Beat the chill with a book this winter

New fiction

The girl on the train Paula Hawkins Rachel catches the same commuter train every morning. She knows it will wait at the same signal each time, overlooking a row of back gardens. She’s even started to feel like she knows the people who live in one of the houses. ‘Jess and Jason’, she calls them. Their life - as she sees it - is perfect. If only Rachel could be that happy. All the light we cannot see The strays Anthony Doerr A god in ruins Emily Bitto A blind girl’s father builds a perfect Kate Atkinson Lily reflects on her childhood friendship miniature of their Paris neighbourhood A novel about war and the shadow it with Eva, daughter of an infamous so his daughter can memorise it by avant-garde painter and his glamorous touch and navigate her way home. casts even over generations who have wife, and her enchantment with their When the Nazis invade, father and never known it. Teddy - would-be poet, home, their garden, their friends and daughter flee with a dangerous RAF bomber pilot, husband and father their expanding creative circle of strays. secret. A German orphan’s knack for – navigates the perils and progress of Now faced with the prospect of reunion engineering wins him a place at a the 20th century, but for all he endures with Eva after a long separation, a brutal Nazi military academy. Their in battle, his greatest challenge will be gallery opening invitation brings back lives intersect during the bombing of to face living in a future he never sharp and painful memories. Saint-Malo. expected to have. New fiction Life or death Michael Robotham Audie Palmer has spent a decade in prison for an armed robbery in which four people died. Seven million dollars has never been recovered and everybody believes that Audie knows where the it is. Beaten, stabbed and threatened almost daily by inmates and guards, all desperate to know the secret, Audie suddenly vanishes the day before he is due to be released. The A place called Winter Station eleven hunt for Audie, and the money, is on. Patrick Gale Emily St John Mandel Forced by scandal to abandon his wife One snowy night a famous dies onstage Merciless gods and child, Harry emigrates to the newly during a production of King Lear. Hours Christos Tsiolkas colonised Canadian prairies, a world later, a deadly virus touches down. The Love, sex, death, family, friendship, away from the suburbs of Edwardian world will never be the same again. betrayal, tenderness, brutality, England. Isolated in a seemingly harsh Twenty years later, Kristen roams sacrifice and revelation ... an landscape, under the threat of war, the wasteland of what remains with incendiary collection of stories from madness and an evil man of undeniable the Travelling Symphony, performing the bestselling author of The Slap and magnetism, Harry discovers an inner Shakespeare. But then her newly Barracuda. strength and capacity for love beyond hopeful world is threatened. anything he has ever known. The truth and other lies Foreign soil Sascha Arango Maxine Beneba Clarke Famous bestselling author, loving In a dilapidated block of flats in husband, generous friend - Henry ’s western suburbs, a young Hayden is a pleasant person to have black mother is working on a collection around. Or so it seems. But when of stories, called Foreign Soil. Stories his mistress, who is also his editor, about racial identity, despair, suffering, becomes pregnant, his carefully and hope. She keeps writing, the constructed life threatens to fall apart. rejection letters keep arriving… So Henry works out an ingenious plan.

Before you see the film... Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn is set in 1950s Ireland where opportunities for young girls are scarce. Eilis Lacey emigrates to New York, leaving behind her family and her home. Just as she takes tentative steps towards friendship, and perhaps something more, Eilis receives news which sends her back to Ireland, where she is confronted by a terrible dilemma - a devastating choice between duty and one great love. In ’s novel, Breath, two thrillseeking and barely adolescent boys fall into the enigmatic thrall of veteran big-wave surfer. It is an extraordinary evocation of an adolescence spent resisting complacency, testing one’s limits against nature, fand discovering just how far one breath will take you. Dark Places is the story of Libby Day, who was seven when her mother and two sisters were murdered. She survived—and famously testified that her brother, Ben, was the killer. Twenty five years later, while trying to profit from her tragic history, Libby begins to question what exactly she saw—or didn’t see—the night of the tragedy. Into thin air is John Krakauer’s chilling account of the 1996 Mt Everest disaster where eight climbers lost their lives and many others were stranded by a ferocious snowstorm. A harrowing tale of the perils of mountaineering, a story of bad luck and worse judgment and of heartbreaking heroism. Young adult books for grown ups Picture books Confessions: the Paris Theodore Boone: Kid lawyer mysteries John Grisham James Patterson Only 13 but already so much a lawyer After investigating multiple homicides in his own mind that he keeps an and her family’s decades-old skeletons “office” at home and dispenses legal in the closet, Tandy Angel is finally advice to classmates and even adults, reunited with her lost love in Paris. But Theo finds himself in over his head as he grows increasingly distant, Tandy when he’s told in strict confidence is confronted with disturbing questions that there’s an eyewitness to a high- about him, as well as what really profile local murder. What to do? Aviary Wonders Inc. happened to her long-dead sister. spring catalog and instruction manual: renewing the world’s A court of thorns and roses bird supply since 2031 Sarah J. Maas Kate Samworth Feyre’s survival rests upon her ability In a future when deforestation and to hunt and kill - the forest where she other environmental factors have lives is a cold, bleak place in the long caused many bird species to go winter months. Dragged to a magical extinct, businessman Alfred Wallis kingdom for the murder of a faerie, offers a catalog of parts for creating Feyre discovers that her captor, his face replacements, from hand-carved beaks obscured by a jewelled mask, is hiding to Italian-leather feet. far more than his piercing green eyes would suggest.

Magonia Razorhurst Maria Dahvana Headley Justine Larbalestier Aza Ray is drowning in thin air. Since Kelpie and Dymphna are accustomed to she was a baby, Aza has suffered from the mean streets of 1930s Sydney, but a mysterious lung disease. When she this is a day that will test their courage, glimpses a ship in the sky, her family their loyalty, and their ability to survive blame her medication. But Aza can both the ill-intentions of the living and hear someone on the ship calling her the ever-presence of the dead. name. Aza is lost to our world. And found, by another. Magonia. Little man Enormous SMALLNESS: the Elizabeth Mann story of E. E. Cummings Red queen Matthew Burgess and Albert is short — very short — and he Victoria Aveyard hates it. He wears too-large hand-me- Kris di Giacomo In a world divided by blood, Reds are down clothes from his bigger brothers, A celebration of the life of E.E. commoners, ruled by a Silver elite and his very best friend has moved Cummings, affectionately tracing how with god-like superpowers. Mare is a away from their small Caribbean Island. Edward Estlin became E. E., what poverty-stricken Red, scraping by as Life seems so unfair. But an encounter brought him to Manhattan from his a thief until a twist of fate throws her with a troupe of stiltwalkers, dancing native Cambridge, and how elephants in front of the Silver court. Here she and leaping on spindly eight-foot high (and trees, and birds) became his lifelong creative companions in the discovers a deadly ability of her own. wooden stilts, leads Albert to discover circus of his imagination. a place where he can belong. Biography & Non fiction The tall man Chloe Hooper Palm Island, the tropical paradise where one morning Cameron Doomadgee swore at a policeman and forty minutes later lay dead in a watch-house cell. This is the story of that policeman, Christopher Hurley, who chose to work in some of the toughest and wildest Hidden like Anne Frank places in Australia, and of the struggle to bring him to trial. Marcel Prins & Peter Steenhuis Fourteen first-person accounts share The Muslims are coming! what it was really like to go into hiding during World War II. Some were only Arun Kundnani three when they were hidden; some An investigation into the costs of were teenagers. Some hid with the ‘war on terror’ for those who neighbours or relatives, while many have been its targets, including the were with complete strangers. All know thousands of innocent Muslims who the pain of losing their homes, their have been infiltrated, entrapped, families, even their own names. and surveilled in the search for the radicalised terrorist among us. The cold war John Lewis Gaddis The challenge of things The most good you can do In 1945 war came to an end. But a new Peter Singer A.C. Grayling terror was only just beginning. Gaddis Grayling’s recent writings on the explains why America and the Soviet Singer presents a challenging new world in a time of war and conflict. In Union became locked in a deadly movement in the search for an ethical describing and exposing the dark side stalemate, and how close we came to life. Effective altruism involves doing of things, he also explores ways out of nuclear catastrophe. It is a story of the most good possible. It requires the habits and prejudices of mind that crisis talks and subterfuge, tyrants and a rigorously unsentimental view would otherwise trap us forever in the power struggles - and of ordinary of charitable giving, urging that a deadly impasses of conflicts of all kinds. people changing the course of history. substantial proportion of our money or time, should be donated to the organisations that will do the most good with those resources, rather than Collections to those that tug the heartstrings. In The best American nonrequired reading 2014, you can take a field trip to the moon, infiltrate a cult, spend sever days in Syria, and drop in on the enigmatic desert community known as Night Vale, among other possibilities. Something special, something rare contains outstanding short fiction by the Other great reads country’s finest female writers. Including tales of love, family, heartbreak and When the night comes joy, it showcases the strength and diversity of writing by Australian women. Favel Parrett Strange objects covered with fur is the annual anthology from the University of Technology, Sydney writing program. Burial rites Hannah Kent Love poems and death threats breaks new ground for Indigenous Australian writing and adds to Samuel Wagan Watson’s reputation as one of our most All that I am exciting poets. Anna Funder The narrow road to the deep north Richard Flanagan Elizabeth is missing Emma Healey Mr Wigg Inga Simpson The signature of all things Elizabeth Gilbert