What's new on the shelves?
New titles for September 2019
Good Girl Bad Girl by Michael Robotham
One needs saving. The other needs justice.
The girl with no past.
Six years ago, Evie Cormac was discovered, filthy and half-starved, hiding in a secret room in the aftermath of a shocking crime. Now approaching adulthood, Evie is damaged, self-destructive and has never revealed her true identity.
The boy who survived.
Forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven, a man haunted by his own past, is investigating the death of champion figure-skater Jodie Sheehan. When Cyrus is called upon to assess Evie, she threatens to disrupt the case and destroy his ordered life. Because Evie has a unique and dangerous gift - she knows when someone is lying. And nobody is telling the truth.
Good Girl, Bad Girl is an unnerving psychological thriller from one of the greatest crime writers of today, Michael Robotham, bestselling author of The Other Wife and The Secrets She Keeps.
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
Taking Tom Murray Home by Tim Slee
The winner of the inaugural Banjo Prize, Taking Tom Murray Home is a funny, moving, bittersweet Australian story of fires, families and the restorative power of community.
Bankrupt dairy farmer Tom Murray decides he'd rather sell off his herd and burn down his own house than hand them over to the bank. But something goes tragically wrong, and Tom dies in the blaze. His wife, Dawn, doesn't want him to have died for nothing and decides to hold a funeral procession for Tom as a protest, driving 350 kilometres from Yardley in country Victoria to bury him in Melbourne where he was born. To make a bigger impact she agrees with some neighbours to put his coffin on a horse and cart and take it slow - real slow.
But on the night of their departure, someone burns down the local bank. And as the motley funeral procession passes through Victoria, there are more mysterious arson attacks. Dawn has five days to get to Melbourne. Five days, five more towns, and a state ready to explode in flames...
Told with a laconic, deadpan wit, Taking Tom Murray Home is a timely, thought-provoking, heart-warming, quintessentially Australian story like no other. It's a novel about grief, pain, anger and loss, yes, but it's also about hope - and how community, friends and love trump pain and anger, every time.
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle by Sophie Green
The author of treasured Australian bestseller, The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club, returns with a new novel perfect for your book club
It's the summer of 1982. The Man From Snowy River is a box office hit and Paul Hogan is on the TV.
In a seaside suburb of NSW, housewife Theresa Howard takes up swimming. She wants to get fit; she also wants a few precious minutes to herself. So at sunrise each day she strikes out past the waves.
From the same beach, the widowed Marie swims. With her husband gone, bathing is the one constant in her new life.
After finding herself in a desperate situation, 25-year-old Leanne only has herself to rely on. She became a nurse to help others, even as she resists help herself.
Elaine has recently moved from England. Far from home without her adult sons, her closest friend is a gin bottle.
In the waters of Shelly Bay, these four women find each other. They will survive shark sightings, bluebottle stings and heartbreak; they will laugh so hard they swallow water, and they will plunge their tears into the ocean's salt. They will find solace and companionship in their friendship circle, and learn that love takes many forms.
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
A Wunch of Bankers by Daniel Ziffer
For Dan Ziffer and his Australia-wide audience, it was a complicated, galling, and gasp-inducing year at the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry.
It wasn't just its exhaustive rounds of hearings around the country - Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin, and Sydney - on topics from farming finance to financial planning. It wasn't even the long list of scandals exposed to a horrified nation - charging fees to dead people, blatant conflicts of interest, and taking $1 billion from customers in fees that banks were never entitled to.
What made it so fascinating, so heart-breaking, and so enraging was the procession of faces through the witness box, and the team of counsel gazing into the dark heart of banking.
Tearful victims, blank-faced executives, hapless regulators, and a couple of utter charlatans all had their day in court, watched by an audience of millions, and revealing - in their stories - the material to justify re-shaping the multi-trillion dollar financial services industry that forms a pillar of Australian life.
A Wunch of Bankers covers not just the big shocks, but the small moments - lost in the flurry of daily reporting - that reveal how companies have used the law, limp enforcement, and basic human behaviour to take advantage of customers.
Is there a phrase that judges how much life-insurance spruikers in call centres can terrify you about your impending death - and the grief-stricken ruins of an estate you'll leave for your bereaved family - while still being legal? Yes, there is.
Was there a meeting in which a bank's executives ignored a warning of "Extreme" from its chief risk officer, to embark on an illegal scheme that accrued $3.6 billion in funds? There was.
Mixed among the testimony are snippets from life on the road as the World's Oldest Debuting TV Reporter - not just driving five hours one-way to talk to a man who almost blew his brains out over a bank nabbing his $22 million estate, but explaining how journalism can only ever give you a glimpse inside complex issues.
In A Wunch of Bankers, Dan Ziffer bring out the colour and grit of the royal commission's proceedings, and explores broader issues raised by the testimony. A mixture of analysis, reportage, and observations, it is densely researched and compellingly written.
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels by Adam Nicolson and Tom Hammick
Brimming with poetry, art, and nature writing--Wordsworth and Coleridge as you've never seen them before
June 1797 to September 1798 is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and "Kubla Khan," as well as his unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, and William Wordsworth's revolutionary songs in Lyrical Ballads along with "Tintern Abbey," Wordsworth's paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding.
In The Making of Poetry, Adam Nicolson embeds himself in the reality of this unique moment, exploring the idea that these poems came from this particular place and time, and that only by experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, at night and at dawn, in sunlit reverie and moonlit walks, can the genesis of the poetry start to be understood.
The poetry Wordsworth and Coleridge made was not from settled conclusions but from the adventure on which they embarked, thinking of poetry as a challenge to all received ideas, stripping away the dead matter, looking to shed consciousness and so change the world. What emerges is a portrait of these great figures seen not as literary monuments but as young men, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but still in urgent search of the paths toward it.
The artist Tom Hammick accompanied Nicolson for much of the year, making woodcuts from the fallen timber in the park at Alfoxden where the Wordsworths lived. Interspersed throughout the book, his images bridge the centuries, depicting lives at the source of our modern sensibility: a psychic landscape of doubt and possibility, full of beauty and thick with desire for a kind of connectedness that seems permanently at hand and yet always out of reach.
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
The Jones Family Food Roster by Alison Jones
An uplifting memoir about a mother's journey with cancer, the solace of community and the power of food to bring people together.
When Alison, a mother of five school aged children, is diagnosed with a rare and incurable cancer she is initially overwhelmed. As a busy working mother she agonises about her future and the effect her treatment regime will have on her family.
Then, one of Alison's friends sets up a roster and a home-cooked meal is brought to the Jones family each day. Family favourites and time-honoured recipes- casseroles, soups and traditional Jewish food are cooked with love to nurture and heal. As Alison and her family negotiate her first year with cancer the daily meals become the constant in their lives, bringing them together around the dinner table each evening.
Determined not to let cancer define her, and supported by her community, Alison navigates intensive treatment and discovers she can do more than she ever thought possible. When her son is also tragically diagnosed with cancer she is there to support him.
Warm, honest and engaging, and including some recipes that sustained Alison and her family, The Jones Family Food Roster will touch your heart and inspire you to reach out to your community.
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
The 117-Storey Treehouse by Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton
Andy and Terry's treehouse now has 13 new storeys, including a tiny-horse level a pyjama-party room, an Underpants Museum, a photo-bombing booth, a waiting room, a Door of Doom, a circus, a giant-robot-fighting arena, a traffic school, a water-ski park filled with flesh-eating piranhas and a treehouse visitor centre with a 24-hour information desk, a penguin-powered flying treehouse tour bus and a gift shop.
Well, what are you waiting for? Come on up!
Information provided by Angus and Robertson