Literature

ISBN: 9780857057945
Title: ARCHIPELAGO OF ANOTHER LIFE
Author: MAKINE ANDREI
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: August 2020 New Release

On the far eastern borders of the Soviet Union, in the sunset of Stalin's reign, soldiers are training for a war that could end all wars, for in the atomic age man has sown the seeds of his own destruction.

Among them is Pavel Gartsev, a reservist. Orphaned, scarred by the last great war and unlucky in love, he is an instant victim for the apparatchiks and ambitious careerists who thrive within the Red Army's ranks.

Assigned to a search party composed of regulars and reservists, charged with the recapture of an escaped prisoner from a nearby gulag, Gartsev finds himself one of an unlikely quintet of cynics, sadists and heroes, embarked on a challenging manhunt through the Siberian taiga.

But the fugitive, capable, cunning and evidently at home in the depths of these vast forests, proves no easy prey. As the pursuit goes on, and the pursuers are struck by a shattering discovery, Gartsev confronts both the worst within himself and the tantalising prospect of another, totally different life.

Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan

Imprint: HACHETTE
RRP: $22.99

ISBN: 9780241417911
Title: ARIA
Author: HOZAR NAZANINE
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

In Iran, 1953, a driver named Behrouz discovers an abandoned baby in an alleyway. When he adopts her, naming her Aria, he has no idea how profoundly this fiery, blue-eyed orphan will shape his future.

As she grows, Aria is torn between the three women fated to mother her- the wife of Behrouz, who beats her; the wealthy widow Fereshteh, who offers her refuge but cannot offer her love, and the impoverished Mehri, whose secrets will shatter everything Aria thought she knew about her life.

Meanwhile, the winds of change are stirring in Tehran. Rumours are spreading of a passionate religious exile in Paris called Khomeini, who seems to offer a new future for the country. In the midst of this tumult, Aria falls in love with an Armenian boy caught on the wrong side of the revolution. And before long she will be swept up in an uprising which will change the destiny of the land - and its people - forever.

Imprint: Viking Books
RRP: $32.99

ISBN: 9780571350926
Title: ARLINGTON PARK
Author: CUSK RACHEL
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Arlington Park is an ordinary English suburb. Over the course of a single day, the novel moves from one household to another, revealing its characters: Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; Solly, about to give birth to her fourth child; Maisie, struggling to accept provincial life; and Christine, the optimist and host of a dinner part where the neighbours come together.

Imprint: Faber and Faber
RRP: $19.99

ISBN: 9780241959572
Title: ARTFUL
Author: SMITH ALI
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: BACK IN STOCK SOON

Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, this title is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. It explores form, style, life, love, death, mortality, immortality and what art and writing can mean.

Imprint: Penguin Books
RRP: $19.99

ISBN: 9780099479314
Title: AS I LAY DYING
Author: FAULKNER WILLIAM
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

The death and burial of Addie Bundren is told by members of her family, as they cart the coffin to Jefferson, Mississippi, to bury her among her people. And as the intense desires, fears and rivalries of the family are revealed in the vernacular of the Deep South, Faulkner presents a portrait of extraordinary power - as epic as the Old Testament, as American as Huckleberry Finn.


Imprint: Vintage Classics
RRP: $14.99

ISBN: 9781405943130
Title: ASK AGAIN YES
Author: KEANE MARY BETH
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: March 2020 New Release

Gillam, upstate New York- a town of ordinary, big-lawned suburban houses. The Gleesons have recently moved there and soon welcome the Stanhopes as their new neighbours. Lonely Lena Gleeson wants a friend but Anne Stanhope - cold, elegant, unstable - wants to be left alone.

It's left to their children - Lena's youngest, Kate, and Anne's only child, Peter - to find their way to one another. To form a friendship whose resilience and love will be almost broken by the fault line dividing both families, and by the terrible tragedy that will engulf them all. A tragedy whose true origins only become clear many years later . . .

A story of love and redemption, faith and forgiveness, Ask Again, Yes reveals the way childhood memories change when viewed from the distance of adulthood - villains lose their menace, and those who appeared innocent seem less so. A story of how, if we're lucky, the violence lurking beneath everyday life can be vanquished by the power of love.

Imprint: Penguin Books
RRP: $19.99

ISBN: 9781922330178
Title: AT NIGHTS END
Author: BARAM NIR
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: October 2020 New Release

A writer wakes up in a hotel room in an unfamiliar city. His clothes are muddy; he doesn't know how long he's been lying in bed. He came to participate in a literary festival that is long over-why is he still there? When he attempts to reconstruct his lost days, he learns that he told people at the festival that his best friend had died.

Except his friend is still alive.

So begins At Night's End, the story of a profound friendship that begins in childhood and follows the intertwining paths of two men. The protagonist, Yonatan, stays on in Mexico City, reluctant to return to his wife and infant son back home in Tel Aviv. Convinced that his closest friend, Yoel, is going to die, he struggles to preserve his sanity. But what makes Yonatan avoid his family? And why is he so sure he cannot save his childhood friend?

At Night's End is a compassionate and personal novel of a life lived in literature, and a life lived after loss. Above all, it is a universal story of family and love; of friendship and understanding; and of the power of memory and imagination.

Imprint: Text Publishing
RRP: $32.99

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: 9781419742989
Title: AU REVOIR TRISTESSE : Lessons in Happiness from French Literature
Author: GROSKOP VIV
Format: HARD COVER
Publishing status: August 2020 New Release

Like many people the world over, Viv Groskop wishes she was a little more French. A writer, comedian, and journalist, Groskop studied the language obsessively starting at age 11, and spent every vacation in France, desperate to escape her Englishness and to have some French chic rub off on her. In Au Revoir, Tristesse, Groskop mixes literary history and memoir to explore how the classics of French literature can infuse our lives with joie de vivre and teach us how to say goodbye to sadness. From the frothy hedonism of Colette and the wit of Cyrano de Bergerac to the intoxicating universe of Marguerite Duras and the heady passions of Les Liaisons dangereuses, this is a love letter to great French writers. With chapters on Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Honore de Balzac, Albert Camus, and of course Francoise Sagan, this is a delectable read for book lovers everywhere.

Imprint: ABRAMS
RRP: $35.00

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: $19.99

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