Bestsellers for July 2009
1 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.
2 The Hungry Ghosts Anne Berry _ $32.99
Raped, then murdered in Japanese occupied Hong Kong, Lin Shui’s hungry ghost clings tenaciously to life. Holed up in a hospital morgue, which then becomes a school, Lin Shui manages to find a host in which to live, just in time. She chooses 12 year old Alice Stafford, the deeply troubled daughter of an English government official. The parasitic ghost follows her to her home on the Peak, where the lethal mix of the two (ghost and teenager), embroiled in the family’s dark web of tensions and lies, unleashes chaos. All this unfolds against a background of colonial unrest in the buildup to the return of the colony to China. As successive tragedies engulf Alice, her ghostly entourage swells alarmingly in number, and they follow her as she tries to escape to Europe. This remarkable novel will surprise and intrigue you and will undoubtedly be one of the most memorable
3 The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society Mary Ann Shaffer Allen & Unwin $29.95
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. Dawsey is a member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and it's not long before the rest of the members write to Juliet - including the gawky Isola, who makes home-made potions, Eben, the fisherman who loves Shakespeare, and Will Thisbee, rag-and-bone man and chef of the famous potato peel pie. As letters fly back and forth, Juliet comes to know the extraordinary personalities of the Society and their lives under the German occupation of the island. Entranced by their stories, Juliet decides to visit the island to meet them properly - and unwittingly turns her life upside down. Gloriously honest, enchanting and funny, ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society’ is sure to win your heart.
4 Burnt Shadows Kamila Shamsie Bloomsbury $32.95
August 9th 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss. In a split second, the world turns white. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.
In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad's half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu. But the shadows of history - personal, political - are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel's astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences –a novel mesmerising in its evocation of time and place and already nominated for the Orange Prize!
5 Jasper Jones Craig Silvey Allen & Unwin $29.99
Late on a hot summer night in the tail end of 1965, Charlie Bucktin, a precocious and bookish boy of thirteen, is startled by an urgent knock on the window of his sleep-out. His visitor is Jasper Jones, an outcast in the regional mining town of Corrigan. Rebellious, mixed-race and solitary, Jasper is a distant figure of danger and intrigue for Charlie. So when Jasper begs for his help, Charlie eagerly steals into the night by his side, terribly afraid but desperate to impress.
Jasper takes him through town and to his secret glade in the bush, and it's here that Charlie bears witness to Jasper's horrible discovery. With his secret like a brick in his belly, Charlie is pushed and pulled by a town closing in on itself in fear and suspicion as he locks horns with his tempestuous mother; falls nervously in love and battles to keep a lid on his zealous best friend, Jeffrey Lu. In the simmering summer where everything changes, Charlie learns why the truth of things is so hard to know, and even harder to hold in his heart.
6 The Secret Scripture Sebastian Barry Faber & Faber $32.95
Roseanne McNulty, perhaps nearing her one-hundredth birthday - no one is quite sure - faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr Grene. This relationship, guarded but trusting after so many years, intensifies and complicates as Dr Grene mourns the death of his wife. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges - of Roseanne's family in 1930s Sligo - is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret, history of Ireland. Exquisitely written, it is the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.
7 Whole Day Through Patrick Gale Harper Collins $27.99
Middle-aged Laura is forced to return from her independent, stylish life in Paris to care for her elderly mother in Winchester. Her lovelife has ground to a halt, until one day when she bumps into the love of her student days and the man whom she has regarded ever since as her masculine benchmark – Ben. Will they be brave again to re-connect? Taking place over a single summers day, this is a bitter-sweet love story, covering the themes of mortality, memory and duty. Patrick Gale is at his best – displaying the same wonderful combination of wit, tenderness and acute psychological observation that we all enjoyed in “Notes from an Exhibition”.
8 Brooklyn Colm Toibin Picador $32.99
Irish writer, Colm Toibin, has written a little gem with this book, set in the 1950s. He tells the story of Eilis Lacey, an Irish girl who gets the opportunity to leave her small hometown in Ireland and work in New York. She fills her days working in a department store, she studies in the evenings and embarks on a social life. Her initial homesickness is gradually overcome, and then she is forced by circumstance to return to Ireland. Toibin plays with themes of secrecy – “secrecy is all over “Brooklyn”. The number of people who know something and don’t tell somebody else is crucial. The book depends upon it”. Written with great sensitivity and emotional accuracy, this is a memorable story with a remarkable heroine, whom you will instantly engage with.
9 The Children's Book A.S. Byatt Random House $34.95
Another of our favourite authors! Here the author of “Possession” brings us a marvellous, gripping and panoramic novel of family secrets, set against a backdrop of a bohemian late Victorian and Edwardian world. Olive Wellwood is a famous writer. For each of her children she writes a separate, private book, bound in different colours and placed on a special shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world, but their lives and those of their rich cousins and friends in London, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out the bigger themes of the day – taking us from the Kent Marshes to the Victoria and Albert Museum to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme. Born at the end of the Victorian era , growing up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, a whole generation were heading to the darkness ahead – betrayed intentionally by the adults who loved them.
10 Chanel Charles-Roux Edmonde Allen & Unwin $29.95
She revolutionised how women looked – she banned corsets, shortened skirts and scented the world with Chanel no.5. She became an icon, but her real story only came to light when Vogue editor, Edmonde Charles-Roux, intrigued by Chanels’ carefully moulded image, decided to pursue the true history of this fascinating woman. Born illegitimate and raised in an orphanage, not by the two aunts whom she always talked of, Gabriel Coco Chanel’s story is fascinating and absorbing. This book is the inspiration for the film “Coco before Chanel” starring Audrey Tautou, but also provides a huge amount of additional information and social and fashion history.
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