Literature

ISBN: 9780241410912
Title: ASK AGAIN YES
Author: KEANE MARY BETH
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope, two New York cops, live next door to each other outside the city in the 1970s. What happens behind closed doors in both houses - the loneliness of Francis's wife, Lena, and the instability of Brian's wife, Anne - sets the stage for the explosive events to come. When their children, Kate and Peter, form an immediate attachment, so too does a violent event divide the families and the Stanhopes are forced to move away. The children reconnect as adults and, as they fall in love, are forced to reckon with their shared past.

Imprint: MICHAEL JOSEPH
RRP: $32.99

ISBN: 9781786896209
Title: ASK THE DUST
Author: FANTE JOHN
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

One of the great novels of LA, a semi-autobiographical story of a struggling writer.

Arturo Bandini arrives in Los Angeles with big dreams. But the reality he finds is a city gripped by poverty.

When he makes a small fortune from the publication of a short story, he reinvents himself, indulging in expensive clothes, fine food and downtown strip clubs. But Bandini's delusions take a worrying turn when he is drawn into a relationship with Camilla Lopez, a beautiful but troubled young woman who will be responsible for his greatest downfall.

Ask the Dust is an unforgettable novel about outsiders looking in on a town built on celluloid dreams.

Imprint: CANONGATE
RRP: $22.99

ISBN: 9781783783625
Title: ASYMMETRY
Author: HALLIDAY LISA
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

In New York, Alice, a young editor, begins an affair with Ezra Blazer, a world-famous, much older writer.

At Heathrow airport, Amar, an Iraqi-American economist en route to Kurdistan, finds himself detained for the weekend. What draws these characters together, and how do their lives connect?

Playful and inventive, tender and humane, Asymmetry is a novel which illuminates the power plays and imbalances of contemporary life - between young and old, West and Middle East, fairness and injustice, talent and luck, and the personal and the political. It introduces a major new literary talent, writing about the world today with astonishing versatility, acuity and daring.

Imprint: GRANTA
RRP: $19.99

ISBN: 9780099429791
Title: ATONEMENT
Author: MCEWAN IAN
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

On the hottest day of the summer of 1934, thirteen- year-old Briony Tallis sees her sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country hosue. Watching her is Robbie Turner, her childhood friend who, like Cecilia, has recently come down from Cambridge. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed for ever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not even imagined at its start, and will have become victims of the younger girl's imagination. Briony will have witnessed mysteries, and committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone.

Imprint: VINTAGE
RRP: $19.99

ISBN: 9781925773552
Title: ATTRACTION
Author: PORTER RUBY
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

The present reckons with the past in Attraction. Porter's unnamed narrator is on a road trip between Auckland, Whangara and Levin with her friends Ashi and Ilana, haunted by the spectre of her emotionally abusive ex-boyfriend, her complicated family background and New Zealand's colonial history. Jealousies intensify as the young women work out who they are and who they might become.

Imprint: TEXT PUBLISHING
RRP: $29.99

ISBN: 9780099445081
Title: AUGUSTUS
Author: WILLIAMS JOHN
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

After the brutal murder of his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, Octavian, a shy and scholarly youth of nineteen, suddenly finds himself heir to the vast power of Rome. He is destined, despite vicious power struggles, bloody wars and family strife, to transform his realm and become the greatest ruler the western world had ever seen.

Imprint: Vintage Classics
RRP: $14.99

ISBN: 9780143791027
Title: AUNTS STORY
Author: WHITE PATRICK
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

From Australia's first Nobel Prize-winning author. With the death of her mother, middle-aged Theodora Goodman contemplates the desert of her life. Freed from the trammels of convention, she leaves Australia for a European tour and becomes involved with the residents of a small French hotel. But creating other people's lives, even in love and pity, can lead to madness. Her ability to reconcile joy and sorrow is an unbearable torture to her. On the journey home, Theodora finds there is little to choose between the reality of illusion and the illusion of reality. She looks for peace, even if it is beyond the borders of insanity.

Imprint: Penguin Books
RRP: $19.99

ISBN: 9780241951804
Title: AUSTERLITZ
Author: SEBALD W G
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

'A superb meditation on time, loss and retrieval. A new kind of writing, combining fiction, memoir, travelogue, philosophy and much else besides . . . greatness in literature is still possible' John Banville, Irish Times, Books of the year

In 1939, five-year-old Jacques Austerlitz is sent to England on a Kindertransport and placed with foster parents. This childless couple promptly erase from the boy all knowledge of his identity and he grows up ignorant of his past. Later in life, after a career as an architectural historian, Austerlitz - having avoided all clues that might point to his origin - finds the past returning to haunt him and he is forced to explore what happened fifty years before.

'A work of obvious genius and an extraordinary writer way above most of his contemporaries' Literary Review

'Mesmeric, haunting and heartbreakingly tragic. Simply no other writer is writing or thinking on the same level as Sebald. A profound, alluring masterwork of singular genius' Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

'An extraordinary, mesmeric story and one of the most haunting books of the year'

Imprint: Penguin Books
RRP: $24.99

ISBN: 9781925603972
Title: AUSTRALIA DAY
Author: CHENG MELANIE
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Australia Day is a collection of stories by debut author Melanie Cheng. The people she writes about are young, old, rich, poor, married, widowed, Chinese, Lebanese, Christian, Muslim. What they have in common-no matter where they come from-is the desire we all share to feel that we belong. The stories explore universal themes of love, loss, family and identity, while at the same time asking crucial questions about the possibility of human connection in a globalised world.

Melanie Cheng is an important new voice, offering a fresh perspective on contemporary Australia. Her effortless, unpretentious realism balances an insider’s sensitivity and understanding with an outsider’s clear-eyed objectivity, showing us a version of ourselves richer and more multifaceted than anything we’ve seen before.

* Awarded the 2018 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction, Melanie Cheng's Australia Day paints a vivid and absorbing panorama of contemporary Australia

Imprint: Text Publishing
RRP: $22.99

ISBN: 9780241973318
Title: AUTUMN
Author: SMITH ALI
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Autumn 2016

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. And the UK is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer. Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever.

Ali Smith's new novel is a meditation on a world filling up with borders, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means.

From Shakespearian jeu d'esprit, via Keatsian melancholy and the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop Art, this first in a quartet of novels casts an eye over our own time, asking who we are, where we are, right now. Here is time, ever-changing, ever cyclical. Here comes Autumn.

Imprint: Penguin Books
RRP: $22.99

ISBN: 9781784703264
Title: AUTUMN : (Seasons Quartet 1)
Author: KNAUSGAARD KARL OVE
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: November 2019 New Release

The Sunday Times bestseller from literary phenomenon Karl Ove Knausgaard, a love letter about the world written by a father to his unborn daughter

Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter. He adds one short piece each day, describing the material and natural world - from twilight to the migration of birds, from Van Gogh to forgiveness - with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark.

With artwork by Vanessa Baird

Imprint: RANDOM HOUSE
RRP: $22.99

ISBN: 9780241968635
Title: AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH
Author: MARQUEZ GABRIEL GARCIA
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

As the citizens of an unnamed Caribbean nation creep through dusty corridors in search of their tyrannical leader, they cannot comprehend that the frail and withered man lying dead on the floor can be the self-styled General of the Universe.

Imprint: PENGUIN BOOKS
RRP: $22.99