Independence Day by Richard Ford

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an 'Existence Period' - selling real estate in New Jersey and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But, over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life. "Independenc e Day" is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of extraordinary empathy and perception. ...Show more

Into the World by Stephanie Parkyn

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

1791. In the midst of the French Revolution, unwed mother Marie-Louise Girardin takes one last look at her baby son before entrusting him to her friend, the revolutionary Olympe de Gouges. She must escape, and only the most daring plan will bring her both the anonymity she needs and the independence to return one day for her son. Marie-Louise disguises herself as a man and joins a voyage of exploration employed as a steward on the Recherche, one of two ships commissioned to journey to the Great Southern Ocean to find the missing explorer La Perouse. Protecting her identity throughout, Marie-Louise forms friendships among the eccentric naturalists. But tensions rise between the royalist officers and the revolutionaries, and Marie-Louise's position becomes precarious when she discovers someone on board knows the secrets of her past. When the expedition docks in Java, chaos erupts as they learn of King Louis XVI's execution and are imprisoned by the Dutch. Marie-Louise seems certain to be unmasked. Will she ever return to France and be reunited with her child? Inspired by a true story, Into the World is a compelling novel of the amazing life of Marie-Louise Girardin battling perilous seas, her own self-doubt, and finding unforeseen loves on a journey to reclaim her child. ...Show more

Beloved Special Edition by Toni Morrison

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

A BEAUTIFUL GIFT EDITION IN CELEBRATION OF TONI MORRISON 'An American masterpiece' AS Byatt It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bear s the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Told with heart-stopping clarity, melding horror and beauty, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece. 'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours..."Beloved," is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times 'The literary titan we must never stop learning from' Metro Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction ...Show more

The Stolen Bicycle by Wu Ming-Yi; Darryl Sterk (Translator)

$22.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

A writer embarks on an epic quest in search of his missing father's stolen bicycle and soon finds himself ensnared in the strangely intertwined stories of Lin Wang, the oldest elephant who ever lived, the soldiers who fought in the jungles of South-East Asia during World War II, and the secret world of butterfly handicraft makers in Taiwan. The result is both a majestic historical novel and a profound, startlingly intimate meditation on memory, family and home. Wu's writing has been compared to that of Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, W.G. Sebald and Yann Martel. ...Show more

Pine by Francine Toon

$32.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

'It's both eerie and thrilling at once, and had me under its spell until the end.' Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure They are driving home from the search party when they see her. The trees are coarse and tall in the winter light, standing like men. Lauren and her father Niall live alone in t he Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she's gone. In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, mysteries like these are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren's mother a decade ago. Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father's turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it's no longer clear who she can trust. In spare, haunting prose, Francine Toon creates an unshakeable atmosphere of desolation and dread. In a place that feels like the end of the world, she unites the gloom of the modern gothic with the pulse of a thriller. It is the perfect novel for our haunted times. ...Show more

Frankissstein - A Love Story by Jeanette Winterson

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE.From New York Times bestselling author Jeanette Winterson comes her most anticipated book since Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire.   Since her astonishing debut at twenty-five with Oranges Are Not the Only F ruit, Jeanette Winterson has achieved worldwide critical and commercial success as "one of the most daring and inventive writers of our time" (Elle). Her new novel, Frankissstein, is an audacious love story that weaves disparate lives into an exploration of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and queer love.   Lake Geneva, 1816. Nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley is inspired to write a story about a scientist who creates a new life-form. In Brexit Britain, 2019, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love with Victor Stein, a celebrated professor leading the public debate around AI and carrying out some experiments of his own in a vast underground network of tunnels. Meanwhile, Ron Lord, just divorced and living with his mum, is set to make his fortune launching a new generation of sex dolls for lonely men everywhere. Across the Atlantic, in Phoenix, Arizona, a cryogenics facility houses dozens of bodies of men and women who are medically and legally dead...but waiting to return to life.   What will happen when homo sapiens is no longer the smartest being on the planet? In fiercely intelligent prose, Jeanette Winterson shows us how much closer we are to that future than we realize. Funny and furious, bold and clear-sighted, Frankissstein is a love story about life itself. ...Show more

Braised Pork by An Yu

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

One morning in autumn, Jia Jia walks into the bathroom of her Beijing apartment to find her husband - with whom she had been breakfasting barely an hour before - dead in the bathtub. Next to him a piece of paper unfolds like the wings of a butterfly, and on it is an image that Jia Jia can't forget. Pro foundly troubled by what she has seen, even while she is abruptly released from a marriage that had constrained her, Jia Jia embarks on a journey to discover the truth of the sketch. Starting at her neighbourhood bar, with its brandy and vinyl, and fuelled by anger, bewilderment, curiosity and love, Jia Jia travels deep into her past in order to arrive at her future. Braised Pork is a cinematic, often dreamlike evocation of nocturnal Beijing and the high plains of Tibet, and an exploration of myth-making, loss, and a world beyond words, which ultimately sees a young woman find a new and deeper sense of herself. ...Show more

Big Sky (#5 Jackson Brodie) by Kate Atkinson

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction | Series: Jackson Brodie Ser.

THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER- THE RETURN OF JACKSON BRODIE, 'LIKE ALL GOOD DETECTIVES, A HERO FOR MEN AND WOMEN ALIKE' (The Times) 'Big Sky is laced with Atkinson's sharp, dry humour, and one of the joys of the Brodie novels has always been that they are so funny' (Observer) Jackson Brodie ha s relocated to a quiet seaside village in North Yorkshire, in the occasional company of his recalcitrant teenage son Nathan and ageing Labrador Dido, both at the discretion of his former partner Julia. It's a picturesque setting, but there's something darker lurking behind the scenes. Jackson's current job, gathering proof of an unfaithful husband for his suspicious wife, seems straightforward, but a chance encounter with a desperate man on a crumbling cliff leads him into a sinister network-and back into the path of someone from his past. Old secrets and new lies intersect in this breathtaking new literary crime novel, both sharply funny and achingly sad, by one of the most dazzling and surprising writers at work today. ...Show more

The 7th Function of Language by Laurent Binet; Sam Taylor (Translator)

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

From the prizewinning author of HHhH, "the most insolent novel of the year" (L'Express) Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies--struck by a laundry van--after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it was n't an accident at all? What if Barthes was . . . murdered? In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Julia Kristeva--as well as the hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory (starting with the French version of Roland Barthes for Dummies). Soon Bayard finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious "seventh function of language." A brilliantly erudite comedy that recalls Flaubert's Parrot and The Name of the Rose--with more than a dash of TheDa Vinci Code--The Seventh Function of Language takes us from the cafés of Saint-Germain to the corridors of Cornell University, and into the duels and orgies of the Logos Club, a secret philosophical society that dates to the Roman Empire. Binet has written both a send-up and a wildly exuberant celebration of the French intellectual tradition. ...Show more

Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan

$19.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 'Flashy, funny ... Delicious ... A memorable, laugh-out-loud Asian glitz fest that's a pure pleasure to read.' USA Today Nicholas Young's grandmother Su Yi is on her deathbed. While he rushes to be by her bedside, he's not the only one. The entire Shang-Young clan has convened from all corners of the globe to stake claim on their matriarch's massive fortune. With all parties vying to inherit a trophy estate in the heart of Singapore, Nicholas's childhood home turns into a hotbed of sabotage and scandal. Taking us from the elegantly appointed mansions of Manila to the secluded private islands in the Sulu Sea, Kevin Kwan's final installment in this irresistible trilogy reveals the long-buried secrets of Asia's most privileged families and their rich people problems. ...Show more

The Bee and the Orange Tree by Melissa Ashley

$29.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Two Girls Down by Louisa Luna

$22.99 AUD

Category: Fiction

Jamie Brandt was not a bad mother. Later she would tell that to anyone who would listen- police, reporters, lawyers, her parents, her boyfriend, her dealer, the new bartender with the knuckle tattoos at Schultz's, the investigator from California and her partner, and her own reflection in the bathroom m irror, right before cracking her forehead on the sink's edge and passing out from the cocktail of pain, grief, and fear. When two sisters disappear from a parking lot while their mother is in Kmart, the devastated family hires bounty hunter Alice Vega to help find the girls. Immediately shut out by a local police department already stretched too thin by budget cuts and the growing meth epidemic, Vega enlists the help of a disgraced former cop, Max Caplan. Cap is a man trying to put the scandal of his past behind him and move on, but Vega needs his help, and she will not be denied. With little to go on, Vega and Cap will go to extraordinary lengths to untangle a dangerous web of lies, false leads, and complex relationships to find the girls before time runs out, and they are gone forever. ...Show more