International Literature
NEALE DANIHER THE MOST INSPIRING AUSTRALIAN BOOK OF 2019. Neale Daniher sat down to pen a letter to the grandchildren he’ll never get to know. And then he kept on writing...
FRANCES WHITING ‘The Best Kind of Beautiful is the best kind of book: touching, funny, whimsical and mysterious! A special story about a delightful family.’ Liane Moriarty
NEW EDITION
HETTY MCKINNON ‘If you were stuck on a desert island and had to choose a salad to survive on, chances are it would come from this book.’ Sydney Morning Herald
CHARLOTTE REE ‘Imagine Florence Broadhurst baking Nana’s tastiest favourites on acid and you’ve pretty much got Charlotte’s Ree-markable first book.’ Matt Preston
Find Me by André Aciman ($30, PB)
André Aciman revisits the characters introduced in Call Me By Your Name in the years after their first meeting. Elio’s father, Samuel, is on a trip from Florence to Rome to visit Elio, now a gifted classical pianist. A chance encounter on the train upends Sami’s visit & changes his life forever. Elio soon moves to Paris, where he, too, has a consequential affair, while Oliver, a New England college professor with a family, suddenly finds himself contemplating a return trip across the Atlantic. Aciman is a master of sensibility, of the intimate details and the nuances of emotion that are the substance of passion. Find Me reenters the world of one of our greatest contemporary romances to show us that in fact true love never dies.
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner ($30, PB)
Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ‘97. His parents are psychologists, his mom a famous author in the field. A renowned debater & orator, an aspiring poet, and—although it requires a lot of posturing & weight lifting—one of the cool kids, he’s also one of the seniors who brings the loner Darren Eberheart into the social scene, with disastrous effects. Deftly shifting perspectives & time periods, The Topeka School is a story about the challenges of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the tyranny of trolls & the new right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.
Granta 149—Europe: Strangers in the Land (ed) Sigrid Rausing ($25, PB)
This issue of Granta includes essays by Elif Shafak, UKON, Andrew Miller, Will Atkins, Lara Feigel, Katherine Angel, Michael Hofmann, Joseph Koerner, Tom McCarthy & many more. It harks back to the 1989 issue of the same name, themed around the response to the fall of the Berlin wall. Through the lenses of exile & migration, the essays look at what it means to be European now. Featuring a photoessay by Bruno Fert who steps inside the temporary homes of refugees in camps in Greece & France.
End of the Ocean by Maja Lunde ($33, PB) Bottle Grove: A Novel by Daniel Handler
This novel begins with a wedding, held in the small San Francisco forest of Bottle Grove—bestowed by a wealthy patron for the public good, back when people did such things. A cross section of lives, a stretch of urban green where ritzy guests, lustful teenagers, drunken revellers & forest creatures all wait for the sun to go down. The girl in the corner slugging vodka from a cough-syrup bottle is Padgett—she’s keeping something secreted in the woods. The couple at the altar are the Nickels— the bride is emphatic about changing her name, as there is plenty about her old life she is ready to forget. And looming over this dark comedy of 2 unions is the income disparity between San Francisco’s tech community and—everyone else. ($30, PB)
Beyond the Sea by Paul Lynch ($30, PB)
Author of the award-winning novel, Grace, tells the tale of two South American fishermen, Bolivar & Hector, who go to sea before a sudden storm. Cast adrift in the Pacific Ocean, the two men must come to terms with their environment, and each other, if they are to survive. It begins as a gripping survival story & ends as a fearless existential parable, a meditation on what it means to be a man, a friend, a sinner, a human, in our fallen world. As deep & timeless as the sea, this novel sits squarely in the tradition of Camus, Borges, Joyce, Beckett & McCarthy.
Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi ($25, PB)
Three sisters live in the village of al-Awafi in Oman: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty; and Khawla, who rejects all offers while waiting for her beloved, who has emigrated to Canada. These 3 women & their families witness Oman evolve from a traditional, slaveowning society, slowly redefining itself after the colonial era, to the crossroads of its complex present. Elegantly structured & taut, this is a coiled spring of a novel, telling of Oman’s coming-of-age through the prism of one family’s losses & loves.
Starve Acre by Andrew Michael Hurley ($30, PB)
Richard & Juliette Willoughby’s son, Ewan, has died suddenly at the age of 5. Starve Acre, their house by the moors, was to be full of life, but is now a haunted place. Juliette seeks the help of the Beacons, a seemingly benevolent group of occultists. Richard, to try & keep the boy out of his mind, has turned his attention to the field opposite the house, where he patiently digs the barren dirt in search of a legendary oak tree. This is a novel about the way in which grief splits the world in two and how, in searching for hope, we can so easily unearth horror.
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In 2019, 70 year-old Signe sets out on a hazardous voyage to cross an entire ocean in only a sailboat. She is haunted by the loss of the love of her life, and is driven by a singular & all-consuming mission to make it back to him. In 2041, David flees with his young daughter, Lou, from a war-torn Southern Europe plagued by drought. They have been separated from their rest of their family & are on a desperate search to reunite with them once again, when they find Signe’s abandoned sailboat in a parched French garden, miles away from the nearest shore. As David and Lou discover personal effects from Signe’s travels, their journey of survival & hope weaves together with Signe’s, forming a heartbreaking, inspiring story about the power of nature and the human spirit.
Muck by Dror Burstein ($30, PB)
In a Jerusalem both ancient & modern, where the First Temple squats over the populace like a Trump casino, 2 young poets are about to have their lives turned upside down. Struggling Jeremiah is worried that he might be wasting his time trying to be a writer; the great critic Broch just beat him over the head with his own computer keyboard. Mattaniah, on the other hand, is a real up-and-comer—but he has a secret he wouldn’t want anyone in the literary world to know: his late father was king of Judah. Jeremiah’s despair yields a vision: that Jerusalem is doomed, and that Mattaniah will not only be forced to ascend to the throne but will thereafter witness his people slaughtered & exiled. But what does it mean to tell a friend & rival that his future is bleak? Can the very act of speaking a prediction aloud make it come true? If so, does that make you a seer, or just a schmuck? Dramatizing the eternal dispute between haves & have-nots, between poetry & power, this is a subversive retelling of the book of Jeremiah: a comedy with apocalyptic stakes.
The Age of Anxiety by Pete Townshend ($33, PB)
That this is a great rock novel is beside the point. The narrator is cultured, witty & unreliable in a novel that captures the craziness of the music business & shows Pete Townshend’s sly sense of humour & sharp ear for dialogue. First conceived as an opera, Townshend’s novel deals with mythic & operatic themes including a maze, divine madness & long-lost children. Hallucinations & soundscapes haunt the novel, which on one level is an extended meditation on manic genius & the dark art of creativity.
The Girl Who Reads on the Métro by Christine Féret-Fleury ($25, HB)
When Juliette takes the métro to her loathed office job each morning, her only escape is books, and as she avidly reads she imagines what her fellow commuters’ choices might say about them. But one day she decides to alight the train a few stops early & meets Soliman—the mysterious owner of the most enchanting bookshop Juliette has ever seen. For Soliman also believes in the power of books to change the course of a life—entrusting his passeurs with the task of giving each book to the person who needs it most—and he thinks Juliette is perfect for the job.