Exploded View HB by Carrie Tiffany

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

A dangerous man moves in with a mother and her two adolescent children. The man runs an unlicensed mechanic's workshop at the back of their property. The girl resists the man with silence, and finally with sabotage. She fights him at the place where she believes his heart lives - in the engine of the ca r. Set at the close of the 1970s and traversing thousands of kilometres of inland roads, Exploded View is a revelatory interrogation of Australian girlhood. Must a girl always be a part - how can she become a whole?   ...Show more

A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville

$35.99 AUD

$39.99 (10% off)

Category: Fiction

Do not believe too quickly... What if Elizabeth Macarthur-wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney-had written a shockingly frank secret memoir? In her introduction Kate Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of discovering a long-hidden box containing that memoir. What foll ows is a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented. Grenville's Elizabeth Macarthur is a passionate woman managing her complicated life-marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her own heart, the search for power in a society that gave her none-with spirit, cunning and sly wit. Her memoir reveals the dark underbelly of the polite world of Jane Austen. It explodes the stereotype of the women of the past- devoted and docile, accepting of their narrow choices. That was their public face-here's what one of them really thought. At the heart of this book is one of the most toxic issues of our times- the seductive appeal of false stories. Beneath the surface of Elizabeth Macarthur's life and the violent colonial world she navigated are secrets and lies with the dangerous power to shape reality. A Room Made of Leaves is the internationally acclaimed author Kate Grenville's first novel in almost a decade. It is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand that gives the past the piercing immediacy of the present.   ...Show more

Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh

$29.99 AUD

Category: New International Fiction

From the Booker-shortlisted author of Eileen, a novel of haunting metaphysical suspense While on her daily walk with her dog in the nearby woods, our protagonist comes across a note, handwritten and carefully pinned to the ground with stones. Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn't me. Here is her dead body. Shaky even on her best days, she is also alone, and new to this area, having moved here from her long-time home after the death of her husband, and now deeply alarmed. Her brooding about the note grows quickly into a full-blown obsession, as she explores multiple theories about who Magda was and how she met her fate. Her suppositions begin to find echoes in the real world, and the fog of mystery starts to form into a concrete and menacing shape. But is there either a more innocent explanation for all this, or a much more sinister one - one that strikes closer to home? In this triumphant blend of horror, suspense, and pitch-black comedy, we must decide whether the stories we tell ourselves guide us closer to the truth or keep us further from it.   ...Show more

My Brilliant Friend (#1 Neapolitan) by Elena Ferrante; Ann Goldstein (Translator)

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction | Series: The\Neapolitan Novels Ser.

Premiering November 2018 as an HBO series. Book one in the New York Times bestselling Neapolitan quartet about two friends growing up in post-war Italy is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted family epic by Italy's most beloved and acclaimed writer, Elena Ferrante, "one of the great novelists of our t ime." (Roxana Robinson, The New York Times)   Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Ferrante's four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its protagonists, the fiery and unforgettable Lila, and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflictual friendship. Book one in the series follows Lila and Elena from their first fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence.   Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between her protagonists.   "An intoxicatingly furious portrait of enmeshed friends," writes Entertainment Weekly. "Spectacular," says Maureen Corrigan on NPR's Fresh Air. "A large, captivating, amiably peopled bildungsroman," writes James Wood in The New Yorker.   Ferrante is one of the world's great storytellers. With My Brilliant Friend she has given her readers an abundant, generous, and masterfully plotted page-turner that is also a stylish work of literary fiction destined to delight readers for many generations to come.   ...Show more

The Fogging by Luke Horton

$29.99 AUD

Category: Australian Fiction

A compelling tale of the slow disintegration of a relationship and the unravelling of a man. Tom and Clara are two struggling academics in their mid-thirties, who decide to take their first holiday in ten years. On the flight over to Indonesia, Tom experiences a debilitating panic attack, something he hasn't had in a long time, which he keeps hidden from Clara. At the resort, they meet Madeleine, a charismatic French woman, her Australian partner, Jeremy, and five-year-old son, Ollie, and the two couples strike up an easy friendship. The holiday starts to look up, even to Tom, who is struggling to get out of his own head. But when Clara and Madeleine become trapped in the maze-like grounds of the hotel during 'the fogging' -- a routine spraying of pesticide -- the dynamics suddenly shift between Tom and Clara, and the atmosphere of the holiday darkens. Told with equal parts compassion and irony, and brimming with observations that charm, illuminate, and devastate, The Fogging dives deep into what it means to be strong when your foundation is built on sand. ...Show more

Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

$32.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

What if Hillary hadn't married Bill? The sensational long-awaited new novel by the acclaimed bestselling author of American Wife. WHAT IF HILLARY RODHAM HAD TURNED DOWN BILL CLINTON'S PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE? ‘Awfully opinionated for a girl’ is what they call Hillary as she grows up in her Chicago suburb. Smart, diligent, and a bit plain, that’s the general consensus. Then Hillary goes to college, and her star rises. At Yale Law School, she continues to be a leader— and catches the eye of driven, handsome and charismatic Bill. But when he asks her to marry him, Hillary gives him a firm No. The rest, as they say, isn’t history. How might things have turned out for them, for America, for the world itself, if Hillary Rodham had really turned down Bill Clinton? With her sharp but always compassionate eye, Sittenfeld explores the loneliness, moral ambivalence and iron determination that characterise the quest for high office, as well as the painful compromises demanded of female ambition in a world ruled by men. Uncannily astute and witty in the telling, RODHAM is a brilliant reimagining – an unmissable literary landmark and truly a novel of our times. ...Show more

Ghost Species by James Bradley

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

When scientist Kate Larkin joins a secretive project to re-engineer the climate by resurrecting extinct species she becomes enmeshed in another, even more clandestine program to recreate our long-lost relatives, the Neanderthals. But when the first of the children, a girl called Eve, is born, Kate canno t bear the thought her growing up in a laboratory, and so elects to abduct her, and raise her alone. Set against the backdrop of hastening climate catastrophe, Ghost Species is an exquisitely beautiful and deeply affecting exploration of connection and loss in an age of planetary trauma. For as Eve grows to adulthood she and Kate must face the question of who and what she is. Is she natural or artificial? Human or non-human? And perhaps most importantly, as civilisation unravels around them, is Eve the ghost species, or are we? James Bradley embeds Ghost Species with his deep and humane understanding of the natural world and a profound optimism, that together we can survive and thrive. ...Show more

The Adversary by Ronnie Scott

$29.99 AUD

Category: New Local Fiction

In a house in Brunswick, summer is coming, and a young man is being strongly encouraged to go outside against his will. He says he's not a shut-in, but he certainly acts like one, spending all day taking hot showers and eating Vegemite toast. But when his housemate and best friend, Dan, gets a boyfriend , he is pushed out into the world, in search of friendship and love. Will he make friends with the mysterious shawl-wearing Chris L? Will he sleep with Vivian, the American who likes silk sheets, even in January? Or the internet guy, who drives back and forth from the gym all day and whose name he doesn't even know? Why do they all want to go to the pool all the time? Does he really have to go with them? He'd be happiest if Dan just came home . . . The Adversary is a sticky summer coming-of-age story about men exploring their sexuality and their sociability. It asks what kinds of stories are possible - or desirable - for which kinds of people, and what happens when you follow those stories to their natural conclusions. ...Show more

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak

$19.99 AUD

Category: Literary Fiction

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2019 'One of the best writers in the world today' Hanif Kureishi 'Haunting, moving, beautifully written - and based by an extraordinary cast of characters who capture the diversity of modern Turkey. A masterpiece' Peter Frankopan For Leila, each minute after her death re calls a sensuous memory: spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the birth of a yearned-for son; bubbling vats of lemon and sugar to wax women's legs while men are at prayer; the cardamom coffee she shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works. Each fading memory brings back the friends she made in her bittersweet life - friends who are now desperately trying to find her . . . 'One of the most important writers at work today' Independent ...Show more

Weather by Jenny Offill

$27.99 AUD

Category: New International Fiction

From the author of Dept. of Speculation, a dazzling and deadpan new novel about hope and despair, fear and comfort as it plays out in these times of environmental and political turbulence. 'What are you afraid of, he asks me and the answer of course is dentistry, humiliation, scarcity, then he says wha t are your most useful skills? People think I'm funny' Lizzie Benson slid into her job as a librarian without a traditional degree. But this gives her a vantage point from which to practise her other calling: as an unofficial shrink. For years, she has supported her God-haunted mother and her recovering addict brother. They have both stabilized for the moment, but then her old mentor, Sylvia Liller, makes a proposal. Sylvia has become famous for her prescient podcast, Hell and High Water, and wants to hire Lizzie to answer the mail she receives: from left-wingers worried about climate change and right wingers worried about the decline of western civilization. As she dives into this polarized world, she begins to wonder what it means to keep tending your own garden once you've seen the flames beyond its walls.  When her brother becomes a father and Sylvia a recluse, Lizzie is forced to acknowledge the limits of what she can do. But if she can't save others, then what, or who, might save her? And all the while the voices of the city keep floating in--funny, disturbing, and increasingly mad. ...Show more

Wild Fearless Chests by Mandy Beaumont

$28.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Brutal. Uncompromising. Magnificent. Complex. Unforgettable. A timely debut short story collection that breaks open the idea of women from a powerful new Australian literary voice.She is the explosion, the clamour, the thunder. She is the beat, the rage. She is every piece of violence imagined on the sk in. She is the near miss. She is the woman you once were, the woman you could be, the woman you are. She is a triumph of our shared history, is every one of you, is your wild and screaming voice on street corners, is the madwoman you fear you may become. She loves you.As women's voices begin to rise together, Mandy Beaumont's brutal and uncompromising stories are a compelling reminder of the ways in which women have fallen, been dismissed, hurt, hated and loved from afar.These are the stories we have always known, have always heard about and are perhaps just short moments away from. They are yours, ours, mine. They are booming anger. They are wild love. They are the distorted and the decided, the imagined and the wanted. They are the shaking ground beneath our feet. A powerful call to arms. They compel us to stand tall. To break free. To defy the gaze. To claim our space.Wild, Fearless Chests is the sound of a certain revolution. ...Show more

A Visit from the Goon Squad (Hachette Essentials) by Jennifer Egan

$16.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

This fantastically inventive, intelligent, and fully realized exploration of music, art, and life is a must-listen. Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the in ner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. With music pulsing on every page, A Visit from the Goon Squad is a startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption. ...Show more