Literature

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: 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: 9780702260353
Title: AUNTS HOUSE
Author: STEAD ELIZABETH
Format: TRADE PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Sydney, 1942.
Recently orphaned, Angel Martin moves into a boarding house populated by an assortment of eccentric and colourful characters. She's befriended by the gregarious Winifred Varnham - a vision in exotic fabrics - and the numerically gifted Barnaby Grange. But not everyone is kind and her scrimping landlady, Missus Potts, is only the beginning of Angel's troubles. Angel refuses to accept her fate. She is determined to forge a sense of belonging despite rejection from her two maiden aunts, Clara and Elsa, who blame Angel's mother for their brother's death. Her Sunday visits to the aunts' house by the Bay expand her world in ways she couldn't have imagined.

Elizabeth Stead brings her classic subversive wit and personal insight to this nostalgic portrait of wartime Sydney. In Angel Martin, she has created a singular and irrepressible character.

A true original.

Imprint: University of Queensland Press
RRP: $29.95

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: 9780140276343
Title: AUTOGRAPH MAN
Author: SMITH ZADIE
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

Alex-Li Tandem sells autographs. A small blip in a huge worldwide network of desire, it is his business to hunt for names on paper, collect them, sell them,occasionally fake them, and all to give the people what they want- a little piece of Fame.

The Autograph Man is a deeply funny, existential tour around the hollow things of modernity - celebrity, cinema, and the ugly triumph of symbol over experience. Pushing against the tide of his generation, Alex-Li is on his way to finding enlightenment, otherwise known as some part of himself that cannot be signed, celebrated or sold.

'The novel is a pleasure from the first page to the last.' David Sexton, Evening Standard

Imprint: PENGUIN BOOKS
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: 9781925704051
Title: AXIOMATIC - Stella Prize Shortlist 2019
Author: TUMARKIN MARIA
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

The past shapes the present – they teach us that in schools and universities. (Shapes? Infiltrates, more like; imbues, infuses.) This past cannot be visited like an ageing aunt. It doesn’t live in little zoo enclosures. Half the time, this past is nothing less than the beating heart of the present. So, how to speak of the searing, unpindownable power that the past – ours, our family’s, our culture’s – wields in the present?

Stories are not enough, even though they are essential. And books about history, books of psychology – the best of them take us closer, but still not close enough.

Maria Tumarkin's Axiomatic is a boundary-shifting fusion of thinking, storytelling, reportage and meditation. It takes as its starting point five axioms:

** ‘Give Me a Child Before the Age of Seven and I’ll Give You the Woman’
** ‘History Repeats Itself…’
** ‘Those Who Forget the Past are Condemned to Repeat It’
** ‘You Can’t Enter The Same River Twice’
** ‘Time Heals All Wounds’

These beliefs—or intuitions—about the role the past plays in our present are often evoked as if they are timeless and self-evident truths. It is precisely because they are neither, yet still we are persuaded by them, that they tell us a great deal about the forces that shape our culture and the way we live.

Axiomatic is Tumarkin's fourth book of non-fiction, and her most pioneering. Her three previous books, Otherland (2010), Courage (2007), and Traumascapes (2005), have each and all been critically acclaimed and shortlisted for major prizes.

More than seven full and long years in the making, and utilising her time as a Sidney Myer Creative Fellow, Axiomatic actively seeks to reset the non-fiction form in Australia.

Imprint: LIFTED BROW
RRP: $34.99

ISBN: 9780241383100
Title: BAD BEHAVIOUR
Author: GAITSKILL MARY
Format: PAPER COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

A young woman anxiously waits for her date on a street corner in New York City; he sits in a pizza parlour across the street, watching her discomfort.

A middle-aged woman returns to a New York that is haunted by the passion and intensity of her former relationship with her estranged best friend.

A secretarial graduate starts her first job at a lawyer's office and quietly keeps her cruel experiences at his hands locked inside herself.

The stories in this collection peer deep into the inner lives of men and women, explore the cavernous spaces between what we say and what can be expressed, and are full of tenderness and cruelty. Published for the first time in Penguin Modern Classics, Bad Behaviour provides a devastatingly insightful and urgently necessary view of our times.

Imprint: PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
RRP: $19.99

ISBN: 9780007545155
Title: BAD BOY OF ATHENS : Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones
Author: MENDELSOHN DANIEL
Format: HARD COVER
Publishing status: ACTIVE TITLE

This striking new collection exemplifies the way in which Mendelsohn – a classicist by training who writes extensively for popular publications – uses the classics as a lens to think about urgent contemporary debates.

There is much to surprise here. Mendelsohn invokes the automatons featured in Homer's epics to help explain the AI films Ex Machina and Her, and perceives how Ted Hughes sought redemption by translating a play of Euripides (the ‘bad boy of Athens') about a wayward husband whose wife returns from the dead. There are essays on Sappho's sexuality and the feminism of Game of Thrones; on how Virgil's Aeneid prefigures post-World War II history and why we are still obsessed by the Titanic; on Patrick Leigh Fermor's final journey, Karl Ove Knausgaard's autofiction, and the plays of Tom Stoppard, Tennessee Williams, and Noël Coward. The collection ends with a poignant account of the author's boyhood correspondence with the historical novelist Mary Renault, which inspired his ambition to become a writer.

In The Bad Boy of Athens, Mendelsohn provokes and dazzles with erudition, emotion, and tart wit while his essays dance across eras, cultures, and genres. This is a provocative collection which sees today's master of popular criticism using the ancient past to reach into the very heart of modern culture.

Imprint: COLLINS
RRP: $49.99