| We Accept |
 |
|
 |
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
Set in mid-1970s India, A Fine Balance is a subtle and compelling narrative about four unlikely characters who come together in circumstances no one could have forseen soon after the government declares a 'State of Internal Emergency'. It is a breathtaking achievement: panoramic yet humane, intensely political yet rich with local detail; and, above all, compulsively readable.
More Information
$23.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Across the Nightingale Floor
by Lian Hearn
Hodder Headline (Australia)
Softcover
Samurai, secrets and the supernatural - Across the Nightingale Floor weaves together elements of both real and imagined to create an intriguing setting for an epic journey. The story of Takeo, the unwilling warrior, and Kaede, the reluctant bride, is more than enough to keep you reading way past your bedtime. An easy, but satisfying read with feisty, engaging characters.
More Information
$29.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
All Over Creation
by Ruth Ozeki
Viking
PB
Ruth Ozeki's previous novel My Year of Meats dealt with what is unsavoury about the beef industry. In All Over Creation, she turns to potatoes and the topic of genetic engineering in vegetables. You will look at french fries differently after reading this novel. A Japanese American prodigal daughter Yumi Fuller is returning home to the Idaho potato farm she ran away from twenty five years earlier. Her arrival sets the scene for many conflicts within the family and local community. Highly recommended for fans of books by Barbara Kingsolver.
More Information
$30.00 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
And The Rat Laughed
by Nava Semel
Hybrid Publishers
Through story, legend, poems, science fiction and diary entries, this unusual and gripping tale will carry you through darkness and light, hope and despair – and a unique exploration of the act of memory itself.
More Information
$29.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Angels
Marian Keyes
Marian Keyes' sixth novel is a truly captivating story about a marriage that's gone wrong and a sensible girl who suddenly just wants to let her hair down. Unlike the rest of her family, Maggie Walsh has always done everything right. Sensibly. By the book. Until the day she leaves her husband and runs away to Hollywood, that is. In LA the primping, preening and partying are non-stop and even the palm trees are skinny. Staying with her best friend, Emily, a struggling screenwriter, Maggie starts doing things she's never done before. Like wearing tights on her head, mixing with film stars - even pitching scripts to studios - and much, much more.
Including meeting the mysterious Troy, a man so non-stick he's known as Human Teflon. Follow Maggie on a journey of discovery, from suburbia to a suntan, taking in some heartache and lots of Martinis along the way, as she discovers what she really wants in life and why she really walked out on her marriage. . .
More Information
$19.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Any Human Heart
William Boyd
Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, and Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - is a rich tapestry of both. As a writer who finds inspiration in Paris and London, as a spy betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in '60s New York, Logan mixes with the men and women who shaped his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in our search for happiness. Here, then, is the story of a life lived to the full - and a journey deep into a very human heart.
More Information
$22.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
April Fool
by Yvonne Fein
PB
Crime fiction
Australian Jewish writer
Yvonne Fein, is an award winning playwright ('On Edge' in 1992), and author of both short fiction and non-fiction. She has edited the Melbourne Chronicle, and Generation, as well as two collections of memoirs by Holocaust survivors, one of which won the Banjo Award for Biography. She has taught in schools and has been a writer-in-residence.
Her novel, April Fool, is the first of the April Taub investigation novels, and introduces us to a seriously funny, wisecracking feisty young woman. April Taub is a Melbourne thirty-something rebel with a cause. A freelance journalist, she also has more than a passing interest in chasing Nazi war criminals. A moment of indiscretion sees her stumbling onto a nationwide conspiracy with potentially fatal consequences to herself and her organisation.
Full of witty snappy dialogue, April Fool is a great read.
More Information
$17.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Bee Season
by Myla Goldberg
PB
Myla Goldberg mixes Jewish family dynamics, adolescence, a national spelling bee and the writings of Rabbi Avraham Abulafia (the Kabbalist) into a compelling story about nine year old Eliza Naumann's quest for family status. Highly recommended for all reading groups as the themes of the novel speak to a psychology of mysticism and to family dynamics that transcend cultural boundaries.
More Information
$19.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Bel Canto
by Ann Patchett
PB
Ann Patchett is the Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2002. Bel Canto is an outstanding novel based on a true event in Peru. Latin terrorists storm an international gathering only to find that their intended target, the President, is not there. The suspense that follows is cleverly paced by Ann Patchett and her sense of emotional delicacy and irony provide some relief as she intregrates a musical theme with this dramatic story.
More Information
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Chopin's Funeral
Benita Eisler
Benita Eisler, author of the acclaimed biography Byron, offers a closely focused portrait of Chopin - the story of his last years, of his legendary affair with the novelist George Sand, and of nineteenth-century Parisian cultural life. Like his music, Chopin's life is heartbreaking. At twenty-one, he left embattled Warsaw for exile in Paris. After just two public concerts, he was a star of Parisian society, and an intimate of his great contemporaries, Schumann, Liszt and the painter Eugene Delacroix, who famously introduced him to George Sand and painted their double portrait. Ten years later, as Chopin lay destitute and dying of consumption in the arms of Sand's estranged daughter, revolution surged through the streets of Paris. Chopin's Funeral is an intimate close-up of the composer's last years - the story of the artist as exile, of a spectacular love affair, and of a nation on the cusp of the modern age. Artful and engaging, brilliantly compressed and atmospheric, it is a masterful interpretation of a great life.
More Information
$35.00 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Confessions of a Clay Man
by Igor Gelbach
Australian Jewish writer
Before migrating to Australia in 1989, Igor Gelbach lived for some twenty years in the Soviet republic of Georgia, in a Black Sea town founded by ancient Greek mariners. The decay of this picturesque resort, playground of the privileged and haunt of the local Mafia, forms the setting for this philosophical novel against the backdrop of the decline of the Soviet empire. The novel's main character, Bronhauser struggles to make sense in a Kafkaesque world. A richly textured tale with paths that lead off to local legends as well as Russian and Jewish folklore including a trip into the story of the Golem that gives the book its title. In 1994, Gelbach was nominated for the Russian Booker Prize. He now lives and writes in Melbourne.
More Information
$26.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
COSMOPOLIS
DE LILLO, DON
A mesmeric tour de force of character, stylistic brilliance, intelligence and wit. It's a stunningly eventful day in the life of Eric Packer, a multi-billionaire who owns a forty-eight-room apartment and a decommissioned nuclear bomber and who has recently married the heiress of a vast European fortune. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across the middle of Manhattan, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding through town, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Eric's bodyguards are worried that he is a target and, indeed, he is - although the danger, as it turns out, is not from protesters or political assassins but from an anonymous man who lives in an abandoned building.
More Information
$30.00 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Crabwalk
Gunter Grass
Gunter Grass's painful, moving new novel is based on the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the worst human tragedy in maritime history. In January 1945, the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German refugee ship, was sunk with the loss of 9,000 lives. Grass's narrator, Paul, is one of the few survivors, a middle-aged journalist who lives in Berlin. Born on a lifeboat that night, the defining moment of his mother's existence, Paul tries to piece together what happened, wishing their lives were less overshadowed by the past. For his teenage son, Konrad, who dabbles in the far-right, the Gustloff and its sinking embodies the denial of Germany's wartime agony.
More Information
$28.00 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Dancing With The Hurricane
by Leon Silver
published by Harper Collins Australia
It’s the 1950s, and thirteen year old Laibel Goldenstein and his family settle in the newly independent state of Israel. By day Laibel stalks the wild orange groves with his friends, by night he cavorts with his dashing Uncle Fred – former ballroom dancing champion and keeper of the family’s dark secrets . . .
Forty years later, Laibel Goldenstein has become Leon Gold and is a brash and successful businessman in Australia. But when he ends up at the hospital bed of his beloved uncle in intensive care, Leon is confronted with a past he’s long tried to repress.
While his uncle listens without really hearing and his girlfriend Rosa packs her bags ready to bolt, Leon careers back through time, recalling his family’s flight across four continents. Slowly he begins to understand why he is who he is.
DANCING WITH THE HURRICANE is fresh and vibrant, a story of loss, but also of moving forward and ‘coming to terms with one’s exile’. The author Leon Silver was born in Shanghai then came to Australia via Israel.
More Information
$27.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Easter Island
Jennifer Vanderbes
It is 1912. Elsa Pendleton, a young Englishwoman, is forced by circumstance into a marriage of convenience. Her one consolation is that she can join her husband on a unique expedition: to visit Easter Island and study its mysterious history. But as Elsa becomes bewitched by the island and engrossed in her work, she doesn't realise that her beloved sister Alice is caught up in desires of her own. Not, in their isolation, do the two sisters realise that Britain and Germany have declared war, and that the catastrophic effects will be felt even in their quiet corner of the South Pacific. Sixty years later American botanist Greer Faraday, recently widowed, arrives on the island. Troubled by unhappy memories, Greer wraps herself up in her work, rejecting the friendly approaches of her colleagues. But as the island gives up its secrets she is forced to confront some unwelcome truths of her own and her story becomes irresistibly entwined with Elsa's.
More Information
$29.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Embers
by Sandor Marai
PB
Embers is back in stock in a limited quantity. Originally published in Budapest in 1942, unknown to modern readers until last year, when it became an international bestseller, Embers is an extraordinary story of love and friendship, of fidelity, pride and betrayal. Gripping and unforgettable, it is a masterpiece.
More Information
$19.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
|
Family Matters
by Rohinton Mistry
This is the long awaited new novel from the twice Booker Prize shortlisted author whose previous novel was A Fine Balance. Written in a beautifully affectionate tone, Family Matters has richness and compassion in a story that crosses all cultural boundaries, a story of the stresses of growing up and growing old.
More Information
$29.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Family Matters
Rohinton Mistry
Nariman Vakeel, a seventy-nine-year-old Parsi widower, beset by Parkinson's disease and haunted by memories of the past, lives in a once-elegant apartment with his two middle-aged stepchildren. When his condition worsens he is forced to take up residence with Roxana, his own daughter, her husband, Yezad, and their two young sons. The effect of the new responsibility on Yezad, who is already besieged by financial worries, pushes him into a scheme of deception. This sets in motion a series of events - a great unravelling and a revelation of the family's love-torn past - that leads to the narrative's final outcome.
More Information
$23.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
|
Father Lands
by Emily Ballou
Out of Print - email us to contact the author
PB
Father Lands is another beautiful book, full of understated lyricism and moving, real characters within a work of fiction. It tells the story of Cherry Laurel, an eight year old who is faced with the Integrationist Policy of bussing, as well as the loss of her dad to Father Lands, a mythical place where errant fathers must surely end up. Father Lands is an incredible debut novel from a writer who has created an unforgettable cast of characters and a story that explores a whole range of issues with confidence and clarity.
More Information
$30.00 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Fragrant Harbour
John Lanchester
Fragrant Harbouris the story of four people whose intertwined lives span Asia's last seventy years. Tom Stewart leaves England just before it is hit by the Great Depression to seek his fortune, and finds it in running Hong Kong's best hotel. Sister Maria is a beautiful and uncompromising Chinese nun whom Stewart meets on the boat out from England; their friendship spans decades and changes both their lives. Dawn Stone is an English journalist who becomes the public face of money and power and big business. Matthew Ho is a young Chinese entrepreneur whose life has been shaped by painful choices made long before his birth, and who is now facing his own difficulties, and opportunities, in the twenty-first century. The novel's shape and scale, its emotional power and beauty, make it John Lancaster's finest book to date.
More Information
$22.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Frankie & Stankie
Barbara Trapido
Dinah and her sister Lisa are growing up in 1950s South Africa, where racial laws are tightening. Big sister Lisa is strong and sensible, while Dinah is weedy and arty. At school the sadistic Mrs Vaughan-Jones is providing instruction in mental arithmetic and racial prejudice. And then there's the puzzle of lunch break.'Would you rather have a native girl or a koelie make your sandwiches?' a classmate asks. But Dinah doesn't know the answer, because it's her dad who makes her sandwiches.
As the apparatus of repression rolls on, Dinah finds her own way, escaping into rewarding friendships. Then there's the minefield of boys and university - not least the Freshers' Reception Committee with its racist rugger choruses. Finally, there's marriage and voluntary exile in London.
As we follow Dinah's journey through childhood and adolescence, we enter into one of the darker passages of twentieth century history. Balancing darkness and light with marvellous dexterity, Barbara Trapido is at the top of her form with Frankie & Stankie.
More Information
$29.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Good Faith
Jane Smiley
Joe Stratford, who sells nice houses in a beautiful place, and whose not very amicable divorce is already over, is ready for his life to begin again. It is 1982, morning in America, and temptation is everywhere. And, as Marcus Burns (Joe's new friend from New York) says, the old rules are ready to be broken. Marcus should know: he's just quit his job with the tax man. But are his ideas about how to get rich - really rich via a local real estate development - too big and risky for Joe? And there's Felicity - the daughter of Joe's business partner. But, Joe wonders, is this winning, free-spirited (already married) woman really the one he's been waiting for?
More Information
$29.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Headlong: A Novel
by Susan Varga
'With a raw simplicity, Susan Varga describes the gradual merging of the inner landscape of grief with the life-giving wider world. An unforgettable work, anchored firmly in our times.' - Robert Dessaix-
Against the backdrop of the Howard Government’s Australia, a daughter tells the dramatic story of her elderly mother’s desire to die.
Vital octgenarian Julia Denes suddenly loses her husband Gabor and along with him, her will to live.
Her daughter Kati watches helplessly as this once energetic woman, who had survived the Holocaust and made a good life in Australia, spirals into depression and tries to take her life.
“When does common or garden depression slip into the clinical variety? How do you grasp that someone your thought you knew has slipped beyond the reach of love and reason”
Kati tries all avenues to try to ‘heal’ her mother but worn down, eventually decides the compassionate action is to assist her to end her life.
“Oh for religious conviction that would help me make a clear moral choice on this! Or if I could just believe in the absolute sanctity of human life”.
When their plan doesn’t work – and Kati demands her mother wait three months before they talk about trying again - the real trauma and pain begins.
Kati not only loses her mother in a devastating way but the resulting grief and guilt affects her her sanity and tests her most valued relationships with her lover Gill and overseas-based brother Robert.
The novel powerfullly examines the disruption of relationships, the way private worlds become intertwined with larger events and the struggle to reconnect with life after overwhelming tragedy.
Headlong is a mediation on the ways people deal with death and beaverment; - the “untidy cruelty of grief…the sheer grind of it”.
Headlong also asks the question: how do we deal with the notion that sometimes, “Life is not worth living”.
More Information
$29.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
|
Heaven's Edge
Romesh Gunesekera
Romesh Gunesekera's third novel is a modern odyssey: a gripping adventure and a moving love story written with clarity, subtlety and terrific emotional force.
More Information
$21.00 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
HENRY'S DAUGHTER
DETTMAN, JOY
Lori Smyth-Owen is balancing on the edge of adolescence but feeling years older. She has eleven brothers, nine living at home and the twins, who were stolen by Aunty Eva - which was lucky for them because there is never enough of anything to go around, except Mavis, LoriÕs mother, who is so overweight she can barely move. That doesnÕt stop her plotting to get those twins back. SheÕll do anything to get them home. From the best-selling author of Mallawindy ,Jacaranda Blue ,Goose Girl ,YesterdayÕs Dust and The Seventh Day , comes a story of love and rescue.
More Information
$30.00 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Holy Cow! An Indian Adventure
by Sarah Macdonald
PB
After backpacking her way around India, Sarah Macdonald decides she hates the country with a passion.
When a beggar reads her palm and insists she will one day return - and for love - she screams NEVER!
But twelve years later, the prophecy comes true. When the love of her life is posted to India, Sarah follows him to the most polluted city on earth, New Delhi.
Sarah Macdonald, originally at Triple J and now a broadcaster at Radio National, entertains us during her modern day pilgrimage as she learns to embrace a nation of many faiths and traditions.
More Information
$22.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
In the Blue House
by Meaghan Delahunt
Meaghan Delahunt's first novel unravels the passions and betrayals of Leon Trotsky's refuge years in Mexico where he meets Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The reader is also drawn into an evocative portrayal of Russian history in the first half of the twentieth century. In the Blue House is a great read for discussion by book clubs.
More Information
$21.00 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Into The Fire
by Miriam Walfish
Format: Hardcover | 6" x 9" | 264 pages
SKU: ITFH
The flames of war, unlike anything the world has ever witnessed, rage across Europe ... and Daniel Sheinfeld, the young son of hard-working immigrants, is pulled into the firestorm.
Forced to leave a heartbroken family ...
Forced to face a destiny he never could have imagined ...
Battling terrible hardship, loss and loneliness, Daniel is plunged into the flames. And there, in the fire, he finds redemption.
More Information
$34.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Just Between Friends
by Sara Wiederblank
Format: Hard Cover / 254 pages
SKU: 4883
Whether it's a walk down memory lane or a tentative peek into the future, this novel makes for a rich and rewarding read.
They were four friends and they had their lives all planned out, until the stream of life engulfs them each in a separate torrent, leading them in ways they never dreamed of.
Strong, well-drawn characters, a hard-hitting and realistic plot, and the gentle sensitivity and wisdom woven throughout this delicious novel provide an entertaining, page-turning experience.
This story echoes the universal hopes we all share, the delicate and complex threads of friendships that bind us together, and the events that conspire to keep us apart. How can it be that popular, pretty, sweet Nava is still single?
Shifra can't answer that question properly; she's struggling to keep her head above water as her marriage becomes mired in disillusionment and unmet expectations. Always the intellectual, Bracha begins to question where she's holding in life and what she's really achieved, while Chana Rivka waits longingly for the day when the cries of a child will fill her beautiful apartment.
Satisfying and enjoyable with just the right blend of light-heartedness and the trials and tribulations of real life.
More Information
$37.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
KIMBERLEY SUN
MORRISSEY, DI
The remote town of Broome, the desert and the Kimberley coast - Australia's last frontier and a land of ancient beauty - are the backdrop for Kimberley Sun , the sequel to Di Morrissey's international bestseller, Tears of The Moon . Lily Barton, now 53, is beautiful, adventurous and looking for a life change. Sami, her daughter, is driving alone through the outback to
finally, reluctantly, confront her family roots. Together they are swept into a world where myths and reality converge, as they find that everyone they meet has a story to tell. From Farouz, the son of an Afghan camel driver, to Bobby, the Chinese-Aboriginal man who is tangled up in the murder of a German tourist, to Biddy, the survivor from Captain Tyndall and OliviaÕs era . . . And who is the mysterious artist hiding in the desert?
All have a secret and a story to share as each finds their place under the Kimberley sun . . .
More Information
$18.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The crew of the surviving vessel consists of a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orangutan, a 450 pound Royal Bengal tiger and Pi - a 16 year old Indian boy. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary pieces of literary fiction of recent years.
More Information
$27.00 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Lost and Found
by Tzipporah Pollack
Format: Hard Cover / 291 pages
SKU: 4930
A young girl brutally separated from her parents and twin sister as World War Two approaches; a new lifestyle, a new identity.
And then comes the pain of rejection and loss as a child abandons the carefully constructed secular world her parents embraced and turns, instead, to Orthodox Judaism.
An elite French family, also struck by the same stinging slap as their son--the future doctor--rejects their lifestyle to join the ranks of chareidi society and learn in kollel.
As the memories clang like doors that never quite close, the characters in this absorbing, true-to-life novel search within themselves to resolve their past and make their future brightest. Surprises await at every turn.
More Information
$39.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
|
Milwaukee
by Bernice Rubens
The latest novel for Bernice Rubens fans. Once again, Bernice Rubens writes in a simple prose which delves deeply into the human psyche. Her previous novel, I Dreyfus was a bestseller at Sunflower Bookshop.
More Information
$21.00 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
 |
Mists of Time
by Chava Rosenberg
Format: Hard Cover / 341 pages
Master storyteller, Chava Rosenberg, weaves a story so real and so close that it draws the reader in to its very core.
A mother's soul departs this world just as her newborn infant's soul enters. How will this child grow up without the nurturing touch of a mother?
From the broken shards of tragedy to the strident cries of triumph and even joy, this novel, with its cast of expertly drawn, true-to-life characters, is poignant and satisfying--good to the last drop!
More Information
$43.95 Australian Dollars
[Currency Converter]
|
|
|
