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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.