LANE BOOKSHOP

The following books are suggested as suitable reading for book clubs:

FICTION

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga $32.95 (Penguin Atlantic) Winner Man Booker Prize 2008

The White Tiger is the tale of two Indias. Balram’s journey from the darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is utterly amoral, brilliantly irreverent, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable. Born in a village in heartland India, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a tea shop. As he crushes coals and wipes tables, he nurses a dream of escape – of breaking away from the banks of Mother Ganga into whose depths have seeped the remains of a hundred generations.

Rose Tremain’s hugely enjoyable new novel is the story of Lev, newly arrived in London from Eastern Europe . It is a wise and witty look at the contemporary migrant experience. Readers will become totally involved with Lev’s story, as he struggles with the mysterious rituals of ‘Englishness’ and the fashions and fads of the London scene. We see the road Lev travels through his eyes and we share his dilemmas; the intimacy of his friendships, old and new; his joys and suffering; his aspirations and his hopes of finding his way home, wherever home may be. Deliciously funny at times and very moving at others, this is excellent bookclub material.

Joel Litvinoff, a radical lawyer, has a stroke and lapses into a coma. This is the story of the wife and children he leaves behind. Audrey his wife who discovers that their relationship is far from as perfect as she thought it was; Rosa who is grappling with a need for a spiritual focus, Karla who starts to believe in herself when she finds someone that loves her and Lennie who is back on drugs again. In the course of battling their own demons and each other, every member of the family is called upon to decide what, if anything, they still believe in. A compulsive read by the author of Notes on a Scandal.  

The uncommon reader is none other than Her Majesty the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when she chases one of her corgis to the rear of Buckingham Palace and discovers a mobile library. She begins to read widely, intelligently and compulsively from the classics to the moderns. Naturally her reading changes her view of the world and her relationship with advisors and with the Prime Minister. H.M. begins to question the order of the world and loses patience with much she has to do. In short, her reading is subversive. The consequence is, of course, surprising, mildly shocking and very funny – making this marvellous little book a must for everyone this Christmas.

The Hamilton Case was one of our favourites in the bookshop. De Kretser’s latest novel is set in present day Australia and mid-twentieth century India. It is a mystery, a love story, a meditation on art and nature and a celebration of dogs and the joy they bring. The Lost Dog is a gripping contemporary novel which explores the weight of history as well as different ways of seeing and comprehending the world. It is a beautifully written book that counterpoints new cityscapes and their inhabitants with the wild ancient continent beyond.

We are lucky to be able to claim Joan London as a local West Australian writer and her new novel is her best yet. Eighteen-year-old Maya de Jong has moved from Warton – country WA, to Melbourne in the hope of finding work and getting away from the stifling environment of a small town. She starts working for the enigmatic fifty-year-old Maynard Flynn whose wife is dying of cancer. Maynard is entranced by the impressionable Maya and the two begin an affair, and when his wife dies the two of them leave to begin a life elsewhere. Maya’s parents turn up in Melbourne to visit her to find she has disappeared. With her disappearance, the lives of those close to her come into focus to reveal the complexity of the ties that bind us to one another. A haunting novel and one of the best around.

Professor Desmond Bates has taken early retirement. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on his father. But these discontents are nothing compared to his steadily worsening hearing loss. Now a constant source of domestic friction and embarrassment, it leads Desmond into continual mistakes, misunderstandings and faux pas. His deafness also inadvertently involves him with a young woman whose wayward behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely. Deaf Sentence is a witty, original and absorbing account of one man’s effort to come to terms with aging, death, mortality and the comedy and tragedy of human lives. 

This is a delightful book about a young boy growing up in Post-war New Zealand. It is 1956 and a twelve-year-old boy writes an essay which inadvertently uncovers a secret from World War II His discovery unleashes a chain of events that rip a close community apart. The boy’s corner of the world has been spared the destruction that ravaged Europe and Asia but even in a safe little community where on the whole people look out for each other, bitter memories run deep and when they surface they can result in a harsh cruelty. An exciting read that chronicles the mood of the times.  

Adrift in a failing marriage, Maya Wise is alone a strange world far from home, until intrigued by an elderly Chinese man carrying a caged nightingale, she begins to follow him through the streets of Hong Kong . Drawn to Ken Tiger and his painful tale of lost love in wartime Shanghai, Maya begins to piece together other stories and histories from the world around her, and so comes to imagine another life, a different future for herself. Written in an elegant prose Nelson’s novel is a haunting story from a new Western Australian author.  

We have had some excellent feedback from customers who have read this one. Sarajevo: a city under siege. As the mortars fall and the snipers conduct their deadly chess manoeuvres a cellist sits at the window. The piece he plays, Albinono’s Adagio in G minor, is all that restores his hope, at least for a time. On this day a bomb falls on the street below him, killing twenty-two people waiting in line to buy bread. For the next twenty-two days he will carry his cello to the cratered street at four each afternoon and play the Adagio in memory of the dead. Exquisite and profoundly moving, The Cellist of Sarajevo gives life to the suffering, cruelty and courage of a broken city. It is a story about survival in a time of war.  

Dave Eggers calls this ‘A haunting book of breathtaking beauty and restraint.’ Greer’s perfect prose conjures up an unforgettable woman who exists both within and somehow above the stifling class, racial and sexual constraints of 1950’s America – and who must unravel her place within it’ It is 1953 and Pearlie Cook, a dutiful housewife, finds herself living in San Francisco, caring not only for her husband’s health but for her son who has polio. Then one Saturday a stranger appears on her doorstep and everything changes. All the certainties by which Pearlie has lived are thrown into doubt as she struggles to understand the world around her. This book is perfect – certainly one of the best to come out in a long time.  

This is a wonderful novel about the transforming power of literature. Matilda lives on an island in the Pacific – but this is no paradise. Civil war is a fact of life though at first the village is largely left alone by the soldiers. The school is closed but Mr Watts a white teacher tries to do what he can to continue educating the children by reading to them. He begins by reading a chapter of Great Expectations each day and, to the children, Pip and Magwitch become as real as the others around them. In Matilda’s eyes Pip is a beloved friend and she writes his name in the sand and decorates it with shells. That is where the soldiers see it and decide that they must track this stranger down. Who is this Mister Pip? The search to find him will have devastating consequences for the whole village.  

A few weeks after Christmas, two adopted boys, close enough in age to be mistaken as twins, are involved in a serious road accident on a dark, snowy night. The family is forced, for the first time, to confront their own truths. For those of you who loved Bel Canto, for which Patchett received the Orange Prize, here is another intricate and touching story about our fragile hopes and fears for our children, and the lengths we will go to protect our families.

In the ancient myth, Orpheus travels to the underworld to rescue his lover Eurydice from death. In this compelling re-imagining of the myth, Leela travels into an underworld of kidnapping, terrorism and despair in search of her lover. A mathematical genius, Leela has escaped her religious Southern hometown to study in Boston. There she encounters Mishka, a young Australian musician who soon becomes her lover. Then one day Leela is picked up off the streets and taken to an interrogation centre. There has been an explosion on the underground; terrorists are suspected. Her interrogators reveal that Mishka may not be all he seems. But as she struggles to digest this, Mishka disappears.

There are some parallels with the novel Embers in that the novel is in the form of a conversation between two men. At a café table in Lahore, a bearded Pakistani man converses with an American stranger. As dusk deepens to dark, he begins the tale that has brought him to this fateful meeting…This is the story of his successful rise through college in America, his being snapped up by a top law firm and his friendship with the beautiful Erica that promises entry into Manhattan society at the same exalted level once occupied by his own family in Lahore. But then comes September 11 – everything changes and the life he so loves is turned around.

Faulks’s new novel is a bolt from the blue, unlike anything he has written before: contemporary, heart-wrenching – and funny, in the deepest shade of black. Mike Engleby says things that others dare not even think. When the novel opens in the 1970’s, he is a university student, having survived a ‘traditional’ school. A man devoid of scruples or self-pity, Engleby provides a witheringly frank account of English education. In the course of his career, which brings us up to the present day, he encounters many famous people – actors, writers, politicians, household names – but the most famous is Engleby himself. For beneath the disturbing surface of his observations, lies an unfolding mystery and, when one of his contemporaries disappears the reader has to ask whether Engleby is capable of telling the whole truth.

In the remote outback of Western Australia during World War II, English anthropologist Nicholas Keene and his wife, Stella, raise a lonely child Perdita. Her upbringing is far from ordinary – a shack in the wilderness with a distant father and an unstable mother whose knowledge of Shakespeare forms the backbone of the girl’s limited education. Emotionally adrift, Perdita becomes friends with a deaf mute boy and an Aboriginal girl, Mary. Mary and Perdita come to call each other sister and share a special bond. They are content with life in this remote corner of the world, until a terrible event lays waste their lives.