find each other, fall in love, get married. Society tells us this is the end of the story. In fact, it is only the beginning. From the first thrill of lust, to the joys and fears of real commitment, to the deep problems that surface slowly over two shared lifetimes, this is the story of a marriage. It is the story of modern relationships and how to survive them. Playful, wise and profoundly moving, The Course of Love is a delightful return to the novel by Alain de Botton, twenty years after his debut Essays in Love. ...Show more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

$24.99 AUD

Category: General | Reading Level: very good

On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher walks down a staircase beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture, looking for sex. Among the stalls of a public bathroom he encounters Mitko, a charismatic young hustler. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, and their trys ts grow increasingly intimate and unnerving as the enigma of this young man becomes inseparable from that of his homeland, Bulgaria, a country with a difficult past and an uncertain future. Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You is a stunning debut about an American expat struggling with his own complicated inheritance while navigating a foreign culture. Lyrical and intense, it tells the story of a man caught between longing and resentment, unable to separate desire from danger, and faced with the impossibility of understanding those he most longs to know. ...Show more

Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley

$29.99 AUD

Category: General

Lily and the Octopus is a novel about finding that special someone to share your life with. For Ted Flask, that someone is Lily, and she happens to be a dog. This novel reminds us how to love fiercely, how difficult it can be to let go and how the fight for those we love is the greatest fight of all. Re miniscent of The Life of Pi and The Art of Racing in the Rain, with spins into magic realism and beautifully evoked universal truths of love, loyalty and loss, a hilariously sardonic and not altogether reliable narrator, and one unforgettable hound whose simple wisdom will break your heart and put it back together again, Lily and the Octopus captures the search for meaning in death and introduces a dazzling new voice in fiction. ...Show more

My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

$35.00 AUD

Category: General

An exquisite story of mothers and daughters from the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her. Her unexpected visit forces Lucy to confront the tension and longing that have informed every aspect of her life: her impoverished childhood in Amgash, Illinois, her escape to New York and her desire to become a writer, her faltering marriage, her love for her two daughters. Knitting this powerful narrative together is the brilliant storytelling voice of Lucy herself: keenly observant, deeply human, and truly unforgettable. In My Name Is Lucy Barton, one of America's finest writers shows how a simple hospital visit illuminates the most tender relationship of all-the one between mother and daughter. ...Show more

Be Frank with Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson

$27.99 AUD

Category: General

Meet Frank - a modern nine-year-old boy with the wit of Noel Coward and the wardrobe of a 1930s movie star. Meet Mimi Banning - reclusive literary legend and mother to Frank. Mimi has been holed up in her Bel Air mansion for years, keeping her secrets, hiding from the world. Until Alice. Meet Alice - a level-headed young woman who finds herself thrust into the Banning household, charged with looking after Mimi's unusual son. Alice doesn't want mysteries, she doesn't want eccentricity and she certainly doesn't want a love-affair. But she finds all of them under the Banning roof. In so doing, she discovers a part of herself she never knew was missing. Full of heart and humour, Be Frank With Me is a captivating and unconventional story of an unusual mother and son, and the intrepid young woman who finds herself irresistibly pulled into their unforgettable world. ...Show more

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

$32.99 AUD

Category: General | Reading Level: very good

Shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize 'Astonishing and unsettling ...A masterwork' San Francisco Chronicle 'Announces Yanagihara as a major American novelist' Wall Street Journal Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic abou t love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome-but that will define his life forever. In a remarkable and precise prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance. ...Show more

Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty

$16.99 AUD

Category: General

One house. Nine strangers. Ten days that will change everything . . . FROM THE WORLDWIDE #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR BEHIND EMMY- AND GOLDEN GLOBE-WINNING HBO SERIES BIG LITTLE LIES AND SMASH-HIT NOVEL THE HUSBAND'S SECRET The retreat at health-and-wellness resort Tranquillum House promises total transforma tion. Nine stressed city dwellers are keen to drop their literal and mental baggage, and absorb the meditative ambience while enjoying their hot stone massages. Miles from anywhere, without cars or phones, they have no way to reach the outside world. Just time to think about themselves, and get to know each other. Watching over them is the resort's director, a woman on a mission. But quite a different one from any the guests might have imagined. For behind the retreat's glamorous facade lies a dark agenda. These nine perfect strangers have no idea what's about to hit them . . . 'This wonderful novel by the Big Little Lies author had me utterly hooked' Daily Mail 'Acutely observed, pacey' Sunday Times 'Original, suspenseful and laugh-out-loud funny. Downright brilliant' Clare Mackintosh 'Utter brilliance, with a twist halfway through that blew my mind' Marian Keyes 'I am jealous of anyone who hasn't read this yet' Grazia 'The razor-sharp thriller of the autumn . . . a very contemporary tale that bristles with Moriarty's unmistakable brilliance' Waterstones 'If it was summer, this would be your beach read. As it is, settle under a duvet and begin . . .' Stylist 'Hugely enjoyable. Will grip you from the first page. Brilliantly combines humour with emotional honesty' Sunday Express 'A super-suspenseful page-turner' Mail on Sunday 'Another page-turning belter. An absolute must' Heat ...Show more

Tato and the Retired Timekeeper by Kerry Klineberg

$23.95 AUD

Category: General