Bestsellers for February 2009

1	The White Tiger    Aravind Adiga    Atlantic    $32.95
		Born in a village in heartland India, the son of a rickshaw puller, Balram is taken out of school by his family and put to work in a teashop. As he crushes coals and wipes tables, he nurses a dream of escape - of breaking away from the banks of Mother Ganga, into whose depths have seeped the remains of a hundred generations. The White Tiger is a tale of two Indias. Balram’s journey from darkness of village life to the light of entrepreneurial success is utterly amoral, brilliantly irreverent, deeply endearing and altogether unforgettable.
2	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.
3	The Story of Edgar Sawtelle    David Wroblewski    Fourth Estate    $32.99
		This book is a staff favourite and is getting rave reviews around the world. It is a contemporary retelling of Hamlet and is set on a farm in remote northern Wisconsin. There, the mute and brilliant Edgar Sawtelle leads an idyllic life with his parents Gar and Trudy. For generations, the Sawtelles have raised and trained a breed of dog whose thoughtful companionship is epitomised by Almodine, Edgar's lifelong companion. But when his beloved father mysteriously dies, Edgar blames himself, if only because his muteness left him unable to summon help. Grief-stricken and bewildered by his mother's desperate affair with her dead husband's brother, Edgar's world unravels one spring night when, in the falling rain, he sees his father's ghost. After a botched attempt to prove that his uncle orchestrated Gar's death, Edgar flees into the Chequamegon wilderness leading three yearling dogs. Yet his need to face his father's murderer, and his devotion to the Sawtelle dogs, turn Edgar ever homeward. When he returns, nothing is as he expects, and Edgar must choose between revenge or preserving his family legacy.
4	Elegance of the Hedgehog    Muriel Barbery    Peribo    $24.95
		Rene is the concierge of a grand Parisian apartment building, home to members of the great and the good. Over the years she has maintained her carefully constructed persona as someone reliable but totally uncultivated, in keeping, she feels, with societys expectations of what a concierge should be. But beneath this faade lies the real Rene: passionate about culture and the arts, and more knowledgeable in many ways than her employers with their outwardly successful but emotionally void lives. Down in her lodge, apart from weekly visits by her one friend Manuela, Rene lives resigned to her lonely lot with only her cat for company. Meanwhile, several floors up, twelve-year-old Paloma Josse is determined to avoid the pampered and vacuous future laid out for her, and decides to end her life on her thirteenth birthday. But unknown to them both, the sudden death of one of their privileged neighbours will dramatically alter their lives forever. By turn moving and hilarious, this unusual novel became the top-selling book in France in 2007 with sales of over 900,000 copies to-date. The French publishing phenomenon of 2007 from an initial print run of 4,000, sales of over 900,000 in hardback. Translation rights sold to 34 countries Cited in Paris Match magazine in highlights of 2007 along with the i-phone and facebook Winner of the prestigious 2007 French booksellers award
5	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.
6	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.
7	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.
8	Crow Lake    Mary Lawson    Vintage    $26.95
		For the farming Pye family of northern Ontario, life is a Greek tragedy where the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons, and terrible events occur offstage. In this universal drama of family love and misunderstandings, Lawson ratchets up the tension with heartbreaking humor and consummate control.
9	Late Nights on Air    Elizabeth Hay    Quercus    $29.95
		Harry Boyd, a hard-bitten refugee from failure in Toronto television, has returned to a small radio station in Yellowknife, Northern Canada. There, in the summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air, though the real woman, Dido Paris, is a surprise and even more than he imagined.Dido and Harry are part of the cast of eccentric characters who form an unlikely group at the station. Their loves and longings, their rivalries and entanglements, the stories of their pasts and what brought each of them to the North, form the centre. Hay brings to bear her skewering insight into the frailties of the human heart and her ability to tell a spellbinding story. Written in gorgeous prose and laced with dark humour, Late Nights on Air is at once accessible and rewardingly complex.
10	The Book of Unholy Mischief    Elle Newmark    Doubleday    $32.95
		It is 1498, and the whole of Venice is abuzz. Hidden somewhere in the labyrinthine city is an ancient book, rumoured to contain thorny heresies and secrets of immeasurable power. Luciano, a penniless orphan, has been plucked from the street and taken on as apprentice to the chef at the doge's palace. While learning the alchemy of cooking, he quickly finds himself entangled in the search for the ancient tome, even suspecting the chef, his maestro, may be concealing information. But lurking in the wings are some of the most powerful, dangerous men in Venice, and Luciano's secret will lead him through a dangerous maze to the centre of an intrigue that will test his deepest desires and loyalties.

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Previous Bestsellers Lists

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3 September 2010
3 August 2010
4 July 2010
3 June 2010
5 May 2010
6 April 2010
3 March 2010
2 February 2010
28 October 2009
29 September 2009
3 September 2009
30 July 2009

Book of the Month
September 2010

Freedom
by
Jonathan Franzen