Bestsellers for March 2009

1	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
2	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.
3	The Slap    Christos Tsiolkas    Allen & Unwin    $32.95
		At a suburban barbecue, a man slaps a child who is not his own. This event has a shocking ricochet effect on a group of people, mostly friends, who are directly or indirectly influenced by the event. In this remarkable novel, Christos Tsiolkas turns his unflinching and all-seeing eye onto that which connects us all: the modern family and domestic life in the twenty-first century. The Slap is told from the points of view of eight people who were present at the barbecue. The slap and its consequences force them all to question their own families and the way they live, their expectations, beliefs and desires. What unfolds is a powerful, haunting novel about love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity - all the passions and conflicting beliefs - that family can arouse. In its clear-eyed and forensic dissection of the ever-growing middle class and its aspirations and fears, The Slap is also a poignant, provocative novel about the nature of loyalty and happiness, compromise and truth.

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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