Summer Reading Guide
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Summer Reading Guide This season’s best books selected by your favourite independent bookseller 2 Australian Fiction ACT OF GRACE THE BEE AND SPECIAL THE BEST KIND SPECIAL PRICE Anna Krien PRICE THE ORANGE TREE OF BEAUTIFUL Following three very different but Melissa Ashley Frances Whiting interconnected stories – that of an Iraqi The lives of three women in 17th-century Florence is a young woman who doesn’t pianist who flees her home country during Paris are rocked by a brutal murder in this quite fit in. She’s close with her family, Saddam Hussein’s rule, an Australian boy richly imagined and meticulously researched especially her younger sister (and slightly living with a violent parent, and a woman historical novel. Marie Catherine D’Aulnoy, unwanted housemate) Isolde, but generally watching her father’s decline into early- famed writer and – long before the Brothers speaking, she isn’t a people person. Albert onset dementia – Anna Krien’s debut novel Grimm – inventor of fairy tales, battles a is quite the opposite – he’s an extrovert Act of Grace moves through different times crippling case of writer’s block. When her who thrives in social settings. The two work and spaces, eventually weaving these three friend Nicola Tiquet is accused of murdering together on ‘The Green Team’, spending their Black Inc PB narrative threads together. Krien’s subject her abusive husband, Marie Catherine and workdays planting trees and flowers. What $32.99 matter is confronting, but her prose retains a her daughter Angelina chase rumours, others think about them is often at odds with sense of clarity as she shifts the perspective allies and secrets across the city, searching who they truly are. The Best Kind of Beautiful Macmillan PB of the story from one character to another. Affirm HB for freedom within Louis XIV’s repressive WAS $32.99 is a novel of horticulture, swing dancing, This is a thought-provoking novel of great WAS $35 regime. As with her acclaimed debut, The NOW $29.99 oddballs, complementary personalities literary quality. NOW $29.99 Birdman’s Wife, Ashley elevates a forgotten and the ever-entertaining dynamics of big woman of history and casts a keen feminist families. More than anything, it is a warm, eye on the past in this dazzling dive into the funny and wry observation of the way THE BREEDING SEASON world of literary salons, allegorical tales and humans relate to one another. the subversive power of writing. Amanda Niehaus SPECIAL After delivering a stillborn child, Elise returns SPECIAL PRICE DAMASCUS to her Brisbane home with her partner, PRICE BRUNY Dan. In visceral, darkly poetic prose, this Christos Tsiolkas intensely atmospheric novel tracks the Heather Rose The author of The Slap and Barracuda emotional aftermath of their loss. Elise, a A novel of our times, Bruny is at once returns with his most ambitious novel to biologist, becomes convinced that her only gripping thriller and incisive social and date: a historical epic set in the decades solace is to be found through research and political commentary. Rose brings all the immediately following the death of Jesus isolation, while Dan throws himself into his acuteness she displayed in the award- Christ. Damascus centres on the life of the own work ghost-writing an autobiography winning The Museum of Modern Love (Allen apostle Paul, and recounts the establishment and growing influence of early Christianity Allen & Unwin PB for his reclusive artist uncle. As they both & Unwin PB $19.99) to this plot-driven $29.99 spiral in different directions, their grief builds novel set in a very near future where across the ancient world. The narrative to a devastating reckoning. Australian writer Chinese–Australian ties are ever closer. draws deeply on the gospels of the Bible, Amanda Niehaus has drawn plaudits from Astrid Coleman has escaped overseas from reimagining them as both indelibly familiar acclaimed authors such as Alice Sebold, a Tasmanian political dynasty, but is called and entirely foreign. Tsiolkas brings his Allen & Unwin characteristic grit and raw humanity to Krissy Kneen and Lidia Yuknavitch, and Allen & Unwin back from her work at the UN when a bomb WAS $32.99 brings down a half-constructed bridge PB Paul’s story, following him as he traverses deservedly so, as her fiction debut sits easily PB WAS $32.99 NOW $29.99 alongside these other writers’ works. The NOW $29.99 linking Bruny Island with the Tasmanian an ancient world that is as brutal as it is Breeding Season is an accomplished and mainland. Bruny raises questions about the beautiful. This is a powerful, wide-ranging evocative exploration of art and science, sex fragility and importance of democracy, and novel that explores masculinity, faith, and and death. the very real dangers of the current political the flaws and strengths of humanity. and environmental situation. But it’s also about such deeply personal matters as family THE DEATH OF JESUS ties, loyalty and compromise. FROM HERE ON, MONSTERS DECEMBER JM Coetzee RELEASE Elizabeth Bryer With The Death of Jesus, Nobel Prize– THE DROVER’S WIFE When antiquarian bookseller Cameron winner JM Coetzee concludes the surreal, Raybould is commissioned to appraise an fable-like trilogy he began with The Leah Purcell unusual rare book, she’s besieged by a series Childhood of Jesus and continued in The As a play, The Drover’s Wife was beloved of strange and troubling incidents. Something Schooldays of Jesus. This disconcerting and by audiences. Now, Leah Purcell has frightening seems to be taking place, or beguiling final instalment again transplants returned to the story, giving it a new life perhaps it already has. Author Elizabeth Bryer the refugee experience to a mythic, liminal in novel form. This novel (like the play) is is an award-winning translator of several setting. Ten-year-old David has endured a reimagining of Henry Lawson’s short books from Spanish to English and her displacement, migration and trauma, and story of the same name, telling the story of fiction debut is testament to her fascination $29.99 Picador PB Text HB has made a new life in an unknown city a lone woman living in the bush with her $29.99 with language: this is a story about words with his adoptive parents. Now he faces a small children. In the original, the woman and the power they contain. Throughout new challenge in the form of an inexplicable is confronted by a snake. But here, it's a the narrative, Bryer draws compelling illness that resists attempts at healing. Hamish Hamilton bleeding black man who appears at her parallels between Cameron’s world and Coetzee uses David’s experiences to explore PB $32.99 door. Purcell is already well known as an our own, offering thought-provoking new the meaning of illness, family, literature, accomplished actor and director, and with perspectives on current politics. Referencing animals and humanity. As he teases at the this novel she proves her writerly chops: the heady magical realism of South American limits of philosophy, theology and literature, her prose is electric. The Drover’s Wife is a literature, From Here On, Monsters is a he reaffirms his place as one of our most captivating, gritty and powerful exploration playful and intriguing literary mystery from a unique and profound writers. of race, gender and history. bold new Australian voice. Literary Award Winners AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE BOY SWALLOWS UNIVERSE CELESTIAL BODIES THE ERRATICS Tayari Jones Trent Dalton Jokha Al-Harthi Vicki Laveau-Harvie Penguin PB $19.99 4th Estate PB $19.99 Allen & Unwin PB $24.99 4th Estate PB $22.99 This elegantly written and Dalton’s extraordinarily This story of three Omani The 2019 Stella Prize was deeply affecting story of impressive debut novel was sisters set against the awarded to this powerful, family, love and injustice awarded the 2019 Book of backdrop of a society and darkly funny memoir of an won the 2019 Women’s the Year accolade at both country in transition won estranged daughter’s journey Prize for Fiction. the Australian Book Industry Al-Harthi the 2019 back into the emotional Awards and the Indie Book International Booker Prize. minefield and physical Awards. dangers of her family home. GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER NORMAL PEOPLE THE OVERSTORY TOO MUCH LIP Bernardine Evaristo Sally Rooney Richard Powers Melissa Lucashenko Hamish Hamilton HB $35 Faber PB $19.99 Vintage PB $19.99 UQP PB $29.95 Joint winner of the 2019 Often described as the first Powers’ masterful novel Australia’s premier literary Booker Prize (with Margaret great millennial novelist, Irish about nine strangers brought prize, the Miles Franklin Atwood’s The Testaments), writer Sally Rooney won the together by an unfolding Award, went to Lucashenko’s Evaristo’s dynamic novel is a 2019 Book of the Year at the natural catastrophe was gritty, darkly comic novel love story to Black Britain told British Book Awards for this, awarded the 2019 Pulitzer about a multi-generational through the stories of 12 very her second novel. Prize for Fiction. Indigenous family tackling different women. the legacy of trauma and dispossession. Australian Fiction 3 HERE UNTIL AUGUST SPECIAL MAYBE THE HORSE THE OLD LIE Josephine Rowe PRICE WILL TALK Claire G Coleman A masterclass in the short form, these 10 Elliot Perlman Earth is under invasion by the ruthless forces stories traverse vastly different settings – Desperate to pay his mortgage and appease of the enormous alien Conglomeration. from the Snowy Mountains to the Catskills his increasingly distant wife, father-of-two Their weapons are unthinkably powerful, to a freezing Montreal winter. Josephine Stephen Maserov unexpectedly winds up attacking not just humans but our home Rowe’s writing orbits around these stark working as a corporate lawyer.