Issue #204 August 2006
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Issue #204 August 2006 www.abbeys.com.au [email protected] New from Palgrave THE 2006 BOOKS ALIVE GREAT READ GUIDES The International Who's Who 50 Books So Good... 70th edition 2,366pp Hb $848.00 Everyone Will Want to Read Them The essential reference source of the world's leading men Plus a Free Book from Bestselling and women. Providing hard-to-find biographical details Author, Monica McInerney for over 20,000 of the world's most prominent and Despite the many entertainment influential personalities, this outstanding reference work choices out there, the humble book is records the lives and achievements of men and women still one of the best ways to chill out from almost every profession and activity - from heads of and enjoy time alone. Books stimulate state to sporting greats. your mind and imagination, and are an Urban Structure Matters important part of our personal, social and cultural development. This is Peter NAESS 344pp Hb $143.00 especially true for children, which is Going beyond previous investigations into urban land use and travel, Nass why there is a new guide for Children’s presents new research from Denmark on residential location and travel to show books this year – it’s never too early to how and why urban spatial structures affect people's travel behaviour. learn to love reading! Whatever your Medicinal Plants of Asia and the Pacific age or favourite genre, there’s Christophe WIART 336pp Hb $340.00 something for everyone. Describing more than 300 compounds, this book discusses Purchase any book listed in either of every important class of natural products, while these guides during August and highlighting cutting-edge research and recent receive a free copy of Odd One Out, a developments. new novel by Monica McInerney, commissioned exclusively for Books The Europa World Year Book 2006 Alive. Only available while stocks last. 47th edition 4,928pp 2 vols Hb $1,628.00 This book provides detailed country surveys containing the Odd One Out latest analytical, statistical and directory data available for Monica McINERNEY over 250 countries and territories Free with the purchase of any title from the free 2006 Books Alive Great Read Guides. A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography Sylvie needed to take a big step into the William SMITH 2,391pp Hb $867.00 unknown…so her brother gave her a This dictionary provides detailed coverage of all the important countries, regions, push. On the verge of turning 30, Sylvie towns, cities and geographical features that occur in Greek and Roman is back living in the family home in literature, including the sacred scriptures. The work is both historical and Sydney, working for her mother and geographical, giving an account of the political histories of countries and cities sisters – and stuck in a rut. Then her and an attempt is made to trace the histories of the major buildings. brother Sebastian steps in with a rescue plan. He offers her a room in his Melbourne apartment on one condition: she has to follow his instructions – ‘treasure hunt’ style – and explore the city. Within days, Sylvie is A History of the English Language discovering things like never before. She’s also getting to know a Richard HOGG & David DENISON (eds) 495pp Hb $250.00 very lovely man. That’s when Sebastian reveals one final In this authoritative volume, a team of international challenge… experts cover the entire recorded history of the English language, outlining its development over 15 centuries. With an emphasis on more recent periods, every key How to Spend $50 Billion stage in the history of the language is covered, with full to Make the World a Better Place accounts of standardisation, names, the distribution of Bjørn LOMBORG (ed) 208pp Pb $25.95 English in Britain and North America, and its global This abridged version of the highly acclaimed Global Crises, spread. New historical surveys of the crucial aspects of Global Solutions (Hb $59.95) provides a serious yet accessible the language (sounds, word-structure, grammar and springboard for debate and discussion on the world's most vocabulary) are presented, and historical changes that serious problems, and what we can do to solve them. In a world have affected English are treated as a continuing fraught with problems and challenges, we need to gauge how to process, helping to explain the shape of the language achieve the greatest good with our money. This unique book today. Comprehensive and fully up-to-date, this volume provides a rich set of dialogues examining ten of the most serious will be indispensable to all advanced students, scholars challenges facing the world today: climate change, the spread of and teachers in this prominent field. communicable diseases, conflicts and arms proliferation, access Buy A History of the English Language to education, financial instability, governance and corruption, by 1 October and receive a free copy of malnutrition and hunger, migration, sanitation and access to clean water, and subsidies and trade barriers. The Cambridge Guide to English Usage (valued at $79.95) while stocks last. Fiction The Madonnas of Leningrad Tuvalu Debra DEAN 240pp Pb $28.00 Andrew O’CONNOR 348pp Pb $22.95 In this extraordinary first novel, the siege of Noah is living a half-life in a Tokyo hostel. Barely in Leningrad by German troops in WWII is echoed by his 20s, he has always felt like an outsider, so the destructive siege against the mind and Tokyo and his dead-end English teaching job and memory of an elderly Russian woman, Marina, his absent girlfriend are a good excuse to not who was a guide at Leningrad’s famous connect with anyone or anything. Then Mami Hermitage Museum. In late autumn 1941, as the Kaketa crashes into his life and suddenly he can’t Luftwaffe roared over and around Leningrad, she pretend to be uninterested in how the world works, and her colleagues were set the task of taking the especially for her. Feelings of isolation and thousands of priceless paintings, sculptures and uncertainty are caught perfectly in this novel of objets d’art out of the grand galleries of the former alienation, a worthy winner of the 2005 Vogel Tsarist Palace and storing them safely away from Prize. due August Lindy the German bombardment and the seemingly inevitable invasion. The Turing’s Delirium German assault threatened to destroy a large part of Europe’s artistic history. If Leningrad fell to the Germans, everything that was not destroyed Edmundo PAZ SOLDAN 288pp Tp $30.00 would be looted and given to the Nazis. Marina, whose own parents had The town of Rio Fugitivo is on the verge of a social revolution, a war waged disappeared during Stalin’s 1930s purges of intellectuals, clings to her hope electronically, where computer viruses are the weapons and hackers the of becoming an art historian herself through her job at the Hermitage. The revolutionaries. This Bolivian thriller follows Kandinsky (the leader of a group novel expertly shifts between Marina’s experiences at the Hermitage during of computer hackers who oppose the government and big corporations), the siege of Leningrad and her current existence as a very old lady in Albert (the founder of the government’s code-breaking unit, The Black America whose mind has begun to fray. Chamber) and Miguel, the Black Chamber’s most famous agent, who fears he works for the wrong side. It’s an edgy, fast-paced story about personal Death of a Whaler responsibility and complicity in a world defined by the ever-increasing gulfs Nerida NEWTON 312pp Pb $22.95 between the global and the local, government and society, the virtual and the Byron Bay, 1962. On the second last day before real. Who could resist? due August Cara the whaling station is closed down for good, The Shifting Fog Flinch, the young spotter, is involved in a terrible accident. Over a decade later, Flinch has Kate MORTON 480pp Tp $29.95 become a recluse, unable to move on from that Summer 1924: on the eve of a glittering Society fatal moment. The Bay, too, seems stalled in its party, by the lake of a grand English country house, bloody past, the land and the ocean on which it a young poet takes his life. The only witnesses - was founded now barren and unyielding. It is sisters Hannah and Emmeline Hartford - will never only after crossing paths with Karma, a girl living speak to each other again. Winter 1999: Grace in one of the hinterland’s first hippie communes, Bradley, 98, one-time housemaid of Riverton that Flinch gradually and reluctantly embarks Manor, is visited by a young director making a film upon a path towards healing, coming to terms about the poet’s suicide. Ghosts awaken and with his past, present and future. memories long consigned to the dark reaches of Grace’s mind begin to sneak back through the The Secret Life of E Robert Pendleton cracks. A shocking secret threatens to emerge: Michael COLLINS 320pp Tp $29.95 something history has forgotten, but Grace never could. Set as the war- It’s been over a decade since Professor Pendleton published his brilliant shattered Edwardian summer surrenders to the decadent 20s, this is a thrilling short story debut and his hopes for a dazzling literary career lie in tatters. mystery and a compelling love story. His simmering despair boils over with the arrival on his university campus of A Long, Long Way his one-time friend, now nemesis, the bestselling author and king of the coffee-table book, Allen Horowitz. For Pendleton, death seems to be the Sebastian BARRY 292pp Pb $22.95 only remaining option, but his attempt to kill himself is thwarted by the One of the most vivid and realised characters of intervention of Adi Wiltshire, a graduate student battling her own demons of recent fiction, Willie Dunne is the innocent hero of failure.