Recent Books

Laughing at the Dark (May 2023)

By Barbara Else

May 16, 2023

From the best-selling and acclaimed author Barbara Else, Laughing at the Dark is a funny, moving memoir about how she rebelled against being a ‘good girl’.

By the time she was in her forties, Barbara was married to a globally recognised academic physician and had two beautiful teenage daughters.  As her writing career developed, her husband became angry at the prospect of her being anything but a housewife.  In a moment of madness – or realisation – she packed her car and took off to live with the man who would become her second husband.

With her trademark wit and humour, Barbara poignantly describes her transformation from a shy but stubborn child into a fulfilled and successful adult.

The Deck (May 2023) – Athenaeum Book Club 2024

By Fiona Farrell

May 16, 2023

What is the point of inventing stories when reality eclipses imagination?

A little way off in the future, during a time of plague and profound social collapse, a group of friends escapes to a house in the country where they entertain themselves by playing music, eating, drinking and telling stories about their lives.  There are tales of thieves and pirates, deaths and a surprise birth, a freak wave and many other stories of misadventure resulting in unexpected felicity.

The Deck borrows the motifs of Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-century masterpiece, The Decameron, in which another small group gathered to avoid contagion and passed the time telling stories.  But what is the role of fiction, this novel asks, as civilisation falters?

The Last Orphan (May 2023)

By Gregg Hurwitz

May 16, 2023

As a child, Evan Smoak was plucked out of a group home, raised and trained as an off-the-books assassin for the government as part of the Orphan program.  When he broke with the program and went deep underground, he left with a lot of secrets in his head that the government would do anything to make sure never get out.

When he remade himself as The Nowhere Man, dedicated to helping the most desperate in their times of trouble, Evan found himself slowly back on the government’s radar.  Having eliminated most of the Orphans in the program, the government will stop at nothing to eliminate the threat they see in Evan.  But Orphan X has always been several steps ahead of his pursuers.

Until he makes one little mistake…

Now the President has him in her control and offers Evan a deal – eliminate a rich, powerful man she says is too dangerous to live and, in turn, she’ll let Evan survive.  But when Evan left the Program he swore to only use his skills against those who really deserve it.  Now he has to decide what’s more important – his principles or his life.

One of Those Mothers (May 2023)

By Megan Nicol Reed

May 16, 2023

The residents of Point Heed keep nice houses and sign up as parent help at the local school.  Occasionally they cheat on their taxes.  Sometimes they fantasise about having sex with someone other than their partner.  Any every now and then they do drugs.  But that doesn’t make them bad people does it?

When a local father is convicted of the possession and distribution of child pornography, the tightknit, middle-class community is quick to unravel.  He is granted permanent name suppression and soon friend turns on friend, neighbour delivers up neighbour, and hysteria rapidly engulfs them all.  Who among them was capable of such moral trespass?

Bridget, Roz and Lucy have been friends forever.  Their lives revolve around their children, their community, each other.  With their husbands and kids, they holiday together every year.  Every year, until last summer, when everything went so terribly wrong.

Were they all complicit?  Certainly they were guilty of looking in all the wrong places.

They tell you things are never as bad as you fear, but what if they’re worse?  Worse than you could have ever imagined.

Victory City (May 2023) – Athenaeum Book Club 2023

By Salman Rushdie

May 16, 2023

In the wake of an insignificant battle between two long forgotten kingdoms in fourteenth-century southern India, a nine-year-old girl has a divine encounter that will change the course of history.  After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who begins to speak out of the girl’s mouth.  Granting her power beyond Pampa Kampana’s comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga – literally ‘victory city’ – the wonder of the world.

Over the next two hundred and fifty years, Pampa Kampana’s life becomes deeply interwoven with Bisnaga’s, from its literal sowing out of a bag of magic seeds to its tragic ruination in the most human of ways the hubris of those in power.  Whispering Bisnaga and citizens into existence, Pampa Kampana attempts to make good on the task that Parvati set for her: to give women equal agency in a patriarchal world.  But all stories have a way of getting away from their creator, and Bisnaga is no exception.  As years pass, rulers come and go, battles are won and lost, and allegiances shift, the very fabric of Bisnaga becomes an ever more complex tapestry – with Pampa Kampana at its centre.

Romantic Comedy (May 2023)

By Curtis Sittenfeld

May 16, 2023

Life is (not) a Romantic Comedy…

With a series of heartbreaks under her belt, Sally Milz – successful TV script-writer for a legendary late-night TV comedy show – has long abandoned the search for love.

But when her friend and fellow writer begins to date a glamorous actress, he joins the growing club of interesting but average-looking men who get romantically involved with beautiful, accomplished women.  Sally channels her annoyance into a sketch, poking fun at this ‘social rule’ because, after all, the reverse never happens for women.

Then Sally meets Noah, a pop idol with a reputation for dating models.  But this isn’t a romantic comedy – it’s real life.  Would someone like him ever date someone like her?

Skewering all our certainties about why we fall in love, ROMANTIC COMEDY is a witty and probing tale of how the heart will follow itself, no matter what anyone says.  It is Curtis Sittenfeld at her most sharp, daring and compassionate.

Birnam Wood (April 2023) – Athenaeum Book Club 2023

By Eleanor Catton

April 18, 2023

Birnam Wood is on the move…

A landside has closed the Korowai Pass in New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizeable farm abandoned.  The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, a guerilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice.  But they hadn’t figured on the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine, who also has an interest in the place.  Can they trust him?  And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other.

A propulsive literary thriller from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries, Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its wit, drama and immersion in character.  It is a brilliantly constructed tale of intentions, actions and consequences, and an unflinching examination of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.

I Will Find You (April 2023)

By Harlan Coben

April 18, 2023

David and Cheryl Burroughs are living the dream – married, a beautiful house in the suburbs, a three-year-old son named Matthew – when tragedy strikes in the worst possible way.

David awakes one night to find himself covered in blood, but not his own – his son’s.  And while he knows he did not murder Matthew, the overwhelming evidence against him puts him behind bars indefinitely.

Five years into his imprisonment, Cheryl’s sister arrives – and drops a bombshell.

She shows him a photograph that a friend took on vacation at a theme park.  The boy in the background looks familiar – and even though David realises it can’t be, he knows it is.

It’s Matthew, and he’s still alive.

In order to find Matthew and clear his own name, David knows he must discover the real story of what happened that devastating night.

But first he must attempt the impossible: escape from prison…

Lessons In Chemistry (April 2023)

By Bonnie Garmus

April 18, 2023

Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman.  In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing.

But it’s the early 1960’s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality.  Forced to resign, she reluctantly signs on as the host of a cooking show, Supper at Six.  But her revolutionary approach to cooking, fuelled by scientific and rational commentary, grabs the attention of a nation.  And soon a legion of overlooked housewives find themselves daring to change the status quo.  One molecule at a time.

So Shall You Reap (April 2023)

By Donna Leon

April 18, 2023

The latest instalment from Donna Leon sees Brunetti engaged in a case that forces him to confront his past.

On a cold November evening, Guido Brunetti and Paola are up late when a call from his colleague Ispettore Vianello arrives, alerting the Commissario that a hand has been seen in one of Venice’s canals.  The body is soon found, and Brunetti is assigned to investigate the murder of an undocumented Sri Lankan immigrant.  Curiously, he had been living in a garden house in the grounds of a palazzo owned by a university professor, in which Brunetti discovers books revealing the victim’s interest in Buddhism, the revolutionary Tamil Tigers, and the last crop of Italian political terrorists, active in the 1980’s.

As the investigation expands, Brunetti struggles to assemble random clues about real estate, land use, books and university friendships.  Until he stumbles over something that transports him back to his own student days, causing him to reflect on lost ideals and the errors of youth, on Italian politics and history, and on the accidents that sometimes lead to revelation.