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New titles for October 2020
All Our Shimmering Skies – Trent Dalton
Darwin, 1942, and as Japanese bombs rain down, motherless Molly Hook, the gravedigger's daughter, is looking to the skies and running for her life. Inside a duffel bag she carries a stone heart, alongside a map to lead her to Longcoat Bob, the deep-country sorcerer who she believes put a curse on her family. By her side are the most unlikely travelling companions: Greta, a razor-tongued actress, and Yukio, a fallen Japanese fighter pilot. The treasure lies before them, but close behind them trails the dark. And above them, always, are the shimmering skies.
A story about gifts that fall from the sky, curses we dig from the earth and the secrets we bury inside ourselves, All Our Shimmering Skies is an odyssey of true love and grave danger, of darkness and light, of bones and blue skies. It is a love letter to Australia and an ode to the art of looking up – a buoyant, beautiful and magical novel, abrim with warmth, wit and wonder.
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
The Book of Two Ways – Jodi Picoult
Dawn Edelstein knows everything there is to know about dying. She specialises in helping her clients make peace with the end of their lives. But as she's flying home from her latest case, she is forced to confront her own mortality for the first time.
Instead of seeing her brilliant quantum physicist husband and their beloved daughter flash before her eyes in what she assumes are her last moments, only one face is shockingly clear: Wyatt Armstrong.
Safely on the ground, Dawn now faces a desperate decision. Should she return to Boston, her family and the life she knows, or journey back to an Egyptian archaeological site she left over a decade earlier, reconnect with Wyatt, and finally finish her abandoned magnum opus, The Book of Two Ways?
As the story unfolds, Dawn must confront the questions she's never truly answered: What does a life well-lived look like? When we depart this earth, what do we leave behind of ourselves? And who would you be if you hadn't turned out to be the person you are right now?
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
Why Visit America – Matthew Baker
Whatever the neighbours insisted would be worth keeping a body for, he always responded that he would still prefer to live as data.
A young man breaks the news to his family that he is going to transition from an analogue body to a digital existence. A young woman abducts a child – her own – from a government-run childcare facility.
The citizens of Plainfield, Texas, have had it with the United States. So they decide to secede, rename themselves America in memory of their former country, and set themselves up to receive tourists from their closest neighbour: America.
The stories in Matthew Baker's collection portray a world within touching distance of our own. This is an America riven by dilemmas confronting so many of us – from old age to consumerism, drugs to internet culture – turned on its head by one of the most darkly innovative and defiantly strange voices of the moment.
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
Killing Time – Jimmy Barnes
Tales of adventure, misadventure, love and loss - this collection of non-fiction short stories from the Australian rock legend turned writer is vintage Jimmy.
Outrageous, witty, warm and wise, Killing Time shares more than forty yarns reflecting an epic life – from an encounter with a soul legend in Memphis, a night in a haunted studio in upstate New York, and a doomed haircut in Thailand to a madcap misunderstanding in a Japanese ski resort, a family feud on a remote coral atoll, and an all-too-revealing appearance for a Sydney charity.
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
Mantel Pieces – Hilary Mantel
A collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel
In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades, tells the story of what happened next.
Her subjects range far and wide: Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case, John Osborne, the Virgin Mary as well as the pop icon Madonna, a brilliant examination of Helen Duncan, Britain’s last witch. There are essays about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole, which display the astonishing insight into the Tudor mind we are familiar with from the bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy. Her famous lecture, ‘Royal Bodies’, which caused a media frenzy, explores the place of royal women in society and our imagination. Here too are some of her LRB diaries, including her first meeting with her stepfather and a confrontation with a circus strongman.
Constantly illuminating, always penetrating and often very funny, interleaved with letters and other ephemera gathered from the archive, Mantel Pieces is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers.
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
Golden Daze – Sean Doherty
Australia's best surf writer brings to life the wild, bold, brave story of Australian surfing from 1915 to the present through the stories of Surfing Australia's Hall of Fame surfers and contemporary surfing legends.
Golden Daze tells the story of Australian surfing one year at a time through the lives of our greatest surfers. The book takes a deep dive into a significant year of their surfing lives. Years when they won, years when they lost. Years where their surfing and their surfboards changed the game. Grommet years when the days never ended. Years where they surfed up the coast, down the coast and globetrotted into the great unknown.
Years when both surfing and society changed. Years when they made high art, experienced spiritual awakenings or were just tubed out of their minds. Even years where they survived the embrace of a great white shark. Part journal, part biography, part surf culture memoir, in Golden Daze, world renowned surf writer and bestselling author Sean Doherty gives a fascinating insight into what makes Australian surfing tick.
Surfing Australia's Hall of Fame recognises the nation's most influential and iconic surfers. Every year the current members of the Hall of Fame vote to induct a new surfer. You will find all of these surfers, from Peter Troy to Tyler Wright in Golden Daze.
Information provided by Angus and Robertson
Hollowpox: The Hunt for Morrigan Crow – Jessica Townsend
Strange things are happening in Nevermoor...
Morrigan Crow faces her most dangerous challenge yet in her latest Wundrous adventure. The highly anticipated third book in the award-winning Nevermoor series from one of Australia's best selling and most loved authors.
Morrigan Crow and her friends have survived their first year as proud scholars of the elite Wundrous Society, helped bring down the nefarious Ghastly Market, and proven themselves loyal to Unit 919. Now Morrigan faces a new, exciting challenge: to master the mysterious Wretched Arts of the Accomplished Wundersmith, and control the power that threatens to consume her.
But a strange illness has taken hold of Nevermoor, turning its peaceable Wunimals into mindless, vicious unnimals on the hunt. As victims of the Hollowpox multiply, panic spreads.
And with the city she loves in a state of fear, Morrigan quickly realises it is up to her to find a cure for the Hollowpox, even if it will put her - and the rest of Nevermoor - in more danger than ever before . . .
Information provided by Angus and Robertson