SWAN PEAK

After the devastating events recounted in THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN, Dave Robicheaux and his ex-partner in Homicide, Clete Purcel, head for the mountains and trout streams of Montana for some much-needed healing. But while Montana might seem an unspoilt paradise peopled by men and women from an earlier, more innocent time in American history, Dave and Clete soon find that there are plenty of serpents in the garden too. The deaths of a couple of hikers suggest a perverted serial killer may be at work, while an escaped jailbird and his former tormentor are locked in a savage dance of revenge that is ultimately connected to the fortunes of a wealthy oil family hiding a terrible secret.

NATHALIE ABI-EZZI

Ten–year–old Ruba lives in a village outside Beirut. From her family home, she can see the buildings shimmering on the horizon and the sea stretched out beside them. She can also hear the rumble of the shelling – this is Lebanon in the 1980s and civil war is tearing the country apart. Ruba however has her own worries. Her father hardly ever speaks and spends most of his days sitting in his armchair, avoiding work and family. Her mother looks so sad that Ruba thinks her heart might have withered in the heat like a fig. Her elder brother, Naji, has started to spend his time with older boys – and some of them have guns. When Ruba decides she has to save her father, and when she uncovers his secret, she begins a journey which takes her from childhood to the beginnings of adulthood. As Israeli troops invade and danger comes ever closer, she realises that she may not be able to keep her family safe.
This is a first novel with tremendous heart, which captures both a country and a childhood in turmoil.

Tolstoy wasn't thinking specifically of the Harrison family when he wrote those words, but maybe he should have been. George Harrison is twenty-eight and afraid of the dark. His father is dead and his mother lives in la-la land. Reeling from a broken heart, and still coping with the trauma of a childhood home invasion, George works in a dead-end job in a bowling alley and finds rare solace in the giant painting of an alien that sits outside his room. His brother Matthew isn't much better off. After losing the love of his life in a traumatic car accident, he's retreated into a private world of sleep where he dreams about falling in love with comedienne Magda Szubanski.

Matthew and George are each stuck in their own little messed-up world, with no idea how to get out, and neither of them is sure whether their unhappy family will ever finally pull together, or simply just fall apart.

The winner of the 2007 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, this is a quirky, left-field, yet deeply felt and wholly engaging story of families, love, loss and grieving.

THE GUERNSEY LITERARY & POTATO PEEL PIE SOCIETY

A moving tale of post-war friendship, love and books, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is a captivating and completely irresistible novel of enormous depth and heart.

It's 1946, and as Juliet Ashton sits at her desk in her Chelsea flat, she is stumped. A writer of witty newspaper columns during the war, she can't think of what to write next. Out of the blue, she receives a letter from one Dawsey Adams of Guernsey - by chance he's acquired a book Juliet once owned - and, emboldened by their mutual love of books, they begin a correspondence.
Gloriously honest, enchanting and funny, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society is sure to win your heart.

JONATHAN BLACK

Here for the first time is a complete history of the world, from the beginning of time to the present day, based on the beliefs and writings of the secret societies. There have been many books on the subject of secret societies written from an outside view, however, Jonathan Black has been assisted in his research by a man who is an initiate of more than one secret society and in one case an initiate of the highest level.

JOHN DICKIE

Everyone loves Italian food. But how did the Italians come to eat so well? The advertising industry tells us the answer lies in the vineyards and olive groves of Tuscany - among sun-weathered peasants, and mammas serving pasta under the pergola. Yet this nostalgic fantasy has little to do with the real history of Italian cuisine. For a thousand years, Italy's cities have been magnets for everything that makes for great eating: ingredients, talent, money, and power. So Italian food is city food, and telling its story means telling the story of the Italians as a people of city dwellers. In DELIZIA! the author of the acclaimed COSA NOSTRA takes a revelatory historical journey through the flavours of Italy's cities. From the bustle of Medieval Milan, to the bombast of Fascist Rome; from the pleasure gardens of Renaissance Ferrara, to the putrid alleyways of nineteenth-century Naples. In rich slices of urban life, DELIZIA! shows how violence and intrigue, as well as taste and creativity, combined to make the world's favourite cuisine.

LIJIA ZHANG

JOHN BERGER

Hold Everything Dear is John Berger’s vital response to today’s global economic and military tyranny. From Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and 7/7, to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the countless personal choices, encounters, illuminations, sacrifices, new desires, griefs and memories that occur in the course of political resistance to empire and colonialism.

These sensuous reflections reveal the political at the core of human existence, from the relentlessness of daily life in the West Bank, to the potential force of desire, to the unflinching gaze of Pasolini’s political film. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on what political resistance means today, by one of the most compelling radical voices of our age.

MARK MAZOWER

HITLER'S EMPIRE: NAZI RULE IN OCCUPIED EUROPE

Hitler's Empire constituted the largest, most brutal and most ambitious reshaping of the continent ever attempted in Europe's history. Liberalism and democracy were swept aside, as Germany aimed to turn itself into the most powerful state on the continent, and to compel everyone else to recognize its mastery. Europe's future was to lie in a new racial order based on the uprooting, resettlement and extermination of millions of people. Hitler's Empire charts the landscape of the Nazi imperial imagination - from those economists who dreamed of turning Europe into a huge market for German business, to Hitler's own plans for new trans-continental motorways passing over the ethnically cleansed Russian steppe, and earnest in-house SS discussions of political theory, dictatorship and the rule of law. Above all, this chilling account shows too what happened as these ideas met reality.
After their early battlefield triumphs, the sheer bankruptcy of the Nazis' political vision for Europe became all too clear: their allies bailed out, their New Order collapsed in military failure, and they left behind a continent corrupted by collaboration, impoverished by looting and exploitation, and grieving the victims of total war and genocide.

JAY GRIFFITHS

'I took seven years over this work, spent all I had, my time, money and energy. Part of the journey was a green riot and parts a deathly bleakness. I got ill, I got well. I went to the freedom fighters of West Papua and sang my head off in their highlands. I met cannibals infinitely kinder and more trustworthy than the murderous missionaries who evangelise them. I anchored a boat to an iceberg where polar bears slept; ate witchetty grubs and visited sea gypsies. I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind. In the end - a strangely sweet result - I came back to a wild home ... '

ROBERT DESSAIX

ARABESQUES - DUE OCTOBER 2008

REFER FORTHCOMING EVENTS

One Sunday afternoon in a secluded valley in Normandy, Robert Dessaix chanced upon the castle where the famous French writer André Gide spent his childhood. Recalling the excitement Robert felt when he first read Gide as a teenager, he set off to recapture what it was that once drew him so strongly to this enigmatic figure.
On a magic carpet ride from Lisbon to the edge of the Sahara, from Paris to the south of France and Algiers, Robert takes us to the places where the Nobel Prize-winning author, in ways still scandalous to modern sensibilities, lived out his unconventional ideas about love, marriage, sexuality and religion.
Featuring meditations and conversations with fellow travellers on such diverse subjects as why we travel, growing old, illicit passions, and the essence of Protestantism – and illustrated with over 100 stunning illustrations and photos – Arabesques is Robert Dessaix and travel memoir at their absolute finest.

RICHARD FLANAGAN

WANTING - DUE NOVEMBER 2008

REFER FORTHCOMING EVENTS

It is 1839. A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, is running through the long wet grass of an island at the end of the world to get help for her dying father, an Aboriginal chieftain. Twenty years later, on at island at the centre of the world, the most famous novelist of the day, Charles Dickens, realises he is about to abandon his wife, risk his name, and forever after be altered because of his inability any longer to control his intense passion.

Connecting the two events are the most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin - then governor of Van Diemen's Land - and his wife, Lady Jane, who adopt Mathinna, seen as one of the last of a dying race, as an experiment. Lady Jane believes the distance between savagery and civilisation is the learned capacity to control wanting. The experiment fails, Sir John disappears into the blue ice of the Arctic seeking the North-West Passage, and a decade later Lady Jane enlists Dickens' aid to put an end to the scandalous suggestions that Sir John's expedition ended in cannibalism.

Based on historic events, WANTING is a novel about art, love, and the way in which life is finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting.

THE LIEUTENANT - DUE OCTOBER 2008

REFER FORTHCOMING EVENTS

In 1787 Lieutenant Thomas Rooke sets sail from Portsmouth with the First Fleet and its cargo of convicts, destined for New South Wales. As a young officer and a man of science, the shy and quiet Rooke is full of anticipation about the natural wonders he might discover in this strange land on the other side of the world.
After the fleet arrives in Port Jackson, Rooke sets up camp on a rocky and isolated point, and starts his work of astronomy and navigation.
It's not too long before some of the Aboriginal people who live around the harbour pay him a visit. One of them, a girl named Tarunga, starts to teach him her own language. But her lessons and their friendship are interrupted when Rooke is given an order that will change his life forever.
Inspired by the 1790 notebooks of William Dawes in which he recorded his conversations with a young Gadigal woman, THE LIEUTENANT is a story about a man discovering his true self in extraordinary circumstances. This powerful novel will enthral readers of Kate Grenville's bestselling THE SECRET RIVER, winner of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

PETER GOLDSWORTHY

EVERYTHING I KNEW - DUE NOVEMBER 2008

REFER FORTHCOMING EVENTS

It's 1964 and the little wine-producing town of Penola, in South Australia's Coonawarra, is about to have its complacency shattered. Robbie Burns, the precocious only child of the local cop, is on the cusp of adolescence and high school. Up until now his life has consisted chiefly of rabbiting and carrying out experiments in the backyard shed, often with explosive results. But that year, an exotic element enters Robbie's chemical mix in the form of a new English teacher. Miss Peach is a thoroughly modern sixties girl, all Capri pants and Kool cigarettes and sky-blue Vespa. Her big-city views on poetry and art are too much for the quaint folk of Penola, but they fire the prodigious imagination and burgeoning lust of young Robbie like nothing he's experienced. Desperate to please, he writes outrageously plotted sci-fi stories for her, and the more free reign he allows his imagination, the less control he seems to have over his own actions. Until his choices become scarcely credible - and irreversible.

Peter Goldsworthy has a large following for his seven novels and multiple volumes of short stories and poetry. He has won numerous awards and his last novel, Three Dog Night, was shortlisted for the 2004 Miles Franklin Award.

J M COETZEE

New York Viking 2003

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ELLIOT PERLMAN

New York Riverhead Books 2005

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