AustLit

''In an age driven by desire, what happens when you want two different things?

'Set in the pristine, precarious world of MoMA, The Modern is a brilliantly wry and insightful debut about art, sexuality, commitment and whether being on the right path can lead to the wrong place.

'Things seem to be working out for Sophia in New York: having come from Australia to be at the centre of modernity, she’s working at the Museum of Modern Art, living in a great apartment with a boyfriend interviewing for Ivy League teaching positions. They’re smart, serious, dine in the right restaurants and have (a little unexpectedly) become engaged just before he leaves to hike the Appalachian Trail.

'Alone in the city, Sophia begins to wonder what it means to be married – to be defined, publicly – in the 21st century. Can you be true to yourself and someone else? In a bridal shop she meets Cara, a young artist struggling to get over her ex-girlfriend, and the two begin a connection that leads Sophia to question the nature of her relationships, her career and the consequences of being modern.

'Both playful and profound, inhabiting the gap between what we feel about ourselves and how we behave, Anna Kate Blair’s debut novel is a sparklingly insightful queer exploration of desire, art and her generation’s place in the world. It announces an exceptional new literary voice.' (Publication summary) 

'TWO MISSING WOMEN. ONE WITNESS. SO MANY LIES . . . The brand-new thriller by the number-one bestselling and award-winning master of crime 

'Twenty years ago, Cyrus Haven's family was murdered. Only he and his brother survived. Cyrus because he hid. Elias because he was the killer.

'Now Elias is being released from a secure psychiatric hospital and Cyrus, a forensic psychologist, must decide if he can forgive the man who destroyed his childhood.

'As he prepares for the homecoming, Cyrus is called to a crime scene in Nottingham. A man is dead and his daughter, Maya, is missing. Then a second woman is abducted . . . The only witness is Evie Cormac, a troubled teenager with an incredible gift: she can tell when you are lying.

'Both missing women have dark secrets that Cyrus must unravel to find them - and he and Evie know better than anybody how the past can come back to haunt you . . .

'This breathtaking new thriller from the #1 bestselling author will keep you guessing until the very end.'  (Publication summary)

'The Australia Director at Human Rights Watch shares her experiences defending human rights – from human trafficking in Nepal to the 'drug war' in the Philippines to treatment of detainees in Papua New Guinea and in Australia – offering an extremely involving personal account of how far we’ve come, and how far we’ve got to go.

'Growing up in Perth, Elaine Pearson always dreamt of the wider world. Her British father and Singaporean-Chinese mother meant that her family extended beyond our shores, but it wasn’t until later in life that she fully understood how her professional calling might have been influenced by personal history: she learned that her beloved maternal grandmother had been sold to an opera troupe as a child to save the family from starvation.

'As soon as she could, Elaine followed her interest in women’s rights and people-trafficking, interviewing sex-workers and victims of trafficking on the streets of Bangkok and Amsterdam’s red light district. Her experiences in Nepal and Nigeria profoundly shaped her understanding of how governments and NGOs need to protect the rights of victims, as well as how poverty, corruption and war drive trafficking in the first place.

'Elaine’s story takes us on a panoramic survey of human rights across the world – into the UN committee rooms of New York and Geneva, as well as to the front-lines of Sri Lanka’s search for those who disappeared in the country’s civil war, examining death squad killings on the Philippines island of Mindanao and the detention of asylum seekers in Papua New Guinea. And her work on the appalling treatment of prisoners, many of whom are Aboriginal, vividly demonstrates that human rights abuses are something that happens at home as well as out in that wider world.

'In exploring human rights abuses and governments’ failure to address them, Chasing Wrongs and Rights sometimes shows humanity at its worst. Just as often, though, we see people at their best – compassionate, resilient, determined. Deeply informative and inspiring, Elaine Pearson’s story will leave you understanding how much needs to change, and how individuals can make a difference.'  (Publication summary)

A bold collection of stories about sex that leaves you guessing who wrote what.

'Bestselling novelists Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan present an elegant, international anthology of erotica that explores the diverse spectrum of desire, written by winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, PEN Awards, the Women's Prize for Fiction, Edgar Award, and more. There are stories of sexual obsession and sexual love, of domination and submission. There's revenge sex, unrequited sex, funny sex, tortured sex, fairy tale sex, and even sex in the afterlife.

'While the authors are listed in alphabetical order at the beginning of the book, none of the stories are attributed, providing readers with a glimpse into an uninhibited landscape of sexuality as explored by twenty-seven of today's finest authors.' (Publication summary)

They say it takes 28 Questions to fall in love. Then what?

‘Reader, imagine yielding to someone with a power so strong she has the ability to slice time. Before. Her. After.’ 

'When first-year music student Amalia stumbles into her Oxford college bar, she has no idea that everything is about to change. Seated across from her is Alex, a velvety-voiced fellow Australian with eyes the colour of her native sky. They strike up a friendship that is immediate - its intensity both thrilling and terrifying. 

'As the days and weeks go by, they spend more and more time together: philosophising, hypothesising, questioning everything. There is nothing they cannot talk about, except the one thing that matters most. Dare they risk a romantic entanglement if it threatens this most perfect of friendships?

'Set across four years and five cities, and suffused with music, literature, art, dance, sex, and the exquisite pain and pleasure of first love, 28 Questions is a passionate and unforgettable first novel about love in all its guises, growing up, and figuring out who you are along the way.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'He thinks the truth will set her free. She knows it will kill them. A heart-stopping psychological thriller from the Number One bestselling author of THE SECRETS SHE KEEPS and THE OTHER WIFE

'She has secrets. Six years ago, Evie Cormac was found hiding in a secret room in the aftermath of a brutal murder. But nobody has ever discovered her real name or where she came from, because everybody who tries ends up dead.

'He needs answers. Forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven believes the truth will set Evie free. Ignoring her warnings, he begins to dig into her past, only to disturb a hornet's nest of corrupt and powerful people, who have been waiting to find Evie - the final witness they have been searching for. Unbeknownst to him, Cyrus is leading them straight to Evie. The truth will not set her free. It will get them killed. ' 

(Publication summary)

'A riveting, suspenseful, and exuberant novel from the bestselling, Man Booker Prize–winning author of The White Tiger and Selection Day about a young illegal immigrant who must decide whether to report crucial information about a murder—and thereby risk deportation.

'Danny—formerly Dhananjaya Rajaratnam—is an illegal immigrant in Sydney, Australia, denied refugee status after he fled from Sri Lanka. Working as a cleaner, living out of a grocery storeroom, for three years he’s been trying to create a new identity for himself. And now, with his beloved vegan girlfriend, Sonja, with his hidden accent and highlights in his hair, he is as close as he has ever come to living a normal life.

'But then one morning, Danny learns a female client of his has been murdered. The deed was done with a knife, at a creek he’d been to with her before; and a jacket was left at the scene, which he believes belongs to another of his clients—a doctor with whom Danny knows the woman was having an affair. Suddenly Danny is confronted with a choice: Come forward with his knowledge about the crime and risk being deported? Or say nothing, and let justice go undone? Over the course of this day, evaluating the weight of his past, his dreams for the future, and the unpredictable, often absurd reality of living invisibly and undocumented, he must wrestle with his conscience and decide if a person without rights still has responsibilities.

'Propulsive, insightful, and full of Aravind Adiga’s signature wit and magic, Amnesty is both a timeless moral struggle and a universal story with particular urgency today.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The Arsonist takes readers inside the hunt for a fire-lighter. After Black Saturday, a February 2009 day marked by 47 degree heat and firestorms, arson squad detectives arrived at a plantation on the edge of a 26,000-hectare burn site. Eleven people had just been killed and hundreds made homeless. Here, in the Latrobe Valley, where Victoria’s electricity is generated, and the rates of unemployment, crime and domestic abuse are the highest in the state, more than thirty people were known to police as firebugs. But the detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn’t know.

'The Arsonist tells a remarkable detective story, as the police close in on someone they believe to be a cunning offender; and a puzzling psychological story, as defence lawyers seek to understand the motives of a man who, they claimed, was a naïf that had accidentally dropped a cigarette.

'It is the story not only of this fire - how it happened, the people who died, the aftermath for the community - but of fire in this country. What it has done, what it has meant, what it might yet do. Bushfire is one of Australia’s deepest anxieties, never more so than when deliberately lit. Arson, wrote Henry Lawson, expresses a malice ‘terrifying to those who have seen what it is capable of. You never know when you are safe.‘

'As she did in The Tall Man, Chloe Hooper takes us to a part of the country seldom explored, and reveals something buried but essential in our national psyche. The bush, summertime, a smouldering cigarette - none of these will feel the same again.'  (Publication summary)

'In this spellbinding and poignant historical novel--perfect for fans of All the Light We Cannot See and The Flamethrowers--a Swedish glassmaker and a fiercely independent Australian journalist are thrown together amidst the turmoil of the 1960s and the dawning of a new modern era.

'1965: As the United States becomes further embroiled in the Vietnam War, the ripple effects are far-reaching--even to the other side of the world. In Australia, a national military draft has been announced and Pearl Keogh, a headstrong and ambitious newspaper reporter, has put her job in jeopardy to become involved in the anti-war movement. Desperate to locate her two runaway brothers before they're called to serve, Pearl is also hiding a secret shame--the guilt she feels for not doing more for her younger siblings after their mother's untimely death.

'Newly arrived from Sweden, Axel Lindquist is set to work as a sculptor on the besieged Sydney Opera House. After a childhood in Europe, where the shadow of WWII loomed large, he seeks to reinvent himself in this utterly foreign landscape, and finds artistic inspiration--and salvation--in the monument to modernity that is being constructed on Sydney's Harbor. But as the nation hurtles towards yet another war, Jørn Utzon, the Opera House's controversial architect, is nowhere to be found--and Axel fears that the past he has tried to outrun may be catching up with him.

'As the seas of change swirl around them, Pearl and Axel's lives orbit each other and collide in this sweeping novel of art and culture, love and destiny"--'(Publication summary)

'Manjunath Kumar is fourteen. He knows he is good at cricket - if not as good as his elder brother Radha. He knows that he fears and resents his domineering and cricket-obsessed father, admires his brilliantly talented sibling and is fascinated by the world of CSI and by curious and interesting scientific facts. But there are many things, about himself and about the world, that he doesn't know . . . Sometimes it seems as though everyone around him has a clear idea of who Manju should be, except Manju himself.

When Manju begins to get to know Radha's great rival, a boy as privileged and confident as Manju is not, everything in Manju's world begins to change and he is faced with decisions that will challenge both his sense of self and of the world around him . . .' (Publisher's description)

'Liese Campbell has an engagement for the weekend: to stay with Alexander Colquhoun, the well-mannered heir of a pastoral dynasty, at his property in western Victoria. Liese, an English architect in flight from the financial crisis, now works at her uncle's real-estate business in Melbourne. Alexander has been looking for a place in the city. The luxury apartments Liese shows him have become sets for a relationship that satisfies their fantasies - and helps pay her debts. It's a game. Both players understand the rules. Or so she thinks.

'Across the ancient landscape they drive at dusk to his grand decaying mansion. Here Liese senses a change in Alexander, and realises a different game has begun.

'This gripping, provocative new novel by one of Australia's finest writers is a psychological thriller for the modern age, one which explores the snares of money and love, and the dark side of erotic imagination. A trap has been set, but how and why? And for whom?' (From the publisher's website.)

'This is a story of right and wrong, and how sometimes they look the same ...

'1926. Tom Sherbourne is a young lighthouse keeper on a remote island off Western Australia. The only inhabitants of Janus Rock, he and his wife Isabel live a quiet life, cocooned from the rest of the world.

'One April morning a boat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a crying infant - and the path of the couple's lives hits an unthinkable crossroads.

'Only years later do they discover the devastating consequences of the decision they made that day - as the baby's real story unfolds...' (From the publisher's website.)

'"Because Stanley came into my life in 2001 and Sophie in 2004, this is a tale, tangentially, about Manhattan in those first confounding years of the new millennium. Years when our lives were a rhubarb of noisy emotion: a devil's chorus of fear, blatting rage, birring anxiety, tweedling incredulity, roupy sorrow."

'Stanley and Sophie is a book that woofs. Ostensibly an animal book, it's about two beloved border terriers in New York City and two monkeys in Bali. It is also a book about terrorism, about grieving, about finding one's way through sadness, and about remaking a life.' (Libraries Australia)

'The Scandal of the Season is the story of the real-life seduction of the beautiful, clever Arabella Fermor by the charming, enigmatic nobleman Robert Petre, seventh Baron of Ingatestone. Arabella knows that other girls have been ruined by risking an affair like the one she dares to contemplate. The object of her desire, Robert Petre, is also flirting with a Jacobite plot against Queen Anne, and he knows that if his part in the conspiracy is found out he will be hanged.

'A true story, covered up in its day because it threatened to cause a sensation, this was the tale that gave rise to Alexander Pope's bestselling poem The Rape of the Lock, the era's most celebrated satirical entertainment. Watching them all with a beady eye, and taking notes and his part in the story, is an outsider, a cripple, destined to become the genius of his age - the poet Alexander Pope himself. He comes to London from the country, determined to become famous. He knows that if he fails, he will be left destitute. But can he find a story for his next poem powerful enough to make his reputation? Some people take risks because they think they'll beat the odds. Some take risks because they think they're lucky. Some because they love danger. And some do it because they're desperate. This is a story about risk.' (Publisher's blurb)

Set against a backdrop of the Holocaust, Awake in the Dark was written while Nayman was living in Mexico. Her fiction uses mid-twentieth century settings and psychological detail in a study of the self and the effect of the Holocaust on individuals and families.

Source: Shira Nayman, website, www.shiranayman (sighted 19/11/2007)