Bestsellers for August 2008
1 The Time We Have Taken Steven Carroll Fourth Estate $27.99
One summer morning in 1970, Peter van Rijn, proprietor of the television and wireless shop, pronounces his Melbourne suburb one hundred years old. That same morning, Rita is awakened by a dream of her husband‘s snores, yet it is years since Vic moved north. Their son, Michael, has left for the city, and is entering the awkward terrain of first love.
As the suburb prepares to celebrate progress, Michael‘s friend Mulligan is commissioned to paint a mural of the area‘s history. But what vision of the past will his painting reveal?
Meanwhile, Rita‘s sometime friend Mrs Webster confronts the mystery of her husband‘s death. And Michael discovers that innocence can only be sustained for so long.
2 The Good Parents Joan London Vintage $32.95
Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old country girl from the West, comes to live in Melbourne and starts an affair with her boss, the enigmatic Maynard Flynn, whose wife is dying of cancer. When Maya's parents, Toni and Jacob, arrive to stay with her, they are told by her housemate that Maya has gone away and no one knows where she is. As Toni and Jacob wait and search for Maya in Melbourne, everything in their lives is brought into question. They recall the yearning and dreams, the betrayals and choices of their pasts - choices with unexpected and irrevocable consequences.
With Maya's disappearance, the lives of all those close to her come into focus, to reveal the complexity of the ties that bind us to one another, to parents, children, siblings, friends and lovers.
Pacy and enthralling, The Good Parents is at once a vision of contemporary Australia and a story as old as fairytales: that of a runaway girl.
3 Deaf Sentence David Lodge Harvill $32.95
When the university merged his Department of English with Linguistics, professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research.
His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them.
The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine year old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to leave the house he is patently unable to live in with safety.But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, of which he first became aware in his forties, and which has steadily worsened since. It is now a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment, leading Desmond into continual mistakes, misunderstandings, follies and faux pas. Archetypically, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself, it is no joke. It is Desmond's deafness which inadvertently involves him with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely.
Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a witty, original, and absorbing account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.
4 The Other David Guterson Bloomsbury $32.95
Seattle, 1972: two teenage boys are standing at the start line of an 800m race. Neil Countryman is from the public high school in the north of the city: he slumps at his desk all day and gets high in the park at lunchtime, and wears a moustache that makes him look like the guy in the Camel cigarette ads. John William Barry is from Lakeside, a private academy for the more privileged of Seattle's youth: he is an earnest, fiery young man, and his family background is one of the material wealth and emotional deprivation. As John William wins the race by a hair's breadth, their lives collide for the very first time, and it is the beginning of a friendship that is both fraught and intimate. Both boys have a taste for the wilderness, and they explore together the most remote areas of the mountains, the places ignored by guidebooks, where tracks and roads fade to nothing and all that can be seen is an endless unbroken destiny of trees. But as they grow old, John William's intense intelligence and craving for isolation mark him out as an eccentric, and as Neil begins to accumulate the more conventional comforts - a wife, a steady job - their lives begin to take radically different paths.
Eventually, John William is to retreat permanently into his own self-made wilderness, and in doing so presents his oldest friend with a gift which will change his life forever, bringing them both a notoriety that Neil had neither dreamed of nor hoped for.
A moving tale about the mixed blessings that friendship can bring, The Other is an extraordinary novel from a masterful storyteller.
5 The Forgotten Garden Kate Morton Allen & Unwin $32.95
A lost child On the eve of the first world war, a little girl is found abandoned on a ship to Australia. A mysterious woman called the Authoress had promised to look after her - but the Authoress has disappeared without a trace.A terrible secret On the night of her twenty-first birthday, Nell O'Connor learns a secret that will change her life forever. Decades later, she embarks upon a search for the truth that leads her to the windswept Cornish coast and the strange and beautiful Blackhurst Manor, once owned by the aristocratic Mountrachet family.A mysterious inheritance On Nell's death, her grand-daughter, Cassandra, comes into an unexpected inheritance. Cliff Cottage and its forgotten garden are notorious amongst the Cornish locals for the secrets they hold - secrets about the doomed Mountrachet family and their ward Eliza Makepeace, a writer of dark Victorian fairytales. It is here that Cassandra will finally uncover the truth about the family, and solve the century-old mystery of a little girl lost.A captivating and atmospheric story of secrets, family and memory from the international bestselling author Kate Morton.
6 Breath Tim Winton Hamish Hamilton $39.95
More than once since then I've wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than a rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. Breath is a story about the wildness of youth - the lust for excitement and terror, the determination to be extraordinary, the wounds that heal and those that don't - and about learning to live with its passing.
In his first novel for seven years, Tim Winton has achieved a new level of mastery. Breath confirms him as one of the world's finest storytellers, a writer of novels that are at the same time simple and profound, relentlessly gripping and deeply moving.
7 People of the Book Geraldine Brooks Harper Collins $32.99
When Hanna Heath gets a call in the middle of the night in her Sydney home about a precious medieval manuscript which has been recovered from the smouldering ruins of war–torn Sarajevo, she knows she is on the brink of the experience of a lifetime. A renowned book conservator, she must now make her way to Bosnia to start work on restoring The Sarajevo Haggadah, a Jewish prayer book –– to discover its secrets and piece together the story of its miraculous survival. But the trip will also set in motion a series of events that threaten to rock Hanna's orderly life, including her encounter with Ozren Karamen, the young librarian who risked his life to save the book. As meticulously researched as all of Brooks' previous work, People of the Book is a gripping and moving novel about war, art, love and survival.
8 The Road Home Rose Tremain Random House $32.95
'On the coach, Lev chose a seat near the back and he sat huddled against the window, staring out at the land he was leaving...' Lev is on his way to Britain to seek work, so that he can send money back to Eastern Europe to support his mother and little daughter.
Readers will become totally involved with his story, as he struggles with the mysterious rituals of 'Englishness', and the fashions and fads of the London scene. We see the road Lev travels through Lev's eyes, and we share his dilemmas: the intimacy of his friendships, old and new; his joys and sufferings; his aspirations and his hopes of finding his way home, wherever home may be.
9 A Household Guide to Dying Debra Adelaide Picador $29.95
When Delia Bennet – author and domestic advice columnist – is diagnosed with cancer, she knows it's time to get her house in order. After all, she's got to secure the future for her husband, their two daughters and their five beloved chickens. But as she writes lists and makes plans, questions both large and small creep in. Should she divulge her best culinary secrets? Read her favourite novels one last time? Plan her daughters' far-off weddings? Complicating her dilemma is the matter of the past, and a remote country town where she fled as a pregnant teenager, only to leave broken-hearted eight years later. Researching and writing her final Household Guide, Delia is forced to confront the pieces of herself she left behind. She learns that what matters is not the past but the present – that the art of dying is all about truly living. Fresh, witty, deeply moving – and a celebration of love, family and that place we call home – this unforgettable story will surprise and delight the reader until the very last page.
10 Texas Sarah Hay Allen & Unwin $22.95
When did it all start? This feeling of being beneath water: slow and cumbersome, every movement met with something thicker than air, some form of resistance she was unable to see. On a rundown station in the remote top end of Australia, life for Susannah is isolated and difficult. Left alone by her husband, the manager of the station, Susannah has to cope with their young twins, the relentless physical work of running the homestead, and the frustration that these things now mark the boundaries of her life. A dark history seeps through the land and the air shimmers with heat and an intangible menace; nothing is as she expected it to be. And then a young English jillaroo, Laura, arrives to work on the property. She falls in love with Texas, the Aboriginal head stockman, believing that her love will pull him out of long-held destructive habits. As the weather builds and the heat intensifies, both Susannah and Laura are faced with decisions that will affect the rest of their lives.
Winner of the 2001 The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for her bestselling novel Skins, Sarah Hay writes compellingly of the ruthless nature of this country and the fragility of the people trying to force their will upon it.
A powerful story of the land and the past and desire. A novel of place, history and our relationship with the land, it tells of the extremity and ruthlessness of this country and the way in which it constantly reminds us of the fragility of our place on it.
Previous Bestsellers Lists
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3 August 2008
1 July 2008
2 June 2008
1 May 2008
1 April 2008
11 March 2008
1 March 2008
1 November 2007
5 September 2007
6 August 2007
8 July 2007
12 June 2007
Book of the Month
August 2008
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by
Mary Ann Shaffer