Reading Guide See What I Have Done | Sarah Schmidt | $32.99 | Hachette Schmidt has created a visceral, utterly compelling, and highly original exploration of the murder of the Borden family, and the investigation and subsequent trial of daughter Lizzie. Atmospheric, perplexing and at times very creepy – I could not put this down.
The Last Garden | Eva Hornung | $29.99 | Text Publishing A community’s faith is already fraying when Orion shoots his wife and himself the day their son Benedict returns from boarding school. There’s a human violence and animalistic strength that is explored through Eva’s harrowing prose & vicious story of loss and faith.
The River Sings | Sandra Leigh Price | $32.99 | Harper Collins Mischa says; Transporting readers through 19th century London and across to the penal colony of Australia, this is a mesmerisingly gritty Dickensian tale of a young woman weighted down by her father’s misdeeds. Like The Bird’s Child, Sandra has created another strange and beautifully imagined novel that holds the glitterings and hauntings of the past between its pages.
Closing Down | Sally Abbott | $29.99 | Hachette Conjuring a dark future for Australia, Closing Down gives us a glimpse into a world fractured by a financial crisis and the effects of global climate change. An extraordinary and timely debut novel from a compelling new Australian voice and inaugural winner of The Richell Prize for Emerging Writers.
House of Names l Colm Toibin | $29.99 | Pan Macmillan “I have been acquainted with the smell of death.” From the thrilling imagination of Colm Tóibín comes a retelling of the story of Clytemnestra. The novel brilliantly inhabits the mind of one of Greek myth’s most powerful villains to reveal the love, lust, and pain she feels. Tóibín renders myth plausible and tangible through his graphic, lush, and gripping prose.
AUSTRALIAN FICTION / FICTION
Mother’s Day
Men Without Women | Haruki Murakami | $35.00 | Penguin Across seven tales, Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all. Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic!
The Impossible Fortress | Jason Rekulak | $27.99 | Allen & Unwin Dean says; Set in 1987, a crew of 14-yr-old boys in mismatched clothes, riding around on bikes, are trying to get hold of the latest playboy featuring Wheel of Fortune’s Vanna White. The trials to get hold of this infamous magazine lead them on an almighty misadventure. The love interest is Mary Zelinsky; a 1987 computer geek, writing code on her commodore 64. I really adored this book’s escapism and returning to the days of my youth - it is just perfect fun. Electric Dreams meets Goonies meets Breakfast Club - “they are all the Breakfast Club here, everyones in a clique; sportos, girly-girls and I don’t fit in so that makes me Ally Sheedy.”
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