AustLit

'How many loves do you actually get in a lifetime? Everyone knows by now that Magnolia Parks and BJ Ballentine are in the stars, but is that enough?

'Magnolia and BJ are reeling from a devastating loss as they try to plan what's been dubbed 'the wedding of the century'. As family tensions mount and their respective pasts begin catching up to them, they finally have to look the truth in the eye: Can they learn to trust and be with one another again, or will they die trying?' (Publication summary)

'Madurai, 1992. A young mother in a poor family, Janani is told she is useless if she can't produce a son - or worse, bears daughters. They let her keep her first baby girl, but the rest are taken away as soon as they are born - murdered before they have a chance to live. The fate of her children has never been in her hands. But Janani can't forget the daughters she was never allowed to love.

'Sydney, 2019. Nila has a secret, one she's been keeping from her parents for far too long. Before she can say anything, her grandfather in India falls ill and she agrees to join her parents on a trip to Madurai - the first in over ten years. Growing up in Australia, Nila knows very little about where she or her family came from, or who they left behind. What she's about to learn will change her forever...' (Publication summary) 

'IN THIS LIFE, EVERYTHING COMES AT A PRICE...

All 20-year-old Daisy Haites has ever wanted is a normal life, but it's just not on the cards for her.

;Raised by her older brother Julian since their parents were murdered, Daisy has never been able to escape the watchful gaze of her gang-lord brother. But Julian's line of work means that Daisy's life is... complicated.

'And things don't become any easier when she falls hard for the beautiful and emotionally unavailable Christian Hemmes, who also happens to be one of the few men in London who doesn't answer to Julian.

'Christian's life is no walk in the park, either, since he's in love with his best friend's girlfriend...

'He's happy enough to use Daisy to throw off the scent of his true affections - until she starts to infiltrate those too.

'As their romance blossoms into something neither were anticipating, Daisy, Christian, and Julian must come to terms with the fact that in this life everything comes at a price. As their relationships intersect and tangle, they all learn that sometimes life's most worthwhile pursuits can only be paid in blood.' (Publication summary) 

'HOW MANY LOVES DO YOU GET IN A LIFETIME? AND ARE MAGNOLIA AND BJ EACH OTHER'S?

'It's been nearly a year since everything happened between Magnolia Parks and BJ Ballentine on the steps of the Mandarin Oriental, and it seems like everything since then has changed.

'Magnolia has a life in New York now and BJ appears to have finally let go and moved on.

'But when they both wind up back to London and are thrust together once again, they find themselves asking their age-old question: how many loves do you actually get in a lifetime, and most importantly - are they each other's?' (Publication summary)

'She is a beautiful, affluent, self-involved and mildly neurotic London socialite. He is Britain's most photographed bad-boy lothario who broke her heart. But Magnolia Parks and BJ Ballentine are meant to be, and everyone knows it. They're in the stars... just suspended in a strange kind of love that looks like hurting each other a lot of the time: She dates other people to keep him at bay; he sleeps with other girls to get back at her for it. But at the end of their every sad endeavour to get over one another, it's still each other they crawl back to. But their dysfunction is catching up with them, pulling at their seams and fraying the world they've built; a world where neither has to ever let the other go completely. As the cracks start to show and secrets begin to surface, Magnolia and BJ are finally forced to face the formidable question they've been avoiding all their lives: how many loves do you really get in a lifetime?' (Publication summary)   

'Starting with Vernor Vinge's concept of the Technological Singularity (the moment when machines begin to evolve without human assistance or restraint), Broderick takes three people at the end of this century toward the technological/biological apocalypse, beginning with Abdel-Malik, a Lebanese-born judge. In 2004, Malik is murdered, reanimated about 70 years later, and now rules on the fate of humans in an era when the race has given control of its destiny to the Aleph, a godlike, continuously evolving AI. Amanda, a near-thirtysomething adolescent who plays a great violin, can hack into any communications system and was caught breaking into a mag-lev freighter terminal with her boyfriend Vik as part of a failed attempt to hitch a ride on these superfast underground trains. Malik confines her to her home, takes away her communications and Mall visitation privileges, but Amanda hacks through and, using robot bees, gets the attention of Mathewmark, a product of a severely isolated, kind of latter-day–Mennonite compound in which all technology is banned. Mathewmark agrees to help Amanda and Vik sneak down a mag-lev ventilator shaft inside the compound, but ends up almost dying when their plans go awry. Malik rules that Amanda must take care of Mathewmark, whose brain is now rebuilt of computer circuitry and has extraordinary abilities that lead them to discover the apocalyptic event the Aleph has planned to take everyone to the next evolutionary step.'

Source: Kirkus Reviews (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/damien-broderick/transcension/). (Sighted: 23/6/2014)

'Long before William Shakespeare, tales were told of the Dane Ameleth whose noble father was murdered by the uncle who swiftly weds new widow Gerutha. Must Ameleth repay this crime by killing his uncle? The White Abacus dares to reconfigure the best known version of the classic tale, Shakespeare's Hamlet, to create a futuristic revenge drama with an entirely different outcome. Telmah is an inventive genius. Ophelia is no sobbing suicide but rather the impressive Warrior Rose, who shockingly revises the fate of her lover.

'Maggie Roche is an out-of-work poet and single mother. Spied on by a cyborged rat, attacked, drugged into panic and rapture, seduced, drawn into conspiracy, she's flung four thousand years into her own future. In the alien world of the Ull–Upload Lifeform Lords who are human-machine hybrids of overwhelming power–she learns that she is history's first true time traveler, hunted by friend and foe to the end of time. The entire future of the cosmos will be reset by these terrifying events. The Judas Mandala introduced the terms "virtual reality" and "virtual matrix," anticipating Frank Tipler's influential Omega Point Theory, William Gibson's cyberpunk fiction, and The Matrix ... A new Afterword describes the strange publishing history of this ground-breaking novel, and includes the full text of an omitted chapter.'

Source: ABR.

'Sopwith Hammil might be the nation's top chat-show host but his peace of mind is shattered when a time traveling bureaucrat lands on his couch. To save his life and the human race (They're turning the Sun off!), Sopwith must find a wife inside three hours. Turns out it's not that easy, Soppy.

'Meanwhile, popular astrologer and certified lifesaver O'Flaherty Gribble, a favorite guest on Sopwith's show, has discovered the Callisto Effect and how to build striped holes. And in a future that makes Nineteen Eighty-Four look like Brave New World or vice versa, beautiful Hsia Shan-Yun is about to have her brain scrubbed for knitting one of those striped holes, with frightful consequences. But luckily, O'Flaherty finds himself seated on a plane next to God. Tighten your belt, it's that kind of novel.'

Source: Publisher's blurb (Gateway edition).

'Aboriginal anthropologist Alf Dean Djanyagirnji, with his autistic nephew Mouse, seek evidence that the Rainbow Serpent is a desert myth sprung from the ancient skeleton of a dinosaur. Instead, they find a gate that teleports them into a vault miles beneath sacred Uluruh, the huge eroded monolith once dubbed Ayers Rock by the white invaders. They are not alone. American and Russian scientists and military personnel have drilled into the Vault, and only Mouse's damaged brain can communicate with the Vault intelligence.

'Elsewhere, in California's Big Sur, former hippie physicist and student of the occult Dr. Bill DelFord is commissioned to explain an equally ancient ruin on the far side of the moon. A non-human, extraterrestrial intelligence? A long forgotten intelligent dinosaur species destroyed at the apex of their civilization by the cataclysmic asteroid impact 66 million years ago? Or something worse?

'This story, like so many stories, begins with a gift. The gift, like so many gifts, was a book...' So begins the essay by Robert Macfarlane that inspired this collection.

'In medical student August Seebeck's world, almost identical to ours, there are eleven months in a year. None of them is the month of August—until now, when the young orphan stumbles into the true, infinite universe, and becomes a Player in the Game of Worlds. And step by deranged step he meets his siblings: Avril, Decius, Jan, Jules, Maybelline, Septimus/Septima who is both male and female, Toby, the others. And outside his family, glorious, brilliant Lune, also a Player, is quickly his lover, with dreadful secrets of her own.

'These diverse warriors of the multiverse confront the terrible K-machines, who detest and slaughter humans ... but then are the Seebeck family really human? What are these silver symbols engraved into their flesh? What is the true nature of the unending, unfolding cosmos, a meta-reality built from ontological computation, Lune's doctoral specialty? And how can August slay the looming Jabberwock using only the Sun-blazing Vorpal implant in his hand? What final transformation awaits the multiverse at Yggdrasil Station, at the death and dawn of spacetime, where all the heroes die and live again? In this astounding helter-skelter two-part novel, the answers to such questions emerge along a twisting path that will not set you free until you sit with August at a great thirteen-sided table and learn his destiny, and perhaps your own.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Vakov Fukasawa used to be a Reaper: a bio-enhanced soldier fighting for the Harmony, against a brutal invading empire. He's still fighting now, on a different battlefield: taking on stormtech. To make him a perfect soldier, Harmony injected him with the DNA of an extinct alien race, altering his body chemistry and leaving him permanently addicted to adrenaline and aggression. But although they meant to create soldiers, at the same time Harmony created a new drug market that has millions hopelessly addicted to their own body chemistry.

'Vakov may have walked away from Harmony, but they still know where to find him, and his former Reaper colleagues are being murdered by someone, or something — and Vakov is appalled to learn his estranged brother is involved. Suddenly it's an investigation he can't turn down ... but the closer he comes to the truth, the more addicted to stormtech he becomes.And it's possible the war isn't over, after all ...'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'An exquisitely imagined fantasy novel about a girl who can see history with her touch. Set on the canals of Venice, from an award-winning author, this is a perfect book for fans of Frances Hardinge and Jennifer Bell for 9+ readers.

'Twelve-year-old Aurelia Bon can see what happened in a place by merely pressing her fingertips up against the walls. So when young boys start disappearing around an old palace, Aurelia must use her ability to find out what has happened, before the boys of Venice disappear forever...' (Publication summary)

'One street-boy's quest to reunite and make amends with his best friend told in an epic story that spans a city, a decade, and the divide of life and death itself. From the award-winning author of The Bone Sparrow.

'A boy awakens in the Afterlife, with a pocketful of vague memories, a key, a raven, and a mysterious Atlas to guide him as he sets out to piece together the mystery of his final moments ...

'Meanwhile on Earth, Twig is alone as a newly-made street kid after his dad goes missing. But when he meets Flea, a cheerful pickpocket, the pair become fast friends, better even than blood family itself. Together, Twig and Flea raise themselves on the crime-ridden streets, taking what they need and giving the rest to the even-poorer. Life is good, as long as they have each other. But the all-powerful Boss who rules the streets has other plans.

'Loyalty will be tested, and a cruel twist of fate will lead to an act of ultimate betrayal. But will it tear the friends apart ... forever?' (Publication summary)

'The river can take you home. But the river can also drag you under...

''It's something she learned years ago - the hard way - and that she knows she will never forget: even the sweetest fruit will fall and rot into the earth, eventually. No matter how deep you bury the pain, the bones of it will rise up to haunt you ... like the echoes of a summer's night, like the river flowing relentlessly on its course.

'Margot Sorrell didn't want to go home. She had spent all her adult life trying not to look behind. But a text from her sister Lucy brought her back to Somerset. 'I need you.'

'As Margot, Lucy and their eldest sister, Eve, reunite in the house they grew up in beside the river, the secrets they keep from each other, and from themselves, refuse to stay hidden. A wedding brings them together but long-simmering resentments threaten to tear the family apart. No one could imagine the way this gathering would change them all forever. And through the sorrow they are forced to confront, there is a chance that healing will also come. But only if the truth is told.' (Publication summary)

'If what they said was true, then the grotesque and the monstrous ran in her blood. It was imprinted within her very core, her DNA, a part of every cell in her body.

'Kat's children are both smart and well-adjusted. On the outside.

'Kat has always tried to treat Imogen and Jemima equally, but she struggles with one of her daughters more than the other.

'Because Imogen's birth mother is a serial killer. And Imogen doesn't know.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'A cache of unsent love letters from the 1950s is found in a suitcase on a remote island in this mysterious love story by top ten bestselling author, Kayte Nunn.

1951. Esther Durrant, a young mother, is committed to an isolated mental asylum by her husband. Run by a pioneering psychiatrist, the hospital is at first Esther's prison but soon becomes her refuge.

2018. Free-spirited marine scientist Rachel Parker embarks on a research posting in the Isles of Scilly, off the Cornish coast. When a violent storm forces her to take shelter on a far-flung island, she discovers a collection of hidden love letters. Captivated by their passion and tenderness, Rachel determines to track down the intended recipient.

Meanwhile, in London, Eve is helping her grandmother, a renowned mountaineer, write her memoirs. When she is contacted by Rachel, it sets in motion a chain of events that threatens to reveal secrets kept buried for more than sixty years.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.