The
Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje $29.95 (Jonathan Cape)
In
the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy boards a huge liner bound for England.
At mealtimes, he is placed at the lowly ‘Cat's Table’ with an eccentric
group of grown-ups and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes
its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean,
the boys tumble from one adventure to another and at night they spy on a
shackled prisoner whose crime and fate prove a galvanizing mystery that will
haunt them forever. As the narrative moves from the decks and holds of the ship
and into the boys’ adult years, it tells a spellbinding story about the
difference between the magical openness of childhood and the burdens of earned
understanding.
Lettah's
Gift by Graham Lang $29.95 (UQP)
Failed
writer Frank Cole can barely remember Lettah. When his family left Zimbabwe,
their beloved servant was gradually forgotten. Now, forty years on, Frank has
been set a mysterious task in his mother's will: he must find Lettah and
deliver her bequest. What Frank finds is not the country of his childhood, but
a place where memories of civil war and colonial injustice fester beneath the
surface, where brutality stands for the law, where fear and farce preside. But
in chaotic Bulawayo, Frank discovers life and humour among unlikely
companions. As he pieces together Lettah's fate, Frank begins to see the new
Zimbabwe, and himself, in the delicate chemistry between meaning and
hope.The
Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq $32.95 (William Heinemann)
If
Jed Martin, the main character of this novel, was to tell you his story, he
would perhaps begin by talking about a boiler breaking down, one 15th December;
or about his father, with whom he passed alone many a Christmas Eve. He would
certainly recall Olga, a very pretty Russian he met at the start of his career,
during the first exhibition of his photographs of Michelin road maps. This was
before global success arrived with the series of ‘professions’, those
portraits of personalities from all walks of life (including the writer Michel
Houellebecq), captured at their work. Art,
money, love, the father-son relationship, death, work, and France turned into a
tourist paradise are some of the themes of this novel, which is resolutely
classical and openly modern.
All
That I am by Anna Funder $29.95 (Hamish Hamilton)
'When
Hitler came to power I was in the bath. The wireless in the living room was
turned up loud, but all that drifted down to me were waves of happy
cheering.’ Ruth Becker, defiant and cantankerous, is living out her days in
the eastern suburbs of Sydney. She has made an uneasy peace with the ghosts of
her past – and a part of history that has been all but forgotten. Another
lifetime away, it's 1939 and the world is going to war. Ernst Toller,
self-doubting revolutionary and poet, sits in a New York hotel room settling
up the account of his life. When Toller's story arrives on Ruth's doorstep
their shared past slips under her defences and she's right back among them,
those friends who predicted the brutality of the Nazis and gave everything
they had to stop them.
Animal
People Animal People by Charlotte Wood $29.99 (Allen & Unwin)
Set in Sydney over a single
day, Animal People traces a watershed day in the life of Stephen,
aimless, unhappy, unfulfilled - and without a clue as to how to make his life
better. His dead-end job, his demanding family, his oppressive feelings for
Fiona and the pitiless city itself ... the great weight of it all threatens to
come crashing down on him. The day will bring untold surprises and disasters,
but will also show him - perhaps too late - that only love can set him free.
Sharply observed, hilarious, tender and heartbreaking, Animal People is a
portrait of urban life, a meditation on the conflicted nature of human-animal
relationships, and a masterpiece of storytelling. Filled with shocks of
recognition and revelation, it shows a writer of great depth.
Obedience
by Jacqueline Yallop $29.99 (Atlantic)
In
a convent in rural France, only three ageing nuns remain. Cloistered within her
failing faith and her failing body, Sister Bernard navigates each day through
the simple markers of domesticity. But when the convent is threatened with
closure, the protective bonds of piety and routine are torn away, and Sister
Bernard is forced to confront herself and her past - the memories of wartime
disgrace; of a German soldiers' bet giving voice to a love that deafened the
heavens; of the full horror of war and motherhood, and of a furious God who
began to sulk.
Honest and heartbreaking, Obedience explores how
the human psyche can endure and survive even the most brutal events, but more
so, it is about passion, the unquenchable desire for both physical love and
spiritual love, and how in yearning for one, we often betray the other.
Transgression by
Geraldine Wooler $24.95 (Sid Harta)
Eleanor is returning to Italy after a fifteen-year absence. She is out to
lay old ghosts to rest and to examine at a distance the grief that stalks her.
The journey leads her to seek out old acquaintances: some she can take up with
again but others have moved on and her attempts to re-kindle an old relationship
prove futile. As she comes to grips with memories and a family tragedy in
Australia, she finds an unlikely conspirator in Dante’s birthplace. The
narrative unfolds with mingled compassion and warm humour. Eleanor’s old and
new escapades reveal that she is still a risk-taker, as she embraces her sexual
identity and makes her peace with her child’s father — and with herself.
The Misogynist by
Jomier has reached the age
of retirement, his children are grown up and his wife, after having an affair,
has left him. Embittered and humiliated, he lives alone in London, mourning the
disintegration of his marriage as he broods about the past and the present. When
he falls for Judith, things begin to improve. Yet he still cannot escape his old
habits and it is only when his daughter falls ill that he begins to reassess his
feelings towards those he loves and his ability to forgive. Darkly humorous,
ruthlessly satirical and surprisingly moving, The Misogynist is a
perceptive exploration of the ways in which we can unintentionally let past
disappointments affect our present, and how difficult it can be to move forward.
The
Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman$32.95 (Vintage Australia)
Recently
released from prison, Lamont Williams, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an
elderly patient in a nursing home, a Holocaust survivor, who had been a prisoner
in Auschwitz-Birkenau. A few kilometers uptown, Australian historian Adam
Zignelik, an untenured Columbia professor, finds both his career and his
long-term romantic relationship falling apart. Emerging out of the depths of his
own personal history, Adam sees, in a promising research topic suggested by an
American World War II veteran, the beginnings of something that might just save
him professionally and perhaps even personally. As these two men try to survive
in early twenty-first-century New York, history comes to life in ways neither of
them could have foreseen.
In 1962, actuary Walter
Cousins makes the biggest mistake of his life when he sleeps with the
sharp-tongued British au pair Diane Burroughs. This brief affair sets in motion
a tragedy of epic proportions, upending Sophocles’ immortal tale of fate, free
will, and forbidden desire. At the centre is Ed King, an infant given up for
adoption who becomes one of the world's richest and most powerful men. But
beneath the sizzling story of Ed's seemingly inexorable rise to fame and fortune
is a dark and unsettling destiny, one that approaches with ever-increasing
suspense as the book reaches its shattering and surprising conclusion. Ed
King is a classic of contemporary American life from the bestselling author
of Snow Falling on Cedars.
Jamrach's
Menagerie by Carol Birch $23.95 (Text)
London,
1857: after surviving an encounter with an escaped tiger on the streets of
Bermondsey, nine-year-old Jaffy stumbles into a job for its owner, the wild
animal collector Mr Jamrach. Commissioned by Jamrach to find and collect a sea
dragon, Jaf soon joins a ship bound for the South Seas, and so begins a
wonder-filled voyage of discovery. But when things start to go awry, Jaf's
journey becomes a fight for survival which will push faith, love and friendship
to their outermost limits. Brilliantly written and utterly compulsive, Carol
Birch's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel evokes the smells, sights and flavours of
the nineteenth century. This historical adventure is a major literary
accomplishment.
The
Marriage Plot by
Jeffrey
Eugenides $29.99 (Harper Collins)
Madeleine
Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn′t get the memo. While
everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed
with Jane Austen and George Eliot. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little
too nicely for the taste of her more Bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend
whose college love life hadn′t lived up to expectations. But now, in the
spring of her final year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course ′to
see what all the fuss is about′. And, for reasons that have nothing to do
with her studies, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she
falls in love with Leonard Morten -- charismatic loner and college Darwinist -
who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the
ecstasies of immediate experience!